Friday, October 30, 2020

Live Not by Lies a Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher Book Review

 

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"Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents"
Bestselling Conservative Rod Dreher Offers a Prescription for Culture War Combatants

 

On October 16, 2020, in a Parisian suburb, a Muslim refugee decapitated 47-year-old schoolteacher Samuel Paty. Previously, during a lesson devoted to freedom of expression, Paty had shown a Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting Islam's founder, Mohammed, to his students.

 

On October 17, at nine a.m., I posted Paty's photo on Facebook with a salute to his courage. Within minutes, I received notification from Facebook that my salute to Samuel Paty "goes against our Community Standards on hate speech." Note the capitalization of "Community Standards." This document, crafted by self-appointed Facebook thought police, is a new scripture, worthy of capital letters. I would not be able to post for a week. I contested the ruling, and by 10:47 a.m., I received an apology. In spite of this, I still could not post for the next twenty-four hours.

 

At the same time that Facebook removed a salute to Paty, social media was flooded with bigoted images of Trump Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic. Marc Murphy, editorial cartoonist at the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, alleged that Barrett, during her confirmation hearing, dressed in such a manner so as to send coded messages that she supports the misogynist agenda depicted in Margaret Atwood's novel and TV series, "The Handmaid's Tale." "The Handmaid's Tale" is a Christophobe's "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Like that notorious forgery, "The Handmaid's Tale" depicts scary religious people trying to take over the world. "The Family Values party nominated a member of a sex cult," read one of many hysterical replies to Murphy's paranoid conspiracy theory, which was shared hundreds of times.

 

"Soon, with all the Catholics on the court, will they mandate the only religion allowed in this country is Catholicism? And of course declare this to be a Christian nation and abolish the constitution for their bible," wrote a reader at Slate, responding to Slate's article arguing that Barrett was about to single-handedly take over America.

 

The New York Times went so far as to conduct an in-depth investigation of Barrett's adoption of Haitian children. The most popular reader comments castigated Barrett as a white supremacist; her adoption of black children just proved it. Ibram X. Kendi is a high priest of the new woke church of perpetual racism. Kendi tweeted that Amy Coney Barrett is "a White colonizer" who uses her black children as "props" to disguise her white supremacy.

 

What exactly is happening here? In saluting Paty and naming his killer's ideology, I violated a new religion. In demonizing Christianity, others also followed the dogma of the new religion. What to call this new religion? In the past, we used terms like "Political Correctness," "cultural Marxism," "social justice warrior," "woke," "liberal," "progressive," and "leftist." I use the term "Team Anti-Western-Civilization," but this is clearly too awkward. We need a handy new term for a new, powerful religion that is now affecting all of us.

 

Marxism purports to champion the poor. In this new religion's rigid caste system, a rich black man has higher status than a poor white woman. Rationality provides no workable strategy to map out the new wasteland we all traverse. It is not "hateful" to call someone with double x chromosomes "she," but Twitter will ban you for doing so. But one can find, on Twitter, tweets alleging that "a cabal of Jews control world governments, the banking system, the media and entertainment industry to keep people poor, ignorant and enslaved." "Anti-Semitism and hate speech are rampant on Twitter."

 

Several recent books have addressed the new religion underlying the above phenomena. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay gave us "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody." British author Douglas Murray dissected "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity." Gad Saad, a Lebanese-born, Canadian evolutionary psychologist and secular Jew, has just published "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense."

 

Tom Holland's 2019 book "Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World" proclaims the obvious truth: the West is inescapably Christian. Atheists can mock and rebel but they cling to Christian concepts of morality. As Douglas Murray put it, atheists "Dream Christian dreams. They still have Christian thoughts and impulses."

 

But Christianity as a religious practice is losing adherents. The "Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace," reports the Pew Research Center. What morality will arise once Christian-influenced morality finally disappears? Holland's musings on this question call to mind Dostoyevsky's famous quote. "Without God, everything is permitted." Once Christianity's influence disappears humanity will, as Nietzsche predicted, live by power as the only good.

 

Rod Dreher's September, 2020, Sentinel book "Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents" takes up the same tasks previously tackled by the above authors, who are all atheists. Dreher attempts to define the murky new religion now controlling our lives, and to offer an action plan for Christians and others who would resist it. Dreher is the senior editor at The American Conservative.

 

Dreher was raised Methodist, converted to Catholicism in 1993, and then to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006. He is the bestselling author of 2017's "The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation." New York Times columnist David Brooks called that bestseller "The most important religious book of the decade." In that book, Dreher says that Christians have "lost on every front." Our current society is barbaric. Our barbarian rulers are "governed only by their will to power." They "neither know nor care a thing about what they are annihilating." "Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human."

 

Christians, Dreher argues, quoting Scottish philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, must emulate medieval monastic life. "A crucial turning point … occurred when men and women … turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium." Instead, they set about constructing "new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness."

 

"Live Not By Lies" offers a sequel to "The Benedict Option." The opening hundred or so pages, that is roughly half the book, offer Dreher's take on the enemy our culture has become. Dreher says he was alerted to this enemy by a phone call from an American whose mother had lived in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. This survivor saw in modern American life reminders of life under Soviet communism.

 

Virtue is no longer about individual rights, but about rights assigned to privileged groups. A utopian vision demands the denunciation and punishment of transgressors, like the Indiana pizza parlor forced to close down by violent threats. A reporter broadcast a ridiculous story about the pizza parlor not hosting gay weddings; the restaurant owners paid the price.

 

In this new religion, what was acceptable yesterday is heresy today. "It masquerades as kindness." Dogma is expressed in constantly evolving jargon like "diversity" and "inclusivity" and has no real meaning: if you are Catholic and you are pro-life, you are excluded from "diversity," "tolerance," and "inclusion." Pope Benedict called this new religion "a worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies." Dreher calls it "soft totalitarianism" and, after sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." Its dogma consists of lies; its power lies in terrorizing the population with show trials, often conducted on social media.

 

Dreher bemoans the "almost incalculable influence over public and private life" exercised by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These companies can and do tell states what legislation to accept or reject. Dreher cites Indiana's 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law meant to protect small business owners like Colorado cake decorator Jack Phillips. The law was opposed by Apple, Eli Lilly, the NBA, and the Islamic Society of North America. "Equity, diversity, and inclusion" offices are found in 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

 

This new religion's reach is also described in a recent Gad Saad YouTube interview. Most of the granting agencies that fund research in the natural sciences, Saad reported, that is physics, chemistry and biology, demand from applicants a "DIE religion statement." DIE stands for diversity, inclusion and equity. Funding applicants must state what they have done to promote DIE principals and how their work will promote DIE. Right now the world faces a pandemic. Imagine being a vaccine researcher seeking funding, and being forced to announce how your vaccine will promote DIE.

 

Roughly the second half of "Live Not by Lies" offers examples of Christian dissidents who resisted Soviet domination. Dreher writes about famous figures like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Karol Wojtyla, and Milan Kundera, but also figures lesser known in the West including Stjepan Tomislav Kolakovic, Kirill Kaleda, Maria Wittner, Vaclav Benda, Silvester Krcmery, Richard Wurmbrand, and Jerzy Popieluszko. Dreher also mentions Catholic anti-Nazi resister and martyr, Franz Jagerstatter. These resisters lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Austria and Croatia.

 

From their lives and examples, Dreher draws the following lessons. Those who would refuse to bow to our as-yet-unnamed new religion, and those who choose to remain faithful to Christianity or even just the Constitution, should consider doing some or all of the following. Accept a life outside the mainstream. Form small, supportive communities of fellow believers. Maintain memories of the best in Western civilization. Host and attend lectures in private homes. Send children to Catholic school. Accept suffering as part of life.

 

I'm glad a bestselling author is bringing new attention to Eastern European dissidents and communist persecution of Christians. "Live Not by Lies" is a quicker and easier read than the above-mentioned books that also address the new religion we all confront. I had a few issues with the book, and on the off chance that Dreher would ever read this review, I would be remiss if I did not mention them.

 

My mother was born in a village in what is today Slovakia. My father was Polish. I traveled to what was then Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, just after Soviet-bloc tanks crushed the Prague Spring. I've been to Eastern Europe several times since, and spent 1988-89 in Krakow, Poland.

 

I don't often try to explain to Americans how wretched Soviet communism was. We have been conditioned by Hollywood to regard anyone who condemns communism as a McCarthyite. Even popular romance films like Barbara Streisand's The Way We Were send that message.

 

Too few know that Communism murdered 100 million people. Even those who know this may think that those killings were merely the initial price paid to overturn corrupt, moribund monarchies and establish the worker's paradise, after which life settled down to free health care and concerts. Michael Ignatieff confronted this attitude in a conversation with communist and influential scholar Eric Hobsbawm. "Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm. "Yes," Hobsbawm replied.

 

The wretchedness of communism was about so much more than massacres and gulags. By the time I spent a year in Poland, I had lived and worked in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and most dangerous countries on earth, and also in very poor Nepal. In C.A.R., life expectancy was 49 years. Low-level warfare was constant. Slavery was still a problem. But in people's day-to-day lives, Africans had hope. The Africans I knew, though living in absolute poverty, expressed the conviction that tomorrow would be better than today, and that their effort would make it so. Africans' irrepressible vitality is reflected in Pew polls that describe Africans, no matter how poor, as among the most hopeful people on earth.

 

Yes, in Poland and Slovakia material conditions were magnitudes better than in Africa. It's hard, then, to communicate this simple fact: daily life in communist Poland felt worse to me than daily life in C.A.R. Communism isn't just a bad model for economics. It is a straightjacket and a gag that asphyxiates the human spirit and inevitably results in mass, petty pathology.

 

How to say this without sounding absurd – one of my worst days involved an attempt to get bedsheets for my dorm room. The woman in control of the sheets conspired to make my day miserable, for no discernable reason, except that she could. It was the twisted, sadistic pettiness of it all that confounded me. Franz Kafka, who died before communism arrived in his native Prague, knew how to describe the ugly absurdity of arbitrary power. Read Kafka's "The Trial," to get a sense of what I mean.

 

Daily life under Soviet communism was not romantic resistance. It was going for a walk in a park, struggling for air through steel mill exhaust, and a man in a pathetically shabby suit jumping out of the shrubbery and masturbating in front of you. It was days when you went to the shops to confront empty shelves. On one day, you could buy cabbages, on another, blueberries. One day bread, another day yogurt. Food, but never all you wanted, never all at once.

 

Daily life under Soviet communism was people shoving you on the sidewalk. We foreign students discussed this. Are they doing it on purpose? Consciously? A friend was pregnant. She said once she started showing, no one pushed her any more. Life under Soviet communism was small town streets paved with the supine bodies of inebriated men on Sundays. Their wives would come and try to shovel them up and get them home, and they'd rouse themselves enough only to wrestle with and yell at their wives.

 

One day I went to a bar mleczny in Krakow, that is, a cheap eatery that served basics like fermented rye soup, borscht, and sliced cucumbers with sour cream and dill. An old man in worn clothes, his sagging cheeks prickly and unshaven, picked up his potato pierogi and smashed it against his cheeks, smearing it into his stubble, as if it were shaving cream. He just sat there, his face besmeared with the basic starches and grease – flour, butter, and potatoes – that made up much of our daily calorie intake. That was communism. Ugly irrational, soul-crushing. Thirty years later, some of those souls have yet to bounce back. Life expectancy in the former Soviet sphere remains lower than one would expect for developed, European nations. Interestingly, Poland defies this trend. Its citizens gained in life expectancy after communism's fall, in spite of its rapid "shock" transition to capitalism, possibly because of "the country's strong social institutions." For that clinical phrase, think "The Catholic Church."

 

During that first trip in the early 70s, when I was a naïve girl visiting relatives in my mother's hometown, I met a priest who had been tortured, and who lost his mind. There was a blank-faced, stumbling body; there was no discernable functioning inside that body. A girl my age lead the priest by the hand. My mother said he was kept in the village as a warning. My Uncle Jan was a woodsman who guided others through the mountains, often hunters, but also a dissident scientist who had been made a non-person. This scientist lived in a primitive dwelling in the middle of nowhere, unable to communicate with his peers, cut off from intellectual life. No, he wasn't being tortured, he wasn't in prison, and they didn't kill him. His fate would appear on no list of the victims of communism. Our visit with this brilliant, isolated, effectively paralyzed scientist broke my heart.

 

I'm walking myself and you, dear reader, down this sooty memory lane, reeking of vodka and inhabited by sad perverts, for a reason. Dreher is asking his readers to be ready to suffer and sacrifice. That is right; that's what Christians do; that's what atheist dissidents do. But there's a phrase I heard in Poland during the 1989 uprisings. "Everyone is ready to die for Poland. But how many are ready to live for Poland?"

 

The suffering Dreher's American disciples will undergo will not necessarily be cinematic, accompanied by a poignant, rousing soundtrack. Once the street demonstrations in 1989 Poland reached fever pitch, once I was running for my life, stampeding, with thousands of others, from the ZOMO, paramilitary thugs who landed many of us in the hospital, life was thrilling. But outside of those demonstrations, life felt infinitely petty and pointless. The devil who will attempt to seduce Dreher's dissidents may not be a clear-cut demand to sign a document or lose a job. The demonic siren call may be boredom, friendlessness, loss of respect or income, and a sense of meaninglessness.

 

And, yes, this anonymous, isolating, devil of boring meaninglessness operates in lives of American dissidents, too, just as it did in those interminable bread lines and the constant breakdowns of that miracle of Soviet engineering, the Trabant automobile.

 

I never wanted to be a dissident in American academia. I wanted to get a PhD and tell my people's story through my work and help my students. I was told I was the "wrong ethnicity" and "too right-wing." I was told, to my face, that my being Catholic was a problem. In spite of publications and some excellent reviews from peers and students, I never got that tenure-track job. As a semester-by-semester hire, an adjunct, I was given to impolitic statements, for example, "I love my country;" immediately after that, I lost my job. My life lacks the thrill I felt when I was running from the ZOMO. I live in a garbage-strewn, high crime, low-rent neighborhood, and wonder about paying for groceries. Again, no swelling anthem on my soundtrack, no martyr's flameout. Just day to day drear. Surviving that, alone and silently, is my discipline. I know I'm not alone.

 

Dreher's followers need to know this. The price one pays for dissidence will not always look, to the outside world, like heroism. Witold Pilecki and Emil August Fieldorf, two men Dreher does not mention, were courageous anti-Nazi resisters. Soviet communists captured them, tortured them, and buried them in unmarked mass graves. Before erasing their physical existences, the communists defamed them with false accusations. These men were part of the Armia Krajowa or Home Army. Soviets labeled them "anti-Semitic," and, thus, an ally to the very Nazis Pilecki and Fieldorf risked and suffered to resist. That charge, that Poland's anti-Semitism made the Nazis' job easier, was convenient to the Soviets overrunning Eastern Europe. It was also convenient to Roosevelt and Churchill, who agreed, at Yalta, to betray Poland, their former ally, and the first nation to fight against the Nazis. During the war, Western media might portray Poland as a courageous victim. After Yalta, Poland became a despicable villain. World politics write history and play a role in your not knowing the names of Witold Pilecki and Emil August Fieldorf.

 

The microcosm is like the macrocosm. Express a pro-life position on Facebook and be called a "misogynist." Express support for traditional marriage and be called a "homophobe." Express support for children being able to live out their childhoods without life-altering, sterility-inducing drugs and surgeries, and be called a "transphobe." Link to accurate statistics on police shootings and be called a "racist." Mention the centrality of freedom of speech to Western Civilization and be called an "Islamophobe." Talk about a tortured priest you met behind the Iron Curtain and be called a "paranoid McCarthyite cold warrior." Acknowledge that "free college" actually does cost a great deal, and be called a "capitalist tool who votes against her own best interests." A Facebook friend who is a child of Holocaust survivors, and relative of Holocaust victims, is regularly called a "Nazi" because she supports Israel's right to exist.

 

Sometimes, to observers, heroes will look like the scum of the earth, before they are disappeared forever, without ever having had the chance to tell their story. Many of the dissidents Dreher describes survived torture in prison, but then went on to rehabilitation. Some joined post-Communists governments. Some wrote memoirs that are cherished by believers worldwide. These happy endings are granted to very few. For many of us, being a dissident means, simply, wondering how you will pay rent.

 

In "Live Not by Lies," Dreher quotes Maria Wittner about her experience of arrest and imprisonment after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Wittner mentions a friend, Catherine. Communists hanged Catherine. Before dying, Catherine "straightened herself up and went with her back ramrod straight." There is no further mention of Catherine in Dreher's book. I am most touched by Catherine, and I know virtually nothing about her, including her last name. I admire the superstars, Lech Walesa, Karol Wojtyla, and Vaclav Havel, who passed through a period of anonymous suffering but emerged, respectively, as TIME man-of-the-year and a Nobel Prize winner, a pope and a canonized saint, and a friend of Frank Zappa. Catherine is like most dissidents. Her courage will never be known to the wider world, and no one can visit her tomb, because it's probably an unmarked, mass grave. The Catherines deserve to inhabit our consciences, instruct our concerns for our own futures, and educate us about our judgments of others as much as do the superstars.

 

Dreher and his disciples need to know this. By dissenting, they may be inviting the kind of exhilaration that we enjoyed when taunting the ZOMO, and then running for our lives. They may even win Nobel prizes. Or they may disappoint their loved ones by becoming "losers," and their kids may have to go a week eating not much more than potatoes. The temptation the devil sends them may not be anything as exotic as the fleshpots of Egypt; it may be something as simple as adjusting one's speech to gain access to a Twitter account.

 

Even bestselling Christians are not above judging their poor fellow Christians as "losers." "You don't want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood. Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a shithole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood a shithole to bring the shithole to your street? No, you don't. Be honest, you don't." The bestselling Christian who wrote these words about the poor is Rod Dreher.

 

What I want to shout to Dreher's readers is this: please don't think that you doing Christianity wrong if you practice all the courage of the Eastern European dissidents Dreher describes and you do not attain a halo, your loved ones express contempt for you, and your prayer life feels like a monologue to no one, spoken in the desert.

 

I've got a second issue with Dreher's book, and this one is difficult to talk about. I've been insisting in my own published writing for years (see here and here) what Tom Holland seems to have just realized. Western Civilization is Judeo-Christian. That many Westerners are not religious is not the point. Rather, our concepts of right and wrong, our insistence that "All men are created equal," are inheritances from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Western history, there have been attempts completely to root out Christianity's influence, and those attempts have often ended very badly (see here and here). New Atheist authors like Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose insist that humans are rational. Human reason, stripped of any religious underpinning, can and will result in moral societies. I see more support for Tom Holland's fear that Nietzschean struggle for power will dominate.

 

So, yes, along with Dreher, I vote for institutional Christianity, even in so simple a form as a house church, as a good.

 

But. I think Dreher has gotten a couple of things wrong here. America today is significantly different from Soviet-era Eastern Europe, and Soviet-era Eastern Europe is not exactly as Dreher implies.

 

"Religion is at the core of effective resistance," Dreher writes. "The underground church became the principal means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years." Yes, the overall message of Christianity was a driving force for dissident movements. Yes, the institutional church offered support. Yes, totalitarians singled out the church for persecution. The "priest's barracks" at Dachau was "the largest monastery in Germany." Yes, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox religious leaders were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by Soviets and Nazis alike.

 

This is all true. It's also true that not all Christians in Eastern Europe were dissidents, and not all dissidents were Christians. Lech Walesa was obviously, devoutly, Catholic, and close to the pope. Adam Michnik, no less an important figure in Solidarity and the downfall of communism, was a secular Jew. His parents and brother were leading communists. Jacek Kuron, "the godfather of the Polish opposition" self-identified as a "non-believing Christian" who followed Christian teachings but did not believe in God. When asked who ended Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Lech Walesa included American journalists. Yes, the very same New York Times that so mishandled the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and the 1619 Project published John Darnton's Pulitzer-Prize-winning coverage of martial law in Poland.

 

I met a Pagan dissident who worshipped the ancient Slavic god Swiatowid. I participated in actions by the Orange Alternative, a surrealist dissident group without religious identity. In those protests, we used humor, for example by chanting the slogan, "Citizen, help the militia! Beat yourself up!"

 

During one Krakow dusk thirty-one years ago, hundreds of us were gathered in the Rynek, the thirteenth-century square. I couldn't make out the words of the speeches. I was, like a nostril-quivering gazelle on the Serengeti, balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to spring. The ZOMO could start a baton charge at any moment, from any direction. My body bore technicolor bruises from previous encounters.

 

A young Punk stood in front of me. He was about 17 years old. Skinny, small, tattooed, with spiked hair, ripped clothes, and safety pins in his multiply-pierced earlobes. He was carrying a khaki green backpack.

 

Somewhere in the dusk, it began with one voice. "Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła." "Poland is not yet lost while we remain alive." The national anthem. Others picked it up. I began to sing.

 

The anonymous young Punk standing in front of me let his backpack slide down off of his shoulders onto the ancient cobblestones. His shoulders pressed back. He stood  straight as an uhlan, those legendary Polish cavalrymen. His whole affect changed; suddenly, he was no longer a slack-spined, ironic-lipped, lounging Punk, disciple of Johnny Rotten. He was a Polish patriot, ready to give his all for his homeland. He belted out the national anthem with earnest conviction. That kid, that moment, was one of the lightning bolts illuminating the no-exit drear that was Soviet-era Poland.

 

I mention these atheists, communists, Jews, Pagans, Punks, surrealist pranksters and the New York Times for this reason. Dreher's approach strikes me as a tad smug. "We're the Christians; we've got it right; the rest of you are doing it wrong; we will retreat from you and will associate only with the right people. We'll emerge periodically to broadcast our correctness via bullhorns."

 

It didn't work that way in Eastern Europe. Non-Christians were essential participants in bringing down Communism. "Divide and conquer" was a tried-and-true tactic of Poland's totalitarian invaders. Nazis and communists worked hard to sow animosity between Christians and Jews, workers and intellectuals, urbanites and farmers. "Solidarity" referred to the miraculous union of religious workers, embodied by Walesa, and secular, even leftist, intelligentsia, epitomized by Michnik.

 

There are many articulate, empowered atheists tilting at the exact same dragons that Dreher is taking on. I've listed many of them here: Pinker, Lindsay, Pluckrose, Holland, Murray, Saad. Not a few of the folks taking on the new religion are gay: Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan. Christians should be forging strategic alliances with these courageous figures.

 

Dreher wants Christians who resist the new religion to form small groups of mutual support. As I've described in detail in my other writing, I embarked on the quest for a PhD as a wide-eyed, first generation, working class, Polish-Slovak-American Catholic. My collision with academia almost killed me, and that's not a metaphor. After a particularly unfortunate encounter with a very powerful professor, my inner ear burst and I spent the next six years functionally blinded and paralyzed much of the time, and unable to stop vomiting. I could not work; I lost my life savings. After a pro bono surgery, I hit the job market, and was repeatedly told I was the "wrong ethnicity" and that I was "too right-wing" to be on a university campus.

 

As Dreher prescribes, I have a support network, and that support network has held my hand and pushed me forward. There's been Don Friedkin, Stuart Vail, Laurie Skopitz, Roman Solecki, Nachman, Morton, Robin, Alex, Sue, Paul Kujawsky, Karen, Otto Gross, Simon, John, Sandy, Danuta, and others. A few of these folks have stuck with me for decades. I can have serious conversations with all of them about what's happening in our culture. They educate me, and they are willing to learn from me. Not a single one of these people is a practicing Catholic. Most are secular Jews. A couple are former Christians and current atheists. 

 

I am still Catholic, but all too often, when I knock on my church door, I hear a hollow sound. When I was diagnosed with cancer and told I would probably die, I asked for a visit with a priest. I couldn't get one. Instead, a New Age priestess who volunteers at the hospital rubbed my feet and talked to me soothingly about death. Liron, an Israeli I've never met, reads everything I write and offers insight from her considerable knowledge. You are reading this thanks to David Horowitz, a secular Jew.

 

When I try to give as well as take, the door still remains closed. I asked a priest at a campus Catholic center if I could, for free, offer talks on Islam. Students were convinced that Islam emerged before Judaism and Christianity, that it is a "religion of peace," and that the Crusades were all about Christians marching to Jerusalem to force Muslims to convert. I wanted to provide the students with the basic facts: who, what, when, where, why, how. The priest said no; he was afraid such talks might cause a stir. I've had too many similarly disappointing encounters with institutional Protestantism. I was being considered for a tenure-track position at a Protestant college. I was hopeful. Suddenly, the hammer came down. The college does not hire Catholics. Is such internecine sectarianism a worthy focus at this time of crisis?

 

On social media, I've encountered Catholics who are more woke than Antifa; on their Facebook pages, one proves one's virtue by bashing white people incessantly. On the page of a mild-mannered liberal priest, a Catholic who questioned the insertion of BLM dogma into Catholic practice was immediately labeled a "racist." I've visited the Facebook pages of conservative Catholics, where conservatives dismiss their fellow Catholics as "Bolsheviks," "fools," and "stupid."

 

Dreher is wrong about this: we American Christians are not analogous to Christians persecuted under communism. We are the ones closing Catholic schools, by not sending our kids to them. We are the ones sentencing young people to lies, because we aren't addressing what's happening in education. We are the ones dividing and conquering. We are the ones who have lost the commission to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and to announce our identity with the love we show each other.

 

Dreher says we need support groups to aid us through trials. He's right. We need Christians who emulate Jesus in such groups. Jesus made people feel that they could go on through anything. How? Jesus made people feel that their most private, pressing sleepless nights mattered to the God of the universe. A lonely and poor woman had a wound that wouldn't heal. A smart-mouthed woman was in a series of bad relationships with men who wouldn't commit to marriage. Newlyweds ran out of wine. Those listening to Jesus preach got hungry. A shepherd lost a lamb. A father's son went astray. Jesus focused on the individual and cared about what he or she cared about. That's why we are still caring about Jesus 2,000 years after his ignominious, prisoner's death.

 

Maybe, in his next book, Dreher could talk to lapsed Christians who need and want supportive fellowship and haven't been able to find such fellowship in the church, but have found it elsewhere – among Jews and atheists, lapsed Christians and gay people, in Twelve Step groups and on private Facebook pages. Such accounts could help Christians to understand how better to nurture the kind of groups Dreher envisions.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery


At Front Page Magazine here

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Abortion Protest Shows that Poland's Youth Are Not Traditionalist - Comment on Rod Dreher's Blog


Photo source Reuters Marcin Stepien 
Sign says: Religious Fanatics Get the F--- Out 

There have been massive protests in Poland over a new abortion law. A commenter on Rod Dreher's blog wrote, "Poland as traddy paradise is something largely confined to older and more rural people. Younger Poles are typical Eurokids. They want to party and have fun and dance to bad techno music with as few consequences as possible. They couldn't care less about Western Civilization(R) or traditional piety."

Borat Belittles Eastern Europeans: Edward Lucas in the Times UK

 Edward Lucas, writing in the Times (UK) points out that the Borat films mock and belittle Eastern Europeans. This mockery would not be acceptable were it directed at any other group. I said the same thing in Bieganski the Brute Polak Stereotype. The new Borat movie, released in 2020, is a reprise of the same ethnic humor from the previous Borat movie. 

An excerpt from the article: "Yet the veneer of humour rests on unthinking orientalism: in effect, racism. Vesna Goldsworthy, an Exeter University professor born in what was then Yugoslavia, notes that Borat's Kazakhstan is a "flag of convenience", embodying a "medley of east European stereotypes". The region, she says, is the "last refuge for feelings of superiority that can't be placed anywhere else", an idea she outlined in her 1998 book Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former president of Estonia, highlights westerners' racism to eastern Europeans more bluntly: "They have often treated us as w**s.""

Friday, October 16, 2020

Today's Democratic Party, A Jewish American Writer, and a Polish American Writer

 


"Well, look what's happened. Look what started to seep in, beginning and probably even with candidates during our administration. We stopped showing up at the Polish American club. We stopped showing up, and we all went to you, the really smart people. We had a new kind of coalition we were putting together. College-educated women and college men and boom, boom, boom and so on."

Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, New York Times, January, 2020.

 

A couple of interesting articles came my way this month. One was by high profile author Bari Weiss. Weiss argues in the Tablet that there is an as-yet-unnamed phenomenon at work in America culture that is dangerous to Jews. Some call this phenomenon "wokeness" or "Social Justice Warriors" or "anti-racism" or "political correctness." Weiss denounces Trump, but is wary about this phenomenon, embraced to the bosom of the Democratic Party.

 

The other article is by Tom Zoldak, who, unlike Weiss, is not famous. Zoldak is writing in Intellectual Takeout. Though Weiss is Jewish American and Zoldak is, I would guess, Polish American, they both send a very similar message. Today's Democratic Party is not what it once was. The previously mentioned, as-yet-unnamed phenomenon has taken over the Democratic Party, and it is hostile and dangerous to Polish Americans, as it is to Jews.

 

Here's a quote from Zoldak's piece:

 

"Biden supported NAFTA and Most Favored Nation trade status for Communist China, which resulted in thousands of American factories shutting down, causing millions of American manufacturing jobs to disappear. Biden also supported the Iraq War, a misadventure planned and executed by the type of Republicans who have endorsed his candidacy. That fiasco killed thousands of Americans and grievously wounded many more, devastated the ancient Christian communities of Iraq, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars that places such as Scranton could have used.

 

Now Biden is embracing critical race theory and the concept of 'white privilege.' This latest project of 'the really smart people' promises to work out as well for the people of northeastern Pennsylvania as Biden's earlier brainstorms did. It is absurd to describe Eastern European immigrants who came to northeastern Pennsylvania with nothing as 'privileged.' Their families were serfs in Europe, and the work they did once they came here was always hard, often debilitating, and sometimes deadly. Mining anthracite coal put bread on the table, but also put coal dust in lungs.

 

Polish immigrants like my friend's grandfather worked long days deep in anthracite coal mines without masks, respirators, or other basic safety equipment. They would not see the sun, or their children, for months – except on Sundays for Mass – yet they showed up every day, on time, without complaint. My friend's grandfather died from black lung complications at the age of 57 – true senior citizen status by NE PA standards in the 1970s. His remaining retiree buddies toasted his memory with nickel beers at the Polish Club in Dupont, PA, the same type of club Biden admits the Democrats abandoned for the 'really smart people.' Now he wants to abandon their descendants by accepting the theory that what their families have earned in America is the result of an unfair and underserved 'privilege.'"

 

Here's a quote from the Bari Weiss piece:

 

"By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews 'are the face of capital.' Jews are flattened into 'white people,' our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely 'white on white crime.'

 

This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: 'This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,' and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

 

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

 

It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

 

It is why those who claim to care about diversity and inclusion don’t seem to care about the deep-seated racism against Asian Americans at schools like Harvard.

 

It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: 'Impeach her Zionist ass,' they insisted.

 

It is why the Democratic Socialists of America, the emerging power center of the Democratic Party in New York, sent a questionnaire to New York City Council candidates that included a pledge not to travel to Israel.

 

It is why Tamika Mallory, an outspoken fan of Louis Farrakhan, gets the glamour treatment in a photoshoot for Vogue."

 

I sometimes call this as-yet-unnamed phenomenon "Team Anti-Western Civilization." I write about this phenomenon for Front Page magazine; you can find those pieces on my other blog, here. A recent piece on Team Anti-Western Civ is here.

 

What Weiss and Zoldak describe is nothing new. It's been going on for some time. Barack Obama, two-time president of the United States, gave voice to it in 2008, specifically targeting the very Pennsylvania Bohunks Zoldak champions. At a San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said,

 

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest … they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

 

I'm a lifelong, registered Democrat, child of two registered Democrats. I oppose Trump. To my great regret, I cannot vote Democrat this fall.

 

My choice doesn't matter; I live in a blue state, and it will go for Biden who, by all predictions, is set to win.

 

Poles and Jews have reason to be wary.