'Live Not By Lies' In Los Angeles Today

Hello from Los Angeles. We arrived late last night for a big private screening tonight here. Then tomorrow morning, a long cross-country flight to Washington (dang, I had wanted to go to liturgy here). I am about to pop my last Sudafeds, but the man-cold fights on. I will surrender my liberty to the totalitarian dictator who first cures the common cold. There, I’ve said it.

And men, can I get an amen here? WOMEN JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND! My ex-wife probably divorced me because she was tired of my griping when under the weather. Hard to blame her, to be honest.

Anyway, I learned last night from the producers of the Live Not By Lies movie (trailer here) that our project was debanked by Chase at the beginning of fundraising a couple of years ago. They don’t know why, and Chase was not required by law to explain it. The day that the first round of fundraising came in, Chase kicked the production company’s account to the curb. More recently, the lawyer they hired to clear all the permissions for film clips, an attorney who had declared herself a liberal but a “First Amendment absolutist,” demanded to be released from her contract. She did not like the film’s criticism of queer activists as totalitarian. Of course the producers let her out of the contract, because you don’t really want someone who is working under duress to be responsible for the legal aspects of the film, but it tells you something about soft totalitarianism, does it not?

Speaking of, I think this documentary is going to do big business in Great Britain. Look at the latest:

And there’s this: UK police arrested a couple in front of their children for the “crime” of criticizing the leadership of their children’s primary school on a private WhatsApp group:

I thought surely there must be more to this story. Surely the parents must have threatened violence or something. Nope: watch this five-minute explanation from the father in the case, who, as it happens, is a producer for the Times of London Radio. The British ruling class and the institutions it controls are provoking utter contempt for authority among the people of that country. How much longer are they going to take this? I refer you once again to Prof. David Betz, the expert in civil conflict at Kings College London’s war studies department, explaining how the UK authorities seem to be acting from a textbook on How To Start A Civil War.

In the first few minutes of the Live Not By Lies movie, we see Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a Catholic pro-life campaigner, arrested by UK police for standing on a sidewalk praying silently, in her head, for unborn children, in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. Isabel says in the film that many people assumed that there must be more to the story, that she must have done something more to have provoked her arrest. She says that she sympathizes with them, because it’s just too insane to imagine that a British subject would be hauled off to jail for the thoughts in her head. But no, it really happened. And, after paying her damages for false arrest … the cops did it again!

If all this isn’t soft totalitarianism (accelerating towards hard), well, what is it?!

Meanwhile, there has been another mass stabbing in Europe, this time in Trondheim, a peaceable city in Norway. The identity of the attacker has not been released. This comes days after a mass stabbing in the heart of Amsterdam. The attacker there has not yet been identified, but there have been unconfirmed reports that he is a Turkish Muslim. This kind of thing happens all the time across Europe.

How much longer will people there take this from Muslims and migrants? As one of this blog’s readers, an Italian, put it to me privately, European authorities are overseeing the hollowing out of liberal democracy. If liberal democracy requires Europeans to accept this kind of thing (including what the UK authorities are doing), then Europeans will end up rejecting liberal democracy.

As I told you in this space, when I was in France recently, so many people I talked to said they expect civil war there between Muslims and migrants on one side, and français de souche (native-born French) on the other. As Betz says about the UK, it’s not going to be a matter of one army lining up against another, but something more like a campaign of sabotage and violence along the lines of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Not one of the French said it with the least enthusiasm; they said it as a matter-of-fact truth, as something that they have to prepare with withstand. They know that something is going to blow at some point. As David Betz said of Britain, the question is no longer “if”, but “when”.

The ‘Joy’ Of Religious Tolerance

This week in Kansas City, a group of Satanists held an extremely provocative demonstration outside the State Capitol. As you can see in the clip below, their leader held up a purportedly consecrated Host stolen from a Catholic church, blasphemed against Christ, and began to stomp it. Keep in mind that for Catholics, a consecrated Host is not a mere symbol, but is actually the Body of Christ, the most sacred matter in the universe. (The Satanists had earlier testified under oath in court that the Host had not been consecrated. Who really knows? They wanted people to believe that it had been, though.)

A Catholic man barreled forward, seized the Host, and consumed it to prevent the Satanists from carrying on. He was arrested and later released without charges. Watch it in this clip on Twitter (careful: there is some profanity, and lots of blasphemy):

God bless that man, and God bless all the Catholics who showed up to protest this, and who gathered in local churches to pray for God’s mercy in the face of this evil. I hope other Christians joined the Catholics. This attack on them is an attack on us all. There was other trouble at the Statehouse involving the Satanists, when they attempted to stage a so-called “black mass” inside the capitol building.

We have to admit that things like this expose the limits of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty, and indeed of classical liberalism itself. Strictly speaking, on what constitutional grounds can the Satanists, as offensive as their beliefs and conduct are to Christians, be prevented from doing what they do? I don’t see any. And yet, had I been in Kansas City, I would have done whatever I could have done to stop this thing, short of violence. My Lord is more important to me than the First Amendment.

Whenever I see people burning the Koran, I hate it. I honestly do. The only reason to do this is to provoke Muslims. I do not share their religion, obviously, but I believe that it is wicked to trample provocatively on someone else’s sacred beliefs for the sake of insulting them. And yet, when I saw Koran-burning video of the Assyrian refugee from Iraq, driven out of his country and into Sweden, by radical Muslims, I pitied the man. I would not have done it, but I understand why he did it, out of desperation, and a sense of rage about Muslim violence in Sweden. (He was later murdered, presumably by Islamists.) The thing is, Sweden is not an Islamic country, and I think he should have had the right to do what he did, even as I condemn what he did.

True, for Catholics (and Orthodox, though we celebrate the Eucharist in a different way; we consume it as consecrated bread soaked in consecrated wine), a consecrated Host is more sacred than the Bible, because we believe it is literally the Body of Christ. As offensive as I would find burning the Bible, it’s not as bad as desecrating a Host. Then again, America is not a Catholic or Orthodox country. On the other hand, the Koran is as sacred to Muslims as the Host is to Catholics. For Muslims, the Koran is more like the sacred Host is to Catholics than like the Bible is.

Isn’t there some hypocrisy within me over this? Yes, there is. This is not really an issue in a country in which people share the same religion, broadly speaking (even most atheists, I suppose, have no interest in radically blaspheming against what religious people hold sacred). What we are seeing here is that classical liberalism only really works when it exists on the foundation of Christian belief, even if that Christian belief has been largely secularized. That is to say, the legal framework of the First Amendment makes intuitive sense to people within a cultural framework that emerged out of Biblical religion.

The growing presence of Muslims — especially, as in Europe, Muslims who at times violently attack the native Christian religion — in the West raises the prospect of deep disorder, including violent disorder. We don’t have this problem so much in America, thank God, but boy, is it a problem in Europe. And I hope we never do! It is possible in America, therefore, for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to live in peace. But what would happen here if Muslims started behaving the way some do in Europe?

For that matter, if liberal democracy requires us to tolerate Satanists blaspheming publicly in a provocative manner, well then, to hell with liberal democracy. Keep in mind, though, that Muslims do not accept that burning the Koran — an act of unsurpassable blasphemy in their religion — should be tolerated in a liberal democracy. I don’t blame them! But at the same time, if they are not prepared to live with that possibility, they should stay out of the West.

As I see it, if a Western Christian or atheist is not prepared to live in a society in which burning the Koran is utterly intolerable, then they should not seek to settle in an Islamic country.

What we are faced with in these cases is the fact that religion is so primal that it cannot be entirely subject to procedural liberalism. Let’s take it outside the framework of religion, and think about sex. Back in 1991, Camille Paglia — atheist, lesbian, self-described pagan (though not the religious kind) — wrote a hilarious essay called “The Joy Of Presbyterian Sex”. In it, she lays into the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s absurd report on sexuality, which tried hard to corral sex into a liberal framework. Sadly, “Joy” is not available online, but I did find excerpts. For example:

The [PCUSA’s} committee’s prescription for an enlightened Christianity is “learning from the marginalized.” This new liberal cliché is repeated so often that I began to misread it as “margarinized.” We are told that “those of us with varying degrees of social power and status must now move away from the center, so that other, more marginalized voices... may be heard.” But the report picks and chooses its marginalized outcasts as snobbishly as Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes. We can move tender, safe, clean, hand-holding gays and lesbians to the center—but not, of course, pederasts, prostitutes, strippers, pornographers, or sadomasochists. And if we’re e going to learn from the marginalized, what about drug dealers moonshiners, Elvis impersonators, string collectors, Mafiosi, foot fetishists, serial murderers, cannibals, Satanists, and the Ku Klu Klan? I’m sure they’ll all have a lot to say. The committee gets real prudish real fast when it has to deal with sexuality outside its feminist frame of reference: “Incest is abhorrent and abhorred,” it flatly declares. I wrote in the margin, “No lobbyists, I guess!”

The conservative Protestant scholar Carl Trueman does not share Paglia’s worldview, to put it mildly, but he admires her in some ways, and especially admires her take on liberal Presbyterian sex. From his essay on that 1991 Paglia piece:

Yet there is another aspect to the essay, and that is Paglia’s barely concealed contempt for the attempts of liberal Christianity and of the gay lobby itself to make homosexuality respectable. For Paglia, sex is powerful and deviant sex reflects that power precisely because it is transgressive, because it breaks the rules. For her, sex is an erotic, Dionysian force that threatens to shatter civilization as we know it. Drawing on the later Freud, with distinct tones of Nietzsche, she understands the destructive power of sex and rejoices in it. To tame it, to domesticate it, to make it respectable, to turn it into merely one more form of pleasurable recreation is to destroy both its substance and significance.

Her basic thesis is that liberal Christianity cannot cope with sex as it really is. Instead it has to make into something anodyne and inoffensive as defined by the aesthetics of the wider world. Cultural tastes trump biblical teaching and historic Christian ethics. This is the problem of liberal Christianity in microcosm. Make Christian doctrine merely an expression of religious psychology and, as sophisticated as that might seem, it leads in only one direction: the assimilation of Christianity to the world.

Ironically, Paglia here is more Christian than the liberal Protestants she lambasts so mercilessly. Traditional Christianity, with it various sexual taboos, its physical discipline of celibacy for those who are not married, its view of marriage as lifelong and sexually monogamous, and its refusal to make sexuality and sexual behavior a matter of bland personal preference, acknowledges sex as precisely the dangerous, atavistic force that she too sees it to be. Paglia and orthodox Christianity are two sides of the same sexual coin.

But here is where Paglia differs with the sexual attitudes of the permissive society. When (almost) everything is permitted and when all social and legal prohibitions and restraints on sexual behavior have been stripped away, society has made sex safe. Too safe. In enfranchising the deviant, it eliminates deviation. And when nothing is forbidden, sex actually loses its meaning and becomes just one more bland form of entertainment, pleasant but of no social significance, rather like consuming a vanilla ice cream.

Similarly with religion: if we accept that it is permissible for worshipers of the Supreme Evil Being to curse the living God and stomp on His body in a public desecration, what does that say about the quality of our faith? If even that must be accepted, then the claims of Christianity lose their meaning, and become a matter of bland personal preference.

Obviously — obviously! — I do not in any way support the violence that some Muslims living in Europe carry out against those who blaspheme their sacred beliefs in provocative ways. That said, I admire them at least for taking their faith with more seriousness than we neutered Christians do.

Sex and religion are two “dangerous, atavistic forces” in human life. We have denatured Christianity massively in the West since the Enlightenment. And no wonder! The Wars of Religion, between European Catholics and Protestants, were hellish. “Taking religion seriously” should not come to that — there must surely be some limiting principle. Within Christianity, it ought not to have come to that, because the limiting principles are within the principles of the faith itself. But again, religion is a primal thing, though so many of us in the modern West have forgotten this.

From Living In Wonder:

The great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade taught that modern man has a radically impoverished idea of religion, at least compared to archaic man and even Christians of the premodern era. In his classic work The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade writes that, to the religious man, experiencing the “living God” is not like encountering the God of the philosophers. “It was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.”

This holy terror, this fear of God, is not like what it means to be scared by an encounter with a bear in the woods. It is more like what one feels when one is confronted with an overwhelming manifestation of power, mystery, majesty, “in which the perfect fullness of being flowers.”

The sacred, in this sense, is a manifestation of “a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities.” Eliade prefers the term hierophany—meaning “manifestation of the sacred”—to refer to this phenomenon. So, for traditional man, the material world can be saturated with divinity and becomes something else while remaining itself. In other words, a sacred grove is indeed a grove like any other to outward appearances, but to those who hold it to be holy, it is also grounded in transcendent reality. To traditional man, the entire cosmos can become a hierophany.

Does this sound like the Christianity most Americans live with? No, we have come to think of it as more like a personal preference. We have more passion for political conviction than for religious belief. And hey, I am grateful that we are more religiously tolerant! I saw yesterday a video clip in which a young hard-right Protestant hothead pastor led a discussion about how the State has the right to “correct” the churches. If you think I want to live in a Calvinist theocracy, you are badly mistaken. Classical liberalism is, as far as I can tell, the best way for pluralist societies to live together in peace.

But classical liberalism has its limits, and we run hard up against them when Satanists exercise their First Amendment rights by cursing the living God and stomping on His Body. It all goes back to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation in the early 1980s: that in the contemporary West, we have lost the “sacred canopy” (the phrase is Peter Berger’s) that served as a source of moral authority, giving us a framework from within which to reason, and settle our differences. Now it’s mostly a matter of emotional people yelling at each other.

Here’s the paradox: the First Amendment works in a society where it doesn’t really occur to people to stomp on consecrated hosts or burn Korans. That is to say, it works as long as people aren’t prepared to push the liberty it grants to the logical extreme.

There is a significant minority of Muslims living in Europe who believe that fidelity to their God requires them to reject not only the liberal tolerance of European societies, but also Christianity itself (as a religion that has equal standing with Islam). If you know much about the precepts of Islam, this makes sense. There is no way to make Islam “liberal” without doing violence to Islam. Are there Islamic liberals? Of course! But it’s hard to see how they are being faithful to the exclusivist core principles of Islam, which inarguably demands Islamic supremacy, including the subjugation of Christians and Jews (“People of the Book”), and intolerance for non-monotheists. This, I think, is why it is always going to be destabilizing to have a significant Islamic population living within Western democracies — not because they are bad people, but because there will always be the chance that they, or their children, will take Islam seriously enough to understand how incompatible it is with liberal democracy. To put a fine point on it, I think democracy is achievable within Islamic polities, but it won’t be liberal democracy.

Similarly, because I take both Satanism and Christianity seriously, I see no way we can live together in peace. Yet I also do not see how we have the constitutional means to suppress Satanism in the United States. I believe in religious tolerance, broadly speaking, but my liberalism ends where Satanism begins. I know there are plenty of people, including Christians, who think Satanism is just a theatrical joke. It’s not.

One more thing: I certainly do not believe that Muslims living in Europe who go around stabbing people at random are behaving like good Muslims. Most Muslims living in Europe are peaceable and law-abiding. Yet more than a few Muslims who come there are psychologically unprepared for living in Europe, and don’t know how to behave. Europeans, for their part, are psychologically unprepared to defend their own societies by recognizing the threat posed by bringing in large numbers of Muslims from radically different cultures. This will not end well. How could it?

My point here is simply this: religious tolerance as it has come to mean today demands that we all cease to take religion as seriously as it should be taken. You can no more subject religion to the rules and principles of procedural liberalism than you can subject sex to same.

Trump’s Canada Stupidity

Hard agree!

Peter Thiel On The Antichrist

Peter Thiel is hosting the LNBL film screening tonight, and I’ll be having dinner with him afterwards. He has been talking a lot about the Antichrist of late. He takes the concept very seriously. In the second part of a two-part interview (Part One is here, Part Two is here) he did last year with Peter Robinson, he says that the Antichrist will come to power promising peace and safety in a world in which people are terrified of losing them. Here is Thiel from the transcript:

Yes, it's the 1 Thessalonians 5:3. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, which is nothing wrong with peace and safety. But you have to sort of imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things.

I have argued that “soft totalitarianism” is based on the Huxleyan idea that people will voluntarily surrender their liberties for the sake of maintaining comfort and social peace. This, as opposed to the Orwellian idea that people will have their liberties taken from them by force. In Brave New World, people are willing to live under a totalitarianism that guarantees them peace, safety, comfort, and entertainment. That, and not Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the essence of the contemporary threat. It will be interesting to me tonight to hear what Thiel has to say about the first episode of the series — though I’m sure I won’t be able to report it to you, because he guards his privacy closely.