A Stormy, Solemn Saturday

And: Blind Man Sunday; Escaping Academia's Echo Chamber; Bill Cassidy's Loss

It was a solemn, rainy Saturday for me here in Budapest. I spent the late afternoon with a friend I’ll call Eva, which is not her real name. I have a handful of faithful Catholic friends here in Budapest. Eva is one of them.

Eva is not terribly political, but has voted Fidesz all these years, because she is a Christian and a patriot, and does not want Hungary to go the way of the European Union. She is today very worried about the future of her country.

“We are going to have same-sex marriage here within a year, maybe two,” she said. “And nobody will care. It will now be obvious to everybody that this isn’t really a Christian country anymore. Cultural Christianity is not enough.”

I brought up something a Catholic sociologist here told me a few years ago: that the Catholic and Reformed churches are moribund, and that the only religious communities with any spirit left are the Orthodox Jews (Chabad) and the large community around Faith Church, an Evangelical/Pentecostal megachurch.

Eva is in no position to know what’s going on with the Reformed, but she pretty much agreed with that verdict on the Catholic Church.

I told her that from my perspective, Viktor Orban did the best that can be expected of any politician to help the churches thrive, but in the end, you cannot solve a spiritual problem with politics. I brought up once again the thing Orban once said: that politics cannot provide meaning, but it can open a space in which meaning-giving institutions — families and churches above all — can fulfill their vocations. If they fail to act within that space, then nothing politics achieves can last.

Now I think Hungary is about to live that out. After our dinner, I went back to look at the transcript of Viktor Orban’s closing address last summer at the annual Fidesz summer camp meeting in Transylvania. Here’s how he closed his talk:

To expand on Orban’s point about same-sex marriage, I think what’s behind it is the same point of my viral 2013 essay, “Sex After Christianity”. Its basic point is the same one sociologist Philip Rieff made in his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic: that the Christian sexual model is at the heart of Christianity’s social imaginary, and that very thing is what was, at the time of his writing (the beginning of the Sexual Revoultion), being rejected wholesale by the West. The Sexual Revolution was not just a revolution in ethics, but a cosmological one. It’s important to understand what Rieff was saying: that rejecting Christian sexual ethics amounts to rejecting the authority of the Christian faith. As an atheist and a Jew, Rieff had no horse in the race in terms of defending Christianity or its sexual ethics. He was making a sociological judgment on the collapse of the Bible’s binding authority to set the moral framework.

Rieff was right, as the decades since he first wrote have shown. MacIntyre’s 1982 corollary about how emotivism is at the core of our moral reasoning today, is something we are living out now as well. That poor woman Celeste, the 66-year-old woman who defends her romantic relationship with an AI lover on the basis of how the machine makes her feel, is typical of our time. (Watch the video here.)

I agree with Orban about the tipping point. Same-sex marriage did not emerge in a vacuum. It was simply the rational next step of the Sexual Revolution. Heterosexual society had already hollowed out marriage, making it into nothing more than a contract between two people who feel themselves to be in love. The contractual model, based on expressive individualism, had become the baseline long before same-sex marriage was a realistic possibility.

Once a majority comes to believe that this is what marriage is, then it’s hard to justify denying it to same-sex couples. Orban once said that the main social difference between Hungary and the EU is that the EU countries see the individual as the basis for society, while Hungary sees the family as such. This is what Orban meant by saying he wants to build an “illiberal democracy”: on that prioritizes the family as the basis of society, and recognizes the Christian faith as the source of law.

That’s gone now. I don’t think people voted consciously to reject that. They voted against Orban because they are suffering economically, and because they were fed up with a system they perceived as corrupt. Still, it’s becoming clear that PM Peter Magyar, despite having campaigned as “Orban, but without the corruption,” is going to be a hell of a lot more “European” than Hungarian. Eva’s fear is that there won’t be enough resistance to any of this left among Hungarians to stop it.

Eva told me that she believes the only way Catholic life will survive in the long term here is “through small groups of Catholics really devoted to prayer.”

“The Benedict Option?” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

Now, let’s turn to America. Church attendance is a much better measure of devotion than mere identification with a particular church or tradition. Take a look at this chart from the political scientist Ryan Burge, who studies American religion:

Here’s a link to that post. What I found most interesting about it was how the Catholic decline has been straight downhill. Not even the world-changing pontificate of St. John Paul II, or the sex abuse scandal, affected the decline. I’ve been texting with American Catholic friends about it since this chart appeared. One of them responded:

Another factor on US Catholic decline, going back to terrible catechesis and faith formation is that by the 1970s, Catholics at the parish level were functionally indistinguishable from mainline Protestant sects. It is completely unsurprising that they would experience a similar decline.

It isn’t that JP2 didn’t affect the situation, which could have been much worse, but I would keep in mind that we are only now starting to see momentum where priests who actually care about the Church are only even starting to reach a critical mass and even then they aren’t in the leadership.

Douthat made this point in one of his columns a month ago or so where he stated that even where the Church leaders are orthodox, they are still ur-Boomers who are clearly profoundly uncomfortable and in many cases ashamed of their own faithful. You had JP2 as a widely respected leader but the wide gap between him and his employees was a meme. While I don’t relish the public feud between Trump and the Pope, the fact is that it hasn’t cost Trump meaningful support because the Pope stopped being a leader anyone took seriously even among his own flock since JP2 died.

Again, if the duty of the Church is not to proclaim the witness of Christ but to serve as yet another EU-adjacent NGO, that will regurgitate all the standard positions and talking points, then it is going to be dismissed accordingly.

Per Burge’s chart, the news is great for Evangelicals, but it has to be qualified. In the United States since the 1970s, all religious observance has been declining. So, Evangelicals have held on, and even increased, their numbers of Christians who actually go to church. The problem is, there are fewer and fewer of those. Only about half as many American Christians attend church regularly today as in 1970s.

I would guess that the theological conservatism of Evangelicals accounts for much of their strength. As you know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian for twenty years, but there are too few Orthodox in the US to make even a blip on big studies. But from 13 years in Catholicism (1993-2006), I can tell you that actual, existing Catholicism in America is theologically diverse. This was the biggest shock to me, as one who was converted by reading myself into the Catholic Church, and by following with love and admiration Pope John Paul II. I had not reckoned with how much heterodoxy (from the point of view of fidelity to the Catholic Magisterium, or teaching authority) I would find in American parishes.

I do believe, with my Catholic friend quoted above, that the change is making its way through the system, as many liberal Catholics have left the Church, or at least aren’t winning over the young. You’ve seen studies, I guess, saying that there are virtually no theological liberals studying for the priesthood today. According to a study last year, “priests ordained before 1975, more than 70% described themselves as theologically progressive, while in the 2010-or-later cohort only 8% did so.”

The problem for those young priests, and priests-in-training, is the US Catholic laity are much more liberal. Then again, that only means that the laity is a mission field. I’ve written here before how the Millennial-generation priest at the Catholic parish in my Louisiana hometown has become quite popular. He’s orthodox, and ministers with real spirit. Maybe a lot of laity might never have experienced what it’s like to be led by a pastor who is on fire for God. So, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

I would imagine too that the only Evangelical churches that are going to hold on to people are those that offer truly countercultural Biblical teaching. It’s certainly true that there are a sizable number of progressive Evangelicals, but it’s hard to see how they can grow, because when your church looks like the culture, and makes few demands on you, what’s the point of going? While the numbers on the chart for Evangelicals are something they can rightly take pride in, I am thinking of what an Evangelical friend, an academic, told me a while back: that Evangelicalism’s strength and its weakness is that it always tracks closely with the culture’s trajectories.

Please forgive me for not knowing more about Evangelicalism — and I’m happy to be corrected — but I understood him to be saying that the structural flexibility of Evangelicalism allows it to be more responsive to changes in the culture. That’s both good and bad, in his view. I wonder if that explains this recent graph by Ryan Burge:

Non-denominational churches are those without fixed creeds — or rather, they likely have a “Statement of Faith,” but they aren’t fixed within a particular tradition, like Baptists are. So they can be flexible. I don’t say that as a criticism, but looking back on how much American Evangelicalism changed in the 20th century, I’m not sure what to expect in this century. Protestantism has historically depended on print culture; I don’t know what happens to it in a culture where younger people simply do not read.

The bottom line is that we are in a period of intense religious fragmentation and churn, such that it is difficult to make predictions. Matthew Schmitz, who is Catholic, had an interesting piece the other day in First Things, in which he noted that the Catholic Church in the US is “in steep decline,” citing harsh statistics revealing that whatever the good news about converts entering the Catholic Church right now, its not nearly enough to counter the broader decline. “And yet,” he writes

…something is stirring in the Catholic Church. It is evident not only in the number of adults seeking confirmation, but in the way Catholic concepts and figures have moved to the center of public debate. Rather than simple Catholic decline or Catholic revival, we appear to have entered a period of Catholic ferment, in which a process of breakdown is accompanied by the emergence of something new.

He talks about how Catholic ideas are finding new salience in the public square. No space here to quote him, but do read the piece. The professor with whom I dined last night asked me about Orthodox conversions in the US. I told him that I hear anecdotally all the time that churches in the US are filling with converts, but that it is also true that Orthodoxy is such a tiny presence in the US that it’s hard to say what kind of influence that may have on American life in the long term.

Whatever one’s faith tradition, chosen or inherited, all of us Christians are going to face the same problem: holding fast to the faith in the present and coming storm, which will present challenges like nothing the church has ever seen. I think of the coming of AI in the way Jaguar Paw and his pursuers in Mel Gibson’s brilliant Apocalpyto reached the end of the chase (it’s here, but the ending will be spoiled).

The key battle we will be fighting is to know what is real. Yesterday I got lost for a while plotting out an apocalyptic novel, which I might take a shot at writing once I get settled in the US this summer. I was thinking about how forms of Christianity that require embodiment — sacramental forms — have an advantage in the age of AI. If the sermon is the center of one’s worship service, then AI can produce a sermon more learned and masterful than nearly every preacher. As people begin to merge themselves more fully with the Machine, I wonder how Protestant pastors are going to stay relevant. No machine can ever confect the Eucharist out of bread and wine … but if a people does not believe that is a necessary, irreducible aspect of Christian life and worship, it won’t matter. And even then, if priests do not actually preach, teach, and disciple their congregations in being countercultural in an AI-dominated culture, then simply having the Eucharist is not going to be sufficient to make disciples.

However, I recall from my Catholic years coming to understand, towards the end, why some disaffected Catholics left for Evangelicalism. In my triumphant early years as a Catholic convert, I couldn’t grasp this at all. But as the years went by, and especially in the sex abuse crisis, the fact that in parish after parish, the sermons rarely taught or proclaimed anything substantive really taught me why Catholics starved for real leadership defected to Evangelical churches whose pastors went deep into the Bible. I have had too little experience in American Orthodox churches to make a judgment about the quality of preaching, and having been out of Catholicism for two decades now, I’ve missed any improvements in preaching that might have come from younger, Millennial priests. Still, we Christians of the older, liturgical and sacramental traditions, are going to need to look to our Evangelical brethren for examples on how to preach and teach effectively. The times are incredibly disorienting.

No matter what kind of Christian you are, you need a Benedict Option community: a thick group of prayerful disciples who understand themselves to be in opposition to the broader culture, and who consider all of life to be training in discipleship. There’s just no substitute for being part of a worshiping community, one that forms the whole self. Viktor Orban is right about our duty: “That duty is to preserve what we have, to acquire what we do not have but need, and to reject what we do not need.”

Being outside of a serious community of worship and discipleship has made it harder for me to fulfill my duty. I will miss Europe, but need to get my spiritual life in order.

The Sunday Of The Blind Man

Yesterday in the Orthodox Church was what we call the Sunday of the Blind Man. The Gospel reading is the story from the Gospel of John, Chapter 9, in which Jesus restores sight to a blind man. The Pharisees get angry over this. They reject the idea that God could have worked through Jesus to do this miracle. For one, they don’t want to hear the testimony of the formerly blind man, because he is not learned. For another, Jesus did this work of healing on the Sabbath, breaking religious law.

The chapter ends like this:

Then Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”

Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?”

Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.”

How mysterious this whole story is! As in the story of the Gerasene demoniac liberated by Jesus, who was then driven out of town by the people, who preferred the world they could predict to the possibility of liberation, we see here people (the Pharisees) who have a great miracle performed in their midst, but who refuse to see what is right in front of them because it doesn’t conform to their expectations. Jesus’s final line to them is a real challenge to us all, isn’t it? It’s a challenge to their pride and arrogance. He’s saying, “You think you know everything, but you can’t even see what’s happening in front of you.”

I don’t think Jesus was denying the possibility of knowing truth, not at all. What he’s saying is that we can become so trapped in our own ways of knowing that we blind ourselves to mysteries unfolding all around us. Religious people do this (“God can’t be working within that church, because they are Not Like Us”) and non-religious people do, going out of their way to come up with materialist explanations for seemingly miraculous events, or at least to dismiss the possibility that something has truly happened here that violates their model of reality.

This Gospel passage always makes me interrogate myself, to ask what movements of the Holy Spirit am I missing in my own life, and as I survey the world, because they don’t fit into my way of framing reality?

I really love the new piece by Josh Robinson, in which he talks about evangelizing the “naturalist” — that is, the kind of person who thinks the world can be entirely explained by materialism. (The Pharisees were religious men, of course, but their understanding of religion was highly legalistic, so they, in a sense, were like Robinson’s “naturalist”). Robinson writes:

What is an enchanted apologetic? First, I will say what it’s not. It’s not an evidential apologetic that leads you to the belief that a god exists. It’s also not a presuppositional apologetic that spends time examining underlying presuppositions, though I think that is helpful at times, depending on the conversation.

It’s mainly an argument for meaning. Here I was talking to the guy, and even though he was skeptical about his entire upbringing and what anyone could know apart from the scientific method, yet, he had no way to account for meaning.

He couldn’t explain to me what it meant that he loved his wife and children, yet he did. He couldn’t explain to me what justice was, though he believed it to be important. And he couldn’t explain to me why his experience participating in confession at a catholic church was somehow burden-lifting.

That’s because naturalism, naturally, leads you straight to a meaning crisis. It causes you to begin to look at yourself in the third person instead of the first person. When asked about love, you step out of yourself and begin to describe the release of chemicals in the brain. You step outside of yourself and begin to talk about social conventions, competition, evolution, and the preservation of the species. And, you begin to step outside of yourself like a doctor inspecting a patient on a couch and begin to talk about therapy.

Naturalism removes you as a participant in the world and makes you a spectator. That’s because naturalism reduces everything down to its material cause, which is what it can examine and quantify. It cannot account for meaning because it rejects all the other causes. And the problem with this is that no one lives life this way. No one goes home and tells their wife, “Hey, my brain is producing feel-good chemicals when I look at you and the kids.” Or at least, I hope they don’t. And what about justice? If we’re just matter in motion, then what the hell does justice matter? And what are you confessing? Is there sin or is there not?

Robinson goes on to talk about how the naturalist, though he claims to be a man of science, is actually a man of false enchantment:

Naturalism reduces the world to its material parts and reduces the person to a spectator operating on those parts. Everything becomes technique or techné. The right inputs produce the right outputs. The body is managed. The mind is hacked. The emotions are regulated. The relationships are optimized. This is what magic always wanted to be. The old magician muttering over his herbs and the modern naturalist adjusting his serotonin are doing the same thing in different costumes. Both of them have replaced participation with manipulation. Both of them have decided the world is a mechanism, and they are the operator.

The enchanted man does the opposite. He receives the world as it is. As a gift from God. And offers it back up to Him in thanksgiving. He opens his hands. He lets the bread be placed in them. He does not operate the world. He lives in it.

This is where the naturalist gets confused, because he has been told that he is the opposite of the magician. He has been told that he stands at the end of a long progress out of superstition and into reason. The old world was full of witches and charms and incantations, and the modern world has cleared all of that away with the clean light of science. He believes this. He has been catechized into it. He thinks of himself as the disenchanter, the one who pulled the curtain back and revealed that the wizard was just an old man with a microphone.

But he actually has the story exactly backward. The naturalist is not the opposite of the magician. He is the magician’s grandson. They are after the same thing by different means.

Robinson explains that both magic and science emerged in the early modern world, as attempts to bend the world to the will of the magician/scientist. Science is magic that works. But the goal is the same: to make the world malleable, useful. This is what Yuval Noah Harari, a naturalist, meant when he said that modern man made a fateful bargain at the start of the modern age 500 years ago: he exchanged meaning for power. If there is no intrinsic meaning to the material world, then we can do anything we want with it, and to it. We have become very powerful living by this philosophy, in that “power” means agency over matter. But what’s it all for?

I love this from Robinson:

The enchanted man stands somewhere else entirely. He does not want what the magician wanted. He does not want what the scientist wants when the scientist is being a magician. He does not want to dominate the world. He wants to live in it. He wants to know it the way you know a person, by patient love and long attention, not by dissection. He wants the apple to fall from the tree and find it astonishing, the way Chesterton found it astonishing. He wants to walk through the woods without taking inventory. He wants to receive the bread without analyzing the molecules.

He does not want to dominate the world. He wants to live in it. I want to live in a world in which I can see things like a blind man receiving sight, and not immediately try to explain it away, but simply say, “Glory to God!” To become the kind of man who can do that requires training, though. It is not the way of our world.

Escaping The Academic Echo Chamber

The academic with whom I dined last evening earned all of his degrees — undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate — from Ivy League colleges. Yet he bailed on an academic career because he saw that there were few jobs at all in his field, and none for straight white males interested in subject areas that did not include queer studies, gender studies, decolonial studies, and the usual. He’s a trained scholar of what until yesterday was a major field, one with real-world applications. I have no idea what his politics are, but he told me that the world of American academia is irreversibly sick, and he knew he had to find something else to do with his knowledge.

Thought of him when I saw this chart, via Steve Stewart-Williams:

Sen. Cassidy Loses

I was sad and discouraged to see that my friend Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary bid for re-election as one of Louisiana’s US senators. He lost because of a single vote he made in 2021: to impeach Donald Trump over Trump’s disgraceful behavior around the January 6 debacle. Cassidy didn’t have to vote that way. Most GOP senators refused to uphold Trump’s impeachment, and besides, it didn’t really matter, because Trump was about to leave office anyway. At the time, the Senator explained here why he voted as he did. He was right.

Trump vowed revenge on him for this act of personal disloyalty, and, with the Trump-endorsed candidate Julia Letlow dominating the field at this past weekend’s vote, Trump prevailed. Too bad. Louisiana loses a strongly conservative senator, a devout Evangelical Christian of real integrity, who worked with Trump when he agreed with him (which was often, but only slavish loyalty suffices). Sen. Cassidy returns to private life with his head held high. I’m proud of him, and glad he was my senator.

I can and do support Trump when I think he is right, and oppose him when I think he is wrong. No politician will ever have my unquestionable loyalty. I am quite sure that my loyalty will be misplaced from time to time — same goes for all of us; we are only human — but I don’t care for personality cult politics. You can reasonably ask: how could you, Rod, have supported Trump’s 2021 impeachment, but also backed his 2024 presidential run? The answer is not because I found Trump to be suddenly fit for office. The answer is because the alternative was worse. Remember, I once voted for Edwin W. Edwards for Louisiana governor in 1991, versus David Duke, and had this bumper sticker on my car: