The American Conservative

I’m grateful that one of my US Senators, Republican John N. Kennedy, showed that Matthew Petersen, a Trump federal court nominee, is spectacularly unqualified for the job. The Washington Post adds:

Petersen received his law degree from University of Virginia School of Law in 1999 and spent three years at the law firm Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, where he specialized in campaign finance law. After that, he worked briefly as counsel to the Republican National Committee and served as counsel for two congressional panels.

He was appointed to the Federal Election Commission in 2008 by President George W. Bush. There, he served for five years alongside Donald McGahn, the current White House counsel.

Trump tapped Petersen in September to fill a vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, one of the most important federal trial courts in the nation. Until now, his nomination has drawn little attention, and Trump’s other nominees to the court in Washington have breezed through the confirmation process with bipartisan support.

When video of the interrogation made its way online, several high profile law professors tweeted their surprise.

“Don’t want to beat up on the guy but the questions he was being asked could be answered by a second year law student,” wrote Aderson Francois, a professor at Georgetown Law. “Even if you know zero about evidence the one doctrine every law student knows is Daubert because it’s a very famous case about standard to admit expert testimony.”

Trump has given us some wonderful judicial nominees, but good grief, this is an insult. Who sent this hack up? For the federal bench?! Think of all the well qualified conservative law professors in the country … and they found a political appointee at the FEC.

Sorry that I’ve been away from the keys all morning; I’ll tell you about that shortly. I see that there’s been some talk on Twitter about Paul DeHart’s essay titled “What’s Wrong With Rod Dreher’s Straussian Narrative Of The American Constitution?”

My initial response was:

That’s not a Claremonster in my pocket; I’m just happy to see you. https://t.co/feIABNcFoi

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) December 15, 2017

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

What I meant by that was that I’ve never read the political theorist Leo Strauss, and wouldn’t know a Straussian from a Seussian. DeHart allows for that:

While Rod Dreher may not have read Strauss, he seems to have absorbed and adopted a broadly Straussian construction of the history of Western thought.

What does he mean by that? Read:

I have in view the conservative appropriation of Strauss’s ancient-modern divide as the axis mundi. In this way of thinking, historical Christianity belongs on the premodern side of the divide. Modernity is a rupture with antiquity and classical thought and therefore with Christianity, which is an instance of ancient-classical thought.  

On this view, the political order established by America’s founders and framers stands on the modern side. The Constitution ratified in 1789 is considered the first modern Constitution. What matters most about it is that it stands downstream from the likes of Thomas Hobbes—downstream from the decisive rupture with classical western thought. 

For some influenced by Straussian history of thought (Patrick Deneen and perhaps Michael Hanby), to be on the ancient-classical side of the divide is good, whereas to be on the modern side of the divide is to be bad, allied with the unraveling of Western civilization. Since the American Constitution is a modern Constitution, it was conceived in sin; it is ultimately the progeny of the ultra-modernist theorist Thomas Hobbes, as mediated and moderated by John Locke.  

In the piece, DeHart contends that I reject the natural law, meaning that I do not believe that there are moral truths that can be reached without special revelation. That’s not really true, though it is true that I am ambivalent about the natural law, and totally skeptical of the efficacy of arguments based on natural law claims. The two are connected, as David Bentley Hart wrote in a 2013 essay that occasioned lots of contentious banter between him and Thomists. Hart began:

There is a long, rich, varied, and subtle tradition of natural law theory, almost none of which I find especially convincing, but most of which I acknowledge to be—according to the presuppositions of the intellectual world in which it was gestated—perfectly coherent. My skepticism, moreover, has nothing to do with any metaphysical disagreement. I certainly believe in a harmony between cosmic and moral order, sustained by the divine goodness in which both participate. I simply do not believe that the terms of that harmony are as precisely discernible as natural law thinkers imagine.

That is an argument for another time, however. My chief topic here is the attempt in recent years by certain self-described Thomists, particularly in America, to import this tradition into public policy debates, but in a way amenable to modern political culture. What I have in mind is a style of thought whose proponents (names are not important) believe that compelling moral truths can be deduced from a scrupulous contemplation of the principles of cosmic and human nature, quite apart from special revelation, and within the context of the modern conceptual world. This, it seems to me, is a hopeless cause.

Classical natural law theory, after all, begins from the recognition that the movement of the human will is never purely spontaneous, and that all volition is evoked by and directed toward an object beyond itself. It presupposes, moreover, that beyond the immediate objects of desire lies the ultimate end of all willing, the Good as such, which in its absolute priority makes it possible for any finite object to appear to the will as desirable. It asserts that nature is governed by final causes. And, finally, it takes as given that the proper ends of the human will and the final causes of creation are inalienably analogous to one another, because at some ultimate level they coincide (for believers, because God is the one source in which both participate). Thus, in knowing the causal ends of nature, we should be able to know many of the proper moral ends of the will, and even their relative priority in regard to one another.

So far, so good. But insuperable problems arise when—in part out of a commendable desire to speak to secular society in ways it can understand, in part out of some tacit quasi-Kantian notion that moral philosophy must yield clear and universally binding imperatives—the natural law theorist insists that the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind, regardless of religious belief or cultural formation.

The Thomist philosopher Ed Feser argued strongly against Hart. I don’t want to revisit all that now. As a practical matter, though, it ought to be perfectly clear that natural law arguments are impotent in the face of postmodern voluntarism and radical individualism. I remember thinking as soon as I read the last paragraph of Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, et alia‘s What Is Marriage?, a natural law (that is, non-theological) defense of traditional marriage: “That was brilliant and airtight … but it’s not going to change a thing.”

Why not? Because it’s like trying to explain color to people who have lost most of their sight, or music to someone who has lost the faculty of hearing. Alasdair MacIntyre is right: most people today take moral arguments to be statements of how the person making them feels about a thing. He calls this emotivism. Most people these days, I believe, are emotivists, which entails the fact that they certainly don’t believe that they themselves are bound to change their position based on the argument made.

You don’t have to hang around the faculty lounge to see this. I have conversations with everyday people all the time in which logical discourse is not possible, and so do you. I had a political exchange not long ago with someone I know. I pointed out the illogic in his claim, showing that he was affirming contradictory positions — that both things cannot be simultaneously true. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. He knew what he wanted to believe, and he was not budging.

Clear thinking is in all times and places difficult, but it is especially so today because the sense that Truth is something outside ourselves, and that we have to discover, in part through reason, has largely been lost. This calamity has a hundred fathers, but I trace them all back, ultimately, to nominalism.

DeHart is correct that the US Constitution, as an Enlightenment-era document, is based on natural law. I don’t think the Founders appreciated — or anybody of that era appreciated — how much their understanding of natural law depended on Christian presuppositions, or at least the widespread societal affirmation of the basic Biblical worldview. DeHart writes:

While Christianity appropriates ideas from classical antiquity, it also fundamentally transforms them. By contrast, even though modernity rejects classical Christianity, it does so by and large within a frame bequeathed to it by Christianity. Indeed, the notions that human beings are by nature equal, that by nature they are free from political subjection, that political order is created by human will and choice, that the community or commonwealth is authoritative or sovereign over government, that there are natural rights that government ought not infringe, that there should be separate jurisdictions of church and government and those who exercise political power should have no authority in religious matters, that human persons transcend and are not defined entirely by political association (be it the kingdom, the polis, or the empire) . . . These all are Christian ideas—or, at least, ideas that were first articulated by classical Christian thinkers.  

So, what happens when Christianity loses its primacy, or when the meaning of Christianity has become so diffuse in a highly individualistic and anti-traditional culture that it has no fixed meaning? We are living through the answer now.

Recall this passage from John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts militia (1798):

While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while the continues Sincere and incapable of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned Us by Providence. But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep … simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by … morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition … Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

I leave it up to historians and political theorists to say for sure — I’m only an untutored layman — but it seems clear from this passage that Adams, at least, understood that the Constitutional order depended on strong religion. By “moral,” one has to imagine that he meant either Christian morality, or at least a shared moral code of some sort that bound individual passions.

What is this shared moral code today? I don’t claim that our Constitution is making us bad. I contend that having lost much of our metaphysical and moral foundations, we are adrift, and rapidly losing the capacity for self-government.

When DeHart says:

To underscore the point: the idea that some knowledge of right or of moral obligation can be apprehended by reason alone is not distinctive to the Enlightenment. Therefore, it cannot be used as part of an argument that the American Constitution is modernist and Enlightenment in origin rather than classical or Christian. 

… I would point him to this essay by Patrick Deneen, which would appear to address and to refute the point. What makes the thought of Locke different is its focus on the choosing individual:

As Hobbes’ philosophical successor John Locke understood, voluntarist logic ultimately affects all relationships, including the familial. Locke—the first philosopher of liberalism—on the one hand acknowledges in his Second Treatise on Government that the duties of parents to raise children and the corresponding duties of children to obey springs from the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother,” but further claims that every child must ultimately subject his inheritance to the logic of consent beginning in a version of the state of nature, in which we act as autonomous choosing individuals. “For every man’s children being by nature as free as himself, or any of his ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that freedom, choose what society they will join themselves to, what commonwealths they will put themselves under. But if they will enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their ancestors had it, and submit to all the conditions annex’d to such a possession.” Even those who adopt the inheritance of their parents in every regard only do so through the logic of consent, even if theirs is only tacit consent.

This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the idea of the free choice of individuals. Among other significant ways that preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of human choice was to transform the idea of marriage from an institution based upon considerations of family and property to one based upon the choice and consent of individuals united in sacramental love. What it is to suggest is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships becomes dominated by considerations of individual choice based upon the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader considerations of the impact one’s choices have upon the community—present and future—and of one’s obligations to the created order and ultimately to God.

Liberalism began with the explicit assertion, and has continued to claim, that it merely describes our political, social, and private decision-making. Yet implicitly it was constituted as a constructive or normative project: What it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and long-standing experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”

And it is the way of thinking prescribed by liberalism that has undermined the ability of moderns to perceive the natural law. To the ancients, and to the premodern Christians, liberty was meaningful because it enabled us to choose the good. It gave weight and dimension to our choices. To moderns, the choice itself — as distinct from what is chosen — is the point.

My ambivalence about natural law comes from my sense that it depends on concealed presuppositions more than its adherents believe. Doesn’t the feebleness of the natural law concept today serve as … well, if not quite its negation, then something close to it? As Hart says, it’s one thing to believe that there is a such thing as the natural law (I do, he does); it’s another thing to believe that it’s readily accessible. Even if we are wrong, though, again, as a practical political matter … so what? Few people today would give up their right to self-determination and self-definition because someone tells them it violates the natural law.

I’m not trying to be flippant. Anthony Kennedy infamous line:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

… is as modern as it gets, and radically contrary to the concept of natural law. That single line from the 1992 Casey decision tells you more about the reality of contemporary American political and social thought than a stack of natural law books. I wish it weren’t so, but it is so. And it’s why the idea that we can argue our fellow Americans out of this dark wood we find ourselves in is an idea that makes more sense in a Princeton seminar room than in the post-Christian world in which we live.

 

The thing you have to read today is Heterodoxy Academy’s great interview with Columbia University linguist John McWhorter. Excerpts below.

On why he considers most current campus protest to be pure stagecraft:

When I say theater, yes, there’s theater in any kind of protest. The very fact that you’re making a loud noise in a public forum is theater. The very fact that you’re trying to attract people’s attention who otherwise would not be inclined to give it, that’s theater. That’s part of politics. But there’s a particular theatrical aspect to all of this in that I find it simply incoherent—it’s not believable—that a psychologically healthy person and one intelligent and ambitious enough to have gotten into a selective school, in particular, is somebody who is constitutionally unable to bear hearing somebody express views that they don’t agree with, or that they even find nauseous. It’s one thing to find views repugnant. It’s another thing to claim that—to hear them constitute a kind of injury that no reasonable person should be expected to stand up to. That’s theatrical because it’s not true. Nobody is hurt in that immediate, lasting and intolerable way by some words that a person stands up and addresses, in the abstract, to an audience at a microphone.

There’s an argument as to whether somebody can be harmed by being called names directly over a longer period of time. But the idea that hearing ideas that can be construed as being complicit in something as abstract as societal racism—hearing these ideas constitutes injury along the lines of, for example, somebody calling you a nigger to your face once a day—it’s not that I don’t agree with this idea; it’s that it doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t true.

To claim that is a kind of theater in itself. You are pretending—and that really is the only appropriate word—you’re pretending that something that you find unpleasant to behold is injurious. And I think that the theatricality of that kind in the argument is a response in part to the fact that to make your case otherwise—that somebody just shouldn’t be heard—is difficult. You have to pretend that it’s hurting you like a punch in the stomach, because otherwise it becomes a little inconveniently transparent that, really, you’re just insisting that you have your own way because you’ve decided that a certain way of thinking is what’s on the side of the angels.

On the ideologically-driven use of the terms “racism” and “white supremacy”:

That there’s a point at which what’s being called racism is really either accidental or an issue of individual difference or an issue—this gets really complex—that racism can create cultural traits that outlast the racism itself, which is something that people have a really hard time with, and especially when it refers to blacks rather than white people. It’s interesting. Everybody finds the point readily comprehensible when it’s written about in Hillbilly Elegy which is about whites. But extending that same argument to black people is being somehow unjust.

That’s right. There are some behaviors that, no matter what your skin color, are all but guaranteed to keep you poor and dysfunctional. It is not “blaming the victim” to say so.

On the biases of the professoriat:

I would say that—of all of them that I know, and I’m really trying to think of whether this is true—all of them are studying what they study, whether they are white, black or something else, out of a commitment to a leftist agenda. And I don’t mean that a leftist agenda is in itself bad. But the idea is you are advocating for people who have traditionally been downtrodden and dismissed, and what that means is that it definitely shapes your views. And I would say that most of these people are not ones who would be shouting down somebody who came to campus, by no means.

But on the other hand, none of them would contradict people like that too loudly. There’s a basic sense of allegiance with the views of people like that. So they would say, “Oh, no. You should give people their say.” But that’s not something they would write an editorial about, and I frankly think with all due respect for them, they’re not too terribly upset to see a Charles Murray chased off of a campus.

On the religious nature of campus left-wing activism:

I think that the framing issue here is that we have a group of people who are telling us that we are at the end of intellectual history—that they found the answer, that all of the rules are supposed to govern civilized debate are suspendable here because we’re talking about something that is just simply a God-given truth. And I say God on purpose because these people are, unbeknownst to them, exactly what Galileo was up against.

Read the whole thing. It’s so, so good. And if you have time, watch McWhorter, interviewed by Glenn Loury on his Bloggingheads show, just unload on Ta-Nehisi Coates.

 

What is going to happen to American Evangelicalism in the wake of the Roy Moore defeat? Christianity Today editor Mark Galli, in an editorial, says nothing good. Excerpts:

No matter the outcome of today’s special election in Alabama for a coveted US Senate seat, there is already one loser: Christian faith. When it comes to either matters of life and death or personal commitments of the human heart, no one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation. Christianity’s integrity is severely tarnished.

The race between Republican candidate Roy Moore and Democratic candidate Doug Jones has only put an exclamation point on a problem that has been festering for a year and a half—ever since a core of strident conservative Christians began to cheer for Donald Trump without qualification and a chorus of other believers decried that support as immoral. The Christian leaders who have excused, ignored, or justified his unscrupulous behavior and his indecent rhetoric have only given credence to their critics who accuse them of hypocrisy. Meanwhile the easy willingness of moderate and progressive Christians to cast aspersions on their conservative brothers and sisters has made many wonder about our claim that Jesus Christ can bring diverse people together as no other can.

 

More:

As recently as 2011, PRRI found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” But by late 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president, that number had risen sharply to 72 percent—the biggest shift of any US religious group.

The reason for the flip is not hard to discern. David Brody, a correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, has noted the desperation and urgency felt throughout much of conservative Christianity. “The way evangelicals see the world, the culture is not only slipping away—it’s slipping away in all caps, with four exclamation points after that. It’s going to you-know-what in a handbasket.” The logic is then inexorable: “Where does that leave evangelicals? It leaves them with a choice. Do they sacrifice a little bit of that ethical guideline they’ve used in the past in exchange for what they believe is saving the culture?”

The answer for many of them, Galli correctly points out, is yes, disastrously so. I predict we’re going to see a lot of disillusioned conservative Evangelicals, especially young ones, turning to the Benedict Option in the years to come, and trying to figure out what it means for them.

Others are excommunicating the “backsliders” who failed to rally around Trump and Roy Moore. From The New York Times report:

“It grieves me,” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical school in Illinois. “I don’t want ‘evangelical’ to mean people who supported candidates with significant and credible accusations against them. If evangelical means that, it has serious ramifications for the work of Christians and churches.”

That notion is bewildering to evangelical leaders who see Mr. Trump as their champion. They say that Mr. Trump has given them more access than any president in recent memory, and has done more to advance their agenda, by appointing judges who are likely to rule against abortion and gay rights; by channeling government funds to private religious schools; by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; and by calling for the elimination of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches and charitable groups from endorsing political candidates.

“I believe that God answered our prayers in a way we didn’t expect, for a person we didn’t even necessarily like,” said Stephen E. Strang, author of “God and Donald Trump” and founder of Charisma Media, a Christian publishing house.

“Christians believe in redemption and forgiveness, so they’re willing to give Donald Trump a chance,” said Mr. Strang, who is a member of the president’s informal council of evangelical advisers. “If he turns out to be a lecher like Bill Clinton, or dishonest in some kind of way, in a way that’s proven, you’ll see the support fade as quick as it came.”

Mr. Strang said that those who talk about Mr. Trump tarnishing the evangelical brand “are not really believers — they’re not with us, anyway.”

Wow, that’s harsh: if you’re a Christian who doesn’t have faith in Donald Trump, you’re not really a believer. Strange times.

I’d like to ask conservative Evangelicals in this blog’s readership to answer two questions:

1) How will Evangelical political engagement in the Trump era affect Evangelical Christianity?
2) How will it affect your Evangelical Christianity?

If you are not a conservative Evangelical, please comment judiciously, if at all, on this thread. I’m not going to approve generic rants or lazy potshots about how awful conservative Evangelicals are. I really do want to know what they think about the current and future state of their movement.

UPDATE: Readers, I’m not interested in your political musings, except insofar as they relate directly to your religious thinking. And even then I’m not going to post any comments that are solely about politics. Please stay focused on how contemporary politics is influencing your Evangelicalism. Not other people’s Evangelicalism, but your own. I’m not trying to start an argument here; I just want to take the temperature of the readership.

It’s not a war on Christmas; Christmas as a yearly event seems robust. But the de-Christianization of Christmas is a real thing. From the Pew Research Center:

Not only are some of the more religious aspects of Christmas less prominent in the public sphere, but there are signs that they are on the wane in Americans’ private lives and personal beliefs as well. For instance, there has been a noticeable decline in the percentage of U.S. adults who say they believe that biblical elements of the Christmas story – that Jesus was born to a virgin, for example – reflect historical events that actually occurred. And although most Americans still say they mark the occasion as a religious holiday, there has been a slight drop in recent years in the share who say they do this.

Currently, 55% of U.S. adults say they celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, including 46% who see it as more of a religious holiday than a cultural holiday and 9% who celebrate Christmas as both a religious and a cultural occasion. In 2013, 59% of Americans said they celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, including 51% who saw it as more religious than cultural and 7% who marked the day as both a religious and a cultural holiday.

To be sure, while the public’s commemoration of Christmas may have less of a religious component now than in the past, the share of Americans who say they celebrate Christmas in some way has hardly budged at all. Nine-in-ten U.S. adults say they celebrate the holiday, which is nearly identical to the share who said this in 2013. About eight-in-ten will gather with family and friends. And half say they plan to attend church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, little changed since 2013, the last time Pew Research Center asked the question.

Got that? People still observe Christmas; it’s just that fewer people believe in the reason for the season. More:

The religiously unaffiliated – those who identify religiously as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” and who are sometimes also referred to as religious “nones” – are much less likely than Christians to express belief in the biblical Christmas story. And, in recent years, “nones” have become even less likely to believe in it, contributing to the public’s overall decline in belief in the biblical depiction of Jesus’ birth. (Religious “nones” also have been growing as a share of the U.S. population, although the religiously unaffiliated share of respondents in the December 2017 survey is similar in size to the unaffiliated share of the December 2014 sample.)

At the same time, the new study finds a small but significant decline in the share of Christians who believe in the Christmas narrative contained in the Bible. To be sure, large majorities of Christians still believe in key elements of the nativity story as described in the Bible. But the shares of Christians who believe in the virgin birth, the visit of the Magi, the announcement of Jesus’ birth by an angel and the baby Jesus lying in the manger all have ticked downward in recent years. Overall, the share of Christians who believe in all four of these elements of the Christmas story has dipped from 81% in 2014 to 76% today. This decline has been particularly pronounced among white mainline Protestants.

Read the entire report here.

It’s possible, and even likely, that some conservatives are ginned up about the “war on Christmas” because they correctly sense that the religious sense of Christmas is slipping away in American life. It is also likely that those who believe that President Trump has brought Christmas “back” are the sort of Christians still under the delusion that one can vote in the Kingdom of God.

No politician can bring Christmas “back,” whatever that means, because no politician can bring the basis of Christmas — the Christian religion — back. That’s on us Christians. What this Christmas data show us is the steady de-Christianization of the United States.

It’s vitally important for Christians to understand this connection. I’m as irritated as anybody with grinchy secularists pushing crèches and suchlike out of the public square, but they aren’t the real problem. They aren’t the ones failing to pass the faith on to the young, or to strengthen the faith of those of all ages who remain. The problem is in part with the kind of nominal Christians who only go to church on Christmas and Easter.

Don’t take this sobering news as a reason to rend your garments and wail. Use it as reason to make your family’s celebration of Advent and Christmas more religious. Don’t wait for your pastor to do it for you.

In this spirit, Mary Eberstadt has a good essay in First Things, in which she talks about “the zealous faith of secularism,” characterizing it as a rising and uncompromising religion, displacing Christianity. Hers is an important analysis, but it ends hopefully:

In this ongoing catastrophe over the fundamental question of who we are,there is great opportunity. It is shocking but true: The overbearing secularist culture is itself sowing the seeds of a religious revival.

The wide range of fresh cultural and religious analysis mentioned earlier is one measure of a counterculture that’s thriving in this hour of paganization. Even the dominance of the secularist church in familiar venues looks to be less monolithic than is usually understood. Witness again how the conflagration that started with Harvey Weinstein has gone on to illuminate wrongdoing elsewhere, on the part of others who have acted on the premise that women are available for recreational sex anywhere and anytime. Meanwhile, new Catholic and other Christian associations proliferate on campuses and elsewhere, despite fierce secularist pushback. If the rise in “nones” is one emblematic story of our time, so too is the birth of countercultural campus communities like the Thomistic Institute, the Love and Fidelity Network, and FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students); the sharp rise in high schools grounded in classical education; the Leonine Forum for young professionals in Washington, D.C., now expanding into other cities; related ongoing intellectual projects like the Tertio Millennio Seminar in Poland, the Free Society Seminar in Slovakia, and more; and many other organic responses, both protective and proactive, to competition from the rival church of secularism.

These and other platoons like them will transform the American landscape. They encourage the search for transcendence in a world where neo-paganism insists there is none; they help those damaged collaterally by the sexual revolution to find answers to the question “Who am I?” The rival church of secularism shortchanges humanity, and humanity, plodding and delinquent though it may be, still shows signs of wanting more than the church of the new secularism can deliver.

Two such witnesses to that reality appeared in Washington, D. C., a few months ago, in the middle of a heat wave. They had gotten in touch with me to discuss a documentary they were creating to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae. Their studio in D.C. turned out to be their hotel room. The entourage for the shoot included their three very young children, with whom they took turns throughout the interview. They had made many sacrifices and traveled hundreds of miles because, they said, they were on a mission to tell the truth.

The young woman had grown up without knowing who her father was. Her mother, a radical feminist, raised her to fear and hate men. The young man came from Scandinavia, growing up as secular as Scandinavians can be. Both, if encountered earlier in their lives, would have been categorized as “nones.”

In their own estimations, they had escaped from behind enemy lines of the sexual revolution. Somehow, they found each other. Somehow, falling in love led them to question what had happened in their pasts. Somehow, they encountered a priest. Somehow, they read some books by faithful authors. And what with one improbable development and another, both ended up converting to Catholicism. Now they want to share with others the truths they discovered the hard way. That’s how the Church of the future will be rebuilt: stone by stone, picked up from the rubble, by witnesses to the initial blast.

Preach it, Mary! The Benedict Option is all about building this Church of the future (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) being built in the ruins of what was once Christendom. I was so pleased and honored to learn today that Mary Eberstadt chose The Benedict Option as one of her books of the year. 

 

According to a report in Variety, the veteran talk show host has been suspended by PBS on suspicion of sexual harassment. Excerpt:

Sources close to the production told Variety that PBS hired attorney Sarah Taylor Wirtz of the firm MSK to oversee an investigation into Smiley’s behavior after receiving allegations of misconduct by Smiley, who hosts and produces the talk show. Wirtz declined Variety‘s request for comment. According to sources, MSK took reports from 10 witnesses, a mix of men and women of different races and employment levels in Smiley’s organization, most of them former staffers.

The investigation found credible allegations that Smiley had engaged in sexual relationships with multiple subordinates, sources said. Some witnesses interviewed expressed concern that their employment status was linked to the status of a sexual relationship with Smiley. In general, witnesses described Smiley as creating a verbally abusive and threatening environment that went beyond what could be expected in a typical high-pressure work environment. Several expressed concerns about retaliation.

Smiley is fighting back. His statement:

On the eve of the 15th season and 3,000th episode of my nightly talk show, I was as shocked as anyone else by PBS’ announcement today. Variety knew before I did.

I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth. To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering 6 networks over 30 years.
Never. Ever. Never.

PBS launched a so-called investigation of me without ever informing me. I learned of the investigation when former staffers started contacting me to share the uncomfortable experience of receiving a phone call from a stranger asking whether, I had ever done anything to make them uncomfortable, and if they could provide other names of persons to call. After 14 seasons, that’s how I learned of this inquiry, from the streets.

Only after being threatened with a lawsuit, did PBS investigators reluctantly agree to interview me for three hours.

If having a consensual relationship with a colleague years ago is the stuff that leads to this kind of public humiliation and personal destruction, heaven help us. The PBS investigators refused to review any of my personal documentation, refused to provide me the names of any accusers, refused to speak to my current staff, and refused to provide me any semblance of due process to defend myself against allegations from unknown sources. Their mind was made up. Almost immediately following the meeting, this story broke in Variety as an “exclusive.” Indeed, I learned more about these allegations reading the Variety story than the PBS investigator shared with me, the accused, in our 3 hour face to face meeting.

My attorneys were sent a formal letter invoking a contractual provision to not distribute my programming, and that was it.

Put simply, PBS overreacted and conducted a biased and sloppy investigation, which led to a rush to judgment, and trampling on a reputation that I have spent an entire lifetime trying to establish.

This has gone too far. And, I, for one, intend to fight back.

It’s time for a real conversation in America, so men and women know how to engage in the workplace. I look forward to actively participating in that conversation.

Watch him say these words here, on his Facebook page.

It’s impossible to know at this point who is telling the truth here, but if Smiley’s account is true, then he is right to resist, and to resist publicly. If it’s true that he’s not even being allowed to know who’s accusing him, and it’s true that he had to learn of this investigation through the grapevine, that’s outrageous.

A lot of you have sent me a link to Claire Berlinski’s powerful essay denouncing what she calls “The Warlock Hunt”. It really is as good as you say.

Berlinski starts by recounting some of the accusations women have made against men for sexual harassment in recent weeks. Then:

All true; yet something is troubling me. Recently I saw a friend—a man—pilloried on Facebook for asking if #metoo is going too far. “No,” said his female interlocutors. “Women have endured far too many years of harassment, humiliation, and injustice. We’ll tell you when it’s gone too far.” But I’m part of that “we,” and I say it is going too far. Mass hysteria has set in. It has become a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men.

If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just fired an editor for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?

But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.

Berlinski said that yes, she has often been the recipient of untoward attention from lusty males, including a drunken Oxford don who grabbed her rear end and made a lewd remark at a Christmas party:

But here is the thing. I did not freeze, nor was I terrified. I was amused and flattered and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu strictu. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. But now I have too much power. I have the power to destroy someone whose tutorials were invaluable to me and shaped my entire intellectual life much for the better. This is a power I do not want and should not have.

Over the course of my academic and professional career, many men who in some way held a position of power over me have made lewd jokes in my presence, or reminisced drunkenly of past lovers, or confessed sexual fantasies. They have hugged me, flirted with me, on occasion propositioned me. For the most part, this male attention has amused me and given me reason to look forward to otherwise dreary days at work. I dread the day I lose my power over men, which I have used to coax them to confide to me on the record secrets they would never have vouchsafed to a male journalist. I did not feel “demeaned” by the realization that some men esteemed my cleavage more than my talent; I felt damned lucky to have enough talent to exploit my cleavage.

But what if I now feel differently? What if—perhaps moved by the testimony of the many women who have come forward in recent weeks—I were to realize that the ambient sexual culture I meekly accepted as “amusing” was in fact repulsive and loathsome? What if I now realize it did me great emotional damage, harm so profound that only now do I recognize it?

Apparently, some women feel precisely this way.

Berlinski then goes on to talk about how in real life — the place where human beings, not automatons or ideologues, live — relations between men and women are complicated and fraught with a sexual tension that can be delicious:

Courtship is not a phenomenon so minor to our behavioral repertoire that we can readily expunge it from the workplace. It is central to human life. Men and women are attracted to each other; the human race could not perpetuate itself otherwise; and anyone who imagines they will cease to be attracted to each other—or act as if they were not—in the workplace, or any other place, is delusional. Anyone who imagines it is easy for a man to figure out whether a woman might like to be kissed is insane. The difficulty of ascertaining whether one’s passions are reciprocated is the theme of 90 percent of human literature and every romantic comedy or pop song ever written.

Romance involves the most complex of human emotions, desire the most powerful of human drives. It is so easy to read the signals wrong. Every honest man will tell you that at times he has misread these signals, and so will every honest woman. The insistence that an unwanted kiss is always about power, not courtship, simply isn’t a serious theory of the case—not when the punishment for this crime is so grave. Men, too, are entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and even to a presumption of innocence.

Berlinski is scandalized by the way accused men are accepting blame. It reminds her of Communist show trials:

They are all confessing in the same dazed, rote, mechanical way. It’s always the same statement: “I have come to realize that it does not matter that, at the time, I may have perceived my words as playful. It does not matter that, at the time, I may have felt that we were flirting. It does not matter that, at the time, I may have felt what I said was okay. The only thing that matters is how I made these three women feel,” said Representative Steve Lebsock. Now that is a remarkable thing to say. Why doesn’t it matter what he thought what was happening? Why would we accept as remotely rational the idea that the only thing that matters is how the women felt? The confession continues in the same vein: “It is hard for me to express how shocked I am to realize the depth of the pain I have caused and my journey now is to come to terms with my demons and I’ve brought on a team of therapists and I will be entering counselling and reflecting carefully on issues of gender inequality, power, and privilege in our society and—”

For God’s sake, why are these men all humiliating themselves? It’s not like confessing will bring forgiveness. They must all know, like Bukharin, that no matter what they say, the ritual of confession will be followed by the ritual of liquidation. If they said, “You’ve all lost your f*cking minds, stop sniffing my underwear and leave me the f*ck alone,” they’d meet exactly the same fate. Why didn’t Bukharin say, “To hell with you. You may kill me, but you will not make me grovel?” I used to wonder, but now I see. Am I the only one who finds these canned, rote, mechanical, brainwashed apologies deeply creepy? Isn’t anyone else put in mind of the Cultural Revolution’s Struggle Sessions, where the accused were dragged before crowds to condemn themselves and plead for forgiveness? This very form of ritual public humiliation, aimed at eliminating all traces of reactionary thinking, now awaits anyone accused of providing an unwanted backrub.

This Berlinski essay really brings home what readers and friends who grew up under Communism have been trying to tell me about the way Western culture is changing for the worst.

Here’s the world we have created for ourselves, says Berlinski:

Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual, in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?

Powerful. It brings to mind the time I was accused of racism in the workplace on completely spurious grounds. This accusation would have been laughed out of any remotely fair-minded tribunal. But my accuser was a racial minority, and I understood quite clearly the power he had over me: he could have easily compelled our employer to fire me, and used language indicating that he was willing to press it. That’s why I did not formally challenge his absurd claim … but I also knew that never, ever should I exchange a single word with that man again, other than what is absolutely necessary to conduct business. And even then I would weigh every word carefully.

This was a man I had worked with for years, and on whom I was on friendly terms. The fact that a single word — calling terrorists “savages” — caused him to go not to me to express his offense and concern, but immediately to our supervisor with language indicating that he was prepared to take legal action — well, that revealed to me that I was not safe talking with him. And it infuriated me that he had that kind of power over me within the culture of our company.

A friendship ended that day, as did a normal working relationship. I don’t work in an office now, but the eagerness more and more people have to take hysterical offense at normal human behavior — including the all-too-human propensity to cross certain lines, however inadvertently — makes me much more careful about those I choose to socialize with. You just never know who will be willing to destroy you via social media or otherwise for something they you said, or that they claim you said.

Now that I think about it, I regret my response when the Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton was humiliated by a former lover who released video of the elderly man masturbating. I still believe, as I said then, that Joe Barton had no business sending sex videos of himself to anybody. But in light of Berlinski’s essay, I find a certain pity for men and women who abase themselves for love or lust. Barton shouldn’t have done what he did, but none of us had a right to see it. Many of us would be destroyed if our own most intimate acts were made public. The fact that Barton made this possible by recording himself does not make it any less monstrous that this made it into the public space.

I am reminded of the character Sabina from Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who believed that we could only be fully human if we maintained a strict private space around ourselves:

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

With social media, we always have to keep a public in mind, because you never know when someone might be recording you, or will broadcast private words, often out of context, all for the sake of destroying you.

Please read the whole thing. There’s a lot more to the Berlinski essay than I’ve been able to speak of here. One of the readers who e-mailed me the essay commented:

I think it says a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking. We live in a world of shame without sin – this is the legacy of Rousseau. The absence of any notion of sin (and hence forgiveness), or any notion of male/female complementarity, along with the fetishization of “consent” and the absolute authority of internal states of feeling (the crux of Kennedy’s Obergefell ruling) has rendered us unable to think sensibly about how men and women relate to each other. I think the author is largely correct that the public shamings arise from an inchoate sense of decline and the costs associated with cultural emasculation. The generational insistence in the academy that masculinity is “toxic” is making the world a less interesting and more dangerous place.

One thing I’d especially like to toss out for conversation: her theory on why this is happening:

I’m not sure what, precisely, is now driving us over the edge. But I’d suggest looking at the obvious. The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump. Our country is not what we thought it was. We’re a fading superpower in a world of enemies. The people now running the United States cannot remotely persuade us, even for five minutes, that they know what they’re doing and are capable of keeping us safe. Who among us doesn’t feel profound anxiety about this? Daddy-the-President turns out to be a hapless dotard. Women who had hopefully imagined rough men standing ready to do violence on our behalf so we could sleep peacefully in our beds at night have discovered instead—psychologically speaking—that Daddy is dead.

I don’t know about that. But I think the answer is probably to be found in the exploration of this question posed by Aaron Renn in the new issue of his e-mail newsletter The Masculinist (subscribe to it for free here):

Why did 125 million women buy a copy of 50 Shades of Grey? 125 million! This makes it one of the single biggest selling books in all of human history. Why was that?

This is one of the most wonderful surprises: a new release of bluegrass gospel music by a band of young Dominican brothers calling themselves the Hillbilly Thomists. As they explain on their website:

In 1955, the southern author Flannery O’Connor said of herself, “Everybody who has read Wise Blood thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas. . .I’m a hillbilly Thomist.” She said that her fiction was concerned with the ways grace is at work among people who do not have access to the sacraments. The Thomist (one who follows the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas) believes that the invisible grace of God can be at work in visible things, just as the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, in the person of Christ.

Here’s a link to a live performance. These men are for real. Theologian Chad Pecknold writes about the album here.

Order the album on iTunes or otherwise here. Man, this is great stuff. That Dominican House of Studies in Washington is such a bastion of joyful, creative Catholic orthodoxy — and a blessing to all of us.

Watch this. Learn from it. Go and be likewise.

UPDATE: Half of y’all are crazy. I keep seeing comments that say, in effect, “But whatabout (some bad thing Biden did or said)? Huh? HUH?!” Come on, people, can we not put aside our partisanship long enough to recognize a decent, humane gesture by someone we don’t normally like? President George W. Bush would do things like this too. Most people do. Most people aren’t so wacked out by politics that they are incapable of admiring something admirable in their political opponents.

Seriously, if you hate Biden so much that you can’t approve of this fatherly gesture of kindness to Meghan McCain, whose father is dying of brain cancer, then you need to check your heart and make sure it’s still functioning.

Well, that was something, wuddun it? Who’d have ever thought that a Democrat could win a Senate race in Alabama? It wasn’t so much that Doug Jones won as that Roy Moore lost, of course. Moore supporters will blame that scheming Mitch McConnell, or the national media, for the loss, but it pretty much comes down to the fact that Ol’ Roy was a terrible candidate.

Check out the exit poll results to see why Alabamians voted like they did. Note how little the skeezy stories about Roy Moore and teenage girls mattered to voters, in the end. The main driver of the Jones victory appears to be black voters, who turned out in impressive numbers to vote against a candidate who once publicly waxed nostalgic for the good old days of slavery, and the fact that Jones won decisively among 18-29 year old voters.

Presumably the sliver of write-in votes would normally have gone to the Republican candidate, but were cast as a protest vote against Moore (Sen. Richard Shelby said he did this). Had Moore gotten those votes, he would have won. So the pointed refusal of some Republicans to vote for Moore or for Jones made a difference.

The big takeaway here is that Roy Moore’s fate revealed the limits of Trumpism. Trump came out against him in the GOP primary, and lost. Trump came out for him, bigly, in the general … and lost a second time. It’s beyond absurd that Republicans lost Jeff Sessions’s seat in AlabamaAs Ross Douthat writes this morning:

It was not so much a rejection of the Trump agenda as it was a rejection of the whole Trumpian mode of politics, which since our president’s election has consisted of a trebling down on the most unattractive features of his campaign style, a fervent commitment to “triggering the libs” shorn of any populist substance, and a cocksure assumption that any Republicans who aren’t in it for the liberal-triggering care enough about judges and abortion or their tax cuts or the soaring stock market to swallow hard and go along.

Roy Moore, in this sense, was Trump’s Trump — the man who took this mode of politics to 11 and beyond. The president has harassment accusations; the judge had mall-trawling accusations. Trump is a race-baiter; Moore was a stock character from a message movie about Southern bigotry. Trump’s populism mixed reasonable grievances in together with some stupid ones; Moore’s populism was the purest ressentiment. And like Trump but much, much more so, the Moore campaign relied on the assumption that Republicans who didn’t care for who he was and what he represented simply had nowhere else to go.

And they pretty much didn’t go anywhere — except for a small but critical number. Exits show that though Jones lost college educated whites and white women overall, he did much better among them than Obama did. And there was that slim but critical number of write-in voters, who were almost certainly Republicans. I’m not sure how the Independent voters would normally have gone, but they broke in a slight majority for Jones. More Douthat:

So while Moore’s defeat is, yes, specific to him, specific to the statutory rape accusations and all the rest of his problems as a candidate, it’s also a pretty clear foretaste of what you get when you distill white identity politics to a nasty essence and then try to build a coalition around it. You get massive Democratic turnout, black turnout in particular, slumping Republican turnout, and a whole lot of write-in votes from people who should be your supporters. You get Democrats winning elections in the most unlikely places. And you get, quite probably, a Democratic majority in the House and perhaps even the Senate.

This is the thing that Trumpists don’t want to hear: the politics of substance-free populist outrage has its limits. If it can’t win in Alabama, its day is done. It ends up depressing the normal Republican vote and energizing the Democratic vote. Steve Bannon’s plan to take over the Republican Party is going nowhere now.

But this is the thing that standard Washington GOP types don’t want to hear: this does not mean voters want to go back to the status quo.  If they were happy with Republican governance, Trump wouldn’t have won the presidency in the first place.

But now that we’re about a year in to the Trump presidency, it’s clear that he has not delivered on the incredible opportunity history handed him. He has governed mostly as a corporate Republican, and carried on with such loudmouthed recklessness that he’s embarrassed and exhausted a lot conservative voters. Meanwhile, like Roy Moore, he has sent an electric shock through Democrats.

Now, what do House and Senate Republicans do to avoid being wiped out in what, after the Virginia statehouse races this fall, and now the Dems’ big Alabama win, is surely to be a big Democratic wave in 2018? Do they abandon Trump and try to establish an identity distinct from his — and if so, around what issues? Do they have the political imagination and party discipline to embrace the issues that made Trump popular, without the bluster and clownery? More to the point, do they have the guts to defy the party’s donors?

They had better. It’s important. A GOP insider e-mailed me this morning to say:

It’s hard to be a Republican sometimes given how stupid and ham-fisted we can be, but what’s the choice? Yesterday the House Committee handling the new Higher Ed bill met for mark-up. The bill includes language prohibiting the government from taking adverse action against religious schools that receive Title IV funding (student loans) because the government disagrees with the religious mission/practice of the school. The ranking Democrat voted to strip out the language and it stayed in on a party line vote.

This language is a big priority of the CCCU schools [a coalition of Protestant colleges — RD], many of which do everything they possibly can to signal their support for a host of progressive causes, but when push comes to shove they have only Republicans to go to for protection. I’m as frustrated with the GOP as anyone, but then, there is this stuff…

Yes, there is.

This e-mail put me in mind of this passage from the Politics chapter of The Benedict Option. Here, I’m quoting a man named Lance Kinzer, a conservative Evangelical and Kansas Republican who retired from the state legislature and went into full-time lobbying for religious liberty at the state level. It’s worth quoting the entire passage in full. The highlighted (boldfaced) parts indicate my own emphasis:

Yet Kinzer has not left the realm of conventional politics entirely. The first goal of Benedict Option Christians in the world of conventional politics is to secure and expand the space within which we can be ourselves and build our own institutions. To that end, he travels around the country advocating for religious liberty legislation in state legislatures. Over and over he sees Republican legislators who are inclined to support religious liberty taking a terrible pounding from the business lobby. He doesn’t know how much longer they will be able to hold out. Pastors and lay Christian leaders need to prepare their congregations for hard times.

“It’s important to avoid being alarmist, but people really do need to recognize the seriousness of the threats that Christians face, and the real, deep difficulty of the political environment,” Kinzer says. “They need to internalize what it really means to be in a minority posture, and beginning to think like that is really critical. If we don’t, we’re going to continue to operate out of a playbook that has very little to do with the game that’s actually being played.”

Kinzer contends that even as Christians refocus their attention locally and center their attention on building up their own local church communities, they cannot afford to disengage from politics completely. The religious liberty stakes are far too high. What does this mean at the grassroots level? He offers these suggestions:

 Get active at the state and local level, engaging lawmakers with personal letters (not cut – and – paste mailings from activist groups) and face-to-face meetings.

 Focus on prudent, achievable goals. Don’t fight the entire culture war or waste scant political capital on meaningless or needlessly inflammatory gestures.

 Nothing matters more than guarding the freedom of Christian institutions to nurture future generations in the faith. Given our political weakness, other objectives have to take a back seat. 

 Reach out to local media and invite coverage of the religious side in particular religious liberty controversies.

 Stay polite and respectful. Don’t validate opponents’ claims that “religious liberty ” is nothing more than an excuse for bigotry.

 Because Christians need all the friends we can get, form partnerships with leaders across denominations and from non-Christian religions. And extend a hand of friendship to gays and lesbians who disagree with us but will stand up for our First Amendment right to be wrong.

Most American Christians have no sense of how urgent this issue is and how critical it is for individuals and churches to ris e from their slumber and defend themselves while there is still time. We do not have the luxury of continuing to fight the last war.

“We are facing the real risk that the work of the church, and its ability to form our children according to the things we believe are most important in life, is under threat by a hostile government,” warns Kinzer. “And I don’t think it’s alarmist to say so. ”

I want you to consider that if the federal government barred government-backed student loans from going to religious colleges that, for reasons of conscience, discriminated in any way against LGBT students, most of those colleges would cease to exist. That’s how dependent many colleges and universities are on student loans. The Democratic Party is eager to do this; note the GOP insider’s observation that the only reason that provision didn’t make it into the bill was a Republican majority on the committee. That’s how close it is. Given how hostile the Democratic Party is to religion, the survival of many Christian colleges may literally depend on maintaining a Republican majority. This is not just political talk.

Given that, do you see, conservative Christian readers, how irresponsible it is to be pointlessly inflammatory? How this sort of thing — from a prominent Christian college president, no less! — deeply damages the cause?

AL voters are too smart to let the media & Estab Repubs & Dems tell them how to vote. I hope the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd is alive/well in AL. “A southern man don’t need them around anyhow & Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell me true?@MooreSenate

— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) December 12, 2017

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If we don’t stop it now, the Trumpist politics of “let’s tick off the liberals” is going to be devastating to religious liberty. The country as a whole is narrowly divided. As we saw last night in Alabama, it is possible to lose even safe Republican seats if what the party offers to voters is an embarrassing, bomb-throwing clown who only depresses Republican turnout and juices Democratic turnout. You simply cannot rely on the instincts of Republican voters to pull the lever for any yellow dog the party puts up. (And note well that it wasn’t the DC party that ran Roy Moore, but a plurality of Alabama Republican voters that put him in the race.) And you can’t live in such a bubble that you don’t pay attention to the effect your candidates have on incentivizing Democrats and Independents to vote against the GOP.

To repeat Lance Kinzer’s advice: Religious conservatives must be realistic about the fact that we are a minority in this country now, and that we face a very difficult political environment. Braying and praying for #MAGA might feel good, but it’s going to cost us massively in this post-Christian landscape. We have no margin for error here.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I’ve posted here before under my own name, but am actually a bit afraid to do so now. I am one of those conservative Christians who has not voted for a Democrat for…let’s just say a long time, longer than some of you have been alive. I live in Alabama and agonized for weeks about this election, having observed Moore’s nuttiness for years. As late as Monday night I had decided not to vote for him. As late as my drive to the polls on Tuesday I had changed my mind and decided I would after all. But when I actually had the ballot in my hand I just couldn’t do it, and wrote in somebody instead.

So I am one of that handful of people who put Jones over the top. I do not feel good about it. I feel terrible in fact. My wife is hardly speaking to me–she detests Moore but voted for him in the interests of the bigger picture. And yet I think a Moore victory might have been a win-the-battle-lose-the-war event.

No wisdom or counsel to offer. All I can say is that this whole situation is terrible. It is, as many have said, a cold civil war, and it isn’t going to get better. If you have any notion that the victors in this election are feeling the least bit conciliatory or magnanimous, you are wrong. I listened to them on tv last night and on Facebook this morning.