Letters

Theological Anthropology

Thank you for printing my friend Fr. Blake Johnson’s excellent piece on women’s ordination (“Mere Priestesses,” May 2024). Although some have misread C. S. Lewis and likely will misread Fr. Johnson as accusing women priests of being sexual deviants, the problem has nothing to do with the act of sexual union. Rather, it comes down to the meaning of sexuality itself. Women’s ordination depends on the presumed interchangeability of men and women, and thereby enforces sexual confusion. The best proof for this may be the arguments of those who oppose same-sex marriage but defend women’s ordination—they invariably reduce “male” and “female” to bare signifiers of the abstract notion of difference as such.

Fr. Johnson’s second and more implicit point deserves careful attention, which is that women’s ordination not only flattens sexual difference but also hollows out priestly ministry. Bishop Kallistos Ware correctly predicted in 1978 that those who ordain women are not “creating women priests, but dispensing with priesthood altogether.” (Bishop Ware shrank from this position in later years, but his original essay against women’s ordination remains far more cogent and persuasive than his tenuous and half-hearted disavowal in 1999). Defenders of women’s ordination tend to reject or minimize the sacramental nature of ordination, and they inevitably cut off the Church’s threefold ministry not only from the universally male priesthood of the Old Testament (from Adam on through the Levites, not to mention Melchizedek, David, and Solomon), but also from apostolic ministry in the New Testament (references to Junia being a refuge of last resort).

Actually, these are not separate points. Adam was both husband and priest. Christ is both bridegroom and high priest. As E. L. Mascall put it in a 1972 essay building on Lewis’s argument, “If it is true that the order of redemption is not isolated from the order of creation and that grace does not ignore or destroy nature but presupposes and perfects it, it would be very strange if the differentiation of function on the level of nature was not paralleled by a not less marked differentiation of function on the level of grace.”

None of this should cause us to doubt the sincerity, devotion, or intelligence of women in ministry, but if we wish to combat the sexual confusion endemic in our time, we cannot equivocate on sexual difference.

Mark Perkins
roseland, virginia

Blake Johnson replies:

Fr. Perkins is right to locate the root issue with women’s ordination in “the meaning of sexuality itself.” The force of C. S. Lewis’s argument does not rely exclusively on a theological principle, but on an anthropological one: sexual difference is real, and the sexes are not interchangeable in every domain of life. Holy matrimony and holy orders are two such domains in which orthodox Christianity has maintained the sexes are not interchangeable. I echo Perkins’s point that this anthropological principle is brought together and grounded in the created order, which our Lord and St. Paul are fond of citing by upholding the sexually complementary nature of marriage (Mark 10:6–9; Eph. 5:31–32) and the masculine nature of priestly ministry (1 Tim. 2:8–15). Fr. Perkins’s comments draw me to another essay by the Anglican priest and theologian E. L. Mascall, “Sexuality in God,” where he makes the case that the question of whether women should be priests cannot be adequately discussed until a full consideration is given “of the signification and purpose of sexuality in mankind, created, fallen, and redeemed.” Perkins follows Lewis and Mascall, showing us that the issue of women’s ordination is not simply a theological debate about Church order but a matter of theological anthropology.

Mischaracterization

I thank Kenneth L. Woodward for his “clear” exposition of white Christian nationalism (“The Myth of White Christian Nationalism,” May 2024). I apostrophized “clear” not out of disrespect to his explanation, but in reference to the ever-shifting and tenuous reality the term “white Christian nationalism” is supposed to represent. I am not an academic; rather, I am a white, college-educated, sixty-four-year-old Catholic widow who was married to my white, Catholic, blue-collar spouse for thirty-four years before he succumbed to cancer in 2020. I present this introduction to my life situation as a prelude to saying that I am exhausted. Every day I find myself categorized (usually incorrectly) by those in our country who supposedly know better than I do what I believe and should believe, according to their ideologies. The struggle to maintain a sense of inner calm in the face of these mischaracterizations must, in a small way, approach what Christ must have felt in the face of the numerous false accusations thrown at him by the ruling Jewish elite at the time of his trial and crucifixion. It is, for me, exhausting.

I retreat further and further from the culture with each new false category I find myself thrust into. Apparently, I am now a white Christian nationalist even though I am a woman who supports the patriarchy only insofar as it is a characteristic of a culture based on recognizing the existence of the two sexes. I am not racist, nor do I believe that my Christian identity (Roman Catholic) and my American identity are one. I do not endorse violence as a means of defending any social arrangement, and I am a Trump supporter only as a last resort in the face of the Biden administration’s barbaric pro-abortion stance. All of the attempts by the political left to manipulate the electorate via mischaracterization are disingenuous, at best.

Sabra Lowe-Zedick
flagstaff, arizona

Kenneth L. Woodward replies:

Mischaracterizing opponents is not limited to the left. On the contrary, every speech of Mr. Trump’s is laced with adolescent epitaphs for anyone, including Republicans, who dares to disagree with him. Belittling others is what endears him to his base.

Moreover, I would say that to vote for Trump just because one is pro-life, as am I, is to assume that he is pro-life, which he is not. It would also require a voter to overlook the man’s manifest absence of moral principle, his lack of any religious commitment or practice—he has said he has never asked for God’s forgiveness because he has never needed to—and his manipulation of those (especially white, undereducated rural evangelicals) who do in fact practice a Christian or other religious faith.

Abortion? Now that the regulation of abortion is in the hands of the states, I suggest that any talk of action on the federal level by either party is merely political posturing. As for Biden, he has said very little about abortion, much less promoted it, during his presidency. We Catholics should be especially thankful for that, and don’t think the progressive wing of the Democratic Party hasn’t noticed. But it is now campaign season, and both parties will once again say whatever is needed to vilify the other and arouse outsized passions.

I agree with presidential historian Jon Meacham, my former Newsweek colleague, that this country is facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War. The man most responsible for that crisis is Donald Trump.

Homemade Carnage

Rachel Roth Aldhizer’s May 2024 essay “The Case Against the Abortion Pill” is a thorough, devastating examination of the risks of mifepristone and the systematic establishment cover-up of its side effects. “The FDA flouted basic medical ethics in order to secure a political end,” Aldhizer observes. The guidelines for the abortion pill dismally fail the “standard of care.”

One concluding fact stands out: Compared to women who deliver their children, women who abort are more than twice as likely to die of any cause within two years, according to a systematic review of record linkage studies of pregnancy-related mortality.

Much of the story Aldhizer tells feels horrifyingly familiar: the eugenic intention behind the abortion pill’s creation; the funding from population control enthusiasts wielding their billions to create a world with fewer children; the lengths to which abortion advocates will go to hide health risks. But her essay is all the more powerful because she begins and ends by focusing on the main character in this debate: the preborn child.

Aldhizer describes the loss of her own child through miscarriage and wonders: “My baby has a grave. Where are the babies dead from induced abortions? Do their mothers bury their bodies?” No, they do not. I have held their bodies retrieved from dumpsters behind abortion clinics. Aldhizer rightly refers to abortion as a hidden violence, and it is the responsibility of pro-life activists to bring this violence into the light.

Indeed, the long-term impact of widespread abortion pill usage includes an unintended effect: bringing women face to face with their aborted children. Abortion clinic staff are careful to ensure that mothers do not see aborted babies; as an increasing number use pills to abort at home, that is changing. A 2020 study from the Charlotte Lozier Institute has already noted that 83 percent of women who used “medication abortion” reported that it had “changed them.”

One woman recalled: “I felt her come out.”

Another: “Nothing could’ve prepared me for seeing her body. It was the color of my own skin, and was actually starting to look like a person.”

One woman posted about her medication abortion on Reddit: “I’m so sorry, little bean. Bean was moving its legs and heart was still beating when they came out in one push.”

What will happen as thousands of women come face to face with the “hidden violence” of abortion and realize what they have done? How will they respond when the faces of their tiny babies banish the lie that abortion evicts a “clump of cells”? As a growing number tell their stories, perhaps the brutal truth will finally emerge.

Jonathon Van Maren
tillsonburg, ontario

Rachel Roth Aldhizer replies:

Experiencing the horrors of abortion firsthand does not necessarily ensure the creation of a pro-life apologist. People have been inducing abortions throughout history, sometimes with very rudimentary means. The Ebers Papyrus (c. 1600 b.c.) includes instructions for a medical abortion induced by inserting a vaginal suppository coated with various ingredients, and there are many ancient references to the abortifacient capacities of different botanicals. American women have always had a variety of available abortifacients at their disposal, as well as “physicians” like Madame Restell, who operated in the late nineteenth century and was willing to perform dangerous terminations with medicines or instruments. In the first half of the twentieth century, before Roe v. Wade, Lysol openly advertised “restorative” (that is, contraceptive) uses for “feminine hygiene” if used in the form of douching. Abortion, both medical and surgical, has been a familiar experience to millions of women over the course of history, regardless of legal status.

Guttmacher estimates that nearly 700,000 medication abortions took place in the United States in 2023. If beholding the gruesome reality of abortion was the missing link, we’d now have 700,000 women convinced of the humanity of their children after flushing them down the toilet. Abortion is not chosen in ignorance—denying the humanity of a child—but often in desperation, which manifests itself as a type of self-loathing. Women choose abortion because they believe that their needs supersede those of their growing children. But in reality, the needs of mothers and children are designed to be the same: What is good for my child is good for me.

Education about the horrors of abortion is valuable work, but for those who do not have eyes to see, this evidence will fail to convince, as it has for millennia. Christians are pro-woman, pro-child, and pro-creation, because we serve a God who looked upon us and called us good. That goodness calls us forward without fear into places of deep despair. Holding the body of a child, like you have behind the dumpster of the abortion clinic, is holy work. This work is not just educational but revolutionary, asserting the Lordship of Christ over the darkest corners of history. Our belief that life is sacred calls us to witness to the bodies that others have cast aside, both of mothers and children, and join Christ in calling for justice. Someday, justice will be done, regardless of whether anyone believes us.

A Tale of Two Idolatries

Gary Saul Morson’s essay on the history of Russian ethical extremism—which summarizes his excellent recent book, Wonder Confronts Certainty—sets out with clarity how a systematic reduction of the material world to mechanical processes leaves no criteria for anything we can strictly call judgment (“Faith and Russian Literature,” May 2024). Intellectual and moral discrimination alike become nonsensical; ultimately there is no basis for the perspective of a self. It is an interesting question why a certain kind of intellectual considers the height of intellectual sophistication to be the dissolution of the possibility of thought as such, even of self-awareness.

But if there is any qualification to be entered in the margins of Morson’s lucid exposition, it is that the seduction of a religious culture comes dangerously close to being the mirror image of the secularized desert of Russian radicalism. The identification of the good, even of the “holy,” with unquestioning adherence to values, systems, or personalities that have only a contingent relation to Christian faith leaves us with a comparable desert, in that it insists that certain non-absolutes be treated as absolutes. Certain things or persons are declared immune from the judgment of God. The Russian patriarch’s rhetoric about the war in Ukraine, borrowing from Islamist extremism the idea that the soldier killed in “holy” warfare may be regarded as a martyr, illustrates this disturbing phenomenon.

In other words, at its simplest, it is quite important to couple the critique of secularism with a critique of religious idolatry as well. Both secularism and idolatry spell the death of the soul: The soul lives in the space cleared by the recognition that God is not the state, the culture, the superego (or indeed the id, in the case of certain kinds of political leadership); the recognition that being answerable to God is being liberated for a peace or communion that goes beyond all other identities.

For those of us who love the Russian imaginative and religious tradition, it is one of the bitterest ironies of our time that a heritage which so profoundly explores this resistance to idolatry should also have so deep and dangerous a shadow side.

Rowan Williams
cardiff, united kingdom

Gary Saul Morson replies:

I want to thank Rowan Williams, whom I much admire, for his insightful letter. I entirely agree with him that “it is quite important to couple the critique of secularism with a critique of religious idolatry as well.” And yes, it is both sad and ironic that Russia is the homeland of both extreme idolatry on the one hand and the most brilliant novelistic critique of it on the other.

Military Thinkers

Algis Valiunas’s review “Arabian Knight” (May 2024) impressively synthesizes some of the major highlights of T. E. Lawrence’s life, Fiennes’s contribution to the existing biographical literature, and the deeper philosophical questions thrust upon us by Lawrence’s legacy.

I appreciate the way Valiunas approaches Lawrence. His account does not facilely paint Lawrence too dark or too light, nor does it shy away from sordid details and morally complex circumstances, such as the massacre at Tafas and Lawrence’s response. It is the antithesis to the sort of revisionists (not the historical kind) heavily critiqued by Michael Walzer, who tend to sanitize and abstract the human realities of war in pursuit of greater ethical and theoretical clarity.

In rejecting this oversimplified narrative, Valiunas suggests that commanders who agonize over the moral dimensions of war do not last very long—leadership is meant for “healthier specimens,” those who possess what he calls “useful insensibility.” There is insight here. A country needs bulldogs who will rush into a firefight without first pausing to reflect. Yet I wonder if Valiunas presses this point too far.

Great leaders have in fact concerned themselves with the morality of killing and the justice of their project. By this I do not mean to say these leaders have gotten every moral question correct or obsessed over the justice of an action with a philosopher’s sensitivity. I mean that within the military there are great tacticians who are also “thinking men.” Valiunas’s description of physically robust men with “useful insensibility” does ring true even to my own experience, but these men are shallow in ways that the thinking men are not. I am speaking of the differences between a Cleon or Alcibiades and a Thucydides. Modern examples such as Petraeus or Mattis come to mind, both of whom owe a specific debt to Lawrence’s writings on irregular warfare. For whatever you think of these two and any personal foibles they may have, they are not unthinking or shallow men who brush aside misgivings about killing out of an overconfidence in their own greatness.

Maybe one thing that is unique to Lawrence is his concern for jus ad bellum and whether the English were fighting with right intention; the fact that they were intending to deceive rankled him to no small degree. Most generals leave this entirely up to the politicians, whereas Lawrence didn’t seem to maintain such a bifurcated view of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.

Richard Cassleman
kansas city, missouri

Algis Valiunas replies:

I am grateful for Richard Cassleman’s thoughtful letter. If I suggested that some “thinking men” such as T. E. Lawrence are disabled as military leaders by the liabilities of their mental superiority, I hope I can correct that impression. Lawrence was an intellectual, but his moral suffering did not originate in an excess of thoughtfulness but rather in sheer physical horror and revulsion at war’s atrocity, not least his own capacity for unspeakable violence. He was beaten and raped by Turkish captors; this was likely his initiation into sexual experience, and it likely colored his subsequent masochism. As Lawrence’s biographers quite justly suggest, it also explains his descent into viciousness upon beholding the aftermath of Turkish butchery in the Syrian village of Tafas, when he ordered his men to take no prisoners and incited them to massacre the fleeing Turks. He was so appalled at what he had done that afterward he considered himself unfit to give orders to anyone, and in his postwar military career he accepted only menial roles, renouncing officer status and serving as mechanic and clerk under assumed names.

Winston Churchill was also an intellectual, the leading historian of the twentieth century, and a masterly writer, but his taste for war was not primarily an intellectual passion. He was First Lord of the Admiralty when the First World War broke out, and he was rightly proud that the navy was ready for action; he wrote to his wife, “I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not terrible to be built like that?” He could not help the way he was built. It was his irrepressible nature to seek glory and honor, and dare one say happiness, in the most demanding arena of manly action. He happened to become Lawrence’s most devoted and influential champion; as Colonial Secretary he helped Lawrence realize his dream of establishing sovereign Arab states where there had been European colonial possessions.

I think Mr. Cassleman is perfectly right to point out how rare among military leaders is Lawrence’s concern with the just ends of war rather than the just means. But while this concern did become a near obsession for Lawrence, it was not this so much as his having suffered savagery and having been guilty of it in turn that unmanned him.

Return to Distributism

R. R. Reno’s reflection (“Hitler’s Second Coming,” May 2024) on economist Angus Deaton describes how one of the leading lights of modern economics has had a change of heart, not only about specific economic policies that have been regarded as gospel truth for decades, but about the crippling, narrow-minded approach of modern economists, which treats people as independent, atom-like particles in a mathematically modeled world. Reno cites Albert Hirschman and Karl Polanyi, who may be somewhat more attuned to the human side of economics than their modern descendants, but who are scarcely better known or more accessible to the public than Deaton.

May I suggest that both the policy-related and philosophical problems inherent in modern economics are addressed thoroughly and entertainingly by John C. Médaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market? Médaille takes up the “distributist” cause, which was promoted with more vigor than rigor by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the 1930s, but has lately fallen into obscurity. Inspired by the 2008 financial collapse, Médaille points out that modern economics has no way to account for the birth and rearing of children (the “economic stork theory”), fails to predict economic disasters reliably, and in its attempt to imitate the physical sciences in mathematical precision, leaves behind most of the moral considerations that political economists such as Adam Smith found essential. Now that a prominent mainstream economist has embraced several of the policy recommendations distributism has been promoting for decades, perhaps we can hope for a renewal of humanity-oriented economics.

Karl D. Stephan
texas state university
san marcos, texas

Image by Gabriël Metsu via Public Domain. Image cropped.