On Distrusting The Left

Liberalism means Queering the Church, Queering the Imperial Hegemon

NYC marchers chant: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children’

Ross Douthat writes a subscriber-only newsletter for those who (like me) pay for The New York Times. In today’s issue, he writes at length about why he is not a liberal Catholic. I’m sorry you Times non-subscribers can’t read it, because it’s very good — typically Douthatian (is that a word) in that it is measured, thorough, and tightly argued. And charitable. I want to highlight a couple of points, in service of a broader argument I’ll make in this newsletter.

First, there’s this from near the end of his critique. Douthat takes up the progressive Catholic claim that the Church has to change to become more “relevant” to the modern era, or die. Douthat responds:

To which some liberal Catholics might respond that the desire for a synthesis separate from modern progressive culture is itself a failure to read the signs of the times, that any sustained resistance to the demands of modernity will doom the church to irrelevance, that the way of full transformation is the only way to carry Jesus Christ forward (and avoid entanglements with fascism, racism and other evils of reaction). This is the “change or die” case for liberalization — or, phrased more positively, the “follow me if you want to live” argument.

But if that’s the claim, then liberal Catholicism should be much more troubled by the failure of its program to generate models of growth or even resilience under secular conditions. It’s not that conservative churches inevitably grow while liberal ones shrink; plenty of doctrinally conservative forms of Christianity have suffered buffets or declines, and there is certainly no simple “conservative” solution for secularization. But the decline of belief and practice, rather than resilience or revival, in the Christian churches that have gone farthest with the liberal program is one of the most salient facts of contemporary religious history in both America and Europe.

I just returned from a quick trip to France, the so-called “eldest daughter of the Church.” While there, I met with some faithful young orthodox Catholics who are part of the church’s mainstream, and also with some who attend traditionalist masses. All were impressive and inspiring. But France is a country where Catholicism is evaporating — except for the Trads. In one conversation, I mentioned to my Catholic interlocutors that post-Covid, Orthodox parishes in America have seen a surprising influx of young men, who seek a more robust Christianity, one that is resilient and prepared to endure. They said the same thing is true of Trad parishes in France. Mind you, this is just anecdotal, but I think it’s true.

Douthat’s argument that liberal and progressive Catholicism bears no fruits is undeniable. It’s true across Christianity. In the US, perhaps the church that has taken the lead on all things progressive is the Episcopal Church (TEC). Where has that left it? From David Virtue’s indispensable Anglican newsletter, a report on a recent meeting of TEC’s executive council revealed that TEC is, in Virtue’s words, “in a parlous state and in more serious decline than anyone first thought.” More:

The latest 2021 domestic statistics show that there are 1,522,688 who identify as Episcopalians, of which 19.2% show up for weekly church services across 6,294 American churches with attendance under 50 in most parishes. Only 292,851 people warm domestic Episcopal Church pews during any given week. This is the lowest recorded numbers to date. 2022 and 2023 statistics will surely be even lower when we obtain them.

One in four priests in TEC is homosexual. The number of funerals, (23, 127) outweighed the number of baptisms (13,859) by nearly 2 to 1 in the Episcopal Church in 2021. Hundreds of parishes cannot find priests. The Episcopal Church is dying.

The more woke TEC becomes, the more people abandon it — or, to put it another way, the less able it is to attract modern people, even as the broader society liberalizes. This below quotes from the actual TEC executive council report:

The Executive Council also learned that "LGBTQ+ priests now make up about one in four in The Episcopal Church. Men outnumber women as priests, but women are being ordained at growing rates, especially as bishops. More and more people of color have been consecrated as bishops or called to other senior leadership positions, though clergy of color still lag far behind those of white clergy in parish calls."

This is a church that does not have enough priests to fill the pulpits of its dying parishes, yet its leadership is still worried about an insufficient number of non-white clergy in its ranks. This reminds me of the kind of angst that gripped newspaper industry leaders around twenty years ago, when I was working in a newsroom. I would see the regular dispatches from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which regularly lamented the failure of their initiatives to meaningfully increase the number of racial minorities working within newsrooms — this, at the same time that newspaper readership was cratering. As a leadership class, they could not let go of the idea that increased “diversity” (as they define it) was the secret to reviving a dying industry. Facts and logic rarely penetrated the iron-hard will to believe. So too with liberal clergy.

As Douthat points out, it’s not the case that conservatives have figured out a silver bullet to arrest decline. But a mountain of evidence shows that the one thing that absolutely does not work is embracing liberal teachings and policies.

We will circles back to this point later. Now, I want to cite a second Douthat point about liberal Catholicism. In the past, says Douthat, liberal Catholics claimed that they simply wanted to update the Church, to make it more comprehensible and appealing to the modern world. This was the goal of the Second Vatican Council: aggiornamento (updating) balanced by ressourcement (going deeper into the Church’s teachings from the Patristic era). This is reasonable: trying to figure out how the Church can hold her own in the modern era by shedding historical accretions that may make it more difficult for contemporary people to grasp the essential truths of Christianity. I’m not saying that this is, or was, the right thing to do, but only that it is reasonable. It’s what the papacies of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger were about.

Now that an actual liberal Catholic has been on the papal throne for a decade, what of it? Douthat:

An initial problem with liberal Catholicism, then, is that in the Francis era it has often ceased to make sense in light of itself. When suddenly invested with real power within the church, the liberal tendency has often betrayed its own core insights, trading longstanding arguments about the limits of ecclesiastical authority for a papal positivism that cheers the raw exercise of power as long as liberal ends are served. Instead of defenses of pluralism and principled dissent, we now get reports of papal critics being dismissed or forced into resignations, complaints about the presumptions of conservative laypeople from the liberal academic guild and liberal praise for a progressive pope’s “steely” determination in dealing with the threat of a traditionalist “church within a church.”

All this is very human; the world inevitably looks different when you have the whip hand than when you’re on the outs, and everyone has the right to an intellectual evolution. But given how invested liberal Catholicism had been in a posture of critique, the Francis-era turn toward papalism has vitiated some of its internal credibility and woven a cynical subtext in its place: We don’t really believe in these rules, but we’re still going to use them to compel your obedience. Which is a school that’s hard to seriously engage with, let alone imagine signing up to join.

We see, then, that Church liberals wore their liberalism like a mask, dropping it once they achieved power. This is not surprising. Most church people have had the experience of liberals within arguing that they only want “diversity,” or to achieve modest goals like “tolerance” for their favored factions within the whole — only to become intolerant and authoritarian once they achieve power. Those conservative Methodist laymen who voted to remain with the national United Methodist Church are going to be in for a rude shock when they discover, as they surely will in the next few years, how all that talk of the value of diversity and loyalty from their Remainer co-religionists was merely a tactic.

What Douthat sees is that liberal Catholicism in power has betrayed itself, and vindicates the warnings of conservatives that the liberals were only appealing to liberal principles for the sake of disarming conservative opposition. You can’t argue with people like this. I was once present at a meeting of conservative Catholic intellectuals. It struck me that the fundamental difference between the two is that the older generation came of age in a period in which there was substantial agreement between the Church Left and the Church Right over the basis for discussion. That is, most everybody agreed with the Church’s magisterial authority; the questions were over how to interpret it.

But younger generations — my own, and younger — lived in an era in which this agreement did not exist. The Church Left had become almost entirely antinomian, meaning that it did not feel bound at all by legitimate Church authority, or tradition, or anything else that got in the way of what it wanted. And it benefited massively from the fact that every generation of Catholics born and formed post-Vatican II had little idea what the Church actually taught, and why it should matter to them. They were all functionally liberal Protestant, though superficially Catholic. The unity between these factions was wholly formal. On matters of substance, it seemed to me that the conservative Catholics in the room had more in common with serious Calvinists than with liberal members of their own Church.

Last point: Edward Pentin reports on the methodology that the Church is using to govern its Synod on Synodality. Pentin points out that the methodology makes no attempt to assert or bring into discussion actual Church teaching; it is rather entirely therapeutic. It’s based entirely on the feelings of favored participants. If there is no solid basis for discussion, in law or established teaching, then the door is open to soft totalitarianism.

The same process that Douthat identifies within liberal Catholicism can be seen within the political and cultural Left at large. We have lived through seeing the Left utterly repudiate its Civil Rights era, MLK-derived principles on race, in favor of straight-up anti-white racism. In other words, it has gone from being liberal to being illiberally progressive.

But nothing illustrates this more than LGBT activism, and what the LGBT movement has done with its power. In his latest newsletter, Andrew Sullivan laments the illiberalism of his own side. Excerpts:

Many, many moons ago, when I was a marriage equality pioneer and not a total pariah among the gays, I was asked to speak at the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was then called. Determined as ever not to read the room, I said (paraphrasing from memory): “The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.”

You can imagine how well that went down. And, sure enough, 30 years later, with marriage, military service and trans equality enshrined in the law, the HRC building now has a massive, six-story high poster hanging on it: “BLACK LIVES MATTER. TRANS BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

That tells us a bit about where we are today, and how we got here.

The point I was making in the early 1990s was that liberalism knows limits. A liberal politics does not seek to impose meaning on everyone; it creates the space for individuals to choose that for themselves. It doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth. A liberal politics will seek formal equality for members of minorities; but not substantive equality — what is now called “equity.” It would not require us to come to one, single understanding of reality; it would always allow diversity of opinion and encourage free debate. Live and let live. Remember that?

More:

Homosexual citizens absolutely deserved equal rights, but the question of homosexuality itself would — and should — always be open to dispute and debate. Since a liberal society contains both fundamentalist preachers as well as lesbian atheists, it cannot resolve the core question. So it shouldn’t try. And it should celebrate, not bemoan, this ideological diversity.

I can see why the religious fundamentalists are queasy with the settlement that came from this. They have to live in a society that accepts civil marriages for couples of the same sex. The deal is that in return, they are free to deny the morality of such marriages, to reserve religious marriage to heterosexual couples, and not be forced to participate in any way. I can also see why queer theorists are queasy as well. They don’t like the heteronormativity of civil marriage, or the respectability politics that goes with it. But they in turn are free to live their lives as “queerly” as they want in society, to create culture that seeks to subvert and radicalize.

This, in the end, is my response to all the “slippery slope” arguments about gay marriage now being raised again on the right. There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides. From my liberal conservative perspective, the gay rights movement should have shut down in 2015 after Obergefell; and the trans rights movement should have shut down in 2020 after Bostock. Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.

But in the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives — but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty: smashing the liberal settlement. Combine that with acute polarization in the Trump era, and information silos, so that many gays get their sense of reality from MSNBC and Elton John, and you can see how the spiral into illiberal madness began.

Here we are today. Click here to watch the video below from yesterday’s Drag March in lower Manhattan, and hear the chant:

I searched Google News for any mention of this. The only thing that turned up was this piece from the Narrative-Enforcers (that is, the Mainstream Media, in this case, ABC) which put forth the line that LGBT people have never been at greater risk than they are today. Believe me, if that were remotely true, you would not have an LGBT crowd marching through a major city chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re coming for your children.” The media lie, utterly and contemptibly, about this issue. We still do not have the manifesto that the trans person Audrey Hale left, presumably to explain why she massacred Christians, including schoolchildren. We probably won’t get it, either, unless it is pried from the hands of the authorities, who, I believe, are sitting on it to protect the Narrative.

Now that they are in power, LGBTs and their Democratic Party allies (Team Biden, especially) are turning totalitarian. Look (click here for access to the tweet, which will let you read the Title IX screenshots up close):

To be fair, not all LGBTs agree with this. Sullivan certainly doesn’t, nor do the Utah Log Cabin Republicans. But they are minorities who have little effective voice over the direction of all this. The Democratic Party is all in. So is virtually every major American institution, including the US military, law, medicine, sports, and, of course, academia and media, where it all began. Had you said back in 2003 that within twenty years, this is where we would be, you would have been roundly denounced as a bigot and an alarmist trying to scare people about a non-existent threat. Yet here we are. Legitimizing pedophilia is next — count on it. They say it themselves: “They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re coming for our kids.”

I know they mean it as a taunt, and I would even say, being charitable, that most of those who say it mean that they’re coming to queer the minds of our kids. But you know, I don’t believe it anymore. Those who would insist that they only mean the minds of children are, at best, useful idiots for those who want something more sinister. And even if they are coming only for the minds of kids, that’s still evil. Children should not be made to fear and loathe their own bodies. Children should not be forced to confront all the “secrets” of the adult sexual world.

If you didn’t see what Planned Parenthood, in conjunction with local school authorities, did in Canada, take a look. Warning: it’s strong stuff. It’s about sex-ed flash cards produced by activist organizations. It features discussion about “autofellatio,” which is males sucking their own penises, and far more disgusting sexual practices that most of us have never heard of, but now 14 year olds in Saskatchewan know about, thanks to the public schools there. Here’s one of the few cards I can show you here:

From the instructions. This is grooming. Would you let someone come into your home and do this with your kids?

You may be saying, “Oh, come on, Rod, you’re nut-picking.” Really? Take a look at this remarkable Substack entry by Wesley Yang, who follows the trans issue closely. In it, he shows just one week of life in that world, a world that is radically changing our own. “Everything is changing all at once,” Yang warns. More:

The Queering of the Imperial Hegemon has begun in earnest. What was once a meme has become a fact and is seeking to become a collective destiny. Those of us who have been attending closely to this process know it.Others want it to be something peripheral, something silly, something that can be readily accommodated without undue burdens, or merely a “culture war” in the petty sense of the term. And of course it is all those things too, and will remain so for many. For many, life proceeds as before, even as the ongoing coup institutionalizes itself all around them, and the words they can say and the thoughts they can think grow constrained and bent from one day to the next.

This is the Soft Totalitarianism I warned you about in Live Not By Lies! This is what the Left has become today. Don’t try to say, “But not the entire Left!” Yeah, but so what? Most of the Left in Russia on New Year’s Eve, 1917, was not Bolshevik … but they lacked the foresight, the courage, or the ability to stand up to the Bolsheviks. In our case, very few people on the Left stand up to this stuff, and those that do — honorable people — have no real power to stop it, at least not yet. As Yang points out, about all the institutions of American life that have embraced this revolution:

They have put themselves on a cliff, with no precedent — and perhaps no capacity —for climbing down safely.

That’s exactly right. This is what liberalism has done to us. I think Andrew Sullivan is correct in that, theoretically speaking, this did not have to happen, in the same sense that taking down the fence does not mean the wolf will inevitably eat the sheep. In theory there could have been a liberal settlement along the lines he suggested during his activist days, and that he supports now. But even Sullivan admits that he’s anathema to the LGBT establishment — and the Democratic Party listens to them, not to Sullivan.

The fact is, we are where we are because the gay marriage activists based their claim principally on the fact that there was no substantive difference between heterosexual desire and same-sex desire. The only reason for discrimination against gay couples in marriage law was the belief that there is something wrong, or at least different, with same-sex desire. This discrimination, they said, is illogical and immoral. Aided by an immense propaganda campaign by the captured mainstream media, and helped also by the fact that most Americans have internalized the therapeutic core beliefs of the Sexual Revolution (chiefly, that sexual desire is not something we have, but something we are), they won. And, once that victory was legally in hand, thanks to US civil rights law, they were able to expand their categories of protection from sexual orientation to gender identity, and advance into many more corners of American life.

Sen. Rick Santorum was widely mocked for saying in 2005 that if we have gay marriage, what’s next, the legitimation of man-on-dog sex? It was easy to make fun of his vulgar remark. But when you have ideologically captured public schools recommending to middle schoolers searching out films where men costumed as ponies screw, Santorum’s line is not quite as mockable, is it? His point was that once we sever the anchor of morals law from the belief, rooted in Biblical religion, in the normativity of heterosexual marriage and conduct, we lose the ability to draw binding distinctions between varieties of sexual desire. If desire itself is self-justifying, then who are you to say that this person’s desire is wrong? The existence of those Canadian sex-ed cards, which teach kids about sex acts so vile that animals don’t even do them, largely vindicates Santorum.

“Dogs can’t consent, that’s why.” Oh? If the only thing keeping you from saying that sex with animals is immoral and should be illegal is “lack of consent,” then consent has all the protective power of tissue paper. After all, pedophiles and their advocates claim that kids can consent to sex. The current state of trans pediatric medicine claims that a child’s self-diagnosis as trans is dispositive, and legitimates medical transitioning. Some deep blue states have moved, or are moving, to empower the government to remove children from the homes of parents who will not consent to their child’s request to transition. Do you honestly believe that a culture that grants a child agency for determining something as fundamental as changing their sex is going to be able to uphold prohibitions against pedophilia? The whole spectrum of queer grooming behaviors is there to sexualize children and prepare them for the simulacrum of consent.

Do you think this is evil? I do. And I also can see with my own eyes that liberalism cannot save us from this. The language and the resources of liberalism have been captured by the radicals. Liberalism is used as a cover to anesthetize the potential opposition, and paralyze them. I’ve said many times here, and I’ll say it again, that I prefer to live in a liberal democratic society. But if you look at nearly every polity ruled with no opposition by the Left — think major US cities — you see crime, racism, dysfunction, and depravity rampant. And if you look at US institutions captured by the cultural Left, you see the Queering of The Imperial Hegemon in its late stages. Left-wing power-holders despise principled anti-woke liberals. It’s very hard for these despised liberals to grasp this, but they had better.

Classical liberalism is dying because it has been poisoned by the Left — to be precise, by the core illiberalism of the Left’s project. Old-fashioned liberals have been treated as useful idiots for the radicals. So have normie Republicans, like, for example, former GOP Wunderkind Paul Ryan, who recently griped about the “culture war” being “polarizing” . The reason I believe that Viktor Orban is a model for emerging US conservatism is that unlike most leaders in the GOP, Orban has read liberalism correctly. He understands that its commitment to philosophical liberalism is a mask, and he also understands that it advances illiberal leftism under cover of thoroughly captured civil society institutions. Orban roots his politics in that reality. Orban lives in the real world. He knows that to preserve the normative liberalism we have now requires a commitment to ante-liberal principles that appear illiberal.

Notice that in the UK, which has been governed by the Tories for the past 13 years, immigration has skyrocketed. This, despite the UK having Brexited itself. Hungary, by contrast, controls its borders, even as it remains within the EU. What do you suppose accounts for the difference?

My overall point is this: what we call “liberalism” today is not really liberalism, and it is both a failure, and a trap, because the so-called “liberals” — really radicals in liberal clothing — keep moving the goalposts. A liberal democratic society can only hold if it has a vital center. Left-liberalism in power has obliterated the center. It does not want to live and let live; it demands capitulation. It demands our children — at minimum, that we deliver them to have their minds colonized to reject their families, their history, their religion, and any aspect of their identities not controlled by left ideology.

Are we going to fight? I mean, really fight, not just satisfy ourselves with the bloviations of grifter politicians who think outrage is the same as action? And if we lose, are we preparing ourselves to keep the fight going in an underground resistance, as the churches did under Communist totalitarianism? Do we have the capacity to protect our children in spite of the Machine? We had better be. Read the signs of the times. As I say in Live Not By Lies, we are in a Kolakovic Moment. While we have slumbered, the revolution has quietly marched through all institutions.

Seems to me that the most important question now for us on the Right is not whether to be illiberal, but what variety of illiberalism should we embrace and defend? Yeah, it makes me queasy. But what is the alternative? Look around you. Read Wes Yang. Read Live Not By Lies.