Today is a joyful day for the Church in America. We celebrate the beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Even if you are not Catholic, or American, I invite you to raise a glass today for this remarkable man. But if you are an American Catholic, it is only fitting to celebrate this as a momentous and long-awaited day. A coming of age. An arrival.

By beatifying Sheen, Rome implicitly affirms the American Catholic story as a hopeful and positive subplot in the larger drama of the Universal Church. It swings open a door for the American Church. We’ve waited a long time for that gesture.

Not everyone knows who Sheen was, though, or why he mattered. Let’s rectify that right now.

Most Americans do know that Catholics were, for much of this country’s history, a somewhat-disliked minority. It’s good to keep this in perspective: Catholics were certainly never subject to genocidal pogroms here, like the Jews of Europe or Christians of Asia Minor, and our institutions were generally left standing. That is no small blessing. But if extreme persecution was rare, lower-level discrimination was not. Those institutions are numerous precisely because Catholics were often excluded from mainstream institutions, or mistreated by them, which is why this country developed such a vast network of Catholic universities, schools, hospitals, and charities.

Here’s another, less-familiar reality: American Catholics were in a sense doubly marginalized. They occupied a second tier not only among their compatriots, but also in the eyes of their own religious authorities. Rome didn’t exactly hate the United States, but she viewed it all the way into the twentieth century as “mission territory,” a heathen land where the unfortunates of the mother country were sometimes forced to decamp. American Catholics, in Rome’s eyes, were like permanent refugees. They were encouraged to remain attached to their original ethno-religious communities, not because the Church cared particularly about ethnic purity, but because it was assumed that the loss of the “ethno” would in most cases mean a loss of religious faith. The nineteenth-century Church hierarchy was still widely convinced that robust national churches, with a relatively tight church-state integration, were the way to go. America didn’t seem anywhere close to attaining that, so the recommended strategy was to bunker.

There were some dissenters from this view, even in the 19^th century. Archbishop John Ireland, native son of my own Minnesota, firmly believed that America was a great nation on the rise, that its spirit was fundamentally harmonious with Catholicism’s beating heart, and that American Catholicism thus deserved to be recognized as a distinct but fundamentally healthy phenomenon. He pitched this view, rather aggressively, to Rome in the 1890s. And he was personally slapped down by the pope! Kind of. In a way.

It’s rather a strange story, actually. Pope Leo did issue an Apostolic Letter in 1899 condemning “the heresy of Americanism,” and it was understood that Ireland was in some sense the target. But Leo never mentioned Ireland by name, never removed him from office, and carefully framed his letter so as to leave open the question of whether anyone on Earth is in fact guilty of this heresy. “If anyone out there is preaching these false things, stop it,” is basically the upshot. I think Leo, a rather forward-looking pontiff, was really quite sympathetic to the Americans’ case, but diplomacy was not Ireland’s strong suit and he created a kerfuffle that Leo felt obliged to calm. The United States would have to stay on the back burner a bit longer.

In his late years, semi-exiled from elite ecclesial circles, Ireland refocused on the home front, building the spectacular St. Paul Cathedral (which stands just a few miles from my house) and also founding a major seminary here. Guess who matriculated in 1917, one year before Ireland’s death? That’s right. It was a young Fulton J. Sheen.

The Illinois native would go on to preach Ireland’s message with an eloquence the old soldier himself, though renowned for his oratory, could hardly have matched. Sheen fully grasped Ireland’s vision of America, and after leaving St. Paul Seminary he carried it with him to Europe, studying first at the University of Louvain in Belgium, and then at the Angelicum in Rome. At Louvain he proved his philosophical acumen by becoming the first American ever to win the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Prize for philosophy. At the Angelicum he completed his doctorate, then returned home for a short pastoral stint before taking up a post as a theologian at the Catholic University of America. Through it all, he was clearly thinking about what he’d seen and learned in Europe, and it would soon become clear that those experiences had shaped him in ways that went beyond Thomistic philosophy.

Sheen was attentive to the political currents swirling all around him, first in Europe as it radicalized in the 1920s, and then back at home as the world careened towards war. Far from scorning his native land as a heathen backwater, Sheen saw, with Ireland, that America’s Constitutional tradition contained real wisdom, affording citizens some protection from the poisonous ideologies that were consuming the continent. He understood that we were blessed to have a political tradition rooted in both liberty and justice.

Back on home soil, Sheen was so popular at CUA that he was soon tapped to do a national radio show. The Catholic Hour grew in popularity across the 1930s, eventually reaching 4 million listeners. In some ways, this was really the period when Sheen came into his own as a thinker. I discovered this last spring, when I was researching a piece on Sheen for America magazine; looking back on the ideas from his radio days was honestly something of a revelation. I was astonished at their depth and sophistication. I had already known that Sheen was an incredible evangelist, and a worthy theologian, but I didn’t know that he was such an interesting and fertile political thinker. I think it’s fair to say that he anticipates the work of Eric Voegelin a decade later. He was a theorist in his own right, though he clothed his ideas in theological language and pitched them to normies more than to scholars.

Sheen argued on his radio show (and in his books) that both communism and fascism should properly be seen as religions, rivaling Christianity as totalizing worldviews that are meant to replace God. He urged his listeners to reject these, embracing both freedom and a faith grounded in holiness and the energetic labors of virtuous men and women. The American tradition, in Sheen’s view, supplied a strong framework for facilitating that effort. It’s worth noting that he was airing these ideas opposite Charles Coughlin, another priestly radio host, whose corporatism and agrarian populism eventually matured into a full-fledged clerical fascism. By the late 1930s, Coughlin was railing against World Jewry, raving about Mussolini, and forming a paramilitary-style “Christian Front” that terrorized Jews. Sheen told his listeners to love their country, their Constitution, and their faith. And he fiercely condemned anti-Semitism, writing statements of solidarity with Jews.

He’s best remembered today for his television show, Life is Worth Living. Though it ran for only a few years in the 1950s, the show really was a bit of a miracle in its own right. Originally slated for a “graveyard” slot opposite NBC’s Milton Berle (a ratings blockbuster), Sheen was basically set up to fail. His network, DuMont Television, picked him up because he was cheap. They were in bad financial shape and couldn’t afford anyone with a real chance of competing with the top stars. Everyone was shocked therefore when Sheen, armed with nothing but a chalkboard, a Marian statue, and his iconic cape, began scaling the ratings in leaps and bounds, to the point where he was soon beating Berle. Who knew that America was so hungry for lectures in Thomistic philosophy? Well, apparently one man did.

The show didn’t just reach Catholics. Everyone warmed to the wit and wisdom of America’s most famous prelate. Sheen reminded them of truths that transcended the brokenness of the post-war world. He gave them a glimpse of a worldview that was comprehensive but not totalitarian. He showed them how philosophy could be medicine for the soul. It was the most successful religious television program in history, but when Sheen beat out Lucille Ball and Arthur Godfrey for the Emmy in 1952, he cheerfully stepped up to the microphone and thanked his four ghostwriters: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

What a moment it must have been for American Catholics. They’d achieved normalcy, not by hiding or compromising their beliefs, but through the work of a bishop, standing on national television with his Marian statue, demonstrating the beauty and richness of a joyfully-lived Catholicism.

If you’re inclined to hate popular media, at least note this: Sheen wasn’t canned by anti-Catholic executives or envious entertainers. They all seemed to love him. He was squelched by his own superior, Cardinal Spellman. I won’t tell the whole story, but it basically seems like Spellman couldn’t handle the envy. He wanted to be the biggest prelate in New York City, and so, as so often happens, he became the smallest. I don’t claim any capacity to read souls, but I will just say that I wouldn’t like to explain to St. Peter why I thought it was a good idea to spike a program that was catechizing millions every Tuesday night.

Sheen did a rather unsuccessful tour as the Bishop of Rochester, but his final years were passed in relative seclusion, battling health issues and spending hours each day in prayer. He never tried to retaliate against Spellman, and wrote beautiful things in his autobiography about the pitfalls that star power (we might today say “influencer power”) lays for the soul. He died in front of the Blessed Sacrament in his apartment, on December 9, 1979. (I was in utero at the time. But I existed! I like that.) It appears he was in the midst of his daily “Holy Hour,” a practice he had maintained since his days back at the Saint Paul Seminary.

The United States has an embarrassing shortage of saints. Italy’s literally got thousands! We’ve got 13! Even among those we have, only three were born here. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love St. John Neumann and St. Damien of Molokai, but wouldn’t it be nice to think that we have some capacity to grow saints here on US soil? In fact, this was a favorite theme of Sheen’s too: he wanted American Catholics to work harder to cultivate holiness. They were remarkable institution-builders, and he admired that. But he thought they needed deeper spiritual roots, and more interior discipline. Peace and plenty are a blessing, but they can breed decadence and vice.

For now, he’s only a Blessed. But we can pray to him! And he’s on his way.

My America piece was titled: “Fulton Sheen Bet on America. Some Catholics Want to Call It Off.” It’s a good title. It came from the editors, not me, and the spotlight is mainly on Sheen himself, but they didn’t miss my point.

It is a source of real grief and shame to me that Catholic intellectuals have lately been leading the charge to persuade young Americans that our own political tradition is fatally flawed. That the Founders should be viewed as the mischievous agents of malevolent modernity, and that the right course is some sort of return to a blood-soil-crown-altar something-or-other. That makes even less sense today than in the 19^th century, when Rome already saw that it wasn’t on the table. And in the meanwhile... how hard did we work to persuade our compatriots that yes, we too can be loyal Americans? We built the institutions, won the football games, worked through the theory, and now some people just want to turn right around and show the haters they were right all along? We finally persuaded our own Church that American-style republicanism can work for us, and suddenly our own intellectuals are racing to re-up Carl Schmitt and Charles Maurras? Excruciating.

But you know what? I’m not worrying about that today. This is a day for joy. It’s a day for celebrating the man who recognized America as a good country where Catholicism could thrive. Who saw through the political religions of his own day, and led millions down a different path, where spiritual renewal and freedom could flourish together. Today the Church formally celebrates him as an exemplar worthy of imitation. That means something, for the world but especially for American Catholics.

Bye now, and God love you.

I’m used to being the only woman, or one of very few, at conferences full of men. That’s my conference-going normal. It felt quite strange, therefore, to attend a conference last weekend that was absolutely packed with women. It’s not a bad kind of strange! Actually, this was the best kind of conference, because I met many people in person who had been virtual friends for years. What a treat.

What was this rare event? Well. Hmm. It was labeled “The Women’s Convention 2026.” You might notice that that’s some remarkably nondescript branding. In an age when everything is supposed to be memed and tweeted, prepackaged for easy identification, the selection of such a non-revelatory title is itself somewhat revealing. This group is trying to have an intelligent, nuanced conversation about women, and they’re aware of the gravitational pull of our toxic culture wars. So they went with a simple title, and relied on their speaker line-up and advertising channels to attract the right sort of people. Don’t be fooled though. They are neither vapid nor directionless. “Women’s Convention 2026” had real goals, and I thought it was a real success.

That speaker line-up included me, by the way. I spoke on the concluding panel. I think those remarks are meant to be published in some form, so I won’t rehash them here, but I’ll make them available when I can. Here I’ll just give some general thoughts on the conference and its purpose (as I perceive it).

“So what is this group, Rachel? Stop dancing.” Fair enough. If you’re familiar with Fairer Disputations, it’s that crowd. If not, you could get in the ballpark by calling them “conservative feminists,” but you’ll need multiple asterisks there. Not everyone in the group self-identifies as conservative, and some people still bristle at “feminist.” Now, the conference ended with the reading of a Declaration of Principles on the site of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and I personally consider that anyone willing to participate in that should probably make their peace with being labeled as some sort of feminist. I myself am fine with “conservative feminist.” But if some angry third-wavers bitterly assure me I’m not the real deal… fine, whatever. It’s perfectly true that I have never, at any point in life, undertaken to work within any defined “feminist tradition.”

If you’re just looking to stick a pin in the right spot on the map, I actually think the best label might be “anti-anti feminist.” That is 100% my own assessment, but I can explain. If there is one single stance that seems to unite every person in this space, “opposition to contemporary anti-feminism” would probably be it. They have a lot more shared ground than just that, of course: Most of these people are very pro-life; there is staunch opposition to pornography and surrogacy; they’re cool with women (including mothers) working but also with at-home homeschooling moms; they think that the suffragettes had at least some things right and that the second-wavers had at least some things wrong. But there can still be lively debate surrounding most of those topics. I doubt any of the 200-ish people at that conference would argue that Helen Andews’ “Great Feminization” thesis hit the target. Or that Carrie Gress’ The End of Woman was a worthy work of cultural criticism.

I’m not suggesting they should have labeled the conference “anti-anti feminist.” That would grossly distort the mood and directionality of the movement, giving the impression that we gathered in Rochester mainly to destroy antifeminist ideas with fire, when in reality I didn’t hear Gress or Andrews directly referenced in a single session. There’s a “build and explore” ethos to the Fairer Disputations space that I find very refreshing, and I think the central figures sincerely wish to advance the real thriving of women, in a way that is consonant with both nature and contemporary circumstances. They’re also pro-male, pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-community. These are not narrow partisans looking to settle their scores! I do nevertheless think the antifeminism has given a certain shape and focus to the group.

I think part of what happened here is just that segments of the populist right have grown so reflexively hostile to women that some have bounced out and gone looking for places where they don’t feel like objects of casual contempt. I talked to several people this weekend who clearly had that feeling, which depresses me, especially with the younger women. Like it’s not hard enough to put all these pieces (men, marriage, kids, work) in reasonable places without being pressured at DC happy hours to prove how “based” you are by railing against the 19^th Amendment? For crying out loud.

I’m not the sort of person who normally races to “mentor” younger women. I don’t pretend to understand their circumstances with clarity, nor do I assume that they want my advice. Am I some great success story? Debatable. In that company though, you do start feeling the impulse. Look, I’m no J.K. Rowling but I am happily married with five kids. And I like my work! I get men edits, not coffee! People pay me for essays on subjects that I deem interesting! Don’t let the baby chauvinists of the New Right convince you this can’t happen, or that you’re somehow wrong to want it.

Paradoxically then, I admire the group’s constructive spirit but also feel that “destroying anti-feminist errors with fire” probably is one of the worthiest things it could accomplish. (I’m factoring attainability here. Ridding the world of smut would do far more good overall, but how would we do that?) But I also think that project, undertaken in the right way, has potential to bear other fruit. Antifeminism is out there, having its moment, but evaluated on a philosophical or scholarly level most antifeminist literature is just absolute trash. It exists because it sells, mostly to embittered, gender-resentful audiences. Nevertheless, explaining why it is trash, to an audience more closely aligned with the antifeminists, is a significant project requiring real intellectual work. There are multiple angles to the problem calling for different forms of expertise.

Getting perspective on womanhood is a non-trivial undertaking, after all. There are elements of biology and anthropology, but also history and political theory, moral philosophy, sociology, law. Art and literature are relevant at many points. Public policy matters. It’s helpful to have people who have engaged feminist literature in a sustained way (as I have not) so they know what Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir actually said. And of course, if one wishes to stay grounded in reality, it’s helpful to get perspectives from people with experience of different age groups, demographics, and life situations. There were people from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines at Women’s Convention 2026, debating many points of real disagreement, and yet the mood was exceedingly friendly and upbeat. Maybe that’s Helen Andrews’ real gift to women?

We’re all pretty tired of vacuous “conversations about” social issues, and yet a serious, substantive conversation about women and gender could do some real good. Many people are sincerely confused about these topics, often for good and understandable reasons. So a movement like this should certainly be working to articulate better, more nuanced answers to sincere questions that many people have. I always work on assumption that most Americans actually want to have a free and basically “inclusive” society, which affords all people a chance to forge a good life. I believe that.

At the same time, I also think that our tumultuous political landscape, and right-wing populism especially, has given rise to a non-trivial group that is genuinely sexist in the fullest sense, meaning they want to believe that women are the inferior sex. And that it is appropriate to treat us as such. Relatively few would profess that view openly (though there are a few!), and I’m sure many people who are attracted to these views would nevertheless insist, even in their own minds, that they don’t really view women as inferior, merely “different” or “complementary” in ways that just happen to relegate us to a properly subordinate status in more or less every sphere of life. Because men and women are actually different, there are always wide avenues to “separate but equal” visions of the sexes that aren’t remotely equal in any measurable way. But of course, mystical and moral equality are largely unmeasurable. Healthy cultures do recognize that moral equality can hold across people in very different circumstances and conditions. So it’s hard to make charges of “sexism” stick, even if one is fairly confident in the diagnosis.

In the harsh environment of toxic online culture wars, that fig leaf may fall away. People reveal their real feelings about women. It gets ugly. We’ve seen quite a bit of that ugliness of late.

It can take real work to persuade people that they are in fact eager to see women as the morally inferior sex. (And often, by extension, wanting to conclude that marginalizing or exploiting us may therefore be somewhat acceptable.) Most people deny this, and one rarely moves the ball by flinging angry accusations, so you have to show people that the conclusion falls pretty naturally out of their own premises, then work backwards to the question of why they embraced the premises in the first place. It’s a fairly laborious process. But it’s the kind of process that calls for a dynamic and nuanced conversation, not just a spewing of memes. And it requires some measure of insulation from the polarized genderslop of social media, hence “Women’s Convention 2026.”

One can’t expect a single gathering to change the world, but I found it pretty uplifting. I was impressed by the concentration of intelligent people, the range of lively disagreements, the constructive and generous spirit, the juxtaposition of moral seriousness and winsomeness, and the very evident joy people took in being there together. I’ve been to a lot of thoroughly forgettable conferences; this was a memorable one.

I was also chuckling at myself this weekend, because I have to acknowledge that for years, I’ve shied away from anything that looked too much like a women’s movement, not because I don’t like gatherings of women (I do!) but more just for “typecasting” sorts of reasons. When you’re a Catholic mom of five, and a writer, people tend to want to slot you into one of the obvious categories: spirituality, feminism, parenting, work-life hacks, family policy, education. And yes, I do sometimes have takes on those topics, but I’m also a trained philosopher who works for classical liberals. My next two conferences are on conservative political theory and the Articles of Confederation. The stack of books on my desk right now includes one book on gender theory, but also books by Ratzinger, Adam Smith, Leo Strauss, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and St. Justin Martyr. I’m a proud Catholic mama, sure, but my intellectual life doesn’t all emanate from that particular place, and anecdotally I’ve found that it is sometimes necessary to protect myself from being written off as a glorified mommy blogger. (Even though, yes, I have a Cornell PhD. In philosophy. Not women’s studies.)

There I was, though! Not just moonlighting, but addressing the closing session of Women’s Convention 2026. I’d like to say that I’m too established now to worry about typecasting, but eh, I doubt it. Other factors just outweighed, I suppose.

One of those factors is “Erika Bachiochi,” who, as I sometimes tell people, is a kind of a Bill Buckley or Richard John Neuhaus of Aristotelian feminism. She has a talent for friendship, and a way of drawing people into a space where they also discover each other and a host of common interests. It’s one thing to be leery of “women’s movements,” another to be leery of friends. Or making common cause with friends. I’m not planning to remake myself as a crusader for women’s rights, but I did feel grateful to be there, among friends. And I hope some of those women, the younger ones especially, do look back years hence on Women’s Convention 2026 and think, “Yeah, that mattered.”

When traditionalism loses its commitment to freedom, it tends to tack towards fascism. That’s the thesis on the table for today. You might call it a bit of an experimental thesis, because I’m still deciding how true it is.

Fascism is extremely famous (or infamous), and yet it’s oddly underexplored as a political phenomenon. The obvious reason is that it’s strongly associated with Nazism, which is almost universally agreed to be evil, and that factor tends to swamp all others, making measured analysis difficult. In a contemporary context fascism is at once grossly over-diagnosed and easily dismissed as an empty taunt.

To me it seems clear that regimes or parties can move into a broadly “fascist” space without plunging straight into genocide. Democracy does have an unfortunate way of giving psychopaths a path to power, but often their worst impulses are (happily!) thwarted by constitutions, courts, or opposing parties. So perhaps we should stress that fascism ≠ Nazism, even while acknowledging that it clearly does stand as a specially harrowing case. But on that point, here’s another odd thing. I’m not sure how much people really know even about Nazism.

We know about death camps, Stalingrad, the Blitzkrieg. Ten thousand films and documentaries have been made about all that. And yet, many people are quite startled when I mention, for instance, how Völkisch thought was strongly rooted in rural romanticism, neo-feudalism, and the yearning to re-root German culture in some sort of authentic tradition. That to them seems like the opposite of the spirit of Nazism, which appears mechanistic, industrial, dehumanizing. And I grant that it’s quite a strange story: How did we get from “German flower children dancing across meadows” to death camps rimmed with barbed wire? It seems perverse. It was! But if you’re not aware that this really happened, you’re not in a good position to think about fascism today.

The philosophy world offers another interesting case, in the dismissive reaction one often gets in referring to Martin Heidegger, who was actually a Nazi, as a “fascist thinker.” Heidegger was spectacularly brilliant, and his thought has had a deep impact on postmodernism and deconstruction, hermeneutics, psychology, existentialism, and even architecture. It’s understandable that many would prefer to think of his Nazism as something purely extracurricular that had little to do with his ideas. But this is just wrong.

It’s absolutely true that Heidegger was brilliant; it’s interesting to note as well that among his students, the two who had the deepest impact on political theory (Arendt and Marcuse) were both Jewish and intensely anti-fascist. It seems clear that we can learn things from his work without becoming fascists ourselves. Sometimes it’s necessary to learn from great thinkers who have deeply impacted the world. Heidegger, though, was a great, fascist thinker. That’s not incidental to either his ideas or his legacy. If you think otherwise, go read Alexander Dugin, the Russian political theorist most famous for shaping the paradigms of Vladimir Putin. Dugin has energetically defended the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called repeatedly for the Rus (his re-articulation of the Heideggerian Dasein) to overthrow the West. He’s absolutely saturated in Heidegger. This is not the only application of Heideggerian ideas, but fascist thought is very much a thing.

Fascism is not part of the Christian tradition. The fascist mind characteristically rejects the Christian tradition, chafing against the constraints it imposes in both metaphysics and morals. (Raised in a devoutly Catholic family, Heidegger spent time in a Jesuit seminary before rejecting “the Catholic system” and moving to academic philosophy instead.) Many key fascist thinkers have viewed Christianity as their most formidable philosophical rival or enemy; those who are nominally friendly to it generally want to use the Church as a front for secular power. Both patterns recur. But fascists and religious traditionalists sometimes find themselves marching together, for reasons we can understand.

When traditionalists get fed up with the weakness and formal proceduralism of “the godless conservatives,” they tend to go looking for stronger allies who share their thirst for transcendence. Fascists don’t look weak, and they’re definitely not hamstrung by proceduralism. Where the godless conservatives came pottering to the table with a practical toolkit for governance (contracts, constitutions, checks and balances) fascists bring the fire. They’re alive with prophecy and vision, brimming over with reformist energy. Unfortunately, fascists also have a history of starting wars and murdering people.

I can’t exactly blame traditionalists for being arrested at times by fascist thought, which is genuinely fascinating not only for its dark energy but also, at times, for its trenchant insight. A mind unconstrained by decency, commitment, or reverence does occasionally seem to have an awesome, penetrating power; Friedrich Nietzsche literally went mad in his final decade of life, but before that was quite possibly the most searing, revealing critic of alienated, deracinated, insipid modernity that the world has ever known. Even thinkers of lesser stature than Nietzsche or Heidegger may offer lucid insight into particular social and cultural maladies. I recommend Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism for a lucid introduction to some of the far right’s most important thinkers: Oswald Spengler with his prescient anticipation of identity politics, Alain de Benoist with his ethno-pluralist critiques of liberal universalism, Sam Francis with his clear articulation of the alienation of America’s white middle class. They all have some truth or other firmly in their sights.

Before they go wandering in the wilds of fascist ideology, though, Christians need to get something very clear. Fascists are not friends. They are not looking to build up the Kingdom of Christ, even if they pretend to be. Many fascists (Charles Maurras, Carl Schmitt) have found the Church’s traditional, mystical, hierarchical, and symbolism-drenched exterior extremely appealing and may want to use it for their own purposes. But their purposes are not truly transcendent, and certainly not faithful to the Christian tradition. Fascists want to “immanentize the eschaton” (to use Eric Voegelin’s term), bringing heaven down to earth so they can possess and control it here.

In despairing moments, fascists look like fellow travelers because their bruising critiques of liberal modernity ring true. And in fact, they frequently do contain some truth. But where the godless conservatives are deficient, lacking resources to speak to many of the deeper or more transcendent aspects of reality, fascists are deceptive, making promises they can’t or don’t intend to keep. They promise to make men virtuous. To unite scattered people, directing them towards a high and noble purpose. To recover strength, manliness, cohesion, authenticity, national pride, cooperation, social order, and, yes, tradition. Getting all that in exchange for “directionless autonomy” or “empty proceduralism” can seem like a great deal. But remember. Fascists are not friends. They don’t want to enthrone Jesus; they want to supplant him. The fascist reformer is every bit as godless as David Hume, but way more interested in co-opting you forcibly into his political schemes.

Must we choose between Hayek and Heidegger? Why is it necessary to “ally” with one or another of these camps? I’m aware that my set-up here may reek of false dichotomy, and obviously there are many further nuances that are worthy of exploration. I acknowledged at the start that I’m still thinking through all these angles. But part of the point of this recent series of essays has been to illustrate why I do actually think religious traditionalists may find themselves, in the end, with something like a binary choice.

There exists a developed tradition that explores good governance, organic order, material prosperity and so on in a fairly practical and grounded way, albeit sometimes with its own philosophical errors or blinkers. That is, in very broad terms, the liberal tradition. If you’re determined to reject that, you’ll probably end up in company with liberalism’s reactionary critics. Christians have not developed their own unique alternative to liberal governance in a contemporary context. (Possibly because… there isn’t one? Because liberalism really does respond appropriately to certain deep features of the world as presently ordered?) If you find those terms offensively formal and universalist, and want to build a regime around something else (blood, soil, national fervor, civic-religious faith, imperial conquest), you’re moving in the direction of something fascist. History suggests that that doesn’t always end well.

Let’s be fusionists, what do you say?

I’m headed out now to a conference full of not-progressive feminists. (Some of us are conservatives. I’m not sure everyone thinks of themselves as conservatives, so I’ll step carefully.) Next week I may publish some thoughts on that. We’re also headed towards the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen! That will certainly be celebrated here at Christendom Reborn, as a wonderful way to cap this little series on Christianity and politics.

I had intended yesterday to say more about Stephanie Slade’s new book on Fusionism, which I’ve been reading with enjoyment. Stephanie is a friend, and she and I share many assumptions and goals, so I was eager to get her thoughts. In the big picture, the book gives an accessible explanation of fusionism and its history, followed by an account of what happened to the political right as the old fusionist alliance crumbled in the mid-2010s: theocons, natcons, neoreactionaries, etc.

It’s widely reviewed (and Law & Liberty will also run some reviews in the near future), so I’m not going to devote much space to summary. You can listen to Slade herself discussing the book with James Patterson here, read Mark Miller’s sympathetic review here, and enjoy an excerpt here.

Compact ran a review from Geoff Shullenberger arguing that fusionism “failed” because, essentially, people often like the state to handle their problems for them, especially when they’re anxious about the future. That’s an uninteresting critique. It’s sort of like telling the Catholic Church that it should stop teaching the Catechism because “people kinda like to sin.” Yeah, we know. But it doesn’t always work out well for them (or others), which is why we keep banging on about this. We’re aware that people will go on ignoring us a great deal of the time.

This does at least point to a common problem in talking about fusionism: People sometimes confuse it for a political program or platform. It’s more of a broad framework for approaching politics, though that can of course give rise to more particular policies, platforms, or institutional efforts. Yesterday I wrote about American conservatives’ internal battles concerning the nature of fusionism, and it occurs to me to add here that sometimes American conservatives, in decrying or bucking the label, strike me as “fusionists lacking perspective.” That is, they’ve spent most of their time inside an American conservative world, and don’t have a clear sense of how different they look from other strains of conservatism or traditionalism. They’re more interested in nuanced sub-debates, but they smell like fusionists to most of the world.

Kevin Vallier had a much more interesting critique, published here by the Acton Institute. He thinks Slade’s framework would be strengthened by a greater engagement with Michael Novak, who could help flesh out the role of order in holding liberty and virtue in balance. Vallier writes:

Hayek, for example, was not speaking for liberty against Kirk’s defense of virtue; the Hayek-Kirk debate is not the Bozell-Meyer debate. The core question for Kirk and Hayek is the nature and sources of social order. Both agree that much of it is unplanned and undirectable. Kirk’s order “was not manufactured: rather, it grew,” as stated in the one Kirk book absent from her bibliography. They disagree about direction. Hayek builds from below: Order arises from our material nature, biological and cultural, and morality evolved rather than originated in the Good. Kirk, by contrast, proceeds from above, not denying our biology but stressing our spirituality. An order is authoritative when it conforms, however hard to detect, to what he called the permanent things.

He’s right that a deeper appreciation of order is helpful. It’s worth reading his full review.

Here’s the point of greatest interest to me. Is there real hope of moving American conservatism back in a more fusionist direction?

Near the end of the book, Slade suggests that fusionism needs to expand the scope of its interest, taking in a broader range of questions. She discusses a speech from C. Bradley Thompson to this effect: Why are we always so focused specifically on economics, the so-called “dismal science”? Economics matters, but these principles properly understood should apply to many disciplines, many arts, a whole array of questions relating to human thriving. She notes Kirk’s championing of “moral imagination,” and suggests that fusionists need to revitalize this idea in a robust way. This strikes me as a promising line, and even if those ideas are more referenced than developed in this particular book, the suggestion is not trivial, especially because it indicates that Slade (in keeping with other fusionists?) is not a narrow ideologue, looking to re-impose a decades-old straitjacket on a political situation that frightens her. Rather, she’s looking to draw forward some wisdom from the past, hoping it can be replanted and grown in a new way. This is what conservatives should be doing.

To me at least, it seems very evident that right-wing populism is tired and going nowhere. Admittedly, it’s difficult to distinguish one’s own personal feelings from the “vibes” of the time; I found the shock jock crowd wearisome and juvenile more or less from the start, but clearly not everyone felt that way. (And yet, I do laugh remembering how many times I’ve been assured that some new one will lead the angry young men, with all their bulging vitalist muscles, on a sweeping charge to reclaim the nation. The world will never stop throwing up another Milo or Nick Fuentes or Bronze Age Pervert; we’ll never stop being reassured that “if you listen to him he’s surprisingly articulate and may have read a few philosophy books!”; the vast majority will continue to be swept away with the next tide, while not-so-edgy people like me continue placidly manning our editorial desks. Such is the world.)

There have been a thousand autopsies for Reaganism, with varying levels of merit, but my general view is that natural disasters do happen sometimes, and political disasters likewise. A decade ago we had something of a flash flood. This is not to say that I don’t blame anyone for anything. “For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” I just think what happened was bigger than any particular person or idea, which is also the way of the world. I like the “flash flood” analogy because it did really feel like that. The drizzle turned into a rain; the streams quickly turned into waterfalls; suddenly you were desperately scrambling to get to higher ground.

Now though, at least on my sunnier days, I feel like someone standing on a flood plain surveying the wreckage. It does seem as though the waters have receded somewhat, at least for a while, and I reflect that there may now be some opportunity to recover and rebuild. We’re still assessing what’s salvageable, and guessing at how long that moment will last.

But I’m not alone. There are others here too, like Slade, Vallier, my colleagues at Law & Liberty, and many others. Actually, I find myself rather inspired these days by how many people are still here. I appreciate that I inhabit a bit of a bubble, but still, there are people in this bubble, some of them quite impressive. Many have done impressive scholarly work or risen to positions of real institutional influence, while the shock jocks got swept along the river. Who knows? For years it felt to me like the conservative intellectual world was in absolute shambles, hell-bent on chasing absurd fantasies and fighting civil wars, a mess of clownish attention-seeking and posturing. Now it’s starting to feel less oppressive. Like maybe it’s possible to build something worthwhile again. Maybe I’m wrong.

You know what, though? That’s not the worst kind of mistake to make.

It is a basic premise of this Substack that there is no such thing as a true Christian politics. Politics is by nature imperfect, ever-changing, dependent on circumstance. Even a “good politics” requires tremendous prudence, but realistically, politics usually isn’t all that good, because man is fallen and power corrupts.

Seeing that, it’s tempting to suggest that “good enough is good enough” and go looking for something livable and reasonably stable. (Embrace the “low but solid.”) But I don’t think that’s quite right either, because human beings will always yearn for greater justice, more social cohesion, the attainment of loftier civilizational goals. Perhaps we should. Is every construction a Tower of Babel? But even if that impulse is mostly mischievous, it’s clearly real, which means that the “low but solid” isn’t necessarily all that solid. Within the political arena, even a humdrum plan like “let’s all tend our own houses and gardens, while being generally pleasant to one another and not filling the streets with trash,” often needs to be sold in much loftier terms. Freedom and environmental protection! The brotherhood of man! Politics is a difficult business.

Insofar as we can talk about a “Christian politics” at all, I have argued that a defining aspect of it must be Christ’s command to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” This too is a very curious thing, because surely all things are properly God’s, and Caesar likewise tends to be quite expansive in his claims, and yet Jesus clearly meant for us to impose some separation between them. This looks like a recipe for endless turf wars, and so it has often proven. But the Christian Way, insofar as we have a way, seems to be to insist that yes, we must go on fighting those Forever Wars, rather than allow God and Caesar to collapse into one another, as they are perpetually threatening to do. It is a continual headache, and nothing ever truly gets settled. But perhaps that’s part of the point.

This leads us to today’s topic: fusionism. I think it can fruitfully be understood as a “modern face” of this longstanding Christian quest.

Fusionism is a strain of political conservatism that looks to knit together the best insights of the classical liberal tradition with an older and deeper Judeo-Christian moral tradition. The term was coined by Frank Meyer, a 20^th-century communist-turned-libertarian-turned-conservative who ended up as one of William F. Buckley’s primary lieutenants on the fledgling National Review. As a recovering ex-communist, Meyer had a deep and even visceral commitment to freedom as an essential part of a thriving society. His traditionalist friend Brent Bozell worked hard to convince him that a robust moral traditionalism was even more important, and Bozell does seem to have had an impact: Meyer did develop a deep appreciation of the Christian tradition. But he argued that this needed to be fused with the best insights from classical liberalism. Although there are real tensions between freedom and virtue, he insisted that we need both, and indeed that the tension itself may be beneficial and fruitful. Libertarians and social conservatives have a strong tendency to bicker and point fingers. But maybe they need one another.

Meyer’s religious background was interesting. He was raised Jewish, spent some time as an atheist communist, and was baptized a Catholic on his deathbed. He seems to have had a complex relationship with God.

Meyer didn’t like to think of himself as a pioneer. As Stephanie Slade notes in her new book on fusionism:

He saw himself as a mere articulator of truths that predated him by centuries. The history of the West is a story of societies learning to hold liberty and virtue in constructive tension with each other, he believed. Both were present (“fused”) at the American founding, so both are parts of America’s civilizational inheritance that deserves to be cherished and defended.

That seems broadly right to me. The particular “freedom and virtue” framing is more characteristic of a 20^th-century American conservative than, say, a 13^th-century Frenchman, but I think there are deep themes that do indeed span centuries, and I think Meyer was right to see that the political upheavals of the 18^th and 19^th centuries wrenched apart different strands of a larger political and moral tradition that we must now work to recombine. He saw this as a constructive continuation of the work of America’s own Founders. I basically agree with that too. It seems reasonable, nevertheless, to think of “fusionism” as an American conservative variant of a longer and broader tradition. The term was coined here, and the framework has also been actively employed here, not just among the theorists but in our actual politics.

Conservatives fight a lot about the True Definition of fusionism. The interesting thing about those fights, to me, is that they tend to put on full display the precise tension that fusionism itself is meant to preserve. Sometimes people call themselves fusionists, but race to specify that one component or the other is “dominant” in some important way. Arguably Meyer himself did this, specifying that freedom should be the defining principle for the state, leaving virtue to the realm of culture and private institutions. Seems like freedom’s got the whip hand there. And I think Meyer’s critics have a point when they argue that his view is too simplistic, flattening the complex relationship between law, order, and culture into a pat, didactic formula. It can’t make sense of patriotic duty, and it leaves us with inadequate resources to address a range of important questions, from environmental protection to military service to “sin markets” (e.g. markets for drugs, porn, and other destructive things). These are real problems with a specifically Meyerite formulation of fusionism.

One also encounters self-described fusionists who race to explain that freedom can only be secured through a political tradition that protects order and promotes general flourishing; delving into the details of that, these people often seem functionally indistinguishable from any other statist authoritarian. That is: they have vaguely positive feelings about “freedom,” but those don’t seem to translate into any very meaningful constraint on what they regard as appropriate uses of state power. At the end of the day, one can find a “common good” justification for practically anything one wishes to do on the level of law or policy. Here “order” or “tradition” seem to be the real operative power, with freedom mostly tagging along as a nice-to-have. Modern political history strongly suggests that freedom doesn’t readily flourish as a tagalong. This really is quite the balancing act.

I have also met people who look pretty “fusionist” to my eyes, but insist they are not, generally citing the ostensible betrayals of one of the two groups mentioned above. (“Fusionism is just the mask those people over there use to hide their real intentions.”) I sort of understand, but is there perhaps a bigger picture here that’s getting missed in the infighting?

I sometimes think that it may be easier to be broadly fusionist if one isn’t too interested in political theory. In my experience, a large share of self-described “conservatives” in America really do share a general sense that tradition matters, that freedom also matters, and that we just have to do our best to find some kind of balance. This reflects our political history and tradition in ways that a moderately-educated American often grasps at least in broad form. When a person undertakes to read a huge stack of books and establish a clear position, he tends to want to smooth out some of the obvious tensions and inconsistencies in this juxtaposition, which is most easily done by giving one definite priority over the other. Many people do precisely that, and yet, I think it is possible even for “the learned” to recognize the mistake and intentionally course-correct.

We can choose to live with the discomfort of some unresolved tension, rather than settling for a foolish consistency. And there are some fairly strong reasons why we should. As I argued in “Godless Conservative” week, there is a well-established tradition that explores the logic of freedom and emergent order with a depth and nuance that the Aristotelians, to date, have never managed to match. Those insights are badly needed in an age when the state quite obviously has a strong tendency towards overreach. But the godless conservative tradition cannot really stand for long on its own (as we see in the cautionary tale of modern Toryism). Without continual nourishment from some thicker, more substantive foundation, it tends to become hollow and ephemeral, little more than a nostalgic taste for old things. The Judeo-Christian moral tradition is the clear candidate to supply that needed nourishment.

I have found (to my amusement) that British and Canadian conservatives are often a little uncomfortable with American conservatives, shamelessly celebrating our “one nation under God.” They tend to have more Whiggish sensibilities. American conservatism really did develop along more fusionist lines, through Reaganite Republicanism, Cold War anticommunism, and the George W. Bush “War on Terror” period, and we tend to be more effusive about both freedom and God, comfortable with public odes to each. They get a little squeamish about that. I mean, sure. Freedom is good. God is good. Need we be zealots about it, though?

I think perhaps we do. Indeed, I think we may need to be a bit zealous for both, even recognizing that those enthusiasms run a risk of bleeding into the Oakeshottian’s much-hated “ideology,” or overrunning the Burkean’s organic order. Nothing is safe in politics! I would suggest, though, that thinking of this as a reworking of the old “God and Caesar” tune may provide some reassurance that there is real potential for harmony here. Even dissonant notes may ultimately serve as a pleasing accent in the symphony. It has never been possible to make men good by force. Nor have we ever been satisfied merely to be left to ourselves to tend our bit of soil; the human drive to build and create is insatiable. When disparate components of human society are permitted to co-exist in fruitful tension, that is often the best we can get, for attaining real excellence but also for opening a space for freedom.

Fusionism is not dead. To the contrary, I think conservative Americans (still a substantial set) retain a strong intuitive understanding of its core. We still care about both freedom and virtue. Indeed, our political rhetoric makes clear that those remain our most resonant touch-points! But right-wing politics has been a real mess in America over the past decade, and it would take a very deliberate and prudently managed effort to return to such sane political principles. I don’t think it’s impossible, but politics is always thick with contingency, and our own moment is no exception.

When traditionalists insist on resolving all the dissonance, that can go pretty badly wrong. We may find ourselves marching to a single, martial beat. I’ll consider that problem in my next essay, on the perpetual allure of fascism.

I’ve written a good bit of late about political conservatism and its various strains and components. It may be time to bring all this back around to Christendom. Thus, I’m thinking of this as “fusionism to fascism” week.

I’m going to consider healthy, and perhaps less healthy, pathways to combine a thick religious traditionalism with politics. One of the week’s major essays will consider the traditionalist attraction to authoritarianism. The other will look at fusionism, a characteristically American expression of political conservatism, and consider whether it has promising possibilities. (If you’re not sure what fusionism is, stick around! I’ll explain. If you’re not sure what fascism is, definitely stick around. I appreciate people with enough honestly and self-knowledge to admit that they find fascism a fuzzy concept. It is rather fuzzy.)

These are all fraught topics in the world today. It seems plain that political religions are rampaging across the globe, opening all sorts of terrifying possibilities, but everyone is struggling to figure out which theoretical or historical touch points are most relevant. I’m not an oracle, but at any rate I have a few opinions to offer.

As a teaser, I will just say though that while my general feelings about Western politics in recent years have been exceedingly negative, it feels to me at the moment like there could, just maybe, be openings to something positive over the next few years. I could be wrong. Now and then though, interesting times do go somewhere good.

When I tried to make images for this post, I kept getting frustrated by “AI safeguards” that will not allow me to use images or symbols connected with Dangerous Political Movements. So, I finally gave up and asked it to make me a satirical Unsafe Images image.

See? Whatever else happens, a mad dash from fusionism to fascism is unlikely to be boring.

Today’s readings are on forgiveness, and they follow nicely on last week’s readings about “seeking just judgment.” It’s a deep and rich subject, as I think becomes clearer and clearer with age. In childhood we are sometimes forced to apologize, and also to “forgive” one another, a performative exercise in making peace. Across the years, nearly all of us unfortunately come to realize that humans can wrong one another in a huge variety of ways, and it’s not always possible to “make peace” even in that superficial, performative sense. Sometimes the other person isn’t sorry. Sometimes they aren’t willing even to pretend. And even if they are, you yourself may not have healed from the wrong you’ve suffered. How then can we forgive?

Even as we ask these (genuinely hard) questions, we may find ourselves noticing something else. The world is in a bad way without forgiveness. People wrong each other all the time and often do not have the resources to make things right. This is one of the major themes of Aeschylus’ Oresteia: the characters in the drama have both inflicted and incurred such deep wounds that it simply isn’t possible for them, at least acting as individuals, to handle the problem in a fitting way. Obligations of piety (e.g., to avenge one’s family and preserve family honor) are in direct conflict with the needs of civic peace and order. There is no way, at least on the level of the individual, to make it right.

In that case, Athena must step in and handle the problem, a literal deus ex machina which is generally read as a lesson in the necessity of a state role in preserving justice. (By arrogating to itself responsibility for certain aspects of justice, it defuses blood feuds and other vengeance-related pathologies.) But we sometimes find ourselves in relevantly similar places in our cultures, our communities, or as individuals. We want resolution, but don’t seem to have the means to attain it, because the injury has not healed (and perhaps can’t be healed, at least through ordinary natural means). We cannot get to: “I’m sorry” / “Oh, that’s all right.”

I’ve written before on this Substack about the pathologies of postmodernism. I will note in passing here that this is one of the truly damning defects of postmodern social diagnoses: They really have no role for forgiveness, no mechanism for moving on from social injustice. And without that, every human civilization in history is basically irredeemable. They all have injustices and harms too grave to heal fully.

Clearly this is not easy. I think the readings still offer us a few very helpful insights.

First, even if we can’t entirely move on from injury, try not to “hug it tight.” Don’t build your life around grievance. Don’t make vengeance a defining personal goal. It’s one thing to find yourself in a place where you can’t in all sincerity shake hands with another person and move on. (That unfortunately happens, and it’s not always up to you.) But at least, try not to incorporate that into your own personal identity. “Hugging anger tight” will not make you a better, or happier, person.

Second, understand that a kind of forgiveness is possible even when things have not been made right, precisely because we ourselves have been forgiven of real and serious offenses, by the Lord himself. You’ve been wronged in this life. So have I. But when we recognize that we ourselves have perpetrated harms that we cannot make right, that supplies a basis for recognizing a kind of kinship even with someone who isn’t particularly sorry for what they did to us. Which might in turn give rise to a real compassion, perhaps even a desire to pray for that person rooted not in intense self-righteousness but in a genuine sorrow for their sin. (In my experience though, you should be honest with yourself about whether you’ve gotten there. Sometimes it’s better just to go for awhile trying not to think too much about the person who’s injured you, if efforts to pray for them inevitably tilt into feelings of moral superiority. I do find, if I wait long enough, there usually comes a time eventually when the desire for that person’s moral good feels sincere.)

Finally, I think we should recognize that complete forgiveness generally does require the help of grace. Precisely because we are fallen, weak, and often “within our rights” in some sense to feel aggrieved. Just as Athena had to step in and secure justice for the polis, God needs to step in and restore peace in our hearts. It’s only when we trust him to secure justice and mercy, for us and for others, that we can truly let go of our grievances and “love one another.” But that helps us understand why it’s so important not to “hug tightly” to our wrath. God can’t heal us of our injury unless we let him. We have to be open to that divine intervention.

That, in turn, explains why the second reading fits into this lineup, even though it’s the only one not explicitly about forgiveness:

None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For this is why Christ died and came to life, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. (Romans 14:7-9)

Amen. A greater openness to forgiveness would certainly do much good for the world today.

P.S. This weekend I’ve been musing on a redesign for this Substack. I think it’s time. I started with a very simple layout, which is the reasonable thing to do when you’re just beginning. At this point I think it would make sense to have a more complex layout, enabling me to post other things (shorter thoughts, quotes from things I’m reading, other people’s essays that I liked and want to promote) on the page directly while still leaving the two weekly posts as the centerpiece. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that, but since I’m traveling this week, I may have to keep musing for a little. What I’m saying is: Coming Soon.

I was a senior in college when the Towers fell. Roughly 10 weeks after that, I submitted my paperwork to the United States Peace Corps; the following summer I shipped out to Uzbekistan in their first complete training group back in country. I spent the first and second anniversaries of that date a few hundred miles north of Kabul, talking to young Muslims about America and freedom.

It’s been interesting over the past month to reflect on why I did that, what I thought of America at the time, and how things have changed. I wrote about it for Law & Liberty today, and that essay seemed like the most fitting thing to send for my second missive this week. I begin here:

I’ve always had great respect for the people who signed on for military service after September 11, 2001. They don’t get many accolades, because America is in the midst of an identity crisis, feels little pleasure in memories of Iraq or Afghanistan, and is even inclined to wonder whether we brought that pain on ourselves with all that incomprehensible meddling on foreign shores.

I don’t believe that at all, though it’s certainly true that foreign meddling gets complicated. At the same time, I also know this. After 9/11, many people were grimly determined that “this must never happen to our nation again.” It has not happened again. I don’t fully understand the causal picture, but I don’t need geopolitical omniscience to feel gratitude. People put themselves on the line to protect our country after that brutal attack, and whatever the complexities, their primary mission clearly succeeded: we’ve never experienced another day like 9/11.

I never risked life or limb like that, and signed on only for a form of service you’re allowed to quit at any time (though I didn’t, at least not until my term of service was up). Still, my little contribution meant something, at least to me, and I go on to reflect on how Americans’ understanding of themselves has changed over time. So much, in fact, that one sometimes feels wonders: Did Osama bin Laden finally win the war of hearts and minds?

Read the whole thing here.

I’ve got a piece at Law & Liberty tomorrow that I plan to send out in honor of September 11. For today, therefore, I’m going to re-up this piece from The Freeman, which I mentioned in passing at the end of the last one. I wrote it a year ago, and I still think it holds up pretty well.

The one thing I will say about this piece is that it has a bit of a slow start, at least for people who regularly debate family policy questions. The Freeman is a libertarian publication, so I came to the table expecting that pronatalism of any kind would be a bit of a hard sell with their readership. There’s perhaps more stage-setting than many social conservatives would need. Basically, I establish that the birth dearth is in fact a serious problem but that dumping cash on families doesn’t seem to be helping, at least not very much. If you know all that stuff already, just skip the first ten paragraphs and start here:

In my estimation, there are two broad pathways that modern societies can take at this juncture in responding to the birth dearth. We might call one “communitarian pronatalism,” and the other “libertarian pronatalism.” Thus far, the communitarian approach has been more extensively explored at the governmental level, and has generally enjoyed broader support from people who self-identify as “pronatalists.” But it hasn’t worked particularly well, and I think there are reasons to worry that it never will. The libertarian approach is comparatively untried, and may initially rouse greater suspicion. But it is far more compatible with freedom and human dignity, and may be both more sustainable and more promising over the long run. I think it’s worth a shot.

I go on to explain why a more successful pronatalism may need to embrace a new paradigm for thinking about families, understanding them not as naturally needy, but rather as naturally productive. Sometimes it’s good to invest in productive things, but you do it primarily in the spirit of enhancing flourishing, not in the spirit of relieving suffering. This does not mean that we should never relieve family suffering. Sometimes families need welfare (in various forms), but family welfare is family welfare; pronatalism should be about growth and dynamism, not charity to the needy. We don’t achieve that by dumping money on people, but rather by creating a “family-friendly climate,” more parallel to a “business-friendly climate.”

How would we do that? A large-scale return to the family economy isn’t likely, though it is possible that the fluidity and flexibility of our evolving labor markets could be a boon to families, in ways that labor policy could potentially encourage. Twentieth-century labor policy was largely built around the expectation of work–family compartmentalization. It was assumed that most workers would effectively be wage laborers, and that caretakers and children would be dependents. Many pronatalists today would like to double and triple down on that model, using tariffs and labor legislation to prop up breadwinners while encouraging domesticity through baby bonuses and cultural messaging. A libertarian pronatalism, by contrast, would recognize the many ways in which a more fluid labor situation (think remote work, gig work, and starting home businesses) can be beneficial to families, enabling parents, and perhaps adolescent or young-adult children, to develop their productive potential in ways more compatible with family life. We needn’t remake ourselves as an agrarian society in order to rediscover the many ways in which a household can be more productive than an individual in a cubicle.

I have multiple suggestions here, but one of my favorite is a “quotient” tax system, similar to France’s:

This same sort of logic could apply to a “family quotient” tax system, which is already the basis of France’s somewhat unusual tax code. The details of France’s system have been adjusted several times over the past several decades, but the core idea is that a family’s taxable income can be calculated based on the size of the household. Instead of expecting adult citizens to file “singly” or “jointly,” with additional household members claimed as dependents, a family of five would simply file “for five” with their income divided accordingly. Clearly, this kind of system could give substantial tax relief, especially to higher-earning families. That will be controversial in itself (more on this in a moment), but we should note a significant advantage to this approach: it shifts incentive structures in a pronatal direction without engaging in potentially offensive forms of social engineering. Many people, especially women, are understandably irritated by state programs that seem to be offered with a paternalistic cast, nudging them in the direction of the kitchen. A family quotient tax system needn’t rest on any policymaker’s assumption about how often women should be barefoot and pregnant. It simply recognizes that children are citizens, not pets or personal projects. Why shouldn’t we treat them that way for tax purposes?

I end with thoughts on how this might change culture and create virtuous cycles:

Communitarian pronatalism has made more headway in the world today, since it fits naturally into the logic of the entitlement state, but precisely for that reason it risks ghettoizing family life. As a rule, state subsidy for particular classes of people tends to foster dependency while undercutting adaptation, innovation, and cultural respect. Any handout the government attaches to babies will naturally appeal more to the poor than to the rich. That might easily usher in a world in which family life is viewed as a kind of lowest-common-denominator option for people (especially women) with poor employment prospects. Poor people are incentivized to have more babies, while the talented and ambitious devote their energies to running the economy. If that’s where communitarian incentive structures are leading us, it’s only reasonable to expect that domesticity and caretaking will be less respected in the future, not more, and no amount of “positive messaging” is likely to counteract those trends.

A libertarian pronatalism, by contrast, will incentivize childbearing especially among the affluent. People who believe in the power of markets should easily see the upsides: if parents have more cash, they are likely to use that money to invest in better schools, family-friendly institutions, goods and services that families need, and so forth. Since the affluent impact cultural trends far more than do the poor, a libertarian pronatalism is more likely to facilitate the rise of a family-friendly culture, with attendant benefits for all demographics and for society at large. And if that looks to some eyes like social engineering, we should reflect that it would really only represent a return to a more natural perspective on family and childbearing.

Very grateful to The Freeman for giving me the chance to think through that line of thought. Really, in the end there is this. We already know that communitarian pronatalism is ineffective. It’s extremely expensive, and it doesn’t raise birth rates, at least not by much. How about we try something else?

What kind of political agenda could help to rebuild a thriving Christian society? What goals would be most relevant to such a politics?

If social conservatives have one deeply cherished goal, it is surely the rebuilding of a pro-family and pro-life culture. This is in one sense exactly the right priority: marriage and family life should indeed be the building blocks of any healthy society. Families instill virtue, perpetuate the faith, and ultimately supply a civilization with an absolutely vital resource: well-formed citizens. We need them. And in the West–indeed, much or most of the world–healthy families are now in dangerously short supply.

Thus, many have welcomed the Trump Administration’s proposed plan to enable families with a stay-at-home parent to apply for a state subsidy, drawn from funds currently allotted to subsidize childcare for working parents below a certain income level. The New Right has long been yearning to throw money at families, and now J.D. Vance has a semi-concrete proposal to champion. Granted, this will likely turn out to be just so much political noise. A way of generating buzz before midterms with a controversial policy that angers the left and pleases social conservatives. Still, it’s out there, many people are excited about it, and that opens a door for discussing one of my own established stances: what I like to call libertarian pronatalism.

This was not my plan for this week. I was thinking of this as “fusionism to fascism” week. But it’s hard to pass up such current news, so I’ll push that to next week and devote today to explaining why dumping money on families may not really be the way to rebuild our culture.

From a culture war standpoint–presumably the priority for the Trump Administration–repurposing childcare subsidies is the obvious play. Right now the state subsidizes working parents by offsetting the cost of their childcare. Many parents would prefer to care for their children at home, but they may not be able to afford this if it involves quitting their jobs. Thus it’s reasonable to ask: why is the state pushing families towards institutions if that’s not even what they want?

I agree that this is unfair and undesirable. If we’re going to redistribute wealth to families–though, as I’ll soon explain, I don’t love that practice–we shouldn’t actively prioritize the work-plus-paid-childcare arrangement. The state shouldn’t be socially engineering any particular work-and-family arrangement; families should figure that out for themselves. Thus, the best redistributive policy would be the most neutral: if family welfare is what we want, let’s not try to dress it up as something else. Just set some income thresholds and cut people checks. They can decide whether to spend the money on childcare, replace lost wages while a parent stays at home, or use it as start-up capital for an at-home business. Whatever works for them.

Here’s what we absolutely should not do: make certain subsidies conditional on non-participation in the labor force. Have we learned nothing from the fiasco of disability subsidies? Actively paying people not to seek employment is infantilizing, intrusive, and a generally terrible idea. There is nothing at all wrong with a family model wherein one parent (usually Dad) provides financially while the other (probably Mom) devotes her time to home and family. But it’s not the best arrangement for every family, nor even, I suspect, the great majority.

A large share of mothers, even if they lean out for a time, will find that there are enormous benefits to building or preserving some earning power as their children grow. And a great many have been finding innovative ways to do that, while still being available to their children. Moms have become some of the great entrepreneurs of our age, reinventing work in myriad ways as they strive to meet their families’ various needs. Paying them not to do that would stymie that innovation, foster cultures of dependency, and increase mothers’ vulnerability while diminishing their capacity to do right by their kids. Effectively, we would be turning mothers into very low-level state employees with a sweeping non-compete clause.

It probably won’t happen. I expect it’s mostly a game of optics. Still, I thought the point was worth making, because it’s easy to get tripped up in debating a policy like this, arguing about which kind of parent is more deserving, whether at-home parents “really work,” and whether New Right influencers truly care about families or are mostly just closet chauvinists. Don’t get distracted by all that. “Should the state be paying people to remain unemployed?” is a much better starting question.

Should the state be paying people to raise kids at all, though? We could strike the “non-earning parent” requirement and just give families money, with fewer strings attached. But even leaving aside for a moment the staggering national debt, should the state, in general, be looking to redistribute more money to families? Is that the right way to build a family-friendly culture?

Many people today effectively assume that it is, noting the rising cost of living and the number of young people who cite financial insecurity as a major deterrent to family life, or to having as many children as they would ideally like. There is also a justice-based argument, because it’s widely understood at this point that elderly entitlements have effectively turned into a massive wealth transfer from parents to non-parents. (Parents bear massively disproportionate costs in raising the workforce whose payroll taxes then support all elderly people through Social Security and Medicare.) Another popular argument suggests that parents, especially caregivers, need and deserve greater honor and recognition. Perhaps that could take the form of a special subsidy?

I agree wholeheartedly that it would be excellent for parents to have more money. Richer parents plausibly are the answer, or at least part of the answer, to the puzzle of the “pro-family society.” If families have money, they can then spend it on family-related things, from baby gear to the Family Funplex. Those things will then become cheaper, more abundant, and more visible, making parenthood more appealing and lowering the barrier of entry. On the other hand, if families are disproportionately impoverished, while DINKs and single professionals are flush with cash, the latter will drive markets, take over city centers, and attain the status that young people see and covet. Family life will become a thing of the margins, the domain of losers and religious zealots.

That’s bad. It emphatically doesn’t follow, though, that cash transfers are the best road to family wealth. Our long history of entitlements and subsidies suggests exactly the opposite: throwing money at people tends to diminish their social status, lower their drive and ingenuity, and mire them in dependency and poverty. It also tends to erode human bonds. When necessity forces us to work cooperatively with our families and communities to meet crucial goals, we tend to do that, forging meaningful human relationships along the way. When the state assumes many of the relevant functions, it weakens human bonds as well.

The “welfare” model is really our primary method of helping people who seem needy. And since families seem to be struggling nowadays, both Republicans and Democrats are at present very attracted to beefed-up redistributive policies that effectively toss families in with other needy, dependent groups that are expected to live off the state. You know: the elderly, the sick, the disabled, families.

Do we… like that association? Do we want to habituate people to think of families as “by nature needy and dependent,” natural wards of the state? Of course, looking at the history of entitlements, we should understand that once that paradigm flips, and we accept that family support is rightfully a state responsibility, we will inevitably find ourselves discussing exactly how much subsidy is needed to secure the appropriate lifestyle. Obviously, it will be assumed that poorer families need more while the rich can finance their own children’s needs, so family lifeespecially will take on a more socialist cast. If you’re attracted to freedom, autonomy, self-direction… don’t have kids. In family policy, the goal will not be family wealth, or even family thriving, but family sustenance, the maintenance of a particular lifestyle deemed adequate for this naturally needy class.

Possibly, that process will be arrested as the staggering national debt smothers this and most other spending priorities, but otherwise family welfare will naturally tend to grow, steadily increasing the intrusiveness of the state in family life, and diminishing the vitality and prestige of parenthood generally.

Is there an alternative? I think so. I elaborate at greater length in this essay, but the basic idea is that families should be treated, not as a needy institution, but as fundamentally productive. A business is the other obvious example. Indeed, families and businesses should be seen as the twin engines of productivity, which between them keep civilization running. Societies do facilitate the growth and thriving of business, through tax breaks and contract law, but also through the creation of what we call a “business friendly climate.” It’s understood, however, that the goal is not to bankroll businesses, but to enable them to build capital themselves and exercise their own initiative. A libertarian pronatalism has similar goals for families. Reduce their tax burden. Expand their options. Respect their autonomy. No doubt there will always be some who do really need some form of welfare, but if we really do want both family wealth and family thriving, our family policy shouldn’t be about putting more and more people on the dole.

The proponents of this shiny new plan insist they are not growing the welfare state, because they are simply repurposing funds currently directed towards paid childcare. It’s a clever talking point, enabling the Administration to dodge the accusation that they’re growing the state, while backing us all into a Mommy War battle that hardly anyone wants.

Don’t play! Focus instead on the following points. The state should not pay people to care for their own kids. It should not pay people to keep out of the workforce. Those measures, once entrenched, surely will grow the state over time. A healthy family policy should aim instead at prosperity, vitality, and growth. Mostly, we get those things by helping people help themselves.

So it’s finally here. A day I’ve been trying for months not to think about. College football is back.

Note to readers: This entire post is about college football, so feel free to ignore if you don’t care. I’ll resume normal content next week.

This isn’t normally how I start a season. Normally I’m pumped for this day. I get special snacks and break out my college swag. I paint my nails blue and add gold flecks. (Yes, really.)

Today, my nails are unpainted. I’ve planned no snacks. About a month ago my husband tried to strike up a casual conversation about how Notre Dame’s lineup was looking this year, and I… might’ve bit his head off a little bit. (Sorry.) I don’t blame him for trying. We usually talk football a lot in the month of August, and I feel a little bad for dampening that normally-exciting season, but I emphatically did not want to. He hasn’t brought it up again.

No doubt many readers are concluding right now that I’m obsessive and crazy, and perhaps that’s fair, but let me explain. I have loved the Fighting Irish with a deep, ardent, heart-pumping loyalty for over 25 years. Since I returned from the Peace Corps in 2004, I’m not sure there’s a single game I haven’t seen at least in part. (Not always live. For instance, once I was in advanced stages of labor, not really up for doing the Irish Jig, but I still watched the recording the next day. Cradling my infant. We named him Knute. No, not really.)

As I sometimes say: Grace made me a Catholic, Notre Dame football made me an American Catholic. It has great symbolic significance for me. Obviously I love football just as a sport, but Notre Dame football represents something especially profound: The striving of Catholics in a Protestant country to overcome prejudice. To win respect. To make America our country too. It’s the symbol of a people struggling to overcome, but also of a country that makes that possible. It’s the thing that planted Our Lady triumphant on New World soil.

So yes, I love it, but despite that ardent loyalty, I think I have generally not been a vengeful or deranged sort of fan. I’m sad of course when we lose big games, but my love of the Irish is connected to things bigger than turnover ratios and nickel packages. I’ve been disappointed many many many times, but I get over it. I don’t cry or break things. I’m also reasonably fair, I think, in my evaluation of just desserts. I have surprised people before by agreeing with them when they complain that back in the BCS days, Notre Dame sometimes got major bowl bids we didn’t deserve, just because the suits wanted all those Catholic eyeballs. That did happen, and I hated it. It wasn’t fair. Or fun! Who wants to spend every New Year’s watching your team get pulverized by a much better team? Far better to play in the Holiday Bowl and make a game of it.

I’ve watched some fairly depressing seasons. (Eh, it happens.) I’ve also watched Notre Dame lose the National Championship twice. I’ve watched them win it zero times, but still, the losses didn’t upset me. I knew both times that we were overmatched; those were both incredible seasons for which I was deeply grateful. I put my kids to bed those evenings saying, “Hey, that’s life, but you try to remember the good times.”

They laugh at that, by the way. They used to chide me sometimes for being too Pollyannaish about football, which they tell me should involve some “good clean hate.” Even when I’m sad about losing, for instance, I sometimes acknowledge that I’m a little bit happy for the other team. They find that absurd.

I reiterate therefore that I was an ardent fan, but also emotionally balanced. I found the joy, wasn’t crippled by the disappointment, and tried to give competitors their due. I can do this because I love my team for historical, cultural, and spiritual reasons that go beyond the scoreboard. Of course I love winning, but losing cannot destroy the things that make Notre Dame football meaningful.

And yet… last season kind of broke me. Last season I found the hate. I was grateful when the postseason ended, because my family still insisted on watching the stuff, and basically all proximity to football filled me with rage and a thirst for vengeance, which was exhausting. I was finding it hard to imagine actually wanting to watch a football game, ever again. The thought of just sitting down casually to watch GameDay, now repels me. How could I ever hear Kirk Herbstreit’s voice again and not want to retch?

I understand how this sounds. As a multiple-decade non-crazy fan. You can go on thinking I’m crazy, but let me at least supply context.

The season before last was a fairy tale. It was blissful. Watching Coach Marcus Freeman get shafted in the seeding, come back and trounce Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, and take us all the way to the championship, was a level of sweetness that I never really expected to experience as a 21^st-century Notre Dame fan. Who knew I still had the capacity for that much wild joy, even in middle age? After the National Championship (which, yes, we lost) I didn’t take the decorations down for months because they just made me happy. I didn’t particularly expect a repeat. Again, I focus on gratitude.

So we started the next fall with a very strong team, but we also had a freshman QB, were missing a few key defenders, and were starting the season with two monster games. (This is hard to avoid these days because, thanks to the conference cartels, it’s hard for ND to schedule challenging games mid-season. Front-loading is sometimes the only way to beef up our schedule.) We lost those two games, albeit very narrowly, with a few freaky breaks each time that didn’t go our way. That was sad, but a familiar sad. I knew going in it might happen. I settled into a pragmatic, “Maybe we’ll make the playoffs, maybe not, just enjoy the season.”

Week after week, we proceeded to dismantle mediocre opposition with ease. I knew we weren’t playing with the best, but still, I’ve watched a lot of football. I was trying to stay even-keel, but as we rolled towards November, wheels started turning in my brain. “Hot diggidy dang. These guys are good. They are the real deal. They’re definitely better than last year.” And then came that voice whispering in the back of my head. “I think this is the best Irish team I have ever seen.”

Once formulated, the thought could not be banished. It kept drifting back to me in idle moments. My family watches large quantities of football, so soon it was paired with another thought. “This could possibly be the best team in the country right now.”

I’m not prone to these wild enthusiasms. Not in the least. Indeed, I’ve never taken this view of any other Irish squad, in all the years I’ve been watching them. Which is to say, since 1998. Even in 2012, when we were undefeated, ranked #1, and headed to the National Championship, I was properly excited and all, but also reasonably sure Saban was going steamroll us. (Yep.) This was the first time, ever, that I actually believed Notre Dame might be the best team in the country.

One day in early November, I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I pulled up some of the Vegas betting lines. I hate sports gambling and normally try to avoid that world, but they do at least represent a semi-independent source of evaluation and I just had to know. I pulled up a betting site, and my breath caught. They listed Notre Dame at… 17%. Those weren’t their odds for making the playoff. Those were the odds Vegas gave them for winning the championship. Only Ohio State had a slightly higher number. I just sat there gaping. No, I wasn’t seeing things. It wasn’t just wild flights of fancy. The pundits were still downplaying the Irish but Vegas agreed: Our team was phenomenal.

Well, you can guess what happened at that point. I fell pretty hard down the rabbit hole. I read the analyses. Listened to the podcasts. Geeked out over the stats. It is a bit like a drug. It was also sort of interesting, as a person with politicalmedia experience, to give truly sustained attention for the first time to the sports media. What became clear to me was that the boys in Vegas, the experts, the computers, every remotely independent source, knew perfectly well that the Irish were quite possibly the best team in the nation. The commentators, for their part, were positioning. Of course. Like media men do. All talking heads have unspoken obligations to the wallet that pays them, which right now are aligned with the conference cartels and their major media partners.

I understood all that in theory, but usually I’ve tried not to obsess over those nuances. Leave media politics for politics. Let Football Stay Fun. But now, finally, I was attending to the nuances. Watching the factions position themselves to back-stab my Irish. Which of course is exactly what happened.

My husband kept telling me I was paranoid. I don’t blame him. It seemed genuinely incredible that the media would pull out all the stops to sandbag us. But then the ACC Network started playing the Miami game on an endless, looping taunt. New rules and precedents seemed to emerge out of thin air just to justify our slide. When a decrepit Alabama team jumped the Irish after they barely squeaked past a 5-6 Auburn, the writing was clearly emerging on the wall, and sure enough, they handed the Tide a playoff spot mere hours after Georgia left them torn and bleeding all over Mercedes-Benz Stadium. I watched it happen like a slow-motion train wreck, the malevolent stars all aligning. Yet up until the very moment of the announcement, I still desperately wanted to believe that college football couldn’t be quite that corrupt.

It is. It’s that corrupt. Wake up and smell the chili dogs, Rachel.

Doubtless many people reading this have their own narratives about why the Irish didn’t really deserve a playoff spot (or not clearly), and I can’t answer them all, but let me break it down like this. Playoff selection has always been an inexact science, clearly, but there are really two pieces to the puzzle that must somehow be balanced. First, who deserves to compete in the playoff, given their regular-season performance? Second, which teams are truly the best in the nation at the time of selection? The two are often in tension, but you really can’t pick just one, because both matter. We want the post-season to be a proper sequel to the regular season, but it’s also supposed to be a thrilling winner-take-all among the best teams. So it’s messy.

Florida State in 2023 was almost the most textbook case one could imagine of a team that perfectly split these criteria. They had an absolutely incontrovertible, gold-plated case for their merit, based on regular-season performance. But at time of selection, they quite obviously were not one of the nation’s best. (Their incredible QB, Jordan Travis, sustained a season-ending injury in the penultimate game; despite that, the team still managed to eek out an ugly win in the ACC Championship to seal their undefeated season. But they got left out of the playoff anyway. It was brutal.) At that time the commentators duly went around reminding us that the playoff was simply for “the four best teams,” and reassuring us that the impending 12-team playoff would resolve these hard questions.

Cue laugh track. So obviously all that “four best teams” stuff went straight down the memory hole two years later when it was the Irish they wanted to sandbag. Notre Dame was very clearly one of the twelve best teams. They were one of the four best teams. But on the “merit” front their case wasn’t so gold-plated. Indeed, even in November, when I first went traipsing down that rabbit hole, I had to admit (though it was excruciating) that there were hypothetically possible scenarios in which the Irish could be justly excluded, on merit grounds. Those scenarios were not realized, of course; it in fact took a lot of politicking, rule-inventing, and chart-manipulation to axe us. But we did not, in the standard phrase, “control our own destiny” through November.

That made things easier for the media men, because “merit” is a vague and highly manipulable category, but it’s not why we were excluded. In the end, we solidly cleared the “merit” bar. We did double back flips over the “real-time excellence” bar. There was no plausible football-based argument for excluding us. We were left out of the playoff because the conference-media cartels successfully protected their assets in the post-season negotiation. Corrupt politics, familiar story.

I’ve always been a staunch opponent of the playoff, the creation of which I’ve viewed as a terrible mistake. But I do actually think this was the first time in playoff history that a plausible contender for “best team” was left out of the competition entirely. Supposedly the one great virtue of the playoff was that it would give us a clear champion, decided on the field. Nope! Sorry. In the pros it does, but the college system is too unstable to prevent this kind of petty corruption. So we’ll never actually know which was the best team in 2025, even in the state of Indiana.

I believe it was Notre Dame. I like the Hoosiers and was genuinely happy for them in their joy, but I think late-season Notre Dame was even better. It’s not a ridiculous view, and no one will ever prove it wrong. Nobody beat us except the suits.

It was great how the aftermath of that travesty gave everyone wide avenues to spew their hatred at Notre Dame. Loved all that commentary went something like this, “So that was a little sticky, but after all the Irish lost to Miami and let me tell you, that fan base…”

Sure, real classy. The system is indefensible so might as well put the fans on trial. But of course, everyone’s always loved to hate Notre Dame. Damn papists.

I’m aware that a lot of Irish fans are pumped for a new season. They rave about C.J. Carr, Leonard Moore, the incredible motivation Freeman can pull from last season’s injustice. No doubt! And I do like Carr. (A philosophy major!) I love Freeman. A Rockne-esque “shake down the thunder” comeback season would be sweet beyond words.

But… most likely it won’t happen. Promising seasons can go wrong in a million ways. In 28 years, I have only once sincerely believed that my team might be the best in the nation. And then we got crushed by cronyism. Given the inhospitable cartel-ruled landscape, I’d give less-than-even odds that I’ll ever reach that point again.

How do you just sit down and enjoy a game after that? The whole enterprise now has in my mind an aura of banana-republic sleaze. This whole week, I’ve had this weird premonition that Notre Dame will find some way to lose to Wisconsin, which is undoubtedly emotional, and my son keeps laughing at me and reminding me that we’re favored by 3 touchdowns. Yeah, but who knows.

If they could somehow do it, though? If the spirit of Knute Rockne, George Gipp, or Joe Montana could somehow be reawakened? I might wear that blue nail polish for a year. It’ll feel a little silly at conferences, but eh, you’ve got to have priorities in life.

Don’t worry, gentle readers. I won’t indulge in regular rants about college football. But is it not of some lateral relevance to Christendom Reborn? Natural loves, spiritual longings. The human drive to overcome.

Go Irish.

It would be very impolite to describe any conservative thinker as “spiritual but not religious.” No serious person of any stripe should thrill to that term, but conservatives especially prioritize tradition over novelty and vapid emotionalism. Nevertheless, quite a lot of conservative intellectuals could arguably qualify. They approve of religion, but don’t clearly believe. And many non-believing conservatives clearly do crave an encounter with the transcendent, whether their preferred form is primarily aesthetic (classical music, nature, wine), mystical (high liturgy, reading the Desert Fathers), or communitarian (possibly with nationalist notes).

My Tuesday essay enumerated the genuinely important contributions of the “Godless Conservatives.” Yesterday I developed that point further with this essay on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the common good, which notes the (rather stringent) limits of what an Aristotelian account of politics can explain without drawing on those resources. Today though, I want to talk about the limits of godless conservatism. The problem is really quite simple. It’s not going anywhere.

It’s all very well to respect custom and convention, to celebrate the stabilizing powers of constitutionalism and separated powers, to rejoice in emergent order. They can ward off many malign possibilities, and facilitate good ones. But what are those good and bad things? Why should we care about them, either as individuals or on the level of society? What makes Western Civilization, or any civilization, worth saving? When godless conservatism tries to make itself into the whole of conservatism, we end up with a robust argument for the “low but solid” political platform, and there are indeed times for embracing that. But be warned. The “solid” part is often illusory. Man yearns for meaning, which tends to be found on higher ground.

Godless conservatives have lots of strong reasons for keeping people like me (confessional Christians who will cheerfully talk about their faith even in the public square) at arm’s length. Religion can easily lapse into an ungrounded emotionalism, ideology (their greatest bugaboo), or power-hungry authoritarianism. I grant all those risks. I understand why Commonwealth Tories have a tendency to sniff at American conservatives, with our revivalist preachers, thundering moral causes, open invocations of Almighty God. It’s embarrassing, not to mention alarming. Nobody ever built a fascist regime on quiet country gardens, second-hand bookshops, and choral evensong.

That’s perfectly true. Quick question, though. How are those Commonwealth Tories doing nowadays?

I think Richard John Neuhaus got this broadly right in The Naked Public Square. Politics abhors a vacuum; it will always have a measure of “moral energy” to it. Consecrating your politics to Jesus most definitely won’t protect you from power-hungry ideologues, and it risks profaning the sacred. But the reality is that politics (like sex!) is not safe. Neuhaus was primarily diagnosing the external, structural banishment of faith through law and elite secularism. But the internal, polite retreat of the godless conservatives produces the same kind of vacuum. Downgrading religion to something the godless conservatives find comfortable (an element of culture, a protective coating on tradition) robs it of its power, and ultimately places it on the path to irrelevance. Which is a real problem in an age like our own, when people are absolutely famished for meaning.

What does conservatism finally amount to, when the transcendent elements are stripped away? Michael Oakeshott, a twentieth-century English philosopher and renowned conservative thinker, famously postulated the existence of “a conservative disposition.” Here is his description of it, from his 1956 essay “On Being Conservative”:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specially cultivated.

I read things like this (vintage Oakeshott!), and think, “Well, okay then. Now I understand why the Tories are losing.”

I’m being a little bit glib perhaps, but also serious. I might just be a little surly here because, on Oakeshott’s definition, I’m not sure I qualify as a conservative. But it’s more than that. A milquetoast conservatism like that has no chance against anyone with real convictions. It’ll lose to the socialists. The eco-radicals. The nativists. It’ll lose to everybody. It is losing to everybody.

In Canada the old Commonwealth Tories have been marginalized by more aggressively populist right-wing strains. In Britain Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is absolutely eating their lunch. You could argue, like my friend Elizabeth Corey (an excellent expositor of Oakeshott, and I’ve tried very sincerely to learn from her on this point), that it’s better to be a beautiful loser than to win Pyrrhic victories that destroy everything we once loved along the way. I agree, in fact, if that’s the choice. It’s a little different though if you’re losing in large part because you yourself have already jettisoned the things that infuse meaning and purpose into life (and civilization). If you’ve chosen to excise the things that most matter from the realm of the political. It’s one thing to lose the public square because you’ve got principles, but another to lose because the other guy has some principles, and you left yours at home.

I don’t mean to suggest that a sincere enjoyment of art, nature, family, and other natural goods is not of great value. And I realize of course that the ideal for many is not to banish God, but to embrace him in one’s private life. Opening space between God and Caesar is indeed a good thing, a theme I’ll circle back to over these next few weeks. For now I’ll just say: I don’t think it’s accidental that so many conservatives in that staid, Tory tradition openly acknowledge their difficulty in getting all the way to a sincere confessional faith. Even if they seem to yearn for it. A godless conservatism is always at risk of degenerating into little more than empty proceduralism and a taste for classical music.

Funny thing, too, about that classical music. When I originally sketched this essay, I included it on the list of things on which “nobody ever built a fascist regime.” Then I remembered… the Third Reich. How safe is classical music, really? Nothing in politics is safe. One thinks at this juncture of Ross Douthat’s very prescient warning in 2016 that “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”

What am I suggesting, then? Do I want to see political conventions praising Jesus, patriarchs blessing tanks, presidents’ names on the covers of our Bibles? No. I’m live to the dangers of an excessively politicized faith, and I’ve made clear that I do want to share a tent with the godless conservatives. We need them. They discipline traditionalist excesses, and explain many things that God-fearing conservatives are slower to understand. But they can’t do everything.

We’re getting a clear view, here in the 21st century, of the things godless conservatives cannot do.

Thanks for reading. I’m going to turn my attention next to more transcendence-friendly strains of right-leaning thought, from fusionism to fascism. Unlike the godless conservatives, some of those folks are positively champing at the bit to see a reborn Christendom. That can be a mixed blessing. More on that next week.

Since it’s hot off the presses today I’m just going to post this Law & Liberty piece from yours truly, on MacIntyre and “the common good.” We’re doing a full symposium on the subject this week, inspired (if that’s the word) by a right-wing dust-up a few weeks ago that, in our estimation, brought a lot more heat than light. It so happened I was reading this MacIntyre book anyway, which has a whole lot to say on “the common good,” so it made sense to focus my analysis on that. (Here’s John G. Grove’s essay, and you can read Michael Pakaluk’s at Law & Liberty tomorrow.)

It’s quite relevant to this week’s theme. Basically the core argument is that MacIntyre believed in organic order, but not really in emergent order, and that left him unable to say much about the common good. He was admirably frank about what he was able to explain. But it wasn’t much.

While I do genuinely appreciate MacIntyre’s honesty on this, it’s also true of course that in the meanwhile we have to go on living. To maintain order, stability, and civic peace, we thus end up depending on a lot of political apparatus that MacIntyre isn’t quite willing to endorse. For that, we owe a great deal to… the godless conservatives.

As I write in the piece:

One can understand why we see angry populists issuing dramatic, uncompromising condemnations of core features of modern life: liberalism, pluralism, the global economic order. But MacIntyre rejected that form of rejectionism. It’s hard to think of anyone with a keener appreciation of modernity’s deficiencies; nevertheless, he insisted it was necessary to find ways to live in the world as it was. He realized, in making that case, that he was working with a limited toolkit. He had no principled commitment to free markets, social contracts, or any understanding of civil, political, or human rights; to the contrary, he had a marked hostility to the entire classical liberal tradition and all its modern-state apparatus, which one can at least understand given his defining life project of charting the fragmentation of modern moral discourse. The downside to that view, however, was that he simply had no framework for securing order without falling prey to the power-hungry state. He believed deeply in organic order, but rejected all plausible accounts of emergent order, which left him with no practical account of how a functional political community could actually form under modern circumstances.

I don’t really go into recommended solutions in the piece. But if you’ve been reading Christendom Reborn, you probably have a reasonable sense of what I recommend. I’ve written enough about MacIntyre already that I don’t really need to stress that he was an immensely important influence, whom I view with deep respect. The book was all the more interesting for that reason. It’s MacInryre all right: clear, incisive, entirely frank. Which makes it all the more useful for delineating the limits of his Aristotelian project.

Godless conservatism has limits too! Looking forward to discussing those tomorrow.

Last week I wrote about political conservatives and their role as “Tradition’s Sheepdogs,” tasked with protecting traditionalists and, sometimes, saving them from themselves. We are living through a moment of particularly dramatic flux, which invariably strains conservatism: their services are needed most at the exact moment others are most inclined to sideline them. It is precisely when predators close in that the flock panics and scatters.

Astute readers may have noted that the task I’ve assigned to political conservatism overlaps substantially with what I’ve identified as Christianity’s perpetual strength: adaptation, renewal, and the re-articulation of old truths in new contexts. Christians and political conservatives seem to share deep common ground. Maybe they should work together? Maybe they are essentially the same people?

Sometimes they are. Sometimes not. The Venn diagram has significant overlap, but this picture is fairly complicated, so over the next two weeks I will explore the various segments of that diagram—starting with the secular variety. Think of this as “godless conservatism” week.

Godless conservatives aren’t useless. Though I myself am very much a religious conservative, I’ve come to appreciate what the more secular flank—often identifying as classical liberals or libertarians—brings to the table. Whether or not they self-identify as conservatives, I’m counting them here, because they’ve made major contributions to “the art of sheepdogging.” These thinkers have played a crucial role in protecting and ordering tradition, exposing real vulnerabilities of crown-and-altar politics and illuminating many of the mechanics of organic order. While godless conservatism has real shortcomings (which I will tackle on Thursday), we should begin by recognizing its genuine achievements.

Who do I have in mind when I refer to “godless conservatives”? Faith and politics can certainly get sticky, and looking back across the centuries, it’s clear that great thinkers have related to religious faith in many different ways, ranging from cheerful atheism (Hume) to insouciant heterodoxy (Jefferson, Franklin) or more serious-minded unorthodoxy (Locke), to a kind of plaintive agnosticism-trending-towards-belief (Roger Scruton, Charles Murray). Leo Strauss saw covert skepticism in virtually every philosophical mind, and while that seems to me like a stretch, it’s clearly true that historical figures often had strong motives to be less than candid. Inevitably, there is a lot of debate about the real convictions of figures like Montaigne, Burke, or America’s Founding Fathers.

I don’t mean to flatten those nuances by tossing everyone into a single “godless” bucket. My targeted point is simply this: intentionally non-theological conservatism has been a major force in the modern era. Despite the contributors’ varied motives and private convictions, their collective work offers indispensable insights into how human societies actually work. Obviously I cannot adequately summarize a rich, centuries-long conversation in a short Substack post, but I’ll at least touch on three important things that can be learned from godless conservatism. It forces us to be serious about certain unhappy features of this fallen world, especially scarcity and the temptations of power. It has a real appreciation of organic order. On the flip side of that, it measures the costs of inorganic order, which is not something you tend to think about if you believe in “the divine right of kings.”

Christians have always believed that the world is fallen. Nevertheless, Christianity’s hopeful or aspirational elements can trend very easily into forms of utopianism, which is where the godless conservatives can have a very salutary, bracing effect. If you’re used to rubbing shoulders with Aristotelians, meditating cheerfully on all the things a “pro-family” society would universally supply (preferential option for the poor, of course!), it can be quite useful to walk into a different room and answer the hard questions that a classical liberal is likely to pose.

Instead of happily assuming that a generous, providential God will reliably provide, they start from the assumption that resources are scarce and that people often fail to get what they need. Instead of spelling out guidelines for wise, thoughtful rulers, they expect that most rulers will use power selfishly, and that even the well-intentioned will constantly miscalculate. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!” Alright, so that was Lord Acton, very much a religious believer. But he was unusual among Christians in his deep suspicion of power. In general, the godless conservatives have been much harder-headed, and let’s be real here: they are very often correct.

This leads to the subject of organic order. Together with their suspicion of power, godless conservatives have noticed that even though authorities are (unfortunately) very prone to corruption, we don’t always need them to order the world for us. In fact, most things work better when they don’t. Scarcity may be a fact of the world, but a lot more people will get what they want and need if we don’t ask formal authorities to plan everything for us. (Or, more realistically… don’t let them.) When people work out solutions from the ground up, they are better able to grasp all the morally relevant circumstances, and they also have a much more nuanced sense of what they themselves want and need.

Adam Smith broke new ground in this realm by showing how effectively free enterprise could facilitate mutually beneficial arrangements, not just among people within a small community, but also at the national and geopolitical levels, enhancing The Wealth of Nations. Smith wasn’t naïve about the personal virtue of capitalists, but he saw that markets could often transcend their manifold vices. Friedrich Hayek set another important concept on the table with his clear articulation of “the knowledge problem”: it simply is not possible for any authority, no matter how well-intentioned or intelligent, to grasp the needs of a complex society well enough to allocate work fairly, or distribute goods and services in optimal ways. Another win for organic order.

Writing centuries after Smith, having witnessed the rise of totalitarianism, Hayek spelled out another crucial point as well. When the state arrogates to itself the task of meeting everyone’s needs, that tends to undermine natural order, to everyone’s cost. When the state “solves” a problem, people tend to stop looking for solutions, even if the top-down solution is mediocre. Over time we become habituated to petitioning the state at every turn, and lose the ability and motivation to solve problems for ourselves. Hayek wasn’t the only person to see this, of course. Robert Nisbet, Wilhelm Röpke, and Bertrand de Jouvenel were among the many thinkers who wrote insightfully on this subject. But it’s important to understand that this critique goes far beyond some hackneyed assertion that “people are poor because they are lazy.” All of us, rich and poor, have been shaped in deep (and often undesirable) ways by our relationship to the modern state.

It’s not that these points are entirely absent from the tradition, but it’s harder to appreciate them when you think in the grand, sweeping arcs of a Platonist or Scholastic. Mind you, I have no doubt at all that St. Thomas or St. Augustine could sit down and have a delightful conversation with a Smith or a Hayek. But their genius was of a different kind. Explicitly Christian or Aristotelian frameworks do often weave in moments of appreciation for organic order, but particularly in a modern context, they tend to be far too weak and underdeveloped to “do the job.” Sure, Catholic Social Teaching includes a “principle of subsidiarity,” but unless it’s supported by the longer-developed insights of a Hayek or a Nisbet, it tends to be easily swamped by a cluster of other goals and demands. The godless conservatives really have a better handle on this.

I think there is a phenomenon at work here remarkably similar to what we saw in the natural sciences in the early modern period. Is it possible to study the natural world with rigor and discipline, while maintaining a theistic or teleological worldview? Yes! But people do seem more motivated to seek out mechanistic explanations of natural things when the supernatural framework falls away. You’re likelier to look for that sort of explanation when it’s the only one “permitted.” I’ve already discussed this with reference to empirical science and the rise of philosophical materialism, and I think a similar story can be told about godless conservatism. Non-theistic frameworks proved uniquely well-suited for exploring certain truths about human life and society. Properly understood, none of these insights should be seen as proofs for the non-existence of God. Anyone who takes them that way is making the old mistake of confusing methodology with metaphysics and morals.

Godless conservatives haven’t necessarily made that mistake. Some are sincere religious believers (“godless” only in the sense of accepting methodological constraints on their political theory), and anyone with a real respect for tradition can hardly help but notice that religion plays an important role in preserving it. Thus, even non-believing conservatives generally view religion as culturally and socially salutary, and well worth preserving at least in some civic form. Even David Hume thought that clergymen had a legitimate function. (Well, sort of.) Godless conservatives aren’t usually enemies of the faith, even if the cross-Venn friendships can get a bit complicated.

I will note in passing, before concluding this post, that there are many other insights I could have brought forward from what I am christening the “godless conservative” tradition: the principle of prescription, stern warnings about ideology and rationalism, moving tributes to custom and civility, well-honed thoughts on constitutionalism and effective checks on power. Godless conservatism has a lot to offer. But it also has limits. I’ll consider those later this week.

This week feels like a bit of a “Take 2.” I didn’t quite get back on track here at Christendom Reborn, though I did post my two major essays, so that’s not total failure. This week I want to tie last week’s reflections on political conservatism back into my broader narrative about Christendom. How does the political project of conservatism relate back to “the realm that Christ judges”? I certainly don’t promise to produce a crystal-clear, fully-formed answer to that question, but we can at least talk about it.

For today, though, a very interesting set of readings, beginning with this rather jarring passage from the Prophet Jeremiah:

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;

you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.

All the day I am an object of laughter;

everyone mocks me.

—Jeremiah 20:7

Wow. Okay. So that doesn’t sound good.

Jeremiah got a hard assignment in life. If he sometimes comes across as a bit of a hot mess, it wouldn’t seem fair to judge him. I don’t imagine anyone would choose for themselves such a bleak life, marked by brutal isolation and rejection, intense public mockery, and the strong impression that his message wasn’t having any real effect. He’s called “the weeping prophet” for a reason.

Nevertheless he ends here. Note that the “him” in this sentence refers to God:

I say to myself, I will not mention him,

I will speak in his name no more.

But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,

imprisoned in my bones;

I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

The phenomenology of it is fascinating. He wants to quit, and sometimes even resolves to, but the Holy Spirit won’t let go of him.

I think of the Prophet Jeremiah as a particularly powerful example of how there’s really no guarantee that accepting your life “assignment” will work out well for you here in this life. It’s relevant to my “Sex is Not Safe” post from a couple of months ago. Do I believe that religious faith correlates positively with this-worldly thriving? I’d say so, yes, as a general rule. But it’s also perfectly true that God can have some hard asks, and sometimes they may just break you.

I’m not trying to compete with the Prophet Jeremiah, but there have certainly been a few times as a parent when it felt to me like the ask was just objectively more than I could do. “This is too much, Lord. I can’t do it.”

I think of those as the “Jesus take the wheel” moments. If you are going to wreck, try to crash into the Lord. The stone that the builders rejected.

It’s a perfect message for the week when I plan to talk about godless and God-fearing conservatives.

Then Jesus said to his disciples,

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,

take up his cross, and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,

but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Happy Friday! This Back to School week has been fairly hectic, and I wasn’t fully successful in getting the Substack back on schedule. Maybe next week. I’m still determined to end the week by answering the question: Why do I think of myself as a conservative? What do I take that to mean, and why is it important?

Let me start with a question that has long fascinated me. Why aren’t intensely traditional societies more resilient? Intuitively it seems to me that cultures rooted in rich, long-established traditions should be strong, enduring, steeped in long-accumulated wisdom. They should have a robust, untroubled sense of their identity. A deeply developed root structure that enables them to respond gracefully to changing times. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be so.

Traditional societies in the modern era have proven astonishingly fragile. Looking back a little further, it’s true that some have shown an impressive capacity to perpetuate themselves across the centuries, as long as they don’t encounter serious opposition. But over the past few centuries, when new technologies or ideologies came sweeping through, agrarian societies in particular were leveled with terrifying speed. The most obvious and painful example can be seen in the rise of communism in the 20th century, which upended traditional, agrarian societies like an ideological plague. One thinks immediately of indigenous populations coming into contact with Western explorers, dying en masse of “virgin soil” epidemics like measles and influenza. Ideas too, it seems, can have malevolent impacts on “virgin minds.”

The contrast with more gradually developing Western countries is fascinating. Great Britain was early to embrace constitutional monarchy, and the world’s first real industrial power. It has traditions, certainly, but tradition has been embattled there quite literally for centuries, sometimes in some fairly harrowing ways. Nevertheless, or perhaps for that reason, it was far more successful at shaking off the 20th century’s toxic political religions. Indeed, the entire Anglosphere was impressively resistant. China and Russia, by contrast, had massive agrarian populations that were still, at the dawn of that century, recognizably perpetuating the same way of life they’d inherited from twenty generations or more—working the same soil, telling the same stories, praying the same prayers. Their encounter with modernity was… a little rocky. To put it mildly.

Some people argue, when I raise this point, that Tsarist Russia wasn’t really “less traditional” than Chesterton’s Britain, just more monolithic and authoritarian. The problem isn’t tradition as such, but a dogmatic, unthinking brittleness that refuses to adapt to circumstance. That critique moves into the vicinity of something true, but stated that way, I don’t buy it. Yes, I’ve read Dostoevsky; I’m aware that a small contingent of elite Russians encountered modernity at earlier dates. I know that revanchism is a real phenomenon, and I’ll have more to say about it in coming weeks. And the relationship between tradition and political forms is likewise quite complicated; certainly Russia has always had a strong element of authoritarianism in its politics.

However, I don’t really think turn-of-the-century Russian peasants were revanchists. They were just farmers. They were what today’s back-to-the-land agrarians want to be and cannot: people who farm, pray, marry, dance, and submit to properly constituted authorities in roughly the way their forebears did, without a lot of navel-gazing because that’s just what one does. True traditionalists. As “based” as human beings can realistically be. It would be absurd to fault them.

But then the Revolution came, and they were absolutely steamrolled. That’s what happens to true traditionalists.

Left to their own devices, the most traditional peoples (deeply rooted in custom, harmoniously fusing orthodoxy and orthopraxy) are sitting ducks for malevolent ideologues. They have their own beauty and worth, which is why I’ve noted already that “The West Needs Traditionalists.” But they have very little capacity to defend themselves. This is why we don’t just need traditionalists. We also need conservatives.

Conservatism is, in a very real sense, a modern phenomenon. In a good way, though. It’s a response to modernity’s unfortunate tendency to level and destroy traditional things.

An analogy might help here. If you’ve ever seen the movie American Sniper, or just had a lot of contact with military or policing families, you’re probably familiar with “the sheepdog fable.” It was popularized by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a military psychologist, in his 2004 book On Combat, but I think the story goes back considerably further. It’s something like this: There are three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Sheep (e.g., most of us) are basically nice people who are unfortunately a bit weak, and perhaps also naïve about the reality of evil in the world. Wolves are self-seeking predators who prey on the sheep. Then there’s a third category: the sheepdogs. They have the aggression of wolves and the goodwill of sheep. They have a sacred calling to protect the world from the wolves. Obviously, military and policing families envision themselves as the sheepdogs.

To be clear, I’m perfectly fine with that; it seems to me like a modern re-expression of Plato’s parable of the metals. The sheepdogs are Plato’s “silver-souled,” the guardians, protectors of order and decency. And I am not a member of that class! I respect them, which is important, because honor is the reward they most crave and indeed deserve. But my own temperament and talents are different.

However, I bring up the “sheepdog” parable here because I think of “conservatism” in a somewhat analogous light. Conservatives are guardians too, of a different kind. They are stewards of tradition.

Tradition is absolutely essential to human thriving, a primary conduit to beauty, truth, and goodness. Without tradition, civilization is impossible and life bitterly impoverished. But traditionalists have grave vulnerabilities that modernity has exposed, sometimes in fairly horrifying ways. Traditional subcultures are easily destroyed, and even when they aren’t destroyed, traditionalists are sometimes prone to their own forms of predation and malevolent zealotry.

Conservatives are tasked with counteracting this tendency. They must act as thoughtful stewards of humanity’s inheritance. Their job is to work for its preservation, not in a dogmatic or reactionary way, but thoughtfully and prudently. Conservatives must love the past, but not be dogmatically wedded to it. They must be keenly attentive to changing times, but not too fearful about the future, because fear leads to turtling, and turtles can’t protect anyone but (maybe) themselves. You could summarize my view by calling conservatives “reflective traditionalists,” and that would be broadly true. But that would miss an important aspect of conservatism that I think needs to be appreciated, especially in a fulcrum moment like the present, when things seem to be changing even more quickly than usual.

In its own way, conservatism really is a fighting posture. That feels a bit paradoxical, because it’s also deeply suspicious of ideology, revolution, and most other familiar forms of political struggle, and yet I think it’s just clear, looking across modern history, that conservatism is nearly always embattled. Some ages are more embattled than others, but the posture is reasonably constant. We have a tendency, looking back on older generations of conservatives, to imagine that they were in a very different position, just kind of keeping an eye on a traditional inheritance that was already in pretty good shape. If they were sheepdogs, they were mostly just trotting around the pasture keeping an eye out in case any wolves should happen to wander by. By contrast, we see ourselves desperately trying to save a few sheep from a ravenous pack that is already laying waste to the pasture. Maybe we can’t even be conservatives anymore, because there’s so little left to conserve.

That view is steeped in nostalgia. And it’s mostly wrong. When you go and read earlier generations of conservatives, you quickly realize how naïve we are to think that we’re in some kind of unique position among moderns, fighting to keep the wheels on in the face of violence, social dissolution, destructive ideologies and the like. That’s basically the normal condition of principled conservatives; they always have their backs to a wall. And should that really surprise us, considering the ever-shifting nature of modernity? Is it not clear just on face that this “sheepdog” will, almost necessarily, be a somewhat rare breed in every age?

A principled conservative must continually maintain delicate tensions between freedom and authority, custom and innovation, compassion and moral clarity. He must learn to live with high levels of uncertainty, because the past is complex, the future is unknown, and he is somehow expected to mediate between them. He must maintain a certain aristocratic posture without falling into high-and-lonely narcissism. He must keep sight of the virtues, without despairing of the world’s egregious failure to inculcate or even respect virtue. These are hard asks. “Conservatism” as I understanding it has a certain intellectual component, and yet it shuns hard forms of rationalism and ideology. There will never be all that many conservatives in the world. Very few people even aspire to be conservatives in a robust sense.

Of course many people do identify as conservatives. I’m not planning to go around policing the term, and I do actually think many Americans have elements of a real “conservatism” in their worldview. America is an unusually conservative country. However, most people who identify that way probably have strong elements of “traditionalist” or “revanchist” in them too (or instead) —the noble and ignoble sides of a coin we might call “the past.” Conservatives don’t just like the past. They steward the inheritance of the past.

Conservatives love arguing about the nature of conservatism. I’ll probably say a little more about other definitions over these next few weeks. I have great admiration for Russell Kirk, for instance, and he clearly did much to define and ennoble conservatism. But I think there are some subtle differences between my perspective and his that are worth flagging. On Michael Oakeshott’s view, interestingly, I think I probably don’t qualify as a conservative. (You know, I never liked that guy all that much.) Another piece of this puzzle, mostly left out of this essay, is freedom. I care very much about freedom. I’ll say more about that too in coming essays.

For now, I’ll just leave this on the table. This is how I understand “the mission” as a conservative. It’s got an element of paternalism, but isn’t that true of almost anyone who understand themselves to have particular (and worthwhile) work to do in this life?

Tradition is precious. It has to be someone’s job to protect it.

Before I start talking about politics, let me first issue a disclaimer. Though I am about to discuss some more political themes, I am not going to unveil any radically new political platform or theory. No shining pathway will be illuminated towards a brighter and more just future. We have problems, but I alone cannot fix them. Just diagnosing them seems to me like a tall order.

My goal is far more modest. I want to suggest an angle of approach to political questions that is prudent and grounded. Possibly, that sounds a bit boring. Don’t worry! I’ll surely pick a few fights along the way.

Today though (in what was meant to be my Tuesday essay), I want to set something on the table. It’s just this. I think we are living in a kind of “fulcrum moment,” an age of particularly dramatic flux. It’s fairly obvious that what lies ahead will be quite different from what lies behind, though in ways that are hard to foresee. The apocryphal Chinese curse has found us. We live in interesting times.

Maybe that sounds too obvious to be worth stating. Then again, some may question whether it’s true. Isn’t the world always changing? And don’t people always have anxiety about the future? Also: hasn’t Tom Friedman made an entire career out of unspooling this exact point from his perch at the NYT?

He has, and I promise not to ramble on at his trademark length. I think, nevertheless, that his signature claim is basically true, and maybe even a bit helpful for re-orienting one’s perspective, in ways that are quite relevant to Christendom Reborn.

It’s a bit like this. If you find yourself suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed with nausea, and none of the usual remedies seem to help, you might start to worry. Maybe I have a brain tumor. Maybe I’m dying! Then someone points out to you that you’re on the deck of a ship passing through a violent storm. The ship, we’ll assume, is large enough that it’s very unlikely to capsize. Now you probably find yourself feeling much calmer, even if the nausea is as bad as ever. You’re not dying. You’re just seasick. It will pass.

Our age is rife with vicious partisanship, demagoguery, conspiracy theorizing, a fraying cultural fabric. It feels sometimes like our civilization must surely be broken in some catastrophic way. But maybe this is more like the seasickness: it feels terrible, but it’s not truly a deadly illness, just the vertigo that comes with erratic movement. Perhaps this too shall pass.

It’s hard to come up with metrics to test for “fulcrum moments.” The world is constantly changing, and there are of course many different ways it can change. Here’s something I’ve noticed, though. In conversations with people a generation or two older than me, especially discussing (for instance) their parenting choices, or how their kids have turned out, I often hear some version of this sentiment: “It’s shocking how much the world has changed. I didn’t anticipate it. I just figured my kids would do more or less stuff that we did.”

Maybe in some ages that would be normal. It’s not my experience of parenting, though. I think I and most of my peers have already grasped that our kids’ adult lives probably won’t be very much like ours. My own kids are now getting towards college age and I’m thinking, “Hey, look at that! College is still a thing! Here we go!” I really did wonder, when they were first starting school, whether we’d still be doing all this college-visit-standardized-test stuff by this point. Likewise, looking over the next hill, I see friends with 20-something sons getting married and think, “It’s still happening! Marriage hasn’t vanished!” Genuinely heartening.

In short, my perspective has flipped somewhat. I assume that my “normal” is passing. It almost feels quaint when it hangs on in particular ways. It’s hard to relate to older generations that acknowledge a level of complacency about many of their parenting choices (school choices, religious formation, advice about relationships or sexual morals) on the grounds that “I assumed my kid would do the done thing.” A done thing? You still believed in that?

I might be a little extreme, but fundamentally I think parents have moved with me in a serious way. We know that labor markets, marriage markets, even supermarkets have been transformed. We know that young people are “failing to launch” to a very sad degree, meandering through physical adulthood with no apparent ability or willingness to do grown-up things. Parents, because they have especially strong reasons to think about the future, are particularly attuned to the reality that they are navigating a major historical turning point, one of those transitional periods in which things change very fast.

Is this exciting? Disastrous? A mix? I’ll acknowledge that I don’t particularly love it. Fulcrum moments may precipitate catastrophic wars, the rise and fall of empires, etc. Still, if this is where we are, we’d best take the curve as gracefully as we can. I’ll leave the more proactive component of that for my next essay. Here I’ll just buzz through a few errors endemic to “fulcrum moments” that I think we should make particular efforts to avoid. On some level it really just boils down to “Don’t Panic.” But there are recognizable “panic traps” that are particularly worth flagging.

First, people living in chaotic periods are prone to a kind of Survivor Syndrome. Recognizing that many things are passing away, they latch onto particular things with a white-knuckled death grip, and act as though nothing else matters. Imagine you’re packing a small bag before fleeing from a natural disaster. You pack the things that matter most, right? Everything else gets left behind.

If people were holding tightly in this way to their families, communities, or devotion to God, that might be fine. Too often they choose causes of various sorts, particular fragments of tradition, nostalgic visions of the past, or utopian visions of the future. Realistically, Survivor Syndrome has a strong element of cosplay, a deep unseriousness grounded in too many years of comfort. If you were actually packing a small bag for a desperate flight, you’d maybe slide in a cherished photograph and pocket Bible, but you wouldn’t make room for yearbooks, teddy bears, or energy drinks. Most of the space would go to food, matches, woolen socks. Westerners today are exploding with luxury causes and luxury beliefs. There’s a strong element of cosplay even to their zealotry.

Let’s move on to zealotry though, because that’s my second “panic trap.” Fulcrum moments involve high levels of uncertainty, which is uncomfortable and even paralyzing. In such moments, people are extremely susceptible to oversimplified worldviews: conspiracy theories, political ideologies, half-baked religions. The appeal is obvious: they create the illusion that the ship has stopped lurching, at least for a short time. Even if the “diagnosis” is extremely grim, that may feel preferable to radical uncertainty. The problem of course is that they aren’t true, and may leave the credulous at the mercy of unscrupulous actors. In saner times, it’s sometimes possible to build healthy cultures in which gullible, undiscerning people can mostly get along without mishap. In fulcrum moments, there’s really no adequate substitute for prudent discernment, combined with a willingness to tolerate some uncertainty.

When that gets too hard though, there is a third panic trap: the suicide mentality. If the world were really ending tomorrow, what would you do? I’d try to get to Confession, pray a few Rosaries, and spend the rest of the time with my family. A good game of backyard football seems to me like excellent preparation for eternity. But no doubt many people, knowing the world was ending, would go on a rampage, looting shops or torching buildings. Why not? Nothing matters anymore!

People do terrible things when they feel like nothing matters. I think that says a lot about the mad dash towards socialism, nihilistic populism, and other modern maladies. Panic and despair can do a lot to erode healthy inhibitions. How often nowadays do we hear drastic political measures justified with the argument, “Yes, it’s non-ideal, but we really have no choice?” That’s panic talk. Be very suspicious of such people.

I started with my Taxonomy of Panic because I think it’s important groundwork for a fruitful political conversation. Our public square is distorted at every turn by panic, the “civilizational vertigo” of rapidly changing times. It’s poisoning our politics and threatening social stability. I’m definitely concerned about all of this, and I think it’s important to keep working the problems, but I also think one of our most important survival skills in such a moment is the capacity to remain calm. Panic makes for bad decisions. People are making a lot of those nowadays.

If panic is bad, what’s a good way to get through a fulcrum moment? My short answer is “be a conservative!” I’ll elaborate in my next essay.

A couple of months ago, I spent a week thinking about traditionalists. I do think of myself as a traditionalist, though I don’t plan to fight anyone for the label. I respect traditionalists’ right to define their own boundaries.

I would fight for the label “conservative.” That shoe fits. The longer I linger in the political world (at the fringes perhaps, but still), the clearer I am on what I think it means, and why it fits me. I’ll lay out the reasons this week.

A few years back, I was invited to a conference hosted by ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. If you’re not familiar with this organization, it’s an old and historically respected conservative institution that has long specialized in bringing conservative ideas to university campuses, particularly for the benefit of undergraduate students. William F. Buckley Jr. was its first president. It used to be a bulwark of fusionist conservatism, focusing on liberty, great works of Western Civilization, constitutionalism, and related topics. If any organization anywhere clearly merited the label “conservative,” it was ISI.

There were young people at the conference, as one would expect. But, as they told me, they didn’t like to be called “conservatives.” I was dumbfounded. At an ISI conference? How is that possible?

Also, I was almost afraid to ask, but… what did they wish to be called?

Nationalists. They wanted to be “nationalists.”

I found that quite disheartening. Perhaps even alarming. I do not assume that every self-described “nationalist” is simply a fascist, but nationalism is a very sticky thing. It has considerable potential to go wrong. Then there’s a further point, which is equally crucial: we still need conservatives. There is in fact a very real sense in which “conservatism” is a genuinely modern thing, a creation of our own era. But we still need it, and we need some share of our young people to understand why conservatism is needed. ISI seems to have shrugged off that mission. Let’s hope someone else picks it up.

Tomorrow’s essay will consider: What kind of moment are we living in right now? What explains the rising sense of panic that so many people seem to feel? On Thursday, I will connect this to conservatism and explain how it can help.

I haven’t done one of these in a few weeks; I scaled Christendom Reborn back to skeletal mode while I wrapped up all the summer stuff. This week I’m back up and rolling! I’m going to talk more these next few weeks about Christians and politics, and how we should think about ourselves right now vis-à-vis the chaotic political order. I’ll say more about that tomorrow. But for today, just a few thoughts on the readings.

Funny story about that. I looked them up yesterday, which I sometimes do on Saturday mornings, just so that I can muse a little on the passages and what’s worth saying about them. It actually happens quite often that I think, “Wow, these readings are so incredibly relevant to my theme for this week. It almost feels Providential!” Maybe divine grace is guiding Christendom Reborn! Or maybe I’m highly prone to confirmation bias. Maybe Scripture is just very rich and applicable to many things.

However you want to see that, I found myself reading about Ruth. I like Ruth, but the passage didn’t seem particularly applicable this week. Oh well.

Then I went to Mass today and realized I’d gotten the wrong readings somehow. Today’s readings are on the theme of:

You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.

Somewhere out there, I hear my integralist friends cackling. “Take the hint, Rachel!”

I can’t ever see myself identifying as an integralist. That term just has way too much baggage. For those unfamiliar: it’s a strain of Catholic political theology that emerged in 19th-century Europe, drawing, of course, on earlier sources, but positioning itself very self-consciously against aggressive forms of secular liberalism that were sweeping across the continent at the time. I suppose it’s understandable, given that context, that some 21st-century people have wished to recover “integralism,” but there are some very good reasons not to. Let’s just say that it fell into most of the traps one associates with traditionalists and reactionaries of that period—among them, serious strains of antisemitism and some fairly enthusiastic support for fascism.

Some defenders argue that we should be able to separate the core ideas of a movement like that from its prudential missteps. Sure. We probably can. (In some cases “prudential missteps” might be an excessively charitable description, but we’ll set that to the side.) But I think, at the very least, a significant rebrand is in order. And in any event, 19th-century integralism involved a level of rejectionism toward the modern order that just seems unhelpful and unconstructive.

Nevertheless, I do believe in the authority of Peter. It is, to my mind, immensely significant that the Church Jesus founded is now the oldest actively operating institution in the world. It has remained while innumerable earthly kingdoms have risen and fallen, to the point where Jesus’ promise that “the gates of hell will not prevail” seems thoroughly plausible. It did that, in part, by not hitching its wagon too tightly to any particular political star. We’ll get into that more in these next few weeks.

For now I’ll just say: politics is by nature a messy, angsty subject. It’s constantly shifting and changing, floundering over human weakness. It has neither the grace nor the gravitas of philosophy. One wonders at times why the world should be so complicated and hard. At moments like that, I try to remember Romans 11:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!

Let’s just keep that point in mind as we proceed.

This is starting to turn into a parenting Substack. I promise that will change next week; I’m pinioned right now between my editorial retreat, Back to School, and kids’ sports camps. So I’m again re-upping an essay for today, this time from Law & Liberty, but I’ll say a few things first because it actually pairs quite well with the one I posted Tuesday. It’s about football, boys, and the educated classes’ flight from a time-honored American sport. That really is the right way to put it. Educated Americans are presently fleeing from football.

Here’s a reality, which has become increasingly plain to me over the past five years. Within my own demographic, I’m becoming a freaky outlier simply by allowing my sons to play the sport. American boys in general are still playing in large numbers, which is why my sons can still play for their Catholic school. But beyond a certain level of education, parents increasingly won’t allow it. It’s not so much that the boys themselves are developing different interests. Many of them still want to play, but their moms often put down a foot. And it generally is about moms. Dads may have a range of views on the subject but moms feel growing confidence in insisting, “No, that’s not happening.”

Many of these moms are personal friends. I have to step carefully here. But I think I am stating something true. Moms are striking football from American youth, at least in more educated circles. How should we feel about that?

Often, a mom (or her husband, son etc.) will cite particular reasons for her deep misgivings. Maybe the kid had some major vulnerability as a younger child, causing her to develop especially strong protective instincts. Or perhaps she’s a medical professional of some sort and “has seen things”. Look, I really do understand. There are many worthwhile things to do in this life! And I’m certainly not arguing that any boy who doesn’t play football will become an emasculated weenie. But let me make something clear.

You don’t need a special reason to be shocked and alarmed by the raw physicality of football. That is a normal maternal reaction, especially in the milieu in which educated Americans currently live. As I relate in the piece, it was my reaction to my sons’ first experiences of tackle football, which thoroughly startled me given that I had already watched and loved this sport for many years. Football truly falls a long way outside the civilized-behavior norms for our present culture, and for mothers in particular, sensibilities revolt. Why are all our nice boys throwing one another to the ground? Barbarism!

Given that reality, I think things like the “medical professional” explanation are mostly obscuring the real issue. Obviously I grasp the reasoning: “this person has seen the grim underside of the business.” But this isn’t like mountain camping or days at the beach where it all seems like fun and happiness until you’ve seen that one-in-a-thousand unfortunate who got mauled by a bear. Here, the bear is front and center from the start. These campers came to wrestle the bear. In short, I can’t really think that setting a bone or treating a concussion would awaken any protective instinct that wasn’t already wide awake after watching a normal play.

I actually think, reading the stats, that football is quite a bit safer than the Normal Maternal Reaction would suggest, understanding of course that the players must be kids you know, not distant professionals, who are naturally far less real to us. I’m not denying that it involves risk. But boys are tougher than modern people tend to think, and we need to stop searching for science to convince us otherwise. Most people are quite startled, for instance, to hear that girls’ soccer, in terms of concussion risk, is within spitting distance of football. Of course hardly anyone is raging against that sport, because watching girls kick a ball around a field doesn’t trigger that same sense of alarm and outrage. The feeling that “surely it can’t be right or responsible to let our kids do this.”

On the ground I’ve found that there’s a river of what I think of as “anti-football pseudo-science,” scores of half-baked theories all pointing to the same conclusion: youth football is in fact far more dangerous than the numbers actually suggest. Nowadays, of course, those narratives tend to revolve around subtle, not-immediately-detectable forms of brain damage. “You know, new theories about sub-concussive hits…” Their brains are turning to jelly right there on the field, dontcha know. But you may also hear concerns about the neck, joints, spine, whatever. “Those boys will have injuries that they’ll carry with them their whole lives,” one woman sighed to me sanctimoniously on the sidelines of a cross country meet. She was railing against the barbaric practice of football and how grateful she was that her grandsons had been spared by their loving parents. This comes up sometimes at cross country meets, which are a bit of a magnet for “definitely not football” families. (Though I should note, lest I start a needless war here, that my own son’s cross country coach is also a football dad.)

“Injuries they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.” I mean, possibly? Then again, many generations of American boys have played this sport, and most of them made it to productive adulthood. In general, they did that quite a bit more successfully than today’s young men are doing. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but in my own view, it’s not entirely coincidental.

One can’t easily refute a half-baked theory prefaced with “this does need further study but…” Brain science is pretty mysterious. On the other hand, I find the psychological and cultural currents fairly easy to read. Even if they enjoy watching professionals play this game for their entertainment, educated Americans struggle mightily to make peace with their own sons playing a sport as brutally physical as football. They latch very readily onto “more dangerous than you’d think” theories because those give form to the “panic remainder” that lingers even after one has looked at the numbers. Sure, generations of American boys played this game and went on to lead healthy adult lives, and indeed a great many are doing that still. But then you watch a few plays and… hmm. I don’t know. This just doesn’t seem right.

I do not make my sons play football. As it happens, four of them are playing this fall (three tackle, one flag, the fifth is my runner), and they’re all in camp right now, so my car’s pretty stinky. I have always emphasized, however, that football is not mandatory. More than that, I have stressed to all of them, particularly as they get older, that while I am very proud of my eldest teen for sticking with a hard sport across his high school years, there are lots of possible ways to make me proud. Lots of things I would consider worthwhile. Football isn’t the end-all-be-all of manhood.

On the other hand, doing hard things kind of is, and I think a young man is at a serious disadvantage if he isn’t pressed in some way to develop physical courage. It will be much harder, without some such experience, to internalize the importance of perseverance, self-sacrifice, taking risks for things that matter. It doesn’t have to be football, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that your son can get an equivalent experience by, say, studying for a hard test. As I say in the piece:

Football is not the only possible “school of toughness,” but it could be the only one still robustly in business in cities and towns across America. Some days, I honestly think it is.

As I note, we couldn’t possibly invent football today, and it’s actually quite astonishing to reflect that 150 years ago, this game was invented not by miners or soldiers but by posh Ivy League elites. The world has sure changed, eh? In any event, I end up here:

Young men today are lazy, undisciplined, antisocial. They’re incredibly safe by historical standards, and yet they remain anxious and risk-averse, sometimes to the point of pathology. In the dark hallways of the manosphere, it’s clear that young men have an overpowering sense that manhood has been stolen from them, and they’re bitter about it, though they can’t explain with any clarity what has been lost. Surrounded to a historically unprecedented degree by choice and opportunity, they struggle to find the motivation to do even the things that have been considered normal for almost all men everywhere: work, get married, have children. Even sex is a “maybe” for men today.

Yes, football involves some risks. What do we risk by suffocating it, though? It’s not like anyone thinks the boys are doing fine nowadays. Note too what I said a few weeks ago about intellectuals and cowardice, and you’ll begin to grasp why I’m so dogged about defending this sport, even though my kids are not at all the sort one expects to become firemen, marines, or rescue swimmers.

It’s especially hard, I think, for moms to grasp these sorts of connections, because obviously football is not necessary for them. Physical courage is more gendered than most other forms. Women certainly have their own physical challenges and ordeals, as my Tuesday post addressed, but it’s different. For men, learning to use their greater strength, speed, and aggressiveness for others, applying it to goals beyond themselves, is crucial. They do that on the gridiron.

We all have to learn to live in our bodies. It’s not particularly easy for anyone.