Bestselling Conservative Rod Dreher Offers a Prescription for Culture War Combatants
On October 16, 2020, in a Parisian
suburb, a Muslim refugee decapitated 47-year-old schoolteacher Samuel Paty. Previously,
during a lesson devoted to freedom of expression, Paty had shown a Charlie
Hebdo cartoon depicting Islam's founder, Mohammed, to his students.
On October 17, at nine a.m., I posted Paty's photo on Facebook with a
salute to his courage. Within minutes, I received notification from Facebook that
my salute to Samuel Paty "goes against our Community Standards on hate
speech." Note the capitalization of "Community Standards." This document,
crafted by self-appointed Facebook thought police, is a new scripture, worthy
of capital letters. I would not be able to post for a week. I contested the
ruling, and by 10:47 a.m., I received an apology. In spite of this, I still
could not post for the next twenty-four hours.
At the same time that Facebook removed a
salute to Paty, social media was flooded with bigoted images of Trump Supreme
Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic. Marc Murphy, editorial cartoonist at the
Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, alleged that Barrett, during her
confirmation hearing, dressed in such a manner so as to send coded messages
that she supports the misogynist agenda depicted in Margaret Atwood's novel and
TV series, "The Handmaid's Tale." "The Handmaid's Tale" is a
Christophobe's "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Like that notorious
forgery, "The Handmaid's Tale" depicts scary religious people trying
to take over the world. "The Family Values party nominated a member of a
sex cult," read one of many hysterical replies to Murphy's
paranoid conspiracy theory, which was shared hundreds of times.
"Soon, with all the Catholics on
the court, will they mandate the only religion allowed in this country is
Catholicism? And of course declare this to be a Christian nation and abolish
the constitution for their bible," wrote a reader at Slate, responding
to Slate's article
arguing that Barrett was about to single-handedly take over America.
The New York Times went so far as
to conduct an in-depth investigation of Barrett's
adoption of Haitian children. The most popular reader comments castigated
Barrett as a white supremacist; her adoption of black children just proved it. Ibram
X. Kendi is a high priest of the new woke church of perpetual
racism. Kendi tweeted that Amy Coney Barrett is
"a White colonizer" who uses her black children as "props"
to disguise her white supremacy.
What exactly is happening here? In
saluting Paty and naming his killer's ideology, I violated a new religion. In demonizing
Christianity, others also followed the dogma of the new religion. What to call
this new religion? In the past, we used terms like "Political
Correctness," "cultural Marxism," "social justice
warrior," "woke," "liberal," "progressive," and
"leftist." I use the term "Team Anti-Western-Civilization,"
but this is clearly too awkward. We need a handy new term for a new, powerful
religion that is now affecting all of us.
Marxism purports to champion the poor. In
this new religion's rigid caste system, a rich black man has higher status than
a poor white woman. Rationality provides no workable strategy to map out the
new wasteland we all traverse. It is not "hateful" to call someone
with double x chromosomes "she," but Twitter will ban you for doing so. But one
can find, on Twitter, tweets alleging that "a cabal of Jews
control world governments, the banking system, the media and entertainment
industry to keep people poor, ignorant and enslaved." "Anti-Semitism
and hate speech are rampant on Twitter."
Several recent books have addressed the
new religion underlying the above phenomena. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
gave us "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made
Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody."
British author Douglas Murray dissected "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity."
Gad Saad, a Lebanese-born, Canadian evolutionary psychologist and secular Jew,
has just published "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing
Common Sense."
Tom Holland's 2019 book "Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the
World" proclaims the obvious truth: the West is inescapably
Christian. Atheists can mock and rebel but they cling to Christian concepts of
morality. As Douglas Murray put it, atheists "Dream Christian dreams. They still have
Christian thoughts and impulses."
But Christianity as a religious practice
is losing adherents. The "Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,"
reports the Pew Research Center. What morality will arise once Christian-influenced
morality finally disappears? Holland's
musings on this question call to mind Dostoyevsky's famous quote. "Without God, everything
is permitted." Once Christianity's influence disappears humanity will, as Nietzsche predicted, live by power as the
only good.
Rod Dreher's September, 2020, Sentinel
book "Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents"
takes up the same tasks previously tackled by the above authors, who are all
atheists. Dreher attempts to define the murky new religion now controlling our
lives, and to offer an action plan for Christians and others who would resist
it. Dreher is the senior editor at The American Conservative.
Dreher was raised Methodist, converted
to Catholicism in 1993, and then to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006. He is the bestselling
author of 2017's "The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a
Post-Christian Nation." New York Times columnist David
Brooks called that bestseller "The most important religious book of the
decade." In that book, Dreher says that Christians have "lost on every front." Our current
society is barbaric. Our barbarian rulers are "governed only by their will
to power." They "neither know nor care a thing about what they are
annihilating." "Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our
scholars, and our scribes are at work demolishing the faith, the family,
gender, even what it means to be human."
Christians, Dreher argues, quoting Scottish philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, must emulate medieval monastic life.
"A crucial turning point … occurred when men and women … turned aside from
the task of shoring up the Roman imperium." Instead, they set about
constructing "new forms of community within which the moral life could be
sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of
barbarism and darkness."
"Live Not By Lies" offers a
sequel to "The Benedict Option." The opening hundred or so pages,
that is roughly half the book, offer Dreher's take on the enemy our culture has
become. Dreher says he was alerted to this enemy by a phone call from an
American whose mother had lived in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. This survivor saw
in modern American life reminders of life under Soviet communism.
Virtue is no longer about individual
rights, but about rights assigned to privileged groups. A utopian vision demands
the denunciation and punishment of transgressors, like the Indiana pizza parlor forced to close down by
violent threats. A reporter broadcast a ridiculous story about the
pizza parlor not hosting gay weddings; the restaurant owners paid the price.
In this new religion, what
was acceptable yesterday is heresy today. "It masquerades as
kindness." Dogma is expressed in constantly evolving jargon like
"diversity" and "inclusivity" and has no real meaning: if
you are Catholic and you are pro-life, you are excluded from
"diversity," "tolerance," and "inclusion." Pope
Benedict called this new religion "a worldwide dictatorship of seemingly
humanistic ideologies." Dreher calls it "soft totalitarianism" and,
after sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." Its
dogma consists of lies; its power lies in terrorizing the population with show
trials, often conducted on social media.
Dreher bemoans the "almost
incalculable influence over public and private life" exercised by
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These companies can and do tell
states what legislation to accept or reject. Dreher cites Indiana's 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law
meant to protect small business owners like Colorado cake decorator Jack
Phillips. The law was opposed by Apple, Eli Lilly, the NBA, and the Islamic
Society of North America. "Equity, diversity, and inclusion" offices
are found in 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
This new religion's reach is also
described in a recent Gad Saad YouTube interview. Most of the granting agencies that
fund research in the natural sciences, Saad reported, that is physics,
chemistry and biology, demand from applicants a "DIE religion statement."
DIE stands for diversity, inclusion and equity. Funding applicants must state
what they have done to promote DIE principals and how their work will promote
DIE. Right now the world faces a pandemic. Imagine being a vaccine researcher
seeking funding, and being forced to announce how your vaccine will promote
DIE.
Roughly the second half of "Live
Not by Lies" offers examples of Christian dissidents who resisted Soviet
domination. Dreher writes about famous figures like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav
Havel, Karol Wojtyla, and Milan Kundera, but also figures lesser known in the
West including Stjepan
Tomislav Kolakovic, Kirill
Kaleda, Maria Wittner, Vaclav Benda, Silvester
Krcmery, Richard
Wurmbrand, and Jerzy Popieluszko.
Dreher also mentions Catholic anti-Nazi resister and martyr, Franz
Jagerstatter. These resisters lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia,
Romania, Austria and Croatia.
From their lives and examples, Dreher
draws the following lessons. Those who would refuse to bow to our
as-yet-unnamed new religion, and those who choose to remain faithful to
Christianity or even just the Constitution, should consider doing some or all
of the following. Accept a life outside the mainstream. Form small, supportive
communities of fellow believers. Maintain memories of the best in Western
civilization. Host and attend lectures in private homes. Send children to
Catholic school. Accept suffering as part of life.
I'm glad a bestselling author is
bringing new attention to Eastern European dissidents and communist persecution
of Christians. "Live Not by Lies" is a quicker and easier read than
the above-mentioned books that also address the new religion we all confront. I
had a few issues with the book, and on the off chance that Dreher would ever
read this review, I would be remiss if I did not mention them.
My mother was born in a village in what
is today Slovakia. My father was Polish. I traveled to what was then
Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, just after Soviet-bloc tanks crushed the
Prague Spring. I've been to Eastern Europe several times since, and spent
1988-89 in Krakow, Poland.
I don't often try to explain to
Americans how wretched Soviet communism was. We have been conditioned by
Hollywood to regard anyone who condemns communism as a McCarthyite. Even
popular romance films like Barbara Streisand's The Way We Were send that
message.
Too few know that Communism murdered 100 million people. Even
those who know this may think that those killings were merely the initial price
paid to overturn corrupt, moribund monarchies and establish the worker's
paradise, after which life settled down to free health care and concerts. Michael
Ignatieff confronted this attitude in a conversation with communist and
influential scholar Eric Hobsbawm. "Had the radiant tomorrow actually been
created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been
justified?" Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm. "Yes," Hobsbawm replied.
The wretchedness of communism was about
so much more than massacres and gulags. By the time I spent a year in Poland, I
had lived and worked in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and
most dangerous countries on earth, and also in very poor Nepal. In C.A.R., life
expectancy was 49 years. Low-level warfare was constant. Slavery was still a
problem. But in people's day-to-day lives, Africans had hope. The Africans I
knew, though living in absolute poverty, expressed the conviction that tomorrow
would be better than today, and that their effort would make it so. Africans'
irrepressible vitality is reflected in Pew polls that describe Africans, no matter
how poor, as among the most hopeful people on earth.
Yes, in Poland and Slovakia material
conditions were magnitudes better than in Africa. It's hard, then, to
communicate this simple fact: daily life in communist Poland felt worse to me
than daily life in C.A.R. Communism isn't just a bad model for economics. It is
a straightjacket and a gag that asphyxiates the human spirit and inevitably
results in mass, petty pathology.
How to say this without sounding absurd
– one of my worst days involved an attempt to get bedsheets for my dorm room.
The woman in control of the sheets conspired to make my day miserable, for no
discernable reason, except that she could. It was the twisted, sadistic pettiness
of it all that confounded me. Franz Kafka, who died before communism arrived in
his native Prague, knew how to describe the ugly absurdity of arbitrary power. Read
Kafka's "The Trial," to get a sense of what I mean.
Daily life under Soviet communism was
not romantic resistance. It was going for a walk in a park, struggling for air
through steel mill exhaust, and a man in a pathetically shabby suit jumping out
of the shrubbery and masturbating in front of you. It was days when you went to
the shops to confront empty shelves. On one day, you could buy cabbages, on
another, blueberries. One day bread, another day yogurt. Food, but never all
you wanted, never all at once.
Daily life under Soviet communism was
people shoving you on the sidewalk. We foreign students discussed this. Are
they doing it on purpose? Consciously? A friend was pregnant. She said once she
started showing, no one pushed her any more. Life under Soviet communism was
small town streets paved with the supine bodies of inebriated men on Sundays.
Their wives would come and try to shovel them up and get them home, and they'd rouse
themselves enough only to wrestle with and yell at their wives.
One day I went to a bar
mleczny in Krakow, that is, a cheap eatery that served basics
like fermented rye soup, borscht, and sliced cucumbers with sour cream and dill.
An old man in worn clothes, his sagging cheeks prickly and unshaven, picked up
his potato pierogi and smashed it against his cheeks, smearing it into his
stubble, as if it were shaving cream. He just sat there, his face besmeared
with the basic starches and grease – flour, butter, and potatoes – that made up
much of our daily calorie intake. That was communism. Ugly irrational,
soul-crushing. Thirty years later, some of those souls have yet to bounce back.
Life expectancy in the former Soviet sphere
remains lower than one would expect for developed, European nations. Interestingly,
Poland
defies this trend. Its citizens gained in life expectancy after communism's fall, in spite of its rapid "shock"
transition to capitalism, possibly because of "the country's strong social
institutions." For that clinical phrase, think "The Catholic
Church."
During that first trip in the early 70s,
when I was a naïve girl visiting relatives in my mother's hometown, I met a
priest who had been tortured, and who lost his mind. There was a blank-faced,
stumbling body; there was no discernable functioning inside that body. A girl
my age lead the priest by the hand. My mother said he was kept in the village
as a warning. My Uncle Jan was a woodsman who guided others through the
mountains, often hunters, but also a dissident scientist who had been made a
non-person. This scientist lived in a primitive dwelling in the middle of
nowhere, unable to communicate with his peers, cut off from intellectual life. No,
he wasn't being tortured, he wasn't in prison, and they didn't kill him. His
fate would appear on no list of the victims of communism. Our visit with this
brilliant, isolated, effectively paralyzed scientist broke my heart.
I'm walking myself and you, dear reader,
down this sooty memory lane, reeking of vodka and inhabited by sad perverts,
for a reason. Dreher is asking his readers to be ready to suffer and sacrifice.
That is right; that's what Christians do; that's what atheist dissidents do. But
there's a phrase I heard in Poland during the 1989 uprisings. "Everyone is
ready to die for Poland. But how many are ready to live for Poland?"
The suffering Dreher's American disciples
will undergo will not necessarily be cinematic, accompanied by a poignant,
rousing soundtrack. Once the street demonstrations in 1989 Poland reached fever
pitch, once I was running for my life, stampeding, with thousands of others,
from the ZOMO,
paramilitary thugs who landed many of us in the hospital, life was thrilling. But
outside of those demonstrations, life felt infinitely petty and pointless. The
devil who will attempt to seduce Dreher's dissidents may not be a clear-cut
demand to sign a document or lose a job. The demonic siren call may be boredom,
friendlessness, loss of respect or income, and a sense of meaninglessness.
And, yes, this anonymous, isolating, devil
of boring meaninglessness operates in lives of American dissidents, too, just
as it did in those interminable bread lines and the constant breakdowns of that
miracle of Soviet engineering, the Trabant
automobile.
I never wanted to be a dissident in
American academia. I wanted to get a PhD and tell my people's story through my
work and help my students. I was told I was the "wrong ethnicity" and
"too right-wing." I was told, to my face, that my being Catholic was
a problem. In spite of publications and some excellent reviews from peers and
students, I never got that tenure-track job. As a semester-by-semester hire, an
adjunct, I was given to impolitic statements, for example, "I love my
country;" immediately after that, I lost my job. My life lacks the thrill
I felt when I was running from the ZOMO. I live in a garbage-strewn, high
crime, low-rent neighborhood, and wonder about paying for groceries. Again, no
swelling anthem on my soundtrack, no martyr's flameout. Just day to day drear. Surviving
that, alone and silently, is my discipline. I know I'm not alone.
Dreher's followers need to know this.
The price one pays for dissidence will not always look, to the outside world,
like heroism. Witold Pilecki and Emil August Fieldorf, two men
Dreher does not mention, were courageous anti-Nazi resisters. Soviet communists
captured them, tortured them, and buried them in unmarked mass graves. Before
erasing their physical existences, the communists defamed them with false
accusations. These men were part of the Armia Krajowa or Home Army.
Soviets labeled them "anti-Semitic," and, thus, an ally to the very
Nazis Pilecki and Fieldorf risked and suffered to resist. That charge, that
Poland's anti-Semitism made the Nazis' job easier, was convenient to the
Soviets overrunning Eastern Europe. It was also convenient to Roosevelt and
Churchill, who agreed, at Yalta,
to betray Poland, their former ally, and the first nation to fight against the
Nazis. During the war, Western media might portray Poland as a courageous
victim. After Yalta, Poland became a despicable villain. World politics write
history and play a role in your not knowing the names of Witold Pilecki and
Emil August Fieldorf.
The microcosm is like the macrocosm.
Express a pro-life position on Facebook and be called a "misogynist."
Express support for traditional marriage and be called a "homophobe."
Express support for children being able to live out their childhoods without
life-altering, sterility-inducing drugs and surgeries, and be called a
"transphobe." Link to accurate statistics on police shootings and be
called a "racist." Mention the centrality of freedom of speech to
Western Civilization and be called an "Islamophobe." Talk about a
tortured priest you met behind the Iron Curtain and be called a "paranoid
McCarthyite cold warrior." Acknowledge that "free college"
actually does cost a great deal, and be called a "capitalist tool who
votes against her own best interests." A Facebook friend who is a child of
Holocaust survivors, and relative of Holocaust victims, is regularly called a
"Nazi" because she supports Israel's right to exist.
Sometimes, to observers, heroes will
look like the scum of the earth, before they are disappeared forever, without
ever having had the chance to tell their story. Many of the dissidents Dreher
describes survived torture in prison, but then went on to rehabilitation. Some
joined post-Communists governments. Some wrote memoirs that are cherished by
believers worldwide. These happy endings are granted to very few. For many of
us, being a dissident means, simply, wondering how you will pay rent.
In "Live Not by Lies," Dreher
quotes Maria Wittner about her experience of
arrest and imprisonment after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Wittner mentions a
friend, Catherine. Communists hanged Catherine. Before dying, Catherine
"straightened herself up and went with her back ramrod straight."
There is no further mention of Catherine in Dreher's book. I am most touched by
Catherine, and I know virtually nothing about her, including her last name. I
admire the superstars, Lech Walesa, Karol Wojtyla, and Vaclav Havel, who passed
through a period of anonymous suffering but emerged, respectively, as TIME
man-of-the-year and a Nobel Prize winner, a pope and a canonized saint, and a friend
of Frank Zappa. Catherine is like most
dissidents. Her courage will never be known to the wider world, and no one can
visit her tomb, because it's probably an unmarked, mass grave. The Catherines
deserve to inhabit our consciences, instruct our concerns for our own futures,
and educate us about our judgments of others as much as do the superstars.
Dreher and his disciples need to know
this. By dissenting, they may be inviting the kind of exhilaration that we
enjoyed when taunting the ZOMO, and then running for our lives. They may even
win Nobel prizes. Or they may disappoint their loved ones by becoming
"losers," and their kids may have to go a week eating not much more
than potatoes. The temptation the devil sends them may not be anything as
exotic as the fleshpots of Egypt; it may be something as simple as adjusting
one's speech to gain access to a Twitter account.
Even bestselling Christians are not
above judging their poor fellow Christians as "losers." "You
don't want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood.
Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a shithole it is. Do you want
the people who turned their neighborhood a shithole to bring the shithole to
your street? No, you don't. Be honest, you don't." The bestselling
Christian who wrote these words about the poor is Rod
Dreher.
What I want to shout to Dreher's readers
is this: please don't think that you doing Christianity wrong if you practice
all the courage of the Eastern European dissidents Dreher describes and you do
not attain a halo, your loved ones express contempt for you, and your prayer
life feels like a monologue to no one, spoken in the desert.
I've got a second issue with Dreher's
book, and this one is difficult to talk about. I've been insisting in my own
published writing for years (see here and here) what Tom
Holland seems to have just realized. Western Civilization is
Judeo-Christian. That many Westerners are not religious is not the point.
Rather, our concepts of right and wrong, our insistence that "All men are
created equal," are inheritances from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In
Western history, there have been attempts completely to root out Christianity's
influence, and those attempts have often ended very badly (see here and here). New Atheist authors like Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose insist
that humans are rational. Human reason, stripped of any religious underpinning,
can and will result in moral societies. I see more support for Tom Holland's
fear that Nietzschean struggle for power will dominate.
So, yes, along with Dreher, I vote for
institutional Christianity, even in so simple a form as a house church, as a
good.
But. I think Dreher has gotten a couple
of things wrong here. America today is significantly different from Soviet-era
Eastern Europe, and Soviet-era Eastern Europe is not exactly as Dreher implies.
"Religion is at the core of
effective resistance," Dreher writes. "The underground church became
the principal means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years."
Yes, the overall message of Christianity was a driving force for dissident
movements. Yes, the institutional church offered support. Yes, totalitarians
singled out the church for persecution. The "priest's barracks" at
Dachau was "the largest monastery in Germany." Yes, Catholic,
Protestant, and Orthodox religious leaders were imprisoned, tortured, and
murdered by Soviets and Nazis alike.
This is all true. It's also true that
not all Christians in Eastern Europe were dissidents, and not all dissidents
were Christians. Lech Walesa was obviously, devoutly, Catholic, and close to
the pope. Adam Michnik, no less an important figure in Solidarity and the
downfall of communism, was a secular Jew. His parents and brother were leading
communists. Jacek Kuron, "the godfather of the Polish opposition"
self-identified as a "non-believing Christian" who followed
Christian teachings but did not believe in God. When asked who ended Soviet
domination of Eastern Europe, Lech Walesa included American journalists. Yes,
the very same New York Times that so mishandled the Holodomor, the
Holocaust, and the 1619 Project published John Darnton's Pulitzer-Prize-winning
coverage of martial law in Poland.
I met a Pagan dissident who worshipped the ancient Slavic god
Swiatowid. I participated in actions by the Orange Alternative, a surrealist dissident
group without religious identity. In those protests, we used humor, for example
by chanting the slogan, "Citizen, help the militia! Beat yourself up!"
During one Krakow dusk thirty-one years
ago, hundreds of us were gathered in the Rynek, the thirteenth-century square. I
couldn't make out the words of the speeches. I was, like a nostril-quivering
gazelle on the Serengeti, balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to spring.
The ZOMO could start a baton charge at any moment, from any direction. My body
bore technicolor bruises from previous encounters.
A young Punk stood in front of me. He
was about 17 years old. Skinny, small, tattooed, with spiked hair, ripped
clothes, and safety pins in his multiply-pierced earlobes. He was carrying a
khaki green backpack.
Somewhere in the dusk, it began with one
voice. "Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła." "Poland is not yet
lost while we remain alive." The national anthem. Others picked it up. I
began to sing.
The anonymous young Punk standing in
front of me let his backpack slide down off of his shoulders onto the ancient
cobblestones. His shoulders pressed back. He stood straight as an uhlan, those legendary
Polish cavalrymen. His whole affect changed; suddenly, he was no longer a
slack-spined, ironic-lipped, lounging Punk, disciple of Johnny Rotten. He was a
Polish patriot, ready to give his all for his homeland. He belted out the
national anthem with earnest conviction. That kid, that moment, was one of the
lightning bolts illuminating the no-exit drear that was Soviet-era Poland.
I mention these atheists, communists,
Jews, Pagans, Punks, surrealist pranksters and the New York Times for
this reason. Dreher's approach strikes me as a tad smug. "We're the
Christians; we've got it right; the rest of you are doing it wrong; we will
retreat from you and will associate only with the right people. We'll emerge
periodically to broadcast our correctness via bullhorns."
It didn't work that way in Eastern
Europe. Non-Christians were essential participants in bringing down Communism. "Divide
and conquer" was a tried-and-true tactic of Poland's totalitarian invaders.
Nazis and communists worked hard to sow animosity between Christians and Jews,
workers and intellectuals, urbanites and farmers. "Solidarity"
referred to the miraculous union of religious workers, embodied by Walesa, and
secular, even leftist, intelligentsia, epitomized by Michnik.
There are many articulate, empowered
atheists tilting at the exact same dragons that Dreher is taking on. I've
listed many of them here: Pinker, Lindsay, Pluckrose, Holland, Murray, Saad.
Not a few of the folks taking on the new religion are gay: Dave Rubin, Douglas
Murray, Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan. Christians should be forging strategic
alliances with these courageous figures.
Dreher wants Christians who resist the
new religion to form small groups of mutual support. As I've described in
detail in my other writing, I embarked on the
quest for a PhD as a wide-eyed, first generation, working class, Polish-Slovak-American
Catholic. My collision with academia almost killed me, and that's not a
metaphor. After a particularly unfortunate encounter with a very powerful
professor, my inner ear burst and I spent the next six years functionally
blinded and paralyzed much of the time, and unable to stop vomiting. I could
not work; I lost my life savings. After a pro bono surgery, I hit the job
market, and was repeatedly told I was the "wrong ethnicity" and that
I was "too right-wing" to be on a university campus.
As Dreher prescribes, I have a support
network, and that support network has held my hand and pushed me forward. There's
been Don
Friedkin, Stuart Vail, Laurie
Skopitz, Roman Solecki, Nachman, Morton, Robin, Alex, Sue, Paul Kujawsky, Karen,
Otto
Gross, Simon, John, Sandy, Danuta, and others. A few of these folks have
stuck with me for decades. I can have serious conversations with all of them
about what's happening in our culture. They educate me, and they are willing to
learn from me. Not a single one of these people is a practicing Catholic. Most
are secular Jews. A couple are former Christians and current atheists.
I
am still Catholic, but all too often, when I knock on my church door, I
hear a hollow sound. When I was diagnosed with cancer and told I would probably
die, I asked for a visit with a priest. I couldn't get one. Instead, a New Age
priestess who volunteers at the hospital rubbed my feet and talked to me
soothingly about death. Liron, an Israeli I've never met, reads everything I
write and offers insight from her considerable knowledge. You are reading this
thanks to David Horowitz, a secular Jew.
When I try to give as well as take, the
door still remains closed. I asked a priest at a campus Catholic center if I
could, for free, offer talks on Islam. Students were convinced that Islam
emerged before Judaism and Christianity, that it is a "religion of
peace," and that the Crusades were all about Christians marching to
Jerusalem to force Muslims to convert. I wanted to provide the students with
the basic facts: who, what, when, where, why, how. The priest said no; he was
afraid such talks might cause a stir. I've had too many similarly disappointing
encounters with institutional Protestantism. I was being considered for a
tenure-track position at a Protestant college. I was hopeful. Suddenly, the
hammer came down. The college does not hire Catholics. Is such internecine
sectarianism a worthy focus at this time of crisis?
On social media, I've encountered
Catholics who are more woke than Antifa; on their
Facebook pages, one proves one's virtue by bashing white people incessantly. On the
page of a mild-mannered liberal priest, a Catholic who questioned the
insertion of BLM dogma into Catholic practice was immediately labeled a
"racist." I've visited the Facebook pages of conservative Catholics,
where conservatives dismiss their fellow Catholics as "Bolsheviks,"
"fools," and "stupid."
Dreher is wrong about this: we American
Christians are not analogous to Christians persecuted under communism. We are
the ones closing Catholic schools, by not sending our kids to them. We are the
ones sentencing young people to lies, because we aren't addressing what's
happening in education. We are the ones dividing and conquering. We are the
ones who have lost the commission
to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and to announce our
identity with the
love we show each other.
Dreher says we need support groups to
aid us through trials. He's right. We need Christians who emulate Jesus in such
groups. Jesus made people feel that they could go on through anything. How? Jesus
made people feel that their most private, pressing sleepless nights mattered to
the God of the universe. A lonely and poor woman had a wound that wouldn't
heal. A smart-mouthed woman was in a series of bad relationships with men who
wouldn't commit to marriage. Newlyweds ran out of wine. Those listening to
Jesus preach got hungry. A shepherd lost a lamb. A father's son went astray. Jesus
focused on the individual and cared about what he or she cared about. That's
why we are still caring about Jesus 2,000 years after his ignominious, prisoner's
death.
Maybe, in his next book, Dreher could
talk to lapsed Christians who need and want supportive fellowship and haven't
been able to find such fellowship in the church, but have found it elsewhere –
among Jews and atheists, lapsed Christians and gay people, in Twelve Step
groups and on private Facebook pages. Such accounts could help Christians to
understand how better to nurture the kind of groups Dreher envisions.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
You can find this review at Front Page Magazine here
