A reader writes:

I’m asking you to keep me anonymous, because I just don’t feel like I’m up for any potential social justice drama, especially considering where I currently live.

I am a right of center but mostly conventionally and reverent Catholic  (Mass the way it was intended, in Latin, I feel that people like us don’t have a political home in the 21st-century).

I am married with two young children, and my wife and I live in an upper middle class, progressive neighborhood, in a large northeastern city. I work in what we might call “the culture industry“ so I am quite familiar with “corporate wokeness”, but I have been able to coexist peacefully if uneasily with it for several years I’m my professional life.

Now, my neighbors are also overwhelmingly liberal, but we also had (past tense) good relationships, mainly because my wife and I are too afraid to share some of our more “conservative” political opinions. I’ve often prayed if I should actually engage some of them about the problems of the inner city ghettos thugs (I’m sorry, but there’s no other word for some of these people) , and the deep, dark, even demonic zeitgeist of secularism in today’s America.

But overall, I have not “gone there”, and up until June, my family felt safe and “tolerated“ if not embraced, even though we were a distinct political minority.

The George Floyd protests changed all of that. About a week after the riots started, one of my neighbors emailed the street email list we use to plan block parties and told everyone she was “buying black lives matters“ signs for all of our front yards. She made it very clear that she expected all of us to put the signs in our front yard.  Of course, as you might expect, immediately many people responded enthusiastically, and within a week, literally every house on our block had a Black Lives Matter sign except for mine. I just don’t feel comfortable putting political things up, unless they are directly related to my personal theological values.

A few weeks after the signs went up, I noticed something very strange about my formerly friendly neighbors. When our family would take our daily walks down the street, people would turn their backs to us. Friendly “hellos” from us were met with stone silence. The neighbor who purchased the signs for the street was especially cold to me. After a few weeks of this, I finally confronted her, and asked her if there was some kind of problem that I should be aware of, that we could be able to talk out.

She just pointed to my house, smirked, and said “you know EXACTLY what the problem is.“ Then she walked away.

So now we’ve been ostracized by our neighbors for weeks, and have decided to join thousands of other people in fleeing American cities. They have become completely impossible to live in, unless you are willing to drop all of your values and embrace progressivism. The “for sale” sign in front yard is now a sad reminder to me of this. We’ve had enough. How many more of us are there? I wonder.

I know you are now have finished a book project about “soft totalitarianism“ and I felt that our painful story might be an example of the kind of thing you have been discussing. Feel free to share this, but please leave my name out of it. Thank you again, for all that you do for people like me.

UPDATE: Just heard from a friend, who said he just got home from hanging out with a bunch of his buddies tonight. The group expressed lots of exasperation with wokeness, which is hitting some of the guys at work. It’s on everybody’s mind, even the least political members of the group. Said my friend, of the current cultural moment, it “clearly has moved a couple of the guys from ‘I’m sitting this one out’ to voting for Trump.”

UPDATE.2: This just in from a reader:

I’ve been reading you for over a decade and am grateful for your books and your blog.  Your post today – “Pariahs of Their Block” – struck a chord, because I am identical to your correspondent in many ways:

I too am a right of center Catholic who likes the Traditional Latin Mass;

I too am married and living in “an upper middle class, progressive neighborhood, in a large northeastern city.”

My neighbors are also overwhelmingly liberal, and I have also had good relationships with them, largely because I too don’t share my conservative political opinions with them.

After George Floyd’s death, a woman on my street also emailed the street’s email list and offered to get Black Lives Matter signs for everybody, and her email was also met with enthusiastic responses.

At this point, the vast majority of the house on our block have BLM signs.  The notable exceptions are one family that has a “White Supremacy = Terrorism” sign, and my house, which has no signs.

But here is where your correspondent and I part company.  When my neighbor sent her email, I talked with her about it in person.  I said that while my wife and I agree that black lives matter, we aren’t “yard sign people” and we weren’t planning to put a BLM sign in our yard.  (Nor do we have a “Wherever you’re from, I’m glad your my neighbor” sign, or an “In My America, Love is Love, Science is Real, etc. sign, both of which are popular around here too).

I think because we have always been friendly, and because I did this in person and not by email or phone or videochat, the conversation went well.  She said she completely understood, and we still get along with our neighbors.  Which is good, because we like our corner of the world and would like to keep living here.

I thought you might be interested in that perspective.

I’m writing to express my anxiety at seeing how often your correspondents insist on anonymity before telling their troubling stories about being ostracized or striving to prevent future ostracism. I wonder to what extent their anonymity frees them to exaggerate the threats to their well-being or to buy into narratives of victimhood.

I say this from many years of listening to various Episcopalians rise at microphones to tell horror stories about being shunned for their left-wing theology, personal lives, or politics.

The stories were so similar that I wondered sometime whether there was a template that involved gothic accounts of vicious rectors telling couples they were unwelcome in the parish, forever and ever; that they were going to Hell, the sooner the better; or that they were abominations who should move to a city filled with other abominations.

The most absurd example I encountered was listening to a person speak of being shunned, with her partner, during a church’s coffee hour. As nearly any Episcopalian can tell you, being ignored as a visitor at a coffee hour is the default parish setting, not a statement about your personhood.

I recognize that people feel concerns about their job security or their physical safety. I recognize that a husband cannot very well write about new and ideological conflicts with his wife while using his name. But I wonder, in turn, whether a husband should write about these conflicts for public consumption, even under the cloak of anonymity. Such matters are better resolved with pastoral care.

I worry that many of these stories are impossible to confirm, and thus their narrators are more vulnerable to making incredible assertions. There is also the reality that fear feeds on itself, such that insisting on anonymity may reflect a life shaped by fear of exposure, others’ disapproval, shaming, or of people who are hollow bullies or simply opinion-laden blowhards.

I do not live in such fear. That may be because I don’t work in a hostile environment, live in a neighborhood surrounded by loons, or engage in substantial discussions with anyone other than people I respect enough to entrust with what I hold dear. Perhaps I’ve already driven away people who would exclude me from their lives based on our disagreements. I tend not to be drawn to such toxic personalities anyway.

I also know that some of the richest friendships I’ve known are with people who are my philosophical opposites, especially when we love each other enough to argue fiercely and hug each other goodbye when it’s over.

That’s a good point. I don’t really know how to answer it. When people write to me anonymously, I usually don’t post anything, but if I do, I typically make sure I know who I’m talking to. This has been very important for conservative academics, who really are facing extremely difficult circumstances right now within their colleges. But there is always the chance that anonymity allows people to exaggerate, even if they don’t realize they’re exaggerating.

What do you think?