Well Said

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Matt

A great turn of phrase from J. Budziszeski this morning:

When Rome burned under Nero, the cry was “The Christians must have set the fires.”  This time it is our Rome that is burning.  But this time the cry is, “The Christians are trying to drown us.”

Posted in Culture | 1 Comment

On the Relevance of Male Lactation

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Matt

It’s some pretty stupid reasoning, but it nevertheless amuses me to see our modern-day gnostics hoisted on their own petard.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court let stand a controversial lower court decision. Angela Ames alleged that her employer forced her to resign because she wanted special accommodations to pump milk at work and sued them for discrimination. According to RawStory, a portion of a lower court’s decision on this case held that sex discrimination was not an issue when it comes to breast feeding because men are technically capable of lactation in unusual circumstances.

Now, though I can’t say I’d make the same choice as Ms. Ames’ employer, I believe in freedom of association and think that employers should be allowed both to choose their employees and decide for themselves what kind of accommodations they want to provide. So I’m not opposed to the standing court decision. There’s also the caveat that RawStory is trumping up a tiny part of a court ruling that was at least one court further down than the headline implies—in other words, it wasn’t really a significant part of what the Supreme Court was considering taking on in the first place. Nevertheless, I think everyone can agree that it’s silly to claim that lactation is completely arbitrary with respect to sex.

Or can they?

As stupid as it is, this kind of reasoning is just an everyday part of American gnosticism. The gnostics of old believed in a sharp dualism between matter and spirit and conceptualized humans as spirits temporarily trapped in a fleshly prison. In other words, they believed that our bodies had nothing to do with the “real” us—our spirits. This point of view stretches further than ancient mysticism, though. Ever since Descartes, it has been a staple of modern thought as well. We tend to see our true selves as our minds while seeing our bodies as a kind of mind-vessel arbitrarily granted us by some accident of biology. Over the centuries we’ve reached a point where any thought that there is intention behind our biology that is worthy of respect is dismissed out of hand. The human body works a particular way, but this is deemed irrelevant due to the body being a machine that could have worked pretty much any way at all.

In fact, liberal political thought in America is packed to the gills with this kind of reasoning. Abortionists like Warren Hern try to classify pregnancy as a disease and deny that this condition (in which every human who ever existed has been involved in one way or another) is “normal.” In that same vein, Feminists have succeeded in making people think that drugs that break healthy reproductive systems are primarily medicine. Indeed, feminism in general hinges on its denial of any significant differences between men and women (no matter what our lying eyes may tell us) because sex and gender are supposedly arbitrary. The rainbow lobby tells us that our factory-equipped genitalia is of no relevance on matters like sex and marriage. When it comes down to it, the entire anti-discrimination industrial complex would collapse without the common public assumption that the design of our bodies simply doesn’t matter in any moral or spiritual sense.

But then again, rulings like this show that it all eventually collapses anyway when taken to its logical conclusion. The world can be a strange place, and if the kind of unusual biological exceptions that spring up in it make the concept of human design entirely arbitrary, then they make all of it entirely arbitrary. If pregnancy is a disease, then there is no real difference between disease and health anyway; it cannot be considered normal for a woman to lactate or abnormal for a man to do so. For that matter, if sexes don’t matter, then there’s no such thing as “women’s issues” in the first place. Neither is there any non-arbitrary sense of responsibility towards one’s own biologically produced children, which makes maternity leave a completely unnecessary accommodation. Even more abstract concepts like fairness and justice which liberalism cannibalizes become arbitrary, for our bodies are what observably interact with other bodies. If they are arbitrary, then there is no way that that these others ought to be treated. Punching someone in the face is just a applying a few Newtons to a piece of meat that someone has an irrational attachment to. So what if it hurts? After all, some people can’t feel pain at all, so why should that be a consideration?

As stupid as it is, the discrimination police have no grounds on which to complain about this legal reasoning. It’s no less stupid than what they come up with every day.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Natural Law | 2 Comments

Scripture Alone, but not a Scripture that is Alone

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Matt

Like any doctrine or teaching, the various Sola’s of the Reformation have provoked some misunderstandings from time to time. This is perhaps most common for sola fide—that we are saved through faith alone and not by our works. Because of this, Lutherans and others have often been charged with antinomianism—the belief that we are altogether without the law and that Christians need not regard God’s commands to us as such. While antinomians have existed among protestants, the confessionally-minded parts of the Reformation have always understood that while we are saved by faith alone, we are not saved by a faith that is alone. In other words, faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ (the only kind of faith that actually saves) ultimately produces works as well. Accordingly, we can agree with James that faith without works is dead. This does not imply that faith is insufficient on its own, but rather that a faith without works isn’t the saving kind of faith at all. To quote James’ example, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” A bare commitment monotheism simply is not the same as faith in Jesus Christ and can do nothing to save.

I believe an analogous saying can be helpful when it comes to the misunderstandings surrounding another one of the sola‘s—sola scriptura. This confession that our doctrine and theology must come from Scripture alone has also provoked misunderstandings. Lutherans have also been accused of creating a kind of “just me and my Bible” mentality among Christians—one that results in individual Christians and denominations leaning entirely on their own understanding and getting swept away by every bad interpretation of Scripture that pops into their heads. There’s no denying that this has happened—a lot. Nevertheless, while it is not such a famous saying, the confessionally-minded parts of the Reformation have always understood that while our theology must come from Scripture alone, it cannot come from a Scripture that is alone.

When the first Lutherans presented their confession of faith to Charles V at Augsburg, they saw it as an opportunity to address the muddy waters surrounding their beliefs—specifically the common view that they were heretics who invented new doctrine. When summing up the first twenty-one articles of this confession, they said, “This is about the Sum of our Doctrine, in which, as can be seen, there is nothing that varies from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic, or from the Church of Rome as known from its writers.” Indeed, these preceding articles are littered with condemnations of the historical heresies (and those parts of the Radical Reformation that embraced them anew), affirmations of the historical creeds of the Church, and conformity to her historical practices. It is only then that they proceeded to the remaining seven articles that they considered controversial. These articles concerned the true innovations—the contemporary abuses that had crept into the church over the years. Expecting an opportunity to find some measure of unity in newly clarified waters, they were taken aback when Rome’s confutation began rebuking their confession as early as the 2nd article. In response, they wrote a defense of their confession which, once again, relied heavily on the Church Fathers (especially Augustine) to demonstrate the catholicity of their confession.

Their strong insistence on affirming continuity with the Church Fathers and drawing on their writings was well advised, for reading Scriptures along with the saints who went before us provides certain advantages and protections. C. S. Lewis noted this in his introduction to a modern translation of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

 What Lewis observes is an incredibly practical point. Everyone brings their own biases to a text. It is not that these biases make a text undecipherable or unapproachable as postmodernism would suggest, but that they have a tendency to skew one’s perspective on it when he is unaware of them. When one reads a Scripture that is alone—a Scripture disconnected from the history of the Church—one is not truly reading Scripture alone, but Scripture along with one’s own philosophies and beliefs. But the surest way of delineating one’s own implicit beliefs from the teachings of Scripture is to read it along with the greatest teachers of the Church throughout the ages. If you read the Bible and come up with a teaching that is entirely new to orthodox Christianity, chances are it’s something you’ve read into Scripture rather than out of it.

The difference between scripture alone and a scripture that is alone is ultimately the difference between reforming the Church and rebooting the Church. The Radical Reformation sought a reboot: burn the confessionals, drop the ceremonies, reject the traditions, forget the history, and then start fresh with Scripture and nothing else. The gravest problem with this kind of nuclear option is that it inadvertently imports as much dross into the church as it purges from it. A reboot by men who have a bone to pick over superstition ends up excising Jesus’ promises about the efficacy of the Sacraments; a reboot by men who are enamored with a growing sense of individualism ends up putting the locus of salvation on our own decision for Christ; and so forth. The confessional part of the Reformation, on the other hand, sought to reform the Church. They did this, not through an idolatrous devotion to tradition that places it higher than Scripture, but by using tradition to identify the innovations that were corrupting the Church and as a safeguard against become innovators themselves.

Despite the bloviating of modern megachurch pastors, “sacramental entrepreneurs,” and the like, Christ never asked his Church to be doctrinal innovators, but rather to hold fast to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints through his Word. Nevertheless, we should not be so vain as to think we are the only saints who have done this. “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” This proverb is no less true when it comes to Church history. If we are to remain steadfast in the Faith and defend it against error, then we would be well served to draw our theology from Scripture alone, but also to do so along with those who fought these same battles long before we joined the fight.

Posted in Heresy, Lutheranism, Theology | Leave a comment

Faithlessness and the Danger of Busybodies

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Matt

I’ve written several times about the virtue of faith and the associated vice of desperation. This virtue is not the saving faith taught by Christianity, but is instead an ethical matter—a disposition towards acting as though the world will ultimately unfold as it should and a knowledge that whatever my personal responsibilities may be, I am not ultimately responsible for fixing the world. Those who lack this virtue can tolerate no harm to anyone, and are therefore driven to save the world from itself no matter the cost. The most extreme examples of this kind of desperation are, of course, the dictators and utopians of the 20th century who, in their quest to rebuild society so that no one would ever again suffer, starved and murdered tens of millions of people who stood in their way.

But vices are not found only in extremes, and the desperate need not be powerful to be dangerous. Though they may not murder millions, petty bureaucrats and busybodies are entirely capable turning lives upside down and tearing families apart. One Maryland family had a particularly close call with the desperate this past December when their children (aged 10 and 6) were caught walking home from a park by themselves. A local busybody who witnessed them deemed it necessary to call the police on the matter. The police deemed it necessary not only pick up the kids, drive them home, and lecture their parents on the dangers of the world, but also to notify Child Protective Services. A couple of hours later CPS agents came to their home with an ultimatum: immediately sign the safety plan they provided, or they would take the children away.

As Ron Burgundy put it, “Boy, that escalated quickly.”

Any sane person would consider the removal of children from their parents to be an option of last resort—carried out only in the most extreme cases when the abuse or neglect is more severe than the act of tearing a family apart. But how were these children being neglected? Exactly what danger were these children actually in by being alone half a mile from their house? “They could have been abducted!” “They could have been raped or murdered!” Tragedies like these do happen, to be sure, but do we have any reason they were about to happen in this case? Were they in a dangerous part of town? Was there a suspicious person following them? Was there any evidence at all to suggest that these scenarios were going to depart the murky land of “maybe” and become a reality? There doesn’t seem to be.

The problem with preventing every scary “maybe” that crosses one’s mind is that it is a never-ending task. There is no limit to the imagination’s ability to come up with threatening scenarios. Like it or not, we live in a world in which bad things can happen. Escaping the possibility of danger can only be accomplished by escaping life altogether. This is precisely why the drive to prevent all harm to anyone is synonymous with tyranny. Now that I’m a father, I find these stories quite troubling—as though my choice is between being a helicopter parent and having my kids taken by CPS. At the risk of sounding older than I am, back when I was a kid, I was free to move about the neighborhood (with specific streets acting as boundaries that expanded as I got older and more responsible.) It worked out pretty well.

Of course, some precautions are quite reasonable. Looking both ways before crossing the street, for example, does not meaningfully inhibit life, and cars travel down most roads on a regular basis. On the other hand, looking both ways before crossing your lawn because a passing car’s brakes might fail and it might skip the curb is not reasonable at all. It could happen (and probably has), but there’s no reason to suppose that it actually will happen to you in your lifetime. Some imagined threats simply aren’t tangible. Accordingly, we must ask what the tangible danger to these children was in this case. What danger stood a good chance of passing from the realm of “maybe” into the real world? Considering the known facts of the case, the biggest threat that came closest to harming these children was CPS agents coming to rip them away from their loving parents. But the busybodies and bureaucrats weren’t protecting the children from this danger—they were the ones inflicting it by protecting them from a maybe. Few people appreciate just how dangerous busybodies can be in the nanny state era.

There is no rubric or flowchart when it comes to deciding which risks to mitigate and which risks to live with. All we have are an ongoing series of judgment calls. When it comes to children who have not yet acquired good judgment, the responsibility to make these judgments falls to those who know them best, who love them best, and who are closest to the situation. The vast majority of the time, these people are parents, not bureaucrats.

Posted in Ethics, Politics | 1 Comment

The Obsolescence of Conservatism

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Matt

Could American conservatism be obsolete? Liberals and progressives have, of course, felt this way about us for a long time, but there’s never been a need to be bothered over that. I raise the question for a different purpose: as an opportunity for conservatives to take a short break from critiquing our longtime opponents so that we might constructively critique ourselves. Has conservatism—in a practical, boots-on-the-ground sense—ceased to be useful even by our own reckoning?

What do I mean by conservatism? By some accounts, the essence of conservatism is simply an attitude that is accustomed to the act of conserving. As Theodore Dalrymple recently put it:

A conservative has no fixed doctrine to which he must subscribe. He has, rather, a general attitude, namely that man is fallible, that regress is as much to be feared as progress is to be hoped, that human action always has unforeseen consequences so that prudence is a virtue, that ignorance is always greater than knowledge, that those who came before us were as intelligent as we, that tradition contains wisdom as well as irrationality, that life cannot be lived according to a preconceived plan, that wickedness lies in wait for all of us, that man is imperfectible.

There is some wisdom in what Dalrymple writes, and such an attitude may preserve people from the whims of the utopians and radical social engineers that are always among us. Nevertheless, it is all oriented around a cautious resistance to change as such. Dalrymple’s conservative walks the same road as the progressive, he just believes that slow and steady is a better way to go down it.

Others will describe conservatism as adherence to certain values and principles—the value of the two-parent family bound together by traditional marriage, or the liberties afforded by limited government, for example. Unlike simple resistance to change, these at least offer a compass which helps one to choose a direction rather than merely a pace. Nevertheless, even among this kind of conservative, conserving remains the practical approach to pursuing those principles. Even the very term “traditional marriage” highlights this, as does our practice of pursuing limited government by merely trimming at the fringes of every new government expansion to keep the end result closer to what came before. Conservatism is, by-and-large, caught up in the preservation of what has been handed over to it so that it may pass it along unsullied to posterity. Its understanding of its own principles is caught up in those same traditions—traditions that have been dragged kicking and screaming by progressives down their own road for quite a long time now..

Now, contra what progressives would like us to believe, there’s nothing inherently wrong with conserving. Respecting and preserving precious things is a responsibility taken up by any virtuous person. However, there is still the question of exactly what is being conserved in today’s America. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” Thoughtful conservatives need to consider how much of what they now conserve actually belongs to progressive mistakes of the last generation. We need to re-evaluate our own approaches—particularly whether simply conserving is still an appropriate approach to governing America. We need to ask ourselves a hard question: Is there really enough left of the America we love that conserving is the best course? Or is it time to rebuild and renew instead?

There are many cases where conservatives have begun conserving the wrong things through an inadvertent adoption of liberal attitudes. Consider, for example, traditional marriage. Most conservatives know that marriage is under assault in the recent push to legally force Americans to pretend that men are married to each other; and so it is. Nevertheless, what exactly are our marriage traditions at this point? No-fault divorce has been one of them for a long time, and it goes unchallenged by most conservatives despite being more poisonous to marriage than any homosexual lobbying could ever be. Neither does it help that our family court system is so skewed against men when it comes to dividing assets and custody. Combine the two, and the result is that any husband can be stripped of both his family and property at any time and for any reason. In effect, brides no longer have the opportunity to make a legally enforced commitment to their grooms. Legal disincentives like that are likely one of the reasons that marriage rates have fallen so much in the past 50 years.

Our anti-marriage tradition of serial monogamy is not limited to our laws, though; it also infects our customs. The rampant sexual immorality in our culture is something conservatives have fought against, but once again, some of its deepest roots have become traditions we blithely conserve. What is the traditional path to marriage for young Americans—conservatives included? Put it off until your education and then career are established at about 30. In the meantime, date as many people as you find yourself having romantic feelings for in either short-term hookups or long-term relationships that are basically play marriages without any promises. This is not at all conducive to real marriage, but it is treated as normal by most conservatives nonetheless. Conservative parents talk a good game, but by-and-large we fail to rise to the task of deliberately guiding our children into suitable marriages. Marriage may be a subject on many minds and tongues these days, but the push for gay “marriage” is not the most serious threat to the institution.

Speaking of troubles caused by the rainbow lobby, there are also those instances of photographers and bakers being forced to participate in celebrations that their consciences may have no part of. Quite naturally, conservatives have been vocal in defense of the religious liberties of these businesspeople. However, the legal basis for this intrusion into religious liberty is far older than the recent push for gay marriage. It has its roots civil rights legislation that is a half-century old—legislation that has become a longstanding tradition unquestioned by today’s conservatives.

I have no wish to second-guess the era that produced these laws—armchair quarterbacking them through the severe pressures, necessities, and injustices of their own time is pointless. Nevertheless, we no longer live in that era. We have an obligation to re-evaluate what they have left to us in light of recent events. The cost of a great deal of civil rights legislation has been the right of all races to freedom of association, and the bill is now coming due. But the racial issues these laws were meant to combat are not the same anymore. Is that heavy cost still worth it in an era when those who talk about racism for a living increasingly have to use terms like microaggression? Near as I can tell, microaggression is indistinguishable from being kind of a jerk. That’s a far cry from lynchings and forced segregation. Is the cost worth it when the placarded examples of violent racism like the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown increasingly turn out to be trumped up narratives woven by activists who have divorced themselves from the facts? Are there no better ways to fight racism than eviscerating our freedoms? And yet, too many conservatives would reflexively put on their outraged faces simply because the cost was questioned.

Or consider conservatives’ favorite political party. Though the GOP is essentially the big government of conservative politics, they are who we consistently look to for salvation. The most vehement political belligerence I’ve ever received was not from a liberal—it was from a staunch conservative upon hearing that I would not be voting for the Keynesian statist who had received the Republican presidential nomination that year. Tellingly, that description does very little to narrow down which year I’m referring to. In any other context, conservatives recognize that rewarding bad behavior (like voting for liberals who pose as conservative candidates) encourages bad behavior, but when faced with the prospect that “otherwise the Democrats might win,” fear takes over—principles are dropped for an expediency that does nothing more than slow the decay. Now that I’m a father, merely slowing America’s decay is no longer a terribly appealing option.

The upshot of all this is that conservatives have, in many respects, simply become out-of-date liberals at heart. Worst of all, our politics have encouraged us to look first to government as the solution. When our Republican-nominated justices support things like abortion or egregious abuses of eminent domain, and when our Senators vote to bail out the corporate losers of the free market at the expense of the people, we rant, we stew, and then we keep voting them back into office until it works. We seem to forget that government is not our only tool for change. What about all the things we can do that do not begin and end with government?

If conservatives are to attempt a new approach, there will hardly be a better time. The liberal stereotype of the supposedly conservative 1950’s entails, among other things, a time of rigidity too brittle to adapt to necessary changes and of an institutional arrogance that expected mindless conformity from a population no longer willing to conform. This actually describes our own time quite well, but not along conservative lines. You will not get dismissed from your job for being now or ever having been a member of the Communist Party, but busybodies at tech companies will get you canned for voting against gay marriage. You might not see Father Knows Best on TV, but the morality plays across television programs and movies are astonishingly uniform when it comes to matters like extramarital sex, abortion, and homosexuality. They just uniformly endorse liberal sensibilities.

Our institutions of higher learning are in a firm ideological grip that will not tolerate any dissent from the established orthodoxy, just as they were in the visions of yesterday’s campus radicals. Their new orthodoxy just happens to consist of perpetually overturning the once-traditional morality and religion that was rooted in American culture of the past. Many, for example, have made efforts to derecognize religious student organizations that don’t meet their ideological standards. Recently, this has even extended to making fraternities gender-inclusive because, as one professor put it, “In only allowing men to join, fraternities insist that men are fundamentally different from women right in the middle of an environment — a university — whose goal is to question such shopworn truisms.” It’s as though he has no idea that our culture has not been consistently teaching fundamental differences between the sexes for more than a generation. In 2014, the shopworn truism is that men and women are the same. This, academics confuse with critical thinking—as though they fail to realize that half a century has passed since progressives completely took over academia.

But as I’ve previously mused, if we are currently in a liberal 50’s, then why can we not follow up with a conservative 60’s? If the Baby Boomers collectively rose up to disregard the wisdom of their parents’ traditions, what is to stop multiple generations of conservatives from doing the same to disregard the foolishness of the aging Boomers’ traditions? Such an undertaking will not happen by trying to conserve the rot in the institutions they have left to us that have been decaying for decades—leave those institutions to die along with the parasites that infected them in the first place. Neither will it happen by looking for a government solution first. As the story goes, when Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the constitutional convention had given to Americans, he replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” If America has devolved to a point where its population is by-and-large incapable of maintaining limited self-government, then the work of those who desire such freedom needs to start with raising citizens virtuous enough to do the job Americans won’t do—and we clearly cannot look to government to do it for us.

Our first duty in this regard is, of course, to have, raise, and educate our children well. Too many culture warriors seek to spray perfume on our public schools by trimming at the fringes of sex ed or finding ways to reintroduce something vaguely like prayers and religious holidays. However, other Americans have already woken up to the idea of homeschooling as an alternative to handing our children over to schools that are too cowardly to tolerate National Guard t-shirts because of a gun silhouette and too narrow-minded to even allow a child to say “ bless you” in response to a sneeze. Anti-cultural nonsense like this is, of course, on top of the fact that these schools are getting poorer and poorer at actually educating. Nevertheless, homeschooling is an idea that still needs to become more normal and less exceptional among the conservative rank and file. We all seem to like it, but not enough of us actually do it.

Likewise, it is past time to reconsider the fiscal, moral, and spiritual cost of sending our children to universities compared to other ways they might be educated. Think long and hard about whether college is the best choice for your sons and daughters. Reconsider whether your annual donations to your alma mater are really doing anyone any good. If you are an employer, then when you hire, stop using college degrees as a proxy for the intelligence and capability of prospective employees (after all, colleges too are getting poorer and poorer at educating despite the growing costs.) Use other traits & accomplishments to vet your hires.

Naturally, schooling (home or otherwise) is not the only place virtuous citizens are formed; it also happens out in our communities. We should unapologetically do the many little things that help determine the course of our culture—whether supporting the victims of anti-Christian bullies or regularly helping our neighbors so that they feel less need for government to “help” them in the first place. Though we should not be busybodies, there is also an important place for things like social stigma. For example, As parents do all they can to help guide their children into suitable marriages, they should not balk at warning their sons away from marrying loose women no matter how much the libertine scream about slut-shaming. Neither should they hesitate to warn their daughters away from men who are too uninterested or too unprepared to provide for a family of their own. This may still be part of parenting, but advice like this tends to leak out into the wider culture, and that is OK. Despite recent twitter campaigns, it is also OK to openly dislike traits like bossiness. It is OK to point out that while bad luck can result in temporary needs for assistance, it is shameful for that kind of assistance to become a way of life. Finally, as a Christian, I believe that we have an important (though not exclusive) role to play in this. Churches should be bold in proclaiming what God has given us to teach—even if it means shrugging off the government interference that comes with our traditional 501(c)(3) status; even if it means offending congregants who have themselves adopted anti-Biblical moral traditions.

What then of government and politics? Though it cannot be the primary battleground, government does remain a necessity even in a free nation, and many freedoms will be more difficult to live out until it backs off. Nevertheless, even when it comes to government, there is growing promise in replacing (or at least displacing) the rotten institutions rather than simply conserving them. Though it is an important part of our heritage, creating a competitive alternative government from scratch is perhaps a bridge too far for loyal American citizens. Nevertheless, there is an option for the states to use Article V of the Constitution to pass amendments that empower existing state governments to be true competition to the bloated federal leviathan. The Liberty Amendments by Mark Levin was my first encounter with this idea, but it seems to be worth pursuing—far more so than expecting career federal politicians to reign themselves in.

Our nation did not come about through the conservation of the unjust order that American patriots found themselves in. It came through the work of men and women bravely willing to go their own way according to their principles and virtues. The time has come for conservatives to be those men and women once again and build something better than what we have been left with.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Rethinking Equality

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Matt

Awhile back, I wrote a short piece about equality and marriage. I noted that when the idea that all people are created equal was added to our political discourse, it brought some benefits to the common good. It helped to modify and even remove distinctions between peasant and lord, slave and master, and so forth–distinctions that were frequently abused and worked against justice by allowing those in power to escape its reach when it came to offenses against those under their authority. For example, the idea that a citizen should be able to bring a governor before a magistrate to seek justice was at one time quite novel, but it serves to help keep those who govern in line (while it lasts, anyway.)

But as I pointed out then, good things are often corrupted, and equality is no exception. As Western society became more and more impressed with this new hammer, it began to see every social problem as a nail, and tried to extend equality into every area of life—often to our detriment. For example, equality is harmful rather than helpful in the area of marriage; it exacerbates marital discord rather than resolving it. However, our sense of equality has overgrown its proper boundaries in many other respects as well. Over time, equality morphed from a political tool with a limited range of utility to an all-encompassing factual belief to which all human thought must be made to conform. When this happened, equality ceased to be our servant and instead became our god. Rather than a means to an end, it was treated as something valuable for its own sake which today claims unjust authority over the lives of everyone.

Half a century ago, C. S. Lewis wrote about this transformation in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, an excellent piece of illustrative fiction in which the demon Screwtape describes to an audience of devils the process whereby Hell has worked through modernity to remove from mankind every form of human excellence. Their efforts centered around encouraging the humans to use the word “democracy” as a kind of incantation—not as a term with a clear definition, but as a sound that invokes a particular set of feelings in both speaker and audience. Screwtape advises his underlings thusly:

You can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided. The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

Our colloquial language has changed a bit since Lewis wrote this in 1959. When contemporary Americans use democracy as an incantation, it is usually to generate certain feelings about our military adventurism in the Middle East. However, we do use the word equality in precisely the way Lewis describes. Lewis himself notes the close connection between his use of democracy and “the political ideal that men should be equally treated” which Screwtape sought to use to “make a stealthy transition in [human] minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on.”

Though our parlance might have changed in the interim, the function of this incantation has not. Very seldom does anyone consider exactly what they mean by equality—rarely do we question exactly what measurements or characteristics we suggest are equal (such as our standing before the law.) Instead, it is used to ward off both judgment and discernment by generating feelings of offended entitlement that cry either “I’m as good as you” or, as is perhaps just as common among the social justice warriors who most regularly abuse the word, “he’s as good as you.”

The success of the most poisonous philosophies and movements affecting modern society has hinged on using this magic word to banish from the minds of the unthinking many of the very important and very human distinctions on which civilization depends. The natural consequences of all this willful ignorance are becoming ever more dire as people are trained not to excel in life.

Socialists in their various incarnations use equality to ignore the practical distinctions between the industrious & the lazy and between those who create wealth & those who merely consume it. They chant their incantation of equality over both incomes and outcomes and expect society to fall into line. But if one cannot discern between the lazy and the industrious, then one can neither reward the latter nor train or otherwise discourage the former. Economic excellence and productivity is thereby discouraged and excluded. It should therefore be no surprise that the focus of our economy has shifted from rewarding the production of goods and services to rewarding the mere administration of them. This is not to say that administration is wrong or unnecessary, but rather that it’s sole value is in service to the productive by greasing the wheels of commerce.

Instead, the wealthiest of us are increasingly found among the bankers—those who administrate the wealth produced by others and skim off as much as they can get away with. The largest and most successful businesses tend to be the ones most able to influence the government administrators to provide them with special favors and opportunities. Meanwhile, as Lewis observed even 50 years ago, taxes and penalties meant to equalize the rich and poor are destroying the middle class—the very group of people most willing to make sacrifices so that their children would be better educated and more productive than they themselves were—the very class which Lewis notes through Screwtape, “gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators.”

Multiculturalism, another terribly destructive philosophy, makes frequent use of the equality incantation in order to to ignore the distinction between the barbaric and the civilized. The effect is analogous to socialism’s use of equality; it diminishes the potential for human excellence by removing the ability both to reward & encourage civilization and to discourage & punish barbarism. The most common and obvious consequences are found in our schools, where no aspect of American heritage can be spoken of with pride lest any other heritage encounter a corresponding criticism. We go out of our way to honor very troubled societies simply for not being us. This is not to suggest that we have no vices or that others have no virtues, but rather that refusing to distinguish between vices and virtues removes any sound basis for both critique and commendation.

This same idea bleeds into our current conversation on immigration. Any consideration that our nation may not be well-served by admitting people whose intention is to cling wholeheartedly to cultures possessed of dangerous barbaric elements is excluded. Any thought that welcoming such massive numbers of people with no root in the traditions of English common law and limited government that have served us so well could be detrimental to our nation is dismissed by another magic word: racism—a more provocative and ham-fisted version of the equality incantation meant to ward off legitimate criticism.

Feminism follows a slightly different pattern, for it does not obscure the contrast between a social virtue and a paired social vice. However, feminists do use the incantation of equality to ignore the very real and very important differences between men and women. Accordingly, men and women are both inhibited in their ability to pursue masculinity or femininity, for the feminist pretends that there is no such thing as either and expects society to do the same. Instead, they hold up confused ideals of an androgynye that is ultimately mythical, for there are no androgynous humans—only male humans and female humans.

The various social mechanics established to overcome this obvious reality have caused incalculable harm. In order to disestablish a mother’s unique relationship with her unborn child, feminists work feverishly to ensure the authorization and de-stigmatization of lethal violence against the very young at the growing cost of tens of millions of lives. In order to break down various gender roles which have served civilization well for millenia, they encourage men and women to base relationships around a selfishness glamoured by invocations of equality. To provide a relief valve for the predictable consequent unhappiness, feminists established no-fault divorce laws which allows any spouse (and through the biased family court system encourages wives) to walk out on marriage and family for any reason—or no reason at all. Feminism also walked hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which chanted equality in order to veil the moral distinctions between the chaste and the unchaste. The obvious result is that our society has refused to teach and laud the virtue of chastity lest the slut or the wanton feel ashamed, and so we force our children to wander unguided through an increasingly harmful sexual anarchy.

What then shall we do? In light of what has been done under its banner, America cannot proceed with its uncritical and hopelessly rose-tinted vision of an unbounded and undefined equality. At the same time, we do not want to lose the baby with the bathwater by rejecting equality as a very helpful political tool. The balance lies in removing equality from the realm of the vague and magical into the realm of the specific and practical—to cease being its servants and instead use it to serve us. A great example of this approach can be found in our Declaration of Independence. It affirms that all men are created equal, but immediately goes on to specify the meaning of this—“that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Within these broad rights inherent in our humanity, we are indeed equal. Furthermore, this is not a humanity of our imaginations that is otherwise void and without form; it is a humanity defined by the context of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. It is therefore not an equality that erases all human distinctions. Understanding the proper meaning, context, and limitations of the word deprives the incantation of equality of its power.

So do not mindlessly affirm unspecified equality between men and women; instead, affirm that though we are equally human, and equally necessary to civilization in our own ways, we tend to be very different in our sexualities, our preferences, our goals, and more. Affirm the humanity of the members of all cultures, but stop pretending that each culture is as good as the other or that their virtues and vices are exempt from judgment. Affirm the part of human nature that drives us to work, build, and freely pursue happiness, but stop pretending that everyone does this equally well or takes it equally seriously; stop perceiving unequal results as a symptom that something is wrong. The equalitarian priests and social justice warriors among us will inevitably try to undermine our new-found freedom from their god. But when they curse blasphemers with words like racist, sexist, classist, and the like, we need not supplicate before them until the curse is lifted, for there is nothing to fear. The more we understand the true nature and limits of equality, the more we know that their religion is mere superstition that has no hold on us.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Humanism, Politics | Leave a comment

Ending the Real Rape Culture

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Matt

Struggling to Define Rape

Despite the common pretenses of relativism and moral uncertainty among Americans, there yet remain certain moral touchstones that none of us are at all uncertain about. One of these is, of course, that Hitler was evil. Using the Nazis as moral goalposts is so ubiquitous that the internet has described the phenomenon as Godwin’s law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Another of these moral touchstones, in the West at least, is the fact that rape is about as heinous of a crime as anyone is capable of committing. Before pronouncing judgment, cultural relativists do not first need to dialogue with other cultures past and present which have condoned or even enjoined rape in certain circumstances. Nor do utilitarians first need to scientifically poll rapists and their victims about the relative amounts of pleasure and pain that they’ve experienced. Rape is simply wrong, and we all know it apart from our ethical philosophies. It is therefore curious that rape has become the topic of so much recent controversy.

Part of that controversy is simply those who are well-intentioned but intemperate surrendering to the understandable fear of rapists going without punishment and victims going without vindication. This is a large part of the motivation behind recent attempts to combat rape by revoking the rights of the accused—particularly on college campuses. While the goal is admirable, the means seem to center around 1) facilitating accusations and punishments until their frequency matches blatantly false claims of 1 in 5 college coeds being raped and 2) responding to failures to take accusers seriously by going to the opposite extreme of reflexively believing them. The reason that the accused have such rights (and why we do not call accusers “victims” before guilt has been established) is to protect against the severe harm that false accusations bring. It has yet to be demonstrated by anyone why rape is the one allegation for which the accused are offered no such protection. It is not uncommon to hear claims that false accusations are practically non-existent, but there is no evidence that this is actually true, and plenty of examples to the contrary.

Dehumanizing Consent

There is, however, a deeper reality behind the fervor to convict, the bogus statistics, and the guilty-until-proven-innocent mentalities. Nowadays, the idea of sexual violation is expressed entirely through the concept of “consent.” However, the ability of this single factor to exclusively undergird our concept of rape is complicated by attempts to divorce consent from every other factor of human experience.

One of the earliest and most famous of these attempts is the “no means no” standard which sought to more firmly establish a woman’s refusal. However, this standard is not without its problems. Though deliberate refusals are what they are and should be treated as such, the standard also promotes a myopia when it comes to the tendencies of many women to be coy and of many men to be boldly persistent—complimentary character traits which facilitate romance and have many innocent incarnations. It also leads to its fair share of absurdities, the most infamous of which is probably the one-free-grope policy feminists were forced into whilst defending some of President Clinton’s alleged dalliances. After all, who is to say that a sexually liberated woman isn’t allowed to enjoy the occasional unsolicited fondle? Surely men need fair warning to the contrary when they try to provide such services. The important thing is merely that the men take no for an answer in the event that they’re told to get lost. Accordingly, this kind of standard not only divorces consent from male-female sexual complimentarity, but also made a mockery of the crime of rape itself.

A more recent attempt to refine and purify consent can be found is Mary Adkins’ response to the suggestion that a woman’s resistance to the use of force play a role in the legal identification of rape. In it, the author suggests that such a standard is unfair because many women do not resist specifically because their relative lack of strength means they probably won’t prevail. In response to an advocate of the force requirement, she writes:

He wants that she should push back, require her rapist to show his full strength so she can accuse him later. Under Rubenfeld’s preferred definition for the law, she should dehumanize herself further for it to be considered a true act of rape (because, by definition, there is no force unless there is resistance). Despite the terrible, visceral knowledge that she is unlikely to win any physical match against him, she has to try and fail.

This response, however, is problematic. First, to describe physical resistance to rape as “dehumanizing” is surely unjust to those who actually have pushed back. Are they really less human for having done so? Though horrible, the red badges of courage earned by those who fought against their violation are surely worthy of more respect than that. Rather than dehumanizing, the character to resist evil even in the face of defeat is one of the bright spots of humanity.

More problematic from a legal perspective, however, is the presumption of violent intent on the part of the alleged rapist. Ambiguous situations are created when weak no’s are intermingled with words and actions that seem to say yes. A physical ‘no’ cuts through that ambiguity and can just as easily result in an end to the encounter as it can in violence. Refusing to give such a clear signal out of fear of a possible future outcome takes a great deal for granted. In many cases, all that is then left to identify a rape are the fears of the alleged victim and a handful of mixed messages. The attempt to cleanse consent from the need for a clear physical manifestation thereof makes it almost entirely subjective. Such is hardly a sound basis on which to condemn someone for a heinous crime—particularly when maintaining a legal presumption of innocence.

Still more comprehensive attempts to distill consent down to its purest form can be found in the recent pushes for affirmative consent laws. By feminist reckoning, the expectation of maintaining an ability and willingness to deliver a clear refusal of sex places too heavy a burden on a woman’s sexuality, and so no-means-no must give way to only-yes-means-yes. But not just any “yes” will do. In order to purify consent, the yes must meet a host of standards to ensure its quality.

The “yes,” for example, must usually be ongoing. In California’s law, for example, “Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” Furthermore, this revocation cannot depend on a no, but only on continued delivery of the yes, for the law also states, “Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” The intent here is to divorce consent from any form of commitment. Committing to marriage has, of course, long been seen as far too extreme a requirement to legitimate a sexual encounter. Likewise, so-called long-term-relationships were also deemed too confining. Now it seems that even one-night-stands and hookups constrain the sexuality of a liberated woman beyond all reasonable boundaries. It must be able to be ended at any time for any reason (or for no reason at all) without any kind of notice. In other words, a legitimate encounter can suddenly turn into rape between one thrust and the next without the “rapist” even knowing. Indeed, nothing says that either partner needs to realize it at the time. If recognizing consent requires such cold-sober analysis, then why should it not also be aided by the 20/20 hindsight provided through post-coital reflection? And when last night’s hot dish leaves without even buying breakfast, maybe that’s what it takes to realize that the consent wasn’t pure enough after all.

In some versions of affirmative consent, consent must even be granted anew at each escalation of the encounter. But what counts as escalation? Are there now legally accepted definitions for first, second, and third base? Or perhaps such categories are too restrictive and even harder, deeper, and faster must all count as escalation. Criteria like this divorce consent even from human sexuality itself. Two computers might negotiate a connection for data transfer by explicitly requesting and confirming each step in the process, but this is far removed from authentic human sexuality. Standards like this essentially classify most sexual encounters as rape. They leave the matter of guilt or innocence almost entirely in the decision to prosecute rather than in the act itself. As Ashe Schow recently found, the proponents of affirmative consent laws are unable to offer any suggested means by which the accused could prove that consent was actually granted. Now, this may be precisely what feminism seeks—granting women arbitrary legal power over men—but it cannot be what any just society seeks.

Perhaps the most absurd attempt to distill consent comes from Valerie Tarico who recently wrote about how “rapey” Christmas is. After all, the holiday revolves around God having His way with a young virgin’s reproductive system—a violation second only to His unilateral creation of that reproductive system in the first place without so much as a by-your-leave. I’m sure there are any number of Christian rape-apologists ready to object that the virgin birth (by definition) involved no sexual intercourse in any sense of the term, and that Mary indeed consented—she even sang a song about how wonderful it all was (which is perhaps a little unusual in rape situations.) Though the first point is entirely lost on Tarico, she does acknowledge the latter point about consent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really count because Mary’s consent was not pure enough. After all, “Mary assents after being not asked but told by a powerful supernatural being what is going to happen to her.” Apparently even God Himself is not allowed to impugn on a woman’s consent by making her an integral part of mankind’s salvation, for this might sway her opinion on the matter. Much like the color-blind are physically incapable of distinguishing red from brown, feminists seem to possess a mental defect that makes them unable to perceive anything other than power and coercion when they encounter things like hierarchy, authority, and even godhood.

The Cost of Reducing Consent to Whim

So what does all this ridiculousness amount to? In their ongoing attempts to purify consent from all outside contamination, feminists have inadvertently turned it into something else. A consent that may flit to and fro from moment to moment and which ought not be subject to any external influences or pressures is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from mere whim.

But is a person’s whim even something that is worthy of respect? When critiquing George Bernard Shaw’s worship of human volition in Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton observed that “You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain, to discover truth, or to save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of will, you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet, choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.” In other words, choice is not meaningful apart from judgment. Now, respecting even poor choices is still a sensible concept, for we treasure the meaningful human capacity to choose better courses of action over worse ones. Whim, however, is a different animal altogether. It does not choose better or worse; it does not really choose at all. It is simply an arbitrary animal impulse. Choices have criteria, but a consent divorced from any other consideration necessarily has none.

Some feminists complain that while parents teach their daughters how to avoid rape, they fail to teach their sons not to rape. I found this puzzling based on my own experience. I was, after all, catechized in the Lutheran church, and Luther’s explanation of the Fifth Commandment included “do not hurt or harm your neighbor in his body” and of the Sixth included “lead a chaste and decent life in word and deed” both of which quite obviously preclude rape. While not everyone was raised Lutheran, most traditions, religious and irreligious alike, include some version of “do unto others…” or even “don’t be a jerk” which also quite obviously preclude rape. It is only when consent is hermetically sealed from anything which might humanize it—when it is reduced into pure whim—that we can fail to recognize such obvious instruction for what it is. It is true enough that many parents do not raise their sons to immediately submit to every feminine whim they might encounter. If failure to do so in a sexual situation is all that defines rape, then one could indeed consider such instruction passed over.

But that is not, by a long shot, all that rape is. Forcing oneself onto a woman against her will is one thing; having sex in a way that does not accommodate momentary whims is something else entirely. Accordingly, understanding rape solely in terms of a dehumanized consent undermines the moral sensibilities upon which the continued criminalization of rape depends. Borrowing a roommate’s blouse without permission is done against consent, but it is trivial. There are no feminists complaining about a blouse-borrowing culture on campus, nor calls to revoke due process for accused blouse-borrowers. The only reason for considering rape to be a particularly heinous crime is because unlike shirts, sexuality is something special and set apart.

But if sex is something special and set apart, then it ought not be treated so casually at all. This brings us back to chastity—precisely the moral virtue that feminism’s myopic focus on consent is meant to bypass. The aforementioned article by Tarico tries to shame Christianity because the Bible “fails” to talk about her dehumanized understanding of consent. The Bible, however, talks about far stronger concepts on which to understand rape: purity, chastity, fornication, propriety, carnal knowledge, and so forth. These are far higher and deeper concepts on which to understand the horror of rape. For example, the Bible talks about sex functionally making a man and a woman “one flesh.” It doesn’t matter whether it is a husband with his wife or a man with a prostitute—sex does what sex was designed to do whether we use it rightly or not. Such an understanding provides one dimension (among others) in which rape is clearly perceived as particularly heinous, for forcibly establishing that kind of intimate relationship with a woman against her will is abhorrent. A grievous wound of this kind can be survived and overcome, but it is what it is and demands retribution. A concept of rape based on mere whim could never plausibly trigger than kind of reaction in the human conscience.

But doesn’t “lack of consent” basically mean the same thing as “against her will?” It could, but not when consent is divorced from every other factor. There is no routine soul-smear by which movements of the will can be scientifically detected; we can only rely on a person’s actions to express her will. The key question in determining beyond a reasonable doubt whether a rape has been committed is therefore whether the alleged victim expressed a refusal to have sex. Answering that question well will always be more complicated than seeing whether a “no” ever crossed her lips at any point or whether a “yes” dutifully crossed her lips at every minute escalation. It requires looking at the nature of the existing relationship between the people invovled, the character of both accuser and accused, the nature of the refusal, evidence of forceful resistance, and so forth. In short, it requires looking at all the very human aspects of a sexual encounter that feminists seek to make off-limits.

Consider, for example, the difference between these two situations: A number of years ago, I remember hearing of a college student who was judged a rapist by his school and treated accordingly. He was involved in some kind of threesome in which he took his turn of consensual sex with his roommate’s girlfriend after said roommate had finished. At some point during the encounter, she informed him that she wanted to go home. He took that to mean “hurry up and finish” and so he said “OK, just a minute” and did so. Unfortunately, what she later said she really meant was “stop this very instant,” and so her partner unknowingly became a rapist. If this should be considered a crime at all, is it really a particularly heinous one? It is entirely fair to ask what that girlfriend even lost from the last couple moments of the encounter other than time. Exactly what harm transpired that requires retribution? Now compare that to, say, the rape carried out by Malcom McDowell’s character Alex and his gang in A Clockwork Orange. There, it is far easier to explain what the victim lost and how she was harmed, nor is there any question of the severity of the act.

No morally sane person could judge these two crimes to be equivalent. They are so far apart that it seems odd to even give them both the same label of “rape.” And yet an understanding of rape based entirely on dehumanized consent is absolutely incapable of making any distinction at all between them, for both violate whim. Neither can one violation be considered greater than the other, for there is no such thing as strong or weak whim. The moment one speaks of a relatively strong whim, one has lent that whim a seriousness that goes against its very nature. Whim simply is what is it is and does not come in degrees.

The intention in conflating these two kinds of crimes is, of course, to extend protection to more women. If rape is all about consent, then the (for lack of a better term) sloppy second thoughts kind of rape described above is as bad as the Clockwork Orange kind of rape. That girlfriend might not need protection nearly so badly as the other victim, but acquiring it is still considered a win by feminists. Unfortunately, that kind of logic cuts both ways. If rape is all about consent, it is just as logical to conclude that the Clockwork Orange kind of rape is no worse than sloppy second thoughts kind of rape.

But could anyone ever think such a horrible thing? Human experience unfortunately says yes. Not all cultures have treated rape as serious, and not all cultures that treat it as serious consider the woman to be the primary victim (think honor killings.) Natural law can be subverted and consciences can be retrained against their own nature. It is entirely possible that our own culture may someday join those ranks. The quickest path to the ignoble circumstance of seriously questioning whether rape is truly wrong is by throwing the falsely accused under a bus and by excessively punishing those involved in the grayer areas. The quickest path to being unable to convincingly answer the question of why rape is even a big deal in the first place is by hanging everything on an increasingly puerile version of consent.

“Rape Culture” is just Unchaste Culture

It is clear that we have problem when women begin thinking that saying “no” is just not worth it. In the aforementioned article, Adkins gives the impression that saying no to an aggressive sexual advance as an almost extraordinary act of strength and bravery that most women cannot muster. So what do they do instead?

In order to avoid victimhood and maintain simple, victimless personhood, women can be extraordinarily, stunningly rational; we can rationalize away acts of violation simply because we don’t want them to have been real. Perhaps if I decide it didn’t happen, it didn’t; perhaps if I decide it doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t.

Indeed, if whim is all that makes a rape, then avoiding rape is simply a matter of adjusting one’s whims. Think of it as “surprise sex” and its not so bad anymore. The advocates of affirmative consent likewise seem to think that a “no” is beyond the capability of too many women. But whereas feminism inadvertently paints women as being too feeble in mind, body, and spirit to deliver a clear “no,” chastity empowers women to do so by giving them a platform on which to stand which is greater than whim. Chastity highlights the higher values associated with human sexuality and trains people to act accordingly in a way that whim never could. A chaste woman who knows the value of her sexuality can say no to a proposition with confidence. In contrast, a woman who dutifully starts going to town when a stranger at a party pushes her head towards his crotch—who thinks that refusing just isn’t worth the potential trouble—has a shallow and impoverished understanding of her own sexuality.

Chastity also offers women a protection that the law never can. Legal retribution is, of course, a necessity, but it is far better to avoid the need for it in the first place. Much of the drive toward affirmative consent comes from the increasing prevalence of hard-to-prosecute situations such as drunken hookups in which participants were too intoxicated to adequately gauge even their own wills. This is part-and-parcel of a dehumanized sexuality that operates on whim, but the chaste know better than to enter such situations in the first place.

The common rejoinder is that a woman should even be able to walk down the street naked without fear of rape, or dress as provocatively as she wants without fear of provoking an unwanted response. A less-common but actual claim is that a woman should even be able to go to a strange city and a sleep in a strange man’s bed without any sexual repercussions. However valid (or not) one may consider such claims, trading away due process, the presumption of innocence, and even an understanding of the seriousness of rape to secure these abilities is a very poor deal for women and society. The chaste, in contrast, understand the value of propriety because they understand the higher values that propriety is meant to guard. To them, it is no burden at all but simply how one treats her sexuality with respect. None of this is to say that the wanton deserves to be raped—it is merely to say that the wanton has already willingly abandoned protection far better than any affirmative consent law could ever provide for her. It is still good to give her protection, but it is not necessarily a good for which it is worth throwing the rest of society under the bus.

In contrast to the recent over-hyped rhetoric, if there was ever a so-called “war on women,” it was carried out by those feminists who deemed chastity a burden. Their reductionistic and myopic view of rape as the absence of a form of consent from which all trace of humanity has been boiled away does women no favors. There is no rape culture—there is only a culture in which the sexual revolution has so skewed our perspectives that belatedly unwanted gray areas have become a matter of everyday life for women. But broadly expanding the scope of “rape” beyond all good sense is not a viable solution, for if so-called rape truly becomes a matter of everyday life, then it simultaneously ceases to be a big deal in the public consciousness. If women feel sexually disadvantaged in contemporary America, their best bet for improving their position is to do the hard work of reclaiming the virtue of chastity.

Posted in Chastity, Ethics, Feminism | Leave a comment

Keeping the “Free” in “Freedom”

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Matt

Is it heresy for Americans to try and keep Christ in Christmas? That’s the charge made by Stephen Ingram in a recent blog post. His hometown of Piedmont, Alabama has recently run into some trouble with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The anti-religious activist group first demanded an end to prayer over the intercom at the town’s football games. The town conceded under the threat of legal action and opted for a moment of silence instead. More recently, the town chose the controversial theme of “Keep Christ in Christmas” for their annual Christmas parade and then backed away once again when it unsurprisingly caused controversy among the same activists.

So what makes such action heresy according to Ingram? Well, he says American Christians need to stop playing the persecution card, that taking such actions through civic institutions imposes religion on the irreligious or differently religious, that Christianity itself eschews political power in favor of meekness, and most importantly, that Christ is already in Christmas of his own accord and so we don’t need to put him there. For a Christian to insist on the point shows a lack of faith and a “belligerent” attitude at odds with his religion.

In a way, I do think he has a point. Granted, I don’t think Ingram quite grasps what the word “heresy” actually means as he casually throws it about—while he clearly considers culture warrior Christians to be in error, I don’t get the impression that he considers those who persist in the error to be cut off from the Body of Christ and Hell-bound. But if we overlook his poor choice of words, his observations that the persecution card is overplayed, that Christ is already in Christmas no matter what we do, and that Christianity neither requires nor demands political power to spread the Gospel are entirely correct.

But while Ingram has a point regarding his criticisms of some Christians, this is not the only aspect of the ongoing “war of Christmas” controversy. This is one of those matters that crosses the boundaries between the Two Kingdoms and exists in both at once. In the Church—the right-hand kingdom—the matter is already settled as Ingram suggests. It is not a fight that we need to even take part in, let alone win. Nevertheless, as long as Christians live in this world, we also bear dual-citizenship. Our home is heaven, but for the sake of our earthly neighbors, individual Christians must still take an active role in the kingdom of the left—civil government—through our vocations. For example, the Christian leaves it to God to avenge wrongs, but a Christian who is an officer of the law has been called by God to avenge wrongs done against his fellow citizens, for as Paul writes of civil authorities in Romans, “he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” Likewise, though a Christian must turn the other cheek, a Christian soldier holds an office whose God-given responsibility is often to kill and maim.

When these facts of life in the Two Kingdoms are taken into account, the controversy over Christmas and public expressions of faith are not nearly so cut and dry. After all, freedom of religion is not merely a benefit for Christians, but for all American citizens regardless of their religion. Accordingly, it is indeed a matter of responsibility for Christian citizens to fight for this freedom on behalf of our neighbors—Christian and unbeliever alike. But the beating heart of religious freedom in the United States is not the recently discovered and constitutionally dubious doctrine of utter separation of church and state as Ingram seems to suppose. Rather, the freedom of all citizens is found in the free exercise of religion granted by the First Amendment.

Thus, what is at stake in the war on Christmas are not primarily theological questions, but civic ones: First, are Americans allowed to have an individual religious identity? And second, are groups of Americans allowed to have collective religious identities?

The First Amendment does forbid the establishment of a state church, but it in no way imposes the incoherent burden of religious neutrality on our civic institutions, nor does it demand that the right to free exercise of religion end when one crosses from the private to the public sphere. We can already see where this leads. Our President talks about “freedom of worship” rather than free exercise. But freedom of worship is nothing more than the right to go into a private building and follow one’s preferred liturgy on any day of the week so long as it is out of the public view.

But the right of free exercise of religion cannot end there, for there is no religion on earth that ends there. Whatever the specific details of one’s god, the very nature of a god is that it is supreme—that it lays claim to one’s entire life rather than merely one’s private life. This is true regardless of whether one follows a traditional religion. Even the hedonist, whose god is pleasure, does not leave his worship of pleasure behind when he enters the public sphere. He certainly may refrain from certain pursuits in the public eye, but he will only do so if this will net him more pleasure in the long run—it is still his god which dictates his public activities. So it is with the Christian, the Muslim, the Utilitarian, and the Scientologist. And so, when the follower of a god becomes a public official—anything from simple voter all the way up to President of the country—he does not and cannot cease following that god. He will instead look to what that god demands of someone within that public office.

If our neighbor’s right to free exercise is to have any meaning at all, then they must be able to exercise that right even within their public capacities, for they cannot stop serving their god while teaching, coaching, or governing without making their god less than a god—less than their ultimate concern. A mayor or council in charge of a public event or institution must therefore have the freedom to choose what kind of religious character (if any) it is to have. One may talk of religious neutrality in our public institutions, but one may never actually achieve it. When the question is whether to pray before games or not to pray before games, only one side may have their way. There is no neutral ground between X and not-X. To pretend that X or not-X is a neutral position that must be adopted by default is to grant victory to one side rather than the other. It merely grants that victory through deception and pretense rather than open and honest debate. It cries fairness while forbidding one side from even having a seat at the table. If decisions must be made one way or another, it is far better to allow both sides to honestly and openly contend for their goals, for such is the very substance of religious freedom.

But what of those whose religious sensibilities are offended by the free expression of their public officials? What protection do we have against, say, someone who believes his god demands a parade in December? Our contemporary response has been to avoid these controversies and provide such protection by restricting free expression. If the Christian cannot freely express himself in public, then he cannot offend the Muslim, nor impose religious responsibilities upon him and vice versa. But pursuing this course to its end leads only to the eradication of the freedoms of both Christian and Muslim alike—the relegation of religion to a small portion of their lives.

There is another way of handling these disputes—an American tradition that is remarkably simple and effective: voting. If you do not like the manner in which your representative represents you, then vote for someone who you think will do a better job. Now not everyone will get their way. The Christian in New York City would never be able to achieve a Keep Christ in Christmas parade, nor (presumably) would an atheist in Piedmont be able to stop one. Nevertheless, this approach allows all citizens to freely follow their gods and openly contend for what those gods demand. Their freedoms are left intact even for those who do not get their way. Such is life in a society.

But what of those who believe his god demands the imposition of his religion at the expense of all the others? What of a potential majority among a single religion that would throw all the others under the bus? Here, we do have Constitutional protections—not by limiting the religious freedom of individuals, but by limiting the potential power and authority of government. Our government is forbidden from creating a state church and from restricting religious freedoms by, say, forcing adherence to one religion at the expense of others.

Nevertheless, we cannot consider such protections to be religiously neutral, for different religions have different understandings of government. Islam, for example, does not delineate religion and government at all. It is simultaneously a religion and a philosophy for temporal government. This is very different from Christianity, which does distinguish between the two. Our precise doctrines may differ among two kingdoms, sphere sovereignty, subsidiary sovereignty, etc, but Christianity does recognize a distinction. It is therefore no accident that religious liberty arose in the Christian West as opposed to the Middle East. Accordingly, it would be fair to consider the 1st Amendment to inherently favor Christianity over Islam even as it seeks to protect the religious freedoms of Christians and Muslims alike.

It is here that Christians must therefore consider the question of a collective religious identity among Americans. The simple fact is that not all collective religious identities would be of equal service to our neighbor. Neither can we simply refuse to have one, for this would merely be the de facto adoption of secular humanism or atheism as the national religion. This is exactly what political liberals in this country have been carrying out for a long time, and their ever growing hatred for the consciences of those who do not share their faith has been quickly eroding religious freedom. It is clear that not every religious identity will be inclined to allow religious liberties to others. Therefore, if we are to serve our neighbors as Christians, we cannot simply practice our religion as discrete individuals, but as communities.

When it so happens that a municipality acquires a religious identity of this kind, there is no inherent need to quash it. Regardless of whether I think it is a good idea to have a “Keep Christ in Christmas” parade, it should be within the purview of the municipality in charge of that parade. Regardless of whether I think it is a good idea to have a prayer before a football game, those in charge of the game ought to have the freedom to follow their best judgment. It is unfortunate that some citizens will feel left out, but they will nevertheless be free to pursue their own religion however they feel. Too many Christians have bought the postmodern lie that religious freedom for all means subduing everyone’s public expressions of religion—especially the majority’s. On the contrary, such public expressions of religion are the incarnation of religious liberty. For the sake of their neighbors, Christians must honestly contend for their religion. This should be an obvious service for those neighbors who are Christians, but it is no less a service for the Hindu and Buddhist, for their religious freedoms depend on public expression as well—both their own and ours.

This is the true challenge of religious tolerance in America. Too many suppose it to be the incoherent task of suspending religious judgments. But if a god’s nature is to hold authority over the judgment of its followers, then to suspend religious judgment is merely to suspend religious freedom. If Americans must make religious judgments, then we must do so as best as we are able—Christians included. Do we dare to allow our neighbors their freedom? Is that freedom worth the price of both causing and encountering offense? If Christians so dare and so value freedom, then the war on Christmas is worth fighting—not merely for the sake of our own religion, but for the sake of the religious liberty of all Americans.

Posted in Culture, Humanism, Politics | 1 Comment

Some Words are Too Bloodstained to Reclaim; “Feminism” is One of Them.

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Matt

Can conservatives “reclaim” the word Feminism from the liberals and radicals who have done so much harm in its name? Leslie Loftis urges us to try in a recent piece at the Federalist.

Now, I put scare quotes around “reclaim” because feminism never belonged to conservatives in the first place. It certainly never sought to conserve anything, and it had only a tangential relationship with any conservative principles even in the best of times. Likewise, though feminism has accomplished some good, I’m not convinced it was ever best described as “a force for good and freedom” as Loftis suggests. But apart from these lesser issues, the biggest problem with feminism is and always has been the heavy cost to any of its triumphs—a cost so heavy that these “triumphs” cannot help but be quite minor in comparison. Bearing that cost in mind, it’s mystifying that any conservative would want apply it to themselves at all.

After all, we are talking about an ideology that is largely responsible for the slaughter murder of tens of millions of unborn children over the past half-century.

Loftis does (very briefly) address feminism’s close ties with the pro-abortion movement, but only to quickly dismiss it:

One might object about feminist association with abortion. But pro-life feminists exist. They are currently ostracized, but they exist.

Yes, that’s her entire treatment of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an argument so trite applied to an issue with such gravity before. One cannot simply brush off the murder of tens of millions of innocent children by means of the tiny handful of ostracized pro-life feminists any more than one could use the existence of National Socialists who weren’t down with the whole genocide thing to wipe the slate clean for Nazism. Did non-Jew-murdering Nazis exist? Sure, but so what? Did they have accomplishments like making the trains run on time? I’m honestly not sure, but neither do I care. How could such trivialities compare to the Holocaust? Likewise, in what way can feminist achievements like fairer wages and more educational opportunities for women balance the scales enough to try and salvage a word which has been so saturated by innocent blood?

It boggles the mind that someone could look at that and suggest that a little elbow grease will get that stain right out. There are contexts in which “Not All _____ Are Like That” is a meaningful observation—places where recognizing diversity of thought is truly important. When it comes to feminism and abortion, however, we are no longer talking about mere ideas and conversations, but about actual human lives that have been lost en masse. One cannot blame liberals for failing to notice these things, but one must blame conservatives.

Although it is both sufficient and the best reason to abandon feminism altogether, we need not hang our hat entirely on the issue of abortion when considering whether to try and (re)claim it. Even if one could somehow manage to ignore all that blood, it is not the only stain on the polluted garment of feminism. Though ensuring the ability to murder the unborn for any reason at all is mainstream within the movement, lets try approaching it with one of the less “radical” understandings: belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes—something very much akin to the “equality of opportunity” that Loftis suggests. No bizarre academic concepts, no slut-walking or armpit dye, just a straightforward statement the typical feminist would find adequate. It’s still nothing a conservative should want to rehabilitate.

Attempts to achieve social equality between the sexes have not been kind to society. One of the most pressing contemporary issues for conservatives is marriage. But though we whine and moan about all the damage the homosexual lobby wants to do to the institution, its nothing compared to what feminism already has done.

Legally speaking, one of feminism’s major accomplishments on the social front is the ubiquity of no-fault divorce (or as it could more precisely be called, unilateral divorce.) For the sake of liberating those truly unfortunate women who are trapped in genuinely abusive relationships and ensuring their ability to be self-sufficient, feminism abrogated the filial and marital responsibilities of all wives across the board. The result of this scorched-earth policy is that almost half of marriages end in divorce (most of which are unilaterally inflicted on husbands by their wives), many children are forcibly deprived of their fathers, and former husbands are sent through the meat-grinder of our heavily biased family court system. Meanwhile, men are beginning to respond in kind by abandoning marriage altogether, for a purely one-sided commitment is hardly in their interests.

In terms of interpersonal relationships, feminism’s major accomplishments is the injection of equality into the marital relationship and thereby diminishing both husbands and wives into equal and androgynous spouses. But as I’ve written before, equality is marriage-poison. It is entirely alien to the kind of self-giving love on which family and marriage depend, and obscures the complimentarity by which they function. Instead of protecting women from oppression, it kills romance, whets the appetite of resentment, and establishes incoherent expectations for resolving conflicts. Inasmuch as no-fault divorce provides the legal mechanism for destroying marriage, exchanging male-female complimentarity for an unnatural equality within marriage provides much of the motivation for doing so.

Social equality of this kind is not a good thing for civilization, nor is it the kind of thing conservatives should think they can fix by applying a little spit-shine. Oh, and by the way, social equality between the sexes—even equality of opportunity—requires abortion as well. Biology has given women a unique relationship with the unborn with substantial social consequences that, in practice, are not shared by men. It is not fair, but it is reality. If social equality between the sexes is something that must be realized, then the availability of murder as an option is the only practical means of accomplishing it.

One could go on ad nauseum about the havoc wrought by social equality—we haven’t even mentioned aspects such as the feminist attacks on virtues like chastity and modesty which, though necessary for both sexes, quite naturally found different manifestations among them. But even economic equality is a mixed bag at best. Take, for instance, the so-called wage gap. Women supposedly only make around 75 cents for every dollar a man makes for the same work. But invariably, when one looks at these studies, it’s never really the same work. Once one accounts for the additional hours that men tend to spend in the office, most of this gap disappears. The reason women tend to work fewer hours outside the home is the same as its ever been: children inside the home. Feminists try to work around this by promoting generous leave policies for mothers and similar policies, but a mother on official leave is still putting in fewer hours of office work than a man who is not, and a mother on paid leave is still a greater cost to a company than a man who is producing something for them.

Fifty years ago, the wage gap was a more meaningful phenomenon. Even the starting salaries were lower for a woman in the same position as a man. If, contra the professional feminist complainers, we actually treat this reduction in the historical wage gap as an accomplishment of feminism, can we still treat it as a win for women and society? Not unequivocally. The reason the wage gap existed fifty years ago was the expectation that while men would remain with the company for a good long time, women would eventually take a great deal of time off to raise children—often indefinitely leaving their field altogether. In other words, it was a stronger effect of the same difference in hours worked that we see today.

So what changed? Two key things: first, most employers no longer see their employees as people in whom they ought to make a long-term investment. Today, many companies are more likely to see interchangeable human resources—mere cogs that can be and are replaced at will. If this change can somehow be legitimately laid at the feet of feminism, I cannot fathom seeing it as an triumph. Second, and most importantly, there has been a shift in the expectations for women. Though a huge number of exceptions have always existed, women in general had been expected to devote much of their work to bearing and raising the next generation. Other kinds of work were considered more as add-ons or accessories to life: sometimes necessary, sometimes desirable, sometimes odd, but never the expectation. This allegedly tyrannical expectation is something feminism has indeed diminished or removed, and it indeed makes it easier for women to pursue careers. So can we consider this a clear improvement for women? Is it something that (if you ignore the deaths of tens of millions of innocent children) could lead a conservative to say, “maybe this feminism thing isn’t so bad—it just needs to be taken from the crazies who failed to give it the necessary TLC?”

It would be more precise to say that it’s an improvement for some women at the expense of others. While it is much easier for women to pursue to careers, it is simultaneously much harder for women to dedicate themselves to family. Economically speaking, simple supply and demand indicates that the influx of women into the workforce depressed wages across the board (if you increase the supply of labor without a corresponding increase in demand, you lower its cost.) It is consequently much harder for a husband to financially support a household on his own, and so it is much harder for a woman to stay home and raise her children. Likewise, if the expectations that society places on women are tyrannical, then the tyranny has not ended; it has merely changed course. Women are now expected to have careers while marriage and motherhood are treated as the add-ons or accessories to life, and they are prepared accordingly. The kind of crushing student loan debt that is now just a regular part of the college experience just adds another financial burden on the family—one that women are expected to help discharge by entering the workforce regardless of what they may want.

So if society cannot help but favor one decision over the other, which shall it choose? What does “equality of opportunity” even mean in such a situation? Does it mean women must have the same opportunity to meet traditionally masculine expectations as men do, or does it mean that they must have the same opportunity to fulfill their own natures as men do theirs? It seems that society cannot have it both ways. The only way one could consider this a clear win for women is if they consider career to be fundamentally more important and fulfilling. While this is certainly the case for some personality types, it is a hard sell for others seeing as how careers are undesirable enough that most people actually have to be paid to pursue them. The cost of this shift to our civilization as a whole is also worth considering. U.S. Birthrates have now fallen to a record low of 1.86 children per woman—significantly below the replacement level of 2.1. There is literally no work more important to civilization than raising children well, but for the sake of some women, other women have been denied their opportunity to participate in it.

So far, there is very little unequivocal merit to feminism—certainly not enough to make a sensible conservative look past all the bloodshed and, as even Loftis acknowledges, the societal destabilization that it continues to acheive. While there may still be “oppression” that requires action, and ideas must become a banner around which to rally, feminism is just about the worst idea one could possibly use for that purpose. The kind of people who are generally drawn to its call have no coherent understanding of oppression in the first place. You would find more who feel that women are more oppressed by the male gaze, or by social ineptitude, or by skepticism about obviously false rape accusations, than by the mere peccadilloes of, say, the Religion of Peace (you know, genital mutilation, honor killings, and that sort of thing.) And to think, you get get all this for the low low price of whitewashing the end of civilized marriage & sexual virtues, the loss of much of the next generation of children, and last but certainly not least, tens of millions of tiny corpses.

Some words are too bloodstained to reclaim; feminism is one of them. If there was ever a word that no one should ever want to touch with a ten foot pole, it’s this one.

Posted in Feminism | 1 Comment

A Change I Can Do Without

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Matt

“What if Three Weekends Can Change Your Life?”

That’s the bold question asked by a postcard I received last week announcing a local church’s grand opening.  Because I think curiosity should be punished, I decided to read the details on the other side where it explained the question in greater depth:

What if, during the first three weekends in [church’s] expanded and fully renovated space, you and your family had the chance to learn:

  • How to Celebrate Life’s Wins
  • How to Have the Best Thanksgiving Ever
  • How to Have a High Immunity Household

We promise:  these three weekends CAN forever change your life.

And to think…  all I got from my church these past three weekends was the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Boy, I sure missed out.

“But Matt,” one might respond, “You can’t reach unbelievers the unchurched seekers by using weird theological language like that.  They would neither know nor care what you mean.”  Well, I have no idea what a “High Immunity Household” is or what business a church has telling me how to have one, so if that’s what they were going for, they still missed the boat.  If they’re going to use obscure terminology that no one understands anyway, it might as well have something to do with their religion–whatever that is.

Oh, and they also advertised their “newly expanded Children’s Environments” that are open during each service.  After all, if would be crazy to think that Jesus actually wants the little children to come to him.  My attitude on the recent development of “children’s church” is, of course, that Christians have always had children’s church–we just called it “church.”  Going another mile down that road and sequestering children (up to 5th grade!) in an “environment” instead of church is a whole new level of foolishness.

Then again, given their approach to changing people’s lives, they haven’t sold me on the idea that their adults are in church either.

Posted in The Modern Church | 1 Comment