Am I a soldier of the cross,
A foll’wer of the Lamb?
And shall I fear to own His cause,
Or blush to speak His name?Must I be carried to the skies
On flow’ry beds of ease?
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas!Are there no foes for me to face?
Must I not stem the flood?
Is this vile world a friend to grace,
To help me on to God?Sure I must fight, if I would reign;
Increase my courage, Lord!
I’ll bear the toil, endure the pain,
Supported by Thy word.Thy saints, in all this glorious war,
Shall conquer, though they die;
They see the triumph from afar
And seize it with their eye.When that illustrious day shall rise,
And all Thine armies shine,
In robes of vict’ry through the skies,
The glory shall be Thine.
Month: January 2015
Terrorists and hate speech at the Daily Caller
Over at the Daily Caller I got a piece published about the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. Take a look:
This use of violence to silence “offensive” speech is structurally identical to hate speech laws, the only difference is that it was vigilantes that executed “justice” this time. I’m not calling supporters of hate speech laws insensitive and I’m not saying that they support terrorism. I am saying that their goals are identical to those of the men in who committed this atrocity. Those goals are to suppress “offensive” or “harmful” or “hateful” speech through coercion and government action is inherently coercive. Progressives seem to only want to make this violent suppression more systematic through the use of the legal system.
Thanks a lot to the wise and handsome opinion editor over there.
An open letter to a budding terrorist
Dear Budding Terrorist,
Greetings. You don’t know me, although perhaps you might be inclined to think that you do, but I thought that I might do something different and break the ice. I understand how unsettling it is for an infidel or mindless sheep or collateral damage or whatever to make the first move, but relationships in violence don’t seem any more or less complicated than relationships in love. And seeing as how we’re basically going to be getting off on the wrong foot no matter how we carry ourselves, I hope you will permit my indulgence.
First I want to offer my most heartfelt congratulations. I mean that sincerely. You’ve found something to believe in; you’ve found something far larger than yourself, and to which you have submitted your whole being in order to be defined by it so totally that it almost obliterates everything you were up until that point. That is not an easy thing to do, I imagine; to wholly dedicate yourself to this or that creed, however abstract on its face, however diluted or manipulated by cleverer but still lesser minds. This is more than I can say for most people I know and love, and I am very close to respecting you far more than I do them. Speaking for myself, living in a fog of unbelief has proven satisfactory and securing in only the most superficial sense, like going into a vast wilderness with nothing but a sharpened tree branch.
That you found something, a proverbial light penetrating an otherwise total darkness, in other words, is great. I am happy for you. You want something better than what you have, and moreover you want it spread as far and wide as possible so that, I presume, it gives others the feeling that it gave you. It’s on this point that I’d like to offer some advice.
In setting about with persuading people of the superiority of your beliefs, it helps to have a sense of proportionality when doing so. I know that this seems rich coming from a citizen of the United States, a country that never knew a disproportion it didn’t like, but be assured that I speak to you as someone thoroughly fatigued by any and all disproportion, not only those inflicted against my fellow countrymen but those inflicted in our names against others wholly undeserving. To put it bluntly, I speak as someone who is tired of seeing people get killed. I’ve not seen very many compared to others, I admit, but I’ve seen enough at a reasonable enough distance to know that whatever good anyone thinks will come out of it just won’t.
Perhaps you’d think it out of line of me to presume that you’d kill anybody. Perhaps you’re convinced that people you seek to persuade will very clearly see the very same light you saw and fall in line with no bloodshed or other force necessary. I think you and I both know that that is the highest order of bullshit. Whatever the content of your belief, your fervor will be stoked so early and often that it may well eclipse the former. It will very likely be stoked by people who casually disregard your worldview. It will certainly be stoked by people who willfully disregard it, indeed, who disregard it with vulgarity and vehemence, with insensitivity and antipathy. Perhaps they do not seek to harm you personally, but you may feel wounded all the same. How dare they persist in flouting The Truth? How dare they belittle and ridicule that to which you’ve so dedicated your time and energy? These people are beyond persuasion, you’ll conclude, they are beyond redemption, and so making an example of them will surely make more sense to you. Against vile words and images you’ll take action and your point will be made.
Even if you haven’t made up your mind on that point, I offer only this suggestion: don’t. Don’t make an example out of anyone for expressing this or that crude criticism. Don’t threaten and don’t kill, if not for the sake of your victims then at least for the sake of yourself and whose name under which you do it. It will not only fail, it will elicit negative results. Your cause, for one, will be regarded outwardly as unjust, even malignant if it isn’t already, but more crucially your actions will be responded to, and likely overtaken, by the very sentiment you hoped to stifle. Your vulgar, locally renowned target will go national, even international; its subversive infamy will be imbued with an almost knightly heroism. Innumerable people of all stripes, of all backgrounds and views, will go out, into the cold if necessary, to express solidarity with it and defend its right to be as vile as it wishes.
It’s perverse, really, that it would take you killing someone to remind everyone else of freedom’s presence. Freedom, don’t get me wrong, is every bit as abstract as the ideas to which you’ve clung, hell it might even be more so, yet therein lies its power. You come to us with a mind to impose rigidity and obedience, perhaps more than was intended at that, or worse if we refuse; freedom imposes generosity and presupposes at least some dignity in pretty much everybody. To some it is granted far more easily than others; it was to me and I’d hazard a guess that it was almost equally as much to you. I feel sorry for people who don’t quite grasp that feeling, but in the end there’s only so much time to give to people like you and me when there are others under more trying circumstances and with some responsibility for them attached to us.
You and I are not really all that impressive, valuable or memorable in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we should just be friends.
Sincerely,
Chris
(Image source)
How sad it must be to be angry all the time
Well I didn’t call it.
The perpetually indignated lefties at Slate have declared 2014 “The Year of Outrage.” They aren’t wrong; and it’s more than a bit ironic the writers making the claim are also responsible for the madness that now defines the internet news cycle. A handful of the site’s reporters weighed in on the outrage phenomenon, some admirably taking responsibility for it. Jordan Weissmann, to his credit, lamented the “impulse to jump on the outrage cycle” and drive traffic to small pieces of life’s innumerable injustices. He defends the practice however, saying “viral hits help finance other less outraged, more important journalism.” Yes and drug-dealing can also be used to fund soup kitchen operations. The latter doesn’t make the former any less immoral.
Betsy Woodruff does a decent job highlighting the more embarrassing attempts to use outrage machinations by conservatives. But even while well-meaning voices on the right are apt to use harsh-worded demonization, the kind of determined vitriol progressives embrace is another matter altogether. For the left, outrage is a lifestyle instead of a seldom-felt emotion.
Thanks, and Happy New Year
A new year is cause for thanksgiving and rededication, so here’s a dog’s breakfast of housekeeping and personal things. The blog is now a little over eight months old, and has grown from just myself to the 19 bylines we’ve had since then. So first of all, my thanks go out to everyone who’s contributed a piece this past year. This blog would not be what it is without you. I learn a lot from all of you, and I value your ideas. In case you were wondering, the undisputed traffic king around these parts is Rob, especially for his posts on Gamergate. Here’s to more in 2015, and those reading this who have not published here but might be interested in doing so, please contact me.
Secondly, thanks to all our readers and those who have linked or blogroll’d us. To name some of them roughly in order of the traffic they’ve sent us: Marginal Revolution, Nick Land, Free Northerner, Scott Alexander, Ace of Spades, Social Matter, Nick Steves, Robert Stacey McCain, Real Clear Policy, and Ed Sebesta, bullier of churches, who despite putting up two posts about me sent us a grand total of 39 visitors. Sorry nobody reads you Ed!
We’re averaging over a thousand pageviews a day now, which is awesome.
*****
On a personal note, yesterday I was received into the Catholic Church at St. Luke’s at Immaculate Conception, an Ordinariate parish in Shaw, not far from where I live. I went into some of the reasons why I became a lapsed Anglican in this post, largely out of suspicion of the neoconservative sympathies of many leaders of the Anglican realignment in the DC area. I still think they were and are right to flee the Episcopal Church and its tyrannical leadership. Episcopalianism is historically a religion of American elites, and as the elite consensus has shifted further to the left, it faced a choice between Christian orthodoxy and its historic class affinities. The Episcopal Church made the wrong one. TEC is resolutely pro-abortion and its health ministry is helping to implement Obamacare; Gene Robinson and the NEHM’s director are fellows at the Center for American Progress.
However, it is not at all clear to me that people like Fred Barnes, Michael Gerson, Howard Ahmanson Jr., and other politically connected movers in the Anglican realignment have any particular concern for what we in the Ordinariate call “Anglican patrimony.” In fact, they seem to see the matter as just another front in the culture wars. Those first two, among others, were chief propagandists for the disastrous second Iraq invasion, which has reduced the Christian population of Iraq by around a million. Most disturbingly, there is evidence that Barnes, Ken Starr, Mort Kondracke, and the rector of my family’s parish put themselves under the instruction of Jerry Leachman, who is, to put it mildly, certainly not an Anglican. It seemed to me that leaving the Democratic Party at prayer, only to become the Republican Party at prayer, was not going very far at all. I had always been against abortion and preemptive war, for the same reason.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all, and many have admitted after the fact that the Iraq invasion was a catastrophe. But if this doesn’t speak to a crisis of authority, I’m not sure what would. When reporting the above for a piece I ended up withdrawing for personal reasons, I couldn’t help but compare Rev. Yates’ response to me on the Iraq war — that it had gone badly, but that weighing in on matters political was unwise in such an influential congregation — to Michael Novak’s fruitless petition to the Vatican in 2003. The Holy Father, at least, was able to speak the truth about injustice without worrying about offending powerful congregants in the media or civil service.
Not long after I put up that post, news broke that there will probably never be another Lambeth Conference, due mostly to TEC’s desire to hew more closely to the Democratic Party than the rest of the Anglican Communion. Around the same time a friend informed me that St. Luke’s, once an Episcopalian congregation that converted, was moving from Bladensburg to downtown, on my way to work. Given the above, I took this to mean that the Catholic Church wasn’t going to leave me behind, and knew it would be wrong not to honor that. At that point it was a matter of putting my money where my mouth was.
I received the Eucharist for the first time yesterday, and to put all this behind me is truly a gift from God. I encourage anyone else who’s been disturbed by any of the above to do the same. There is peace and security in the Universal Church.
The picture above is of St. Alban Roe, whose name I took during confirmation, a martyr of the English counter-reformation, hung at Tyburn during the Long Parliament for the crime of being a priest. A convert himself, he is described by the main sources as being “remarkably chearful and facetious even in the midst of his sufferings.” Here’s the exchange he had on the gallows, from Bishop Richard Challoner’s account:
“Pray sir,” said Mr. Roe, “if I will conform to your religion, and go to church, will you secure me my life?”
“That I will,” said the sheriff, “upon my word my life for yours if you will but do that.”
“See then,” said Mr. Roe, turning to the people, “what the crime is for which I am to die, and whether my religion be not my only treason.”
Bp. Challoner’s says his speech from the gallows was taken to parliament and stored there, but it hasn’t been found. He is occasionally pictured with a playing card, in reference to him gambling while in prison, betting small prayers instead of money.
*****
To get back to business (blogness), I’d like to hear from you, reader. If there are changes you’d like to see, topics you’d like to see covered, writers we should get, or have any other kind of comment or criticism, please sound off in the comments.
Sacred Harp 401: ‘Cuba’
Go, preachers, and tell it to the world,
Poor mourners found a home at last.Through free grace and a dying Lamb,
Poor mourners found a home at last.Go, fathers, and tell it to the world,
Poor mourners found a home at last.Go, mothers, and tell it to the world,
Poor mourners found a home at last.
The lady and I went to the FSGW’s New Year’s Day sing in Alexandria this week, which was small but lots of fun.
