And they are unconsciously so blinded by Americanism that they unthinkingly dismiss anything in the words of Jesus Christ or Church teaching that challenges their faith in America, in its exceptionalism and goodness.

I stumbled across this quote on a Catholic site, referencing a certain type of Catholic, in the context of their support for a particular Presidential candidate. The warning here, of course, is not just for Catholics. Such thinking--perhaps our nation's besetting sin--is commonplace across the American religious landscape, Orthodoxy included.

The article can be found here.

My Irish Offering for St. Patrick's Day

In the old days I never paid much attention to St. Patrick’s Day, or at least the phoney-baloney fake-Irish popular American version. I thought it all just so much silliness, such as the commercial I just endured--Burger King promoting french fries with green ketchup, all in fake Irish brogue, of course. Now of course, saint’s days have actual meaning to me, and I have since taken it upon myself to learn a little of the real story behind St. Patrick. (I wonder what percentage of the revelers on Saturday know that he was not even Irish? I would guess it would be in single digits toward the lower end.)

Of course, any real comprehension of the saint behind it all is lost in our frenzy to evoke all things green and "Irish." In my extended family, my paternal cousins (with whom I am very close) consider me the keeper of the family lore. One of my favorites was a career flight attendant for Delta, making the Atlanta-Dublin run every week for many years. My cousin fell in love with Ireland, considered it a second home, and maintains friendships there still. She almost pleaded with me once-- “don’t we have any Irish blood in us?” My answer was "well, yes, but..."

The story, of course, is in the “but.” We actually do have Gaelic blood, through a wonderfully wild and eccentric and slightly rough-around-the-edges Irish clan--the Gollihars (which is just the phonetic back-country spelling of Gallagher.) My dad and his brothers were pretty wild themselves when they were young. In exasperation, my long-suffering grandparents would sometimes scold them in a usually futile attempt to shame them into better behavior. The miscreants would be told that they were "acting just like little Gollihars.” It was not a compliment. My grandad's two sisters were the sweetest women one could hope for--and they were, in fact, the absolute salvation of my family after my grandmother’s death. They were proper Presbyterian ladies of the Edwardian era--prim, polite, and truth be told, a bit proud. My grandad would tease them, and one of the subjects he knew would get under their skin was to start talking about their grandmother's family, the notorious Gollihars. My aunt remembers her aunts getting embarrassed and saying, "Brother! hush!" Aunt Willabelle's daughter thought she would also try that line of teasing with her mother. She told me once that that was the only time her mother ever slapped her. In my great aunts' world view, you just did not talk about the Gollihars in polite society.

The first of my line of whom we have any real record was a Patrick Gollihar (sometimes Gallagher), appearing at Harrodsburg, on the Kentucky frontier in the mid 1780s. His wife's name is unknown, but we do know that she was Choctaw. There is no proof, of course, other than my grandfather’s word. But in every generation since, there have been descendants who look like they were part native American, even down to my dad's generation. The Indian blood was never the problem, however. The Irish Gollihar strain
was another matter, apparently.

Patrick’s son, Charles Gollihar, established himself in the Arkansas territory by the early 1820s. He fathered a few children by his first wife, and upon her death, married Margaret, the daughter of an old German Dunkard neighbor. Charles and Margaret had 8 or 9 children of their own. Gollihar made his living by operating a tavern out in the countryside, in a community with the misnomer of "Harmony." It seems the establishment did not have a good reputation (though in fairness, I do not imagine this was unusual for taverns of that day and place.) Some cynics noted that well-healed travelers who stopped at the inn had a way of turning up dead. In fact, at the time of his daughter Jane’s marriage to my great-great granddad John Cowan, Charles Gollihar was in jail in Arkadelphia awaiting trial for murder. I do not know how the trial was resolved, other than that Charles Gollihar was eventually released. It seems, however, that the authorities in Clark County thought it advantageous that he remove himself elsewhere. Charles and Margaret and most of their children moved to Texas in the mid 1850s. John and Jane, along with his sister Martha who had married Jane’s brother Drew Gollihar, followed the Cowan family to the Fort Smith area instead.

The Gollihars were hard to pin down once they arrived in Texas. Mention of them is found here and there throughout the Hill Country of central Texas, while others appear on the Texas Gulf Coast, in the general area of Corpus Christi. The Civil War (I am one Southerner who refuses to play the silly word game of saying “War Between the States”) disrupted the life of this family, as it did for most. Three brothers in Texas—Crittenden, Grandison and Charles, Jr.—were drafted into the Confederate Army, while Drew and brother-in-law John Cowan were drafted into the Confederate Army in Arkansas. Significantly, none of them enlisted. Only Gran seems to have taken it all seriously. He became ill and died in camp in 1864. All the others deserted early on. The Cowans were straight-out Unionists, and were persecuted for their stance during the war years. John’s younger brother and brother-in-law fought for the Union, while he went home on Christmas leave in 1862, loaded up the family and slipped across the line into the Indian Territory, and then on to Texas, where they laid low for the remainder of the conflict. The Gollihars gave no evidence of being so principled, but seemed to take a dim view of the Confederacy, nonetheless. Drew deserted and hid out in the Indian Territory. Crit and Charlie deserted and hid out with others in the brush country in Victoria County along the Texas Gulf Coast. Uncle Crit was a giant of a man, and was the leader of the gang of deserters. Their main concern was avoiding the vigilante Rebs (or “Heel Flys”) who took control in many Texas counties. Other than that, it does not seem that they were up to much good. In the revealing and little-known memoir, “Heel Fly Time in Texas,” one of the more humorous incidents was when these county men raided Uncle Crit’s farm, stealing all of Aunt Frances’ chickens.

The post-war years did not signal better times for the Texas Gollihars. Uncle Crit was killed in a gunfight in 1866. In 1867, his older half-brother, Uncle William, was hanged for horse theft. Also during this time, 70-year old Charles Gollihar who had evaded the hangman's noose back in Arkansas, was not able to avoid a Comanche's arrow on Wolf Creek in Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country. He managed to escape, but died shortly after making it home.

John and Jane Gollihar Cowan lived on 200 acres on Cowan Mountain in southern Bell County. He worked as a teamster and she was the community midwife. The remaining siblings were scattered. Aunt Laura Snider lived in San Antonio. Aunt Mauguerite Nichols lived in Copperas Cove, and if her tombstone is any indication, did well in this life. Uncle Charlie lived out his life down in Corpus Christi.

The Gollihars were no doubt Catholic upon their arrival in America. Catholicism would have been hard to maintain on the Kentucky, Arkansas and Texas frontiers, however, and it seemingly slipped away in most of the family. My family emigrated before Catholicism became so heavily tied to Irish nationalism. But nevertheless, once Uncle Charlie and Uncle Gran moved to Corpus Christi, you might say that they reverted to type. There must have been some nascient Catholicism within the family during those frontier years. Uncle Gran never married and his grave is one of the oldest in Holy Cross Cemetery, the historic Catholic burial ground. Uncle Charlie is there too, along with his large family. He lived on until 1939, dying at age 96. His buckboard was a common sight on Corpus Christi streets long after automobiles had become the norm. His family were tradesmen and shopowners in the city, well known but never exactly prominent. Today they are considered the oldest Anglo-Catholic family in Corpus Christi. One of the major streets is named after them, as is a park.

In my dad’s youth, he remembered the occasional visit of a Tobe Gollihar, a kinsman who was described as “simple-minded,” in the old terminology. The old man would just show up and hang around the various family farmsteads, with no apparent inclination to ever return home. My dad recalls that once his great-uncle George gave Tobe a new pocket knife if he would return home. And so, Uncle George put Tobe on the train home. My dad conflated this story with the story of the uncle in Corpus Christi and thought they were the same man. It took me a while to untangle this, but Tobe, it turns out, was the son of Uncle Will the horse thief.

About 4 years ago, I paid a hurried visit to Corpus Christi, and met with a few of my distant kin there. My contact in the family was Sister Patrice, principal of Incarnate Word Academy. She wanted me to meet her two surviving aunts (both since deceased), as well as their cousin, Miss Margaret. Uncle Charlie’s oldest son was also named Charles. He never married, but late in life had something of a common-law arrangement with a much younger Mexican lady. Two years prior to his death, she gave birth to their child, Margaret. The daughter never married, and at that I met her she was 80 years old. She was a quiet and dignified Mexican matron. She brought a grocery sack with her, and before our visit was over, pulled out two carefully-wrapped large fragile portraits—one of her grandfather (my uncle Charles,) and another of her grandmother (my Aunt Martha.) They were her treasures.

So that is the story of my Irish family on this St. Patrick's Day. And my great-aunts were wrong. I am glad to claim them, rough edges and all.

New Church Website

Due to the generosity of a parishioner, our church has a new and improved website. There's a few items left to be loaded, but the site is basically up and running. I think it is all very well done, for this sort of thing. Our East Texas mission has been in existence for 5 1/2 years, in an area that is overwhelmingly evangelical Protestant. The site is designed with that demographic in mind. Check it out here.

HHS, Pat Buchanan, Hitchens on Thatcher, Charles III In Waiting, John Maynard Keynes, D. G. Hart, and Right-Mindedness

On the masthead of The American Conservative are the words "ideas over ideology" and "principles over party." I am an enthusiastic booster of this publication. Ideologues of all stripes will find something to offend on almost every page. A few selections, and some comments, from the March 2012 issue, following:

1. The lead editorial--"Liberal Misconceptions"--tackles the recent flap over the HHS ruling regarding contraception. Personally, this issue is not the hill upon which I wish to fight a battle to the death. But the TAC writer zeroes in on the question that has bothered me--namely, why the insistence that contraception absolutely must be covered in health plans, with its denial being characterized as a denial of rights? I have health insurance, but with no dental coverage. When I go to the dentist, I pull out my wallet, and I do not feel as though I am somehow being denied my rights as a patient.

...the HHS ruling did combine two fundamental precepts of modern liberalism--that true freedom requires other people to foot the bill for one's choices and that women in particular are not free until they have been pharmaceutically liberated.

...the notion that lack of a subsidy is infringement of freedom has to be understood in light of the larger principle....At stake is the core liberal principle of autonomy: while anyone can choose when to have sex, without the aid of technology women cannot control when they conceive. Pregnancy circumscribes many freedoms, including the freedom to work; thus individual liberty requires "free" provision of contraception.

This liberal view is itself a religion of sorts--certainly it is as intimate and foundational as most faiths. And as sectarian, too. Just as it would not be right to tax one church to support another, liberals are in no position to demand that people who hold other understandings of human life and liberty conform to the rituals and liturgies of their worldview. Few liberals, blind to their own biases, see this however.

Such matters aren't settled by political brawls; a much larger project of suasion is required. Churches understand this better than their critics, and in fighting to preserve the domain of conscience--the right to refuse to participate in someone else's encompassing worldview--the opponents of mandates like this are in fact championing the most basic freedom of all.

2. Pat Buchanan defends his recent termination from MSNBC in "Blacklisted But Not Beaten." The publication of his most recent work, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025, and in particular the 4th chapter entitled "The End of White America," has stirred up a hailstorm of criticism from the professional Left. A group called Color of Change, Media Matters, the Human Rights Campaign, and of course Abe Foxman's Anti-Defamation League beat the drums for Buchanan's termination from MSNBC. The president of the network bowed to the pressure, first putting him on leave, and in recent weeks firing him. Buchanan notes that he said nothing more than did the Atlantic and Newsweek in 2009 when they ran cover stories entitled "The End of White America," and "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" respectively. Frankly, I take Buchanan much the same way I do Ron Paul--appreciative of their warnings against our over-reaching foreign policy, but a bit spooked when they turned their attention to domestic issues. And being a Texan, I do not share Buchanan's alarm over our changing demographics. I still watch MSNBC, and it remains the best US news channel, but there is a big hole where Buchanan's commentary used to be. I miss him already, and the discussion is diminished by his absence.

3. Peter Hitchens writes of "The Myth of Margaret Thatcher." He rightly bemoans the cruelty of the recent movie of her career, but notes that "Conservatives must come to grips with the noble failure of the Iron Lady." Living for many years overseas, Hitchens came to see Britain as foreigners did, which he said made him melancholy. "They thought we were still polite. They thought our schools were still good. They thought we were law-abiding and hard-working and patriotic....And with this went an absurd, uncritical worship of Margaret Thatcher..."

He faults her on a number of accounts: her Falklands War was to "save her own bacon," with a Royal Navy she had been trying to "cut to ribbons" only weeks before; her coal mine, steelworks and shipyard closings "look thin in an age where it is generally recognized that manufacturing industry is still important after all;" the gigantic welfare state continues unabated; British state education "annually turns out tens of thousands of some of the most ignorant and unemployable teenagers in the industrialized world;" political correctness run amok under the Equalities Act, etc.

Perhaps above all, the hideous cultural and moral revolution of the 1960s goes completely unchallenged. Civility, beauty, tradition, the small and the particular are all still despised and trampled on....Marriage, the family, and private life continue to fade away, blasted by the chilly interference of the state and the roar of commerce....in all her years she did little or nothing to reverse the demoralization brought about in the 1960s, when she had the power to try.

4. Rod Dreher's "Philosopher Prince" attempts the unenviable task of casting Prince Charles as champion of "traditionalist ideals and causes." I am generally sympathetic to monarchies and monarchism. Just not the British. My preference runs to the Ruritanian or in-exile variety. Outside of the Japanese, the Plantagenet-Tudor-Stewart-Hanover-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsors are no doubt the longest show running, and I have no desire to see a 946-year act come to a close anytime soon. I just have a hard time warming-up to any of them, particularly Prince Charles. I get the idea that while the Windsors have been enormously successful in protecting and nurturing their particular family franchise, that they have no larger loyalty to the institution as a whole, or in fact, anywhere outside their borders.

Dreher writes that "Charles believes Western civilization took a wrong turn at the Enlightenment, is headed toward destruction (especially environmental) and cannot save itself without an abrupt change of intellectual and spiritual course."

I agree with every word of that. It is just that I have a hard time taking that as my marching orders when they come from Prince Charles. To be sure, he has put a bit of his money where his mouth is: supporting historical preservation, funding the teaching of traditional arts and skills, supporting localism, decrying modernist architecture, creating new urbanist communities, and turning his 1,000 acre farm into a successful organic gardening enterprise. This is all well and good, and certainly doable if you are one of the richest men around.

In the past, some American Orthodox Christians have made much of his visits to Mount Athos, or clandestine meetings with Orthodox priests in England, creating speculation that Prince Charles is a secret wannabe Orthodox. To his credit, Dreher does not even hint at that, noting in fact that the Prince is just as enamored with Tibetan Buddhism, and Islam and "its insistence on the essential unity of all things," as well as being a thorough-going Perennialist devoted to the teachings of Rene Guenon, all the while being a "prayerful and devoted Anglican communicant." In today's parlance, he would be dubbed "spiritual."

Most of his critics are on the Right, who find him incredibly naive about Islam and its leaders in Great Britain, as well as being dangerous in his ignorance of economics. Localism, traditionalism, organic farming, historic preservation and such like are all issues I support. Indeed, Charles seems to be someone who is given to thinking about things, which is something of a novelty in his line. I will give him that. I just think that if I am being lectured about "godless, hedonistic materialism in the modern age," that it needs to be from someone with less godless, hedonistic, materialistic baggage. God Save the Queen!

5. I do not understand economics, but I did appreciate the following paragraph in "Why Stimulus Fails," by William W. Chip.

Conservative critics of today's Keynesian stimulus spending may be right, but not necessarily because Keynes was wrong. Unlike philosophy or physics, economics is a social science that seeks to explain the events of its time, not to reveal eternal verities. It may be that Keynes got the formula exactly right for the 20th century but that we have entered a new era in which his theory has become as obsolete as classical 19th-century theories that Keynes himself debunked. As Keynes famously said: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

6. D. G. Hart weighs in on contemporary American Christianity in "Church Not State: Christians must choose between faith or worldly relevance." Well, yes. Hart divides adherents into 2 broad camps--the "republican Christians" and the "Augustinian Christians." (To me, the larger story seems to be the extent to which Americans have fallen off the grid of either one.) He places his particular Presbyterian sect into the "Augustinian" category, along with right-thinking Lutherans and Roman Catholics. This did not seem nearly as natural to me as it apparently did to Hart. I suppose for some people, church history really does begin in 1517. But no matter. I also found it interesting that he had nothing to say at all about Episcopalianism in this country--in either category.

These quibbles aside, I agreed with most of the points he raised. Extended quotes, following:

Over the last 30 years, born-again Protestants have overwhelmingly backed Republican candidates in the belief that for religion to matter, it must influence not only what people do when they gather for worship but also what they do every other day of the week....arguments for taking religion seriously in politics have coincided with the resurgence of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.

Consequently, to propose that a truly conservative position is to contend for faith's own inherent merits, quite apart from any benediction from the civil government, is to risk sounding liberal--or even worse, secular.

The idea that faith is important to the degree that it shapes public life--especially the workings of government--although asserted with the most laudable of motives, is in fact the greatest impediment to taking religion seriously. (emphasis mine.)

The ideas and standards that inform most faith-based politics do not arise from religion's own ideals but from the shifting demands of policy, legislation, and re-election.

Hart believes that if we are to take religion and its theological and liturgical convictions seriously, then we need to be prepared for the kind of disagreement and balkanization that come with the most devout of faiths. Americans have not been well prepared for this kind of religious antagonism. the largest and most influential religious bodies have not only failed to explain such disagreements, they have actually established the dynamics that undermine faith's importance.

Hart concludes that the "republican Christians" that have been most eager to assert the relevance of faith, have also been the most responsible for its secularization. Meanwhile, the "Augustinian Christians" who objected least to secularization, who were least likely to talk openly of their faith, were often the ones who took faith "in all its details more seriously."

Hart notes that the Second Great Awakening (1820-1860) established "conversion" as the standard of genuine faith, leading to the combination of revival and reform as being normative for republican Christianity.

The republican Protestants demonstrate how a desire for a relevant faith redirects Christianity from convictions about the supremacy of eternal realities to the demands of the present. In the hands of republican Christianity, faith ceases to be otherworldly. Instead, it uses cultural health or social order as leading indicators of the world to come. In effect, republican Christianity immanentizes the eschaton.

For Augustinian believers, a modest republic free from continental, let alone global, ambitions was a worthwile endeavor becuase the church, not the nation, was the only vehicle for real and lasting greatness. The logic behind this Augustinian concession was that the truths and practices of a church did in fact mattter irrespective of liberty, democracy, and free markets, while republican Christians too often gave the impression tht their faith only mattered if it could be shown to advance the cause of political independence, republican government, and the creation of wealth.

I found it interesting that Hart did not buy into the Manhattan Declaration, and questioned the usefulness and wisdom of the project. He closes with H. L. Mencken's obituary for J. Gresham Machem (1936), a piece that is familiar to me, as my late, great friend Milton Burton was fond of quoting from it. Lines like this--"Religion, if it is to retain any genuine significance, can never be reduced to a series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony"--were made for Milton.

Hart closes strong--"the biggest obstacle to taking religion seriously are those well-meaning republican Christians who do not understand...that the more deep-down-diving and mud upbringing faith is, the less it will need to prove that it matters in national life."

7. And finally, Samuel Goldman writes of "Right Minds."

Classical conservatism is a coherent theory of opposition to the French Revolution and its consequences. And it does insist on hierarchy in human affairs, both public and private.

But what the great sociologist Robert Nisbet called the “dogmatics” of conservatism cannot be understood by reflecting on Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, or other 20th-century publicists….The counterrevolutionary ideology has to be articulated on its own terms before it is connected to the dilemmas of contemporary politics.

The French Revolution was not the first revolution in human or even European history. Mobs had ruled the streets before; princes had often enough been deposed. Yet Burke insisted that that the Revolution was “the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.” What was so astonishing about it? Burke’s answer was that the French Revolution was the consequence of an extraordinary new theory of society.

According to this theory, which Burke attributed to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, human beings are naturally free and self-sufficient. Because each man is potentially a Crusoe, any relations between individuals are essentially voluntary.

The question, then, is whether the “chains” that bind one person to another reflect the will of every individual involved. If so, they are legitimate—a term that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to transform from a principle of dynastic succession into the moral justification of rule as such. If not, they lack moral authority and may be rejected, potentially with violence. So, in Burke’s view, went the philosophical argument behind the revolution.

This reasoning was mistaken, Burke argued, not so much in its logical structure as in its first principle. In fact, human beings are born into networks of sympathy, obligation, and authority. These networks make us what we are, transforming unformed potential and dispositions into concrete identities. On this view, there is no Archimedean point from which the legitimacy of existing social relations can be assessed. As Maistre put it in a brilliant formulation, “In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians… . But, as for Man, I declare that I have never met him in my life. If he exists, I certainly have no knowledge of him.”

If the social arrangements that characterize national communities are background conditions of humanity, they are not legitimatized by the consent of those who participate in them at any given time. Instead, they derive their authority from the way that they bind together past, present, and future in an enduring partnership. It follows that men and women of today have no right to dissolve the partnership in which they are involved merely because it seems inconvenient to them. Society, which always means a particular society, is an “entailed inheritance,” like a landed estate whose owner is legally prohibited from selling.

From this point of view, the radicalism of the French Revolution was not that it aimed to alter relations of authority in favor of the previously subordinate. The desire of subjects to rule kings, servants to dominate their masters, sons to command fathers might be misguided. But it was readily understandable, and certainly nothing new. The real issue was the Revolution’s implicit aim of establishing a condition in which nobody would obey anyone else unless he agreed to do so.

This aspiration, the conservatives insisted, was not merely unwise, but actually insane. The insistence that power be embedded in restraining traditions and institutions is the crucial distinction between classical conservatism and the fascism that would eventually replace it on the European right. Conservatism defends the authority of lords, of generals, of kings—but not of a “leader” who emerges from and rules over the disorganized mob.

But despite its anti-egalitarianism, classical conservatism cannot be assimilated to anything like fascism. This is not because it is more or less “extreme,” a comparative adjective that has no ahistorical meaning. It is because conservatism insists that authority is constituted but at the same time limited by the network of relationships that make up society.

What does this backward-looking, theologically inflected ideology of hierarchy have to with the contemporary America conservative movement? The answer is: not much. In addition to the historical distance, the concept of individual rights imposes an unbridgeable theoretical gap between the two positions. Classical conservatism is essentially communitarian, and locates individuals in structures of obligation that are not derived from their choice or consent. The American conservative movement, on the other hand, appeals to many of same beliefs about natural freedom and equality that inspired the French Revolution.

These appeals are most obvious in the libertarian strand of the movement, which cannot simply be dismissed as an apology for economic exploitation. They are most destructive, however, when they are used to motivate and justify our perennially adventurist foreign policy. According to the ideologues of American exceptionalism, there really is such a thing as Man in the abstract. And Man has the same rights and desires in Afghanistan that he has in Arizona. The purpose of government is to secure these rights. To the extent that it aims to do so universally, the government of the United States is therefore the universal government, with the responsibility to reorder all the traditional loyalties and obligations that define “illegitimate” societies.

No matter which party endorses this vision, it is difficult to imagine anything more distant than from “the contrary of revolution” inspired by Burke and articulated by Maistre. For it is a mirror image of the very Revolution that they opposed.

“we need to make sure that this president…not allow his administration to somehow speak contrary to what our ally thinks is in its best interest.” (emphasis added)

Eric Cantor on President Obama's AIPAC speech

It is refreshing to have all the niceties out of the way and to forthrightly clarify our foreign policy objectives as practiced by both political parties--i.e. what our allies think is in their best interest.

Oops sorry, I misread that. It is ally not allies. And so, we are not to contradict what this particular ally and this ally alone thinks is in their best interest. Too bad Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Turkey, etc.

Read it here.

"The Ecumenical Patriarch is Right"

For the occasional visitor here, I apologize for the long blogging dry spell. Real life keeps intruding into online life--financial concerns, work (or the lack thereof), teaching, church, family, and all that. And, I do not see much let-up in the foreseeable future. I did want to post, however, the following article regarding the Ecumenical Patriarch's address to the Turkish Parliament.

Mustafa Akyol is a young Turkish journalist and writer I have followed for several years. He formerly blogged at White Path, but his more recent articles can be found here. Someone wanting to really understand developments in the Middle East--and Turkey's growing influence there--could do far worse than by following this writer's columns. While a few American commentators take note of what is happening in Turkey (Zbigniew Brzezinski for one,) far too many succumb to superficial and cheap demagoguery (for example, the last debate performance of the unlamented former GOP Presidential candidate from Texas, and most any Cal Thomas columns), concluding that Turkey is sliding into an "Islamist" state.

In the real world, the Turkish government invites the Ecumenical Patriarch to address a parliamentary commission. I will be the first to admit that Turkish relations with its Orthodox subjects and neighbors have long been infuriating and frustrating (the Phanar, Greece, Cyprus, etc.) Often it seems that progress is one step forward and two steps back, and that a final resolution is just at the cusp--but only just. That said, real progress has occured in recent years, and it has all come durring the watch of the AKP--the "Islamist" party--rather than under the secularists. Anyway, the article speaks for itself. I have copied it in full, and highlighted significant passages.

The Ecumenical Patriarch is right

Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, visited the Turkish Parliament the other day. This was a first, for His All Holiness had visited the Turkish Parliament only once before, and only to attend the funeral of the late President Turgut Özal. But this time, he was invited by the Parliament’s Constitution Conciliation Commission, in which deputies from all parties work together to draft a new charter for Turkey.

After his meeting at the commission, where he expressed his expectations from the new constitution, His All Holiness said the following to journalists:

“It is the first official invitation to non-Muslim minorities in Republican history. We don’t want to be second-class citizens. Unfortunately there have been injustices in the past. These are all slowly being rectified. A new Turkey is being born. We are leaving the meeting with hope and are extremely grateful.”

What a great summary that was. It underlined the bitter fact that throughout the history of the “secular” Turkish Republic, non-Muslims were seen as second-class citizens, if not enemies within. It also heralded that “a new Turkey is being born,” in which the anti-non-Muslim prejudices of the past were being abandoned “slowly.” (I, too, wish the change were faster.) The Ecumenical Patriarch also noted that this current transformation in Turkey made him, and his fellow Christians, hopeful and grateful.

Now, if you are among those who believe that Turkey is being drawn away from its bright secular past to an Islamist “darkness,” you might find these hard to believe. But please do believe the Ecumenical Patriarch, and let me explain to you why he is right.

His All Holiness is right, because the main threat to Turkey’s Christians and Jews has not been Islam, but Turkish nationalism. In fact Islam respects the religious rights of “the people of the book” – Jews and Christians – and that is why non-Muslims had freedom of worship throughout the Ottoman centuries.

In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire also gave equal citizenship rights to non-Muslims, leading to the appearance of many Christians and Jews in the Ottoman bureaucracy and Parliament.

In the 20th century, however, both the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the nation-state model imported from continental Europe led to the emergence of Turkish nationalism. This secular yet illiberal ideology had little respect for “the people of the book” and wanted to create a non-Muslim-free Turkey – not for its love of Muslimness, but Turkishness. Hence came the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians, Greeks or the Assyrians, or the “Wealth Tax” on all non-Muslims including the Jews.

Kemalism, the official ideology of the Turkish Republic, was the embodiment of this nationalist paradigm. Clueless Westerners often praised Kemalism for its “secularism” and “modernism,” but little they noticed that the persecution of Turkey’s Christians (and Kurds, for that matter), from which they rightfully complained, was carried out by none other than the Kemalist Jacobins and their sans-culottes. (By the latter, I refer to the vulgar ultra-nationalists of Turkey, whose ideology is a crude but natural reflection of that of the more sophisticated Kemalist elite.)

That is why post-Kemalist Turkey, just like the pre-Kemalist (Ottoman) one, will be more amiable to non-Muslims. And we are seeing the evidence of that day by day.

P.S.: You might have noted that I did not call the Ecumenical Patriarchate “Fener Rum Orthodox Patriarchate” as the Turkish state and mainstream media does. For I believe that every religious institution has a right to define itself, a right that should be respected by others.

Alternative Right is a favorite online destination of mine. [Update: a couple of visitors here have raised valid objections to some material on the AR site, so...as in most everything online, use discretion.] I particularly enjoy the writings of Mark Hackard, an infrequent contributor there.

His latest, Pleasure-Dome Police State is a keeper. A few selections, after quoting Plato's We should expect tyranny from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty:

Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakastani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.

....And what is the secret of democracy, this gospel to liberate and empower all mankind? It is the political expression of our modern faith, self-worship. Just below the rationalistic assertion of rights and equality is the abyss of desire, the wish to ultimately recognize no authority higher than one’s own will made divine. Faith, ethnos and culture must be annihilated by egalitarianism and market forces, thereby giving rise to the New Man. From spiritual disorder springs social anarchy. In the contemporary West, a nation is no longer itself, but a mass of atoms, sovereign in their frenzied quest for profit and pleasure, mere demographic material for the plutocrats’ global Babylon.

....Herein we discover the bankruptcy of humanism: reason works as an eloquent prostitute for passions that would enslave us all. The Pleasure Dome is a police state.When the democratic principle is exalted beyond the suitable level of local institutions, it flattens all qualitative distinctions between individuals and peoples, leaving destruction, mediocrity and token tasteless amusements in its wake. As the modern West pursues the ideals of liberty and equality to their final outcomes, it draws ever nearer to a nightmarish despotism and dissolution. Immanent universal brotherhood can only be diagnosed as the fever-dream of a diseased imagination, which in its turn is seduced by a malicious deceiving spirit....Tyranny is not democracy’s tragic demise, but the logical consummation of its progress....Life in this fallen world is struggle--toward Transcendence and eternity. Accordingly, politics must be conducted in fidelity to the moral law, whose Author is supra-natural. All power derives from God, and to Him shall it be consecrated.

This is another interesting Hackard article.

If you are on board with Hackard, you might also appreciate this.

The big bang theory - Sheldon and Amy Farrah Fowler

Look for the punch line at 1:02 minutes.

Stuff Presbyterian Seminarians Say

I'm not picking on Presbterians, but this is hilarious. In the interest of fair play, if someone ever does one of these on Orthodox seminarians, I'll be the first in line to post. I promise.

"Envisioning" Shiner Bock Evangelism

I always appreciate droll absurdities and irony. That is why I particularly enjoy the Religion section each week in our Saturday newspaper.

This week’s offering included a story on the big Episcopalian church downtown. No doubt many wonderful people attend there. Maybe I am too cynical, but the church always struck me as the place Methodists moved up to once the money was made and the lifestyle on auto-pilot.

The article notes that the church has grown 10% during the last two years, with 1,500 members, “800 of which are active and 400 who are regular attendees.” I don’t understand that statement at all, but I will let it pass. Of the 400, the assistant rector notes that 200 attend Sunday School every week.

One year ago, the church initiated an “Epiphany Envisioning Service.” (For the record, if my church ever made regular use of the word “envisioning,” I would know all is lost.) At that time, the church explained the
concept thusly:

Envisioning is a contemporary service that features modern Christian worship music, (lead by musicians playing guitar, violin and bongo drums), a shorter somewhat simpler liturgy, (currently one borrowed from the Church of Kenya), and a greater focus on the homily or the teaching.

Violins and bongo drums, you say?

Apparently, all this envisioning has been a roaring success, as noted in this week’s article.

This is not a service for the parishioners, it’s a service for their neighbors and coworkers…The Epiphany Eucharist is the church’s version of a contemporary service. The priests opt for a collar instead of robes and the music includes more modern songs, such as ‘Mighty to Save,’ ‘In Christ Alone,’ and ‘Christ is Risen.’ Still, attendees confess creeds every Sunday and take bread and real wine from a communal chalice…

Perhaps anticipating snarky reactions such as mine, the assistant rector was quick to note:

It’s important for us that the liturgy not be dumbed-down…We love the liturgy so much, we want to share it. It’s not a rock concert at all. It’s a service where folks who might be uncomfortable in the nave (the more traditional service) can be exposed to the liturgy. Ultimately the point of the Epiphany Eucharist service is to acclimate those who haven’t grown up in the tradition.

But here is where the assistant rector really goes off the rails, in my opinion. He compares the
Epiphany Envisioning Eucharist Service to a “bridge beer,” concluding there’s a good chance they’ll like something about it. This service is like a Shiner for someone who drinks Bud Light. This is how we introduce Bible Belt evangelicals to church history.

For those of you on the wrong side of the Red River, the word Shiner denotes the product of our cherished and independent Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, Texas. I resent the defamation of an iconic symbol of Texas to make a point about some artsy-fartsy Episcopalian envisioning silliness. I say envision all you want, just leave Shiner Bock out of it.

The article continues to tell of the assistant rector’s project.

Most of the service’s attendees are younger…he tailors his sermons to fit that audience. But the people who attend the two types of services aren’t as different as one might think. "The things I
talk about also play well in the nave," he said. "For example, I could talk about cutting, but maybe there’s a 75-year-old grandmother whose granddaughter struggles with that. I think the 75-year-olds today are much different than they were 20 years ago, because of the Internet. It’s an exciting time to do ministry.”

How very, very relevant. Someone help me out here—is that regular pulpit fare these days?

The best thing about the article, however, is the attached picture (sadly not available)--much the same view as above, only with people. The assistant rector is up front, liturgizing, and a young 30-something in the back row of chairs attracted my attention. He is casual, legs-crossed, looking intently--down at the text message he is sending on his iPhone. Clearly, more bongo drums are called for.

Byzantine ship to sail again

I am a sucker for this sort of thing. See here:

In the Doldrums

I'm stuck in the blogging doldrums these days. It is not that I do not have anything to say, but rather that I cannot seem to muster enough interest to expound on much of anything. And then, financial concerns and working 3 jobs tends to focus one's attention in directions other than blogging. That said, I have posted something here every month since November 2005, and I realize that January is fast slipping away. Skipping a month sets a bad precedent and evokes images of an undisciplined soul sliding further into sloth and lethargy. And so, I must post something it seems.

To post on the current political circus would be picking low-hanging fruit indeed, and Lord knows I am the last one to pile-on. Ahem. But if I were to do so, I would probably link to something like this, from a writer with whom I never agree, except on those rare occasions when he writes something sensible that agrees with my thinking.

I suppose I could post yet another laudatory commendation of my hero Daniel Larison's latest, or perhaps a

Visit msnbc.co'>clip

or

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a clip or two by my other foreign policy mentor, Dr. Brzezinksi.

I could always link to an interesting article on Turkey, such as this or this (with dead-on conclusion: Here, the trouble with the AKP is not that it is too “Islamist.” The trouble is that the governing party, which has clashed with a powerful state establishment for years and found the solution in liberal reforms, is now enjoying the very power that it once found menacing. As Andrew Finkel put it well in the New York Times, with a reference to the Lord of The Rings, this is a “Frodo Baggins moment” for the AKP: “It knows it should throw the ring of power into the fire, but the ring feels increasingly comfortable on its finger.”)

I suppose I could pour scorn on the incoherent ramblings of unrepentant neocons--always fun.

And with Great Lent still almost a month off, it is too early for American Orthodox "Scandal Season."

And so, I think my first post of 2012 will be this: My friend John preaches for a church of Christ in rural Alabama. He is a good-natured sort, who does not take offense at the Protestant/evangelical/Restorationist straw-men I construct and demolish here. John sometimes posts his sermons online. I encourage you to check out this one: "A Gentle Religion." As an Orthodox Christian, I have to say that I agree with every word. I find it very well done, a thorough mining of Scripture as only a church of Christ preacher can do.

And on his subject, I would add the following, though I doubt the writings of an Orthodox bishop and saint would be much quoted from a church of Christ pulpit ;)

And when your enemy falls into your hands, do not consider how you can pay him back and let him feel the sharp edge of your tongue before sending him packing; consider rather how you can heal him and restore him to a better frame of mind. Continue to make every effort by
both word and deed until your gentleness has overcome his aggressiveness. Nothing has more power than gentleness. As someone has said, ‘A soft word will break bones.’ And what is harder than bone? Well then, even if someone is as hard and inflexible as that, he will be conquered if you treat him gently. There is another saying, ‘A soft answer turns away wrath.’ It is obvious therefore that whether your enemy continues to rage or whether he is reconciled depends much more on you than on him. For it rests with us, not with those who are angry, either to destroy their anger or to inflame it.

St. John Chrysostom

Books for the New Year

Today, I finally finished Digenes Akrites, the epic Byzantine narrative poem (yes, there is such.) This brings to a close my last book list, meaning that is time to start whittling-down the new stack. The appeal of book is often connected to the place and occasion of their discovery. Consequently, I have sorted the new list accordingly. I have cheated a bit on my discipline, having read a few in advance--but for the most part, I am sticking with my plan, that is to read the books I have on hand before moving on to others. The list for the first part of 2012 shapes up as follows:

Annual Pilgrimage to Arkansas, May 2011:

New Confessors of Russia, by Archimandrite Damascene (Orlovsky)
The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios, by Dionysios Farasiotis

Every May, I take a two-day trip to northern Arkansas to visit the last surviving sibling of either of my parents. We are not noticeably long-lived, so at age 88, my aunt is redefining the genetic history for our family. I aways go the back roads, avoiding Arkansas interstate highways at all costs. All Saints of North America Orthodox Mission (ROCOR) out from DeQueen has become one of my favorite stops. The rural setting is picture perfect. The two titles above that I purchased there should be familiar to most Orthodox readers, but for some reason have eluded me until now. Fr. George earns a living by the St. Mark the Grave-digger's Workshop, in a barn across from the farmstead and chapel. There, he crafts wooden liturgical furniture, as well as caskets. Events of this last year have brought home the fact that I might want to keep his number handy.


Road trip through the South, July 2012:

Slaves in the Family, and The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South, by Edward Ball
Sunken Plantations: The Santee Cooper Project, by Douglas W. Bostick
Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events that Shaped the Modern South, by Curtis Wilkie
The Reservoir, by John Milliken Thompson
A Good, Hard Look: A Novel, by Ann Napolitano
Life, Death and the Coming Kingdom, by Fr. Cyril Argenti

Any road trip east usually takes us through Jackson, a favored stop-over. In times past, we would always try to have supper at Dennery's (now closed), a favorite haunt of Eudora Welty. In recent years, we enjoy the Mayflower and/or Cock o' the Walk. The thing we never fail to do, however, is to visit Lemuria, the South's finest independent bookstore. My preference is for used bookstores and the people who own and inhabit them, but I make an exception for this establishment. On our way east, we noticed they were hosting a book-signing in a few days, which would fit nicely on our return trip. We probably would not have purchased the books by Thompson and Napolitano otherwise, but I am glad we did. We picked up a few titles in Charleston, where--to my wife's consternation--little notice is given to native-son Pat Conroy. I came away with a slim volume while paying a short visit to Holy Ascension Orthodox Church in nearby Mount Pleasant.

If you are trying to understand the history of Southern slavery in all its ramifications, I heartily recommend Ball's Slaves in the Family. I passed the book on to the late Milton Burton about two weeks before he went into the hospital for the last time. He devoured the book and claimed it to be one of the best he had ever read, which which is high praise indeed. Wilkie's book offers a unique insight into the Civil Rights Movement. He grew up in the Mississippi of the 1950s, the step-son of a relatively enlightened Presbyterian minister, attended Ole Miss and witnessed first hand the violence of 1962, worked as a journalist for the Clarksdale, MS newspaper where he interviewed Martin Luther King while sitting in a car in a rural church parking lot only a week before his assassination, served as a McCarthy delegate on the alternative (and seated) Mississippi delegation to the 1968 Democratic Convention while also taking part in the antiwar street demonstrations, then later a turn as a legislative aide which led to scoring a job as the token Southerner on the Boston Globe where he was able to experience firsthand northern racism in the anti-integration violence on Boston's South Side, then assigned to cover the 1976 Presidential candidacy of an obscure Georgia governor, and finally assigned to the paper's Middle East Bureau, just in time for the Lebanese Civil War. All told, his story makes for a helluva ride.


Recycled Books, early October 2011:

The Alexiad, by Anna Comnena
Montenegro: The Divided Land, by Thomas Fleming

During a professional convention in the one of the north Dallas wastelands (in this case, Frisco), I made a break for nearby Denton, which is at least a college town and has some history to it. Recycled Books, downtown on the square, is a worthy destination. I already owned the Comnena, but not in hardback. I look forward to reading Fleming's take on Montenegro. As I have been told, he is something of an enthusiast for Serbia and Montenegro, though I think he stops short when it comes to their Orthodoxy.


Byzantine Studies Conference in Chicago, late October 2011:

Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness, by Roman Cholij
The Chronicle of Ibn Al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh, Part 1
The Chronicle of Ibn Al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh, Part 2
The Chronicle of Ibn Al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh, Part 3
History as Literature in Byzantium, ed. by Ruth Macrides
Tales from Another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha, Jane Baun
A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811-1057, by John Skylitzes
From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Hellenistic Art in Adversity, 1453-1830

One of the overriding attractions of the Byzantine Studies Conference is the presence of 3 or 4 booksellers, where one can obtain scholarly works at a 40% to 60% discount. Even so, they are still over-priced. If I am able to attend next year (at Holy Cross, in Boston), obtaining 3 titles from Ashgate Publishing will be as strong a motivation as any. Of the titles above, I particularly look forward to delving into Ibn Al-Athir and Skylitzes.


Holy Archangels Monastery, early December 2011:

A Ray of Light: Instructions in Piety and the State of the World at the End of Time, by Archimandrite Pantleimon

What God has Done for our Salvation, by St. Nikodim of the Holy Mountain

Five members of our parish teach classes in one way or another at tiny Lon Morris College in nearby Jacksonville, Texas. And so, the Orthodox presence at this nominally Methodist school has attracted a little attention--at least among other faculty members and students. My friend and fellow parishioner received permission to take some of his history and world civ. students on a field trip to Holy Archangels Monastery in the Texas Hill Country. The number of students was not large, so there was plenty of room for me to tag along. There and back again turned into a 18-hour day, but I believe it to be quite an experience for the students--and the bus-driver. While there, I picked up the two small devotional volumes listed above. I have already read St. Nikodim's and profited from doing so.


Recommendations and Odds and Ends:

A Christian Ending: A Handbook for Burial in the Ancient Christian Tradition, by J. Mark Barna
Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible, by John J. O'Keefe and R. R. Reno
Greece's Dostoevsky: The Theological Vision of Alexandros Papadiamandis, by Anestis Keselopoulos
The Last Years of the Georgian Monarchy, 1658-1832 , David M. Lang

I have posted on the Papadiamandis book earlier. It remains a strong favorite of mine. If you want to know anything about the late Kingdom of Georgia, then I'm your man--having already read Lang's rare work. I figured I could go ahead and read it since I paid-out on this book over 4 or 5 months. One of the revelations of this book had to be the extent of Persian influence in Georgia--and in some cases, visa-verse. Obviously, much of it involved coercion, and cooperation was necessary for their very survival. And so, the claim of Georgian "Europeanness" is a qualified one, I think.

In the Mail:

l'Histoire de la Georgie depuis l'antiquite jusqu'en 1569 J.-C., by Marie-Felicite Brosset

The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos, by Anthony Bryer

These two are my birthday/Christmas presents to myself. There's not much out there for those interested in detailed histories addressing Trebizond and Georgia--or at least not in English. Brosset's work (1851) is seminal for Georgian study. As it can only be obtained in French, it is safe to say that I may be reading it for quite some time. For Trebizond, you start with Bryer. Print-to-orders abound, but the original first volume with the maps and illustrations is harder to come by. This one is being sent from Germany.

Wish List:

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis

I enjoy reading of America's Cassandras. George F. Kennan was one. Andrew Bacevich is another. Kennan was one of the most fascinating Americans of the 20th-Century. As soon as I come across a good deal on this volume, I will snap it up.

D. B. Hart on the Fate of the American Religion

I still have some residual Ochlophobistophilism about me, which gives me pause before linking to an article written by David Bentley Hart. Back in the day, such actions could get you banned in Memphis (Owen, I joke.) My first exposure to DBH was back in 2003, when I stumbled across an essay he wrote about Malcolm Cowling. I found myself terribly impressed and scribbled 2 or 3 pages of selected passages in my real common-place book. His acclaimed work, The Beauty of the Infinite, was released that same year, and so I eagerly ordered a copy. I found the book to be utterly and absolutely unreadable. And so, I have since shied away from his writings. I will say, however, that his coffee-table book, The Story of Christianity, is very nicely done. A recent post at Second Terrace, led me to the particular article in question here, in the current issue of the New Criterion. If you can wade through the Hartian verbiage, I believe there to be much to commend this work. I have copied significant excerpts below, and have highlighted on particular passage I find to be especially noteworthy.

After all--and this is a truth so certain that only the most doctrinaire Marxist or lumpen British atheist could deny it—the structure of culture is essentially an idealist one, and a living culture is a spiritual dispensation…. That is why the very concept of a secular civilization is nearly meaningless…

All of which brings me to my topic: the uncertainties of the American future and the possible role religion may or may not play in that future…. Often blamelessly derivative, but also often shamefully forgetful of even the recent past, it is a nation that floats lightly upon the depths of human history, with sometimes too pronounced a sense of its own novelty…

There may not be a distinctive American civilization in the fullest sense, but there definitely is a distinctly American Christianity. It is something protean, scattered, fragmentary, and fissile, often either mildly or exorbitantly heretical, and sometimes only vestigially Christian, but it can nevertheless justly be called the American religion—and it is a powerful religion. It is, however, a style of faith remarkably lacking in beautiful material forms or coherent institutional structures, not by accident, but essentially. Its civic inexpressiveness is a consequence not simply of cultural privation, or of frontier simplicity, or of modern utilitarianism, or even of some lingering Puritan reserve towards ecclesial rank and architectural ostentation, but also of a profound and radical resistance to outward forms. It is a religion of the book or of private revelation, of oracular wisdom and foolish rapture, but not one of tradition, hierarchy, or public creeds. Even where it creates intricate institutions of its own, and erects its own large temples, it tends to do so entirely on its own terms: in a void, in a cultural and (ideally) physical desert, at a fantastic remove from all traditional sources of authority, historical “validity,” or good taste (Mormonism is an expression of this tendency at its boldest, most original, and most effervescently vulgar). What America shares with, say, France is the general Western heritage of Christian belief, with all its confessional variations; what it has never had any real part in, however, is Christendom.

And so, in fact, America was established as the first truly modern nation, the first Western society consciously to dissociate its constitutional order from the political mythologies of a long disintegrating Christendom, and the first predominantly Christian country to place itself under, at most, God’s general providential supervision, but not under the command of any of his officially recognized lieutenants. The nation began, one could argue, from a place at which the other nations of the West had not yet arrived.

In another sense, however, when one considers the result, it is all rather astonishing. America may have arisen out of the end of Christendom, and as the first fully constituted political alternative to Christendom, but it somehow avoided the religious and cultural fate of the rest of the modern West. Far from blazing a trail into the post-Christian future that awaited other nations, America went quite a different way, down paths that no other Western society would ever tread, or even know how to find. Whereas European society—moving with varying speed but in a fairly uniform direction—experienced the end of Christendom simultaneously as the decline of faith, in America just the opposite happened. Here, the paucity of institutional and “civilizing” mediations between the transcendent and the immanent went hand in hand with a general, largely formless, and yet utterly irrepressible intensification of faith: rather than the exhaustion of religious longing, its revival; rather than a long nocturnal descent into disenchantment, a new dawning of early Christianity’s elated expectation of the Kingdom….

In the wake of Christendom’s collapse, the forms of Christianity that would prove most lively would be those that possess something analogous to the apocalyptic consciousness of the earliest Christian communities: their sense of having emerged from history into the immediacy of a unique redemptive event; their triumphant contempt for antique cult and culture; their experience of emancipation from the bondage of the law; their aloofness from structures of civil power; and their indifference to the historical future (for the present things are passing away).

Whatever the case, the American religion somehow slipped free from this story before it reached its dénouement, and so it is not inextricably entangled in the tragic contradictions of historical memory. At its purest, in fact, it is free of almost all memory, and so of all anxiety: it strives towards a state of almost perfect timelessness, seeking a place set apart from the currents of human affairs, where God and the soul can meet and, so to speak, affirm one another. For a faith so thoroughly divorced from history, there is no set limit to the future it may possess. And if, as I have said, culture is always shaped by spiritual aspirations, this all has a very great bearing on what kind of future America might possess. History is not created by historical consciousness, after all; the greatest historical movements are typically inspired by visions of an eternal truth that has somehow overtaken history. This is simply because a people’s very capacity for a future, at least one of any duration or consequence (good or bad), requires a certain obliviousness in regard to time’s death-bound banality, a certain imaginative levity, a certain faith. The future is often the gift of the eternal.

Whatever one’s view of Evangelicalism, only bigotry could prevent one from recognizing its many admirable features: the dignity, decency, and probity it inspires in individuals, families, and communities; the moral seriousness it nourishes in countless consciences; its frequent and generous commitment to alleviating the sufferings of the indigent and ill; its capacity for binding diverse peoples together in a shared spiritual resolve; its power to alter character profoundly for the better; the joy it confers. But, conversely, only a deep ignorance of Christian history could blind one to its equally numerous eccentricities: the odd individualism of its understanding of salvation; its bizarre talk of Christ as one’s “personal Lord and savior”; its fantastic scriptural literalism; the crass sentimentality of some of its more popular forms of worship; its occasional tendency to confuse piety with patriotism….

Much of American Evangelicalism not only lacks any sense of tradition, but is blithely hostile to tradition on principle: What is tradition, after all, other than man-made history, and what is history other than exile from paradise? What need does one have of tradition when one has the Bible, that eternal love letter from Jesus to the soul, inerrant, unambiguous, uncorrupted by the vicissitudes of human affairs? In some of its most extreme forms, Evangelicalism is a religion of total and unsullied reverie, the pure present of the child’s world, where ingenuous outcries and happy gestures and urgent conjurations instantly bring forth succor and substance. And, at its most intensely fundamentalist, so precipitous is its flight from the gravity of history into Edenic and eschatological rapture that it reduces all of cosmic history to a few thousand years of terrestrial existence and the whole of the present to a collection of signs urgently pointing to the world’s imminent ending….

My central claim is that what one sees with particular clarity in Evangelical piety is a deep spiritual orientation that both informs and expresses the American mythos: that grand narrative, going back to colonial times, of a people that has fled the evils of an Old World sunk in corruption, cast off the burden of an intolerable past, and been “born again” as a new nation, redeemed from the violence and falsehood of the former things.

It is not difficult, of course, to enumerate the weaknesses of a culture shaped by such a spiritual logic. It is a spirituality that, for example, makes very little contribution to the aesthetic surface of American life. This is no small matter. The American religion does almost nothing to create a shared high culture, to enrich the lives of ordinary persons with the loveliness of sacred public spaces, to erect a few durable bulwarks against the cretinous barbarity of late modern popular culture, or to enliven the physical order with intimations of transcendent beauty. With its nearly absolute separation between inward conviction and outward form, it is largely content to surrender the surrounding world to utilitarian austerity. It could not do otherwise, even if the nation’s constitution were not formally so secular. It would not have the imaginative resources. It is a religion of feeling, not of sensibility; it might be able to express itself in great scale, but not as a rule in good taste.

It is, however, a religious temperament wonderfully free of cynicism or moral doubt, and so it may have a singular capacity for surviving historical disappointment and the fluctuations of national fortune. Its immunity to disenchantment seems very real, at any rate. It may, in fact, grow only stronger if the coming decades should bring about a decline in America’s preeminence, power, international influence, or even solvency. Whatever the case, it is unlikely to lapse very easily into a decline of its own, or vanish into some American equivalent of the spiritual exhaustion and moral lassitude of post-Christian Europe.

The question that should concern us, it seems to me, is whether in years ahead America will produce a society that has any particular right to a future. By this, I mean nothing more elaborate than: How charitable and just a society will it be, how conscious will it be of those truths that transcend the drearier economies of finite existence, and will it produce much good art? And all of that will be determined, inevitably, by spiritual forces.

It is not obvious, however, what those forces will be, or what they will bring about. It is very much an open and troubling question whether American religiosity has the resources to help sustain a culture as a culture—whether, that is, it can create a meaningful future, or whether it can only prepare for the end times. Is the American religious temperament so apocalyptic as to be incapable of culture in any but the most local and ephemeral sense? Does it know of any city other than Babylon the Great or the New Jerusalem? For all the moral will it engenders in persons and communities, can it cultivate the kind of moral intelligence necessary to live in eternity and in historical time simultaneously, without contradiction? Will its lack of any coherent institutional structure ultimately condemn it to haunting rather than vivifying its culture, or make it too susceptible to exploitation by alien interests, or render it incapable of bearing any sufficiently plausible or even interesting witness to the transcendent . . . ? And so on and so on. There is much to admire in the indigenous American religious sensibility, without question, but also much to deplore, and there is plenteous cause for doubt here.

Still, the worst fate that could befall America, one far grimmer than the mere loss of some of its fiscal or political supremacy in the world, would be the final triumph of a true cultural secularism….Even when it is not breeding great projects for the rectification of human nature or human society—not building death-camps or gulags, not preaching eugenics or the workers’ paradise—the secularist impulse can create nothing of enduring value. It corrupts the will and the imagination with the deadening boredom of an ultimate pointlessness, weakens the hunger for the good, true, and beautiful, makes the pursuit of diversion life’s most pressing need, and gives death the final word. A secular people—by which I mean not simply a people with a secular constitution, but one that really no longer believes in any reality beyond the physical realm—is a dying people, both culturally and demographically. Civilization, or even posterity, is no longer worth the effort. And, in our case, it would not even be a particularly dignified death. European Christendom has at least left a singularly presentable corpse behind. If the American religion were to evaporate tomorrow, it would leave behind little more than the brutal banality of late modernity.

In the end, though, on the matter of religion and the American future, I am certain of very little….Perhaps the quieter strengths they impart to our culture—its deeper reserves of charity and moral community, the earnestness of its spiritual longings, its occasional poetic madness—will persist for a long while yet, and with them the possibility of cultural accomplishments far more important than mere geopolitical preeminence. There is, at any rate, some room for hope.

Tradition and the "Secret Permanences"

I enjoyed the recent article by Michael O'Meara, entitled The Shock of History, being a review of a book by the same name--Le Choc de l'Histoire by French historian Dominique Venner. He finds that amidst the current crisis--financial, demographic, cultural, existential--Europe is awakening from a long sleep, a dormition, if you will. Venner's thoughts on tradition are ones that can be appreciated by the Orthodox reader. He draws interesting distinctions between America and Europe, and I largely agree with his observation that the U.S., in its own way, occupied western Europe every bit as much as the Soviets did in the East. A few selections, as follows:

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking...is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind. As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass. It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition...is preeminently contemporary....It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition...is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century....Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World...America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’....Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents....Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational /universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks...these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition. The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes...combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign. Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals...are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

History is the realm of the unexpected....In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

(The 3 paintings--Echo and Narcissus, The Siren, and Tristan and Isolde--all by pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse are appropriate to the subject matter, I think.)