That’s before we broach the question of whether Osteen is actually Protestant. It’s an open question and there’s some lively debate about it on this side of the aisle. Some of my people view the prosperity gospel movement as a heretical breakaway, sort of the Protestant analogue of SSPX.

Yes, the standard Catholic narrative is that the Protestant Reformation was implicitly a rebellion against civilization itself; whereas the Protestant narrative is that the authority structures were rotting from the head down and didn’t reform themselves until they were threatened with extinction due to the entrepreneurial threat of the Reformation.

You won’t get any argument from me about deplorable liturgical practices in some catholic churches…. My guess is you haven’t seen the worst of it. But that wasn’t quite my point.

Why shouldn’t we celebrate Osteen’s entrepreneurship? More generally, by what standards ought we to judge anything “new?” Well, by the very “old” — i.e. eternal and, gasp, permanent — standards of truth, goodness, and beauty. In this sense, the “old” must, as a matter of ontology, have primacy over the “new.” There simply is no other alternative, as much as we may want it.

You write: “if human beings become more able to shape their own lives rather than having a tiny coterie of elites shape their lives for them, will they destroy themselves?”

I grant that “coteries of elites” have wreaked havoc and mass destruction in the world, and yet….

Considering the aftermath of the Reformation, for example, it’s most likely true that if it weren’t for certain elites — the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, for example — “the best” of certain traditions would indeed be lost. (I also have in mind how General Assemblies work and don’t work, and how subdivisions tend to splinter off because of disagreement over what is “best.”)

Another way to see the point is to note that marriage revisionists and liturgical revisionists both want to “shape their own lives.” To their minds, their enemies are tiny coteries of traditionalists who, precisely because of their outmoded traditions, will be judged to have been “on the wrong side of history.”

But even God seems to respect human autonomy. Therefore, for the City of Man, perhaps the via media between traditionalist / aesthetic czars and “shape my own life” innovating revisionists is what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead. But even this sort of democracy will…

My first response is that you’ve made a fairly weak case by comparing the best of your tradition to the worst of mine. That makes it relatively easy for me to parry your thrust by pointing out that very, very few Protestant churches emulate Osteen’s practices, and there are some large Catholic churches with deplorable liturgical practices. Two can play that game!

Like Thomas Aquinas, I believe that existence as such is good, and (consequently) any act that is not intrinsically evil is intrinsically good, notwithstanding the fact that it can be done to evil ends in particular cases and thus be evil in those cases. Hence “the abuse does not abolish the use.”

It seems to me that you still haven’t addressed the brunt of Mr Deneen’s piece, namely that certain social changes in how we live (suburbia, increased reliance on cars, etc) have hurt society and make it harder to live well. Entrepreneurship isn’t a good thing in itself; it can’t be separated from its content.

The example I keep coming back to is pornography. After all, Hugh Heffner and Larry Flint were just entrepreneurs working to change a way of life that had become stale. They certainly gave people more freedom to decide how they wanted to live; when i look at my phone, i get to decide whether to look at naked ladies or First Things! (As Austin Powers would say, “Yay Capitalism!”)

It seems to me that your defense of Mr Bailey would apply equally well to them. Assuming (as I think we can) that you’d agree that pornography is a bad thing, how is it different? I assume you’d say, “Well, it tears apart families and communities.” But of course, that’s exactly what Deneen would say about the post-war atomized suburban living in which many of us find ourselves. So your problem with Deneen isn’t that he doesn’t understand the beauty of the creative destruction, but that you like certain forms of entrepreneurship that he doesn’t. But if that’s the case, simply asserting that Bedford Falls was an old way of life that had gotten stale isn’t enough; you have to explain why. Deneen, in that place and others, has done a wonderful job explaining why pre suburban living was more conducive to human flourishing than what followed. If you disagree, great. But paeans to entrepreneurship miss the point. Never forget that the pornographer and the pimp are the results of supply and demand.