Hieronymus
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User ID: 419
One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities. Originally the question was how evangelical churches should relate to the mainline churches. Another question followed about how evangelical churches’ worship should relate to evangelism, which is often addressed to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with evangelical culture. But more pertinent here is the question of how evangelical Christians should conduct ourselves in fields like academia and politics.
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
There is a widespread perception within evangelicalism that David French has compromised more and more of his evangelical convictions to be seen as “one of the good ones” by the secular commentariat. I think that this explains his position on transgenderism in the public square, for example, better than principled classical liberalism does. So I don’t see French as an exemplar of classically liberal evangelicals.
To an extent Trump makes sense as a result of the evangelical absence of institutional leadership and embrace of charismatic leaders - if they're going to have a political vision, it will be grounded in dynamic individual leaders hostile to traditional institutions, like Trump himself.
Evangelical support for George W. Bush was much earlier and more heartfelt than evangelical support for Trump has been. Bush’s faith is, as far as I can tell, sincere. But while he himself may have had sympathy for the religious right, he also shared his father’s neoconservative convictions, and virtually all of his political appointments reflected the latter rather than the former. Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms: His political capital was spent on the War on Terror.
The Obama administration, by contrast, saw a flurry of progressive activity. The president did not shy away from using either the federal bureaucracy or the judiciary as a weapon against social conservatives. His administration issued a series of Dear Colleague letters threatening schools and colleges into complying with progressive norms on discipline, sexual assault accusations, and gender identity. He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception and the (Evangelical Protestant) owners of Hobby Lobby that it wasn’t enough to pay for several forms of contraception, they had to include those with abortifacient effects. Thankfully the Supreme Court forbade this, basing its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 rather than the Constitution. At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state. In reaction, the legislature passed another law effectively gutting the RFRA.
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
The more that evangelicals continue to feel that they're doing badly, or that their fortunes are sliding, the more seductive such leaders will be for them.
Yes! When it becomes clear that certain institutions are only used against us, why would we want leaders who leave them lying around?
I had hoped that Pence would come out of the first Trump administration with an awareness of the threat from progressive-controlled institutions and the need to fight them. Combined with his strong evangelical convictions and his small-government conservatism, that had the potential to make him a fantastic future president. But it’s not the lesson he took from his time under Trump, and maybe January 6 would have cut off that opportunity anyway. It remains to be seen what lessons (Catholic convert) J. D. Vance will take from his term as V.P.
They use a number of different names for it - Deneen's 'aristopopulism', Vermeule's 'common-good constitutionalism', and so on - but what unites this group is the conviction that it is both possible and desirable for the United States to be governed in conformance with Catholic social teaching. Liberal democracy should be limited in its scope, fundamentally reframed, or (in the most extreme cases) abolished entirely.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
The obvious criticism to make of this option is that it is a counsel of despair - it takes for granted that the public is lost. While Dreher himself denies that he calls for any kind of 'retreat', this denial has always been unconvincing at best. … The Benedict Option itself is primarily a plea for evangelical Protestants and Catholics to try this. You can indeed find people in those traditions taking an option like this, though so far it's too early to see how generative their efforts are. I don't predict entire evangelical or Catholic communities taking this approach, though, until it's clear that they have no other choice.
I would call it a semi-retreat, or maybe a fighting retreat to a more defensible position. But the question is: Is it defensible? I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms. If you built such a community – and you were successful enough to be noticed – you could reasonably expect to face creative applications of the laws on land use, housing, health care, education, employment, and so on, to impose progressive values.
There is a fourth approach bandied about, but it’s almost as unlikely as Catholic integralism. When “Christian nationalism” became a vague talking point among some Democrats, a few different evangelicals decided to claim the term. One wrote a book on it, which I haven’t read. What they seem to have in common is that they want an arrangement like that the one that existed in America before the progressive movement, with evangelical Christianity in the place of mainline Christianity as normative, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tolerated but not normative, and non-Christian religions legal but marginalized to one degree or another. (This last in particular varies by thinker.) It would take some pretty radical social shifts to make that even vaguely plausible. And while radical social shifts have happened before, that’s not the kind of thing you can accomplish with a political program.
Those are a lot of words to say that I don’t know the best path forward. But hopefully they contribute to understanding the situation.
Hieronymus
9mo ago
enemy areas
This is, on one level, my actual impression of many places. I live in a blue state, so casual pride flags happen. But once you get above a certain threshold of rainbow density in a nominally public place, it’s clear that there’s a dynamic of deliberate hostility to those of us with other convictions.
Still, I’d not open with that phrase on the Motte. Mistake theory is not altogether dead here, the way it usually is there.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
Hieronymus
3yr ago
Seeing the new title of King Charles’ wife, the queen consort, on Queen Elizabeth’s death has left me a surprised and befuddled American. I would love to hear about the Church of England’s role in modern British public life from those who know about it.
The Backstory
As a child I was taught in school that King Henry VIII founded the Church of England because he wanted a divorce from his wife, which Roman Catholic doctrine would not allow. But this is misleading. What Henry sought from the pope was in modern terms an annulment; Henry’s wife Catherine was the Holy Roman Emperor’s aunt, and the pope’s political and military situation was precarious, so the pope stalled. This led Henry to claim supremacy over the church and get the English clergy to grant his annulment. The Church of England still regarded divorce per se, dissolving the valid marriage of two living spouses, to be impossible.
Fast-forward four hundred years to 1936. The new King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American in the process of divorcing her second husband. The prime ministers of the Commonwealth realms were not prepared to accept a disreputable queen, and publicly flouting the church of which Edward was in principle the head threatened to create a constitutional crisis. He decided to give up his throne and his responsibilities to marry her anyway. His brother became King George VI, and George’s daughter Elizabeth became the heiress presumptive.
Prince Charles’ Reprise
In 2002 the Church of England decided to allow the divorced to remarry in church – depending on the circumstances and the pastor. In other cases it may be possible to have a church blessing service after a civil wedding.
This is what Charles, Prince of Wales, did when he married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. His ex-wife having died, his divorce was presumably no impediment to the marriage, but her ex-husband was still living. Neither of his parents attended the civil wedding, though they did attend the blessing afterward. Queen Elizabeth acknowledged the awkwardness by announcing that Camilla was to be known as Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales while Elizabeth lived and as princess consort rather than queen afterward.
The constitutionality of this decision was disputed, and it wasn’t clear whether Charles would follow his mother’s wishes once he was king. So I was surprised when, on Queen Elizabeth’s death, references to Camilla as queen consort occasioned no commentary. It turns out that in February Elizabeth changed her mind and spared Charles the trouble.
What does this imply about the Church of England?
It’s nothing new for the powerful or influential to demand that Christian churches capitulate, and it’s hardly unprecedented for unprincipled pastors to grant those demands. It may be that Elizabeth’s piety and Charles’ sense of duty were the only things that kept him from a church wedding in the first place. But I can’t escape the impression that the Church of England has ceased to be a legitimacy-granting institution beholden to God, at least in principle, and has come to have its own legitimacy judged by how well it follows the Zeitgeist.
Representatives of the Church of England’s laity narrowly turned down a measure in 2012 that would have allowed women to become bishops; some of those voting against the measure were conservatives who opposed the change and some were progressives who thought the measure didn’t take a hard enough line against the conservatives. (The change went through in 2014.) The Archbishop of Canterbury said at the time:
“Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday … the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society.”
Where does all this leave the Church of England? I’m interested in insights from anyone who has them, but I would particularly love to hear the perspectives of English Anglicans and other members of state churches.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I want to ponder a couple of your observations a bit more, because I have some thoughts to untangle. But as a religious righty myself, I would encourage you to distinguish three groups:
- The religious left when it is code switching to speak to the religious right: I think the United Methodist pastor from OP is here.
- Folks traveling from the religious right to the religious left, who may or may not have admitted it yet
- The religious right itself
In particular, I think that the growth of the second group is distinct from drift within the third group. That doesn’t imply that the religious right proper isn’t changing at all, because it is, but if you try to plot its course by following, e.g., Russell Moore, you are going to be confused.
Hieronymus
5mo ago
What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection? Are these just small-community mores being applied to larger places that hadn’t yet come to terms with their size?
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
And I say this as a man in his 50s who is engaged to a woman who is 18.
I certainly have no moral problem with that, provided you both have honorable intentions. But, on a prudential level, how are you thinking about your future marriage in the context of aging? A six-year gap may get smaller as a couple ages, but surely a thirty-five-ish–year gap will get larger; in thirty years you will be in your eighties and she in her forties.
I don’t mean this as a gotcha. I assume you have thought about this, and I am curious about those thoughts.
We need a term for the set of things that people and movements push for in practice after all the social dynamics have been accounted for, as opposed to the things they want in principle. Revealed preferences is close, but it comes bundled with a theory of mind I reject. (Revealed preferences are not preferences.)
The only item on your list of goals that anybody would support in principle is separating kids from their parents, and only some would endorse that. But as a practical matter that movement ends up fighting for the whole list.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Yes, by the religious left I mean what early twentieth century Protestants called modernism. (I think that contemporary Catholics had a different, broader definition of the word.) It’s what you get when you accept the tenets of secular progressivism and try to rebuild Christian practice on top of them. It’s not really Christian.
That said, I’ve always understood James Martin to be in this camp. Roman Catholic ecclesiology didn’t allow the fundamentalist-modernist controversy to take the form it did among Protestants, so the divide isn’t as obvious; at least that’s my take.
If you are ever inclined to do related effortposts, I’d love to read about the dynamics (positive and negative) created by having the likes of Martin and Vigano in the same institutional church, as well as how tradcaths have reacted to Francis’ papacy and the loss of the Vatican’s social role as a countercultural bulwark.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
Do you know of any resources that make the history of Hinduism legible to a westerner? I got curious reading about Indo-European languages and then Indo-European religion. The parallels between Germanic mythology and early Vedic religion are fascinating. But the early Vedic religion has clearly been transformed and subsumed. (No cattle sacrifices in modern Hinduism!) I am curious what the different proto-Hinduisms were and how they met and fought and syncretized.
Books I've read on the history of Indo-European religion (admittedly years ago) were light on the Indo-Iranian branch.
Hieronymus
11mo ago
Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do.
I don't think this is possible, either in principle or in practice. The president has wide discretion not to enforce laws for a variety of reasons. And federal judges, who are routinely blue tribe even when right-leaning, will mostly be looking for reasons to allow a Democratic or neocon Republican president to skip out on his side of the bargain.
We've tried things like this before, and the pro-illegal-immigration factions have successfully defected at the first opportunity. I don't see any reason for optimism that the compromise will be honored in an even more divided country.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason…
The gulf here is much wider than that. If Jesus Christ was not raised from the dead, then confessional Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy falls apart. Liberation theology and the social gospel movement keep on trucking.
… but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.
Only in the sense that they try to “use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop,” in Lewis’ inimitable phrase.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
How are you using distributism here? You seem to mean something smaller scale or more grass roots than I am accustomed to.
I am used to seeing distributism proposed as a full-scale alternative to socialism and capitalism. Distributism in that sense seems unachievable in an industrial or post-industrial society; it will eventually reduce to capitalism or socialism, depending on how you treat the accumulation of capital. A small-scale approach is far more interesting.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Sounds a bit like human sacrifice and scapegoating doesn't it?
Unironically yes. The Bible depicts it as a sacrifice: though those who killed Jesus didn’t intend it that way, Jesus did. And if you do a quick search, you will find a million sermons with titles like “Christ our Scapegoat,” referencing the literal scapegoat in Leviticus.
Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, offering himself as a sacrifice to God the Father on behalf of sinners is the mechanism. It’s the core of Christian belief.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I appreciate the summary. Could you clarify what you mean by authority in this context? You seem to be using it in a particularly Mormon way.
It likely goes without saying, but the Protestant take is that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative guide to the apostolic faith and that all subsequent teachers are to be judged by that standard; the canon is closed.
Obviously, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have their takes on the apostolic succession, but I don’t think their notion of authority is the same as yours, and it would be interesting to see it explained from your side.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.
I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Come on, man. I know that creationists are one of the traditionally iconic outgroups in rationalist-adjacent spaces. And I find Hegseth pretty frustrating myself. But if you asked Pastor Doug Wilson (de facto leader of CREC) whether there have ever been any peoples without metallurgy, what do you think he'd say? Do you really think it would bother him at all?
I’d like to break the “retvrn question” down along two axes. One is the criteria of evaluation: truth, helpfulness, and social attainability. The other is the spectrum of ideologies under discussion: groups who agree on critiques of liberal modernity have very different ideas of the right path forward.
Truth
The criterion of truth is the most important, and it’s the only one to apply to questions of metaphysics and religious doctrine. You, I, and society should seek to believe true things. Is willingness to buck the social consensus here liberal? Not necessarily. First-century Jewish Christians stood against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin; first-century gentile Christians contrasted even more starkly with the pagan social order.
This does contradict some critics of liberalism: neoreactionaries and some rightward-inclined rationalists want to talk about religion in utilitarian terms. But they are wrong to do so. We have a duty to the truth; even if we didn’t, the cost of ignoring it is beating one’s head fruitlessly against the brick wall of reality.
Helpfulness
Helpfulness is, if not more controversial, then definitely less objective. There are always tradeoffs to be made. And the variety of liberalism’s critics becomes obvious here. You may be thinking about neoreactionaries or integralists. But I, as someone who loves American classical liberalism, share concerns with these other critics.
One is that increased social and religious diversity has exposed cracks in liberal principles that were safely papered over in a more coherent society. Much discourse and litigation over religious liberty since the middle of the twentieth century is a fight between three groups of people: people who want to pass laws and to expect those laws to be followed, people who expect freedom of religion to keep the government from making their religious duties illegal, and people who expect freedom from religion to exclude religious considerations from the regulated sphere of life.
Another is that the synthesis of progressivism and liberalism seeks state intervention to free individuals from the influences of their families, churches, and other societies of private life. No-fault divorce is now ubiquitous. Governments forbid male-only fraternal organizations. Some state universities de facto ban religious student groups by requiring them to admit as members or officers those who don’t share their convictions. After a while one begins to think that liberalism as it exists will not leave well enough alone; and if the state is to intervene, I want it intervening to support my idea of the good and not to ban it.
I think there are more people in this camp than there are neoreactionaries and integralists. We thought parts of liberalism were pretty swell, but they haven’t worked out as promised. Was that contingent on the winds of politics? Or could liberalism only support a healthy society so long as there was enough of Christendom left as a foundation? It’s difficult to say.
Social Attainability
I really don’t know what is attainable, particularly in the long run. I don’t think we Americans in 2006 could predict where the country would be in 2015, less than a decade later. Heck, I don’t think that in January 2016 we could predict where we would be in November 2016. Much is in flux.
You are right that we won’t see a return to medieval Christendom. But that’s not the only alternative to liberalism. And I worry that we’ve lost healthy classical liberalism anyway, that that option is no longer attainable.
Hieronymus
9mo ago
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
You've lost me with the references to particular schools and thinkers. I can't promise to pick it up right away, but I'm likely to have some more reading time soon – is there a source you'd suggest starting with?
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
I think it’s just normal human sin. I don’t know the base rate, but as I recall pastors are significantly less likely to abuse children than school teachers.
That list was a weapon in the culture war. There are some progressive (by evangelical standards) people and organizations whose M.O. is to ignore base rates, ignore any exculpatory evidence, and accuse denominations or institutions of being shot through with sexual abuse, then demand checks and balances that subvert the denomination’s polity. The people they want to grant new power over doctrine and practice are consistently from the progressive wing of the denomination, and they always think that the right way to address sexual abuse is by moving the denomination closer to the broader culture.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Customers do not like you asserting your ideology over their needs.
I don't share historic OpenAI's or Anthropic's concerns about being paperclipped by an accidental AI god, so I disagree with many of their positions on AI ethics. But both Microsoft and the DoD made business agreements knowing and agreeing to respect the other party's principles, and both reneged the moment it was inconvenient to keep their words. I can't really respect that, any more than I can respect the business leaders who appealed to their people's ideals as long as it was convenient and then sold them out for money.
Hieronymus
5mo ago
... because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes.
Okay, this is a nitpick.
There was the MtF bartender at the Afterlife with the street racing line of sidequests, and that did feel preachy. And there were the gay romance options. Did I miss anything else?
On the other hand, you have Fingers, the ripperdoc who has made himself androgynous and is unambiguously a villain, in a way clearly tied to his sexuality, in a major quest. I was pretty surprised they'd go there. I felt like they did a good job of preserving the setting's themes even when they were in tension with the mores of the current year.
Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.
The way they handled religion was pretty bad in general, but I can only speculate as to motives there.
As a Protestant, I agree with you that the papacy is no guarantor of doctrinal fidelity. But the core question is this: The pope is said to be the vicar of Christ – is he? Flawed historical assertions and doctrinal contradictions count as evidence against the claim, but the claim itself is true or false and should be addressed as such. (Whether this is the right forum to go deep on that question is a separate issue.)
The same is true of claims about the president of the Mormon church: Is he a true or false prophet? Having a true prophet may be useful, but that doesn’t determine whether Joseph Smith and Russell Nelson qualify. Flawed historical assertions and doctrinal contradictions count as evidence here too. And I think it’s audacious to say that the LDS score well.
What about the Mormon history of pre-Columbian America, which doesn’t jive with any historical source or archeological finds? Or the book of Abraham, whose source manuscripts turned out to be Egyptian funerary texts once we could read hieroglyphs? Or the edits to the Book of Mormon regarding the nature of the godhead? Or the doctrines which were said to be unchangeable but were nevertheless changed, like plural marriage?
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