but the bitter work of a long beak.
Not work, but a thousand grasses
of kisses. This is time collapsed
to an empty watch after a week

building, sewn and lined with down,
and feathers, a hovering over
a face. You, who art, our Mother,
behold the hollow, your crown.

—John Poch

The post Mary appeared first on First Things.

Near St. Mary’s I drove around and around, trying to find a parking place. No Mass in the church year is as heavily attended as Ash Wednesday’s, when the scriptural readings are urgent and the time for excuses is over, and everyone is marked with the oily ashes of the burnt palms from the year before—the ashes of good intentions and human respect, premature celebrations and victories that turn out to be defeats because they haven’t the power of the Cross behind them.

In the church basement the night before, a somewhat lugubrious Mardi Gras celebration had taken place, with a few of us from the RCIA class in attendance. Tables had been set up and inexpensive necklaces strewn around. The Knights of Columbus were serving—watery gumbo and wilted ­salad—and several of the priests from the priory were there. Overall the turnout was modest, the food unpalatable, the atmosphere in the basement dingy and damp. Yet what I remember about that night is the intensity of the life that was beginning to take hold. Locked in conversation with Karen and Joanne, listening to their stories as they listened to mine, I felt myself being grafted into something whose life began to surge in my veins, a life that the dreary setting couldn’t discourage, that was vigorous and irrepressible as a baby’s cry.

Around nine o’clock Adrianna arrived with a young man from her apartment building who turned out to be Wade, one of the Yale students who used to join us in Dwight Chapel on Saturday evenings. So there were exclamations and ­embraces, which had to be repeated shortly afterward when my husband arrived. Wade wasn’t interested in converting, Adrianna confided to me privately. He was just lonely, so she had invited him along. Meanwhile the people around me had resumed their conversations. Karen and I were talking and Wade was sitting uneasily on my left, still visibly shaken by the news that I was becoming a Catholic.

“You call it conversion,” he said finally, after a private struggle with what I had told him. “But conversion is when you meet Christ.”

“True,” I agreed, turning back to him with a smile, “but Wade, what I’ve found in the Church is the whole Christ.”

At this point wobbly music cranked up and an elderly couple stepped out on the floor to dance. My daughter was playing with a group of children and my husband was gravitating in their direction, when Wade said something to me over the music that I couldn’t hear.

“I want to pray with you and Charles,” he repeated loudly, close to my ear.

Across the table, Adrianna was laughing delightedly. On the dance floor the children, draped with all the necklaces they had collected, had joined hands. I tried to pass over what he said but he took it upon himself to speak to Charles, who looked perplexedly in my direction.

Finally, as Wade was adamant, we went into the kitchen with him and stood together under a fluorescent light fixture, near a massive range. The kitchen was deserted and dirty. The sound of the gathering was far away. And then he prayed for us as I hadn’t heard anyone pray for a long time, with marked condescension and grandiosity, an air of superiority and self-importance, with a hand on each of our shoulders. I remember thinking he meant well and trying to enter into the spirit of what he prayed. But all I felt was alienation and the uncomfortable strength of his will, which had taken us away from the others whose activities, I belatedly realized, were prayers as well.

Schism in a nutshell, I wrote in my journal later that night, when I was still trying to identify the sensation that praying apart with Wade had produced, which was like the painful tearing of an invisible garment of unity.

Four days later, on the first Sunday of Lent, our class, together with all of the other RCIA classes from all of the other parishes in the archdiocese, went to the cathedral in ­Hartford for the Rite of Election, or the Enrollment of Names.

The night before, a terrific wind blew up over the state. Gusting almost to seventy miles an hour, it felled trees and crushed cars, snapped power lines and left outages everywhere. ­Comparable to a hurricane in its effects, it scoured the earth, pulling dead leaves out of their hiding places and hurling them in blinding dust clouds across the highways. I remember waking at five to the sound of our house thudding on its foundation, and I remember the drive in the afternoon and my ­husband’s struggles to hold the car on the road. In Hartford, on Asylum Street, in the shadow of the concrete cathedral that was as steep and ­forbidding as an ocean liner, I fought my way across the full parking lot, wrenched open a rear door and felt it shut out the wind with relief, only to have the silence ­immediately filled by a thunder of feet in the stairwells; a crush of humanity on tiled floors; the clamor of hundreds of refugees.

There were nearly four hundred adult catechumens and candidates for confirmation in Hartford that day, together with spouses and children, other family members and well-wishers. Downstairs, in a gleaming undercroft, we rehearsed in groups. And then we filed upstairs into the new cathedral, which was gloomy and futuristic, with an aluminum baldachino over the altar and leaden mosaics on the walls, metal stars on the ceiling and oversized windows in harsh colors—orange and red, bitter yellow and cobalt blue—that hung over us like vast icons, like enormous abstractions drifting behind steel screens.

Up to this point, I had little to compare St. Mary’s to. I hadn’t realized—though Father Keller had warned us—that a church like St. Mary’s was almost an anomaly now, as utilitarian architecture and demystified liturgical practices had taken their toll.

But it didn’t matter. The failure of aesthetics generally and even the dangerous marginalization of the tabernacle—a widespread misreading of Vatican II—couldn’t undermine for me the significance of what was happening. Far from my family, in a vast sarcophagus of echoing tile, I experienced a mystery of assimilation different from any assimilation I had experienced before, as Mass was said, intercessions were offered on our behalf, and then the whole group came in and embarked on the last stage of the catechumenate together, as if we were the Israelites in the Old Testament, crossing the desert en masse.

In the distance, as the rite continued, I saw a face that I recognized but couldn’t place.

Again, as our names were read and the lists from each parish were piled up together on the altar, I heard the name of a woman who had painted a sisal rug for me in the past, a Nancy Slocum from Newington to whom I hadn’t given a thought in years, but who was joined to me now, as the recitation continued, in the strangest intimacy.

It was like a dream I had once, about the ­gradual filling up of a city square. Shoulder to shoulder in the dream, those of us who were already there waited for the others to arrive, in an attitude of expectation and boredom, physical discomfort and shortened views. Standing on tiptoe in the dream, I strained to see whether the people from the Episcopal church in East Haven had come in. Losing my composure at the last, I called out names over the crowd—specific names—that I couldn’t remember upon waking.

Then it was over and we went out, and the wind snatched us and scattered us far and wide. Far ­into the night the wind blew—insistent, ­real—as if the wind that had overtaken me at Grace years before, a spiritual wind heard by no one but me, had breached a wall that restrained it and begun to make ­itself heard in the world.

Back in New Haven, at St. Mary’s, Lent began now in earnest, bringing me face to face with my sins. Every day in this fruitful, bewildering season I found myself in the presence of my failures and ­weaknesses. Every day I was dismayed and taken aback by my sins: sins of the tongue ­especially; the clever ­strategies of selfishness; the sin of force, to use ­Simone Weil’s word, that spends in excess of its resources and extends beyond what it is able to control. From the lectern, Isaiah upbraided me—“Do you call this a fast, / A day acceptable to the Lord?”—and in the pulpit Father Jones placed his finger on the deeper problem: not only sin in its specific ­variety, but what he called worldly ways of thinking.

Around me, in the pews, I was aware of the ­others struggling. Attendance at the various ­Masses increased, and the lines for the confessional grew longer. The Church is in the business of making saints, someone has said, and so it was the saints whose responsibility it was to come and help me now, taking hold of me with their strong hands and drawing me after them by their ­unnerving ­example: Dorothy Day, first of all; and then Therèse of Lisieux, to whom Day introduced me in a ­biography; and Faustina Kowalska, the Polish nun whose seven-hundred-page diary ­Victor had given me as an RCIA present, the same Vic who had taken me to My Father’s House three years before.

Every night before going to bed I read a little of this diary, which was like the warp to the Catechism’s woof—one passionate individual’s response to the immutable truths of the Church—and hesitated over entries like this one:

O Jesus, I want to use every moment scrupulously for the greater glory of God, to use every circumstance for the benefit of my soul. I want to look upon everything from the point of view that nothing happens without the will of God.

Or this:

O humdrum days, filled with darkness, I look upon you with a solemn and festive eye. How great and solemn is the time that gives us the chance to gather merits for eternal heaven!

In the past, as a Protestant, I had never really known any saints. In the evangelical world, the word “saint” is used loosely and the problem of sin often glossed over. But now, in the Church, I found myself close to something else: a whole community of individuals who had actually taken Christ at his word, who had made holiness a priority and taken up the cross as a key, and who looked back at me now in thoughtful anticipation, inviting me to take the same road.

Almost every day in the liturgy the Church held up one of these saints, as she held out the Host in the Eucharist—again, inviting the rest of us to choose the same road.

Sometimes, in the Church, when I looked back on my life as a Protestant, it seemed nothing but vaingloriousness and tumult, feverish ambition and display. Most of us, as Father Jones said in his sermon, want to follow Christ, but we want to be honored for it. We want the fruit, the evidence, the proof of our right thinking, here. I thought of the students in the Yale Divinity School, and their transparent hunger for vindication. I thought of ­Siafa and Hugh, the Bodines’ particular brand of ambition and my own. I remembered so-called Bishop Philpot flexing his legs and saying complacently, “I admire a successful ministry.” And against all of this I placed Therèse’s mild observation, as she lay dying at twenty-four: “My ministry will begin—after my death.”

On Thursday nights in the church basement Father Keller was leading us carefully through the commandments, laying the groundwork that I finally began to understand was the foundation of everything else; the work I had slid over as a Protestant; the agonizing, incremental struggle to make one’s first priority the state of one’s own soul.

Already, in the fall, I had begun to doubt, with John Henry Newman, “whether any religious body is strong enough to withstand the league of evil but the Roman Church.” But now, in the spring, I began to understand something else. Now, as Father Keller instructed us in the commandments, and the scrutinies and the minor exorcisms began to be woven together on a single loom, I began to understand that the Church’s authority over evil was inseparable from her moral authority. Now I understood that the deliverance I longed for would be inseparable from my own growth in holiness, and that this growth the Church would foster, by telling me the whole truth about sin.

“Why is it that the demons are so grievously afraid of you?” a man asks a monk in a small book I was reading by Thomas Merton.

And where in the past I would have ­expected a charismatic answer, a gesture of power or a flashing deliverance prayer, instead the monk says meekly, with the same terrifying simplicity as Therèse, “Because from the moment I became a monk I have striven to prevent anger rising to my lips.”

Now, in the church, when the magnitude of what was being asked overwhelmed me, I found myself drawn to an image of Mary in a high window over the altar, and to her statue at the entrance to the sanctuary. One Wednesday, when Father Keller had been called away, Father Jones came to our class and gave a teaching on Mary that went far beyond the potentially sentimental issue of her motherhood. “Mary is key,” I can hear him saying slowly in conclusion, “to the core Christian belief that all of God’s promises to us—that he will free us from sin and take us to heaven and glory—have, in a real sense, already been fulfilled.”

And as he said this and I received it, as if through an open vein, every Protestant difficulty I still had with the Immaculate Conception and the Dogma of the Assumption simply melted away, together with my anxiety regarding my own inadequacy and sinfulness. God asks nothing that he isn’t prepared to give, I finally understood, as I contemplated the shining humanity of his mother. And yes, he can fulfill his promises concretely to Mary in advance, because he isn’t bound by time. And so she becomes our hope, our great sign in heaven, our mother of mercy. . .

Leaving the church, a tall man in a ragged coat reached up and grasped the feet of Mary’s statue as he passed underneath: a gesture of aspiration and abandonment, concrete familiarity and filial love; a gesture quintessentially Catholic.

Other things, too, began to fall into place, the closer we came to Easter. One Sunday in St. Mary’s when my friend ­Flora was visiting and Mass was beginning, I heard the reading from the Old Testament: “From that day on,” the reading went, “the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David.” And again, as in the case of Mary, my difficulties with the sacrament of confirmation simply melted away. There was no contradiction for me afterward, between the past and the future. There was no conflict or competition between what had happened and what was going to happen. God had done miraculous, life-changing, practically apocalyptic things for me already. He had found me in a wilderness, and sent the Spirit to me outside the Church. And still the Church waited—how to explain this?—as an even greater gift.

At home, that same afternoon, I reread the ­Catechism on the sacrament of confirmation—all about the seal of the Holy Spirit and the coming of age of God’s children—and paused when I came to St. Thomas Aquinas’s assertion: “. . . the confirmed person receives the power to profess faith in Christ publicly and as it were officially.”

And I remembered as I read this how it felt to do the work of ministry outside the Church. I remembered the smell of Dwight Chapel, its atmosphere of exile and improvisation. I remembered the feeling of being disenfranchised, and even somehow illegal, and I remembered feeling that we had to start from scratch and create something out of nothing, every time we gathered. And I compared this with the Church, where every time I came in, I came into the midst of something that was already there: not only the Eucharist on the altar but the whole community that has received it, a community that has taken root downward in history and borne fruit upward, like a great tree with many birds in its branches.

Quickly now, I needed a name of a particular saint who would oversee me, and also a dress, since Father Keller had decided that Karen and I should wear white. The name came easily enough. Reaching up, as if I had grasped her feet, I chose Therèse, after reading her Story of a Soul. But a dress! Finding nothing in New Haven, I drove to Westport, where again I found nothing, shopping not being my strong point in those days, until finally, as I was leaving Laura Ashley’s, I turned and saw the simple linen dress in the window, with the long jacket, that I hadn’t seen inside.

In the dressing room I tried it on, with the help of a saleswoman who turned out to be Catholic and who advised me as tenderly as if I had been her daughter. Staring at myself in the mirror, wondering whether it was the right dress, I became aware, when the woman left me, of the music that was playing on the sound system. It was Loreena ­McKennitt’s version of the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross, about the soul going out at night to meet her lover.

And again, it was like a dream that I dreamed afterward over many years. In the beginning the dream was simply about shopping for clothes. Sometimes other people were with me, in places I recognized from the past. Other times I was alone, in strange cities, in crowded stores. Eventually the dream grew longer, with confused turnings, and more and more it was about the difficulties of the dressing itself: the challenge of the beautifully made undergarments, the struggle with stockings and shoes. Finally, last year, I dreamed I was getting dressed for a wedding, and I made it all the way to St. Mary’s, only to find the street cleared for a funeral. I ran up the steps; the funeral was over; the wedding was about to begin. The bride—a friend of mine—was nowhere to be seen. But I had her dress, I suddenly realized, in a long box like florists use . . .

Still, it wasn’t until the next day, when I was in front of the monstrance at St. Mary’s, that I remembered the dress lying in water in its long box, and realized that this dream, like all of the other dreams over so many years, was about my wedding garment, which I am gradually, arduously putting on.

In the days that followed I sent my dress to be altered, made arrangements for friends who were coming, and prepared my first confession. Father Keller confessed me, after a ­disagreement with Father Jones. Father Jones wasn’t sure that I needed to confess, since in my baptism all sin would be washed away. But Father Keller argued that if my earlier baptism had been valid—which was possible, and the reason my Catholic ­baptism would be considered ­conditional—then my sins in the interim needed to be confessed and ­absolved.

So I confessed in the priory, in a small dark room to the rear. I sat in a low chair and Father Keller made a large sign of the cross in the air, and instantaneously it fell on me—the grace to make a good confession. I began, and it was almost easy. I continued, and found that the more I admitted the more I was able to admit, without digressions or irrelevancies, excuses or blame. Taught by the Church, I was able to tell the chief truth about my sin—that it was mine, so that paradoxically, in the mystery of the confessional, it could be lifted from me.

Born to confess! That was also how I felt: as if I had waited my whole life to be exactly there, in that chair, disregarding my fear and leaping over my shame, like a goat whose feet the Lord has made sure in the high places.

In fact, it would be years before I would make such a good confession again—before I would enter, to the same degree, into the transparency of Christ on the cross, when he confessed everything to his Father, every betrayal, including those I was enumerating now. “It is finished!” I almost said when I came to the end of my list, and relief and gratitude almost choked me—gratitude for so much transparency and truth; for the ­astonishing availability of the sacrament; for the part played by the priest. Father Keller lifted his hand and spoke the words of the absolution, and they fell on me and burned me as if they had been living flames, so that for the next twenty-four hours there was a sore, red rash across my cheeks, ­something was streaming out of me, and my ­sinuses ran.

Afterward, there was a reaction. It was inevitable. The pitch couldn’t be sustained. At Mass the next day, when Father Keller mentioned how soon the catechumens would be able to receive, I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted to receive. Anxiety seized me, and a feeling that things were fine as they were. I was used to not receiving the Eucharist by this point. I didn’t mind—!

In class, our last class, I noticed the same irritability and anxiety. Someone was upset about having to kiss the crucifix on Good Friday. Someone else—eventually an exemplary Catholic—­muttered on her way out, “Father Keller may have taken a vow of celibacy, but I haven’t!”

Back from the tailor, my dress smelled of cleaning fluid and money. In the church, the sexton was refinishing the floor, and the powerful fumes of polyurethane flooded the nave. Driven out by the smell—my chemical sensitivities flaring up—I found myself falling into old feelings of isolation and shame, discouragement and grief, as if water were being poured on the wood of the altar at last.

Then came Palm Sunday and Holy Week, and I fell further, into physical pain. There was the familiar vise on my neck, the staggering weight across my back and shoulders. All of my old enemies were in place. Every one of them was arrayed against me. And the question was, what should I do? Staying away from the church didn’t help. By Wednesday I was no better. It was a question of holding on, I finally decided, my mind clearing a little the worse my situation became. Help me, I wrote in my journal, to turn on this a solemn and festive eye. And in the Bible, I read from Isaiah:

The Lord of Hosts has sworn:
“As I have planned,
so shall it be,
and as I have purposed
so shall it stand,
that I will break the Assyrian
in my land,
and upon my mountains trample
him under foot;
and his yoke shall depart from
them,
and his burden from their
shoulder.”
This is the purpose that is
purposed
concerning the whole earth;
and this is the hand that is
stretched out
over all the nations.
For the Lord has purposed,
and who will annul it?
His hand is stretched out,
and who will turn it back?

By Thursday, my pain hadn’t lifted. The first Mass of the Triduum was that night, celebrating the momentous, interlocking sacraments of the Eucharist and the ministerial priesthood. But I was still afraid of the refinished floor, and the incense that I had been warned could be ­tumultuous at St. Mary’s on Holy Thursday. So I decided to go to St. ­Thomas More instead, the austere chapel at Yale that I had visited in the fall with such ­uncomfortable consequences. And it was there, in the dark, subtly ­deviant atmosphere of that communion, that my cup of bitterness was finally filled up. Utterly desolate, I left, thinking that I would drive home, though St. Mary’s was more or less on the way. I got into my car—it was raining—and started to drive, and immediately my pain and my desolation began to lift. I suddenly realized where I was going—to St. Mary’s, which was drawing me like a magnet. And I began to sob—really sob—as I realized how literally, not just in heaven but on earth, Jesus had prepared a place for me.

I will never forget the drive across the city that night, in the rain, on streets that were running red and iridescent green. My joy grew and grew, as if it had been a wave that transported me—as if it had been a crescendo of joy that lifted me over my weaknesses and threw me on the steps of the church. I ran up the steps, pulled open a door and came in just as Father Jones was kneeling on the floor with a basin and towel, preparing to wash the feet of the other priests who were sitting in a row across the sanctuary, in white, in a haze of incense.

It was like walking into a painting. It was like walking into the past, or the place where the present and the past coalesce. It was walking into the truth: the truth that Jesus washed, not everyone’s feet, but the feet of particular men he had chosen.

Standing in the back, between a lay brother and a man with a baby, I took this in without breathing. And then Father Jones stood up and I saw the sign I had been promised months before. “The new pastor will be a sign for you,” the Spirit had promised me in the fall, which words I had understood, when Father Jones came to St. Mary’s, to refer to his status as a convert. But when he stood up on Holy Thursday and his tall figure unfolded above the other priests, I saw his extraordinary height as a sign of Jesus over his Church—over every priest who falls short, and disappoints, and yet remains a priest.

There was so much that I didn’t understand that night. The Triduum—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter—is like a book that one reads again and again, understanding just a little more with each passing year. But one thing I grasped with clarity and gratitude from the beginning, and that was the specificity of the provision that had been made for me. God had chosen for my formation one particular parish, served by a community of Dominicans, watched over by Mary’s sorrowful, tender gaze. And the year I came in, Father Carleton Jones was her pastor; Father Paul Keller was the assistant pastor; Nicholas Renouf was the organist and choirmaster; Martin O’Connor was deacon.

Good Friday followed, like a dark rent in a mist: the only full day of the year without Mass. Arriving in the afternoon I found the sanctuary stripped and bare, the holy water fonts empty, and the pews full. Every pew was occupied, and still people were coming. The church was like a house that had been ransacked, with everyone crowding to see. The doors of the vestibule swung steadily back and forth; the doors of the tabernacle stood open. Coming in behind the servers, I found a place on a side aisle, behind a family in black, in the cold path of an opening door. And then someone read from Isaiah, in a ringing voice, in the empty air:

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.
Even as many were amazed at him—
so marred were his looks beyond human semblance
and his appearance beyond that of the sons of men—
so shall he startle many nations,
before him kings shall stand speechless . . .

There was no organ or incense. There were no colors or flowers. The choir sang the Gospel in harsh intervals from the loft, answering Father Keller on the altar who was singing the part of Christ. In ascending and descending fifths they sang the whole Passion from John, while the congregation stood for the duration, with something like the stoicism and endurance of Christ himself. How many times I had had occasion to mark this already! The astonishing patience and resignation of Catholics. Even the children in front of me were strong through the long afternoon, with a strength I entirely lacked. Marie—my sponsor—came late, and squeezed in next to me in a black suit. And then we were so crowded together in the pew I was literally held up by the others, by the Church which has endured through so many centuries and dark hours.

The Gospel ended, and the Deacon led us in the Solemn Intercessions. Let us stand, he would begin, and everyone stood as the intercession was proposed. Let us kneel, and everyone knelt in an interval of silence on the hard kneelers. Let us pray, and the prayer was prayed in an identical formula all over the world:

For the Church, and the unity of Christians . . .
For the Jewish people, the first to hear the word
of God . . .
For those who do not believe in Christ . . .
For those who do not believe in God, that they may find Him by sincerely following all that is right.

Rhythmically, the whole Church standing and kneeling together, the intercessions went forward. And then there was a stir in the back of the church and a veiled crucifix was carried in, gradually uncovered, and carried in a three-stage procession to the altar, where it was individually venerated by the faithful, according to an age-old Catholic tradition.

The priests went down first, passing down the center aisle in their bare feet. Through the crowd on my left I caught glimpses of them, striding swiftly in their black habits, falling on one knee. In advance of the rest, each priest went alone to the altar, in the isolation of his vocation, in the renunciations that his bare feet represented. And as I watched this, and their obedience, something in me went down, too, seeing the submission I could finally submit to.

How many times in the past submission had been demanded of me by particular church leaders, and I couldn’t give it, because those who asked it were themselves in rebellion! . . . How I had suffered over this issue! And how strangely peaceful I felt now, watching the priests, after they venerated the cross, ascending the altar. As each one went forward, I saw his sacrifice and his self-offering. I saw what he had given up, which is to say, I saw the cross with its veils removed. And I understood then that not only the saints but every priest who holds to his vocation has made the choice of the kingdom over the world.

In their wake, we all followed: every one of us, children and adults alike. In the loft, the choir began to sing the reproaches in Latin:

My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

I led you out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom,
but you led your Savior to the Cross.

My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

The center and then the side aisles emptied, and the lines wound around to the rear. Waiting in the back, I remembered Grace and her blessing lines. I thought of the great distance I had traveled since then—all the places I had been and the different things I had seen—and I understood that I was ­almost to the end. As I turned down the center aisle, my heart began to pound:

I gave you a royal scepter
but you gave me a crown of thorns.

I opened the sea before you
but you opened my side with a spear.

My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

At the steps of the sanctuary, Father Jones and an acolyte were holding the tall processional crucifix aslant, so people could lean down and kiss the feet of the small corpus where they crossed and the nail drove in. Closer I came, and closer, to the doorsill of the actual wounds. Ahead of me, an old woman ran her hand along the wood, lingered and limped aside. Then it was my turn. And as I leaned down and kissed him—as I pressed my mouth to the painted wound—I suddenly saw his body life-sized, the day before I was incorporated into it.

Back in my seat, I was so shaken by what I had seen I couldn’t stop crying.

I cried for a long time that afternoon under Marie’s arm in the crowded pew: tears of stunned comprehension and shock, grief and a heartbroken gratefulness that I was actually passing into the Church at last, into that Body—so wounded!—in which we have been reconciled to God.

Bring to me the souls of heretics and schismatics! ­Jesus says to Faustina in the diary, and immerse them in the ocean of my mercy . . .

During My bitter Passion they tore at My Body and Heart;
that is, My Church. As they return to unity with the Church,
My wounds heal, and in this way they alleviate My Passion.

I cried, and eventually I laughed, and finally half hysterically I blurted against Marie’s ear, “I don’t envy you, being my sponsor!” at which point she began to laugh, too. I remember her tightening her grip on my arm, whispering something incoherent, and tapping on her missal with her free, manicured hand.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake almost until morning, waiting for the sun that finally drifted free of the trees, the rains and the mists of Good Friday having rolled away. I cooked in the morning for the people who were coming. After lunch there was a rehearsal in the church, on the shining floor. The deacon was in charge, a much-admired, ruefully good-natured man. Overhead the choir was rehearsing Mozart. The mood was vigorous and joyful, and the altar was beautiful again: salmon and gold, with lilies, and a clear glass bowl for baptism.

We had supper at home with my mother and sister, and with Paul, Randall, and Kirsten, former Yale students who had been part of the messengers. In West Haven, Flora’s family was gathering. In Chicago, my friend Lisa’s celebrations were an hour away.

I remember nothing of that meal. I remember dressing—dressing!—with Kirsten watching from the bed. I remember my silk stockings wrinkling and my new shoes squeaking as I walked.

I drove alone to the church, parked, and the streetlight blew. It was after eight and already dark. It was early April and the night was cold. I ran in in my thin dress, and in the time it took to get ready my last reserves were used up. By nine o’clock, when I took my place in the front pew on the center aisle, I was so cold and uneasy I suddenly didn’t think I could last.

And then they turned out the lights.

One by one the lights in the church were extinguished and we were plunged into darkness. In the rear of the church a brazier was brought in, and in it a fire was kindled, but I couldn’t see. By the light of the fire, Father Jones cut a cross in the wax of the tall Paschal candle with a trembling hand. He traced the numerals of the current year between the arms of the cross, intoning as he worked—

Christ yesterday and today
the beginning and the end
Alpha (above the cross)
and Omega (below)
all times belong to him
and all the ages
to him be glory and power
through every age for ever.

But I couldn’t hear. Another year and I would be in the choir loft overhead, watching all of this from above. Another year and I would be baptized, and the confidence of the Church would be mine. But now I was in the dark, and I could scarcely distinguish myself from the darkness.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the lit candle was carried in. I could see it in the distance, wavering above the congregation, its small flame bending in the wind. And then every small candle in every parishioner’s hand was lit from the same fire, setting off soft explosions in the pews that were beautiful when seen from above. And Father Keller sang the Exsultet, with a fervor that bordered on violence.

Then the candles were blown out and again we were plunged into darkness and, in my case, a debilitating fear. The readings began, in the acrid smoke from the candles—long readings from ­Genesis and Exodus, Isaiah and Ezekiel, describing the whole arc of salvation history. Were they going to read the whole Bible? I remember thinking in terror as the Frenchwoman with the hypnotic voice began describing the crossing of the Red Sea.

There was no heat in the church, and I was so cold by this point I might as well have been naked. I was shaking with exhaustion and suddenly drowning in fear. Across the sea, as the woman droned on—as Moses stretched out his hand and the Lord swept the sea all night with a strong east wind—it was as if I were the one pursued by something intent on destroying me, by those chariots and charioteers, between the waters that were standing up like walls.

When the readings finally ended and the lights were turned on, my fear subsided a little. Bells were rung and the Gloria was sung. But then Father Jones climbed the steps to the pulpit and the first words out of his mouth were the words of St. Paul to the Romans:

Brothers and sisters, are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

By now I was grasping that what was about to happen to me would surpass everything that had happened to me before. I was understanding that the economy of salvation history had been more or less recapitulated in my life, and all of those dramatic earlier events—everything from Grace to ­Toronto, like the flight out of Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea—would be surpassed and fulfilled by what was about to happen in baptism.

But what did that mean? That everything would be surpassed and fulfilled?

Behind me, the congregation took up the Litany of Saints. I could hear Marie’s voice in the outpouring, importuning name after name, and again there was that note of violence, as if the whole Church were storming heaven. This was no child’s christening. The strongest impression was of darkness: the darkness of adulthood, and of long years without Christ. Father Jones prayed over the water: “Father, unseal for your Church the fountain of baptism.” He lowered the lit candle into the water, as if infusing the water with fire. And we rejected Satan, and chose God, and I went forward to be baptized.

Only then, at the very end, did my anxiety leave me. As I stepped into the sanctuary, I saw a door standing open, I walked through it, and it closed behind me. And as it closed and I disappeared, I understood that this would be different from all of my fervid imaginings. It wasn’t so much that baptism was greater than everything else; it was of a different order altogether. It wasn’t so much an ­experience to be undergone as an end of experience as I knew it. I bent down over the water and Father Jones fumbled in my hair. It was wavy and thick in those days, and he hesitated, searching for my scalp. And then he said quietly, “Patricia Therèse, if you have not already been baptized, I baptize you, in the name of the Father”—he poured a beaker of cold water over my head—“and of the Son”—another drenching—“and of the Holy ­Spirit”—a third.

I straightened up. He put oil on my head and Marie held a towel to my hair. Over her shoulder I could see the congregation: my friend Kirsten’s red hair; my husband’s pale face in a pew. Someone handed me a lit candle and I stepped down, and Karen was baptized in her turn.

Everything orderly and matter-of-fact! Including the feeling, as I waited to be confirmed: the feeling that a moment ago, I had been asleep, but now, having had cold water poured over my head, I was awake.

The post On the Threshold: Part III appeared first on First Things.

How many live within it till the end?
The Chippewa boy who cast about St. Ignace,
Neglected, beaten, scarred, imprisoned, ever
In search of one who’d love him first of all;
The girl who stands undressed before the mirror
And, wanting only to be beautiful,
Pins up a gown against her curving shoulders,
But turns aside, incapable of looking;
And you, who took yourself away from us
These ten years since, dying with the TV on.

Poor falling creatures in the quiet land,
Gentle and broken things, and needy things,
Who see ice filming on the deeper waters,
Who see the blackened boughs begin to lighten,
We cannot know the air through which you move.
We try out words of wisdom and give up.
How fine it would be, could we just embrace
And trust the body’s solid warmth to speak.
But some snow clings upon the withered rushes
And some descends on water and is gone.

—James Matthew Wilson

The post Atmosphere appeared first on First Things.

The second fact, which my grandchildren used to tell with far greater pride, is that in 1964 I shook the hand of Martin Luther King Jr. The occasion was the June convocation of the Jewish Theological Seminary, at which King received an honorary doctorate and my class of rabbinical students received our Master of Hebrew Literature degrees. King was so honored due to his friendship and collaboration with the great Jewish theologian, our teacher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

For some of us, the connection with King went beyond this occasion. Heschel had enlisted some of his students to work in the Civil Rights Movement, in which he and King were generals and we were mere foot soldiers. My colleagues and I, alongside Catholic seminarians, had marched in Washington, D.C., where we were cheered by some, and had beer bottles thrown at us by others.

It happened that our demonstration in Washington stayed on the right side of local law—hence my clean record, attested by the Sheriff of Henrico County. As for King, in April 1963 he had been arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for participating in a non-violent demonstration that, according to local law, was illegal. During his incarceration, King wrote what is now a classic text of political theology: “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It is a powerful statement of universal morality or “natural law,” all the more significant to me given my relation to King through Heschel, both of whom taught me and many other Christians and Jews the real meaning of natural law, and not only in theory. King’s witness forced many in his time to recognize the sinfulness of racial segregation. His “Letter” now hangs on the wall of the federal courthouse in Montgomery.

In his own eyes, and in the eyes of his supporters, King was not a criminal; therefore, his incarceration in Birmingham Jail was unjust. The true criminals were the political officials of Birmingham, who had violated what King called “our God-given and constitutional rights.” It is these God-given rights that mere human-made constitutions codify and enforce. As King put it, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God.” Conversely, “[a]n unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” Invoking Thomas Aquinas, King wrote: “An unjust law is a law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.” He therefore urged us to “disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

Four questions come to mind: (1) Why must there be a higher moral law by which we decide which human-made law is to be obeyed and which human-made law is to be disobeyed? (2) Why should we call this higher moral law “the law of God”? (3) Why should we call this higher moral law “natural law”? (4) How might we know this “higher moral law,” and why are we obligated by it?

Regarding the first question, there are many people who consider themselves “­secular” who would say that immoral, ­unjust practices are self-evidently wrong because they are irrational. Why appeal to vague “metaphysical” and “theological” realities, such as a “higher law,” when all one needs is the common sense of the Golden Rule? Is it not obvious that we should “treat others as we would like to be treated,” or at least “not do unto others what we would not have them do unto us”? This viewpoint assumes that humans are by nature decent, rational, and empathetic; indecent, irrational, non-empathetic individuals must be unnatural exceptions. The latter stand in need of education or psychotherapy to rehabilitate them, to turn them into normal members of the human community.

But King claimed, in the spirit of Reinhold Niebuhr, that “groups are more immoral than individuals.” Thus the crime or sin of discriminatory segregation was not the activity of lone criminals, but the work of normal persons doing the bidding of their society. Instead of curbing their tendencies to evil, society enabled them to do more evil than they would have done alone. In the eyes of their society, the enforcers of segregation were not merely innocent of wrongdoing, they were upholding the common good. If the common good is whatever a community considers the good that is to be ­done by its citizens in common, then appeals to the common good will be an insufficient basis on which to criticize socially approved practices, such as segregation in the American South. The segregationists protested that these discriminatory policies were their “traditional way of life,” which they had a moral duty to uphold. When any objection was made by those outside this tradition—such as the so-called “out-of-state agitators” of the 1950s—the local discriminators would often demand, “Who are you to impose your morality on us?” (Today, those who consider all standards, whether scientific or moral, to be “socially constructed” have no answer to this kind of relativistic retort.)

Socially endorsed activities such as racial discrimination can be judged evil only by reference to a higher moral law, by which all persons and all societies are judged. Those doing the judging affirm that they, too, will be judged for their violations of this higher or transcendent law. I am reminded of the Talmud’s admonition: “Correct yourself first, then go correct others.”

But why call this higher moral law the law “of God”? Why not appeal to something like the “ideal” of full political and economic equality? Surely, King was right to insist that such a higher, transcendent law justifies the human-made law that “squares” with it, and provides a basis for condemning the human-made law that is “out of harmony” with it. By contrast, ideals are devised by human ideologues; they are projections of the reality some humans would like to see in the world. Like human-made laws, they can be unmade by their makers as easily as they were made. How can an ideal function as the justification or condemnation of man-made laws when, in fact, it is not superior to them? Moreover, since an ideal admits of no argument for its validity, how is the egalitarian ideal of full equality any more justifiable than the segregationists’ ideal of a racially “pure” society? How is an ideal anything more than a prejudice one group of people wants to project onto the world?

As Jacques Maritain proclaimed during his exile from Nazi-occupied France, societies that have no higher purpose than the perpetuation of their own racial identity need a “negative other” against which to define themselves. Acknowledging no one above them, they know only who is “out,” without knowing why anybody is “in.” For the Nazis, those negative others were the Jews. For American racists, they are the blacks. That structural similarity explains why this ideological racism, not theologically motivated anti-Judaism, was the predominant influence on Hitler and his followers. The ideology that motivated King’s persecutors could have been constructed by Joseph Goebbels.

The law of God is the only criterion by which a man-made law can be judged just or unjust, right or wrong. And only laws, rather than ideals, command us to act. Yet a law does not make itself. To speak of a higher law, one must speak of a higher lawgiver, and a higher judge of whether that law has been kept or transgressed. And that lawgiver, that “judge of all the earth” (Gen. 18:25), could only be the creator of heaven and earth. Anyone else posing as such is an imposter. Yet you might ask: If human-made laws and ideals are just as easily unmade by humans as made by them, is not God-­given law just as easily unmade by God?

To answer this formidable question, we have to remember that King was explicitly addressing “my Christian and Jewish brothers,” who would have known God’s promise never to undo his law. For the law of God, God’s Torah, is “the word of our God that will stand forever” (Isa. 40:8). This covenantal promise can be believed by Jews and Christians because we are already living under the law of God and experiencing its unchanging, permanent character. Faithful Jews and Christians will resist the efforts of any in their own communities who would attempt to change the unchangeable law of God. To be sure, Jews and Christian differ as to what exactly constitutes the unchangeable law of God. These differences, though, are almost always in the area of the God-human relationship, especially as it is enacted in worship. Jewish and Christian sacramental practices are significantly different. But in the area of interpersonal relationships, what could be called the “moral realm,” the differences are quite minor. The moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible is foundational for both Judaism and Christianity.

When Martin Luther King castigated “the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South” for “commit[ting] themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular,” he reiterated the ancient Jewish teaching that there is no aspect of the God-human relationship that does not touch the relationships among humans. The church or the synagogue must not be the place where a Christian or Jew seeks intimacy with God apart from human community. Rather, it must be the place from which God sends us out into the broader human community to sanctify it by our advocacy and practice of justice. When King spoke of “men willing to be coworkers with God,” he may have been consciously paraphrasing the Talmud: “Every judge who judges honestly, as it were, becomes God’s partner in the work of ­creation.” Jews are, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “the elder brothers” of Christians.

Yet the higher moral law of God does not pertain only to Jews and Christians. It applies to all humankind, universally. That is why King, ­influenced by Thomas Aquinas, calls this law “natural.” Identifying with the tradition of natural law theory and practice, King invokes Thomas Jefferson’s famous words “that all men are created equal.” Who created all humans equal? For Jefferson (who was neither a Christian nor a Jew), this “Creator” is “Nature’s God.” Thus “nature” means the whole world that God has created intelligently. Indeed, without nature’s being taken as God’s intelligible creation, what reason is there for affirming that human rights and human duties are equally shared by all those who make up humankind? What the Talmud calls “the dignity due humans” (kvod ha-­beriyot) makes sense only when every human being is considered a “creature,” created equally in the image and likeness of God. In any other view of the human condition, the inequality of human beings seems much more “self-evident.”

Even though natural law is ­universally applicable, is it nevertheless a law that ­only Jews and Christians can actually know, ­actually teach, actually enforce, and actually judge by? How may Jews and Christians answer the charge of secularists that we are religious ­imperialists, imposing our morality on those who do not accept its premises?

The answer is that natural law has not been invented by Judaism or Christianity. The recognition of essential human dignity is minimally rational insofar as arguing against it would lead one to the absurd demand to be treated well when one has no intention of treating others well. One need not be religious to appreciate this moral rationality. But if moral rationality suffices, who needs Judaism or Christianity, with all the theological baggage? Could not King’s Sunday sermons be seen as at best superfluous to his political activities during the rest of the week, or at worst a deviation?

No one lives by natural law alone. Whatever law or moral norms we live by will be mediated through our communal traditions. It is within these communal traditions that we see how natural law provides a criterion for confirming the justice of old laws, for guiding the making of new laws, for rejecting new laws that are unjust, and for understanding old laws that may now seem unjust. Though in principle King was speaking to all who were either segregators or victims of segregation, in fact he was calling his fellow Christians and Jews to “clean up your act.” He did this by invoking principles of natural law on which our religious traditions have built, which always accompany their development, and which must never be superseded. As the Jewish theologian Aharon Lichtenstein taught, universal justice (his equivalent of natural law) is a “bottom line,” which even divinely revealed commandments must not transgress. It is what gives our religious traditions universal moral credence.

Reflection on the natural law principles proclaimed by King remains necessary in our time, in which injustice prevails no less than in 1963, when the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written. It was this injustice that Martin Luther King battled throughout his life, and for which he paid with his death. As we Jews say: yehi zikhro barukh—“May his memory continue to be a blessing”—and may it ever enlighten our darkness! As Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, we are to conquer evils one by one, ­until the One comes and conquers all evil.

The post The Bottom Line appeared first on First Things.

Andrew Willard Jones follows his masterful study of the “sacramental kingdom” of Louis IX with this sweeping historiography of the Church, from its foundations in Eden up to the present moment. The plot assumes that Christianity is in fact true and that the protagonist is the Church. He opens with a chapter that provides a biblical theology of the political. The approach very much resembles that of Augustine’s Civitas Dei. From there, the book traces the ever-­shifting relations between temporal and spiritual powers.

A virtue of his analysis is that Jones is generally evenhanded about both the glories and the errors of each era. There is no naive nostalgia undergirding the project. If Jones has a preferred period, it would likely be the High Middle Ages. During that period, civilization was defined by the conviction that a world of peace and charity was possible, and that the City of God was a real place in which one could really live. It was a profoundly “sacramental” society, in which the spiritual was everywhere intermingled with the temporal. The two powers worked in harmony, though the temporal was understood as fulfilled in the spiritual. All functions of society were Christian, and they were united by the drive to transform society into one perpetual act of worship. This was Christendom.

Christendom began to fragment rapidly in the fourteenth century, but Jones remains hopeful. Probably the most surprising aspect of this work is Jones’s largely bullish views on Vatican II. This might not be so surprising given that Jones is the founding editor of the magazine New Polity, which effectively carries the torch of the Communio school—the conservative camp of the nouvelle théologie. As such, he believes that the Catholic faith can reach the modern, post-Christian world. Here’s hoping he is right.

—James R. Wood

Lifting the Veil:
Imagination and the Kingdom of God
by malcolm guite
square halo, 160 pages, $19

Lifting the Veil is adapted from three lectures given in 2019 at Regent College. Rev. Dr. ­Malcolm Guite writes in the British tradition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and C. S. Lewis. For him, as for these thinkers, the imagination is an organ of truth, apprehending meaning behind sense impression. Guite’s model of this faculty is tripartite and broken down by chapter. The artistic imagination, ­appropriately chastened by theological reflection, draws us near to Jesus Christ by recalling to us the concrete particulars of his presence and ministry. The moral imagination opens to us Christ’s teaching, helping us to perceive a new way of being, in imitation of Jesus’s own parables. The prophetic imagination strikes at the heart of the world by cutting apocalyptically through its delusions and invoking hidden or ignored truth. The eternal truths of faith must be re-embodied for each generation, and a sanctified imagination in all its aspects provides this service. Guite’s real contribution here is to show, through highly readable analysis of great Christian poems, how artists can (and do) usher us to Christ, and thus why their labor is essential to the Kingdom of God. He places himself as a poet at the vanguard of an “­imaginative resistance” to the imprisoning cultural forces of ­materialism and reductivism. In his hands, imagination is a lantern whose rays cause the treasures of the Kingdom to ­coruscate through the encrustation of disenchantment. Or, to use Guite’s preferred metaphor, imagination “lifts the veil” on the all-present glory of God. Come and see, Guite ^­proclaims.

—Rex Bradshaw

Liberty for All:
Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age
by andrew walker
baker, 272 pages, $20

Andrew Walker’s Liberty for All argues from an allegedly biblical basis for nearly unlimited religious toleration. Because he aims to argue ­principally from Scripture, ­Walker’s conclusions—if true—apply to all Christians, and the book closes with a triumphant ergo that those who accept his arguments respecting religious liberty will be led “inside the walls of a Baptist church.”

Since many Americans instinctively accept this Baptist view of religious liberty, Walker’s honest explication is helpful for revealing a critical weakness with this perspective. Despite attempting to argue from Scripture to a political ­theory, Walker relies more on the latter than he cares to admit. He frames the issue as Christian principle rather than political prudence and tries to resolve all questions of religious liberty with a simple ­solution: ­Every authentically held belief must be tolerated in the name of the Golden Rule, by which Christians who want to be ­tolerated for the sake of the gospel must also tolerate all others. 

Two critical problems with ­Walker’s presentation are visible in vague qualifications and asides throughout the book. First, authenticity is subjective and therefore useless as an objective standard; accordingly, Walker’s view denies constitutional majorities any real means to distinguish liberty from license. Second, Walker cautiously endorses liberal democracy as most compatible with his view because government is then merely a neutral arbiter over a “marketplace of ideas,” but he later warns that this arbiter is often “rigged with nonneutral biases.” These contradictions reveal that intelligent responses to religious liberty dilemmas require political prudence informed by a Christian understanding of human ­flourishing.

—Clifford Humphrey

Medieval Cantors and Their Craft:
Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History, 800–1500
edited by katie ann-marie bugyis, a. b. kraebel, and margot e. fassler
york medieval, 391 pages, $25.95

There was perhaps no epoch of the Church’s history as closely related to its music as the Medieval West was to Gregorian chant. Yet the men and women who created this music are largely unknown. These cantors are the subject of Medieval Cantors and Their Craft. The volume fills in some of the details of these important figures in the Church’s history. Medieval Cantors is a collection of nineteen case studies by as many scholars from several fields including musicology, history, liturgy, and languages. This mix of disciplines results in a welcome complementarity of ­perspectives.

A pervasive theme is the cantor’s role in the “shaping of history,” as is expressed in the title. We are introduced to numerous cantors forgotten by history, such as the English Benedictine women who held the title of cantor or sacristan. But this book is more than a mere presentation of forgotten men and women. The medieval cantor’s purview included not just chant and liturgy, but also manuscript production and the writing of history. Several well-known medieval figures are investigated, such as William of Malmesbury. Another standout chapter is Henry Parkes’s meticulous examination of manuscripts from around Lake Constance, which yields fruitful hypotheses for better understanding of ­medieval clerical hierarchies and the cantor’s place therein.

Although directed toward specialists, this book is worthy of attention from nonspecialists within the Church as well. One and the same high-ranking expert within the medieval church community—typically a cleric—played a seminal role in history, liturgy, music, and education. Today the Church veers toward segmentation of expertise within ecclesial leadership. The reader of Medieval Cantors wonders what might happen if we looked to these forgotten figures as minis­terial models.

—Kevin O’Brien

A Small Farm Future
by chris smaje
chelsea green, 320 pages, $22.50

Despite the daily declarations that the dead consensus must be buried, every few years we tend to rebrand and revive the same debate between conservatives and progressives. We critique the worship of Progress, and rightly so, but we tend to imagine that techno-industrial society will more or less remain the agora in which we argue.

Chris Smaje suggests that our energy-intensive machine society is akin to the Titanic, on which we rearrange the deck chairs. He lays out a convincing argument that the multivalent crisis of our time guarantees the collapse of the present world order. Rather than debate what new technology or political realignment will save it, we should consider how we are going to feed ourselves and build new polities when the Walmart trucks stop arriving and 9-1-1 stops taking calls. An anthropologist-turned-­smallholder, Smaje writes with the realism of a man who works with his hands. He moves deftly from crunching the numbers on how small-scale agriculture could feed the present population to forecasting the breakdown of nation-states. His arguments for widespread, agricultural private property—in a word, a return to yeomanry—­offer empirically compelling support to those sympathetic to the distributist tradition, who are oft-­dismissed as romantics.

A Small Farm Future is self-aware about its shortcomings, sometimes excessively so. It could have ­benefitted from a more confident approach to political theory and religious practice, which in turn could have been provided by a deeper engagement with ­Aristotelian philosophy. We live in a world where the best-schooled Thomists don’t bat an eye at the global supply chain that delivers their daily bread (despite the advice in De Regno), so how surprised can we be that the best distributist text of this century was written by a very modern-minded peasant? There’s no reason that tradition-minded cosmopolitans cannot fill in the gaps and learn a great deal.

—Sean Domencic

The post Briefly Noted — 5/22 appeared first on First Things.

In politics, negative feelings of well-being reportedly drive the anti-establishment vote. According to researchers at Stanford and MIT, Trump won the “unhappiness vote” in 2016, with negative feelings a better predictor of voting patterns than race or class. Negative feelings also play a role in the opioid crisis, as distressed people find their way to drugs. The twelve-month period that ended in April 2021 saw more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. due to drug overdose, an increase of 30 percent over the year before. Entire industries are built around our desire to address negative feelings. Almost 20 percent of Americans take a psychoactive drug. The global market for psychoactive drugs in 2020 was $35 billion, and is expected to rise to $60 billion in 2031, with Americans taking the ­lion’s share of these meds. The psychotherapy and counseling market in the U.S. is worth $10 billion.

Plenty of people analyze the root cause of all these negative feelings, and they often theorize according to their particular areas of interest. An economist might search for oppressive financial structures. A social worker might focus more on family dynamics. But there is an irony here: Our determination to find theoretical explanations for our unpleasant feelings is partly to blame for their often explosive political and social consequences.

Consider a common thought pattern: We have an unpleasant sensation. It might be nothing more than the absence of excitement, a lifelessness in life itself. Nothing is distinct, but there is still much to feel. The unpleasant sensation becomes the axis on which our existence turns; it has a disquieting power, and we seek the reasons for it. The inquiry is intriguing, for paradoxically, we like to analyze our woes, and we find comfort in talking about them. Eventually, we call ourselves “unhappy,” but only after we have furnished our unpleasant sensation with a reason of some kind. Before, we simply experienced an unpleasant sensation; now, we are unhappy because . . .

Sometimes, we mislead ourselves. An unpleasant sensation gets the mind churning, and we reach for something in our lives to blame. A man feels an unpleasant sensation. In a flash he ponders a thought he has had before: Maybe he should have started his own business, or married later in life, or traveled more—something. He blames his unpleasant sensation on one of these causes and declares himself “unhappy.” But he errs, for the explanation followed the sensation—so fast that he imagines that the explanation “caused” what preceded it. The drive to explain unpleasant sensations, to understand them, to have reasons for feeling the way we do, is so powerful that sometimes we reverse the order in which unpleasant sensations and the explanations for them appear.

We fall into this way of thinking because so ­many unpleasant sensations do have specific causes. I stub my toe, and it hurts. I drink too much, and I get a hangover. The cause-and-effect relationship is clear. But generalized bad feelings are different. Without an obvious explanation for them, we fall back into the habit of finding and blaming a specific cause, such as work trouble, money trouble, health trouble, or love trouble, at which point we pronounce ourselves unhappy.

In these circumstances, a person’s unpleasant feeling is real, but his or her unhappiness is somewhat artificial. In real unhappiness, the connection between the unpleasant feeling and unhappiness is immediate and direct. In artificial unhappiness—that is, remote causes of unhappiness that people use to explain their unpleasant feelings—people know what they feel but not much more. They might feel gloomy, bored, or ill-at-ease—a misery of the soul. Failing to understand why, they cast about for causes, thinking backward.

For example, I may blame an overbearing boss for my negative feelings, which I can now describe in more detail as feelings of inferiority. With this thought in my mind, I habituate myself to the causal connection I have made. I decide that my toxic workplace is dragging me down, and I become habitually unhappy. At night, I spar with the day’s shadows; to feel is to reflect, and I turn over in my head the day’s interactions, scratching the wound of my unpleasant feelings as I do. Other people, seeking to help me, encourage me in this behavior. True, the negative feelings are real. But the unhappiness is artificial, which is to say, “constructed” by the explanations I give.

By this path the more remote “causes” of artificial unhappiness gain traction in people’s minds. In earlier eras, those causes might have been evil spirits. In Salem, they were witches. In our time, the evil spirits tend to be framed in psychological and sociological terms. Whatever formulations are used, remote causes explain ill-defined unpleasant sensations on a mass scale. They purport to explain the unpleasant sensations of not one person but millions. By doing so, they affect politics and economics.

Religion long shaped our attitude toward negative feelings, both insisting that they are part of life and providing supernatural explanations, some of which encourage artificial unhappiness. With religion’s decline as the framework for understanding life’s trials, the modern era has witnessed three waves of artificial unhappiness. The first wave led to psychoactive drugs; the second led to cognitive behavioral therapy; the third is leading us toward new kinds of technology. The third wave, along with its effect on politics and economics, is just beginning.

The psychopharmacology ­revolution began with a chance discovery in 1952 at Sea View Hospital in Staten Island, New York. Two doctors noticed the antidepressant side effects of the drug iproniazid, which was being used to treat tuberculosis patients. A second breakthrough came in 1957 with Roland Kuhn’s chance discovery of the antidepressant imipramine. These drugs gave rise to the two classes of antidepressants that dominated depression therapy until Prozac came along in 1987: MAO inhibitors and tricyclics. They quickly replaced opium as the primary treatment for depression. In an important way, however, they hardly differed from opium, just as opium hardly differed from alcohol. Alcohol, opium, and ­antidepressants stupefy people. They induce a pleasant sensation, independent of what is ­actually going on in a person’s life. Time magazine’s description of patients taking ­iproniazid—how they grew festive and danced on the wards—could just as easily apply to people who are drunk or high.

The invention of the spectrophotofluorimeter in the 1950s led to a new causal theory of unhappiness altogether. This device revealed an association between the new antidepressants and increased levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Researchers concluded that neurotransmitters must somehow mediate the improvement in mood caused by antidepressants.

Through a series of inferences that lacked ­scientific basis, neurotransmitters went from being associated with depression, to causing depression, to causing everyday unhappiness. Henceforth, millions of people who felt unpleasant sensations called themselves unhappy and blamed it on neurotransmitters. Both depression and unhappiness fell under a single category, while neurotransmitters became the single cause—often leading to treatment with the same drug.

Antidepressants were sold based on this model for the next sixty years, and still are. In 2019, the FDA cleared the use of the stupefying drug psilocybin, found in “magic mushrooms,” for depression therapy. Researchers emphasized the neurotransmitter connection—the fact that psilocybin acts on the serotonin receptor—to give the drug the imprimatur of science. In reality, the drug hardly differs from psychedelics such as LSD, which is likewise being evaluated as a potential antidepressant, or the drug ketamine, which is now being used as an antidepressant.

As a basis for stupefying unhappy people, the neurotransmitter model eventually reached the limits of what it could accomplish. Many anti­depressants give unhappy people a zombie-like sensation. For most unhappy people, this is not enough; they want to feel more than just “less depressed.” Yet drug researchers continue to rely on the “less-­depressed standard” to evaluate antidepressants. In “remission,” unhappy people can complain of sadness, weeping, tension, and irritability, and still be considered “cured.”

Yet the political and economic repercussions of the neurotransmitter model endure. Economically, the model spawned a new branch of pharmaceuticals. Politically, it reinforced a longstanding belief that brain matter determines our thoughts, actions, and behaviors. That belief ramifies throughout society, for instance, in law, where it undercuts traditional notions of individual responsibility. Yet the neurotransmitter ­model—or at least its failure—also feeds into today’s political dysfunction.

In the past, most people looked outward to find the cause of their unhappiness, but the neurotransmitter model thrust their unhappiness back into their bodies, where it ceased to be explained by anything but a chemical imbalance. This gave ­unhappy people an advantage. If, underneath it all, unhappiness was just a question of neurotransmitters, people could laugh at other speculations. It was certainly easier to say that one was deficient in neurotransmitters than in true friends. Those who subscribed to the neurotransmitter model consequently found their need to connect with the outside world flag.

But when the model’s defects were exposed and antidepressants promised only a zombie-like feeling, or at best a transient good feeling, ­many people found themselves adrift. They had put their faith in medical science as a solution to their unhappiness, and medicine failed them. Still ­unhappy, but no longer able to call themselves ill, they called themselves cursed. Without the brain-­chemical “cause” to blame, they imagined endless other “causes.”

Some of these “causes,” such as loneliness, overwork, or maltreatment, bordered on the political. Yet everything can be made political eventually. One way or another, from whatever direction, politics kept pressing and pushing, tunneling away inside those seeking the “causes” of their malaise. Unhappy people connected through social media with other unhappy people who imagined the same political “cause” of their unhappiness. Together, they reinforced that cause’s validity.

Politics came to be a competition for happiness as much as a struggle of interests. Politics became something for unhappy people to hope in. The political system might never actually eliminate the “cause” of their unhappiness, but that didn’t matter. To hope is to be happy. Happiness is happiness only when a person actually has it, and to hope is to have it. Politics became one of the last few realms in life where hope seemed realistic, where change seemed possible, when so much else in life seemed fixed. To experience the pleasure of hope, many unhappy people grew preoccupied with politics, despite having no tangible interest at stake or even much interest in public policy.

Psychologists noticed the trend. Unhappiness was already associated with political extremism. Increasingly it has been associated with an obsession with politics. One study draws a line between obsessive political thoughts and psychopathology, including depression and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Another study reveals an association between obsessive political views and anxiety.

In 2016, blue-state voters on average had an additional half-day of poor mental health in the month after Trump won than in the month before. A similar phenomenon occurred among red-state voters in 2020 when Trump lost. Indeed, for the past twenty years, one-quarter of both Republicans and Democrats have complained of depression after their respective candidates lost the presidential election. Grief-related searches typically spike on the internet the day after presidential elections. On the day after the 2016 election, traffic to the website PsychCentral’s “5 Stages of Grief and Loss” page increased more than fourfold. On both sides of the political divide are people whose actual interests are barely affected by the election results, but who nevertheless suffer tremendous misery if their candidate loses. Why? Because losing extinguishes their hope, and therefore their happiness. This makes their unhappiness more like madness, a sort of human rabies, a furious, pointless monomania. Social media fed their hope; after the loss, hope is dashed. Social media then magnifies their unhappiness and covers everything with a cloak of gloom. One crying child makes others cry; worse still, crying makes one cry harder.

In 1860, a Southerner complained of depression the day after Lincoln won. She had good reason to feel depressed: She feared a coming civil war. Her life was at stake. In contrast, many voters today feel unhappy after an election loss in every sense—a matter of vague, intangible factors, such as self-affirmation, intellectual self-confidence, and hope. They are unhappy because politics had given them something to hope in, and now they have lost hope. Theirs is the tragic happiness and unhappiness of total obsession.

The cognitive-behavioral model of unhappiness was less a second wave than a wave that washed over society at the same time as psychoactive drugs, but from a different direction. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has its origins in behavioral therapy, which grew popular during the mid-twentieth century. Rather than probe the unconscious, as Freudian psychoanalysis did, behavioral therapy saw mental illness as a reflex response to stimuli that a person has learned over time. Yet behavioral therapy did not treat depression very well. In the 1960s, psychiatrist ­Aaron Beck focused on analyzing and restructuring the actual thoughts of unhappy people. Called “­cognitive therapy,” Beck’s method eventually merged with behavior therapy in the 1980s, to become CBT. Today, CBT is the umbrella term for practically all forms of talk therapy.

Unlike the neurotransmitter model of unhappiness, CBT addresses a particular cause’s unique details, thereby treating each person’s unhappiness differently. CBT tries to get people to re-evaluate their attitude toward the “cause” they have given to their unpleasant sensation. In doing so, CBT risks becoming another form of stupefaction, like antidepressants.

Take, for example, a man who blames his ­unpleasant sensation on the fact that he hasn’t accomplished much in life. A second man blames his unpleasant sensation on his futile career. A third blames his on life’s elemental unfairness. Through “cognitive restructuring,” CBT tries to detach each man from his preferred cause. In the process, it teaches each man new values. It teaches the first man to rethink the cultural norm that ­emphasizes success, the second to make do with creative outlets beyond work, and the third to accept life’s basic unfairness. Yet all this restructuring borders on stupefaction, wherein reality is overturned and pessimism about life is turned into an almost idiotic acceptance. In these three examples, CBT downplays the values of ambition, the importance of enjoyable work, and the demands of justice. It alters each man’s worldview so that his conscience judges his situation in life less harshly. Each man becomes happier, but at the risk of falsifying his worldview.

More recent CBT modalities, such as mindfulness and biofeedback, likewise risk stupefaction. Unhappy people use these modalities to live in the present and avoid thinking about the past and future. To keep from dwelling on the “cause” of their unhappiness, which is conjured up in memory and anticipated when they are thinking ahead, they put their minds to sleep. “We can’t control what arrives in our life, but we can control how we respond to what arrives in our life,” explains one mindfulness therapist. Like chemical forms of stupefaction, mindfulness and biofeedback shut down the mind, preventing our consciences from rendering judgment on our lives.

The CBT method gradually penetrated American cultural life and changed our politics. The effect was first felt in the 1960s, when CBT penetrated the civil rights movement. Notions of self-esteem and personal identity became central to the movement’s worldview, replacing the older emphasis on voting rights and access to jobs and housing. Soon followed the focus on group identity, the belief that racism is both a conscious and a subconscious phenomenon, and the idea that racism’s effects can be invisible—all hallmarks of today’s identity politics.

The transformation of civil rights into a right to self-esteem was only the beginning. Millions of unhappy people, angry about life but impotent to do anything about it, found psychological release through a four-step method reminiscent of CBT. In the process, they changed American politics.

In the first step, civil rights activists demanded that all disadvantaged people enjoy a feeling of equality with average, middle-class people. Although the movement was motivated by noble goals, it risked impracticality at certain points. For example, in 1970, the City University of New York lowered its admission standards to give everyone a shot at middle-class success and respectability. Yet rather than raise up disadvantaged and remedial students, the reform simply lowered the college’s academic level, making it harder for anyone to get a good education there.

A second step followed. When some disadvantaged people still failed to achieve middle-class success and respectability, they did what CBT encourages. Just as the man who blames an ethic of success for his unhappiness finds relief by embracing “simplicity” and “contentment”—for instance, by smirking at successful people who go to expensive restaurants while declaring his own cheaper meal to be much “better”—those who felt aggrieved by their relative lack of success took average, middle-class people down a notch through ridicule. Activists slandered middle-class people to obscure their positive attributes. They belittled middle-class attitudes toward sex and religion, conservative dress, and efforts to become “solid” citizens. The “culture of irony” that penetrated comedy during the 1970s exemplified this, highlighting easily ridiculed middle-class tendencies.

Still, the values of middle-class success and respectability survived, even as some people failed to achieve them. People might have laughed at the life habits that went along with them, but they could not escape the conflict within themselves between their desire for these things and their impotence to get them. Thus, the third step: To take average, middle-class people down another notch, activists depreciated middle-class success and respectability, calling these things insignificant. In social science, for example, adulthood and maturity ceased to be measured by whether one had a job or a mortgage or was financially responsible—typical middle-class achievements—but by whether one possessed certain psychological traits, such as tolerance and empathy. The social model of adulthood gave way to a psychological model that consisted of values that anyone could possess, including the marginal and disadvantaged.

Activists during this phase did not say that middle-class success and respectability were bad, only that the measures of traditional middle-class success and respectability were bad. It is the old story of the fox and the sour grapes: The fox does not say that sweetness is bad, but that those grapes are sour. Adulthood was still praised—but now a tolerant, empathic thirty-something who dressed in grunge style and played video games all day was considered more mature than a bank executive with a house and a family who lacked the same ethical consciousness. New avenues to middle-class success and respectability opened as a result. Nevertheless, there remained people who failed to achieve any semblance of success or respectability. Their inner tension, manifested in an impulse of resentment, still begged for release.

Release came in the fourth and final step, whereby middle-class success and respectability ceased to be good and became evil. Success itself was said to be the product of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia, and impossible to reconcile with the values of inclusivity. The nuclear family, once good, became a manifestation of the evil patriarchy. America’s success as a country became evil; patriotism, once good, likewise became evil. Free speech became an enemy of progressive values. Good manners became evil, as they prevented activists from shouting down the defenders of middle-class respectability. Police who protect life and property—two major bourgeois concerns—went from good to evil. Art that appeals to middle-class sensibilities, ranging from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, went from good to evil—or at least suspect—while art steeped in revolutionary social justice became the supreme good.

Psychologically, the systematic reinterpretation of middle-class values promised a great deal more than the depreciation of middle-class success had: It brought release to millions. Successful and respectable middle-class people, once a cause of pain and envy for others, were now to be pitied rather than respected. They were, if not evil, then at least beset with evils. The disadvantaged and marginal, especially the unhappy among them, were the pure, the elect, and the good.

All that remained was for successful, respectable middle-class Americans to buy into the new values, to poison their own minds, to feel guilty and ashamed of their success and their country’s heritage, to wallow in the morbid and to dwell fanatically on the lives of victims. Many do. Hence the dawn of woke politics, which is perhaps best understood as CBT on a mass scale.

We are amid the third wave of solutions to unhappiness, one that adopts technologies such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics. In the first wave, neurotransmitters were blamed for unhappiness. In the second wave, wrong thinking was blamed. In the third wave, reality itself is blamed. Rather than stifle people’s desires by numbing their minds, as antidepressants do, third-wave technologies give people a technological substitute for what they desire. According to third-wave ideology, what people want, they should want. No more talking people out of their desires, changing their value system, or prodding them to compromise in life, as CBT does. The only impediment to satisfying one’s desires and finding happiness, says third-wave ideology, is reality itself, which can be corrected and presented anew.

The first virtual reality machine was built in the 1950s, and by the 1960s the technology was being used in flight simulators and, later, video games. In the late 1990s, VR was adapted for use in pediatric burn units to distract children during painful dressing changes. Over the next twenty years, VR technology expanded into other areas, such as adult burn units and trauma units, again to relieve people’s pain through distraction. Gradually, experts in the VR field recognized that VR worked by more than just distracting unhappy people; it worked ­also by immersing unhappy people in another world. If people felt sufficiently present in that other world (that is, if that world seemed sufficiently real to them), they would feel more relaxed and stress-free—in other words, happier.

Today, VR is moving rapidly in this direction, trying to bring happiness to the masses by giving them a virtual substitute for what they desire in life but cannot have, the lack of which “causes” their unhappiness. For instance, people who want to travel, but who lack the time or money to do so, can pretend to hike Everest or snorkel the Great Barrier Reef through VR technology. A man who always wanted to serve in the military can pretend to do so in VR. A woman who always wanted to be a doctor can pretend to practice medicine in VR. The possibilities are limitless.

AI offers another option. Rather than rationalize their unhappiness through CBT, lonely people can simulate companionship through AI programs such as Replika, an app that learns and mimics a person’s personality to become that person’s friend. For many lonely people Replika serves as a sounding board and secret confidante.

Robotics is a third avenue of development. People (mostly men) can use a sex robot not just to enjoy sex, but also to simulate an actual relationship. One man who goes by the name of Brick Dollbanger describes his relationship with the robot Harmony, manufactured by RealDoll, as both physical and psychological. He reports, “I would just sit and talk to her [Harmony] for half an hour every night when I came home from work.” Sex robots let men like Brick simulate relationships with beautiful women, thereby eliminating the “cause” of their unhappiness.

In each case, technology replicates the things people believe are missing from their lives and thus “causing” their unhappiness. With their longing satisfied, their sense of discord between how they live and how they wish to live fades.

But similarities remain with the other two waves. With technology, people rely on stupefaction to experience happiness. Their good feeling is no more derived from real life than is the good feeling obtained through mindfulness or an antidepressant: It is a self-deception. True, being self-deceived is different from being deceived. Self-deception is active. Brick Dollbanger, for instance, has actual sex with Harmony. Yet his relationship with Harmony is no more authentic than the experience of a child who plays at fighting, gets some real bruises, and calls it war. It is a counterfeit of reality.

The third wave’s economic effects are only beginning. VR and AR (augmented reality) contribute $46 billion in wealth to the global economy. That number is expected to rise to $1.5 trillion by 2030. AI is expected to contribute an additional 14 percent (or $16 trillion) to global GDP by 2030. In 2019, the U.S. market for chatbots (robots that keep people company) was $400 million; by 2027, it is expected to rise to $2 billion. Sex robots alone may double the global market for sex devices by 2027.

The third wave’s political effects have yet to be felt, but some predictions are possible. On the one hand, a happy people, including a stupefied people, are easy to govern. They are satisfied with their lives and reconciled to themselves. On the other hand, a madman no longer knows for sure where he is, or what he sees, or what he is doing, and people who use technology to live life outside of reality are in this sense a bit mad. Madmen are hard to govern. Moreover, the less people see ­reality, the more their minds will go in dangerous utopian directions.

Yet in my estimation, the greatest risk to American politics is not that people will grow mad but that they will grow bored. Substitutes for reality, even very high-tech ones, have the curious power of devaluing one’s feelings. Inevitably you feel the unreality; its shadow falls black across your path and things seem less brightly colored; they do not go to the heart as much. When happiness is guaranteed or your money back, you grow bored. Real happiness always presupposes some uneasiness, some sore spot that awakens you to the possibility of its loss. People enjoy a little difficulty in life. When an obstacle is in a person’s way, the blood tingles. That’s why no one would want to play a game if there were no possibility of losing. Such uneasiness, which incites hope, is essential to happiness.

Third-wave solutions to unhappiness usually avoid arousing in consumers this feeling of ­unease—and therefore hope. Replika, for example, can be trained to be always agreeable and never argumentative. A man will always be able to have sex with Harmony. True, some video games and VR experiences include the possibility of losing, but the loss carries no actual risk; the scenario isn’t real, which is why manufacturers need not fear hurting customers if they fall off Everest in VR, or accidentally kill a patient in a VR operating room. It is this falsity that prods VR and AR users to regard the alternative world created through technology with suspicion, thereby dampening the technology’s ability to arouse the feelings of unease that inspire hope, and bring happiness.

Stupefaction achieved through technology will not be as complete as that achieved through antidepressants, or through CBT’s inverted value system. In any event, people want to live in the world, not within themselves. Bored and stifled, those who ­rely on technology to satisfy their desires are bound to feel a new kind of unpleasant sensation. They will then look for a “cause” to explain it, only now, having endured fake relationships, fake companionship, fake travel, and fake interesting work, they will see the deceit perpetrated on them as more comprehensive, and conclude that the system as a whole is failing them. They will blame a wider audience; they will take more risks politically; they will grow more radical.

Life has always dealt more harshly with some than with others. This uneven fate has always troubled the body politic, even more so in a democratic age that promises equality. Third-wave technology is no more likely than the first and second waves to succeed in solving the unhappiness problem, and it may have even more disruptive social and political consequences. This is to be expected, for no technical solution will shield us from the wrath of the slighted, the wretched, the unlovely, the uncertain, and the humiliated. That problem must be addressed politically, morally, and spiritually.

The post The Politics of Unhappiness appeared first on First Things.

In the two years before Pearl Harbor, liberal Christians and many secular progressives maintained ardent opposition to American involvement in Hitler’s war in Europe. Among Christians, the rationale was moral. They argued that the last generation’s bloodletting in the trenches on the Western Front had shown warfare to be a futile undertaking. The only moral and authentically Christian stance was pacifism.

As the pastor of a church in Detroit in the 1920s, the young Niebuhr made a name for himself as an advocate for factory workers and a spokesman for progressive causes. Appointed to a faculty position at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the center of liberal Protestantism in America, he was among the organizers of the Fellowship of Socialist Christians. (Niebuhr was keen to ensure that the emphasis fell on socialist Christians, not Christian socialists.) A popular speaker and sought-after guest preacher, he was regarded as a leading light of progressive Christianity. As the clouds of war gathered in the late 1930s, his advocacy put him in close association with institutions and publications that regarded the anti-war outlook as the truest and purest expression of Christian witness.

But in the late 1930s Niebuhr broke with liberal Protestant pacifism and became an influential theological voice for American preparation for war. After the conflict ended, he supported vigorous Cold War resistance to communism. Niebuhr’s ethics of war and great-­power conflict came to be called Christian realism. In his 1940 collection of essays, Christianity and Power ­P­­­olitics, he laid out his case.

In Niebuhr’s account, too many mainstream Protestant figures had adopted the outlook of “secular perfectionism.” By this term he meant a moralistic optimism based on the naive view that man is inherently good. Niebuhr insisted that this outlook rested on “the ­Renaissance faith in man,” not the biblical understanding of the human condition. The upshot was “a very sentimentalized version of Christian faith.”

Niebuhr recognized that a sentimental and moralistic outlook may seem innocent, but it has a dark side. The problem is not just that pacifism disarms the Christian in the face of evil, although he certainly worried about that. Moralism can also tempt us to bring the eschatological conflict between good and evil into the present, setting up an all-or-nothing conflict between the Children of Light, who have attained “moral clarity,” and the Children of Darkness, whom we deem moral monsters. With this Manichean framing of conflicts, a sentimental moralist easily flips and becomes a crusader who seeks to annihilate evil, and this attitude can lead to the unrestrained use of violence, sanctified by supposedly noble aims. Put simply, if we deem war-making immoral, then when events drive us to take up arms, we’re all too likely to make war in immoral ways.

As a native German speaker, Niebuhr was well informed about the wickedness of Hitler’s regime. He knew that we must “make discriminate judgments between social systems.” This is always the case. In the face of Russia and China, we need to make judgments, recognizing that the American-led system is much to be preferred. But in so doing, we must maintain critical self-awareness. “The Christian faith ought to persuade us that political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners.” God’s righteousness is pure, and it has triumphed in Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection, but its final dominion over human affairs occurs in the “not yet” of eschatological fulfillment, not in our worldly projects here and now. Even the best causes are entangled with the corrupting effects of original sin.

In his later writings, Niebuhr calls this awareness of the “not yet” a tragic view of history. In Christ, we have a glimpse of perfect love and its triumph over sin and death. We see that the principalities and powers that rule this world have been defeated. In prayer, worship, and acts of charity we can enter into the victory. But this is not the case in public affairs. Until Christ’s return in glory, we must discern our collective responsibilities as a nation, knowing that we can attain only a relative justice. This is especially true in the face of violence, when sword must be met by sword.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the leading spokesmen for “secular perfectionism” were not pacifists, as had been the case in the 1930s. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, those claiming the moral high ground were advocates of a new world order, a liberal-democratic consensus that promised to knit the world together in peace and prosperity. It was assumed that economic globalization would lead to the spread of liberal democracy. The rise of social media in the twenty-first century added further confidence. The democratization of information, we hoped, would ­hasten the democratization of nations. In addition to these liberalizing dynamics, which were thought to be nearly inevitable, the human rights agenda was expanded and claimed to express a global consensus. A utopian dream flourished. Many in the triumphant West believed that the world was poised to make a transition from never-­ending great-power competition to enduring internationalism, a perpetual peace that would be overseen by newly founded institutions such as the International Criminal Court.

One of the ironies of history was that some of the most effective proponents of the global project were realists.The George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations saw economic globalization as a tool for expanding American power. The George W. Bush administration married democracy promotion—an idealistic element of the post-Cold War consensus—to a vast expansion of U.S. military operations in the Middle East. Old hands knew that our vaunted principles often bowed to American security interests. (Except for a few years, Japan has been ruled by the same party since 1955, hardly a sign of a vital liberal democracy, and yet our leaders neither mention nor object to this reality, because the long-ruling party has ensured Japan’s role as a loyal and pliable ally.)

Unfortunately, the marriage of American realism to liberal-democratic idealism failed in some instances. Iraq provides the signal example. But it succeeded in others. We owe our ability to impose punitive sanctions on Russia to the architects of Wall Street’s massive expansion, the foundations of which were laid in the 1990s. Critics denounce these developments as triggering “financialization.” Perhaps, but they ensured that the worldwide web of finance would fall under Washington’s regulation, which means under our political control. (I worry, however, that a too aggressive use of sanctions against Russia will encourage the balkanization of the global financial system, and thus weaken our control—but that’s a topic for another time.)

The American-led global project has always had proponents more intoxicated by its moral ambitions than by realist reasoning. These idealists became prominent as practical problems emerged in the global system in the twenty-first century. The 2008 financial crisis exposed systemic weaknesses. The off-shoring of manufacturing accelerated, hollowing out the American middle class. Our nation-building projects in the Middle East failed. The color revolutions brought conflict, chaos, and renewed authoritarianism rather than liberal democracy. It was not surprising, therefore, that during the Obama administration American elites amped up the idealism. The realist rationales for what was by then a neoliberal status quo had become less plausible. A sentimental moralism was ascendant, quick to appeal to “the better angels of our nature” rather than to sober assessments of the limits of American power.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has ­prompted another upsurge in moralism. We are told that American ideals of freedom and democracy must guide our foreign policy. Editorials claim that Russian forces are guilty of genocide and war crimes. The West must not only stymie Vladimir Putin’s military efforts by means of military aid and economic sanctions. We must bring Putin to justice!

In some quarters, the cry has been raised for more forceful uses of American power. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in early March, former senator Joe Lieberman called for the United States to escalate her engagement. He urged the Biden administration to impose a “no-fly” zone over Ukraine. “We cannot stand back and allow this mass murder from the air to continue.” Former assistant secretary of defense Bing West argued that our goal should not be limited to defending Ukrainian sovereignty. He called for ongoing, even intensified sanctions until Putin is removed from power. We must seek regime change!

A nearly universal outrage over the Russian invasion animates these calls for no-fly zones, stiffer sanctions, MiG jets, deadly drones, and other measures. It’s not too much to say that the mainstream media have framed the conflict in Ukraine as the Children of Light versus the Children of Darkness. America, the righteous nation, must face down the architects of evil.

I have no difficulty saying whose side I am on. I wish Vladimir Putin every failure. But as Niebuhr notes, “the spirit of contrition is an important ingredient in the sense of justice.” We do well to cultivate it at this ­moment.

For those anguished by reports of destroyed buildings and civilian casualties, I recommend pictures of Raqqa, the Syrian city that ISIS made its capital. As Time magazine reported, “One day after U.S.-backed Syrian militias defeated the Islamic State in the country’s capital, the town is an urban husk of hollow buildings and bodies lying in rubble-strewn streets.” The United States had good reason to seek the defeat of ISIS and other insurgent groups. Nevertheless, it’s worth meditating on the untold destruction wrought by American intervention in the Middle East over the last two decades. This certainly does not justify the Russian invasion, which is without just cause. Nor does it excuse violations of just war principles, as may have occurred in Russian operations in Ukraine. But it ought to dampen our moral hauteur.

And when we fling charges of war crimes, we do well to recall the U.S. drone attack in the final days of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was based on faulty intelligence, resulting in the massacre of ten civilians, seven of whom were children. The tragic truth of warfare, especially modern warfare, is that it invariably inflicts suffering and death on the innocent.

Again, it is important to emphasize that acknowledging the human costs of war should not undermine our resolve to resist unjust aggression. Niebuhr was opposed to moral paralysis, a condition easily encouraged by perfectionist ethics. But we should be self-aware. Those living in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries that have witnessed the massive firepower of the U.S. military are very likely to find our ­denunciations of the indiscriminate destructiveness of Russian assaults self-serving and hypocritical.

And let us not be deceived about the circumstances that put Ukraine on the front lines of this great-­power conflict. No honest policymaker in Washington can deny that America has sought to support a Western-oriented government in Kyiv, and that we have done so not solely out of solicitude for the people of that country. Ukraine has been an instrument of our foreign policy, which seeks to stymie Russia’s ambitions. Acknowledging this fact does not require us to conclude that making Ukraine a thorn in Putin’s flesh is wrong or immoral. Nor should we discount the will of the Ukrainian people, manifest in their heroic efforts to fend off Russian forces. But we must acknowledge the role of America’s decades-long policy of pressing our sphere of influence to Russia’s borders. Absent that policy, previous Ukrainian governments might have sought a modus vivendi with Moscow, thus averting war and subjugation.

One may deem our policy of expanding NATO and then dangling the possibility of Ukraine’s admission to the alliance unwise and reckless. A number of pundits have said as much. But that’s water under the bridge. At this juncture, the United States is implicated in the conflict. We have responsibilities.

Those responsibilities have to do with far more than Ukraine. As I have noted, after the end of the Cold War, the United States sponsored the erection of the present global system, for which our country serves as the economic and military anchor. That system is being challenged by Russia and China. Whatever one thinks of our liberal-democratic empire (if I may be permitted the e-word), it would be irresponsible to abandon it. Our allies depend on it. Furthermore, the system is American in conception and the product of our leadership, which means that now it is intertwined with our national interest. Thus, whether our aim is to sustain, reconfigure, or retract America’s global commitments, in the here-and-now we have a duty to manage those commitments well. Thus the question for the Christian realist: How are we to think morally about this responsibility without falling into the trap of sentimentalism?

During the Cold War, Niebuhr urged moderation. In the face of a powerful and dangerous Soviet adversary, he warned against both pusillanimity and rashness. American leaders were to seek the mean, a stance of prudent and measured resolve. In view of the risk of escalation to nuclear war, avoiding direct military engagements with the Soviets was imperative. In 2022, our confrontation with Russia is different, and at this point less dire. But the imperative of preventing direct engagement still obtains. Only a supercilious moralism could justify actions that are likely to trigger expansion of the conflict into NATO countries, which would draw the United States into combat and risk escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.

As Niebuhr recognized, one of the signal dangers of sentimental moralism is that it underwrites the “at any cost” mentality, and in so doing sidelines the virtue of prudence and undermines the conditions for morally responsible action in a fallen world. When we see ­horrifying images of destruction, it’s understandable that we pine for forceful action. But our leaders need to weigh carefully the political and strategic costs, which, if ignored, will lead to the erosion of America’s global influence.

In the main, I think the Biden administration gets decent marks from a Christian realist, or at least it does at the time I’m writing this column in late March. Although the administration has not allowed us to be drawn into direct military conflict with Russia, it has endorsed Ukraine’s right to national self-­determination and supported its efforts of self-defense in material ways. Our leadership has drawn formerly reluctant ­NATO allies into a more unified stance than anyone imagined was possible before the invasion.

Moscow may be able to wring concessions from ­Kyiv, should a peace be negotiated. This outcome is sure to anguish the moral perfectionist. But the nation of Ukraine seems likely to survive. And perhaps Putin will have learned that the West is not fractured and feckless—nor reckless—but united and capable of gathering itself for forceful action. As Niebuhr recognized, this knowledge offers a more powerful deterrent to future aggression than anything we constructed while we dreamt of a liberal-democratic empire that would put an end to history.

The Valley of the Fallen

High as a fifty-story skyscraper, the soaring cross northwest of Madrid is the largest in the world. It sits atop a granite outcrop that overlooks a Benedictine monastery to the west and, to the east, a gigantic neo-classical plaza that stretches out before a vast underground crypt carved into the hillside. Behind the crypt’s many altars are the remains of an estimated forty thousand soldiers, killed during the Spanish Civil War.

The complex is called Valle de los Caídos, the “Valley of the Fallen.” General Franco ordered its construction as a memorial for the war dead. He called the dedication of funds and the extraordinary scope of the monumental architecture a “national act of atonement.” After his death in 1975, Franco was buried beside the main altar in the crypt.

In early March, a conference took me to Madrid, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to visit on the first Sunday of Lent. The Valley of the Fallen is one of the grandest expressions of twentieth-century monumental architecture. The classical proportions of the arches that frame the crypt’s entrance bespeak the humanism that motivated the Renaissance revival of this architectural tradition, yet the memorial is executed on a scale so enormous that the result overawes a visitor.

My warm interest in visiting was stoked by my awareness of the historical moment in which we live. Like Monument Avenue in Richmond, the Valley of the Fallen may be erased in the near future. In a recent essay (“The Politics of Memory,” May 2021), the eminent historian of modern Spain Stanley Payne detailed the ways in which the Spanish left continues to fight that country’s civil war, using the power of government to eliminate Franco from public memory. The socialist government that held power from 2004 to 2011 undertook a thoroughgoing campaign to remove Franco’s image and other symbols of his regime from public spaces and buildings.

It was natural, therefore, that the Valley would come under attack. Before 2004, it was one of the most visited national parks in Spain. In the main, its popularity reflected not a nostalgic desire for a return of authoritarian rule, but instead a piety toward the tragedy of fraternal conflict, not unlike the sentiments that led those who survived the Civil War to consecrate battlefields in the United States. Moreover, one need not endorse every aspect of Franco’s rule, and especially not its authoritarian character, to recognize that his regime preserved Spanish civil society from destruction by the left-wing ideological fevers that destroyed so much in the twentieth century, allowing Spain to become a stable democracy after Franco’s death.

Among the measures to erase Franco’s memory, a socialist government in 2009 declared the Valley’s structures “unsafe” and closed the site to visitors. A subsequent center-right government reopened the ­Valley. But as power once again shifted to the left, efforts were redoubled. In 2019, Franco was exhumed and his remains translated elsewhere. Funds for repair of the structures in the Valley are being withheld. Proposals have been floated to have the towering cross removed, the monastery shuttered, and the crypt, which Pope John XXIII declared a basilica, deconsecrated. ­Christianity and its cross are deemed “divisive.”

I don’t discount the unique reasons that Spain continues to relitigate her agonizing civil war. But it is also the case that the neo-classical architecture of the ­Valley of the Fallen and its Christian iconography rankle twenty-first-century progressives, not just in Spain, but throughout the West. The monumental aesthetic is a stick in the eye of postmodern conceits, which emphasize aesthetics of deconstruction and disorientation that undermine authority. If the current government remains in power, the Valley may suffer the same fate as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the monumental statues in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the ­Taliban in 2001.

The dreary spirit of left-wing iconoclasm had little hold on my mind when I visited. That morning the sun shone brightly in the plaza, which is large enough to accommodate tens of thousands. ­Madrid’s modern glass buildings were visible thirty miles to the east. The snow-covered mountains north of ­Madrid rose majestically in the distance. Pine forests in the surrounding parkland presented an inviting prospect.

The Benedictines run a choir school attached to the monastery, training young voices that blended in Renaissance polyphony, echoing in the enormous domed sanctuary carved into the granite mountainside. The monastery’s abbot preached about the three temptations of Christ in the desert. My grasp of Spanish is minimal, and thus in the cascade of foreign words I meditated on the second temptation, which in Luke’s account has ­Satan showing Jesus the kingdoms of this world, promising him all authority and glory if he will but worship him. It’s such a sweet dream: finally gaining command over history, bending its arc, bulldozing symbols of oppression, and designing a new and inclusive world order in which all are affirmed and celebrated.

WHILE WE’RE AT IT

♦ Daniel Mahoney, sometime professor of political philosophy, has launched a regular column at ­RealClearBooks: “A Monthly Guide to Thoughtful Reading.” Mahoney draws attention to “thoughtful and engaging books” that, without getting mired in academic jargon, speak to intelligent readers who wish to entertain sophisticated and consequential ideas. His March column discusses a new book on ancient Greek ­historians—and the great texts themselves—as well as books on Robespierre and happiness. Dan Mahoney is among the most well-read people I know. I look forward to his monthly recommendations.

♦ You might remember the story about Hunter Biden. In the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, ­Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported the discovery of a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop. The hard drive contained a trove of emails showing how then-candidate Joe Biden’s son had connived to cash in on his father’s political connections. At the time, CIA experts deemed the whole affair a likely instance of Russian disinformation. Mainstream media ignored the story. Facebook suppressed discussion. Twitter closed down the Post’s account for two weeks.

A 2021 book by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger examined the Biden family’s activities over the years. Schreckinger demonstrated the authenticity of the emails. And on March 16 of this year, the New York Times, which had denied the authenticity of the emails in 2020, published an article about a Justice Department inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs. A key element of that investigation concerns “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.” In other words, the story ­reported in the Post—and ignored, censored, and suppressed by the New York Times and its media allies—was true.

Commenting on these revelations, Glenn Greenwald describes the whole affair as “one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history.” CIA experts, former Democratic operatives in key positions at social media companies, and the editors and reporters in purportedly responsible mainstream media conspired to deceive the public. “With strength of numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence,” writes Greenwald, “endors[ing] a disinformation campaign.” The admission by the New York Times “that this archive and the emails in it were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions.”

No doubt the fraud and disinformation were justified in the minds of those who orchestrated the suppression of truth as necessary to save “our democracy.” And I’m sure that no editor, reporter, Big Tech executive, or government official will suffer the slightest punishment. On the contrary, their careers are likely to flourish. Meanwhile, the marginal and ineffectual people who stormed the Capitol without the slightest hope of affecting our political system are being sent to prison.

♦ Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Nathan Pinkoski returns to Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949, ­Stanley Payne’s 2011 book about social disintegration and conflicts in the disastrous first half of the twentieth ­century. Drawing on Payne’s historical research, ­Pinkoski observes that civil war erupted in Spain because the supposedly responsible centrist figures in power had winked at the left’s violence while punishing the right: “Centrist authorities were unable or unwilling to stop attacks on private property, businesses, ­churches, convents, and clergy. Instead, they blamed the victims, arresting not the actual perpetrators but scapegoating monarchists and conservatives.” We are not, ­fortunately, anywhere near the kind of social breakdown that catapulted Spain into three years of brutal civil war. But there are disturbing parallels, one of which is the way our powerful establishment institutions lie and censor without consequences while canceling dissent and howling about the claims of electoral fraud made by Trump and his allies.

♦ Charles Péguy: “We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.”

♦ Nadine Strossen teaches at New York Law School. Former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, she’s not remotely conservative. Here is what she told Aaron Sibarium in an interview about the atmosphere in legal education today: “I massively self-censor. I assume that every single thing that is said, every facial gesture, is going to be recorded and potentially ­disseminated to the entire world. I feel as though I’m operating in a panopticon.” In the same article (“The Takeover of America’s Legal System”), Sibarium quotes law professor Katie Stith: “Law schools are in crisis. The truth doesn’t matter much. The game is to signal one’s virtue.” The rising illiberalism infects the entire legal profession. A high-powered attorney in Washington, D.C. (who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals) told Sibarium, “Partners are being blindsided by associates who they think are liberals in their own image. But they’re not. The associates want to burn the place down.”

♦ The law students and young lawyers bent on destroying our liberal traditions of free speech, due process, and judicial neutrality are not the products of communist summer camps in the Catskills. They were formed by mainstream educational institutions that have been dominated by establishment liberals for ­nearly a century. Put simply, the environment created by a dominant liberal elite has produced the radicalism that now undermines the pillars of the American ­culture of freedom.

♦ I recently went back to reread one of the great American liberals, John Dewey. In his 1920 book, ­Reconstruction in Philosophy, he insisted that the definitive test of a rational argument rests in its political ­effectiveness. “Logic” is a “clarified and ­systematized formulation of the procedures of thinking . . . [that] will enable the desired reconstruction [of society] to go on more economically and efficiently.” According to ­Dewey, something is true if it contributes to ­progressive causes; it is false if it fails to do so. The same holds for justice. Are the woke law students rued by their liberal professors operating otherwise than Dewey ­advises?

♦ When I began as editor here, I adopted a policy of not allowing authors to use pseudonyms. My reasoning was simple: We need to take responsibility for our arguments, and that means standing up in public and acknowledging that they are ours. But I’ve changed my view. Today’s atmosphere of intimidation has grown toxic as Twitter mobs roam the virtual landscape looking for dissenters to load into tumbrils. Baby Boomer leaders have proven feckless, often acceding to demands that those who venture disfavored views must be fired. In the present moment, the protection afforded by ­anonymity is often necessary.

♦ On March 25–26, we held an intellectual retreat in Phoenix. The theme was freedom. The syllabus and seminar leaders were provided by Wyoming Catholic College. This allowed me to participate, free from pedagogical responsibilities. The discussions of Pericles, St. Paul, Milton, and the other assigned authors were vigorous and stimulating. On my return home, I marveled at my good fortune. Few editors are as fortunate as I am to have such well-read and intellectually engaged readers. Many thanks to our partners at Wyoming Catholic College for guiding us through another successful ­intellectual retreat.

♦ I am sad to report the departure of Matthew Schmitz, who worked beside me from the very first day of my role as this magazine’s editor. He has joined forces with Sohrab Ahmari and Edwin Aponte to launch Compact, a new e-magazine. It’s an exciting venture, and I wish Matthew every success.

♦ Patrick Wheeler is forming a ROFTERS group in Land O’ Lakes, Florida. You can reach him at ­jpatwheel@gmail.com.

In the area of Sammamish/Bellevue, Washington, Kathi Lehr is forming a ROFTERS group. To join, contact her at kathilehr@comcast.net.

The Chicagoland ROFTERS group has shifted its meetings to Wheaton, Illinois. If you would like to join, contact Andrey Drozd: andrey.n.drozd@gmail.com.

The post Christian Realism About Ukraine appeared first on First Things.

As the sacrifice of the Mass is being offered, the priest pours a drop of water into the chalice, praying sotto voce, “By the mystery of this water in wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” At the heart of Christ’s oblation is thus a desired deification, a thirst for theosis, and a share in Jesus’s own eternal filiality before the Father.

Yet the Church’s contemporary understanding of salvation in Christ, as the University of Notre Dame’s Khaled Anatolios offers in his latest book, is “befuddled” at best. Try asking a modern-day Christian what might be meant by such concepts as atonement or deification. Even among scholars, there is a widespread—and mistaken—suspicion that Western and Eastern accounts of salvation are in tension with each other. As Anatolios shows, this misunderstanding has contributed to the current malaise. We need a comprehensive, orthodox theology of salvation. With his unmatchable style and magisterial insights, ­Anatolios has risen to the challenge.

The deification we long for, as Anatolios emphasizes, is realized through a prior recognition of our absolute need for it; it is a glory attainable only through the honest admission that the Cross of Jesus Christ is the result of our own turn away from God. But the key message of the Cross is about more than healing the wounds of sin; it opens the way to glorification. In ­Anatolios’s phrase, we are brought by the Cross to a “doxological contrition.” By “doxological,” Anatolios wants readers to see the logic—or, better, the ­praxis—of the glorification of redeemed humanity promised in Christ. That is why he insists that we cannot understand ourselves truly without the crucified (contrition) and resurrected (doxological) Christ as a mirror. On Calvary is found the perfect realization of ­Jesus’s healing of humanity’s original rejection of God’s intimacy: not only a restoration to the original integrity of Eden, but something much more as well, the glorification of that same human race in (and as) Jesus Christ, an elevation to eternal fellowship with God. To be judged righteous in Christ, the main thrust of the Western doctrine of atonement, is ultimately to be loved; it is to be brought into a wholeness that no human virtue or effort could attain. The Good News of a crucified savior is fully and finally realized in this remission of sin that opens the way to theosis, the classical term for a real and assimilative participation in the life of God.

To show how this is, these pages rely on the concept of a holy contrition, a sanctifying sorrow for one’s sins. In a way, Anatolios spells out the implications of Gaudium et Spes §22:

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. . . . Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.

In other words, Jesus Christ shows us not only who God is but who we can be, if we would but abandon our self-love and live in and for him.

Without Christ, our sins and brokenness define us; without Christ, we are surrounded only by destruction and death, doubts and denial. With him we see a path forward, a “way” that brings us low in contrition so that we can be lifted up in newness of life. In the main, Anatolios’s twenty-­first-century call to know our divine dignity is nothing new. As a very early (ca. first to third century a.d.) Ode of Solomon proclaimed: “Behold, the Lord is our mirror. Open your eyes and see them in him, learning the manner of your face.”

We can think of this “lifting up” as “Christification,” or as St. Paul puts it, “to clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14). To develop this understanding of the Cross of Christ as opening the way to theosis, the book is divided into two main sections. The first takes up the foundational, mainly patristic, sources for this claim, rooting doxological contrition solidly in the Byzantine liturgy, then in sacred Scripture, and finally in conciliar decrees.

The liturgy immerses believers in the inseparable work of God in Christ on the Cross and in the Resurrection. In liturgy, both death and death’s defeat are re-presented as an exchange of natures, wherein our humanity is not only healed but also “lifted up to the heights of divine glory and seated at the right hand of the Father.” We receive and enter into the Spirit’s promise of a consummate cleansing of our sinful passions, a cleansing that manifests in us “the fullness of trinitarian ­glory.”

This elevation is also the result of rightly reading and living the gospel. An ecclesial reading of the Scriptures shows us how the consubstantial and perfect imago Dei (Col. 1:15–29; Heb. 1:3) has come as a man to realize the glory meant for all mankind, creatures made ad imaginem Dei. The Scriptures, Anatolios shows, should be read as a coherent whole: an unbroken arc between creation, sin, and full redemption, making up one ultimate and inspired story of salvation.

This unbroken arc continues in the life of the Church. Anatolios’s treatment of the first seven ecumenical councils relies on an orthodox understanding that the Church is the Body of Christ, an extension of Christ’s own divine and human life. All students of theology need to read this chapter carefully. Though Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) are traditionally brought into the conversations Anatolios seeks, his insights into how the other early councils advance an invitation to deified glory are remarkable and convincing. For example, by presenting the human person as the priest of all creation, empowered to lift up all that is to the Father’s glory, Nicaea II’s (787) defense of icons shows how “the worship of Christ appropriately includes the veneration of all matter with reference to its relation to the materiality of Christ and its inclusion within the worship of Christ.”

Section two treats ­Anatolios’s thesis concerning the necessary connection between atonement and theosis in a more systematic manner. He discusses the theological implications of Trinitarian glory, humanity’s glory as partaking in that same Trinity, the doxological deformation of human sinfulness, salvation as re­integration into the person of Christ, and then how this concept of doxological contrition can be in fruitful dialogue with contemporary theological movements and thinkers.

The chapters treating the ­Trinity demand a theological mind and a careful eye. The central concern here demonstrates how the interpersonal glorification of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitutes the nature of the triune God—­divine persons eternally constituted to love and be loved. That same gift of self is fittingly extended into the created order and defines the way in which angelic and human persons are to understand themselves.

Anatolios next puts to rest the caricatures that have historically pitted an Eastern view of salvation as ­deifying glorification against Rome’s supposedly legalistic understanding of penal atonement. Ever since the Great Schism of 1054, there has been a debilitating juxtaposition of Eastern and Western ­theories of salvation. Mutual caricatures harm not only ecumenical relations but, more importantly, our understanding of the gospel. We hear all too often that the West conceives of salvation solely in terms of pardon or forgiveness, “ransomed,” as it were, by Christ’s obedient sacrifice on the cross. But this keeps God at arm’s length. We enjoy the fruit of his love, but do not enter into that love, the promise and invitation that sound so loudly in the Gospel of John.

By contrast, the East supposedly downplays such legalism and emphasizes instead our deifying participation in Christ, which alone renders mortals into gods. However, as Anatolios shows (and a fair reading of figures such as Anselm and the later medievals and early moderns supports), the Greek and Latin traditions should be allowed to speak in one voice concerning salvation, despite their various emphases. The Latin tradition may at times stress atonement, the bridge Christ erects by which we travel from our present sinful bondage to free fellowship with God, while the Greek tradition may highlight the ways in which that fellowship brings us into the glory of God, but both in their own ways proclaim the reality of theosis.

This desire to unite East and West comes through in another, more ­unexpected place: in ­Anatolios’s treatment of the implications of human sinfulness. The East’s understanding of sin emphasizes an ontological rupture, that all of ­creation now “groans” for divine union (Rom. 8:22), to be healed from the divine distance the sin of Adam brought upon all living things. By contrast, the West appears to stress personal fault and guilt. Anatolios unites these two tendencies by using Paul’s Letter to the Romans to show how all sin rests in claims to a counterfeit glory (Gen. 3:5; Rom. 1:28). Our bondage to sin arises because God allows us to be “handed over” to our own attempts at deification. All stand guilty in the doomed project of self-glorification, and the entire human race is in need of contrition, confession, and conviction. This is why the Christ has come to impart his Holy Spirit. As the New Adam, the Christ now saves all of creation through the free participation of all Adam’s children (think Laudato Si’) in his Spirit, as man is renewed as the good steward he was created to be.

In his suffering, Christ enjoys the most perfect vision of the Father’s glory, flowing from the greatest possible wisdom and love imaginable. His suffering is ­real (Matt. 27:46), but his crucifixion allows the ultimate limit of love (1 John 4:10) to be revealed, and thus to be recognized by those who in no way deserve it. In this way, the Cross not only reintegrates—brings peace to our souls, which are rent by sin’s futile endeavors—but elevates us to the divine life for which we were created. Anatolios develops this thesis in subtle conversation with the Thomistic tradition, focusing primarily on Matthias Scheeben (d. 1888) and Nicholas Cabasilas (d. 1392). He also engages fruitfully with liberation theology, René ­Girard’s mimetic theory, and penal substitution theories of atonement.

I began the review with a line from the Mass; let us conclude there as well. In her second Eucharistic prayer, the Catholic Church prays to the Father in gratitude, “giving thanks that you have held us worthy to be in your presence and minister to you.” This thanksgiving makes me wonder whether Anatolios has more work to do. He has provided a magnificent account of what God has done for us in Christ’s Cross and Resurrection. But how do we minister to God himself? How is the Almighty in need of our paltry assistance? The answer is anticipated in this book. Only in God’s taking ­creation personally—hypostatically—to himself in Christ are we able to minister to God, because only in the Son’s assumption of the human condition can we, heirs of Jesus Christ, find him in need, as Matthew 25 tells us. This extends theosis to the world, for in our acts of charity, we come to realize how extensive the Body of Christ really is. It stretches beyond the visible walls of the Church and into the streets and gutters and shelters of a world so broken that doxological contrition can be its only real remedy. This is where Khaled Anatolios takes us; this is precisely what Christ’s Church needs today.

David Meconi, S.J., is associate professor of historical theology at Saint Louis University.

The post The Ultimate Love appeared first on First Things.

The Court can perform this rescue operation without any rethinking of constitutional theory and even without a reliable majority on most questions of constitutional law. I leave aside the stimulating debates over whether to abandon or modify originalism. My aim in this essay is narrow. I wish only to show that a conventional right-wing jurisprudence—whether described as “originalist” or not—on a select number of questions is a mortal threat to the regime. The only question is whether the conservative majority will act decisively before it is too late.

To describe Americans as living under a “regime”—like Eastern Europeans living under communism during the Cold War—is to court dismay and disbelief. After all, the ­constitutional order that Americans founded in the eighteenth century remains recognizable. The forms of government—the periodic elections, the divided branches, the flag and seal—persist. The institutions of civil society—churches, schools, businesses, and associations—remain ­nominally independent of the state. No one event—an ­invasion, a coup, or victory in a civil war—marks the ascendancy of a new system of rule (although the late toppling of the old order’s monuments makes one wonder). For these reasons, a powerful faction of American conservatives dismisses critics of the regime as dangerous catastrophists.

At the same time, Americans endure affronts to their heritage that not long ago would ­scarcely have been imaginable. Mobs desecrate statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Hospital systems propose to withhold life-saving medicines based on race. The vice president celebrates political violence (and her administration’s Department of Justice seeks leniency for homicidal arsonists). Scholars submit professions of loyalty as a condition of hiring or advancement. Public school teachers urge children to sterilize themselves and mutilate their sex organs. Virtually every institution in American life boasts a permanent “­diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy. The United States government flies the rainbow and Black Lives Matter flags and funds the advance of woke ideology abroad.

These developments follow from the embrace of a new moral principle unknown to generations before the 1960s. In its most benign form, the principle is as follows: Any disparity in outcome between groups, whether defined by race, ethnicity, religion, or sex (or more recently, sexual practices and gender identification), is evidence of injustice. But that formulation turns out to be inadequate. The overrepresentation of black people in the National Basketball Association or of Indian ­Brahmins in medicine attracts neither comment nor criticism. Instead, the evil that the principle demands to be corrected is any over-­representation of the characteristics of any historically European population—heterosexual, white, and Christian. The demand for reduction in the power, status, and representation of such Americans we may call the “principle of equity.”

The principle of equity has not just advanced as an idea but become institutionalized. Public schools teach critical race theory. Universities boast multiple grievance studies departments and pledge tens of millions to increase faculty diversity, while their administrators—many of them answerable to student demands for adherence to the principle of equity—outnumber faculty. On his first day in office, President Biden ordered equity audits of every federal agency. The principle of equity, in short, is not just a moral aspiration. It is the fountainhead of a sprawling network of power. That network we may call the equity regime.

Mercifully, the equity regime is relatively mild. It will not soon be constructing a gulag to house dissidents. Nevertheless, like communism, which sought equality of material wealth, equity, which seeks equality of outcomes for those in protected ­classes, can be achieved only through coercion. Indeed, socialism is far less utopian than the doctrine of equity. Zealous intentional communities, from the Benedictines to the Shakers, can achieve common ownership of property. But no society has ever eliminated disparities among racial and ethnic groups or between the sexes. As Thomas Sowell has documented, set patterns of achievement and social capital persist among different populations in an extraordinary variety of political and social circumstances. Whatever the causes, which are probably deep and intractable, disparities among different groups have outlasted all the policies—from affirmative action and social handicaps to expulsion, dispossession, and massacre—ever adopted to erase them.

Only the equity regime’s hypocrisy prevents the principle of equity from taking more extreme forms. By the principle of equity, for example, colleges and professional schools should suspend the admission of whites for at least a generation, businesses should declare a moratorium on white male advancement, judges should favor the party who has more “intersectional” credit, and a special racial tax should be imposed to fund reparations. So far, the regime has yet to go to those extremes, but it is hard to identify a principled reason why not. (Ibram X. Kendi proposes a constitutional amendment that would indeed impose antiracist totalitarianism.) The doctrine of equity is perhaps silently held in check only by the many powerful white people—such as the Bush, Biden, Clinton, and Sulzberger clans—who, even as they profess support for the equity regime, would lose their own power and privileges if the regime consistently sought to achieve its goals.

Inevitably, however, the failure of the regime to realize the principle of equity gets noticed. It takes but one event to catalyze the next lurch toward the obliteration of the old American order. In 2020, after George Floyd died while in police custody, a nationwide orgy of arson, murder, and looting ensued. The ruling class did not condemn the violence or aid its victims. On the contrary, corporations and universities pledged billions more dollars for the cause of equity. A year later, their candidate for president announced that he would appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court—a wonderfully explicit commitment to discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

One cannot predict what, exactly, the coercive equity regime will target next. A decade ago, few imagined that biological males would find glory in humiliating girls in sports. After all, just a generation earlier, the principle of equity had forced the cancellation of male athletic programs (such as wrestling) on the theory that girls and boys are equally interested in sports and therefore should be able to join the same number of sports teams. Now it’s the turn of women’s sports to be the victim of the principle of equity. Likewise, ten years ago, it seemed unlikely that uttering a moral sentiment as old as the Axial Age—“all lives matter”—would be met with demands for struggle sessions and groveling apologies. The next manifestation of the principle of equity is arbitrary, as parents of transgender children are discovering. But that the next one is coming is certain.

Vast and inexorable as the coercive equity regime may appear, it is vulnerable. As can occasionally be seen, a willingness to exert political power can halt its progress. Thus parents can confront school boards that support shaming students for their whiteness, and voters can demand that prosecutors and politicians incarcerate criminals (regardless of race) and keep streets and neighborhoods safe. Americans can and should resist this or that extension of the principle of equity where they can.

Meanwhile, one institution—the Supreme Court—has the power to defeat the regime altogether. To do so, the Court need only follow through on a small number of constitutional reappraisals of civil rights doctrine that it developed in the decade and a half after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, reappraisals that already enjoy wide acceptance in the conservative legal establishment. In other words, no radical overhaul is needed. The Court, aided by the work of activists who can bring the necessary cases and controversies, need only do what conservatives for decades have hoped their pipeline of favored nominees would accomplish.

Hostile work environment. Under the theory of hostile work environment discrimination, an employer can be held liable merely for tolerating what anyone in a protected class might deem offensive. To be sure, a plaintiff can prevail only if the offensive conduct is severe and pervasive. But those standards are vague. A prudent corporate executive seeks to avoid liability, and this means adopting a zero-tolerance policy that prohibits any speech or conduct that could offend. Further, to bolster their bona fides should they be sued, employers make sure to adopt the latest ideological fashions. These business imperatives in turn require human resource departments that formulate and enforce diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines. The result is that it is all but illegal to permit discussion of, say, the latest book by Charles Murray, and all but mandatory to endorse, say, the Black Lives Matter movement.

In short, hostile work environment law both promotes woke ideology and proscribes dissent. The Supreme Court can eliminate this systematic bias by holding that hostile work environment doctrine violates the constitutional right to free speech. Such a holding would not be especially radical. In the public school and university settings, two circuit court cases have held that anti-­harassment guidelines conflict with free speech rights. Even the once–notoriously progressive Ninth Circuit (though speaking through retired Reagan appointee Alex Kozinski) noted that an employer’s speech “is entitled to significant breathing space before it will be deemed harassment.” A conventionally conservative Supreme Court would be expected to hold that hostile work environment law violates the free speech clause. To be effective, the Supreme Court’s holding must limit the power of Congress, state and local governments, and administrative agencies to revive hostile environment claims. A case must be brought where hostile work environment guidance can be held facially invalid.

Disparate impact. The fons et origo of the equity regime is the theory of disparate impact liability in employment discrimination cases. First conjured by the Supreme Court in the 1971 case of Griggs v. Duke Power Company, disparate impact law allows a plaintiff in an employment discrimination case to prevail without evidence of discriminatory intent, simply by showing that a job requirement or hiring procedure has a disparate impact on the plaintiff’s protected class. Put in today’s parlance, disparate impact law assumes systemic racism.

In theory, a disparate impact claim does not automatically prevail, for the law allows businesses to defend a practice by proving “business necessity.” But that is a costly and uncertain prospect. For businesses, the practical import of disparate impact is clear: Any failure to achieve proportionate outcomes among groups is an invitation to a lawsuit. To avoid disparate impact claims, employers must monitor the race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual orientation of their employees to keep numbers up for those in protected classes. To be sure, overt discrimination remains technically unlawful, which partly explains why employers shroud their practices in the latest rhetoric of inclusion recommended by a permanent staff of “diversity” professionals. Nevertheless, achieving diversity means discriminating on the basis of race and ethnicity—the very practice Americans thought they had outlawed with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Justice Thomas has argued that Griggs should be overturned. Indeed, but the Court must go further. As Justice Scalia wrote in a 2009 concurrence, the day is coming when the Supreme Court must decide whether the government, through disparate impact law, can effectively compel employers to discriminate on the basis of race or other ascriptive characteristics. The Supreme Court should not shrink from providing an answer. As soon as the occasion arises, it should hold that disparate-­impact liability violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. To defeat the equity regime, disparate impact must not only be purged from civil rights law. It must be constitutionally cremated and buried, never again to be resurrected by Congress or government agencies.

Race-conscious admissions. The Court’s tortured affirmative action jurisprudence has simultaneously legitimized the doctrine of equity and revealed its absurdity. Almost twenty years ago, Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld race-conscious admissions on the theory that racial diversity in the student body serves a compelling state interest. (Before its elevation into a sacred value, “diversity” was one justice’s makeshift attempt in 1978 to rationalize racial discrimination in university admissions.) But O’Connor added that race-conscious admissions “must be limited in time,” and announced that the majority expected racial preferences to be unnecessary after twenty-five more years.

We are now nineteen years in, and racial gaps in test scores and GPA still show no sign of narrowing. Grutter itself was decided forty-two years after affirmative action had begun. Whether cynically or sincerely, O’Connor’s opinion postponed a reckoning on racial discrimination for one more generation. The ongoing failure to achieve proportionate outcomes among all groups—not just in universities, but in any domain of life—­pointedly demonstrates the folly of trying or expecting it ­ever to happen. Why aren’t more firefighters women? Why aren’t more men nurses? Why are there so few black tax lawyers? And what about ensuring roles for transgender persons in movies?

In the pending cases in which Students for Fair Admissions is suing both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, asking the court to overturn Grutter, the Supreme Court must do more than reject “diversity” as a legitimate pretext for discriminating on the basis of race or other characteristics. Surely the Court knows that striking down affirmative action as unconstitutional will provoke resistance on a scale to dwarf the “massive resistance” attempted in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Segregationists in the 1950s represented but one divided region of the country, a region held in disdain by the richest and most powerful people of that era. By contrast, the practitioners of affirmative action control every powerful institution in America. To counter the inevitable backlash, the Supreme Court must give Americans the weapons they need to stop quota-driven discimination altogether.

The crucial move is to elaborate a burden-­shifting framework that will make it impossible for universities to camouflage the practice of discrimination. First, the Court should hold that, in light of decades of covert discrimination, any concealment or obsfucation of admissions criteria will be treated as conclusive evidence of a constitutional violation of equal protection (or in the case of a private university receiving federal financial assistance, a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act). For a university to defend against a claim of an equal protection violation, the Court should hold that it must disclose how many slots are available for which categories of admission, such as legacies, athletes, residents of particular areas, and children of major donors, as well as the academically gifted. Likewise, a defense must also require disclosure of what facially race-neutral methods, criteria, or formulae are applied to fill each category and the class as a whole.

But mere disclosure of targets and methods is not enough. Once a university discloses targets and methods, the Court should hold that a plaintiff has a prima facie case of discrimination if a university’s actual admissions results differ materially from the results that would be achieved if the purported methods were applied to the population at large. With a prima facie case established, the university can then seek to justify the deviation. Consistent with the Court’s jurisprudence that protects fundamental rights from violation, any justification must be strictly necessary and narrowly tailored to achieve a superior educational outcome.

This burden-shifting framework would have the effect of making it all but impossible for universities to discriminate in admissions on the basis of race or any other factor. Even the dishonest and covert discrimination of the past fifty years would be untenable. Moreover, the framework would be a massive embarrassment to the equity regime. It would force out into the open the reality that groups differ in performance. It does not even matter what metrics the universities choose. They could abandon IQ substitutes like the SAT and admit students based on skill at playing hopscotch—still, group differences would inevitably emerge. The requirement that actual admissions results match the distribution of sought-after ­talents and characteristics in the population at large would effectively elevate ­natural ­inequality—a reality that the Founders and our constitutional order once took for granted—into a constitutional principle.

Let utopians remain free to pursue their dreams of equality, as Robert Owen and others did theirs in the nineteenth century. But do not let them continue to employ the coercive powers of the state to impose their vision on others. Many say that the rising generation demands measures to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that institutions and companies that hope to recruit the best and brightest must comply with the equity regime. Fine, let woke college students make demands. But handing them the coercive power of our rule of law has been among the most irresponsible acts of recent decades. By requiring universities to justify in court any deviations from measurable inequalities, the Supreme Court can not only end government-protected racial discrimination but permanently discredit the doctrine of equity. Perhaps, after twenty-five years, it will no longer be necessary to continue the burden-shifting device. Only time can tell.

More radical theories. One can certainly imagine a more radical Court that is willing to take constitutional theories now considered “off the wall” and affix them to the wall of legitimate interpretation. Freedom of association, for example, is perhaps the most vital freedom of all in the American tradition of ordered liberty, yet it has been given short shrift by the Supreme Court, apart from a narrow category of expressive association. To take another example, an expansive definition of “­religion” for establishment clause purposes would imply that public schools cannot teach divisive secular religions such as wokeness. A Supreme Court that manifested a will to lead our country away from its current path to woke tyranny—a will that we very much need right now—could recognize freedom of association as a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s long-dormant Privileges or Immunities Clause, and it could use the Establishment Clause to cast doubt on the constitutionality of governing schools. Perhaps this seems a reach. But those who recognize the dangers posed by the ­coercive equity regime can certainly dream.

Americans often take solace in the thought that extremism must eventually bring a healthy reaction. “The pendulum will swing back,” they say. They assure themselves that what cannot go on must eventually come to an end. In reality, oppressive regimes can last indefinitely. The caste system in India—like wokeness, a sacralized system of subordination—has persisted for thousands of years. The doctrine of equity has already shown exceptional durability. For three generations, it has only advanced, paused, and advanced again. This is not because the doctrine of equity is popular. Given the chance, voters have rejected it, even in liberal bastions such as California. Rather, the doctrine of equity grinds on toward complete dominance because it has been awarded tremendous legal power to destroy dissenters. To defeat it will require leadership and the exercise of political power. The Supreme Court has the power. It only has to use it.

The post Defeating the Equity Regime appeared first on First Things.

To describe what was ­happening to them as “addiction” is not quite right. True, smartphones reshape the brain, and scrolling causes dopamine hits in kids that researchers claim are comparable to the effects of snorting cocaine. So “addiction” seems apt, and yet it misses a key point—that their reaction was designed. It is more proper to say that they were being “controlled.” What better word for Big Tech’s ­employment of some of the most talented neurologists, psychologists, and behaviorists in the world to induce narcotic-level attachment to their products?

Over the last several years, Big Tech has exerted ever more overt forms of social control. Tech firms nudge voters toward preferred candidates and poison the well for others; they recommend progressive talking points on their platforms and search engines despite lack of audience interest, while throttling opposing trends; they drop, or even seize the money of, conservative fundraising efforts on platforms like GoFundMe, while directly funding the campaigns of (sometimes violent) leftist groups; they shut down the accounts—that is, the voices—of users with benighted opinions, in coordination with federal bureaucrats, even to the point of deplatforming a sitting president; they surveil us constantly, cataloging our interests, relationships, politics, and religious beliefs; they auction off this information to the highest bidder—­including, increasingly, state actors. This attempt to exert control over American public life is a logical extension of Big Tech’s hold on us individually.

When did we exit the information superhighway and become ensnared in the web? Neil Postman predicted it in the 1990s, when he warned about the emerging dominion of the winners in the silicon-chip revolution and the erosion of individual competence and civic life.

“The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population,” Postman writes in The End of Education (1995). He puts it more bluntly in his best book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). Technological change, he says, creates “winners and losers.” When we are told that the rise of a particular technology is “inevitable,” and that progress inheres in a specific technological change, we should ask questions—above all, progress for whom? “To whom will the technology give greater power and freedom?” Postman asks. “And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it?” In the case of Big Tech, we know part of the answer. Those who surveil are the powerful, and the surveilled are the weak. “Digital natives”—a euphemism for teenagers watched perpetually by their devices—are the weakest of all.

Postman could occasionally sound a bit conspiratorial: “Those who have control over the workings of a particular technology accumulate power and inevitably form a kind of conspiracy against those who have no access to the specialized knowledge made available by the technology.” But he speaks here metaphorically. He means that one’s interests are shaped by the machines one uses and profits from. However roughly, ­technology defines action and thinking at the level of group instinct—much as class does. “Technology creates its own imperatives,” he says, “and, at the same time, creates a wide-­ranging social system to reinforce its ­imperatives.”

This may be what Adrian ­Vermeule had in mind when he coined “laptop class,” a term evoking the economic, political, social, and technological dynamics that have driven many proponents of the lockdowns. Isolation posed no threat to the laptop class, who were free to retreat into remote work. But it was a grave threat to those whose livelihoods and technologies required physical movement. This technological divergence manifested itself in the Canadian trucker standoff, where the digital lightness of the laptop (the truckers were de-banked and deplatformed) opposed the heavy, roaring, diesel-guzzling big rig. A techno-­politics met a technological reaction. The struggle in Canada was, among other things, a ­machine war.

But Postman’s concerns go deeper. He saw in digital technology an epochal change in American life. Digital technology would increase ignorance, change morals, debase public discourse, erase childhood, cheapen party politics, overwhelm the family, threaten democracy, and cripple the church. Born into a Democratic household, Postman considered himself a “conservative,” though of an idiosyncratic kind. He was sympathetic to conservative concerns in the 1980s about the destruction of the university. Other thinkers concentrated on the divisive politics of multiculturalism, or on providing theoretical explanations for curricular incoherence. Many, following John Henry Newman, proposed theological or ontological explanations. Postman had a different view: The cause was largely technological.

It begins with the invention of “information” by Samuel Morse, the man behind the Morse code. By “information” Postman means “statements about the facts of the world.” Not facts themselves, or “knowledge,” and “certainly not . . . wisdom.” Morse code, ­Postman explained, created a new kind of message, “anonymous, ­decontextualized,” and stripped of “human personality itself, as an aspect of communication.”

What it gained in directness, “­information” lost in detail, nuance, and above all relevance. What did it matter to the people of Topeka that there was a fire in New York, or a revolution in Italy? Or (today) that a child is transgender in ­Seattle? The principle birthed by Morse is that “the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-­making and action.”

This “context-free information” attacked the American mind. Trained to follow the arcs of sermons, books, the classics, and, above all, the Bible, the American mind was bombarded, and retrained, by this new mode of messaging. Our educational system had been arranged to prepare a literate citizenry. That old idea was overwhelmed by a new one that made the mind responsive to ephemera. Postman laments: “Information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and ­disconnected from theory, meaning, and purpose.” This describes our universities and public discourse equally. Flooded by information, our common life has been swept away.

To claims that TV would boost literacy, in Amusing Ourselves to Death(1985) Postman practically LOLed. By the time of Technopoly (1992), with the rise of the internet, which let loose a torrent of “information” into our homes, he despaired: “A family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all.” Harsh words. But thirty years later, the family has realized their truth, as individuals retreat to the isolation of their screens. Schools and churches were once critical to information control, and they have likewise been overrun, Postman says. He feared that nothing would emerge to impart order to the surging flood of information.

He was wrong. Something has, indeed, emerged. For it was soon discovered that one piece of information was of such value that the entire internet should be restructured to capture it. That information: you. Postman did not foresee that the internet, through the “search” function, would be turned back on us as a “one-way mirror” (to quote ­Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), through which we are constantly watched. The search is presented to us as a tool for looking outward, but in fact it is a biopsy. It “extracts” our interests, habits, convictions, hopes, friends, purchases, politics, exact ­location, and much more. Postman’s information crisis was solved by turning the astounding availability of information about very nearly everything into an occasion to gain information about a very specific thing: us. The vast ocean of digital information, which requires tools to navigate, became the pathway to control.

This system of control started by steering us to products. But now it does far more. Caution against the drums of war? You’ll be mobbed. Break a story damaging to candidate Biden? Deplatformed. ­Question mask efficacy? Fact-checked. Support Trump? De-banked. Challenge Fauci? Discredited for ­disinformation.

The elaborations will continue. With ever more objects being integrated into the system—bathrooms, doorways, menus, who knows what next—and with grotesque plans afoot to patch in even human beings themselves (see Facebook’s Metaverse), the possibilities for control are endless.

Postman sought to resist this development. “The aim of a genuine conservative in a technological age,” he writes in Conscientious Objections (1988), “is to control the fury of technology, to make it behave itself, to insist that it accommodate itself to the will and temperament of a people.” We must tame Big Tech. But we must also keep our eyes on the technologies of the future. For either they will be ours to govern, or we will be theirs. In the spirit of Postman, we must learn to ask, progress for whom?

The post Ensnared in the Web appeared first on First Things.

This is happening at a time when our political leaders offer a curious mix of arrogance and vindictiveness at home, and incompetence abroad. As a nation, we’ve turned abortion into a sacred right. We’ve lost control of our southern border. We’re obsessed with pronouns and confused sexuality. Parents are identified as domestic terrorists. Self-described Catholic public leaders act with astonishing hypocrisy. Meanwhile, Russia and China—as we’ve seen in Ukraine and Hong Kong, and may soon see in Taiwan—perceive us as weak, distracted, and bumbling. If I overstate these problems, it’s not by much. We increasingly seem to be a hegemon in decline, and other countries can sense it.

What does all this mean for us as Christians and citizens?

Our traditional political system presumes a civil society that pre-­exists and stands outside the full control of the state. In the American model, the state is (or was) meant to be modest in scope and constrained by checks and balances. Mediating institutions, such as the family, ­churches, and fraternal organizations, feed the life of the civic community. They stand between the individual and the state. And when they recede, the state fills the vacuum. Protecting these ­mediating institutions is therefore vital to our political freedom. The state rarely fears individuals, because indivi­duals can be isolated or ignored. Organized communities are a different matter. They can resist. And they can’t be ignored.

This is why, if one wants to revise the American story into a different kind of social experiment, a problem like the Catholic Church can be so annoying. She’s a very big community. She has strong beliefs. And she has an authority structure that’s hard to break—the kind that seems to survive every prejudice and persecution, even the mediocrity and worst sins of her own leaders.

As Christians, most of us have a deep love for our country. But America is not our final home. There is no automatic harmony between Christian faith and American democracy. For all its strengths, democracy has the potential for its own peculiar and very powerful kind of tyranny. In the words of the political philosopher ­Robert ­Kraynak, democracy ­advances “the forces of mass culture, which lower the tone of ­society . . . by lowering the aims of life from classical ­beauty, ­heroic virtues and otherworldly transcendence to the pursuits of work, material consumption and entertainment.” Human life is reduced “to a one-­dimensional materialism and [an] animal existence that undermines human dignity and eventually leads to the ‘abolition of man.’”

To put it another way: The right to pursue one’s happiness does not include a right to excuse or ignore evil in ourselves or anyone else. When we divorce our politics from a grounding in virtue and truth, we transform our country from a living moral organism into a golem of legal machinery without a soul.

Happiness, real happiness, is tied to wisdom, and wisdom grows out of risk and suffering, the beauty and hard edges of experiencing the real world. It’s never the result of commerce. We can’t “own” happiness. And it is never solitary. Happiness requires other people. The joy of a young mother is linked to the gift of life she makes to a new and unrepeatable soul in the act of birth—to the pain and effort she experiences in bearing her child. Happiness is either created and shared with others here and now, or remembered as moments shared with others in the past. This is why, even as he was beaten and starved in a Nazi death camp, the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl could know happiness and the interior freedom it brings when he remembered the love of his wife.

“Comfort” is a different thing. In its historic sense, this word—its Latin root is fortis—denotes fortification or strengthening, perhaps for spiritual action, perhaps through the ministrations of the Comforter, the ­Paraclete. The modern meaning is more debased: something ­producing physical ease. In our consumerist age, “comfort” is the emollient we place between ourselves and the facts of everyday life. It’s our insulation, our analgesic. The world can be a nasty and ­unforgiving place. Nobody wants to be cold in the winter when he can be warm, or hungry when he can eat steak. Comfort, in this sense, isn’t a bad thing in its place. But it becomes “happiness” in only one circumstance: when we provide it to another person; when we ease someone else’s suffering or burden.

America in 2022 has become a consumer culture that runs on the marketing, sale, purchase, and consumption of comfort. We like and want comfort because we are creatures with bodies that experience pleasure and pain. But we long for happiness. And deep down we all know which is which, and which is more important. We were made for something more than anesthesia. This is why a culture of pleasure and indulgence, a culture focused mainly on the pursuit of material well-­being, is never really a culture of joy. Comfort is about the self, about making things easier or escaping inconvenience. And when it’s the main course of a life and a civilization, it first dulls the appetite for happiness and then replaces it altogether.

A consumer culture ­diminishes hardship, but it also lowers our horizons to the here and now. Comfort is a costly habit to feed and a demanding habit to maintain. As Coco Chanel liked to say, the best things in life are free; the second-best things are very, very expensive. The greater a man’s need for comfort, the more he has to lose, the greater his fear of losing it, and the more firmly bound he is to this world and its uncertainties.

A culture committed to, and organized around, the pursuit of comfort can never really value nobility, honor, courage, or magnanimity—the qualities that distinguish us as human—because these things demand self-denial, and risk, and a belief in something or Someone greater than ourselves. Comfort lived as a guiding appetite produces mediocrity. It sedates the soul. The result is a resentment of any higher purpose in life as an unwanted distraction—or worse, a hostile intrusion. It’s useful to compare this kind of spiritual enfeeblement with the aggressive ambition and relentless work ethic of large segments of China’s defense, software, and other key industries. Work begins early and ends late. And this regimen, ultimately accountable to the Party, serves a higher purpose: the power and prestige of the nation. The words “weakness” and “decline” are absent from the contemporary Chinese vocabulary.

Worship of the self and its comforts, and worship of the state and its prestige, are both forms of idolatry. But it doesn’t take a genius to know which form of worship is more compelling and more powerful.

What shall we do about our situation? The way to create new life in any culture is to live our lives according to convictions that are greater than ourselves and shared with people we know and love. This path is very simple and very hard at the same time. It is the only way to make a revolution that matters.

When young people ask me how they can change the world, I tell them to love each other, get married, stay faithful to one another, have lots of children, and raise those children to be men and women of Christian character. Faith is a seed. It doesn’t flower overnight. It takes time and love and effort. Money is important, but never the most important thing. The future belongs to people with children, not with things. Things rust and break, but every child is a universe of possibility that reaches into eternity, connecting our memories and our hopes in a sign of God’s love across the generations.

To see the face of Europe in a hundred years, look to the faces of young Muslim immigrants. Islam has a future because Islam believes in children. Without a transcendent faith that makes life worth living, there’s no reason to bear children. And where there are no children, there is no imagination, no reason to sacrifice, and no future. At least six of Europe’s most recent and prominent national leaders had no children at all. It’s hard to avoid a sense that much of Europe is already dead or dying, and nothing prevents us from doing the same.

The America we now see ­emerging—an America ignorant or cynical toward religion in general and Christianity in particular—shouldn’t really surprise anyone. It’s a new America, made in America. Christians—including Catholics—helped create it with our eagerness to fit in, our distractions, and our lukewarm faith.

Too many people who claim to be Christian simply don’t know ­Jesus Christ. They don’t really believe in the gospel. They feel embarrassed by their religion and out of step with the times. They may keep their ­religion for its comfort value, or adjust it to fit their doubts. It doesn’t reshape their lives, because it isn’t real. And because it isn’t real, it has no transforming effect on their behavior, no social force, and few public consequences. Their faith, whatever it once was, is now dead.

We make history, not the other way around. We are not victims, or the helpless creatures of inevitable historical forces. Nothing is inevitable except the victory of Jesus Christ—and that includes what history finally says about the character of the nation we call America.

If we do not know and love ­Jesus Christ, and commit our lives to him, and act on what we claim to believe, everything else is empty. But if we do, so much is possible—including the conversion of at least some of the world around us. The only question that finally matters is the one Jesus posed to his apostles: “Who do you say I am?” Faith leads in one direction; the lack of it in another. But the issue is always faith—always and everywhere, whether we’re scholars or doctors or clergy or lawyers or mechanics. Do we really believe in Jesus Christ, or don’t we? And if we do, what are we going to do about it?

The vocation of a Christian ­disciple is to feed the soul as well as the mind; to offer the world a vision of men and women made whole by the love of God, the knowledge of ­creation, and the ­reality of things ­unseen; to see the beauty of the world in the light of eternity; to ­r­­ecapture the nobility of the human story, and the dignity of the human person.

This is the work that sets fire to the human heart. It starts the only kind of revolution that ­really ­changes anything: a revolution of love. Jesus said, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled. Our task is to kindle that blaze, and then use all our strength to help it grow.

This text is adapted from his Benedictine Leadership Institute Award remarks at Belmont Abbey College.

The post Fire Upon the Earth appeared first on First Things.

Our departure from the Enlightenment is apparent everywhere today. “Truth” is contested territory at all points on the political compass, whether in conservative cynicism about liberal bias in the “mainstream media” or liberal claims that “objectivity” is merely “whiteness” mystifying its own interests. First Things readers may not like the moral order that has become dominant in the wake of this shift, but one thing is clear: We are not in rationalist Kansas anymore. And Oz is fundamentally theological: founded on faith, or more accurately, a Babel of competing faiths.

I’ve written previously in these pages about my own struggle to come to grips with this postmodern turn, particularly where sex and gender are concerned. And reading Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender felt like meeting a fellow-traveler of sorts. Favale’s book, a bold effort to open diplomatic relations among feminism, postmodernism, and Catholic social teaching, navigates these sometimes-conflicting currents, taking full account of the intellectual paradigm shift that has rejected the Age of Reason.

The Genesis of Gender addresses what I regard as the central cultural (which is to say theological) struggle of the early twenty-first century: the proper relation between technology and the human person, particularly as it applies to women. This dispute is far from safely confined to academic feminism. Rather, our conclusions have profound ramifications for what it means to be human—whether in the terrain of commerce, our own embodiment, or the very survival of humans as a species. And in our now ­pervasively post-Enlightenment discourse, rational argument is increasingly unequal to the task of deciding this contest.

Favale presents this controversial theme through the lens of autobiography. Raised in a conservative evangelical household, she embraced feminism in college before converting to Catholicism in her early thirties. In recounting her own journey, she addresses a question by no means unique to her: How can anyone with feminist sympathies embrace traditional Christian belief, especially if one participates in a broader discourse that often treats these positions as irreducibly antagonistic?

Feminism, Favale believes, cannot be dismissed out of hand. Rather, it “rightly recognizes that something is amiss, that the relationship between men and women has been too often characterized by domination.” But she questions the solution that has become mainstream feminist doctrine: a worldview she calls the “gender paradigm.” This worldview separates “gendered” social roles and attributes from embodiment and admits of no intrinsic connection between our physiology and our interests, attributes, or social roles.

Favale proposes a different paradigm for understanding sexed human existence: an incarnational, Christian anthropology that speaks not merely of “the human” in a disembodied, abstract sense, but of men and women as we live together. In the “divinely revealed poetry and allegory” of Genesis, men and women are depicted as created beings, interdependent and complementary in physiology and equally possessed of the divine spark. Drawing on John Paul II, Favale argues that this picture of divinely ordered interdependence extends as well to our existence as ensouled bodies. Favale presents Genesis as a picture of human relations in their proper, prelapsarian order: the relations of men and women, and of each human soul with embodiment.

But this easy harmony, this “serene community of love,” was disrupted by the Fall. The loss of Eden marks “a fracture in the original spiritual-somatic unity of the individual,” leaving each of us at war with ourselves. And in this fallen condition, the body is no longer “integral to the self” but “something that must be tamed and controlled.” From this point, too, men and women are set against one another, in conflict, mistrust, and a never-­ending contest for dominance.

Favale is careful to avoid simplistic equivalences between the complementarity of body and soul, and of men and women. As she explains, feminist theologians have often questioned an analogy that is sometimes taken to imply that women are “flesh” and men “spirit.” Rather, in sharp contrast with the recurrent theme of negative liberty in feminist thought, it is in the interdependence of man and woman, body and soul, that we find the parallel.

Here Favale’s vision ­diverges from mainstream feminism, a worldview whose emphasis on individual autonomy sets women against the limits imposed by the sexed reality of our bodies. Embodiment itself becomes a problem to be solved—­particularly our reproductive potential. As Favale acknowledges, feminism is a rich and fractious tradition. But she traces a line from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s atomized understanding of selfhood to ­Simone de Beauvoir’s definition of “freedom for women” as—in Favale’s words—“freedom from femaleness.” Throughout this trajectory, liberation has come to be viewed as an escape from our sexed ­embodiment.

This picture of neutering as liberation, Favale argues, underwrote the movement to legalize abortion in the mid-twentieth century, which—particularly in America—indelibly associated women’s ability to attain full personhood with control over our fertility. For many, reproductive technologies became indispensable tools in the feminist battle to rebalance the sexual asymmetry between men and women, ensuring that women, like men, could live as sexual beings without carrying the main burden of fertility.

Favale argues that it was this widespread social and legal embrace of contraception and abortion that drove the feminist shift toward “gender.” She shows how queer theorist Judith Butler applied to the body Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “nothing is natural” in our personalities or inner lives. ­Prior to this, it had been only partially possible to escape our sexed reproductive roles; but Butler, writing in a context wherein fertility really could be medically controlled, extended de Beauvoir’s claim beyond social norms to the body itself, and to the contraceptive revolution.

As Favale puts it: “The idea that humankind is split into two sexes that are biologically complementary is, for Butler, a social fiction rather than a matter of fact.” And once the female body has been divorced from “womanhood,” the survival of the “social fiction” of what it means to be a woman is, in Favale’s paraphrase of Butler, “a matter of power, not of truth.” Perhaps the most significant consequence of this dissociative paradigm lies in its “divorcing femaleness from the concept of woman.” For severing “bodily sex” from “procreative potential” makes it seem plausible that humans might meaningfully be understood to change sex. From this perspective, we arrive at “a picture of the human person like a Potato Head doll: a hollow, neuter shell that comes with an assortment of rearrangeable parts.”

With our sexed embodiment “reduced to appearance and pleasure-­making,” identities are all we have. And as disembodied identities proliferate without end, a growing number of confused and unhappy young women embrace transgender identities—in many cases to regret them, only after irreversible medical interventions.

But for Butler, this is obviously the path of liberation, for the fight against the oppressive structures of power that shape our sense of self is a feminist one, and it requires us to dismantle every structure that might induce us to view our reality as men and women as influenced by our bodies —structures Butler calls “heteronormativity.” Ground Zero for that liberation is unmooring reproduction from sex and our bodies. Following her logic to its end, Butler advocates “replacing the maternal body” with technology, with the aim of “fully decoupling human reproduction from heterosexual relationships.” We are finally free when our bodies have no relevance to our most intimate relationships and deepest commitments.

Favale invites us to consider whether this disaggregation of selfhood, reproduction, and embodiment—already underway technologically—really adds up to a better world. From the perspective of her reading of Genesis, it doesn’t heal but rather deepens the postlapsarian fractures in our “spiritual-­somatic unity,” offering a vision of selfhood split from embodiment and a relation to ourselves and one another founded in objectification and control. Rather than affording escape from domination, it reproduces the very splits that make domination and control our fundamental mode of being in the world.

Birth control severs women from their own bodies, “pathologizing femaleness” by treating the “­procreational potential of sex” as “a switch that can be flipped” but “whose default setting is ‘off.’” This dissociative relation to their own fertility inhibits women’s awareness of their cycles, a fracture that can in turn make careless and risky sexual behavior more likely.

Birth control also separates us from one another, Favale argues, because it reframes sex in individual and “consumerist” terms as a leisure activity in which the other is little more than object. Splitting sex from love, this norm makes it increasingly difficult to refuse casual or degrading sexual encounters. And it splits mothers from unborn ­children: For contraceptive ­practices are not always effective, which drives demand for the radical rupture of abortion.

Favale contrasts this dissociative, instrumentalist view of “consumer sex” and of inert and endlessly malleable bodies with the fertility awareness methods and periodic abstinence promoted by Catholic teaching. These approaches, she argues, cultivate an integrated bodily awareness, and put responsibility for managing fertility on the man as well as the woman. This in turn encourages mutual investment in the sexual relationship, the opposite of what so often obtains for many women today.

Those “gender critical” feminists who decry trans activism while embracing reproductive technologies will be challenged by Favale’s argument that Ground Zero for trans activism is contraception and abortion. Feminists committed to “gender abolition” may find her proposals equally challenging, for her arguments rest in a commitment to the reproductive telos of sex and the immutable differences between the sexes.

In place of the fantasy of control and mastery, Favale proposes “an ethos of interconnection,” that is, an approach based “on the norm of female embodiment.” She draws on Aristotle’s notion of potentia: a holistic understanding of the human organism as a set of potentials, rather than an assortment of parts. If our embodiment as women is “teleologically organized according to our distinct role in reproducing the species,” it in no way follows that this organization implies sharply defined prescriptions for the ­social roles of men and women. But it might, for example, have ­implications for the factors ­women weigh when choosing whom to marry, or the order in which to pursue life goals.

Favale’s argument is emphatically not that women can evade the collapse of feminism into disembodiment only by spending their lives getting pregnant willy-nilly—or indeed by returning to a bygone world of patriarchal control. Rather, she argues, it is current social norms that are based on an ideology of domination. The “underlying fantasy of postmodernity,” she argues, “is that we have control over our nature, that we are the masters, the gods, the makers,” seeking “a piecemeal self, where body and psyche and desire are split off from one another and rearrangeable—where the body is not the foundation of personal identity, but rather its lifeless tool.”

Those expecting an academic argument in the Enlightenment tradition may find Favale’s blend of personal narrative with interviews, literature, theory, and theology disorienting. But Favale is offering not so much comment on this critical debate as an intervention in it. Despite some textual unevenness in both form and content, The Genesis of Gender represents a sorely needed emerging genre I like to call “postmodern combat theology.”

Writing in this genre does not shy away from positionality, or from moral commitments—but neither does it retreat into iconoclasm, self-absorption, or nihilism. Favale interweaves reason with narrative, literary references, and autobiography to offer an argument that is grounded emotionally as well as intellectually. Her writing rejects dead rationalism for a constructive embrace of the postmodern turn, which seeks (rightly to my mind) the engaged, situated pursuit of a multifaceted truth. In this sense, ­Favale both expounds and enacts the holistic vision she advocates. And it’s in this holistic conception of personhood, premised on “human embodiment as integral to personhood and the person as an icon of the divine,” that Favale articulates a workable synthesis of feminism and the Catholic worldview.

Mary’s assent to becoming the Mother of God became, for all of us, a means “to restore the original justice of creation through the engine of grace.” Favale argues that this “yes” should be a template for a feminism not of fracture within or among us but of integration and integrity, a feminism that ­embraces “radical hospitality” to our embodied selves and the other alike. In such a feminism, pregnancy is no longer a danger, liability, imposition, or illness, but “a living mirror through which we can glimpse the qualities of God.”

The post Gender After Eden appeared first on First Things.

In this unexpectedly timely collection of essays, the journalist David Satter recalls an adventure that informed all his subsequent writing about Russia and the ­Soviet Union. In 1977, having met some Lithuanian dissidents, Satter set off to visit their Estonian counterparts. Eluding the police agents who were following him, Satter eventually made contact with the Estonian dissidents—or so he thought, until the real Estonian dissidents reported to his ­Lithuanian friends that he had never shown up! Satter had been talking to KGB agents in disguise. “You mean the whole thing, the meetings, the arguments, the discussion of KGB tactics, the small army they had following me, all that was a performance?” he asked incredulously. “But what was the point of it? Just to prevent me from meeting a group of Estonian dissidents?” “Not ­only that,” his ­Lithuanian friend explained. “The Soviet Union is a land of miracles and from time to time the KGB likes to create reality.”

Satter became convinced that his Lithuanian friends were right: “the whole point of the Soviet system was to create reality and then impose this world of illusions on a helpless population by force.” Everything official was fake: Trade unions represented management; free elections offered a choice among one candidate; to receive a secret ballot you had to ask for it; you could appeal to the courts when rights were violated, but courts invariably supported the violators; the parliament (Supreme Soviet) unanimously supported the government 100 percent of the time. Everything Western visitors to the 1980 Olympics were shown was fabricated, including the discotheques, where KGB agents masqueraded as clientele. It followed for Satter that, as he testified before Congress, “the most effective weapon against communism was not arms but the truth.”

Most Western journalists and academics have offered a misleading picture of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia because they have failed to probe beneath the surface. Almost all Soviet-era journalistic reports, Satter observes, either paraphrased official positions or conveyed information provided by “independent” sources who were, in fact, KGB plants. Academics refrained from challenging official accounts because they feared losing their visas and finding themselves unable to complete the research on which their careers depended. Satter was different, and he was, in fact, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1982. Allowed back to the new Russia in 1990, he became in 2013 the first Western journalist to be (once again) expelled from it.

One of Satter’s themes is that Westerners have rarely grasped Soviet (or post-Soviet) Russian reality. Imagining that Russians are “just like us” (is there any other way to be?), leaders formulate naive policies. In 1980, when the leaders of France and Germany traveled to hold talks with Soviet leaders, Satter noted the flaw: These attempts were “based on the assumption that the tension over the invasion of Afghanistan exists because the Soviets do not understand the West’s position and consultation will help them understand it better.” Western leaders unaware of ­Lenin’s doctrine that truth is whatever serves the Party’s interests readily believed Soviet “solemn assurances.” Many imagined that “if we reduce our military strength, the Soviets will reduce theirs; if we do not press our ­influence in the world, they will cease to expand theirs.” For American presidents, Satter calculates, the learning curve for understanding Soviet leaders usually took an entire term. Most presidents presumed that good personal relations with the Soviet leader would bear fruit. In fact, the system’s dynamic ensured that the leader’s personality made little difference. Strategy was determined by the Marxist–Leninist playbook, which all leaders took for granted. If the other side is naïve enough to assume bourgeois honesty and goodwill, take advantage of it.

Today, as Western leaders once again puzzle over how to engage with the Kremlin, Satter’s insights throughout four decades—the essays collected here were written between 1976 and 2019—suggest that Russia can be expected to continue Soviet practices, because even though they no longer accept Leninist ideology, they retain the premise that anything that works may—indeed, should—be done.

Satter first visited the Soviet Union as the Financial Times’ Moscow correspondent. He was apparently well-prepared for the task, having written his Oxford dissertation on the great theorist of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. But on arrival he discovered a world unlike anything he had imagined. For Satter, as for Solzhenitsyn, Russia’s key problem was not economic, as American and Russian reformers imagined, but spiritual and moral. Leninism taught that there is no objective truth, only class truth, and no human morality, only class morality. When people appeal to facts outside the context of class interests, they engage in mystification. Whatever serves the interests of the working class, whose representative is the Communist Party, is true and moral. The Party is infallible not because it is especially insightful but because anything it says is true and moral by definition. This idea was not only accepted by trained Leninist philosophers, but was taught to schoolchildren.

The Soviet Union rapidly developed into a series of façades behind façades. The country was a utopia, according to official ideology constantly contradicted by reality. And so the regime engineered a fictitious world in which the ideology was true. People learned to live in both worlds simultaneously, sometimes aware of the ­discrepancy, more often combining the two seamlessly. Satter describes in detail just how Orwellian “double­think” works in practice.

Even the leaders could not always reach bedrock. From the obtaining of raw materials through the ­stages leading to finished goods, managers provided fictitious statistics, making it impossible for anyone to know how the economy was doing. Leader Yuri Andropov once decided to improve discipline by forbidding workers to leave their jobs during working hours, but since there was no other time to shop for necessities, factory managers issued ­documents testifying that employees were running errands on official business.

Soviet elections were unanimous, supposedly because everyone agreed—and so defections by artists abroad proved not just an embarrassment but a challenge to the regime’s core myth. Supposedly only madmen disagreed, and so dissidents were treated in insane asylums with drugs that tortured them. But the regime’s key resource for bridging the gap between façade and reality was vodka, which, ­Satter observes, acquired “mystical significance.” For Marx religion is the ­opiate of the masses, but in the Soviet Union vodka was their religiate.

Children accordingly learned that compassion and honesty are vices, because they depend on the notion of human, rather than class, moral standards and may lead one to spare a class enemy. ­Americans find it hard to believe that anyone could think this way, but Soviet children wondered that Americans could still accept “objective” ­morality, which ultimately presupposed belief in God or transcendent ideals, which no true materialist could accept.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not change this outlook. A nation “emerging from seventy years of atheism and forced collectivism,” as Satter writes, must first develop a respect for human life, the individual, law, and other transcendent values. It must reject the heritage of atheist materialism. Here again, Satter’s views coincide with Solzhenitsyn’s.

Contradicting received opinion, Satter denies that democracy flourished under Yeltsin, only to fail when Putin took over. (In much the same way, Solzhenitsyn rejected the portrayal of Russia under the 1917 Provisional Government as a democratic interval brutally halted by the Bolshevik coup.) In the 1990s, as in 1917, democracy never had a chance and was, at best, poorly understood by the so-called democrats.

From the day Yeltsin shelled the Russian parliament in 1993 to the moment he appointed Vladimir ­Putin his successor, he retained communist ways of thinking and acting. What happened during the Yeltsin years was horrific, Satter explains. Without the rule of law, or even an understanding of legality, Russia succumbed to criminal gangs, one of which was the police. Contract killing became just another business. Nothing happened without bribery. To this day, every business must pay protection. Investment for anything but short-term gains makes no sense, since property can be summarily confiscated. That is one reason Russia remains a gas station with an army.

No less than Soviet Marxist-­Leninists, American economists believed in economic determinism. To modernize Russia, our experts presumed, one need only privatize everything as fast as possible. Competition would do the rest. But one cannot outcompete a rival when violence, not superior goods or services, is what determines outcomes. The only efficiency is the efficiency of murder. From 1992 to 1998, ­Satter reports, Russian GDP fell by 50 percent, more than under German occupation. Male life expectancy declined six years to fifty-seven, the industrial world’s lowest. There were several million “premature deaths” of one kind or another. Comparing Russia with England, one finds that

a Russian is five times more likely to die in a traffic accident . . . 25 times more likely to accidentally poison himself (usually with alcohol), three times as likely to die in an accidental fall, 31 times as likely to drown, seven times as likely to commit suicide, and 54 times as likely to be murdered.

Thoroughly misunderstanding what was happening, American leaders gave Yeltsin “the democrat” unconditional support.

Some observers hoped the revived Russian Orthodox Church would restore the spiritual heart of Russian society, but church leaders, who were actually KGB agents, often proved as corrupt as other politicians. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the church received the highly lucrative right to import duty-­free alcohol and tobacco, with the proceeds enriching the hierarchy. In 2006, Satter reports, the Moscow News estimated Patriarch Kirill’s personal worth at four billion dollars.

When Satter ­addresses more recent events, his writings seem remarkably prescient. He repeatedly warned of the situation we see unfolding in Ukraine today. The main challenge an independent Ukraine poses for Russian leaders, he explains, is not so much the threat of its joining the European Union or even ­NATO, as its contagious example of democratic freedoms. If a people speaking a closely related language and with a very similar culture can sustain democracy, then the whole argument that such forms are unsuitable for Russians disappears. And the more successful Ukrainian democracy becomes, the greater the threat, no matter what its foreign policy may be.

Satter’s essays also offer a warning to the United States about the consequences of its misunderstanding of Vladimir Putin’s intentions during the “Russiagate” affair. With remarkable perceptiveness, ­Satter recognized from the start that documents supposedly depicting Trump as a “Russian asset” were a typical Russian fake. As early as January 12, 2017, Satter observed that “the recently released report that asserts that Russian president Vladimir Putin has been ‘cultivating, assisting and supporting Trump’ for years and that the Russians have compromising information (kompromat) on him is, I believe, a deliberate Russian provocation.” For one thing, the specific charges, the supposed evidence, and the way both were revealed typified Russian operations. For another, Russians would have found no great difference between Trump and Clinton. In the U.S. as elsewhere, the Russian goal was not to elect a particular candidate but “to set Americans against each other” and undermine their faith in democratic processes, while turning intelligence services against elected officials. “Americans must understand that the Putin regime wants to paralyze the U.S.,” Satter argued, “but would rather have Americans do it with their own hands.” As we did. The years-long congressional investigations of Trump, along with the media’s repeated claims to have proof of the president’s guilt, could not have satisfied Putin more.

Looking back on these events in 2019, Satter observes that “the Trump–Russia affair did lasting damage to the U.S. For the first time, it became acceptable, even common, to accuse political opponents of treason. The media, Congress and the intelligence services have all undermined themselves by repeating wild and unsubstan­tiated charges provided for them by Russian intelligence.” Satter, who is highly critical of Trump’s judgment and asserts that during the 2016 campaign “there was legitimate concern about the competence of Mr. Trump” and his policies, still concludes that Russian disinformation had nothing to do with Trump’s election. “The ultimate target was American society,” and ­Putin’s ­devious tactics achieved, with the help of naive and self-righteous Americans, “the greatest triumph of disinformation in the history of Soviet and Russian active measures.”

If we are not careful, our polity will come to resemble Russia’s, wherein the only legitimate elections are those our side wins and the only permitted speech is the truth as our side perceives it. Satter cites Andrei Sakharov: “The history of our country should serve as a warning.”

Perhaps we, too, need to reaffirm our faith in democratic values, including the legitimacy of opposing views and the importance of shifting power from one party to another. If America is to avoid resembling Russia’s “managed democracy,” its citizens must reject unsubstan­tiated, exaggerated accusations and cease justifying any means of defeating their opponents. Academics and journalists must not feel entitled to deem false anything that might help the other side. Partisan “fact checking” recalls the Soviet assumption that a fact is whatever suits our interests.

For such an improvement to happen, we must rediscover our faith in our founding principles and rededicate ourselves to ultimate values. In the West, that means overcoming the idea that the highest goal of life is individual happiness, and that the search for transcendent meaning can be set aside. “If a personality is not directed at values higher than the self,” Solzhenitsyn observed, “corruption and decay inevitably take hold. . . . There can be only one true Progress: the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals.”

The post Hall of Mirrors appeared first on First Things.

Whereas my father grew up ­unchurched and was born again in his early twenties, my mother was raised in the austere Gospel Holiness church of her grandfather. Reverend Turner was a devout man who loved his congregation, but—possessing only a third-grade education and a faith in the perspicuity of Scripture—he clung to a hermeneutic that was rigid to the point of brittleness. Bare arms and painted fingernails were verboten in his church, as were beards. Not even the wise men in the nativity play were permitted beards. My mother remembers sitting in a pew as a little girl and believing the breeze on her naked forearm was the Holy Spirit admonishing her to cover up.

My parents have been in campus ministry for forty-five years. For my mother, a good portion of that time has been spent helping people heal from wounds inflicted by dysfunctional families and churches. Much of my parents’ understanding of what makes for healthy Christianity has been shaped by long acquaintance with what does not.

I was taught from an early age to distinguish my evangelical faith from the religion of fundamentalism. Christianity in its pure form was not a religion but a relationship—a relationship with God, built on a bridge of ­unmerited grace. Fundamentalism was a religion because it ignored grace in favor of works, like Catholicism, like Islam, like the Mormons and ­Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were on Team Luther, even if we weren’t ­Lutherans. Evangelicals understood we were saved by faith alone, but those regressive fundamentalists had tried to smuggle the Law in through the back door. They might sometimes call themselves evangelicals, but we were to guard the distinction jealously, lest the association damage our witness.

This distinction has been a theme at every evangelical institution I’ve been involved in, whether ­churches, para-church ministries, summer camps, or universities. We’d shoehorn anti-fundamentalism into the Apostles’ Creed if we could get away with it.

Increasingly, though, much of elite evangelical discourse speaks as though contemporary evangelicalism were identical with old-style fundamentalism. Theological liberals, including self-proclaimed #exvangelicals, conflate the two in an effort to shame the church leftward on social issues. Orthodox evangelicals do so for more complicated reasons, and not always in bad faith. Elite Baby Boomer and Gen-X believers struggle to make sense of Donald Trump’s purchase among their brothers and sisters because they’ve been conditioned to think of evangelicalism-proper as a Goldilocks movement—not too liberal, not too legalistic, just right. (On this account, the Trump-vangelical phenomenon, being “bad” and not recognizably liberal, must be resurgent fundamentalism.)

Russell Moore and Philip ­Yancey demonstrate in a recent episode of Moore’s podcast how personal and generational experience can blinker otherwise penetrating thinkers. Yancey discovered the God of grace as a young man and has spent his career writing against the malignant vision of deity responsible for the spiritual abuse he suffered as a child. Although Moore’s church upbringing was healthy, he speaks of regularly meeting Christian college students who are haunted by the suspicion that God is a cosmic bully eager for an opportunity to vent some almighty spleen. Moore and ­Yancey both speak as if the bogeyman of fear-based religion were what is plaguing evangelicalism today.

“Somehow we miss that [God is love],” Yancey insists. “It becomes all tied in with an institution and structures and rules. We miss that the core of the universe, the core of the message of the gospel, is God’s love.” But for much of the church in America those institutions, structures, and rules have succumbed to such dilapidation that for most would-be catechumens, love has been evacuated of its content. Love wins. Love is love. It’s an empty signifier, a polished shell casing for the propagandist’s bullet.

The discovery of abundant grace goes a long way in treating the wounds of legalism. But when a movement emphasizes grace to the exclusion of discipline, grace is cheapened. It ceases to heal and merely anesthetizes—yet another instance of moralistic therapeutic deism. Cheap grace also creates its own wounds, and for me these have been more substantial than any caused by an excess of discipline.

The course of my life was altered irrevocably the summer after my freshman year of college, when I attended a month-long leadership training program run by InterVarsity at its flagship retreat in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Boasting five hundred acres of forest and nearly six miles of shoreline along Lake ­Huron, Cedar Campus was less camp than resort. It was also my family’s unofficial second home.

At the end of every spring my parents would take my brother and me along for the four or so weeks they staffed Cedar’s student programs and turn us loose—to adventure in the woods, sail the bay, lose ourselves in books, and sit in on Bible studies and sermons with the college kids. It was deeply formative, a concentration of the best that evangelicalism had to offer: missionary zeal, joyful and earnest worship, intellectual fellowship, a sense of spiritual freedom heightened by the beauty of the inland sea.

The evening seminar during the first week of the leadership program was led by the New Testament scholar D. A. Carson, who taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago, the seminary of choice for many people in InterVarsity’s orbit. Carson led us in a close study of John’s Gospel, modeling for us a rigorous exegetical method. The pastor of my family’s church, a former Hebrew professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, took pains each Sunday to unpack the original language of his chosen passage, but Carson was operating on another level entirely. I simply hadn’t known a text could do that—unfold like a flower in sunlight, at once yielding and withholding its mysteries. The experience recurred the following week, when Carson’s Trinity colleague Peter Cha taught. Lightning had struck twice and I knew I must learn Greek.

Within a year I transferred from my prestigious engineering school to a small Christian liberal arts college in northern Indiana to study biblical literature and languages. My parents were supportive but concerned; after two decades of living paycheck to paycheck as campus ministers, they had been looking forward to their son’s securing a handsome salary as a chemical engineer. But there was a silver lining: Whereas women made up only 15 percent of the secular engineering school’s student body, at staunchly evangelical Taylor University they outnumbered men three to two. My financial prospects were less certain, sure. But at least I might find a wife.

Graduates of Christian colleges will be familiar with the idiom “a ring by spring.” You’ll never again be in an environment with so many members of the opposite sex who share your faith and values, so you’d better capitalize and get engaged by spring of your senior year. One of the first events I participated in at Taylor was a “Pick-a-Date,” in which the men living on my dormitory floor paired off with women from our “sister floor” for an outing. It was low-stakes fun, but part of a larger atmosphere that injected an intimidating gravitas and urgency into interactions between the sexes.

As it happens, Taylor University, like my mother, emerged from the Holiness movement. A hint of those origins lingered in oddments like a prohibition against dancing and an injunction against the university’s ever installing a swimming pool. We used to joke that the Life Together Covenant, the pledge of conduct students sign upon admission, banned sexual activity not for biblical reasons but because “sex leads to dancing.” On the whole, however, the LTC was quite sensible, ­fostering a habitus in which the soul and mind, if not the flesh, might flourish.

So I think today. As a student, I resented the arbitrariness of being forbidden alcohol on and off campus, even on breaks, except for summer break, as if our conduct became less consequential once the air got muggy. But what I most resented had nothing to do with rules. A certain type of “good Christian guy” had been elevated into a romantic ideal at Taylor. He was handsome, but not too handsome; capital-E extroverted; smart, but not especially intellectual; played guitar and sang well enough to lead worship; self-identified as a “servant leader”; was enthusiastic about buzz words; naturally cozy with people in authority, especially administrators; usually from an upper-middle-class family; high in agreeableness; and ideally played soccer. Imagine a better-looking, more athletic, less heretical Rob Bell. These guys were the bugmen of evangelicalism and I found them repellant.

I acquired much at Taylor: lifelong friends, mentors, an intellectual awakening, deepened self-awareness, an enlarged soul. But not a wife. Not even a girlfriend. I came to despise the “ring by spring” phenomenon, and I resented those for whom it all just seemed to fall into place. Strictures of campus life, even transparently sensible ones like the dorms’ limited visiting hours for opposite-sex guests, came to feel arbitrary, legalistic even, because I believed I had been denied a principal good they existed to deliver. Having absorbed my peers’ intense valorization of marriage, I felt my singleness as a spiritual failure.

#Exvangelicals invariably indict “purity culture” for inflicting their formative wounds. The rap on purity culture is that it induces shame over unchastity and promises self-fulfillment if chastity is preserved. (Not only will marriage bring you closer to God, but the sex will be way better than anything you can find on Tinder.) But shame strikes at self-worth, making it impossible to have a fulfilling sexual relationship even within marriage—at least until evangelical commitments are left behind. No doubt some young evangelicals are “wounded” by purity culture in this way, though the tendency of these polemics to issue in the rejection of evangelicalism tout court is suspect. As for me, I took issue not with purity culture’s “shaming” strictures, but with its upbeat messaging. I felt that purity culture hadn’t so much wounded as betrayed me. I had been promised that if I preserved my chastity, God would give me the desires of my heart. But he hadn’t. It wasn’t exactly that the promise was false; I had seen it fulfilled in too many lives to believe that. It was that I had been excluded from it. Through my lonely twenties, I allowed the bitter seed planted in my heart in college to germinate.

My concern for chastity shrank as the bitterness grew. Once one reaches a critical mass of lassitude, an unmapped territory comes ­into sight. Exploration begins, inevitably, as does a new process: the searing of one’s conscience in proportion to the ground covered. And in our brave new world of rock-­bottom expectations, the terrain is frighteningly easy to traverse.

I might have thoroughly cauterized my fear of God were the post-purity countryside not so utterly insipid. There came a moment when I recognized that a script was playing out: the same jokes, the same life anecdotes, the same physical maneuvering to gauge interest, the same mutual feigning of innocence, of surprise, the same inexorable dissolution of novelty, the same inconclusive parting of ways, the same tenuous social-media afterlife of the affair, the same diffusion of a once distinct personality into a digital sea of undifferentiated possibilities. That moment of recognition can last a long time, attenuate into a meta-awareness of one’s own boredom with emotional and spiritual intimacy throttled by premature and incommensurate physical intimacy, before descending into a horror of sameness. Absent the obstacles imposed by moral order, transgression loses its frisson. It’s a territory unworthy of mapping, where true adventure is impossible.

After my brief sojourn there, my heart aches for the gone-away world of structure, of anything that might order my soul.

Although romantic bitterness remains alive in me, Christ, in his mercy, sweetens it. His grace is enough; I have only to make room for it through obedience. It took time and wandering, but I’ve come to recognize that those rules imposed by my college, even the dumb, legalistic ones, were a gift, an operation of God’s grace that makes such soul-expanding obedience possible.

My mother shared with me that after her own wandering in young adulthood she resolved that her return to the church would be based not on fear of hell or earthly punishment, but on a love for Christ and his Body that answered to his love for her. “The love that is perfect casts out fear, because fear carries chastisement, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). Fear of fire is fear not of God, but of his creature. Fundamentalist fear is thus a paltry thing; so too is its love.

But perfect love does not cast out fear of God. Fear of God is categorically distinct from other fears, because its object is the ground of being itself. He who tamed leviathan and covers Sinai in holy darkness, who laid the foundations of the earth and shut up the doors of the sea, whose mind is an abyss of mystery and yet the only thing worth knowing—how can we discover his eye fixed upon us and not tremble?

Fear of God must increase in proportion to our love. No one has truly feared God who has not truly loved. And no one has truly loved who has not submitted to Love’s discipline (“If you love me, keep my commandments” [John 14:15]). Fundamentalism at least ­recognizes—what evangelicals too often ignore—that Christianity requires holy fear, a fruit of which is rigorous obedience.

Don’t give me moralistic therapeutic Jesus, whose back is bent not from carrying the cross but from accommodating the culture. No. Give me the Christ who gallops on a white horse, his eyes flashing like lightning, his livid mouth bearing a double-edged sword with which to raze the world systems of injustice, whose fierceness in victory is not other than his love. Give me the Christ of High Strangeness, the seven-­eyed lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the cosmos, who is the very grammar of existence, the Logos who holds the universe in the palm of his nail-pierced hand. Give me the Christ who demands I pick up my cross and follow.

And give me the church that helps me carry that cross.

The post Holy Fear appeared first on First Things.

The Red Hots are the angry sort. They stand, like fly fishermen, knee-deep in the torrent of news stories washing over us, angling for the latest catch to feed their appetite for outrage. They don’t just get mad about the occasional headline—they are actively looking for everything and anything that might confirm their suspicion that their enemies, real or imagined, are at it again. If they’re on the left, they spend hours railing against the vast right-wing conspiracy. If they’re on the right, they take to Twitter and tut-tut about the woke mob or cancel culture. Either way, they’re fuming.

Not so the Blue Birds. These gentle souls are, well, sad. Buy them a cup of coffee, and without too much prodding you’ll hear all about how terrible everything is. Can you believe, they’ll plaintively ask, how debased our culture is? How broken our politics? How tattered our institutions? Ask them about their day, and they’ll mumble something about the national birth rate being at an all-time low, or opioid deaths at an all-time high, or any other statistic that suggests we’ve lost our collective will to live.

Rage and despair: These are the two dominant flavors of the zeitgeist. Both are rancid. Not that we’ve nothing to stoke our ire; much of observable reality these days is grim. But people of faith have a better, infallible source of renewable energy—hope.

Just how does it work? Walk into a bar and say you feel optimistic about the future, and you may be asked to leave on account of already appearing inebriated. Hope—the real thing, not the cheap knock-off politicos use to paper over their ill intentions—is neither simple nor Pollyannaish. It’s a complicated spiritual virtue, and never has it been more lucidly displayed than in the old Talmudic story about Rabbi Akiva and the fox.

The latter, a reddish and beloved member of the canine family, needs no introduction. The former, to the uninitiated, is a great and wise ­rabbi whose teachings remain seminal in Judaism to this day, nearly two millennia after his passing in the year a.d. 135.

Akiva was no stranger to hope. He was born impoverished and illiterate, and spent much of his life as a shepherd, tending the flocks of a rich man. Akiva fell in love with his employer’s daughter, Rachel. With little to offer this princess of privilege, he took off, promising to return when he’d made something of himself. It took him a few years, but when he marched back into town he was flanked by thousands of adoring followers. The shepherd who couldn’t read or write had transformed himself into the mightiest Torah scholar around.

This tale of rustic rube becoming rabbinic royalty gives us a lot to feel hopeful about, and discredits those sinister nabobs who argue that our destiny is sealed by our race, sex, socioeconomic status, or other accidents of our birth. But Akiva’s theology of hope is far more intricate—and far more relevant to us today.

Which brings us back to the fox.

One day, Akiva, now old and for a long time a celebrated rabbi, was taking a stroll around Jerusalem with three of his friends, all wise and important elders. They reached the site of the former Temple, Judaism’s holiest place, ransacked and destroyed by the Romans in a.d. 70. There, among the ruins of a spot considered so sacred that only the High Priest could enter it, and even then only once a year, they saw a small fox frolicking about. The wise men started weeping for all that was lost. But Akiva began to laugh.

The other rabbis, the Talmud tells us, looked at him reproachfully, asking, with barely concealed rage, how he could chuckle when the building that had previously served as God’s earthly abode was now just a pile of stones and a playground for predators.

Akiva responded, as he often did, by quoting the ­Bible. In this case, he cited Isaiah 8:2: “And I took unto me faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah.” His friends might’ve felt a touch confused: The two prophets the verse mentions lived decades apart and sounded nothing alike. Uriah is best remembered for his gloomy tales of destruction—“Therefore, because of you, Zion shall be plowed as a field”—while Zechariah gave us the more joyful promise of a peaceful future, foreseeing that “old men and women shall yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem.”

Which, Akiva explained, was precisely the point. “As long as Uriah’s prophecy had not been fulfilled,” he said, “I feared that Zechariah’s prophecy might not be fulfilled either. But now that Uriah’s prophecy has been fulfilled, it is certain that Zechariah’s prophecy will be fulfilled.” Or, put simply, if you believe in providential devastation, you must also believe in divine redemption. This isn’t an abstract theological statement, subject to the whims of the spirit. If you read the Bible carefully, you’ll see that Rabbi Akiva’s thinking is reinforced by reason and observation: For anything to grow, you must first plow the earth. Observe the field a moment after every inch was upturned by the plow, and you may see nothing but the violent reshaping of a land mass. But if you understand basic agriculture, you’ll know that into these gaping wounds of earth there will soon be dropped seeds, which, not too long from now, will grow into fruitful trees.

To watch anything break down, then, is merely to witness the beginning of something generative and new; wisdom is the ability to glance at the ruined city on the hill and imagine, generations from now, our happy descendants sitting in the exact same spot, now rebuilt in splendor. It’s all the easier to imagine future flourishing when you believe that God conducts the music of history.

We folks of faith, then, have our marching orders. The discontent we’re seeing all around us isn’t about politics or money or anything quite so transient. It’s a spiritual crisis. Our brothers and sisters have lost faith, not just in God, but in nature’s regenerative power. Terrified, they are turning to those terrible synthetic and deadly substitutes, despair and anger. Our job now is to follow Akiva’s example and remind our loved ones—with a nice fit of laughter, if possible—what real hope looks like.

We may choose to pepper our pep talks with some supporting evidence. We may, for example, call attention to the fact that many of our most prominent entertainers these days are Christians who are wonderfully open about their faith. Or we may marvel at how the government’s censorious and misguided overreaction to COVID-19 delivered an unlikely coalition of lefties and right-wingers now standing together in defense of freedom.

There are plenty of seeds sprouting, if we will but look. From random anecdotes to poll numbers and election results, evidence suggest that an American Golden Age, a return to the fundamental values that make this nation great—the values of the Hebrew Bible and its teachings about a nation chosen by God to spread his light and love in the world—is just around the corner. But first you have to believe, which these days means having faith that, though foxes are scavenging in the ruins and things seem dark, it’s simply because it’s very early morning in America.

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