The American Conservative

Here’s what happened above:

LSU defensive end Breiden Fehoko joined his father for a special tradition ahead of the Tigers’ game against No. 2 Georgia on Saturday.

The junior — who played his first two seasons at Texas Tech before transferring to LSU — is from Honolulu, and his father, Vili, was “Vili the Warrior,” who performed at halftime for Hawaii’s football and men’s volleyball games while dressed as an ancient Polynesian warrior, according to The Advocate in Baton Rouge. It was a way for Vili to share that culture, and the family is doing something similar at LSU, which entered Week 7 ranked No. 13 in the nation.

The Tigers beat the everliving crap out of Georgia today. Wooooooo!

At #Synod2018 Presser; Cardinal Juan José Omella says “As old folks we should not be afraid to embark on this new path the Pope is pointing out to us. It is a path that is leading us to new kinds of families, new family relations, and we should not be afraid to open up to this” pic.twitter.com/t3g0uc0nrb

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) October 13, 2018

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

I would like to hear the context in which the cardinal archbishop of Barcelona made this comment. Perhaps it is less worrying than it seems here — but I doubt it.

Did you ever think you would see the Catholic Church deconstruct and abandon its own fundamental moral tradition on marriage and family as Francis and his team are now doing? It’s happening so fast. Remember what top Francis advisor Father Thomas Rosica wrote recently:

Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.

Let the reader understand.

UPDATE: News from the Synod working group headed by Cardinal Cupich of Chicago:

Also, there are many other forms of family other than the nuclear family or the extended family. We had a debate in our small group about non-ideal groupings from the Christian perspective. Does leadership in the Church require bishops and priests to proclaim the Gospel truth by denying that these are families? Or does our leadership require us to accompany the young people in the reality in which they find themselves? Perhaps these are not contradictory realities: St John recounts that Jesus both accepted the woman caught in adultery and proposed something else. Is it possible for us to both accept and even honour the family unit that a young person finds herself in and to share the Gospel ideal to her?

And, Catholic theologian Larry Chapp, in the comments:

I highly doubt that Pope Francis will just flat-out repudiate the Catholic doctrine that marriage is a life long sacramental union of one man and one women for the purpose of mutual support and procreation. For starters…. he can’t. Those are clearly infallible teachings of the Church and if he were to just repudiate them, there would be a schism, without a doubt, and open rebellion to his legitimacy as Pope. Now, maybe that is his end game, but even if it is, the time is not yet ripe for such a move.

Rather, look to the methodology followed in Amoris. Do not openly deny any doctrine, just undermine it in actual pastoral practice by calling for more “discernment” and paying attention to “concrete experiences” and so on.

That is how the Pope will get acceptance of “gay” families in the Church. He will call for pastors to “accompany” such individuals in order to “discern” if they are doing the very best they can to live up to the Church’s “ideals”. And if they are doing their best, to let them take communion, since living the commandments, as Cardinal Kasper said with regard to those divorced and remarried, is only for the “heroic”.

The same approach could also be applied to contraception and co-habitation. The doctrine will be affirmed as an “ideal”, with different individuals falling into a spectrum on how close they are to the ideal. And so long as they are at peace in their own conscience, no matter how poorly formed, then they can go to communion. This will be done under the banner of “pastoral” sensitivity and an opposition to “rigid” rules. The appeal will be to an “inclusive” Catholicism that has a “big tent” that allows for almost everyone to go to communion under the guise of a kind of “gradualism” in moral matters. This view was condemned explicitly by JPII. But heck… that was a long time ago and who remembers that stuff?

The goal is obviously to someday eliminate the doctrine of infallibility completely, and to create practices in the Church that make such behaviors and lifestyles commonplace, so that when the doctrines are eventually changed, nobody will even notice or care. Since the Church does have a Magisterium, in order for the Roman Church to go full-on Episcopalian, you have to first destroy that Magisterium. But that has to be done in steps. And it begins by “allowing” behaviors that the Church has heretofore infallibly said no to. Over time, it will just become obvious to everyone that nobody really believes any of that silly medieval nonsense anymore and the transformation into liberal Episcopalians will be complete.

But why bother with such a ruse? Why not just have Francis publicly repudiate the doctrine of infallibility, change some central moral teachings, and foment a schism letting the chips fall where they may? Why not let the damn homophobic conservatives run off to Orthodoxy or to the schismatic traditionalists? The answer is simple, though shocking. So shocking many will refuse to accept it. Why don’t they just make their move and let the conservatives bolt out the door? Because this gaggle of progressives is demonic. And I mean that in a very real way and not as just a hyperbolic metaphor. What they seek is nothing short of the total annihilation and humiliation of the conservatives by way of a total reversal of values: the good becomes evil and the evil good. They want conservatives discredited as “fringe group” wing nuts so that they cannot even mount a populist revolt from the outside. They want to rob them of any constituency and of any legitimacy. They want them labeled as “bad people”. They want, as the Pope has recently done, to cast their conservative enemies as Satan, and themselves as Jesus. They want the opposition liquidated so that there isn’t even the appearance any longer of a “debate”. They want opposition to gay families and abortion and sexual libertinism to be viewed right up there with opposition to racial equality, thus painting the defenders of traditional morality, not just as “wrong”, but as stupid at best, and evil at worst.

Finally, it is demonic because the end game is a de facto secularist atheism. Naturalism with a religious halo. Worldliness dressed up as “inclusive diversity”. The average person in the pew is unaware that for the better part of the past two centuries the Christian theological guild has, for the most part, reinterpreted Jesus in completely non supernatural categories. This is especially true among scholars of the New Testament. Jesus has been transformed. No longer the second person of the Trinity, Incarnate for our salvation, but rather, now just a protagonist of class warfare on the side of the “marginalized” and in opposition to “power”. And if you are a traditional Christian you are thus categorized as part of that “power” that oppresses.

So faith in Jesus as the Incarnate God comes to be viewed as a form of patriarchal, white male, cisnormative oppression. The faith of our ancestors and of the martyrs, was merely a cipher for hegemonic power and control.

Wake up. I know most people are not theologians and are not knoweldgeable of intellectual and cultural history, but we no longer have the luxury of such ignorance. And part of any Ben Op community must be an education precisely into the richest resources of our Tradition and of the manner in which hyper-modernity (liquid modernity) is destroying them. The situation of any true Ben Op community is not enviable. For we must now labor to preserve our past, not in the face of pagan barbarity, but in a swirling cesspool of post-Christian hatred (a visceral and irrational hatred I might add) and the aforementioned reversal of values. In other words, a true Ben Op community is going to be hated. Vilified. Attacked. Hounded into submission. Just look at the Youth Synod’s little dig at home schoolers for being “ideological”. And our public schools aren’t? Of course they are. But they have a “good” ideology. Homeschoolers have an evil one.

We had better get ready for what is rapidly approaching. Already, in the few short years since Rod published the Ben Op, we have seen things grow exponentially worse. And the brief respite purchased for us by the wretched clown that is Donald Trump, will not last long. Indeed, in my view, it will only create a far worse backlash once he is gone because we will be blamed for him being in power in the first place. We will be the scapegoat.

And because the secular worldview, especially in its emphasis on an empty Epicurean hedonism, is so nihilistic, only unhappiness will follow in its wake. It advocates an impossible marriage with matter, that cannot satisfy, it will create resentment and hostility in an undifferentiated manner … just a general dissipation and acedia of the soul that leads to despair. And that will only make their rage at traditional religious people all the more incendiary.

I wish that these comments at the Youth Synod on marriage were just a mild stupidity by a nobody prelate that we can just dismiss. But we can’t. This IS what these quislings think.

We face a more radical decision in the near future than we think.

Giselle Donnelly (via AEI)

Just a note to observe that the transgender revolution is now entering its institutionalization phase, at least among the elites. The Washington Post today sympathetically profiles Giselle Donnelly, a senior national security analyst with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Giselle used to be Thomas Donnelly, who — see here — has had a long career as a national security hawk in policy circles.

This paragraph of the profile jumped out at me. It’s about how Donnelly, having divorced his first wife, met the woman who is now his (her, whatever) second wife: Beth Taylor, a Navy veteran who runs a studio in DC that helps men transition to presenting themselves as female:

Giselle and Beth shared a love of national security, wine, gender fluidity and BDSM. They soon began dating, and last year they were married. Those close to them who missed this time in their lives will soon be able to see it up close and personal. For about two and a half years, a film crew followed them and documented their relationship, along with Giselle’s gender journey.

National security, wine, gender fluidity, and sadomasochism. American as apple pie.

More:

AEI President Arthur Brooks and Vice President for Foreign Policy Danielle Pletka told me their decision to support Giselle was a simple one, since she’s the same person dedicated to the same principles that made her a good fit for the institution all this time. “We are proud that she is part of the AEI family,” they told me.

You cannot get more Establishment Conservative Washington than Arthur Brooks and Danielle Pletka. They are in the Inner Ring. And they ratify Thomas Donnelly having become Giselle Donnelly. You may think this is a wonderful thing, or you may think this is a terrible thing, or you may not know what to think at all. But you must recognize that this event happening at one of the top right-wing institutions in Washington is a very big thing indeed.

UPDATE: Let me explain a little bit more. A regular liberal commenter points out that Donnelly’s strengths as a national security analyst don’t depend on whether or not s/he is transgender or a sadomasochist. Donnelly was interested in gender fluidity and BDSM before transitioning, after all.

Of course that’s true — but beside the point. Only a tiny number of people will ever know who Donnelly is, or care about Donnelly’s work. There were no doubt people within conservative Washington institutions who were interested in gender fluidity and sadomasochism long before Donnelly went public. The point is that the Donnelly transition, and the way it’s being rolled out to the public, is enormously symbolic, and represents a meaningful shift in the Overton Window — that is, what is permissible to talk about and think about.

For one, ours is now a culture in which a predilection for kinky sex is no longer something that one keeps private, out of a sense of shame, or because one feared the judgment of others, but now just a quirky part of one’s identity. This is what happens when the masses read Fifty Shades Of Grey (125 million copies sold) and begin to think of kink as normative. Again, you might think this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the point is, it’s a major cultural shift.

For another, as I say in the headline, the Giselle Donnelly phenomenon represents the institutionalization of the transgender revolution. Think of it: a 65 year old man who has spent his life as a national security hawk working among conservative elites, as a fixture in one of the two most powerful right-of-center think tanks in Washington, now says he’s a woman, and presents himself as such. Those same elites — represented by Brooks and Pletka — embrace his transition uncritically. This signals to the rest of official conservative Washington that this is not only okay, but expected of them. If you are a social or religious conservative who objects to what kinkster hawk Donnelly has done, you are now officially at odds with the leadership of the conservative Inner Ring. You will find yourself marginalized — not openly, not at first, but it’s going to happen, and happen faster than you think.

To be fair, it’s hard to imagine that Brooks and Pletka would have reacted otherwise. On the LGBT front, the culture war has been lost among elites, even conservative elites. This has been true on homosexuality for quite some time, but I didn’t expect it would come so soon on transgenderism. But here we are. Transgenders are now the establishment, holding positions of power and influence inside the right-wing DC power centers, and celebrated in the pages of the establishment newspaper. Giselle Donnelly is the first, you might say, but the Rubicon has been crossed.

Once more, because this is really important: you might think this is a good thing, or a bad thing, or you might not know what to think about it. But you cannot deny that it is a major thing. This will become undeniably clear to most people two or three years from now.

Donnelly, recall, is a national security hawk who works for a hawkish neoconservative think tank. Men and women like Donnelly believe in an aggressive foreign policy. Social and religious conservatives have to understand that the American Imperium whose expansion Donnelly and his colleagues labor to bring about is one in which transgenderism is normalized, and a desire to inflict and receive pain for sexual pleasure is something to be celebrated.

Is that the imperium you wish to shore up? Think of MacIntyre. And think of The Benedict Option,, which I wrote as a guide for conservative Christians puzzled over what to do in the world as we find it today. These neocons are not the friends of social and religious conservatives. Yet they are the establishment.

You had better get that learned.

UPDATE.2: Here’s the trailer for the movie:

Thomas Donnelly, before Giselle (via AEI)

If you read The Benedict Option, you read about Sequitur Classical Academy, the classical Christian school in Baton Rouge where my kids study, and where my wife teaches. The school has just produced a series of promotional videos, one of which is above. Take a look at it — we are so fortunate to have a school like that here. The other morning at breakfast, my 11-year-old daughter, apropos of nothing, recited the first 20 lines of The Odyssey, which they studied in one of her seventh-grade classes. I mentioned that to her brother, who is in his first year of college, and he said that he’s been amazed by how well classical Christian education prepared him for university studies. In a history survey course, they were studying Greco-Roman history, and he was the only one in his class who had already read Herodotus. Thanks, Sequitur.

If you’re reading this and are in the Baton Rouge area, please consider coming out to our annual Fais Do-Do fundraiser on Saturday November 10. A number of us Sequitur dads are cooking gumbo and jambalaya for a contest. Get your tickets here. I’m planning to cook my late father’s jambalaya recipe, which, no joke, is terrific. If you otherwise would like to support the mission of Sequitur — a 501c3 entity — please donate here. If you would like to know how to start a school like Sequitur in your area, click here.

Maude Findlay (Beatrice Arthur) and her henpecked husband Walter (Bill Macy) ()

A Mrs. Victoria B. Brown of Haverford Township, Pennsylvania, had a moment the other night. As she relates to readers of the Washington Post:

I yelled at my husband last night. Not pick-up-your-socks yell. Not how-could-you-ignore-that-red-light yell. This was real yelling. This was 30 minutes of from-the-gut yelling. Triggered by a small, thoughtless, dismissive, annoyed, patronizing comment. Really small. A micro-wave that triggered a hurricane. I blew. Hard and fast. And it terrified me. I’m still terrified by what I felt and what I said. I am almost 70 years old. I am a grandmother. Yet in that roiling moment, screaming at my husband as if he represented every clueless male on the planet (and I every angry woman of 2018), I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead. If one of my grandchildren yelled something that ridiculous, I’d have to stifle a laugh.

My husband of 50 years did not have to stifle a laugh. He took it dead seriously. He did not defend his remark, he did not defend men. He sat, hunched and hurt, and he listened.

He was no doubt thinking, Oh lord have mercy, here she goes again…

For a moment, it occurred to me to be grateful that I’m married to a man who will listen to a woman. The winds calmed ever so slightly in that moment. And then the storm surge welled up in me as I realized the pathetic impotence of nice men’s plan to rebuild the wreckage by listening to women. As my rage rushed through the streets of my mind, toppling every memory of every good thing my husband has ever done (and there are scores of memories), I said the meanest thing I’ve ever said to him: Don’t you dare sit there and sympathetically promise to change. Don’t say you will stop yourself before you blurt out some impatient, annoyed, controlling remark. No, I said, you can’t change. You are unable to change. You don’t have the skills and you won’t do it. You, I said, are one of the good men. You respect women, you believe in women, you like women, you don’t hit women or rape women or in any way abuse women. You have applauded and funded feminism for a half-century. You are one of the good men. And you cannot change. You can listen all you want, but that will not create one iota of change.

That poor man, Mr. Brown. Has no one checked on him?

Mrs. V.B. Brown continues on like that for paragraph after paragraph. She adds:

No man right now understands the flood that is rushing through women’s brains, and only women in the deepest denial have evacuated their minds before the flood could reach them.

Ah. So if you are a woman who doesn’t agree with this elderly retired humanities professor from a small liberal arts college, then you are an idiot.

Read the whole thing. 

It’s just bizarre — bizarre that the author calmed down yet still felt it important to publish what she acknowledges was a “ridiculous” display, something she would have laughed at had it come out of the mouth of one of her grandchildren; and bizarre that the Washington Post would have considered something as berserk as that piece worthy of publication. Of all the op-eds that could have been published from a feminist perspective, they go with a primal scream from an aging member of one of the most privileged cohorts in the country, who says in it that she wishes all men were, um, dead?

If somebody starts a Go Fund Me account to pay for Mr. Brown’s tab at his local bar, I’ll kick in.

Once again, Social Justice Warriors have violently assaulted peaceful campus protesters. This time, it happened at Toronto’s Ryerson University.

Check this out:

That’s a screengrab from the home page of the Social Innovation Office at Ryerson.

Below, some hands-on learning and social impact facilitated by Gabby Swarko, an assistant at the Social Innovation Office. Swkarko is caught on camera violently assaulting a peaceful pro-life protester. The attack happens at the :44 point.:

Imagine that woman’s boot on your face forever. According to her bio on the Ryerson website, Skwarko is pioneering new ways for voices to be heard:

How is she still employed at Ryerson, this woman who cannot restrain herself from physically assaulting those with whom she disagrees? Toronto police are investigating the case. They’re also investigating the case of Jordan Hunt, a Toronto hairdresser caught on video delivering a roundhouse kick to a female pro-life protester. 

A reader points out the new study showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans are sick of political correctness. 
He said:

You pointed out yesterday that the emperor has no clothes–everyone hates Leftist ID politics and political correctness. Yet, it is so culturally ascendant right now that the elites on the ground (young people in college) feel emboldened to attack thoughtcriminals without provocation.

MLK won the civil rights movement by peacefully protesting–NOT, harassing and menacing Senators or chasing them from restaurants–and then allowing the corrupt culture of racial segregation to respond violently–usually via police. Americans who had never cared about the plight of blacks felt sympathy for them when they saw them attacked, and people began resenting the attackers.

Christians who are pro-life and pro-marriage should think about this. Massive and coordinated demonstrations on campuses will only cause the footage of violence to increase. I suspect this will do more than anything else to win over people in the public.

Great point. Make the Gabby Skwarkos and Jordan Hunts show themselves for what they are, then pass the evidence on to the public. When people — left, right, or whatever — cannot peaceably gather and demonstrate for their beliefs without having to fear being set upon by violent opponents, democracy is under threat.

UPDATE: Look, if all you have to say is an exercise in whataboutism, save yourself the trouble of posting a comment, because I’m not going to approve it.

UPDATE.2: Reader Kurt Gayle:

Katie Somers, the young pro-life woman who was assaulted at Ryerson University, posted this statement on Oct 5, 2018:

“People often ask me why I continue to do pro-life activism in the face of such opposition—sometimes even violence. And it’s because of conversations like the one that I had an hour before I was assaulted at Ryerson. A young man came up to me and I asked him what he thought about abortion. He told me that he used to be pro-choice. I asked him what changed his mind. He said ‘reflecting on the images that you guys bring to campus’ is what changed his mind. He said it really doesn’t look like a clump of cells. And it’s unfair for men to just treat women like objects and expect them to just go and get an abortion. So he said more than change his mind, our signs changed his behaviour. Because he said he no longer treats women like objects. It’s conversations like that that keep me going.”

Katie: Why do I continue in the face of pro-choice violence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qyr9qu1J14

Writing in the not-at-all-conservative Tablet, Bridget Phetasy informs the world of wokeness that she has had enough. Excerpts:

Since Trump won in 2016, think piece upon think piece has been devoted to the problem with white women. We’ve been labeled “white supremacy in heels,” accused of using our tears as weapons of oppression, and over and over again judged as a group and condemned based on the color of our skin. Much effort has been put into controlling those of us who aren’t getting on board with, as I call it, “The Approved Message.” All these articles and theories about “the problem with white women” basically push the same agenda: if you don’t think like we want you to think and vote like we want you to vote, you hate women and especially, women of color.

I’m done. After years of enduring woke, anti-white women media pieces (written much of the time by upper-middle-class white women), they have finally broken me. Modern feminism demands I live in a constant state of feeling like a victim but if I’m white, I need to simultaneously accept that I’m never going to be victim enough and in fact, I’m actually an oppressor. It’s mind-bending and bananas and I won’t do it.

I have plenty of legitimate reasons to hate myself but I’m not about to add ‘born white’ to the list. I’ll be told I’m the portrait of white fragility for saying so. I’ll be painted as a “gender traitor” and a racist and a shill for the patriarchy.

Intersectional feminism is a trap that pits all women against one another in a race to the bottom. It doesn’t empower—instead, it encourages a perpetual victim mentality, internalized self-loathing and creates a battle between factions of women over who’s the “most oppressed.”

Read the whole thing. Of course she’s right. Intersectionality is a cult. It has nothing to do with justice, only with power. A political party that empowers intersectional true believers is a danger to justice and the common good.

What is wrong with “white feminism” (it’s a term of spite)? Let’s let the intersectional babes of HuffPo tell us:

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of DC’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Catholic News Agency reports:

In a letter to Wuerl obtained by CNA Oct. 12, Pope Francis told the cardinal: “Your renunciation is a sign of your availability and docility to the Spirit who continues to act in his Church.”

“In accepting your resignation, I ask you to remain as Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese until the appointment of your successor.”

Wuerl, 77, originally submitted his resignation on Nov. 12, 2015, when he turned 75 years old, as required by canon law.

The pope said Friday that he had also received a Sept. 21 request from Wuerl that his resignation be accepted.

“This request rests on two pillars that have marked and continue to mark your ministry: to seek in all things the greater glory of God and to procure the good of the people entrusted to your care,” Pope Francis wrote.

In the Oct. 12 letter accepting Wuerl’s resignation, Francis defended the cardinal from the widespread criticism he has faced in recent months.

“You have sufficient elements to ‘justify’ your actions and distinguish between what it means to cover up crimes or not to deal with problems, and to commit some mistakes.”

“However, your nobility has led you not to choose this way of defense. Of this, I am proud and thank you.”

“Your renunciation is a sign of your availability and docility to the Spirit who continues to act in his Church,” he added.

This is not a pope who understands the gravity of the sex abuse problem. This is a pope who, in lavishing praise on the exiting Wuerl, is in effect justifying his own past actions. Hey, everybody makes mistakes, right? I’ve been sitting here nobly being silent about them. You should be proud of me, and thank me. 

This is a pope who has still not said a word about why he embraced Cardinal McCarrick and drew him out of private life despite the overwhelming likelihood that he, Francis, knew exactly what McCarrick had done. In fact, in the text of his letter to Wuerl — full letter here — Francis referred to his own critics — as if the pressure on Wuerl to resign over his handling of sex abuse as Bishop of Pittsburgh was really an attack on Francis himself by the devil (which is how Francis has characterized criticism of himself regarding the McCarrick affair):

I recognize in your request the heart of the shepherd who, by widening his vision to recognize a greater good that can benefit the whole body (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium, 235), prioritizes actions that support, stimulate and make the unity and mission of the Church grow above every kind of sterile division sown by the father of lies who, trying to hurt the shepherd, wants nothing more than that the sheep be dispersed (cf. Matthew 26:31).

Pope Francis’s attitude towards Wuerl, as expressed in this letter, reflects the kind of hardcore clericalism shown by Cardinal Bernard Law to Father John Geoghan, molester of 130 boys, upon his retirement. No awareness of the suffering of others caused by the cleric’s actions regarding sex abuse (in Geoghan’s case, committing it; in Wuerl’s case, covering up for it), only compassion for the poor, poor priest, forced out of ministry by the unpleasantness. Francis is effectively saying to the DC cardinal: Yours has been an effective life of episcopal ministry, sadly marred by some mistakes, accountability for which you are too noble to defend yourself — and for this, I am proud of you. God bless you, Don.

It’s not exactly news that witchcraft attracts some feminists who see in it (in part) a spiritual expression of rebellion against patriarchy — including, obviously, Biblical religion. What is interesting, though, is how this particular cultural moment is feeding its growth.

You could laugh at the “self-care” rituals witches aggrieved over Brett Kavanaugh engage in, but I think that would be a mistake. Excerpts from the Vox.com story:

First, take a candle.

Then, pour some salt into your hand.

Then, keeping the grains in your palm, take a pen to write out a thank you to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman whose allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee — and now justice — Brett Kavanaugh, stunned a nation.

Or, if you prefer, simply say, “I believe you.”

It’s just one of the many quasi-religious rituals circulating the internet — particularly pagan and #resistance circles — in the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. These rituals help self-identified witches process trauma, anger, and grief.

More:

The historical nature of witchcraft has made it a particularly fruitful field for ritual. As the organizers of an upcoming “Hex Kavanaugh” event at Catland, a pagan bookstore and supply shop in Brooklyn, put it on their event page, “We are embracing witchcraft’s true roots as the magik of the poor, the downtrodden and disenfranchised and it’s [sic] history as often the only weapon, the only means of exacting justice available to those of us who have been wronged by men just like him.”

That’s what’s most interesting to me about this: the political weaponization of witchcraft and the spiritualization of the culture war.

Regular readers know that I am a Christian who takes this stuff seriously. I don’t believe it’s a game, or is meaningless, any more than Christian prayer is meaningless. As I see it, the fact that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed despite spells and hexes does not mean that the gestures had no spiritual meaning. These witches are putting themselves in touch with real spiritual entities and forces — dark ones, I believe, who mean destruction. Of course they believe that people like me are the ones serving spiritual darkness.

Look, I understand that many people believe that all of it is silly, and that religious ritual — Wiccan, Christian, all of it — is nothing more than an expression of an individual’s beliefs. That it’s a form of theatrical performance, nothing more. I think this is quite wrong, but even if you do believe that, you should still take seriously what believers in any particular religion call sacred, and what they intend by their prayers, rituals, and beliefs.

Fifteen years ago, as a journalist in Dallas, I clashed routinely with the then-head of CAIR, who was an Islamist. He was also a well-dressed, polished professional, the manager of a luxury hotel in town. Over lunch one day with me and a couple of senior editors from the newspaper, he admitted that he believed Allah wants the faithful to stone to death homosexuals and women caught in adultery. Now, there was and is very little chance of that Islamist paradise being established in America. I would defend that man’s right to believe what he wants to believe, as long as he doesn’t try to enact it into law, or act on it. Still, even if he never picked up a rock to throw at a woman or a homosexual, it’s meaningful that he and others hold that belief. It’s not only culturally meaningful, I believe that it’s also spiritually meaningful, in a way we cannot fully understand. We cannot be indifferent to that kind of thing, no matter which religious community it comes from.

What I expect to happen now will be an uptick of progressive women looking for a spiritual channel for their anger at the forces of patriarchy (as they define it). Emma Green writes that for younger progressives, political engagement is taking the place of religion as their ultimate concern, the passion that gives their lives meaning. Is it so hard to foresee that more than a few of these young progressives, especially women, might take up witchcraft as a way to spiritualize their political passions?

This is especially true given that popular culture is moving this way. Consider this headline from a recent New York Times story promoting the reboot of the TV witch drama Charmed:

From the story:

Something else that’s notable about Harry: He is often the only white person in the room. Another of-the-moment element of “Charmed” is that its heroines are all Latina, something Madeleine Mantock (“The Tomorrow People”), who plays long-lost sister Macy, said she still can’t quite believe. “I’m used to [auditioning] for things and hearing, in the end, ‘They didn’t want to go diverse,’” Ms. Mantock said. “That happened to me three times in the last year. Now I get to be the hero, and I get to do it with two other women who are sensitive to what’s going on in the world.” She paused. “It’s a blessing and a curse to live a political existence,” she said. “But I can’t imagine being switched off.”

That, for the women behind “Charmed,” is the real connection between them and their characters: an inability to turn away from their power, onscreen and off. “Whatever your opinion of a witch is, we’re broadening it,” Ms. Diaz said. “If somebody calls me a witch, I’m like, ‘thank you.’ Witches change the world.”

Witches are the new woke heroines. The meaning of this is something that Christian churches are going to have to confront in real life now and in the years to come. If you don’t believe this is anything more than performance, you might find it interesting, but only that. But if you believe that witches really are in touch with spiritual forces and realities, you had better take a different view. Whatever the truth, this is a culturally significant phenomenon.

UPDATE: Here’s a fascinating bit from Archdruid John Michael Greer explaining why all the anti-Kavanaugh, anti-GOP “binding” spells haven’t worked. Yeah, yeah, you can say “because magic doesn’t work.” Fine. It’s interesting to read how this is explained within the world of those who believe in magic.

UPDATE.2: Great comment from reader Annie:

Adamant is right, but Rod is more right, if you’re willing to hear the experience of a convert once again.

As I’ve recounted previously, my mother was/is Wiccan, my father a hodge-podge of pagan/Buddhist beliefs, and I was raised among the Unitarians. I was extremely lucky to have my parents share a strong reverence for a Creator and respect for the strangeness of the world with me; and extremely lucky to also get out of it in one piece (mostly).

Everyday I am grateful I wasn’t raised in a lukewarm religious household. The curiosity they gifted me resulted in many years of seeking (and also being willing to find, something not so much encouraged by the “endless buffet” of contemporary spiritual-but-not-religious mindset in liquid modernity). My peers and relatives in nominal Protestant, Muslim, or Catholic households all ended up spiritual-but-not-religious or atheist, many later inquiring to me about what it was like to be raised by a Wiccan. As an outsider it became apparent to me that they were shedding something at least as precious as oxygen, secular capitalism being less of an ethos than nihilism.

The worst part of this is watching the process unfold for so many people I have known and loved; they have been denied so much that is hard to name, but the loss is vivid to anyone who can perceive it. Heck, they’ll acknowledge their pain and trauma publicly and swiftly, but they recoil from the idea that it has anything to do with the worldview, that they’re lost in the forest. That engagement with the strange, that reverence for Creation pressed into me was a thin thread but a real one, and I am thankful for all the storms it brought me through.

However.

It has never failed to escape me that I was gifted with that curiosity which made me seek out answers to religious questions. It helped having a relative who was devout in their Catholic faith (the one religion I was not supposed to touch). He and the Inklings may be the reason I was open to being brought across the gap.

But those raised with me by Wiccans and Unitarians in one of the richest, most comfortable places in the world? Mental and emotional illness, every single one of them. Not one of them has children. More than one that I know of has had abortions. Many of them are activists, living in a series of basements. All of them grew up at least middle-class, most of them upper-middle class. Fine educations, books galore as children and teenagers. Yet here we are: Alcoholism. Drug addictions. Depression. Borderlines. Not one person. All of them. It is a constant grief to my heart, to think of so many bright and happy children I know passing on into lives of such misery and rage. What went wrong? It was a tremendous battle within myself, passing from one worldview to another. The joy and peace and ability to be still are all real and nearly indescribable; the sorrow is somehow all the greater as well. I could say more, but in such short form it would necessarily be confused and misleading.

My belief now is it takes a truly ethical pagan, someone highly engaged with the implications of their worldview, to maintain the top soil that nourishes their health and stability. However capitalist mass media will not nourish that top soil, it will exploit the most dangerous aspects of paganism (and paganism in a post-Christian world is a very different beast than paganism in a pre-Christian world), and yes, a broken understanding of cause and effect will emerge.

To those who think Rod has “jumped the shark” by posting on this, I think he’s doing the uncomfortable work of noticing the trends that don’t make it into statistical data. He’s having to rely on intuition, but they say that’s more important than we realize and we discount it to our peril. The commenters on Rod’s page are an unusually literate crew. Try to imagine what this Charmed reboot will mean to young people who have been uprooted from any sense of stability. There are many people today living in a way never known before in human history: with so much power at their fingertips, so unable to navigate it, so miserable, so illiterate, amnesiacs drugged and entertained to the hilt and careening about in a stupor. Charmed isn’t going to offer them the wisdom of Franklin Evans’s beliefs; it is going to gobble them up and regurgitate them as another spiritual sedative to keep them from asking real questions, albeit this time prodding them into playing with fire, seeing themselves as powerful beings able to summon and dismiss as they see fit.

And for those who think it is just a blip, you are not paying attention. “The good witch” is everywhere. As I maintain my study of herbs and plants, I encounter it constantly and it is absolutely a trend. It may appear soft and harmless, however it never fails to parallel a growing fury and sense of entitlement. Personal responsibility is exercised not in terms of spiritual reflection, but as using your “power” to influence events. Introspection is entirely lacking except to stroke the ego. I see this arising in places where its appearance particularly troubles me. However, being vulnerable to this kind of spiritual attack is just one more result from our absolute denigration of God’s creation and the surrendering of stewardship to the materialist capitalists.

We are using up the topsoil stewarded for us by many generations; we are not the ones who began overdrawing from it, but we and our children are the ones beginning to hit rock. Of course my anecdotes are not data. However, all the data in the world hasn’t been making people more peaceful. We’re reading the wrong things in the wrong ways. You don’t come out of one of the most privileged places in the world, with the fruit of certain worldviews in fullest ripeness, intensely pay attention to what you’re seeing around you, and then, perhaps as reluctantly as C.S. Lewis knelt that first afternoon, fail to draw certain conclusions.

UPDATE.2: Franklin Evans (who, as you know, is a pagan) comments:

Annie’s post in the update is by far the most balanced view of this topic any fellow reader can see, in this or most other forums. She makes important, nay critical points about which Rod and I have had some private conversation. Indeed, it is for those conversations above all else that I offer Rod my full trust.

The term “witch” is also an excellent example of lexicon shift and political correctness. There is, as Annie states and implies, a basic ignorance among most people about both the origin of the word, its usage over the centuries, and the distinctly Abrahamic monotheisms’ appropriation of the word as an epithet and curse.

Readers of Rod’s blog are well above the mainstream as a group. Y’all are very well read, consumers of entertainment media in thoughtful ways. I suggest to you that somewhere in your experience is a book you’ve read which was adapted to a movie. I offer this as a comparison point, not so much as an analogy but as a possible insight.

Books, especially novels, wear their intentions on their sleeves (yeah, just had to fit a pun in there). Entire genres are widely understood to be written for their own sakes, to sell to as wide a readership as possible. It’s not really about serving readers’ interests. It’s about profiting from them.

The “witch” phenomenon begs the same comparison. Every witch of my acquaintance is a woman of engagement in her world. She identifies as a witch because the label efficiently describes a plethora of attributes. Not all of them apply to every witch. There is a ubiquitous subset, to be sure.

When you view a TV show like “Charmed”, or a movie like “Practical Magic” or even “Hocus Pocus” (widely denigrated among Pagans), you are not viewing characters who are witches. You are seeing characters drawn to exercise your suspension of disbelief. The best writing will stretch that just far enough by mixing in believability. “Practical Magic”, while being nearly a total failure in accurately depicting modern witches, is very well written from the human experience. Take away their supernatural powers, and you have women for whom we can have deep sympathy. The difference with “Charmed” (its original run) is that it’s really stories about superheroes. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is exactly that, if more overtly than “Charmed”.

Annie mentioned me personally in her post. I am grateful for her acknowledgement. I offer the following from those beliefs for which I have complete confidence that they are widely (if not ubiquitously) shared by my siblings and cousins in faith.

Magic is not a tool to change “the world”. It is a practice or description for enlightenment, for personal validation, for a way to just talk about our connection to and experience of the immanent divine. A core ethic in Pagan beliefs is that offering magical (spiritual) energy to others, particularly with the intention of healing, is just not done absent the request by or consent of the intended recipient. This simple statement of ethical commitment is, in our community, powerful and profoundly informative of our beliefs. In our diversity, this one belief is our mutual strength.

The logically unavoidable consequence of that belief is magic used with the intention to harm is without exception antithetical to the ethic of consent. Wiccans specify this with one of their core beliefs, that all that they do returns to them three-fold. My beliefs center on the concept of balance being a process, a dynamically changing reality, not a state of being or a destination (and certainly not a haven). There are many variations between.

We do have a form of prayer. We (and the exceptions are there) do not denigrate or disrespect the belief in prayer, or the practice of it being offered and just assumed to be accepted. We limit our prayers with the conscious intention expressed thus: may there be the best possible outcome. It skirts the consent ethic, some would say. It is a generic offering.

A reader spotted this petition on a bulletin board at Yale Divinity School, home of the Democratic Party at catechesis:

Which words do you not see in this petition?

God.

Jesus.

Typical.

Moving alone, an Episcopalian reader flags this touching meditation from lesbian psychotherapist and artist Laurie Gudim, in her weekly column published at Episcopal Cafe. She’s talking about the story in Acts 8 when Philip baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch. Excerpt:

I imagine the Ethiopian eunuch as a delightfully androgynous soul – dark of skin, flamboyant, dressed in bright silks, bejeweled, his lips colored and his eyes lined with kohl.  He is sitting under a parasol in a large chariot, and around him are mounted soldiers and attendants. A wagon carries tents and food so that he can camp in luxury on the journey home.

Does Philip, devout Jew that he is, hesitate to climb up into the strange, little. traveling world of this foreign pilgrim and accept his hospitality?  If he does, we don’t hear about it. Instead we hear how he opens scripture to his host. Then, successful in sharing the Good News, he baptizes this precious soul, welcoming him into the family of Christ.

This story soothes my heart in these deeply troubling times.  From the very earliest days of the church comes a gesture of profound acceptance and heart-felt welcome to a gender-fluid person.  One of our very first deacons is seized by the Holy Spirit and driven to the loving acceptance of this queer man, this eunuch, embracing him not as someone who must change, but just as he is.

:::facepalm:::

A “gender-fluid person,” the eunuch? Why is he “queer”? “Not as someone who must change” — as if his baptism would cause him to grow a new set of balls! There is no reason to assume that eunuchs in New Testament times were gay. Eunuchs were males who were castrated to perform specific social functions.  Gudim thinks Jerusalem in the early years of the Christian era was the Folsom Street Fair.

Don’t none of y’all tell her about the “street called Straight” (Acts 9:11)!