Religion

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Nomination for the most Moldbuggian sentence of 2014

From the blog of Fr. John Hunwicke, a scholar and Ordinariate priest, in a great two–parter:

English atheists … often have minds befuddled by a world view which is little other than the old, ranting, Fox’s-Martyrs-in-a-sauce-of-Charles-Kingsley-with-a-dash-of-Kensit Protestantism, all in the reassuring clothing of a friendly atheistical sheep.

Mark pointed out to me recently that Murray Rothbard had similar thoughts about how postwar secular morality is essentially a kind of godless protestantism, but “Rothbardian” seems to mean a different thing these days.

Are human difference and equal dignity opposed?

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig digs up this Will Saletan piece from 2007 on “liberal creationism” and l’affaire Watson, and comments:

What’s curious to me is that in this new age of scientism, Christian ‘superstition’ — our ethics, our value commitments, our axiomatic beliefs about the value of human life and dignity — is again becoming the hallmark of our ridiculousness. None of this is to say that evil hasn’t ever been done in the name of God, of course it has, but that isn’t what’s being lampooned here. Rather, the Christian commitment to the equal dignity of all people is conflated with piggish ignorance of science, which is synonymous with progress. …

The trick for Christians of this era will be to push back on the new scientism — on the truism that some people are just worth less, say, in market terms — while living in a world that identifies a total commitment to human dignity as a ridiculous superstition.

My first thought reading that sentence was, if people really are valued differently in the market — if they’re valued at all — is it not a little ridiculous to insist on the infinite worth of every human being? But so what?

I find this debate immensely frustrating because of all the point-scoring. You’ve got progressives like Saletan trolling secular liberals about the limits of their belief in evolution, and tradcons using it to say progressive assumptions about the world are informed by eugenics. Also it’s hard to separate from the history of white supremacy and American race relations in general. But let’s pretend we can for a minute.

In the years since Saletan wrote that, evidence has continued to build in favor of the idea that the story of human evolution is much more complicated, and in some cases much quicker, than we ever thought. I’m thinking of Neanderthal/Denisovian DNA being found among Asian and European populations; Harpending and Cochran on the Amish getting more Amish even in a couple of hundred years, or the cold-weather gene in Tibetans. I don’t find this scary or problematic at all, I think it’s beautiful. But whatever you think about it it’s getting difficult to ignore. I suspect this also means the guardians of political correctness will fight all the harder against the James Watsons of the world. That said, it makes about as much sense to say a person of African descent is stupider as saying a German is descended from cavemen.

I suppose there’s a case to be made for the “we don’t want to know” side; that this is a Pandora’s Box that society wisely leaves closed, and any conflation of ethics and science can only be a dilution of the former that leads to bad places. I’m sympathetic to that idea, but the robust alternative to Saletan’s “subtler account of creation and human dignity” (which, for the record, I don’t agree with), cannot be insisting that every human being everywhere in the world is exactly five-and-a-half feet tall, or an equivalent claim about intelligence. Think of it this way; say you have a perfect calculator that can measure all of a person’s qualities and give you a number of their worth in market terms. Say you can shrink that person and make him stupider, like playing an RPG backwards. Their value in the market would go down, but their value to God is unchanged. Earning less than your calculator number would be unfortunate or even unjust, and I suppose it could even be unjust that one’s number is not higher. But it makes no sense to take issue with the calculator itself, since it’s just a tool, and it certainly doesn’t bestow value, let alone infinite value.

Moreover, it’s important to ask whether insisting that human difference — which is to say, inequality — and equal dignity are opposed makes it more difficult to argue for equal dignity, especially as the evidence in favor of human difference seems to be growing. Two people can have unequal capacities but equal dignity. Scientism isn’t just the belief that evolution exists, it’s a whole complex of ideas that reduces people to instrumentalities. One could even say the vastness of human difference is further proof of the Christian idea that we are estranged from one another, and that trying to ameliorate that estrangement through policy, eugenic or otherwise, is usurping a role that properly belongs to God.

I also wonder if there’s an interesting natural law argument in the fact that progressive eugenicists were all about birth control as a means to breed “better” people, but the people who use it today are mostly the kind they would have wanted having babies. Is that to say modern America is dysgenic? I don’t know, but I doubt it will lead to good consequences. Is it scientistic to worry?

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When the ivory tower replaces the throne of God

It’s hard to get through the day without a good bout of consciousness-raising or thirty. You’d have to be an anarcho-primitivist hermit to miss any newspaper, television news program or social network mention of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner. We’ve heard their names and know their stories.These men of color have changed the way some see police, their own neighbors, and the criminal justice system as a whole. Protests continue to be held around the country; sometimes violent, but generally peaceful. Now, well-meaning whites have armed themselves not with guns, but with hashtags, flooding the #CrimingWhileWhite Twitter feed with righteous confessionals intended to illustrate the disparity between the way whites and blacks are treated by police.

Will these protests, rallies, boycotts or Twitter confessions effect real change at every level of our criminal justice system to the satisfaction of activists? I don’t think anyone can claim to know for sure.

But one thing is certain: Nothing is perfect. These well-crafted and well-intentioned tweets are being hailed as privilege-checking by some and denounced as flaunting white privilege by others. (What a legitimate role for white bodies in civil rights activism, if it exists, would look like is beyond the scope of this essay.) Still, some popular symbols of solidarity expressed range from donning a hoodie and skittles in honor of Trayvon Martin to the (apocryphal) “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” stance in honor of Michael Brown.

Others have taken this opportunity to reflect on other areas of life supposedly affected by current social unrest. The most interesting, to me, is religion. Not surprisingly, Christianity is a major target. Secular piety compels me to throw in a line here like “and I don’t blame them for blaming Christianity one bit, it’s totally reasonable to doubt your faith in light of things like this.” But I will not, because it simply is not true. This is not insensitive or closed-minded, as many would like you to believe.

Fellow Christians, do not allow others to convince you that you should reject your beliefs because they may differ from the worldview of those calling your beliefs into question. We could just as well respond that it is time for those people to reconsider their conception of our beliefs. These agitators’ prejudices are likewise in need of reflection.

Barbra Sostaita, a Masters Student at Yale Divinity School, Young Voices Advocate and Former Students For Liberty Campus Coordinator offers this lamentation on the failure of a grand jury to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown in self-defense: “As I look around me, I directed my grief to the paintings and statues of Jesus displayed prominently in the room. Where is your justice, My God? You call yourself the Prince of Peace but the blood of my brother cries out to me from the ground and you are astoundingly silent.”

What I find so bothersome about this is not the outright sacrilege of one of the 7 sentences uttered by our Savior in his final hour on earth, it is rather that Barbara has equated her own conception of justice with that of the will of God.

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Leave the 24 hour Christmas music cycle alone

The season of joy is here. And while many of the same troubles that have beleaguered mankind since antiquity (wars, famine, suffering) are still afflicting much of the globe, Christmas continues unabated. Department stores are decked out in green and red. Multi-colored lights decorate houses in middle class neighborhoods. Makeshift Christmas tree shops have sprung up in vacant parking lots. Children are excitedly begging their parents for the latest and greatest gizmo. Brightness is all around.

In present-day America, the Christmas season is known for another tradition: 24-hour holiday music playing on local radio stations. Like many staples of life, the continual playing of festive tunes is met with a fair amount of derision. There are a few reasons for this. The digital revolution is slowly making FM radio obsolete. These days almost everyone opts for their own music rather than the pre-set choices on corporate airwaves. Not only that, but growing secularism and rampant consumerism have eaten away at the real meaning of Christmas. Luke 2:8-14 seems quaint compared to the new Xbox, or whatever video game system is poisoning young minds these days.

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