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

Virginity and Faith: When Sexual Experience Sires Religious Illusions

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Matt

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant wrote, “For as regards nature, experience presents us with rules and is the source of truth, but in relation to ethical laws experience is the parent of illusion, and it is in the highest degree reprehensible to limit or to deduce the laws which dictate what I ought to do, from what is done.” Kant’s point—essentially that experience is not self-interpreting and must be subject to reason—came to mind as I read Dianna Anderson’s recent piece, “What Losing My Virginity Taught Me About Faith.” In it, she writes about her journey from an Evangelical Christian background that stressed sexual purity (and solemnized it with purity pledges, purity rings, commitment ceremonies and so forth,) through a celibate young-adulthood, and into a new spiritual understanding in which “Sex… can be a sacrament, a movement toward understanding God, a form of holiness experienced in a deep, mystical way. Sex can be holy, whether or not you have a ring on your finger.”

Now, there are many legitimate lessons that one could learn from losing her virginity if one interpreted her experience according to reason and in light of what God has told us about Himself in Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, Ms. Anderson allows her experience to interpret itself and ends up creating quite the illusion.

Before we get to Ms. Anderson, however, the subculture in which she was raised is worthy of critique as well. It is worth noting the conflation of Law (morality) and Gospel (good news of forgiveness) that occurs so often in these circles—the idea that one’s salvation depends on one’s sexual purity. According to Christianity, salvation is a free gift granted by God’s grace through faith in Christ’s atoning death specifically because none of us have been sufficiently chaste—or honest, or just, or loving, or pretty much anything else. Ms. Anderson only briefly alludes to this being an issue, but it’s not at all uncommon for the Gospel to be overshadowed by moralism in much of American Evangelicalism.

Nevertheless, even the moralism is faulty in what she calls “Christian purity culture.” Christ and his apostles undoubtedly taught the pursuit of sexual purity. Accordingly, the problem is not with Evangelicals’ condemnation of fornication. And although the Bible does not provide us with customs like purity rings, pledges, ceremonies, and so forth, it is nevertheless the job of culture to provide us with customs that guide us toward virtue. Seeing as how American culture has largely abandoned its own such customs, it is the responsibility of parents to create new ones in their stead. Thus, the problem is not even with Evangelicals’ creation of new rituals and ceremonies per se. The real problem lies in the fact that the customs they have developed are counter-productive because they ignore instructions that God does provide to help us combat temptations to fornication. When we have a fever of this kind, God’s prescription is marriage.

Despite the common impression, the virtue of chastity is not primarily a thou-shalt-not meant to produce shame, but rather a thou-shalt that provides direction and purpose. For the vast majority of people who are not called to singleness, chastity does not consist of the disuse of our sexuality until marriage spontaneously occurs. It consists of actively directing our sexuality towards its fulfillment in marriage. Though the nature of marriage does reserve sex for husband and wife, chastity among the unmarried still involves preparation to become good husbands, wives, fathers, & mothers, and ultimately to seek out someone else who has done the same. Rather than lying dormant in such an endeavor, our sexuality drives us towards marriage. In this light, it is no surprise that the instruction Paul offers Christians in 1 Corinthians 7 is quite clear: those struggling with sexual continence need to find a spouse. Rings and pledges are a poor substitute for a husband or wife. It is entirely possible to be celibate without being chaste, and this is, unfortunately, where pop-Christian efforts at purity often end up.

The error is this: most purity rituals are not designed to facilitate marriage, but to delay it. Their purpose is to encourage celibacy through a person’s teens and twenties until supposedly more important matters like education and career are completely settled and it is “sensible” to finally start settling down and looking for a spouse. They thereby prevent sexuality from guiding us into marriage. Consider, for example, Ms. Anderson’s own story:

I graduated college with only one blind date under my belt. And then graduate school. And then I moved to Japan and started questioning my faith. Lots of little things that I thought were God’s blessing – my job in Japan, my success in academics – were leading me nowhere fast. It wasn’t so much that I was unhappy – it was that I felt totally abandoned and misled by this God I’d been told to believe. I’d done everything right. I’d been told my virginity and modesty and purity would be attractive to Christian men. And yet, nothing was happening, nothing was moving, nothing was clear.

One blind date by the time college was over does not exactly suggest a rigorous attempt to find a spouse—neither on her own behalf, nor by the community dedicated to teaching her purity. This is in sharp contrast to her education and career, for one does not go through graduate school and move to to the other side of the world for a job without quite a bit of determination and effort. Most ridiculous of all, she thought she was doing everything right even though she relocated to Japan—not exactly the best place to find a Christian husband, demographically speaking. Though it was somehow mysterious to her, it’s not exactly rocket science to say why nothing was happening. While virginity and modesty are indeed attractive to marriage-minded men, they cannot overcome an absentminded approach to matrimony that’s buried beneath career ambitions. Bare celibacy does not lead to marriage.

All that said, however, one cannot exactly contend that Ms. Anderson is merely an innocent victim of the ineptitude of her elders. For even where their cautions were accurate, she still misinterprets her own experiences to create both ethical and theological illusions. She lists a number of “dire warnings” that were drilled into her as part of the point of view she has left behind, but though she implies that they were silly, even by her own accounting, they seem to be fairly accurate.

They told her that “Having sex outside of marriage will take away pleasure from sex within marriage” and “Having sex outside of marriage with make connection with your future spouse harder.” Being unmarried, her own experience cannot really speak to this yet, but in general, it certainly seems to be the case—particularly for women. They told her that “Having sex outside of marriage means disappointing God, disappointing family, and causing unnecessary pain and heartache for yourself.” She did not comment on her family’s take on her epiphany, though given what she has said about how they raised her, some measure of disappointment seems at least plausible. Nevertheless, she describes a fairly severe break with “the culture she came from,” and God has made His views on the matter about as obvious as they can be. They told her that “Having sex outside of marriage will essentially destroy you, ruining your witness, your faith, your relationships.” Again, she did not comment much on her relationships, but given that her public witness now consists of dismissing significant swaths of God’s Word and thereby becoming one of those false teachers that Christ warned us about, it’s hard to consider that witness anything other than ruined.

But what about Ms. Anderson’s faith—at least insofar as she presents it? Far from being ruined, her thesis is that fornication has made her faith stronger than ever before. Unfortunately, this interpretation of her experience is the greatest illusion of all. She explicitly notes that this strengthening did not come through repentance and a stronger grasp on forgiveness in Christ. So of what does this better, faster, stronger faith consist? Well, she claims liberation from ideas of right & wrong (even where such right and wrong are taught by God.) She claims a deeper & fuller love for neighbors, which seems mainly to involve affirming LBGT folks in their own pursuits of fornication. She claims a better understanding of God’s love despite the fact that she rejects so much of what He has actually said about it. I’m not sure what religious significance her claim that sex taught her to “meet people where they are” has. Perhaps she means in their bedrooms. There was a pronounced leftward shift in her politics, which again has nothing to do with anything God taught in Scripture. She has learned to judge people less—with the notable exception of the Evangelicals whom she spends most of her piece judging. And most importantly, in the grand traditions of the pagan temple prostitutes of yore and a Nine Inch Nails song from the 90’s, she announces a new sacrament of holy fornication that mystically brings her closer to God. Nothing in this grab-bag has much to do with the Faith once and for all delivered to the saints.

I do not doubt that Ms. Anderson’s sexual experiences were a breath of fresh air after so many years of unchaste celibacy. Neither do I doubt that this new faith is stronger than the one she was raised with. What I do doubt is that there’s anything Christian about either of these things other than her own inertia. There’s no Christ, no cross, no atonement or forgiveness. In the place of God’s promises to us, there remains only theological liberalism’s tired gospel of trendy politics and a shift in spiritual feelings toward something more pleasant. Such is the way of mysticism. It develops rituals designed to provoke deep spiritual feelings about ourselves and God, and then encourages us to believe that these manufactured feelings are indicative of God’s point of view. It is an engine by which we acquire experiences that birth illusion. So whereas Christianity proclaims God’s promises to be present in the real Sacraments and comforts us with what God has actually proclaimed, Ms. Anderson’s brand of mysticism declares fornication to be holy so that we can feel good about what feels good, making it easier to believe that God feels good about our feelings.

And so her elders’ warnings about becoming a hedonistic atheist proved to be imprecise after all, but I suspect that the danger of becoming a libertine quasi-pagan was within the spirit of their words.

Posted in Chastity, Christian Youth, The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism | 6 Comments

We Proclaim; We do not Include

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Matt

 Among theological liberals desperate to “fix” Christianity lest it die in obscurity and obsolescence (say, how is membership in liberal “churches” doing again?) one of the key goals is to make Christianity more inclusive. Why are American congregations so white? Why are they so suburban and conventional? Why are they so strict about which beliefs are true? Why don’t they match America’s glorious rainbow of diversity? If the love of Christ is for all, then surely all should be included in the tent. If they are not, then the tent must be made bigger to accommodate them.

Orthodox Christians often get taken in by this sentiment. After all, unlike theologically liberal heretics, we still believe in Hell. We still believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation. We believe that people outside our tent are dying eternally. Accordingly, though we of course deplore many of the liberals’ methods, we appreciate their desire & motivation, and so we take up their mission of inclusivity, but try to find different means of accomplishing it. This is truly unfortunate; for the problem is not primarily in the inclusivists‘ means but in their mission itself. Making any institution broadly inclusive will always destroy that institution—this is no less true for our congregations and denominations than it is for anything else. Inclusion always destroys.

But wait! Did Christ not tell us that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son? Did Paul not tell us that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus? Does this not make inclusivity the Church’s mission? Yes, Yes, and No. This is a subtle distinction, but it is an important one. What the Bible teaches us in such verses is not an instruction that the Church must be inclusive—it is a proclamation that the Church’s message already is inclusive. This cannot be our mission, for Christ has already accomplished it among us.

The Church has been given two proclamations—the Law and the Gospel. These two messages are inherently universal. The bad news is that there is a moral law that applies to everyone, and yet no one has kept it consistently; everyone is liable to judgment. The good news is that Christ has taken on that liability in our place; everyone’s sins are atoned for in Christ. Because these two proclamations apply to the whole world, the Church delivers them to the whole world no matter their race, creed, sex, or preferred sins. Our message is already universal, and cannot be made more so. We proclaim to everyone; our target is the entire human race.

The same cannot be said for inclusion. The target of efforts to include is never the masses who are dying—it is always the Church herself. When the inclusivists see people outside the Church, they feel sorry for them. Their zeal, however, is not up to the hard work of evangelizing them. Besides, there’s no way everyone would be evangelized. There would always be those who reject the message, always those with many and various reasons to stay outside, always some who never even had a chance to hear. And so, instead of taking up the mission of proclamation that Christ has actually given to the church, the inclusivists take up a newer and better one: change the Church until no one stands outside of her for any reason.

Now, every legitimate complaint about the Church excluding some group or another is ultimately a failure in proclamation—we either do not proclaim the message we have been given or we do not proclaim it enough. But to try and correct the Church beyond this is to attempt a change she cannot survive, for it is inevitably a change to her very nature. Even our own message refers to itself as a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles. Whatever periodic reasons anyone has for avoiding the Church (too judgmental, too boring, too unwelcoming, etc), none can compare to the ones inherent in our message: the scandal of exclusivity, the humiliation that we cannot improve ourselves enough to become acceptable before God and must rely solely on Christ, the disgrace that God actually lowered Himself enough to become a man. To change the Church enough to eliminate these scandals is to change it into something other than the Church. As G.K. Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, “Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.”

I came across a great (which is to say terrible) example of this dynamic in practice the other day over at Steadfast Lutherans. The piece concerns Mark Sandlin, a pastor in the PCUSA. This summer, he kicked off a series on his blog called “The Collar is Too Tight: Heresies from a Southern Minister.” His occasion for writing is that, “Most institutionalized Churches define who is and who isn’t a Christian far too narrowly. There is an increasingly long list of tenets to which a person must dogmatically adhere in order to be in the club.” He then sets out to shorten that list by announcing a series of “I am a Christian, but I don’t believe in ________, therefore no other Christian needs to either.”

He begins with a doozy: denying that Jesus is God. Why doesn’t he believe this? As is customary for theological liberals, Sandlin claims that Jesus never said that he was God in the Gospels except for the places where he does say that he’s God, but those don’t count because everyone knows those parts are just made up. The Gospel of John is right out because it conspicuously mentions Jesus’ Godhood way too often in comparison to the synoptic Gospels, so it looks like a later addition to Sandlin. Likewise, he ignores all those places in the Synoptic Gospels where Jesus forgives sins, accepts worship, scolds those who object to people worshiping him, and generally goes around doing things only Yahweh is allowed to do because they’re just not obvious enough.

The bit about worship is particularly damning for Sandlin, as in the next part of his series he emphasizes Jesus’ extreme belief in monotheism (because he’s a Jew, you know) as a way of dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity (a red herring, since the Trinity is a monotheistic doctrine.) So after Matthew describes Jesus as rebuking Satan on the basis of his monotheism (It is written you shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only) and then goes on to describe Jesus as accepting worship several times, you would think the implication would be clear to someone like Sandlin who so clearly recognizes Christ’s monotheism. Nope: “You have to ask yourself: Something that important, don’t you think he might have mentioned it?” Perhaps, but I guess “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” totally doesn’t count. Neither does it count when, after affirming to Caiaphas that he is the Son of God, Jesus tells him “But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” If Jesus’ words fail to speak adequately for themselves, the High Priests reaction should clear up any ambiguity. Sandlin’s is a deeply dishonest way of reading Scripture, but then it’s theological liberalism, so I had no need to say it twice.

But as is generally the case with inclusivists, Sandlin is quick to point out that whether or not we deny God is not really the point. He writes, “I’m not trying to say I am right and others are wrong. I am saying Christianity should big enough for a variety of thought. I am saying God can handle our questions.” Here too, of course, he speaks out of both sides of his mouth. His entire case for Christ not being God is that such a fact would have been so very important that the synoptic Gospels would have made it even more explicit than it already is, and yet he simultaneously treats it as so very unimportant that it does not even matter whether a Christian believes it or not. Likewise, the conflict is not really about God being able to handle our questions, but whether theological liberals are able to handle God’s answers. And though he claims to be a Christ follower and that “as a Christ follower, frequently referred to as Christian, I have this need to actually follow Christ,” he clearly does not need to follow Christ when Jesus repeatedly warns against false teachers instead of embracing them. He does not need to follow Christ when he calls the way to life narrow and the way to destruction broad.

Shamefully dishonest or not, however, this thought brings us to the crux of the matter. Saying that the core beliefs of the Christian faith are irrelevant to it puts one outside of that faith just as surely as denying them. Saying that Jesus is not God and saying that it doesn’t even matter whether Jesus is God are both inherently contradictory to a religion that worships Jesus as God. It would be absurd of me to claim that I’m a Muslim because the fact that I believe in the Trinity instead of Allah and deny that Muhammad was a prophet isn’t really that important to Muslims. Why? Because I have no business speaking for a religion that is so very different than my own. It is no less absurd for Sandlin to claim to be a Christian, for he has no business speaking for my religion which is so very different than his own. There are therefore only two options: As long as my religion is Christianity, then theological liberals like Sandlin cannot speak for it. If, on the other hand, they deny that my religion is Christianity, then they are clearly on board with excluding people based on “an increasingly long list of tenets to which a person must dogmatically adhere,” and all that is left, then, is to show who has the right list.  Either way, the argument commits suicide.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for orthodox Christians to think of inclusivists like Sandlin as merely confused and fuzzy-minded rather than as heretics. We think that their zeal to welcome people into Christ’s Church and save their souls merely clouds their judgment. The rub is that we cannot meaningfully describe people like Sandlin as wanting to welcome people into Christ’s Church, when he himself stands outside of Christ’s Church and only welcomes people to stand alongside himself. That he extends such a welcome to those inside is an assault on the Church, not a misguided effort on her behalf. Orthodox Christians are way too wishy-washy about acknowledging theological liberalism as a heresy that amputates individuals, congregations, and denominations from the Body. History and inertia have provided the liberal denominations with orthodox Christian individuals and congregations in their midst. However, these increasingly rare aberrations do not mean we have to consider such denominations to be Christian any more than we have to consider the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Muslims to be Christian.

Posted in The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism, Theology | Leave a comment

Yes, the Problem is Clearly “Religious Extremism”

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Matt

That, at least, is the main cause of terrorism according to The Guardian;  and there’s no possible way they could have been any more precise.

Religious extremism has become the main driver of terrorism in recent years, according to this year’s Global Terrorism Index.

The report recorded 18,000 deaths in 2013, a rise of 60% on the previous year. The majority (66%) of these were attributable to just four groups: Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaida.

Hmm…  I wonder if there is any common factor amongst these four groups that hold such a commanding lead in their victim counts–something more specific than “religious extremism.”  Well, Wikipedia might shed some light on the subject, but that’s an awful lot of typing and mouse clicks to expect from a journalist.  Let’s just leave it at that.

Yes, we’re all used to political correctness trumping competency in journalism, and implicating the Religion of Peace is a big no-no.  There is, however, a greater misunderstanding at work here resulting from this self-imposed ignorance–one that undermines the entire point of the article.

The Guardian supposes that these numbers represent a shift in the motivation for terrorism away from socio-political matters and towards religious matters.  This is not so.  Ironically, the secular/religious distinction makes sense to Westerners because of our religion, which has traditionally been some flavor Christianity.  Though our specific theologies have differed, not even the concept of Christendom erased our inherent distinction between the City of Man and the City of God.  Some Christians have separated them more than others, some have delineated them differently than others, and some have just been confused, but there is always a distinction.

Islam, on the other hand, has no such distinction.  Mohammed established a religion that is also a political ideology.  Ignorant Westerners impose their own religious assumptions on top of that and thereby misunderstand it.  The only real religious/political distinction that Islamic theology contains is the division between Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Habr (the House of War.)  Furthermore, this distinction is not a conceptual tool for understanding the makeup of society, but a challenge with an ultimate political goal.

Accordingly, it is a gross misunderstanding to call this a shift in motivations for terrorism.  These four entirely random groups are indeed motivated by religious extremism, but for them, that is no different than a political motivation.  That is not a shift.  There is no actual change in the type of motivation–only a change in which popular political ideology is at work.

But that’s not a story liberal journalists are allowed to write.

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The Other Shirtstorm

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Matt

Feminists just can’t stop talking about clothes these days, and not just when it comes to scientist Matt Taylor. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently explained his penchant for simple gray t-shirts:

I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.

But was this a straightforward statement about his own views on fashion, or an attack on women CEOs’–indeed on every woman who wants to work in the business world?  Naturally, Alison P. Davis think its the latter:

Is it just me or does the mindset of the Silicon Valley Power-Schlub imply that caring about clothing or how you look invalidates your ability to work? Of course, male CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to care about something as “silly” or “frivolous” as dressing professionally — they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.

So which is more sexist… disregarding fashion for the sake of work, or assuming that no woman is capable or desirous of doing the same?  Davis manages to make it sound like dwelling on the right kind of clothes is part of the essence of being female.  How else could anybody make the leap from Zuckerberg’s comment to Davis’ conclusion?

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Catcalling and the Criminalization of Social Ineptitude

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Matt

By now, most everyone has heard of the video of a model being catcalled as she walked down the streets of New York. Under the guise of raising awareness about this casual form of alleged misogyny, it has served mainly to the raise the blood pressure of feminists who are always slathering for new wrongs to be righted.

In a sane world, catcalling would merely be seen as rude behavior, and the only reaction it would provoke would be a roll of the eyes as the target proceeded on her way, her mood temporarily dampened. After all, the rude always have and always will exist, and the polite will always go on bearing their crosses when necessary. But Americans are no longer allowed to be sane, lest sanity leave even the smallest of injustices unavenged. Unfortunately, recognizing a person as rude is no longer enough. In their never-ending quest to “help” women who are insufficiently self-centered, feminist social justice warriors have risen up to overreact by transforming “Some jerk was rude to me!” into “Somebody transgressed against my very personhood by violating my right to only interact with other people on my own terms.”

Consider, for example, Rachel Zarell’s glowing praise of #DudesGreetingDudes over on Buzzfeed. The hashtag was created by Elon James White, and is meant to satirize the notion that catcalling is (in Zarell’s words) merely a “harmless greeting” or just “saying hi” by targeting catcalls at men instead of women. My particular favorite is “You see a dude looking all hard & sh*t. Roll up on him like “Aye yo, smile, son. Damn.” BRING SUNSHINE TO HIS DAY.”

Now, I have not actually heard anybody claim that catcalling is just a greeting. Zarell links to another piece about SNL’s Michael Che as an example, but Che says nothing of the kind within that piece, so I’m inclined to believe that this is a straw man. However, if anybody does reduce catcalling to a simple greeting, then he is, of course, silly. At the very least, it combines a greeting with a signal of sexual interest; and one might argue that it signals some measure of sexual intent as well. This is precisely why White’s satire is amusing—because the casual and enthusiastic homosexuality expressed in #DudesGreetingDudes remains humorously incongruous in normal society despite the best efforts of the rainbow lobby.

The overreaction, however, is not found in the satire itself, but in White’s other comments quoted in the piece:

“A woman was just killed for not accepting a man’s advances, but we’re going to pretend that our right to engage women unsolicited outweighs their right to feel safe? No.”

“The right to approach women at any point in time no matter where they are is seen as a right by some men,”

“Dudes who were arguing for the right to greet women against their will were very annoyed with me.”

Lines like these should set off the warning sirens of anyone who loves personal liberty. Women have a right to feel a particular way that outweighs the rights of others to express interest to them in public? One should never greet a woman against her (unexpressed) will? The problem is in the ridiculous subjectivity of these “rights” with which White attempts to endow women. Essential to the notion of the rule of law (a notion we in America are quickly abandoning) is that the law to which all citizens are equally held is something that can (in principle, at least) be known by all citizens before they act against it. But no woman can accurately predict in advance exactly how she’s going to feel about any and every man approaching her about some kind of sexual relationship. Neither is a typical woman’s unexpressed “will” regarding such approaches required to be a matter of public record. Even attempting to enforce something this subjective is inherently tyrannical. It shifts authority away from the rule of law, and instead places it in whichever individuals or groups happen to hold some measure of social influence at any given moment.

Like most people, I do not deny that catcalling is rude. Many well-intentioned moderates have ended up supporting the cause of the social justice warriors on the catcalling issue specifically because they see a false dichotomy between rudeness and hypersensitivity. They naturally do not want to support rudeness, and though hypersensitivity holds no appeal to them, they see it as a more-or-less harmless kind of peevishness. The reality, however, is that such peevishness is not harmless at all—not when it leads people to claim liberty-destroying rights that grant some citizens arbitrary power over others.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Campus police were involved in the hunt for a young Asian student who tried to hold hands with a couple of women uninvited whilst telling them they were attractive. It also seems that he stood in their path when they walked away from him. The director of the campus police is unsure of whether this student will face any further disciplinary action, but he has determined that the student was harmless and was simply socially awkward.

I’m glad that the campus police seem to have deliberated thoughtfully on the matter, but two troubling facts remain: First, a man was arrested simply for being socially awkward around women because it creeped them out. Second, there seem to be quite a few who think that what he did should actually be considered criminal. The first, I think, is tolerable. The police had a responsibility to investigate, it got sorted out in the end, and though it was a near-miss for the accused student, no one was harmed. One would hope that he at least learned a valuable lesson about personal space—only the highly attractive get to violate it uninvited. However, the second fact, the impulse to punish the student, is much more dangerous. I keep hearing that social awkwardness is no excuse for what he did—but an excuse implies that there exists something that needs to be excused. That is fair enough insofar as we mean that the man’s rudeness is not excused by his being socially inept. But if that’s all that is meant, then why are the police involved at all? If we are speaking from a legal perspective, however, exactly what harm has actually transpired in this scenario? What has the student caused that needs to be punished rather than tolerated by the police and courts?

Too many people, like Elon James White, try to create such a basis by inventing these rights that are as subjective as they are dubious. Perhaps that was not his intention, but whenever we speak of rights in such a manner, we speak of something that demands recognition and protection by the law. The more people who assert that anyone has a right not to be made to feel certain ways by others—who insist that the momentary fear experienced by the young women amounts to actual harm that requires retribution—the more this kind of scenario will be met without thoughtful deliberation, and the more actual harm will result when awkward young men are actually punished for their awkwardness.

 

 

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Law | Leave a comment

No Reason to Get Excited

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Matt

So America’s latest round of Choose the Form of the Destructor is over.  I must confess that I did feel some genuine pleasure at seeing the Democrats losing so badly in last night’s elections.  I shouldn’t have.  Not because it’s cruel, or gloating, or poor sportsmanship, or anything like that.  I shouldn’t have been pleased because there was very little to be pleased about.  The celebration of so many conservatives needs to be tempered by the realities of history.  Remember back  in the mid-2000’s when the Republicans held all three branches of government?  Of course you do.  They had the Presidency, majorities in both houses of Congress, and a majority of the Supreme Court was Republican appointed.

Now, do you remember how the size of the government was reduced during those years?  Do you remember the great strides they made to end the ongoing slaughter of the unborn?  Do you remember how our punitive tax system was reworked?    Do you remember how our activist courts were reined in?  Do you remember all the epic progress that was made on all the issues that conservatives care about the most?

Neither do I.

Conservatives need to get over this idea that the GOP is our political salvation.  Every story about the election has some variation on how Republicans rode a wave of discontent into congress.  While it’s great that voters don’t care for the way our government has been run by the Democrats, their loss is not our gain.  We are still being governed by Keynesian statists–they just have R’s showing up after their names when they appear on television now.  All it means is that we have 2-4 years before those same voters put the Democrats back in because they still don’t care for the way the country is being run.

That is American politics in a nutshell.  We have two political parties parties that we hate, and we take turns punishing one by rewarding the other.  But the truth is that American citizens are the only ones punished by this ridiculous political cycle.  Our deepest political problems are caused by beliefs and principles shared by both parties.  American will never have conservative government until conservatives stop being so gleeful about Democrats’ losses and so terrified of their victories.

So once the new congress takes over, have fun watching the Republicans use their new-found power to push for amnesty for illegal aliens and try to score meaningless political points to help their latest slightly-more-practical-than-a-Democrat “moderate” candidate in the upcoming presidential election.  In the meantime, the current lame duck congress will use its temporary electoral immunity to accomplish the one thing both parties can agree on:  empowering the government at the expense of the people in many and various ways.  Ah, bipartisanship.

I hate to say it, but even conservatives have gotten the government we deserve.

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Because Hazing Isn’t Controversial Enough Already…

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Matt

…Wesleyan University is apparently mandating that their fraternities allow women as members.  Oddly enough, gender warriors are cheering it as a powerful measure to fight sexual assault and gender inequality.

The foolishness of this plan for such purposes is, of course, remarkable. In his commentary, Professor Syrett proceeds from the typical feminist assumption that all men are larval rapists, and concludes that fraternities reinforce that tendency through the sheer maleness of the whole endeavor. His solution? Balance all that unseemly masculinity by including women to watch over them and keep them in line. You know, kind of like having their moms around. Only these women will be younger, not related to them at all, and hand-picked from among those who are eager to spend time among popular frat boys in intimate living arrangements. In fact, they sound a good deal like the young women Syrett believes are being violated by fraternities in the first place—the ones who quite obviously did not keep those young rapists in line. But through the magic of inclusiveness and gender equality, I’m sure it’ll turn out totally different this time. Wesleyan’s fraternities will no doubt appreciate having such ready access to a woman’s touch (figuratively speaking, of course) to liven the place up a bit.

More interesting to me, however, is this professor’s tangential comment about the nature of the university: “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.” The dominance of the ironically unquestioned assumptions of Critical Theory should be no surprise, of course. The reduction of our institutions of higher education into places to ask meaningless questions as a substitute for seeking meaningful answers is a tragedy that has already run its course. But what should be embarrassing to any professor whose life’s goal is to “question shopworn truisms” is his failure to recognize one when he sees it.  Universities haven’t been teaching fundamental differences between the sexes for more than a generation. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s been a long time since the 50’s, and if the very existence of fraternities (strictly speaking) insists on sex differences, then it seems the frat boys of 2014 are now the bold free-thinkers questioning the tired orthodoxy of the establishment. Considering the way Professor Nicholas Syrett seems to regard masculinity as if it were something entirely strange and alien, they may very well be the only ones in universities who still do so.

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Stranger than Fiction: An Apology to Terry Goodkind

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Matt

Though I’ve never written about him before, I have expressed a number of negative opinions regarding the Sword of Truth author from time to time. Not that his epic fantasy series is without its merits—the first three books are quite good. After that, however, it gets very uneven. Temple of the Winds and Soul of the Fire were so bad I just stopped reading the series. Years later, I picked up the sixth book, Faith of the Fallen, in an airport on a whim, and was pleasantly surprised. In a way, it’s probably the high point of the series (at least through the 11th book which I had thought wrapped it all up, but apparently he’s written more since then that I have not read.)

In this sixth book, our hero Richard Rahl is captured by his foes—the evil Imperial Order—and taken to their capital to be forced to live as a common man. The Order is a Soviet-style leftist dictatorship with a weird anti-human religion tacked on that gives heart to their ideology. The thought of Richard’s captor is that once he sees the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, he’ll see the value of the Order’s ideology of “compassion.” Instead, Richard thrives as an entrepreneur making his way through a dismal world of poverty & oppression and improves not only his own lot, but that of almost everyone he meets. The climax of the book is not the revolution that Richard ends of sparking—it’s the statue he carves that embodies and explains the spirit of human nobility to a culture that (in a bad misrepresentation of the doctrine of original sin) considered humanity to be fundamentally and exclusively wretched. Richard’s work of art reminds them of something which had long been driven out of them by their priests, their petty bureaucrats, and their tyrannical overlords. It has its flaws, but the book succeeds as a work of art because Goodkind managed to do what his protagonist does—powerfully communicate an abstract concept by crystallizing it in a tangible form.

Though arguably the best of the lot, Faith of the Fallen also begins what ultimately drags the series down so far: the substitution of exciting stories and interesting characters with soap boxes and mouth-pieces for the philosophy of objectivism to which Goodkind is devoutly committed. Even if I were a fan of Ayn Rand’s ideals, which I mostly am not, a successful novel needs to be an interesting story first and foremost. It can serve to express an ideology, but it can never do so well if it ever ceases to be a good story. As the series goes on, the ideology takes over to such an extent that Goodkind ends up weirdly retconning his own series and flattening its world. For example, though Goodkind crafted a dualistic world with a good Creator and an evil Keeper of the Underworld, because objectivism is atheistic, Goodkind goes to great and convoluted lengths to actually write the Creator out of his story. Likewise, early on, Richard becomes physically unable to eat meat because he has to balance all the killing that he does whilst being the hero; but later on he has to start eating meat again because he realizes that all his killing is so completely and utterly justified that it requires no balance whatsoever (he figures this out after massacring a mob of peace protestors who were protecting that book’s villain.) Accordingly, most of the latter books fail at being stories because of the extent to which ideology swallows absolutely everything (though the part towards the end where Richard escapes his enemy’s clutches by starting what is essentially a soccer riot was admittedly very entertaining.)

So why do I owe Goodkind an apology? Well, I felt that one of the greatest flaws in Faith of the Fallen was all the straw men. The villains, as I’ve already mentioned, are deeply ideological, but often in a stilted and unrealistic way (though not as bad as in later books.) I felt they showed a lack of insight into the mentality of those who hold leftist and authoritarian views. Richard’s captor, Nicci, for example, has a long history of super-generous but mindless charity that frequently results in her being mugged by those she’s trying to help and enabling them in all sorts of self-destructive behavior.  All that is fairly realistic, but the self-perception of her beliefs  sometimes stretched the bounds of credulity.   When she is called on her foolishness, she often goes on and on about how thugs should never be judged because nobody knows what circumstances conspired to made them that way. She diatribes about how responsibility to the unfortunate negates any & all sense of ownership and how people therefore have every right to literally rob her. For all intents and purposes, she thinks it’s a crime against humanity to hold thieves accountable and a mark of selfishness to actually stop someone from robbing you. And she acts accordingly. Having never encountered anyone who actually thought this way, I considered it to be a pretty over-the-top criticism of socialism that was both ineffective and detrimental to the story.

Then I found out that people like this actually exist.

Jordan Sargent comments about a New York woman who was mugged for her cell phone by a 13-year-old boy, but chased the thief down, caught him, and turned him over to police. Though most people would consider this an appropriate response and even applaud her determination in fulfilling her civic duty, Sargent has a different perspective.

Now, granted, it’s not entirely Clara Vondrich’s fault that this 13-year-old boy was arrested by police for stealing her phone. But, she did, by her own admission, willingly cause the commotion that led up to police being summoned, and she did—as the photos show—keep the kid pinned to a car until police arrived despite already knowing that he didn’t posses her phone.

Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely [****] up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

Yes… it’s not “entirely” the victim’s fault that the one who victimized her was arrested for doing so. Just mostly. After all, she admittedly made a fuss about being robbed! How dare a white woman take offense as such a thing? Doesn’t she know she owes her smart phone to any passing underprivileged minority who non-verbally requests it?

Sargent tries to backpedal in the comments by saying:

Since people seem confused: I’m not saying that Clara Vondrich shouldn’t have chased the kid down and gotten her phone back. That’s totally normal. I just think she shouldn’t have pinned him down so that he would be charged with grand larceny and then posed for photos in the New York Post. I think this is pretty agreeable.

Now, it’s fair enough to criticize posing for pictures as a form of gloating, but this is a function of the media rather than the robbery victim he calls out. It’s fair enough to criticize the justice system for either being too strict or too inept, but neither is this the victim’s doing (indeed, this problem has much more to do with leftist attempts to divert the justice system from retribution to systematic rehabilitation—a quick proportional punishment wouldn’t ruin the boy’s life the way being entered into the system apparently will.) In any case, it’s quite clear that Sargent’s readers came to their “confused” understanding of what he’s saying because they actually read what he said. After all, he specifically told victims of vibrant child muggers to let them run along to their friends.

Here we have a man who apparently believes that the property of whites is fair game to any young minority who wants to take it. Here we have a man who apparently believes that accountability and consequences for doing evil are too horrible to be inflicted on minority criminals—that our response to a mugging should essentially be “boys will be boys.” Thus, what I wrongly presumed to be a caricature has now been made flesh. And to one Mr. Terry Goodkind, I must apologize for thinking you too unrealistic in your characters and criticisms.

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