Late last week I wrote a long blog post called “Prophet Or Alarmist,” inspired by a young reader’s criticism of my writing. That reader, Anthony Barr, had tweeted that he used to admire my writing, but that of late it had become “a punchline in the young conservative crowd” because of the culture-war style of my subject matter. You can follow the link to read my response. Over the weekend Anthony Barr wrote me a thoughtful reply, which I publish here. My response to the response follows:

Rod, I am grateful to you for your thoughtful and generous essay in response to the Twitter exchange. I’ve read your essay several times now, and I especially appreciate those opening paragraphs, and also the historical context surrounding some of the religious liberty judicial trends. I can certainly appreciate that there is a difference between your living through the shift, and my coming-of-age afterwards. I thought that to respond to your essay, I’d start with a little autobiographical stuff because I think to understand my perspective, it’s important to know I was raised in a hyper-conservative, politically attuned context. And so when I say that I reject the culture war, it’s not as one who merely observed it from a distance.

At my homeschool graduation ceremony, our commencement speaker read from the book of Joshua and charged us to “take back the land.” His generation was Moses, liberating us from the lies of the Government Schools, leading us to the border of a brave new world: it was our task to enter the promised land, which we possessed at America’s Christian Founding, and then lost along the way, probably in the 1960s, and which now needed reclaimed for Christ.

We were well prepared for this charge: we went to Worldview Academy and drilled in presuppositional apologetics and did the political boot-camps created by organizations with names like Generation Joshua. While our Public School Friends were wasting their time on violent video games and wayward women, we were reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye and talking about how to create Christian movies that could transform “the culture.” (At sixteen, I studied scriptwriting under the writers for Focus on The Family’s longrunning audio drama Adventures In Odyssey. A story for another day.)

I lived in the makeshift training campus of the culture wars. And then just as I was stepping out to join the fray (or more accurately: argue with atheists on blogger.com), I looked around and I didn’t see Christ fighting in front of me, and I didn’t see Christ fighting beside me, and so I stopped fighting.

All of that was eight years ago, and I’ve undergone profound shifts since then. I abandoned young-earth creationism, for example, and also the apocalyptic end-times theology that taught me to be fearful of government. I’m also not a Calvinist any more, thank God. I attended a Great Books program, minored in Eastern Orthodox history and theology, attended a conservative Anglican parish, became close friends with a number of LGBT+ Christian friends, converted to Catholicism, stopped using the phrase “the culture.” Now I teach Beowulf to 2nd graders at a religion-friendly-but-not-religious classical school.

Look, I’ve read MacIntyre and Taylor, Ratzinger and Wojtyła, and all the rest. I get that the stakes are high when we’re dealing with metaphysics in a world that implicitly accepts the axioms of utilitarianism. I didn’t become some wishy-washy progressive, didn’t sell out to some feel-good Moral Therapeutic Deism. If I get an opportunity to pontificate on contraception (all my friends will groan here because they know how much I talk about this stuff), I get really animated as I explain classical teleology. And if you ask me about gender reassignment surgery, I’ll talk about Descartes and the dangerous error of seeing our “self” as something distinct from “our body.” I’ll say something like, human flourishing is found in the integrated self as the harmony of our objectivity (object-ness, our material reality, being in space and time) and our subjectivity (subject-ness, the self-determination and self-consciousness that are an emergent property of our embodiment.)

But yes, when I’m talking to a trans friend, I use their preferred pronouns. And I do so because words are signifiers, not of reality directly, but of the interpretive framework through which reality as such is mediated to me, in terms and concepts I can understand. And who can ever really say that the signifiers and the signified are squarely aligned? (I became Catholic in part because I didn’t want signifiers, a symbol in bread and wine: I wanted Christ himself. As O’Connor quipped, if the Eucharist is only a symbol, then to hell with it.) But I also use their preferred pronouns because I don’t think everyday human interactions should require a 100-hour grad school seminar on ontology and epistemology. And I do so because my study of patristics reminds me that the chief end of man is theosis, union with God, and in that teleology, gender and sex (which are so integral to procreation now) become irrelevant. As the Apostle says, “neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female.” But mostly, I use their preferred pronouns because it is kind, because it meets my friend where they are at rather than demand that they conform to my vision of reality in order to interact, because to do otherwise is a cruel disregard for their expressed wishes, because as O’Connor also tells us, “certainty without experience leads to harshness” and the world is already unbearably harsh to my trans friends, why the hell should I add to that?

This isn’t a compromise in first principles. But it is a prudential recognition that we are first and foremost persons in the world, not Brains on A Stick, not Walking Collections of Axiomatic Beliefs. And that means that in the real world, the offline world, it’s much easier to build the kind of intra-tradition dialogue that MacIntyre envisions when we don’t fixate on the cosmetics like what grammar conventions to use, and when we are willing to enter the morally fraught conversational space with the courage to risk our very selves in vulnerability before the questions and ideas those conversations include. And so maybe you can find fault in me for using preferred pronouns, but I can guarantee you that doing so has allowed for more dialogue than if I had made this the hill to die on, and guarded my perceived moral purity or ideological coherence in some echo-chamber enclave.

I think a similar dynamic is at play in the Sohrab Ahmari / David French debate from a little while back. Ahmari wrote some interesting columns and a decent memoir, fine, but French has spent his whole career litigating pro-life cases, etc. You can try to fault French for being too polite, for hoping perhaps unrealistically that the civic and civil norms and institutions are reliable. But at a certain point, step back and ask, who is actually doing the MacIntyrean work here? And besides, drag queen story hour? Really? Drag queen story hour, that’s the straw to break the camel’s back? Our country was made to endure Jim Crow as the law of the land, but it’s drag story hour that somehow signals the end of all good in the world? Be resilient, gird up your loins, go to church with a little black grandma who knows what it feels like to be called a racial slur by “good [Christian] country people,” and then face the far less severe contingent cultural moment you are in with the kind of dignity and quiet strength befitting a follower of the Crucified One.

Okay, so what I’m saying is that maybe a better path is to accept the culture war loss with generosity of spirit, and to focus again on the fundamental virtues like hospitality (in the Homeric sense.) Maybe I’m saying that it’s time for less Benedict Option stuff, and more books like The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, where you share from the heart, from the lived experience you have and the wisdom you’ve gleaned. Maybe it’s time to stop with the alarm-sounding, and get back to the gardening, the cultivation of the kind of little acts of great love which animated the life of the saint we call the Little Flower. Maybe the Benedict stuff needs to be more Benedictine: less concerned with the imperial power, who has it and how that can help or hurt the abstract cause of “religious liberty” (to riff on MacIntyre, “whose liberty, which religion?” Is this just pretext for certain corners of Christendom in a proxy war culture war, or more representative?), and more concerned with the Benedictine care of the people in our orbit: the quiet work of the orphanage, the hospital, the school, the parish church. I get that this is what you claim your Benedict Option is about, but it certainly isn’t what you spend your time blogging about.

So many of my agnostic friends associate Christianity with the pro-life marches and the Supreme Court battles and the Trump-support, and all the rest. And they aren’t interested, because they don’t encounter Christ there. And neither do my ex-evangelical friends who got burned badly in the church, who came out of the closet and were kicked out, cursed out, told they didn’t belong. I think that’s what I mean when I say I looked around as a young culture-warrior and I didn’t see Christ. Because in the Gospels, it isn’t just that Christ eats with the sinners – we’re all sinners! – it’s that he eats with the prostitutes and tax collectors, the kind of sinners that the institutional church excluded.

And so to bring it all full circle, I do not think Christ oversaw the culture war. And I certainly don’t think He fought in it. I think Christ was not sitting with us in the homeschool worldview seminar, he was at the gay nightclub keeping vigil with a lonely addict shooting heroin in a dim-lit bathroom. This is my body, broken for you.

I thank Anthony Barr for this response. I’m going to try to keep mine short. (Wish me luck.)

First, I appreciate the biographical back story. If I had gone through the Christian culture war boot camp experience like Anthony did, I would almost certainly have a different take on things. Not that I would have been a progressive, or a semi-hemi-demi-progressive, but like Anthony, I would have probably developed a weariness with the culture war’s tropes and themes. Moreover, had I grown up in a Christian culture where my elders pumped me full of rhetoric about the critical importance of having Godly political leaders, and then all jumped on the Trump train with pompoms shaking as it left the station, I would have surely been a lot more cynical than I am.

Anthony is clearly intelligent and well-educated, but I can’t help wondering if he’s reacting more in rebellion to his youth than to the ideas that animate the culture war. I’ll get to that in a second, but first, let me say that the kind of culture-warrior formation that Anthony had — the Take Back America For Christ stuff — gives me the hives. I’m with him mostly on that. I didn’t have anything like his direct experiences in my own background, but generally, the idea that “taking back America” is largely a matter of achieving political power, and that making better apologetics arguments is key to that project — well, no, I don’t believe that, and I believe that conservative Christians who have believed that need a serious rethink.

That said, I believe that Anthony makes a common error among progressives in thinking that the only culture warriors are right-wing people who just can’t stop being annoying. The thinking goes something like this:

Progressive: “Let’s invite a drag queen to the library read storybooks promoting gender fluidity to children!”

Conservative: “No, that’s wrong!”

Progressive: “Help, help! I’m being aggressed!”

What I mean is that in almost every case, conservative culture warrior types are fighting a defensive war. It was they who were aggressed against by people who want to push hard against every established boundary, in the name of cultural revolution. To Germany in 1939, the existence of Poland was an intolerable aggression. To use the “culture war” metaphor, being a cultural conservative today feels like living in Warsaw in the summer of 1939, wondering what fresh hell is coming next from the West.

Anyway, the biographical information from Anthony is helpful, because it seems to me that he’s still fighting with his younger self, rebelling against that formation. I get that — I fought a long internal battle with my father over my raising, and it affected how I saw many things — so please don’t think I’m being condescending. For many of us, our twenties, and perhaps beyond, are a period in which we come to a reckoning, one way or another, with what we have been given in our youth. I don’t think Anthony argues in good faith when he posits himself as a conservative (even though he might believe himself to be one). In this blog post from three weeks ago, he discusses his thinking as a supporter of Elizabeth Warren (subtitle: “What exactly do we love about Elizabeth Warren?”)

If you love Elizabeth Warren, a high-octane liberal technocrat, in what sense are you a conservative, especially a cultural conservative? Warren has staked out positions that are devoutly on the far left of the US spectrum on abortion and LGBT rights (which unavoidably affects religious liberty). A critic’s words stand on their own, of course, and if Anthony is right about my own writing, then he’s right no matter what his personal politics. That said, it’s one thing to take “you’ve lost us, man” from a Zoomer who identifies as a conservative, but another thing to receive the same criticism from an Elizabeth Warren supporter. Why? Because despite Anthony saying that this is not a matter of “first principles,” it almost certainly is. I’m not sure why Anthony identifies in any way as a conservative.

This matters because in the text above, if I’m reading him correctly, he’s advising conservatives on a better conservative strategy for accepting our culture war loss. But he seems to believe that the right side won! If it’s a matter of frustration with right-wing dead-enders who still think that worldview camps and the lot are going to turn this war around, well, I share that with Anthony. The old strategies failed, and there is no reason to believe that they are going to find success going forward. But that’s a very different thing than accepting that the winning side was the one with the theologically and morally correct principles, which is how I read Anthony’s remarks above.

He appears to believe that for Christians, there is nothing theologically or morally problematic about homosexuality and transgenderism. He’s a Catholic, and by taking that stand, he aligns himself with fashionable Francis-era Catholics like Father James Martin, SJ, but against the vast weight of the Catholic Church’s authoritative teaching on sexuality and anthropology, derived from Scripture and Tradition. That is no small thing. There is simply no way to reconcile that with any sort of conservatism. It seems that the best way for cultural conservatives to be culturally conservative, in his view, is to cease being conservative precisely on the most neuralgic points of intersection with contemporary culture. That is, at best, unpersuasive.

It seems to me that Anthony has set up a series of manipulative dichotomies. Either we are Walking Collections Of Axiomatic Beliefs, or we are human beings. Either we are head, or we are heart. This is inaccurate and unhelpful. I have written extensively about my own failure a couple of decades ago to understand the head-heart distinction, and how my error led to the collapse of my Catholic faith. I had put far too much emphasis, and faith, on intellection. But the answer is not to make the opposite mistake, and to sacrifice intellection for emotion and intuition. As I see it, the authentic Christian stance toward the world is to lead with a heart that is tempered by the head. The Catholic writer Sophia Feingold has a helpful short post on the importance of teaching kids the art and craft of moral discernment, as distinct from laying out rigid lines beyond which one must never, ever cross.

So, for example: the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love tell the believer that he must love the drag queen reading stories to children, because that drag queen is made in the image of God, however disfigured he has rendered that image. But reason tells the believer that he must not bless, or appear to bless, the drag queen’s beliefs or actions, that in fact you must oppose them as morally wrong, and meaningfully so.

About that: Anthony doesn’t understand why Drag Queen Story Hour is such a big deal to cultural and religious conservatives. To us, it is a grotesque case of sexualizing children, and deforming their moral imaginations. Drag queens don’t sit there and read Richard Scarry classics; they read books that catechize little children in gender ideology. This is not the place to make an argument about that, but I will simply say here that for most of us,, when you have children of your own, the world looks a lot different. Even though I figured this would happen to me when I became a father, nothing prepared me for the instinctive sense of protectiveness I felt when my firstborn actually arrived. I was compelled to imagine the kind of world that he was going to grow up in, and it changed me.

I remember watching the Scorsese gangster movie Goodfellas on cable when my son was one month old, and being excited that I had the whole afternoon to babysit him and watch that movie while my wife was out shopping. That had been my favorite movie of the year when it first came out in the early 1990s, and I was looking forward to re-watching it. But I ended up turning it off about 45 minutes in, because I couldn’t take the violence. What had happened to me? It was the little baby sleeping in my arms. I couldn’t bear watching bodies (of gangsters!) being treated so violently, not as I cradled new life, so vulnerable and precious. This response was quite involuntary, I assure you, but it taught me something about how being responsible for children forced me to abandon some of the positions I had held, and thought unproblematic. Should he marry and have kids, it will almost certainly happen to Anthony Barr. Biography matters in many different ways, including ways that surprise us. As I’ve aged, I find it harder to take life advice from people who haven’t ever had to raise children, and who haven’t ever suffered in a serious way. It’s not because they are bad people, heaven knows, but because there is so much wisdom to be gained through those fundamental human experiences, things that are very difficult to know in any other way. I first came to Dante’s Divine Comedy in a terrible mid-life crisis. The poem meant so much to me because I could read it and say, yes, that’s the way life is over and over — something that I just could not have done had I read it in my twenties or thirties, when much of what the poet has to say would have been merely theoretical to me.

Anyway, reading Anthony’s text above made me think about Sophia Feingold’s point, though from the other side. She writes:

Explaining to your 10-year-old that Uncle Joe is a good man, but has made some mistakes, and we need to love him and be polite to him and not ask awkward questions, but also not take him as an example in everything, only in some things, is complicated; not seeing Uncle Joe is simple. And perhaps the epitome of the easy, simple thing is to join a very close-knit, very strict group, and shun outsiders altogether. Not only do you avoid hard explanations, but you are surrounded by people who are doing the same. You don’t need to make judgment calls, because everything is perfect—at least, everything is inside the hard, fat, straight, bright-red line.

But there are problems with this approach. In the first place, the line tends very quickly to become unjust. Maybe Uncle Joe has a long relationship with the kids, and is a very kind man, and in many ways a good example. Cutting him off entirely so that “the kids don’t get the wrong idea” is quite possibly an offense against charity—towards him and the children. As for those sack-dresses—well, anything looks good on a 2-year-old hunk of chub, but it isn’t actually kind, or necessary, to insist that your 18-year-old dress as if she or he lacks a figure.

In the second place, the hard, fat, straight, bright-red line cannot, by its very nature, separate human beings into sheep and goats, the good and the bad.  Inside the line is actually imperfect, because it is human; outside the line is, for the same reason, full of potential good (tailored dresses! Uncle Joe!).  As a result, children brought up inside eventually grow suspicious of the line. They rediscover Uncle Joe—and his sexual mores; they rediscover tailoring—in the form of skank. And because their parents never modeled discernment, but contented themselves with the hard, fat, straight, bright-red line, their departed children end up like the Victorian lady without her corset: charming figure, no abdominal muscle, very little backbone, and a newly discovered tendency to let herself go.

These are important points. But isn’t the obverse also true? That if you draw that “straight, bright-red line” with your left hand, so to speak, you avoid having to do the hard work of moral discernment. You can just write off Christians who object to Drag Queen Story Hour, or using trans pronouns, as goats who lack compassion, and in so doing excuse yourself from having to take a difficult stand based in what your religion tells you is moral truth.

I confess that I weary of false dichotomies such as “would Jesus be at the worldview seminar, or hanging out in the bathroom at a gay bar?” What kind of question is that? Again, it’s the (self) deceptive division between head and heart. It’s a rhetorical question designed to produce a particular answer. It’s a way of saying, “Thank you, Lord, that I am not like those right-wing Pharisees.” The problem is not that Jesus would not have been keeping vigil with the heroin addict in a gay bar; the problem is that the progressive Christian who makes that sort of claim would never say to the addict, “Repent, choose life.” I can’t read Anthony Barr’s mind or heart, but whenever I hear that sort of line from progressive Christians, I take it as a rationalization for the fact that they actually don’t believe that there is anything wrong with abortion, homosexuality, gender ideology, and the usual culture-war issues — but they can’t admit to themselves that Christianity is overwhelmingly clear on these moral matters, just not in the way they wish it were.

This was me when I wasn’t that much younger than Anthony: “Does God really care what we do with our genitals? Doesn’t He have bigger things to worry about?” This was my way of trying to avoid the undeniable truth, via Scripture and Christian tradition, that God very much cares what we do with our genitals, because sex is not merely flesh rubbing against flesh. My questions were posed sincerely, but it bad faith, because they were my attempt to banish a guilty conscience, and to convince myself that I could have the God of the Bible on my terms, not His.

To wrap up — gosh, I failed to be brief; who could have predicted that? — I agree with Anthony Barr that the old ways of waging the culture war from the conservative Christian side have failed. In fact, the pushback I get from the Christian Right against The Benedict Option is from believers who don’t accept that, and who think that if we only work harder, make better arguments, and win more elections, we can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This is self-deception, and the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is going to be to recover. Barr doesn’t want conservative Christians simply to admit defeat; he wants us to accept that our conquerors were right. There is nothing surprising about this coming from a liberal Christian; I wonder if the Liz Warren-backing Barr has yet come out to himself as a liberal Christian.

So why keep resisting if we’ve been defeated? Because it is perfectly clear that the victorious Left will not be satisfied until it has compelled all of us to affirm that they are correct. It is still possible to win partial political victories, and we have to keep fighting for them for as long as we can. Conservatives who think Donald Trump can or will turn things around are beyond deluded. But sensible conservatives recognize that having Republicans in power at least delays the Left’s endgame for social and religious conservatives, which is to turn us into total pariahs and push us out of the public square. This, by the way, is why the Chick-fil-A capitulation was so symbolically important in the culture war. It showed that not even winning — more than doubling in size since 2012, despite being the target of merciless progressive smears — is enough.

Christians who understand how the culture war’s terms have changed will grasp that we have moved to the resistance-under-occupation stage of the conflict. They also understand that the Left does not want to live in peace; it will not rest until it grinds our beliefs and our institutions to dust. Those leading the charge don’t simply think we’re wrong; they think we are evil. So, when Barr says:

Maybe it’s time to stop with the alarm-sounding, and get back to the gardening, the cultivation of the kind of little acts of great love which animated the life of the saint we call the Little Flower.

… I think that this is the advice of someone who is tired of hearing the alarm, even though conditions grow more alarming. The other side is poisoning and parching the soil in which we are to raise the next generations. The culture war — at least the parts that grieve Anthony Barr — have to do not so much with what one does with one’s genitals, and whether or not one believes oneself to be male, female, or something in between, but rather with what it means to be made in the image of God, what a human being is for, what sex means, and what Genesis 1:27 means:

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Let me end on this appropriation of Barr’s gardening metaphor. He is insisting that we small-o orthodox Christians focus on working our own gardens, but that we don’t pay attention to the fact that the climate is radically changing, such that growing gardens that produce healthy fruit is more and more difficult.

UPDATE: Amazing and encouraging comment from a reader:

I am the mother of a child who decided she was non-binary and wanted to dress in androgynous clothes and asked people at school to call her by a gender nonspecific name. I am incredibly grateful that she attends a Catholic HS and when we found out about this we went to administration and a text was sent out to all of her teachers informing them that she was to only be called by her given name and called by female pronouns. A few of the teachers at school had allowed her to sign her “new” name in any communication they had with her. The school also implemented some other checks and controls, as we did at home, to keep her from getting any positive feedback about her trans-positive inclinations. Over several months she began to move back towards a more feminine style of dress and dropped the extreme image she was attempting to create. My daughter has suffered from anxiety and depression since 8th grade and also has ADHD. She has always been a different kid that found it hard to fit in. That the school did not give into her confusion is worth every penny I have ever paid for Catholic school tuition. With a new Catholic therapist and many open conversations between her, her dad, and myself she has realigned her self image with her biological reality. People continue to say how kind and loving and Christian it is to support young people (in this case a 15 year old girl with a history of mental health issues) by using their preferred pronouns and new names and self professed gender identity. But when it is your child you may feel very different about that. I think it was kind and brave of the school to uphold the truth of her femaleness and not cower and misgender her as a boy, or as a nothing. She was not able to see the truth so we her parents and the administration of the school showed her the truth. That is the Christ-like thing to do.

I once read a story, I think it was fictional, about a tribe in that had a song for each member of the tribe. When a member of the tribe would do something wrong the people of that tribe would sing that person’s song so they could remember who they were in the family of the tribe. My daughter’s Catholic school sang her song to her and helped us bring our daughter back to herself.