the next step towards the Omega point of the history of Western Civilization will be society’s full acceptance of the idea of “open marriage.”
.. Susan Dominus. In her article, “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”, Dominus argues that, in general, yes it is happier, especially in the case where it is the woman who acquires many partners: jealousy spurs the sexual appetite of the man, and the sexual life of the partners comes into a nice balance.
.. Christianity, when you come right down to it, is really not a very demanding religion. It permits believers to eat pork and drink wine except on days of fast. On lay people it does not impose particularly harsh domestic norms. In fact, the only strictly tabooed side of life in Christianity relates to sexuality. Sex is permissible only in marriage and preferably for the purpose of giving birth to children, while deviations from this norm give rise to various suspicions.
.. It is either, as Chesterton once said, “the glad good news” of original sin, or else it is, along with other Abrahamic religions, an apparatus for suppressing something important and necessary in sexual life, something which, apparently, is stifled by traditional marriage and is of little use for the continuation of the species.
.. Among the things common to all religions is that they all impose taboos on female promiscuity, and on same-sex sex, but it is Christianity that adds that a person is obliged not only externally, but also internally, to be free from attraction to what is prohibited by the tradition.
.. How invulnerable to the threat of “sexual liberation” will remain Russia, China, the Islamic world?
.. should one remain politically loyal to one’s state even after you notice that it’s well on its way to hell?
.. Instead of fighting for the dominance of our faith in the public sphere, we are only trying to achieve corporate independence from the pressures of the secular state. Alas, I think this position is strategically untenable.
.. In one religious community, let’s say, all women could be subject to regular beatings on the principle that all of them are known to be sinners by nature. In another religious community women could be forbidden from entering into extramarital affairs, but if they do, they are threatened with divorce and exclusion from their community.
America’s Culture War On Russia
The [Russian Orthodox Church’s social teaching’s] ambivalence about individual rights and its emphasis on the religious community reflect central themes in Orthodox thought, which distrusts Western-style individualism. It is not simply a matter of rejecting the “excesses of individualism” in the matter of Western communitarian scholars. Orthodoxy often expresses discomfort with the very idea of the autonomous individual as a rights-holder.
.. Moreover, Orthodox thought conflates religious and national identities in a stronger way than in the West. To be sure, religion can serve as a marker of national and cultural identity in the West as well; consider Italy and Poland. And citizenship in Orthodox countries is not directly tied to religion; as a formal matter, one can be a Russian citizen and not an Orthodox Christian. But religion and nationality are intertwined in a particularly powerful way in the Orthodox world. In Russia, for example, it is a “widely accepted idea”—“shared by politicians, intellectuals and clergy”—that Orthodoxy is the fundamental factor in national identity.
.. I do want, however, to point out that when Orthodox countries reject liberal Western ideas (e.g., gay rights, religious liberty), they are not necessarily doing so out of bigotry, but because they have a fundamentally different view on what the human person is, what the church is, and what society is. They see the West’s war on their traditions in the name of secular liberalism as an act of aggression — and they’re right.
Christians Tempted By Trump Idolatry
Jerry Falwell Jr.: No other president “in our lifetimes has done so much that has benefited the Christian community” so quickly as Trump.
.. Third, without really knowing it, Trump has presented a secular version of evangelical eschatology. When the candidate talked of an America on the brink of destruction, which could only be saved by returning to the certainties of the past, it perfectly fit the evangelical narrative of moral and national decline. Trump speaks the language of decadence and renewal (while exemplifying just one of them).
In the Trump era, evangelicals have gotten a conservative Supreme Court justice for their pains – which is significant. And they have gotten a leader who shows contempt for those who hold them in contempt – which is emotionally satisfying.
The cost? Evangelicals have become loyal to a leader of shockingly low character. They have associated their faith with exclusion and bias. They have become another Washington interest group, striving for advantage rather than seeking the common good. And a movement that should be known for grace is now known for its seething resentments.
.. the idea that the robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.
.. There is first the temptation to worship power, and to compromise one’s soul to maintain access to it. There are many ways to burn a pinch of incense to Caesar, and some prominent pro-Trump Christians arguably crossed that line during the campaign season. Again, political victory does not vitiate the vice of hypocrisy.
.. to believe that the threat to the church’s integrity and witness has passed because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election is the height of folly.
One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics, and the culture would take care of itself.
.. if Trump’s presidency collapses, that Christians in general and Evangelicals in particular are going to be the scapegoats.
.. These diehard Trump-backing Christians will have provided progressives, as well as factions within the GOP who are sick of Christians’ influence in the party, with the pretext they need to crack down. Good luck defending religious liberty when it is associated with Donald Trump
.. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.
Some have compared Trump to King David, who himself committed adultery and murder. But David’s story began with a profound reliance on God who called him from the sheepfold to the kingship, and by the grace of God it did not end with his exploitation of Bathsheba and Uriah. There is no parallel in Trump’s much more protracted career of exploitation. The Lord sent his word by the prophet Nathan to denounce David’s actions—alas, many Christian leaders who could have spoken such prophetic confrontation to him personally have failed to do so. David quickly and deeply repented, leaving behind the astonishing and universally applicable lament of his own sin in Psalm 51—we have no sign that Trump ever in his life has expressed such humility. And the biblical narrative leaves no doubt that David’s sin had vast and terrible consequences for his own family dynasty and for his nation. The equivalent legacy of a Trump presidency is grievous to imagine.
.. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.
But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength—the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome—at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.
Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.
.. If — if — we learn that Trump did what he is alleged to have done, and you stand behind him even so, how do you answer the charge that Christians care so much about access to power that they will turn a blind eye when the president they support blabs extremely sensitive national security secrets to the Russians? Are we really idolaters who would sell our souls to stay in the king’s good graces?
.. There was a time when we condemned Democrats and liberals for standing by Bill Clinton, despite how he disgraced the Oval Office. We accused them of caring more about power than principle — and we were right to. Remember when the liberal journalist Nina Burleigh said in 1998, amid the Lewinsky scandal, that she would fellate Bill Clinton to thank him for keeping abortion legal? Are conservative Christians really prepared to walk a mile in her kneepads for Donald Trump? And for what?
God is not mocked.
The Cost Of Christian Denial
Although the situation in Boston is unusually bad, it is not unique. All around us, the same sad trends are in evidence. Parish closings and wholesale diocesan retrenchment programs have become familiar. How should we respond?
Here are two possible responses:
A) “This is a disaster! Stop everything. Drop what you’re doing. “Business as usual” makes no sense; this is a pastoral emergency. We don’t just need another “renewal” program, offered by the same people who have led us into this debacle. We need to figure out what has gone wrong. More than that. We know that the Gospel has the power to bring people to Christ; therefore it follows that we have failed to proclaim the Gospel. The fault lies with us. We should begin with repentance for our failures.”
.. the Evangelical right hates the Benedict Option book because it calls out the failure of the Religious Right. The Evangelical left hates it because they are ready to compromise (quietly) with the culture on moral theology. And most of the people who actually read the book but disagree with it don’t really think the situation on religious liberty and the rest is as bad as Rod Dreher does.
.. I am not talking about left-of-center Christians whose leftism is found in their economic views. I am talking about those who compromise on moral teaching, especially on sex and sexuality, and on the nature of religious authority.
.. The observer adds that many Evangelicals view conversion not as a lifelong process of steady repentance and dying to self, but rather as a singular moment in time. The kind of thing I discuss in The Benedict Option — the necessity of incorporating the Gospel into a holistic and disciplined way of life — doesn’t make intuitive sense to people who believe the summit of Christian activity in the world is preaching the Word and leading people to accept Jesus as their Savior.
.. The point is, evangelism is largely pointless without discipleship: the sustained and continuous formation of the individual Christian into the disciplines of the Christian life.
.. Evangelical professors keep telling me that the typical student at their Christian college is one who is filled with strong emotions about Jesus, but with little or no formation in the habits of Christian thought and living. Their faith is built on sand, which is why it is not likely to survive the rising floodwaters of liquid modernity.
.. This is a point that cannot be emphasized strongly enough. After one accepts Christ, then what? That is not the end of the journey, but rather the beginning. Very few of us will be called to be Benedictine monks, of course, but all of us are called to lives of discipleship.
.. The great historian Robert Conquest said that this is his Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” Adapted to Christianity, this might say, “Any Christian individual, church, or organization that does not understand itself as orthodox and live accordingly will sooner or later become heterodox.”
.. And it’s important to emphasize that, though the faculty deserve some blame, this trend is largely driven by students, who care only about advancing their self interests while engaging in various virtue signaling rituals to demonstrate the depth of their devotion to the anti-culture.
.. Law school is a seminary of modern progressivism. First principles are rarely worthy of discussion. Only relevance matters. The mysterious science of the law is described as neither mysterious nor science but simply prejudice wrapped in the cloak of an undeserved constitution. And it’s important to emphasize that, though the faculty deserve some blame, this trend is largely driven by students, who care only about advancing their self interests while engaging in various virtue signaling rituals to demonstrate the depth of their devotion to the anti-culture.
.. You really think the coming generation of lawyers and judges will care about defending religious liberty when they see it as nothing more than a cloak for bigotry? Are you willing to stake your future on that?
.. Note that a very strong majority of Catholics do not even support the religious liberty position of their own church on mandatory birth control. A majority of Evangelicals do, and generally hold the line for religious liberty, but they’re the only ones.