I have something very timely and more broadly interesting coming up, but I thought it would be a good idea to make known the following piece I co-wrote, dealing with material from my first book, that went up today as party of Tikkun magazine’s “Open Hillel Dispatches” – just a bit of a shout out to Those Who Lost in American Jewish History, whom I’ve taken on as a torchbearer:
Religion
Here’s some advice for conservatives: Use more stories and less talking points
Check out my latest piece in Taki’s Magazine. Here is an excerpt:
The Republican response to the otherwise tepid lecture showed the same promise at first. Delivered by Iowa’s newly-minted Senator Joni Ernst, the onetime pig-castrator regaled listeners with an engrossing story about growing up on a farm and working fast food in high school. She even admitted to wearing bread bags around her only pair of good shoes on rainy days. Unfortunately the hokey story didn’t last; the narrative soon collapsed into standard, red-meat talking points. Republican tropes about jobs and economic growth overwhelmed Ernst’s speech and drained it of its original, rustic flavor.
It was a shame. But playing it safe is typical for politicians. The question is: why was Ernst’s brief story so compelling? When polled by PolitiFact, many Iowans admitted to strapping bread bags around their shoes to protect them from bad weather. So Ernst’s anecdote had more than a grain of truth to it. But facts aside, there was something wholesome, even vivid, about the description of her childhood. It demanded attention.
Not all politics are created equal
Congrats to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig on her new gig at the vertically integrated new media company the New Republic. Her latest is a complaint that, while conservatives admired Pope St. John Paul II’s strong anti-communism, they don’t like it when Pope Francis says political things:
In any analysis of a public figure, partisan interests will influence one’s opinion, and there isn’t anything particularly productive about pointing out that conservatives tend to forgive in conservative leaders what they don’t in liberals. A more helpful question is this: Why has Pope Francis addressed political issues, such as climate change, inequality, poverty, and overpopulation? Is it evidence of abject partisan interest, or a covert dedication to communism, Marxism, or some other insidious ideology?
Or is it just that we now presume that “politics” belongs outside the Church’s purview—despite the Church’s historical record of considering and intervening in political affairs? To me, this appears to be the distortion at hand.
This is partly because the notion that “politics” can be neatly separated from daily life is a new one.
I agree with most of this; it’s impossible, and definitely foolhardy, for a pope to be completely nonpolitical. When Pope Francis denounces trickle-down economics it doesn’t bother me (in fact I think he’s basically right).
Though I take Michael’s point that Francis’ description of contraceptives as a kind of “ideological colonization” seems like an oddly political way of putting the issue, it’s also an uncomfortable truth for both left and right that the United States is the world’s foremost exporter of secular liberal values. No doubt, there are some who would see this as an anti-American worldview, but it’s also true, and important. The West’s development plan includes gay rights and abortion, not some 21st century version of the British East India Company. There’s a case this sort of thing is better left unremarked-upon, but that seems untenable for some of the reasons Bruenig describes.
Most individual choices, down to the things we buy, are political today. Whether or not that politicization is good, Bruenig contends it at least means religious leaders have to stop coming up with sophistical reasons for opposing socialism and just support the state redistribution of goods:
A stateless response to poverty has not been part of Christian tradition for some time, and to address poverty without implicating politics at this point in history would be nearly impossible.
Didn’t you know Dorothy Day was a Democrat?
Bruenig concludes:
… To expect Pope Francis to remain apolitical or to avoid politics is, therefore, to expect silence or awkward retreat on issues integral to Christian life, and to impose the modern notion of a “political sphere” upon an institution that has never really bought into such demarcations. Appreciate his conclusions or not, Pope Francis’s willingness to address politics makes his witness all the more authentic, and, yes, traditional.
“Authenticity” as a concept is at least as shaky as that of a “political sphere.” And while I’d hate to get in the way of an opportunity to call out the hypocrisy of American conservatives, Bruenig is being cagey about at least two things. First, the relative importance of things popes say. Fr. Hunwicke wrote on this last week:
Is it OK for us ordinary Cardinals, Bishops, Priests, Deacons, and Laics to say publicly, with regard to a non-Magisterial and non-formal papal statement, “Goodness me, what twaddle Bar Jona/Borgia/Lambertini/Pacelli/Ratzinger/Bergoglio did talk this morning”? If you reply to me “No; because of the deep respect and deference owed to the Vicar of Christ”, then I have to say that, by bringing in his status, you seem to me to be smuggling the Magisterium back into the equation. If you suggest to me that it would be OK to talk thus frankly about the non-Magisterial and non-formal utterances of a previous Pontiff but not about those of this one (like all those bishops and journalists who kept moderately quiet during the last pontificate but do not refrain now from public sneers at Benedict XVI), I would have to ask you why the death or resignation of a Roman Pontiff means that the respect and deference due to a Vicar of Christ is no longer due to him.
Second, Bruenig’s piece is nearly devoid of specific examples of how Pope Francis has involved himself in politics. Not all politics are created equal. Maybe she can explain what purpose it serves to hand the population control crowd a cudgel that says, “Even Pope Francis agrees…”
It doesn’t follow from the rather pedantic observation that almost everything is political that it’s good for Pope Francis to be as political as possible. On a prudential level, he has limited political capital that should be spent wisely. The papacy drew a hard political line against Henry VIII that led to hundreds of years of persecution of English Catholics. It seems absurd to speculate whether Pope Clement VII was being “authentic” or “traditional.”
America needs to get back to religion, no matter what libertarians say
Here’s a quick lesson for young, self-styled libertarians: Nick Gillespie’s punk-rock stylings and irreverent attitude are not a formula for success.
Admittedly, few in the budding millennial libertarian “generation” will believe me. They are busy celebrating pot freedom and the right to marry whoever they want. Clearly, somewhere along the line between Leonard Read and the New York Times-dubbed “libertarian moment,” freedom turned into blissful sodomy and getting stoned. Should the trend continue, libertarianism will wither, and rightly so.
Gillespie, who is a thought leader in the trendy libertine-leaning freedom movement, is championing the decline. From his soapbox at Reason magazine, he preaches the principles of free association and non-aggression. Much of his work is laudable; his wittiness is a great tool showing how foolish the warmongers in Congress are. But even the wisest jokester is not immune to stupidity. Gillespie’s attitude, anti-authoritarian as it is, is a road map of the perilous direction that libertarianism is trending.
In a recent diatribe, the black jacketed sermonizer attempts to correct Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on a topic of high importance: God and America. The governor, who is a convert to Catholicism, recently told a group of Christians and Jewish leaders the country has drifted away from God. This path is dangerous for America, he averred. As a possible 2016 presidential candidate looking to court social conservatives, Jindal was unambiguous about his warning, telling the crowd, “We have tried everything and now it is time to turn back to God.”
This is all wrong according to Gillespie. Issues of public policy, spending and debt, entitlement programs, civil liberties, and militarization are not matters of spiritual conviction. When it comes to politics, he maintains, “God has nothing to do with any of that.”
Conservatives for secular morality and cultural relativism
Not cool, Austin Petersen:
This is from his public page. What’s a little Catholic bashing to establish your Cool Atheist bona-fides? It’s apparently news to Judge Napolitano’s former producer that the Holy Father isn’t quite on board with the liberal paradigm. I wonder if he’s told his former boss he’s a member of the “cult of Christ.”
Let’s reassure him by noting that there are some liberal Catholics trying to sanctify Charlie Hebdo, and claim that Western Civilization depends on the protection and dissemination of publications like it:
The attack on Charlie Hebdo was an assault on Christendom. Magazines that publish sophomoric cartoons mocking religion are, paradoxically, part of the Body of Christ – if perhaps its lower intestine.
We also have conservatives like the neocon Herodotus Victor Davis Hanson engaging in a little moral relativism, which should cheer an atheist like Petersen:
Unfortunately, when we look to prominent defenders of the Western faith in free speech, we find too often offenders.
Start with Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League. He recently made a series of silly statements about the terrorist attack in Paris. The gist was that the slain Charlie Hebdo staffers were nearly as much to blame for their deaths as were their killers, given their gratuitous blasphemy against the Islamic religion.
Does Donohue believe that satirists who poke fun at Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism — and there are many, including the editors of Charlie Hebdo — are in similar mortal danger worldwide? Would Donohue wish such crass artists and writers to be?
These are both examples of the disturbing tendency after the Paris attacks of shutting down anyone who’s observed a cause and effect relationship between the cartoons and the murders. Indeed, against anyone who has dared to point out that words and pictures have consequences. Should the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been murdered in the name of Islam for drawing stuff? No, of course not. But they were. Can we handle that?
What people like Pope Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Bill Donohue, in descending order of erudition and kindness, have pointed out is that disrespect for religion has bloody consequences. A defining feature of the revolution in France, which established the secular order under which Charlie Hebdo has been allowed to flourish, was the massacre of priests, for example.
Now, not even Donohue wants to go back to those bad old days of “theocracy.” He’s quite clear that he doesn’t support blasphemy laws; apparently he’ll make a big stink if you even ask him to. But if he did, who cares? Are we going to pretend Bill Donohue really has the ability to tip elections, enact massive speech-curtailing laws, call pogroms, or whatever it is that makes him haunt these people’s nightmares?
On the other hand, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, European self-abasement, whatever you want to call it, is not irrelevant. It’s directly related to France’s problems. Which is why it strikes me as cowardly and unreflective that conservatives and libertarians are jumping to the defense of a naked, value-free public square that has been useful for nothing so much as prioritizing Islam at the expense of Christianity. (more…)
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.
