From R.R. Reno’s “Public Square” in the May issue of First Things. Support First Things by subscribing here.

First Things has been updated for the iPad. It has the same elegant style as the print magazine, but we’ve changed the formatting in significant ways to make the articles more readable for electronic subscribers, and easier to navigate. You can buy individual issues or sign up for regular monthly delivery. Check it out in Apple’s iTunes store, or on our website (which I hope you’ve made your homepage).

We can thank Austin Stone for the iPad update. He steps into a new role at First Things, that of e-publisher responsible for “pushing out” our content on “multiple platforms.” (That’s a sentence I never imagined myself writing.) First Things remains committed to old-fashioned print. That’s my preferred way to read serious articles and essays. But we also want to give our electronic readers formats as easy and pleasurable to read as the crisp, clean pages of America’s finest journal of religion and public life.

While welcoming Austin Stone to the team, I’d also like to acknowledge the departure of Joe Carter, our former web editor. He is now senior editor of the Acton Institute and an editor at the Gospel Coalition. Joe is an important voice among religious conservatives, and a man whose faith, integrity, and intelligence I admire a great deal. In his five years with the magazine, Joe was an adept tech guy, an insightful writer for our website, a faithful Christian, and a good friend. Thanks, Joe.

Pamela Fox makes really cool stuff. So says Tessa Kinja on Life Hacker, a website the “curates [web-speak for exercising editorial judgment] tips, tricks, and technology for living better in the digital age.”

I’m sure that’s true, about Pamela I mean. But she’s more than someone making really cool stuff. She’s a window on our twenty-first century culture and our seamless garment of money-making and idealism.

Pamela’s someone who, like the rest of us, sees herself as unique. She’s got a bleached swath of hair and doesn’t “believe in” alarm clocks. “I’m not your typical engineer,” she says. Apple products all the way, of course. Asked about her favorite time saving device (remember, this is lifehacker.com), she replies, “the IUD.” Think of all the time saved not worrying about birth control pills!

But the ways in which Pamela is unique are pretty conventional. Americans have been individuals in the same way for a long time. It’s her job that’s telling. She’s a product engineer at Coursera, a for-profit company that “partners” with dozens of big-name universities to provide free on-line courses, so-called MOOCs, massive open online courses. With them you can take Stanford University’s Larry Diamond’s course on democratic development, or a Cal Tech professor’s course on galaxies and cosmology.

This is new frontier stuff in education. Thus the Coursera website: “We believe in connecting people to a great education so that anyone around the world can learn without limits.” Without limits! “We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education that has so far been available to a select few.” Everyone! Pamela’s very excited too: “I joined Coursera because I love their mission, and also because there is so much more experimentation to be done in the world of online education.”

I don’t doubt that Pamela, the founders of Coursera, and the venture capitalists who have put many millions into the company believe in their product—believe in their roles in the Great Educational Revolution. But I also don’t doubt that they would very much like to get rich (or in the case of the venture capitalists, to get richer still). I have no brief against moneymaking, but this is Amway on steroids. And it’s typical today. We want to believe: Anyone around the world can learn without limits. And we want to win, win, win in the great race for wealth. Thus Pamela. Every few months she re-reads Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. (I am not making this up.)

I don’t think Pamela realizes how strange and new this seems to me. The ad men on Mad Men would blush at the hype masquerading as idealism. I can’t understand a mind that can so easily fuse feel-good, sentimental moralism—breaking down barriers to elite education!—with a job as a technical cog in what some very rich people in Silicon Valley hope will be a profitable business with a big payout.

Two thoughts:

First, I strongly believe Pamela represents our age: IUDs, for-profit companies proposing to save the world (without limits!), insistent assertions of individuality, and Dale Carnegie. It’s not a wicked age (though Kermit Gosnell suggests otherwise). In many respects is sensible, functional, and appealing. Pamela would probably make a good neighbor. But I can’t see how it makes much sense.

Second, I’ve been writing recently about the triumph of capitalism, chiding conservatives for misguided worries about socialism. Pamela, Coursera.org, and lifehacker.com provide powerful evidence that whatever our secular liberal culture wants, it doesn’t want anything other than capitalism. Perhaps it can’t even envision anything else, so easily does its moralism and chipper idealism serve moneymaking purposes. 

Poet George Green isn’t somebody I’d want to meet in the Muse’s dark alley. If his wonderful new book of poetry, Lord Byron’s Foot, is any indication, he swings a mean verbal broadsword.

Here’s a short poem. It’s part of a series titled “Warhol’s Portraits.” This one takes up Warhol’s portrait of Mick Jagger:

Mick Jagger

He is in my opinion past his prime
already in this print, and he and Keith
are fast becoming tacky little shanks
and sherry-slurping, chicken-headed whores.
They shake their butts and sweat in leather pants,
like ancient drag queens high on Angel dust.

Ouch.

There’s a longer poem about Ana Mendieta and the New York art scene that’s particularly pungent.

Lord Byron’s Foot. It’s a fine book of poetry, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Great observations about American popular culture. Highly recommended.

We live with interesting dissonances.

For example, it’s fascinating that young people now accept economic discipline with little protest. That’s something I wouldn’t have predicted when I was in college when people still worried about being imprisoned in what Weber called the “iron cage.” But at the same time our age rejects sexual discipline as inhumane.

Another example: Most Ivy League students are likely to admit that many Americans aren’t able to participate in the lucrative global economy. They just don’t have what it takes, as it were. But mention gay marriage and they suddenly become proponents of a strict equality, viewing with great dismay my belief that two men “just don’t have what it takes” to get married.

In both cases our era believes very sincerely and deeply in the supposedly inviolable laws of economics, while rejecting as absurd the natural law. We’re docile to the marketplace and in rebellion against our bodies.

It’s unsurprising, I suppose. As Pascal recognized, it’s our fate to work at cross purposes and live against ourselves.

We’re in the midst of a big shift, no doubt. Check out this report from the Nation: “NHL Takes ‘Historic Step’ for LGBT Equality.”

The piece speaks of sports as a bulwark of “heteronormative socialization,” with the implicit suggestion that this, like homophobia, has to go. What would a society look like that doesn’t involve “heteronormative socialization”? My view: It’s a society in which the vast majority of people are disoriented in life, while the elites navigate rather well in a culture of bespoke identity formation.

Capitalism works best when all our desires are free, because then they can be reconfigured and redirected toward the needs of the market. That’s pretty much what the Nation wants, it seems.

When I was a young person I could imagine the success of the LGBT agenda. Sexual freedom was in full swing when I came of age in the late 1970s. What I couldn’t have imagined is the present complicity of the left with the dissolving, atomizing effects of global capitalism. Whether it’s legalizing marijuana, permitting pornography, or ending “heteronormative socialization,” the left today is all about getting morality out of the way. The marketplace, therapy, and bureaucratic management fill the void.

In a very fine article in the American Conservative, “Sex After Christianity,” Rod Dreher explains how the growing support for gay marriage reflect deep and profound changes in our moral imaginations.

He writes, correctly I think, that “gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage.”

What do Americans believe? Dreher says it’s a post-Christian individualism that reigns. For traditional Christianity (and for all traditional religions) moral rights and wrongs reflect cosmic truths. We thus accept moral discipline, because in so doing we participate in the dignity and truth of reality itself. (This is the spiritual pay-off of natural law arguments, which are meant to help us live in accord with our true natures. They’re not about policing behavior.)

The secular moral imagination thinks otherwise. At the end of the day there are no cosmic truths, and so we default to the immediacy of desire, unless practical or utilitarian concerns limit us. For such a view life is most “noble” when most “free,” which means unimpeded by moral constraints that are increasingly seen as meaningless.

Dreher is surely right that religious faith is at odds with this view of freedom. For freedom Christ has made us free. St. Paul meant by that a freedom from bondage to sin that allows us to enter into a more perfect obedience to God’s law. He’s also surely right that the success of gay marriage suggests that increasing numbers of Americans find this religious view of human freedom unintelligible, and thus aren’t likely to be all that enthusiastic about Christianity.  In that sense, support for gay marriage is a tell-tale. As it rises, the churches fall.

Societies are complicated, and our moral imaginations aren’t always consistent. As Dreher knows, there’s no simple formula at work here. But he’s right about what gay marriage means for our society, our moral imaginations, and our attitudes toward religious authority.

During his oral argument before the Supreme Court, Ted Olson observed that marriage is a “fundamental right.” This is a confused statement.

It’s true that marriage is very important, fundamental, in fact. It’s part of the DNA of society, and for most people the path in life most likely to bring stability and happiness. And so government should not have an unlimited capacity to muck around with marriage. It’s too important for politics, too fundamental for us to turn it into a policy that might or might not be implemented.

In other words, people have a “right” to live in a society in which marriage is a widely accessible, stable, functional institution.

But that’s not really what Olson and other proponents of “marriage equality” mean. They’re saying it’s more individualistic: each individual has a “right” to whatever definition of marriage suits him, which isn’t the same as our right to marriage as a stable, functional institution, and may in fact be at odds with it. That’s because to secure Olson’s sense of “fundamental right,” government must in fact muck around with marriage to make it plastic enough to guarantee that everyone can have the kind of marriage that suits him. In so doing, marriage changes. It’s no longer a pre-political institution the state protects and advances so as to secure our fundamental right to the possibility of marriage as a stable, functional institution. Instead marriage becomes a creature of politics, which means vulnerable to definition and re-definition (and therefore instability) as political circumstances vary.

(more…)

A friend sent me a recent piece in the New York Times about super-athlete Kilian Jornet Burgada. He leaps tall buildings in a single bound, etc.

Super-extreme sport, the athletic hero, the perfected body . . . are we seeing signs that our post-Christian culture is reverting to classical ideals? That’s the question my friend asked.

Plausible, at least for the upper middle class. We live in a time that worships the perfectly sculpted body, and the masters of the universe see an ascent of Mount Everest as a way to crown their professional success as lawyers, doctors, and investment bankers. In these and other ways, our secular culture adopts old (often modified) ideals. It’s evidence that the trajectory of our time is not toward nihilism but to new cultural norms or revitalized pagan ones that may end up being reasonably functional. Functional, that is, for elites. In ancient Greece the winners weren’t anxious about their dominance.

That worries me. Our new meritocracy tends to see itself as natural rulers, which is of course the same way the ancient Greeks on top saw themselves.

I continue to be fascinated by the Argentine reactions to the election of Cardinal Bergoglio. Jorge Fernández Díaz titled his recent column “El papa peronista.”

Juan Domingo Perón is the defining personality in modern Argentine history. He was a protean figure, hard to categorize. Some regard him as a proto-fascist, others as a proto-socialist. But all agree that he smashed the old oligarchies that dominated Argentina, setting in motion the many convulsions of populist and anti-populist movements that have roiled Argentine society. To this day a wide range of politicians claim the title “Peronist.” It’s akin to saying you’re in solidarity with “the people,” which has a very real but ill-defined meaning.

There are leftist Peronists and rightist Peronists. In the current scene in Argentina, Pope Francis is on the right. He was notably and sometimes sharply opposed to the Kirchneristas, the government of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner that has ruled for the last decade. Fernández notes the joke that God seems to be playing, having elevated a conservative Peronist to the papacy from a country ruled by a progressive one.

Fernández thinks that by and large the political establishment in Argentina will find ways to claim Pope Francis as their patron. Cristina Kirchner is off to Rome to commune with the new pope, and this in spite of refusing to meet with him on many occasions in recent years. But there are true believers on the left, “setentistas” formed by resistance to the dictatorship in the 1970s. They will continue to “abominate Francis.”

But it’s not going to be easy. “It will be difficult by any means to respond to a simple comparison. Who is more progressive? Someone who lives in Puerto Madero or Palermo Hollywood, who owns several properties, travels in planes and helicopters with armies of guards and wears gold Rolexes and designer clothes? Or a priest who lives in a completely austere environment, wears worn down shoes and a weathered coat, travels by bus and subway, eats in soup kitchens, and regularly visits the slums?”

For those not familiar with Argentina, it’s Cristina Kirchner who wears the gold watches and designer clothes. She enjoys the support of the “setentistas,” because she’s the progressive. Supposedly.

News flash: The revolutionary left does not like the new Pope. An interview with Brazilian sociologist and Marxist philosopher Michael Lowy offers a particularly pure example of the reasoning behind the Latin American Left’s efforts to discredit the new pope.

His reasoning is as follows: Anyone not a thoroughgoing Marxist revolutionary is de facto complicit with the status quo. Bergoglio is clearly not a thoroughgoing Marxist. Therefore, he was complicit with the junta during their dirty war in Argentina during the 1970s. Details to follow as needed.

The Peronists in Argentina are rather less theoretical. Then Cardinal Bergoglio crossed swords with Cristina Kirchner. She’s not a fan. Meanwhile, other Peronists are lauding the new Pope as one of their own. Columnist Ricardo Roa titled his piece: “Argentine miracle: A Peronist on Saint Peter’s throne.”

It says something about American politics that our Democratic party is less likely than Argentina’s Peronists to have a divided opinion of Pope Francis. Is that because today’s Democratic party isn’t all that concerned about the poor, other than to manage and palliate? Say what you want about Peronists in Argentina (and there’s a great deal negative to say), they’re actual populists.

The Peronist reactions have helped me see that Pope Francis is very likely to represent something the secular world may find hard to fathom: conservative populism.

I like the sound of that.

The Argentine left doesn’t like the new pope. Horacio Verbitsky, a leftist journalist and author in Argentina, responded to the election of Pope Francis with a bitter column in Página/12.

He describes former Cardinal Bergoglio as “a conservative populist,” who, like Pius XII and John Paul II, is “unwavering on questions of doctrine,” but open to the world, “and above all, to the dispossessed masses.” For Verbitsky, this fits into the standard Marxist frame of reference: the Church seducing the poor with a false solidarity. Religion as opiate of the masses.

Verbitsky ends with a warning to his fellow Argentines. Just as Pius XII worked to impede a communist victory in Italy after World War II, and then John Paul II worked to bring about the end of communism in Eastern Europe, so might the new Argentine pope use the seductive Christian rhetoric of solidarity with the poor to undermine the populist government of Argentina and restore the exploiters to power, etc.

I find the criticisms very interesting. Verbitsky knows the new Pope’s modus operandi quite well. Francis renounced the grandeur of his episcopal residence, and expressing solidarity with the common man as he rode a bus to work. (Not something Cristina Kirchner does.) But he did not do so for the sake of the revolution, at least not the Marxist revolution, but instead for the sake of the revolution of the Gospel. This, unlike free market ideologies, poses a direct threat to the modern left, which claims a monopoly interest in the poor.

Perhaps we’re about to open an interesting new chapter in the ideological story of the modern West.

Thanks to Katie Infantine for the translation of Verbitsky.

Like most of us I’m scrambling to learn more.

Here’s what I do know: Francis is a conservative Jesuit, but in some ways a revolutionary, as almost all modern Jesuits are. He’s like Benedict in the sense of not having any restorationist impulses. He recognizes that the idea of princes of the Church is an anachronism. At the same time he’s against the emerging secular consensus in the West, which includes South America. He has engaged in conflicts with Cristina Kirchner in Argentina over gay marriage and gay adoption. She punches below the belt. He knows what the Church is up against.

I  worked with Jesuits  for twenty years. They break the rules. So far Pope Francis is true to form. He took an unprecedented name, which is the name of the most severe critic of the papacy before Martin Luther. He bowed to receive the crowd’s blessing.

The Spiritual Exercises serve as the central and powerful basis for Jesuit formation. This mode of interior union with God’s will can have a tremendous effect, which is why Jesuits really, really believe in what they’re doing. That makes them powerful forces in the Church, for good and for ill. The Church is an incredibly immobile institution, but this fellow may effect some changes.

I want to follow up on Matthew Schmitz’s observations about the New York Times/CBS News poll of Catholics. Two cohorts jump out.

The first is made up of those who attend Mass weekly and think their faith is very important in their lives. They consistently express greater support for the current teaching and ministry of the Church. With one exception: the question of whether nuns are in touch with the needs of Catholics today. Those who attend Mass weekly were less likely to think so than those who attend monthly. The difference isn’t dramatic, but it’s telling.

Most female orders are off the rails and represent the most extreme forms of liberal Catholicism. Regular Mass-goers know that, and they aren’t as sympathetic as those who attend somewhat less frequently. Perhaps the less frequent Mass attending Catholics are more sympathetic with theological liberalism, which explains their more positive view of nuns. Their answers to other questions suggest that’s the case.

The second cohort is made up of baby boomers (45-64 years old). That’s my generation. We’re the cohort most in favor of married priests and women priests. We’re the least likely to believe the pope is infallible and least willing to let employers opt out of the contraceptive mandate for reasons of religious conscience.

To my mind it’s the dissenting impulse of the baby boomers that’s been the ongoing story in American Catholicism, as it has been in American culture. Young people today aren’t as ideologically cocksure. They have desire for tolerance that pushes them toward libertarianism, but they lack the baby boomer mentality, which is to remake the world in our own image.

The polling results suggest a picture of what parish priests face. The baby boomer generation has a lot of self-identified Catholics who are still somewhat engaged by the Church. They attend, perhaps less than weekly, but they’re part of the parish. They care about the Church. But they’re often mad at the Church. They’re the ambivalent generation—the Church has a hold on their spiritual imaginations, but they don’t like the “conservatism” of the Church hierarchy. They want to get back to the “spirit” of Vatican II.

Meanwhile, in the up-and-coming generation, the parish priest finds fewer ambivalent Catholics. We need finer-grained data (for example, a weekly mass attendance broken down by age cohort) but data dearth notwithstanding, here is my hypothesis: Many were raised with the ambivalence of their baby boomer parents, but they don’t feel the grip of the Church on their imaginations. They’ve drifted away. Those who’ve stayed (or returned) tend to be more committed. Some are warm in their affirmations of traditional views. Others, perhaps a larger cohort, have internal misgivings and doubts, but unlike the arrogant baby boomers who’ve always insisted on themselves, they accept the Church for what it is—a spiritual institution committed to supernatural truths that aren’t up for vote.

It’s this pastoral reality that foretells no strong pressure for the Church to change from the path set by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The clerical leadership of the Church is not interested in satisfying the desires of the ambivalent baby boomers who have made their lives difficult for decades, especially not when their children are either out of the picture altogether, or more inclined to affirm the Church’s present trajectory.

After recent public accusations of sexual misconduct with seminarians, Cardinal Keith O’Brien of Scotland not only resigned as archbishop but also announced that he would not attend the conclave to elect the next pope.

I wish some of the other Cardinals would give up the privileges of their office and refrain from attending the conclave. Cardinal Mahony offers a good example. The most generous thing we can say for his work as archbishop of Los Angeles is that it involved egregious errors of judgment. I’d like to be charitable, but I’m inclined to think much worse. The same holds for Cardinal Danneels of Belgium.

Cardinal O’Brien isn’t the only precedent. Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was historic, and it was not prompted by any accusations of misdeeds and misconduct. Citing his advanced age, he decided that in important ways he was becoming unable to properly discharge his responsibilities as chief pastor of the Catholic Church. He thought  it was in the best interests of the Church for him to step aside, giving up his office.

In Benedict, a good and holy man whose long service to the Church is widely admired gave up the privileges of his office, and he did so in accord with his judgment about how best to serve the Church. How much more so should cardinals whose failures have brought shame on the Church do the same?

This is not an argument that the Church should be run by spotless saints. I have little doubt that cardinals must rely on the grace of God. When it comes to the hierarchy, it takes a fair bit of inner push to climb the greasy pole, which only too easily blooms into sins of pride and more. Yet God can use the twisted timber of our fallen humanity to serve his supernatural purposes. That said, it doesn’t take a wild spiritual imagination to see that it would be a good witness for our age if a few of the Church’s princes accepted the fact that the best service they could provide to the Church is to acknowledge the damage they’ve done by staying home.

After I posted about the implications of Scottish Cardinal O’Brien’s resignation amidst allegations of sexual misconduct, I’ve found myself swept up into the surging currents of Rod Dreher’s blog.

Given that Rod says a great deal, there’s of course a great deal that can be said in response. But I’ll refrain. Instead, what interests me is the urgent tone of Rod’s postings on these and related matters. There’s an odd atmosphere of collapse, a kind of apocalyptic anxiety. Rod speaks of declining (collapsing!) Church attendance in Britain, which he merges with evocations and warnings about still more depravities to be uncovered. In his mind it adds up to a crisis of Catholicism akin to the traumas of the Reformation. He can’t understand why I’m not outraged, or mad, or in some way properly agitated by what he sees as the evident signs of a world-historical threat to the Christian witness.

Maybe I’m blind. Maybe I’m morally obtuse. Maybe I’m spiritually deluded. But then again maybe Christian faith and the Church have enough spiritual range, as it were, to cover bad situations like the current clerical abuse crisis, or larger trends such as secularism.

Some years ago I was talking with Muslim friends. They expressed some of Rod’s dire urgency. By their thinking, Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction of Islam to the traumatic challenges of modernity: science, secularism, pluralism, the atomizing effects of free market capitalism, the lure of sexual freedom, the pleasure-a-day seductions of consumer culture, and so forth. They were anxious, concerned, and in ways akin to Rod’s postings, fearful of collapse though self-inflicted wounds as Islam over-reacts and corrupts itself in a spirit of blind opposition and desperate negation.

I expressed sympathy. But I told them that Christianity and Judaism put failure and collapse into their founding narratives. The Israelites make a golden calf. They prostitute themselves to strange gods in every generation. In their captivity they are seduced by assimilation. The same holds for the disciples. They deny and abandon Jesus. With characteristic insight into the logic of the Old Testament and its fulfillment in Christ, St. Paul does not push these truths about our weakness and humiliation away, but draws them near: “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”

And your point, my Muslim friends asked? Ah, I replied, Christianity and Judaism are of course threatened, debilitated, and weakened by modernity, for all the reasons you say, and more—and for all the reasons Rod Dreher says, and more. But it’s not unprecedented. On the contrary, it’s common, almost the norm. This is why Christianity and Judaism, however beaten down by the present age, need not be anxious and despairing. We need not think that the real debilitations and real wounds inflicted on the Church—and the sexual sins of the clergy to wound the church in a special way in our era, a time when sexual morality plays such a central symbolic role in Western Culture—are fatal.

So of course I agree with Rod that clerical sins should be censored and miscreants disciplined. And of course I regret that more people don’t go to church in Britain (or New York for that matter). But I can’t participate in his odd sense that somehow the Church is on the verge of collapse. No longer at the center of Western culture, no longer influential, no longer the obvious option for morally sensitive upper-middle-class people? Yes, quite possible, and in many ways already all too actual. But the collapse of the cultural dominance of Christianity is not at all the same thing as a spiritual, theological collapse. From where I sit, when it comes to the interior lives of Catholics and of the Church, things have gotten better, not worse, in the last two decades. I suppose it’s as St. Paul says: for when I am weak, then I am strong.

In a long post, Rod Dreher takes the measure of the recent resignation of Cardinal O’Brien of Scotland in the wake of charges of untoward advances on seminarians and young priests some thirty years ago.

I have no particular desire to defend the honor, innocence, or reputation of Cardinal O’Brien. But I must admit that I’m mildly exasperated by Rod’s overwrought concerns. The Cardinal is accused of making unwanted advances on seminarians, and the coded language used by the media suggests that he may have used his authority over younger men to coerce them to have sex with him.

Cardinal O’Brien’s alleged conduct is rather more like professors pressuring their graduate students to sleep with them than molesting pubescent altar boys. It’s something to be censored and punished, but surely that fact that some men do these sorts of things doesn’t throw a normal person into a state of anomic horror.

But let’s leave that aside. If the allegations are true, O’Brien behaved shamefully. Nonetheless, this statement by Dreher gave me pause:

Cardinal O’Brien had a reputation for speaking out boldly for Catholic truth about homosexuality and marriage. He was called an anti-gay bigot by his opponents in the UK. And now, if these charges against him are true, he will have been shown to have been a roaring hypocrite, and the UK Catholic witness to Christian truth will be even more diminished and despised.

Come again? I am by no means without sin. I did after all grow up in the worst of the Sixties, which was actually the Seventies. It was a time of hedonism without idealism. Now I run a magazine committed to defending the moral truths taught be Catholicism (as well as Judaism and Islam, among other religions, as well as reason itself in some instances), some of which I have myself sinned against. Am I therefore a hypocrite? Has Rod never heard of confession?

Priests should be held to a higher standard, and etc. This is very true. Moreover, Rod’s right about the diminishment of Catholic witness. The sins of those who represent high moral ideals undermine both the spokesmen and the ideals. Yet we should be aware that we live in a paradoxically moralistic age that is uniquely unforgiving of those who affirm moral truths, especially rigorous ones, but don’t live up to them. That’s very likely because we have an only attenuated sense of office. Our culture is one of celebrity, not station. Much turns on personality; little on position. And so when the man falls, we can’t remain true to the office. When priests sin, we find it hard to believe in the priesthood.

Rod connects this to the general difficulty of belief in our secular age. I don’t mean to gainsay his account of his own spiritual struggles. We all have them. But mine are different. I’ve found belief easier, not harder as I have gotten older. And this is true even as getting older has meant a deeper exposure to the corrupt nature of our humanity, including my own. And it’s true even as getting older has meant a greater awareness of the diversity of culture, the contingencies of belief, and the fragility of faith.

Maybe I’m too postmodern. Maybe some sort of corrosive inner skepticism within me is so powerful that it even undermines the reasons to doubt. (That’s not farfetched. There’s a early modern tradition that sees skepticism as ministering to rather than undermining faith. Pascal, for example.) The same goes for the the sexual abuse scandals. Yes, of course I find it all demoralizing (in every sense of the word). But maybe my knowledge of my own sinfulness is so close and vivid that I’ve become hardened and insensitive. Whatever the reason, I must admit that I never and I still don’t find the dolorous news of clerical decadence, debauchery, and debasement a threat to my faith, anymore than I found the pettiness, lassitude, and dishonesty of so many academics a reason to doubt the noble calling of a life of teaching and scholarship.

There’s more to say about this, of course, but there it is. I deplore O’Brien’s alleged transgressions, especially insofar as they made others miserable, damaged the Church, and undermined people’s faith. But I don’t find them spiritually relevant to me. Or maybe the point is that I do, and because I believe even in spite of my sinfulness, I can in spite of his as well.

There is a growing political divide between the irreligious and religious. A recent Pew study shows that those who have no religious affiliation (Nones) are the single most ideologically committed cohort of white Americans, rivaled only by Evangelical Protestants. They overwhelmingly support abortion and gay marriage. Seventy-five percent of them voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and they placed a decisive role in his victory in 2012.

In Ohio, Obama lost the Protestant vote by 3 percent and the Catholic vote by 11 percent. (All those numbers rise if we isolate Protestants and Catholics who say they go to church every week.) But he won the Nones, who make up 12 percent of the electorate in Ohio, by an astounding 47 pecent. He racked up similar huge advantages among the Nones in many swing states.

I think its fair to say that Obama ran a values campaign last fall that gambled that secular voters would cast the decisive votes. For the first time in American political history, the winning party deliberately attacked religion. The national convention famously struck God from the platform, only to have it restored by anxious party leaders in a comical session characterized by the kind of frivolity that comes when people recognize that it doesn’t really matter. Democratic talking points included the “war on women” and other well-crafted slogans that rallied their base, which is the cohort that has no religious affiliation. At 24 percent of all Democrat and Democratic-leaning voters the Nones have become the single largest identifiable group in the liberal coalition.

The political reality of the Nones presents the deepest threat to religious liberty. We know from history that the Constitution is a plastic, flexible document. When the most numerous and powerful constituency in the Democratic Party has no time for religion—and their adversaries are most easily identified by their commitment to religion—it’s not hard to see that they’ll try to bend it in a direction that serves their political interests.

“Girls”—the cable TV sitcom featuring young women recently graduated from Oberlin College who hook up, text about it, fret about it, and generally live the soft hedonism of elite culture—is Seinfeld for millennials. Some think it exemplifies the decadence of upper middle class twenty-somethings living a twilight zone between adolescence and adulthood. Others see it as empowering: women being honest about sex and relationships.

I haven’t seen the show, but it’s not hard to imagine, and it seems to me that Emily Nussbaum, writing in the current New Yorker, has it right: “For some this is bleak viewing. For others the harshest of these stories can be thrilling, because they make private pain public (and embarrassing stories funny), and also because they work as a sly how-to, on ways to thicken one’s skin.”

Thicken one’s skin. In my experience as a teacher for twenty years, I witnessed a shift in youth culture. In 1990, when I started as a professor, my students were sometimes disoriented, as college students often are—as human beings often are, and they were sometimes eager or bored or preoccupied with beer and parties. By 2010 they had largely jelled into a single cultural type: anxious proto-adults committed to acquiring armor.

Today’s young people work hard to build resumes. They lay up experiences to give themselves a competitive advantage in the ruthless meritocratic scramble for success. They’re motivated by a self-protective impulse. Don’t study what you love; study what you need to study to get a job or go to the next step in the credentialing process.

The same impulse shows itself in the pervasive irony. Of all postures, it’s the one that thickens our skin. The ironist is never caught in an emotionally vulnerable position. The irony protects us from being taken as a chump. Snark is an ironic gesture of superiority. “Whatever” builds a wall of self-protection. Social media allows us to keep our distance: Relationships are at our disposal. Cell phones make it easy to screen calls.

More than two centuries ago Rousseau saw the self-protective potential of making our private lives public. He paraded his weaknesses, his vulnerabilities, his sins. In so doing he dared the world to judge him. “Hah,” he said in so many words, “unlike you moralists I have the courage to speak aloud what you secretly whisper.” Rousseau knew that there are two kinds of shamelessness: one based in a life without shame, and another in a thick-skinned life that willingly exposes all shame to public view, thus showing oneself beyond the power of shame.

That’s our age, I think. We seek salvation through the thickening of our skins. The happiest person is she who feels nothing at all, or at least feels everything with enough dullness. The disenchanting incantations of our therapeutic and critical educations minister to this ideal, which is why it’s appropriate that the girls of “Girls” are from a college with as strong a ministerial heritage as Oberlin.

Today’s New York Times features an op ed by former executive editor Bill Keller. He weighs in on the religious liberty debate, especially the question of whether owners of for-profit companies can claim rights of religious liberty. It’s not the most clear-minded piece, but it raises the key questions.

The most obvious concerns Hobby Lobby and other litigants. Keller sides with those who think it obvious that the regulatory state can tell corporations what to pay for and what not to pay for, just as the government can tax and spend as it sees fit. This view fails to grasp a key distinction. There’s a difference between what the government does in taxing and spending and what the government does in using its regulatory power to force me to spend. That’s why Chief Justice Roberts redefined the individual mandate as a tax. The government has a near plenary freedom to tax. The Constitution limits the government’s power for regulate.

It’s for this reason that Keller’s moral and legal analysis doesn’t work. He says that we’re right to exempt a pacifist from military service (though in fact we allow no Constitutional right to conscientious exemption from military service), but wrong to grant him the right to withhold taxes if he objects to our war-making policies. The same holds for Hobby Lobby, he says. But that ignores the difference between taxation and regulation. Hobby Lobby isn’t being forced to pay taxes that pay for abortion-inducing drugs (that’s already happening with Medicaid payments). It’s being told to pay for private insurance policies that must pay for abortion-inducing drugs.

Keller writes: “I don’t know what the courts will say, but common sense says the contraception dispute is more like taxation than conscription.” Spoken like a true liberal. For him there’s no real distinction between government and the private economy. In many ways that’s an important issue at stake in this debate: the collapse of civic life, which includes economic relations, into the regulatory state.

There’s a second issue here. Keller mentions the Civil Rights Act, which intervened deeply into private employment decisions and many other aspects of civil life. It did so because we thought we faced a profound problem–racism–that required draconian measures. I find it remarkable that Keller thinks free access to contraceptives is analogous, which he must if he thinks the coercive measures associated with Civil Rights Act provide a useful way to think about the contraceptive mandate. Fully funded sexual freedom is equivalent to overcoming Jim Crow?

Keller closes with some observations by Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor. Laycock has been a noble defender of religious freedom, but he pretty much thinks we ought to fold our tents. “Interfering with someone else’s sex life is a pretty unpopular thing to do,” he says. Hum. Refusing to pay for insurance policies providing free contraception constitutes “interfering with someone else’s sex life”? I suppose Laycock would say voting against redefining marriage also constitutes “interference.”

We live in an age in which even sensible liberals like Doug Laycock assumes that people are oppressed unless they have full social recognition and financial resources to endorse and support their choices. And since it’s the job of the government to protect freedom, we must all be compelled to provide recognition and support. Rousseau theorized this form of totalitarian liberalism.

This is perhaps the crux of the debate about the contraceptive mandate. If Bill Keller thinks it’s imperative that conscience give way to the great social cause of free contraceptives–a non-issue if there ever was one in American public life–I can imagine he’s not terribly concerned about religious freedom when it comes to gay rights, a cause with much a much more plausible (if misguided) claim to social urgency.

This in one reason why religious leaders know we need to make a stand now.

“Strong, oddly cautious, a bit common (how cd he not be with those parents?) but unemotional, terre à terre, tough, quick, independent, ruthless, soulless, gifted, serious, anxious to pick up whatever he can.” So wrote Isaiah Berlin to his wife after meeting John Kennedy. The letter appears in Building: Letters, 1960 – 1975 and is reprinted in the most recent issue of the New Republic. The occasion was a dinner party in Georgetown. The date was October 16, 1962, when earlier in the day McGeorge Bundy told the President that the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba.

It’s all fabulous, not the Camelot myth, but the long lost world of postwar America. Fabulous, and very nearly unimaginable today. Who can imagine the President of the United States attending a private dinner party in a house in Georgetown? That’s impossible with the security envelope that now surrounds the President.

And the guests! Joseph Alsop and his wife, Phil and Kay Graham, Arthur Schlesinger, Chip Bohlen, and their wives, along with others. Journalists, publishers, and the president’s close advisors and spinmeisters talked politics and foreign policy, including apparently about the classified and explosive situation in Cuba, because Berlin knew when he wrote his letter the next day. That’s impossible today. The journalists would be tweeting to get the scoop. The spinmeisters would be working everybody 24/7 with tediously predictable talking points. Congressional hearings would be held to investigate the breach in national security.

It was a very different time. Although America had endured the slaughters of World War II and was engaged in a fundamental and potentially world-destroying Cold War with the Soviet Union, on a day-to-day basis people felt safer. And there was an Establishment that allowed very powerful people from different places in the system to have drinks, dinner, and conversation outside their official roles.

By the end of the decade much of that world had come apart, in some cases for good reason. Gain and loss. That’s history, I suppose.

Boy Scout national headquarters in Philadelphia.

It was an ugly scene in Irving, Texas, when the Boy Scout decided on Wednesday to delay a vote on whether to end the policy of prohibiting openly gay leaders. From today’s Wall Street Journal: “In a Web conference with Scouts leaders on Wednesday afternoon, Scouts Chief Executive Wayne Brock said that proposal to end the ban came as outside forces put pressure on the Scouts to address its policy on gays.” In this context “address” means “get with the progressive program.”  Merck and Intel have already withdrawn financial support.

This is one episode among countless that have and will continue to take place. The Selma analogy to the civil rights movement means that gay rights activists believe they have a moral justification for bulldozing all dissent and to force all institutions, private and public, to conform. If executives of companies like Intel aren’t entirely convinced of the cause, they are very fearful of being on the “wrong side.” And so the long march through culture continues.

Two thoughts:

First, America has a very conformist culture. It’s natural for elites to want to be on the winning side of most things—that’s necessary to remain an elite. But the degree of fear of being “outside” the magic circle of the progressive consensus bespeaks a striking sense of vulnerability and lack of independence. I find it amusing that many conservatives think America is exceptional because we’re so “free.” In a certain sense, of course, that’s true. But pyschologically? Socially? Culturally? In the building where we work at First Things a large internet company employs dozens of intelligent, interesting, and uniformly pleasant young people. I’m struck by the fact that they all dress in the same way: the urban hipster look (think Buddy Holly glasses, black jeans, and scuffed wing tip shoes with vibram soles and no socks). They’re all expressing their individuality in the same way. That’s America!

Second, postmodern progressivism has a tendency to spend social capital rather than build it. In this gay rights drama, the Boy Scouts will inevitably be weakened as an institution, because major constituencies will be mad no matter what the outcome. That’s typical, I’m afraid. The older modern progressivism was class based. It often strengthened working class institutions (trade unions, Grange societies, coops). Postmodern progressivism focuses on lifestyle liberation. It’s much closer to libertarianism than socialism. This view is gaining ground. I fear a future of hyper-individualism: everybody making claims to the right to satisfy their desires as we all scramble to get ahead in a competitive free market economy.

I plan to write more on this second point. Let me conclude, however, with this idea: postmodern progressivism is the perfect cultural match for Ayn Rand. As substantive cultural norms that define status (gender roles, marital status, parents and children, student and teacher, wise vs. foolish) diminish, we can only position ourselves with confidence in economic terms (rich vs. poor). Postmodern progressivism liquifies cultural authority. All that’s left is the authority of the market and raw political power.

To me that’s a nightmare, which is one reason I’m a cultural conservative.

I plan to write up a summary of where we stand on the recently released rules, or more accurately proposed partial rules, for the contraceptive mandate for the next issue of the magazine. In the meantime, I’ve found myself reflecting on the larger trends. Here is my general view.

We’re up against powerful cultural trends that threaten religious liberty. In the recent election Obama won a “values” campaign that felt it could ignore or even attack religious voters (“war on women”). This reflects fact that the fastest growing and most ideologically engaged demographic among white voters are the “nones,” people who have no religious affiliation. For the most part this group resents the historic prominence and influence of religion in the public square. The Democratic Party is their political vehicle. Thus we’re seeing sustained efforts to redefine and narrow the meaning of religious liberty. This runs from theorists in the law schools (e.g., Brian Leiter, Micah Schwartzman), to legal activists, to government bureaucrats.

In our favor is a parallel trend toward libertarianism and the general view that we ought to let people do pretty much what they want. This is the “don’t tread on me” sentiment that tends to be solicitous toward claims of conscience and against political correctness. This is a dangerous ally, however, since it’s the “different strokes for different folks” sentiment that also supports gay marriage and sexual liberation in general. This libertarian sensibility may support tolerance, but it won’t encourage support for religion. On the contrary, the moralism one finds in all forms of traditional religion will be seen as a threat to our culture of expansive personal freedom

It’s going to be difficult. I think we’re heading into dhimmitude of sorts. Our culture is becoming more and more dominated by post-religious attitudes that dictate the terms of the social contract. We’ve seen that very clearly in the university where religious voices have learned to obey rules set by the secular academy. The rules are sometimes cruel (Stephen Pinker), or sometimes sympathetic as long as certain liberal dogmas are respected (Martha Nussbaum), or even permissive (faith as part of the great pluralist postmodern conversation). The culture of the secular university is now becoming the norm for society as a whole, at least in part, which is why we’re feeling the pressure.

What’s to be done? The First Amendment provides a great deal of protection. We need good lawyering to make it work for us. But dhimmitude is a state of mind as much as a legal subordination, and this we must resist. We need a bit of Karl Barth in our diet. One hundred years ago he saw the Church’s voice being subordinated to the needs of the German state and its bourgeois culture. His response: speak and think in a confident, even aggressive Christian voice.