Sure. People are reluctant to teach women that they need to hold up their end even when their husbands sin against them.
In a culture that is so hostile to it, low decouplers – and most low decouplers are women – will hear that as, “He’s totally allowed to abuse you.” Some high decouplers will deliberately misinterpret it that way for rhetorical reasons. A pastor has the responsibility to distinguish the two and to break through honest misunderstanding where it occurs. But it’s difficult, and it’s risky, and too many shirk that duty.
That said, there are still going to be men who want to take the benefits without the responsibilities. Reminding them of their duties is noble work, as long as you don’t use it as excuse to ignore more common sins.
Edited to add the last paragraph.
Hieronymus
7hr ago
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
I think that’s key. The church needs to teach men to do their part, even when women sin against them, and it needs to teach women to do their part, even when men sin against them. But it’s fine for a parachurch ministry, or a church’s men’s or women’s ministry, to focus on just one of these at a time.
I do think that such a ministry needs to be willing to frankly discuss the other side’s duties. But it would be odd if that were the primary focus.
Hieronymus
8d ago
I haven't seen episode 8, I only read the plot summary to prepare myself for 9. So I have no view on how well handled it was, but I like the idea of the turn, marry me, and rule alongside me proposal. It's an interesting way of reprising Vader's offer to Luke.
How are you using the word mysticism here? I don’t think that personal devotion has been deëmphasized in Western Christianity. But mysticism proper was never as central to the Western church as it is to Eastern Orthodoxy today.
I don’t think I fully understand how you are drawing up your categories, so I apologize if this is a crude way of putting it. But if you are asking, “When did you guys stop being Palamist?”, the answer is that we never were.
Edit: To explain from another angle for the sake of clarity: I am treating mystical and supernatural as overlapping categories, not as synonyms.
My first reason is the less important of the two and may be futile, but I like to make a best effort at privacy: Watching YouTube logged out without persistent cookies, Google is probably doing a fair amount of tracking. Watching YouTube logged in, Google is definitely doing an awful lot of tracking.
Secondly, and more importantly, I prefer not to give money to de facto monopolies which participate in culture-war censorship. YouTube’s most obvious offenses from my perspective are on COVID, guns, and the alt-right broadly construed. If anyone has a more complete list, I am interested.
In a market with more intermediaries, focusing on niches is fine. If you want to restrict your little video platform to the five Quakers still adhering to the plain speech testimony, using “thee” instead of “you,” knock thyself out. But if YouTube starts banning every video containing the word “you,” that is best interpreted as an attempt at social control by a powerful company, and I don’t want to support it.
I used to give to a few creators through Patreon. But Patreon, then a de facto monopoly in its niche, began dropping right-wing creators and I stopped for the same reason. Now that there are SubscribeStar, Floatplane, etc., as alternatives, I should figure out whom I want to support and for how much and get back to it. And since Patreon is no longer a gatekeeper, I can also be comfortable giving through Patreon again.
I have also switched to buying books through Barnes & Noble rather than Amazon when I can, because Amazon started down the road to censorship. But it looks like maybe it has reversed course, so I should reëvaluate Amazon too.
Hieronymus
11d ago
It's true that it'd fit the B5 setting, but I wouldn't have trusted the writers to do it well. Most of their handling of religion gave the impression of a good-faith attempt by people who have never met anyone that actually believes his religion in real life.
It did work well for the Centauri, though, given their sincere but not earnest regard for tradition.
Hieronymus
12d ago
Thanks. That's not at all what I expected. Sad to read about.
Hieronymus
13d ago
High school diplomas were a heavily discounted credential long before I ever heard of that policy, which was well after I was out of school. (Though I think I did have a teacher or two who used letter grades in their gradebooks; I didn't appreciate them enough at the time.)
Sincere question: If you are worried that this will make it impossible to fail, what do the distribution of a failing student's assignment and test grades look like without it? Are these students getting Cs on the homework and the teacher is relying on a 30% test grade to counterbalance them, or what?
Hieronymus
13d ago
... many don't let you give anything lower than a 50.
I don't understand why this policy is so often compared to awful ones. It is the same as averaging the student's letter grades to come to a final grade, instead of averaging percentages. It makes missed work a normal F instead of a super-duper F. As an unknowing-ADHD kid who struggled with getting homework done, especially when I knew the material already, that would have been an incredible blessing that hurt my learning not at all.
Hieronymus
13d ago
Are you comfortable saying which denomination you were raised in? That makes me curious.
Hieronymus
13d ago
Have you not seen critics of the COVID vaccine (any COVID vaccine) consistently described as anti-vaxers? The only time I recall a serious offline conversation about this, an old friend took my criticism of the social dynamic as criticism of vaccines in general despite my explicit words to the contrary.
Hieronymus
20d ago
I view this as an almost definitional/textbook deal with the devil. “What’s the harm,” evangelicals say, “if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?”
Remember that the standard for right-wing support in the 2016 general election was “better than Hillary Clinton.” I don’t think that anyone really expected to control him. He was occasionally analogized to Cyrus, king of Persia, who freed the Jews from exile – a pagan whose actions benefit the people of God, whether from benevolence or from reasons of his own.
If Christians want greater respect in society, they need to live more Christlike lives and support more Christlike behavior. It is truly baffling that so many have deluded themselves from the plain teachings of the New Testament. They need to be servants.
In the gospels, Christ is not nearly so understated as this implies. But, in any case, Christians in general and evangelicals in particular do quite a lot of charity. We mostly don’t do it for influence, which is good because we do not win much influence from it.
To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily imply unqualified meekness; you can be zealous to some extent if your own house is in order and if it comes from a place of love.
Many people are in social circles or media bubbles where they get told over and over again that socially conservative takes are acts of hatred. My personal experience is that high decouplers who know you well can sometimes overcome this to see that you are coming from a place of love. But low decouplers struggle with this; if they live in one of those bubbles, they will most often reject their past experience of your love in order to conform to the social norm that regards people like you as haters. This has been a source of frustration and sadness for me.
That applies to politics as well. We don’t support socially conservative policies because we want you to eat your Brussels sprouts or whatever; we support them because they are conducive to human flourishing. Gender transitioning children is a sin, yes; but it’s also profoundly bad for the children, and we should reject it for that reason. That is in fact a politics of love.
Hieronymus
21d ago
As much as I LARP hard as a TradCath, I get worried that St. Marys, KS could turn into Waco 2.
I am (gallows-humorously?) tickled by the two possible interpretations of this sentence, and I hope you meant both of them.
At various times he was all of a zealous evangelical from Louisiana…
As much as I’d like to claim him, I don’t think he’s ever been a zealous evangelical. He was raised a cultural Methodist.
I've heard some shady rumours about TradCath households receiving visits from CPS because their neighbors were worried about six or seven kids running around.
Yeah, I am never sure what to think on that front. On the one hand, you hear stories of CPS folks who have seen enough real abuse to laugh off accusations against merely countercultural Christians, and I believe it. But then you hear about cases where the investigators have gone completely off the rails.
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
22d ago
No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.
A principle that has served me well for twenty four years: If he calls someone a coward who isn't, don't trust him. This applies regardless of his target's other vices.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
If a man married a virgin and then lost sexual interest in her after the wedding night, when she was no longer a virgin, it would be fair to say that he suffered from a virginity fetish. But as a practical matter I've never heard of that happening, which suggests that something else is going on.
Do you just mean that they find purity a sexually appealing trait? If so, that's not surprising, and I don't see how that would cast doubt on their other reasons. Or do you mean something more than that?
Edit: If you could give a relatively SFW example, that would be helpful.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
Could you explain this? I don’t follow. Also, it would help if you could clarify what you mean by tradwives here; there are several very different ways the word is used, and I can’t figure out which you mean from context.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
At one point I hoped that open source, decentralized social media would be more resistant to censorship. Apparently some of its pioneers had the same dream. It seems crazy naïve now.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
(The Catholics and Orthodox consider each other's apostolic successions and sacraments valid).
It’s a tangent, but is there a clear Eastern Orthodox consensus on this? E.O. attitudes toward the Western churches seem to vary quite a lot, and I have never been able to get a handle on which takes on the issue, if any, are mainstream within their communion.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Natural law is the moral order inherent in the order of creation, particularly human nature, as distinct from social custom or positive law such as statutes. In the ancient world it could be discussed by Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists, but in 21st-century America it is mostly a Christian idea.
… how do you guarantee that your reforms don't change, and revert back to standard liberalism?
This is an open question, and a vital one. I have some thoughts but not a satisfactory answer. Realistically, many of these policies couldn’t happen unless there were social change underway already, and I am not optimistic about that change happening absent a black swan event like another Great Awakening. I don’t want to pretend that wise social policy can fix things by itself.
Many of your proscriptions/desires/policies, resemble those of 1950s America, and we know for a fact that those changed to align with progressive mores.
True. I’d argue that the 1950s were kind of unstable to begin with, that the social legacies of the 1920s and of the New Deal had yet to be worked out.
Experience now gives the lie to some naïve past arguments for liberalization in a way that would make them harder to repeat. In the push for no-fault divorce, people argued (seriously!) that it wouldn’t increase divorce rates. Afterward, social psychologists said that divorce would be good for children. Those are arguments you can’t make with a straight face in 2025. If you wanted to restore no-fault divorce after a change in the status quo, you’d have to argue that no-fault divorce is worth the costs, not that there are no costs.
That is empirical evidence that, no, conservative laws are not naturally resistant to progressive agitation, and in fact, seem very vulnerable to them; hell, conservative customs aren't very resistant to liberalization. So how can you be sure you won't just repeat the cycle all over again?
I can’t be sure.
Western societies were Christian before they were liberal, and liberalism benefited from the customs and ideas laid down under centuries of Christendom. One of the outstanding questions on the modern Christian right is whether classical liberalism necessarily erodes that foundation: Did it have to be that way, or was that just how it worked out? I don’t know.
I think that laws that make it easier to have healthy families and churches and so on will lead to more of them, and that having more of them will feed back into policy. That’s the virtuous cycle I mentioned. I can’t promise that it won’t be outweighed by other factors, but I still think it represents movement in the right direction. It’s just not a silver bullet.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I’ve been thinking about the best way to answer. To be specific and even gesture at the scope of the issue would take an effortpost that I don’t have in me right now. But I can give a few examples:
- Ban abortion and assisted suicide.
- Reverse government recognition of gay marriage. The reason this one comes so early is that gay marriage makes a bunch of the other changes to family policy harder.
- Require a demonstration of (considerable) fault to obtain a divorce.
- Take fault into account when deciding what responsibilities the spouses have to one another in the distribution of property, etc.
- Acknowledge that people will abuse this if they can get away with it, and so treat perjury in divorce proceedings seriously.
I have ideas at various stages of development about how the state can make male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families a realistic option for more of those who want them; better respect parents’ rights and duties in raising their children; defend those who speak the truth on culture issues; protect the right of self-defense; and acknowledge the independence of churches. I am sure this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what comes to the tips of my fingers for now.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I don't know. Absent a revival, which is an act of God, I think by far the most likely outcome continues to be decadence as a state-enforced right.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
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.
In the context of a parachurch ministry, the answer is straightforward: God designed the human sexes that way, and He has commanded us to follow that design. The Bible is pretty emphatic about this:
If I were to make a secular argument, I would build it on the distribution of temperaments in men and women and how they interact within this framework, and I’d refer to studies of different subcultures with different marriage norms, being aware of the biases in social psychology. But it’s much harder to make a normative argument that way, and there would be legitimate discussion to be had about when to strengthen traditional norms to benefit the average person and when to weaken them to benefit outliers.
When you believe that the Bible is God’s Word – and that’s the conviction the Promise Keepers were working from – then it has the right to make normative claims that human prudence does not.
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