Here’s an occasional guilty pleasure of mine: Chatting with Europeans who think that America is an inhumane, harrowing place. It’s basically all tent cities and McMansions, right? We water our gardens with the sweat and tears of the poor. Everybody’s packing, obviously, but you still never know when you might be spontaneously gunned down in the street.

When I was 13, my family lived for six months in Edinburgh, Scotland. Fielding my public school classmates’ questions was extremely entertaining. “Are any of your family in the mob?” “Do you carry guns in school?” “How many people have you personally seen murdered?”

Who could keep count? Yes, my mom is furious if I race out the door without my piece.

America looked to them like a terrifying, chaotic place. Maybe it is in a way. But life is terrifying and chaotic by nature, and after enough of these conversations, even my teenage self began to glimpse some of the things that set America apart. My Scottish classmates had obviously gotten some absurd ideas from Westerns and mobster movies, but we really are the land of the free, or at least the free(er). That remains true, and it gives me hope, despite the squalid, unseemly politics of recent years.

I’m not sure Americans themselves understand that exceptionalism with much clarity, so let’s get into it in this November series. How are we distinctive from the rest of the developed world? How did it happen? How might it position us to survive and thrive through the challenges of the next few decades? Finally, what does faith contribute to this effort?

That’s a lot of pieces to connect, so today I’ll just give a kind of ten-thousand-foot overview. Later on this week I’ll explain why the conservatism of the past half-century did indeed conserve something, though perhaps not as much as some hoped, focusing especially on the very interesting case of the Tea Party. Next week I’ll get to the question: Is there any reason to think a renewed conservatism could do better? Especially now, as the purple tornado sweeps through Texas and New York City falls prey to the Democratic Socialists? Obviously it would be rash to make confident predictions, but I think that it could, and I’ll explain why.

That will lead us to my particular hobby horse: libertarian pronatalism. Falling birth rates are coming for the entire developed world, but we are better positioned than anyone to meet the challenge, and, as I will argue, the way forward is to absolutely not re-wire the state as a massive pronatalist redistribution machine. There might be some helpful things the state can do, but we have ample evidence already that dumping money on a particular sector or demographic undercuts its energy, adaptability, and social respectability. This is not what we want for families.

Finally, I’ll circle back explicitly to faith, and Christendom. But I hope it will be clear throughout that faith is necessarily a large piece of this puzzle. Other organizations and cultural developments can surely help, but religious communities are the only non-state actors that can do what we need at scale, and in the West, that largely means churches. All sorts of things are up in the air right now, but this much at least seems very clear. There is no plausible path back to stability and cultural health that does not rely heavily on churches. Christians, we’re going to have to do some heavy lifting here.

Today is mostly for framing the conversation, though. So let me start here.

Among modern, developed nations, the United States stands out as one that has seen the most robust efforts by far to resist the growth of the caretaker state. The Brits, admittedly, have had their moments. Great Britain, as I discussed this last summer, was the birthplace of “godless conservatism,” that classically liberal tradition that celebrates organic order, human ingenuity, and the “little platoons” that sustain a thriving free people. It’s rather ironic that my own reflections on American exceptionalism first began to germinate in Edinburgh, the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment, where many of the operative ideas were first debated. I probably walked by the statues of David Hume and Adam Smith many times with hardly any notion of who those men even were. Belated apologies, gents.

But Europeans, in general, have long since internalized the notion that it is in fact the state’s job to meet people’s needs and guarantee some minimum quality of life. And they’ve largely accepted the trade-offs: less economic vitality, a nosier and more invasive state. They picked comfort, security, and social harmony over the ruthless and inhumane American alternative. Many Americans (especially on the left) are quite indignant that we haven’t done the same, as illustrated by the recurrence of “Life of Julia” fantasies. And many still want to traipse further down that path, as we clearly see in the rise of a new group of “socialists.” They’ve got the reins now, and I fully expect those folks to do some damage in the immediate short term, but they’re cruising into some very stormy waters. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to become Europe, even as Europe begins to fall apart.

Up to a point, and at least for a period of time, a prosperous nation can choose to translate its assets into a high-conformity, low-innovation, egalitarian social order in which life is fairly comfortable for almost everyone. You’re not going to be charting the course into the future, because that kind of society doesn’t facilitate entrepreneurship or excellence. It may not go great for you if you’re part of a countercultural religious minority. And in the mainstream, you’ll probably end up with a sizable class of people who work a little, hang out a lot, take up a few hobbies, and while away the years until they die. Does that all sound so terrible, though? It’s fairly easy to cast the European model as the obviously-humane choice: fewer billionaires, fewer despair deaths. Surely those are the right priorities?

But even if you’re convinced of that, there’s a further problem. It’s the birth rates, of course. You can’t sustain cradle-to-grave care for everyone when the cradle is being overshadowed by the grave.

Europe’s caretaker state is rapidly losing the capacity to sustain itself. It’s hard to see how it can be remedied at this point; the structural defects are too severe for incremental reform, even if European citizens were open to incremental reform, which they mostly haven’t been. You need a large base of young workers to sustain a massive entitlement system. But as people get comfortable and secure, they become less and less interested in taking on the burdens of parenthood, at which point the only real option is to import a workforce from abroad. That creates a whole new set of problems, especially in a social model premised on high levels of conformity and cultural homogeneity. Been reading the news about France lately? It’s going great.

Now, it’s true that the American resistance to the growth of the state has been messy, uneven, and often polarizing. I’ll get more into this in my next essay, but it seems fundamentally true that efforts to trim the entitlement state have been fairly successful when the cuts are perceived as affecting the other party’s voters (the poor, welfare queens, etc.), and wildly unsuccessful when the Republican Party’s own voters saw their “expected benefits” under threat. We all know the core problem: Social Security and Medicare. We haven’t been able to fix them, though Heaven knows, people have tried. Despite a decades-long effort to tame it, therefore, the sprawling entitlement state is still coming for us too. Dang you, FDR and LBJ.

You could see that as grounds for despair. But I myself think those efforts have paid at least some dividends, as I will discuss in my next missive. At the very least, Americans have more understanding of the logic of limited government, which may make a real difference. We also have a far more robust network of charitable institutions and churches. And, non-coincidentally, our economy is far more robust than Europe’s, which gives us more breathing room moving forward.

We are also, even still, considerably more religious than most of the developed world. I think that’s going to work out well for us.

I’m aware that this case for American exceptionalism will sound extraordinarily dated to many ears. How very rotting-flesh Reaganite of me, to go on believing against all evidence that we’re a free, fecund, God-fearing people as our birth rates fall and our churches empty. Haven’t we learned over this past decade that America is far less exceptional than we thought? Isn’t that jig pretty much up at this point?

If it is, then we’re truly in a pickle, because it’s increasingly clear that the European alternative is no alternative at all. But I think the more “exceptional” path may be worth another shot.

I’ll pick up there on Friday with a look back at the “libertarian populist” moment, which incidentally was my own entry-point into political discourse. What did the Tea Party get right and wrong?

On Tuesday I claimed that Election Day is no longer emotional for me. Perhaps I spoke too soon. Watching the Trumpians take their well-deserved pounding affected me more than I expected, even though I was unshocked, as a reader of James Heaney’s De Civitate.

Still. Wow. Talk about “voters sending a message.”

I wish there were some sort of election result that I could enjoy. I was genuinely startled by how sad I felt, watching one flipped seat after another, my mind traversing all the way back to those heady #NeverTrump days, when I still could not quite believe that the American right could go that far wrong. We weren’t really going to lie utterly supine in the path of a figure as unsavory as Donald J. Trump. Right? Right?

Truthfully, I haven’t paid much attention to the man himself in recent years. I long ago concluded that Trump is kind of a mirror image of the titular character of the film The Truman Show. Truman (played by Jim Carrey) thinks he’s just living a normal life, when in fact he is the star of a reality TV show; unbeknownst to him, the people in his life are all paid actors, and his day to day the stuff of water-cooler conversations across America. Trump thinks of himself as that guy, the star of a reality TV drama, the perpetual talk of the town. The rest of the world functions in his mind as mere props and supporting characters to his personal drama. I however do not wish to be part of The Trump Show. So I simply got on with things, tending my garden(s): Law & Liberty on one side, home and family on the other. It’s a good life, but even so, I’m grateful that I didn’t know in 2016 just how long and bleak this chapter of our politics would be. You’ve got to sip that despair-draught slowly.

Anyway, I think his show’s finally been canceled. Along with Republicans that allowed themselves to be cast as supporting characters. It’s not quite a complete wrap yet, but as a moving force in America, MAGA looks done.

So this is an odd moment: After a shellacking like that, it would feel unseemly to breeze right into the conference room with my Rebuilding Conservatism PowerPoint all ready. But I don’t want to wallow too long. Some of us have been waiting years for this page to turn. So, I’ll make that today’s topic. Can a page really turn for conservatism?

It’s hard to say. But give it a chance.

When Ross Douthat wrote the other day that, “Nothing in this sad story means that the new right is simply finished. It’s not like there is some other form of conservatism more attuned to late-2020s reality waiting in the wings,” I thought, “In the wings is a bit much to ask after all this time, but how would you know what might be built, under less hostile conditions? What potential good ideas or promising lines of development were smothered with the ‘don’t know what time it is’ banner? Who can say what we might discover if we finally break out of the Trumpian funhouse?”

I’m not entirely Pollyannaish here. I have truly spent many hours pondering whether any substantive form of political conservatism can survive the Trumpian era. And look, there are quite a few countries in the world where conservatism seems to be little more than a bookish club at the fringes, a place for a few oddball scholars to debate literature and political theory. That could become us. America has historically been different, and I used to assume it always would be, but... ah, assumptions. And yet, I still think it’s possible. Americans retain a deep love of both tradition and freedom. Maybe we can work with that.

I hope so. Because we’ll need both those things, as our entitlement state becomes increasingly unsustainable, and our demographic problems more severe. Many of the European conservatives I know seem largely resigned to the inevitability of dramatic social collapse and widespread civil unrest as their middle-term future. They can see that their fiscal and demographic problems are pushing them towards crisis, but their people show no will or ability to adapt. It’s going to go badly for them; they already know this. Is America still “exceptional” enough to do better? Perhaps even to pilot new political solutions that might in time be adopted by others? Again, I don’t know. But if so, I feel quite sure that freedom and tradition will both be key assets.

One of the truly infuriating things about the Trump years has been the way populists take time-honored conservative principles, slap abusive labels on them (“Zombie Reaganite”, “Conservatism Inc,” “the old right”), and treat anyone still developing those lines of thought as hopelessly dated. You needn’t even trouble to argue that people’s ideas are bad; they’re gauche, which is worse. Even now, after Tuesday’s drubbing, populist apologists race forward to tell us, “We were sabotaged by the old right, and the main thing is not ever to go back there.”

Back where? Does anyone even know what “the old right” is anymore? Could our young people pick Reagan out of a lineup? No one is calling for a zombie invasion, but we do desperately need a better, more truthful conversation, which re-integrates elements of the conservative tradition that populists have deliberately excised. That’s not nostalgia. It’s not a hidebound refusal to change. Adapting timeless truths for new circumstances is what we used to call being conservative.

And the truth is that the intellectual climate of Trumpism has always been pretty stultifying. It’s interesting to me how many traditionalists, even those disaffected with MAGA, don’t quite get this. They can see the surface ugliness, but figure that the movement has “good bones” which were never fully fleshed, due to failures of discipline or execution (or bad luck, or the nefarious old right). I think it’s mostly the other way around. Let me tell a little story here.

In 2017, when Steve Bannon’s “outside-the-box” political strategizing threw Alabama voters into a quandary, I was still nominally writing for The Federalist, although the relationship was pretty frayed. I mostly only sent them anodyne cultural pieces (because money! need money!), but the Bannon thing kindled something.

It was so ugly. I was genuinely appalled. Many will doubtless recall that Bannon used his (then considerable) influence to put forward the crazed and morally abhorrent Roy Moore as a Senatorial candidate in a very red state, spurring ferocious infighting on the right. The public defenses of Moore (including at The Federalist) were stomach-churning, but beyond that, the event threw the Bannon apologists into a frenzy. And I knew quite a few at the time. Some of my Catholic intellectual friends raved about his strategic genius and lightly-worn erudition. The word “polymath” got thrown around a lot. He was touted as the substance behind the figurehead, the learned mind that would ensure that the Trumpian Revolution amounted to more than cheap populist tricks. (They would swoon over other “idea men” in later years, most obviously J.D. Vance.)

So… I just had to do it. I realized The Federalist would probably reject me in a hot second, but the claim had to be evaluated, and somehow I felt strangely honor-bound send it to them. I’d been with that outfit almost from its very inception, writing well over a hundred columns. I had an established readership there. If it were still in my power, I had to tell them whether Trump’s brain trust truly possessed the sort of formidable mind that could stand on its own without the yes-men.

Bannon didn’t write much, so I spent several days letting him talk at me, in the car, the kitchen, doing yard work. Then I wrote my assessment, keeping close focus on that one single question. No advice for Alabama voters, no bitter rants about Trump. Just this. If we gave Bannon Polyjuice potion, and enabled him to pose as a non-white woman under an assumed name, could he (say) stroll into the Cornell philosophy workshop and hold his own? Could “the polymath” impress smart people not already enamored of him?

No, reader. He could not. They’d laugh him out of the room. He’s a dilettante in love with his own voice.

It was an absurd thing to do really, an obvious waste of time. I’m occasionally prone to these quixotic quests. I have to be clear though that I am not claiming to be a victim of injustice just because an outlet wasn’t willing to platform me. It did mean something, given our longstanding relationship, but obviously those decisions are their prerogative, and it was my own silly choice to pour time into a piece that would almost certainly be shot down. Meanwhile, I myself tell writers, “thank you, but no” almost daily. That’s not an injustice.

The point here is that I was a writer with highly relevant credentials who had built significant rapport with their readers across several years, and the question of Bannon’s intellectual caliber was genuinely pressing in that moment. They didn’t want it answered.

So, two further questions.

First, what kind of intellectual climate is likely to grow from a movement that begins by enshrining Steve Bannon as its Big Idea Man?

Second, did the movement grow much beyond that? What’s the best MAGA ever did on the level of substance and intellectual coherence? The torch passed eventually from Bannon to other figures, and I’m pretty familiar with the whole line of people who tried to step up and be Trump’s brain trust. (Many I know personally, or did at one time.) They all faced a severe structural challenge, namely, Trump’s intransigence. He doesn’t want advisors, only toadies and yes-men, so they’ve mostly been reduced to chasing after him while trying to make it look like they’re driving the bus. I’m not going to say that there were no interesting ideas in that entire landscape, but I will say that those are very suboptimal conditions for a fruitful, truth-oriented conversation.

The right has been so awful of late that it’s easy to generate explanations of Trumpism’s failure that leave its intellectual foundations unexamined. “If you’re starting a war, you should have clear objectives and some kind of end game.” “Try not to be racist, sexist, or antisemitic.” All good advice! But the fact that the fruit is bad should hardly be taken as evidence that the trunk and root structure are sound.

There are still smart conservatives having smart conversations. I don’t mean to suggest it never happens anymore. You’ll find reasonable concentrations at places like AEI or The Dispatch; smaller outfits like Law & Liberty, Public Discourse or Civitas Outlook try to do our part. I could name others. But when you get deluged like that, and find yourself at the margins, you may actually feel obliged to devote considerable energy to articulating and maintaining aspects of the tradition that are in danger of being buried entirely. Not because you’re hidebound, but simply because you’re short-staffed and working against formidable headwinds. It’s hard to build cool new things in that climate. Even if you manage it, will anyone notice?

And now, enough of all that. The moment of silence has been observed. Let’s move on and talk about freedom!

Election days aren’t all that emotional for the politically alienated. I feel a bit sad that both parties can’t have a bad night, but at least one will, so that’s something. Everyone seems agreed that it’ll be the Republicans this time, and they certainly have it coming. But I have no doubt the Democrats will gloat shamelessly, massively over-read their “mandate,” and seize upon the opportunity to make some awful blunders of their own. One takes for granted nowadays that resentment, deranged ideology, and a lust for vengeance are far more determinative of our politics than any prudent assessment of what might be good for the country.

But no, don’t go away! I’m not going to subject you to a torrent of bitterness. I may hate our political parties, but I’m not planning to move from there into a tiresome lecture about “getting what we deserve good and hard.” Because really… do we deserve this? Speaking for myself, I rather think I deserve better. I think the nation deserves better.

Of course, I grasp H.L. Mencken’s point: citizens of a democracy necessarily get what they deserve because that’s how the system works. We deserve it because we picked it. I do in fact feel deep frustration sometimes with my compatriots, and their willingness to be the pawns of the corrupt and power-hungry. And I’ve thought through those questions too. Once, a few years back, I put on my moral-philosopher hat, and wrote a careful, contemplative essay on the ethics of voting. Feel free to read it if you’re seeking that kind of advice.

My ten-thousand-foot view, nevertheless, is that Americans as a group really are better than their ghastly politics. I must credit my social scientist friends (thank you, George Hawley and Jesse Smith!) for helping me to grasp this point: the most hateful and deranged elements of our politics, though real and depressingly visible, aren’t particularly popular. They don’t represent what most Americans actually want. The public wants a saner politics, though it’s proven quite hard to build, for a range of explicable reasons.

One way to think about it is just to say that there are some very hard questions on the table right now, to which no one has adequate answers. Partisan politics tends to obscure that problem, because you don’t win elections by admitting frankly that “we’re all in the dark a bit here.” You win by presenting yourself as capable and wise, and the other guy as bumbling or malevolent. When unanswered questions loom large on the horizon, politicians get very deft at deflection and misdirection, which gives rise to an intensely performative and emotion-driven politics. This is bad, obviously; we end up with a political class that perpetuates obvious lies and sponsors initiatives so idiotic, we have to wonder if the architects themselves even believe that they’re doing something good. It’s all very sordid and depressing, and yet, I return to the above point: Americans don’t particularly like their political class. Though there are obvious exceptions, our demagogues in general are neither ardently loved nor greatly feared. They are objects of public contempt. We know they’re bad men. Why can’t we find better men?

My suggestion is something like this. We can’t find better men because a healthier politics must begin by reckoning with some fairly hard truths. Nobody likes being the bearer of bad news, which is understandable; if you’ve ever read, say, the Bible, you may have noticed that those folks tend to have stressful lives. But if truth-tellers aren’t very welcome, the public square will fill with liars. If the work that needs doing is deeply unpopular, clowns and charlatans will take over instead. If moral integrity is a serious liability, our political class will be heavily compromised. We must deal appropriately with the elephant-in-room problems that are distorting our politics. Until we can summon that courage, we will be ruled by cowards.

I’ll keep this one brief. Today belongs to the election analysts, so I’ll toss out a quick thought and bow out. Here it is: Our implicit “social contract,” developed in the post-war period, has become deeply dysfunctional and needs re-negotiation. We need to rekindle a more freedom-oriented politics. It’s the American way. It’s also the Christian way, or so I believe, and it’s maddening to me how so many Christians have persuaded themselves otherwise in recent years, even arguing sometimes that too much freedom is in fact our core problem.

Clearly people don’t always use their freedoms well. But to me it seems obvious that freedom will in the long run tend to benefit the people in possession of the one true faith. Do we… not think that’s us? A faith with a millennia-long track record of converting diverse cultures and shaping civilizations should not doubt its ability to hold its own under conditions of freedom.

I’m still proud to be an American, and I still think the United States is better positioned than anybody else to course-correct and thrive again. Europeans in general are more stagnant, more reliant on the caretaker state, less religious, and now wrestling with the cultural convulsions that result when you’re obliged to import a significant share of your workforce from abroad. We’re better off than they are. We’re much better off than authoritarian regimes, which are by nature not adaptable. But we need to “come back to ourselves” in some fundamental ways. Recognize and take pride in our real strengths. Rekindle our willingness to do hard things. Recover the sense of dignity we once found in being a free people.

Let’s say that “freedom” is November’s theme. I’ll say more in coming weeks about what I think this all means for us politically, which is not a Tea Party redux, nor a Reaganite redux, though I think both groups got some things right. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, because I’m not a megalomaniac. But I can at least frame certain questions as one who, at this point, truly feels no loyalty to either of our political parties. I love my faith, and I love America. I love Americans. We can do better than this. And for our children’s sake, we need to.

Vote wisely. God bless the Land of the Free.

Happy Halloween! These next few days are known within the Lu household as “the Death Triad,” our annual memento mori. After the sugar-saturated antics of Halloween, we move on to All Saints, singing our Alleluias with the Church Triumphant. Those festivities then come to a softer close on Monday, with the gently somber Feast of All Souls.

I love this sequence of days. I look forward to the Death Triad every year. I do genuinely love Halloween, with its impish, pagan spirit, which to my mind is a fitting opener for a death sequence. We remember that life is sweet (sometimes literally), and reflect a little on the monsters and myths that various cultures have put forward to try to make sense of the awfulness of death. Also, Halloween has shown some remarkable staying power as a neighborhood-oriented civic holiday, and that’s very heartening too. Go see your neighbors! Or give them treats when they come to see you!

All Saints makes the obvious point about death, which nevertheless does need to be made, lest our death sequence devolve into a despair sequence. “Don’t be too afraid! Stay the course like all these people did, and you’ll end up rejoicing in Heaven with them.” That’s a nice little shot of hope, and I always find the litany of saints particularly moving, because it feels on that feast like those great men and women are genuinely present with us as we invoke them, casting a benevolent glance on the still-toiling Church Militant. It’s a nice feast.

And yet, spiritually speaking, this all feels to me like preparation for All Souls. Monday is the day when it “gets real,” from the standpoint of a mortal being. We ate the candy, sang the triumphant hymns, and now are ready to fix our minds on death as fallen humans experience it. As a source of loss. A yawning, dark doorway. A painful separation. Salvation sounds great, but for us death is still very hard, and on All Souls, we try to stop hiding and look that reality in the face.

It’s clearly the least fun day of the Triad, but to me the mood is not so much mournful as tender. We visit the cemetery. We remember and pray for our own departed loved ones. Monday night I will spend a few hours at my parish’s Requiem Mass, complete with Mozart, black vestments, and my sons serving at the altar. I really do cherish these occasions when the men handle all the liturgical preparations, and I just get to rest in a quiet pew, restoring tranquility to my own soul. Contemplating the mysteries. Reflecting on eternity.

That brings us to the subject of Patrick Stewart, and Jean-Luc Picard, the gentleman-scholar who took Shakespeare to the stars.

It felt oddly fitting that his death should be announced just before the start of the Death Triad. I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation as a teenager. Every new episode was anticipated, and I have also have fond memories of staying up with my sister on Friday nights to watch the 10pm rerun. Then there was that time in college when I hit a rough patch and started comfort-watching Star Trek for an emotional boost. Worked great! It was an odd confluence of circumstances that brought a Shakespearean onto a sci fi show, but it turns out that was exactly the medicine some of us needed.

Gene Roddenberry was a secular humanist, looking to use space as a backdrop for illustrating his utopian political ideals. He wanted to fantasize about how super-cool technology could usher in a peaceful paradise where hunger, prejudice, and war were no more. Stewart strode right onto that stage and turned it into a production of Henry V. Where Kirk charged around the galaxy getting in brawls, Picard engaged alien civilizations with prudence and reason, showing all the sensibilities of a trained humanist. I have nothing against the “cowboy captain”: Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, and Kirk are great characters in their own ways. But in Picard, we got a bona fide old-world aristocrat, projecting the authority of a medieval lord. And people loved it.

It’s said that Roddenberry was vehemently opposed to the casting. He made the right call! Eventually, with immense effort, his producers wore him down, being generally of the view that you should find a way to say ‘yes’ to an actor of that caliber. Here’s the problem, though, with actors of that caliber: You cannot control them. They will make the role their own. Stewart did that, and effectively hijacked the whole Star Trek universe.

Everything about him projected classical excellence: his voice, his bearing, his hobbies, his expressions. The man grew up on his family’s French vineyard! And every beloved Picard episode raises deep questions about the human condition. I’ve been going back through the classics, reminding myself how amazing they were, and noting how certain questions thread their way through the entire series, with Picard offering different angles on them in different episodes. I’ll restrain myself and mention just a few.

In The Inner Light, Picard is mentally “taken captive” by an alien probe that allows him to live an entire lifetime as a citizen of a now-vanished civilization. Seeing that they were unable to save themselves from a crushing drought, the aliens created this probe as a kind of legacy, to show the universe who they were. Picard steps into the life of a young, married man, and ends up raising a family, cherishing grandchildren, and watching his loved ones prepare themselves for their anticipated end. The episode is masterful, especially because its most poignant message goes unstated: the life of a normal man, raising his family and loving his home, is the experience this civilization chooses to transmit. They didn’t make a montage of heroic deeds and technological discoveries. A civilization’s legacy is its people.

Heroic deeds do matter though! That point is made in Darmok, when Picard is again taken captive, this time in person, forced to fight a mysterious beast together with an alien who speaks to him exclusively in metaphor. When he recognizes that this civilization is obsessed with legend and story, Picard tells the alien the story of Gilgamesh, and thus they come to understand one another.

His single most famous episode is of course The Best of Both Worlds, which to me is an exquisitely sweet example of a humanist triumphing, not only over the Borg, but over Roddenberry’s Borg-like vision of humanity’s future. The Borg are technocratic imperialists who consume civilizations and convert their people into mindless automatons. When they integrate Picard, this becomes the ultimate test, both for him and for the Borg. Can the technocrats triumph over the Shakespearean? Is the mind mightier than the cybernetic implant? It is. Picard beats them, in a very human way. Resistance is not futile.

Could he have turned that ship any more masterfully? I normally roll my eyes at the notion of “actors making a difference,” but I think Stewart did.

A few years ago, my family rewatched the entire Next Generation series, which my husband and I had both loved as kids. It was his idea, actually, and I was game, but also prepared to find that my middle-aged self was a little less enamored of Star Trek.

It held up. I still loved it. Actually, I was genuinely surprised just how much I enjoyed it, and how grateful I was for a show that didn’t have some massive budget to blow on endless explosions and bells and whistles. When you think about it, they really didn’t have much going for them, apart from a great team of writers and a superb Shakespearean actor. What’s a show to do at that juncture but write some great dialogue and develop its characters?

The first couple of seasons of Next Gen are infamously not-great, and yet one must note that the show was bookended by two episodes in which the all-powerful Q collective puts humanity on trial, with Picard standing as its advocate. From the very start, then, it raised fundamental questions: What are human beings? Are they good? Despite our many sins and weaknesses, are there things worth preserving from humanity’s benighted past? It was the perfect opening for a humanist, and Stewart took that ball and ran very far with it.

Now he has passed on, boldly going where many have gone before. But in an age quaking in terror at yet another technological revolution, Star Trek: The Next Generation will outlive him.

Requiescat in pace, Patrick Stewart. And dear readers, enjoy your memento mori.

It’s nearly Halloween, which means of course that the stores are not full of candy, cobwebs, and creepy-crawlies. That stuff’s gone already, shelved to make way for the Christmas décor. Accordingly, I’m going to get into the obscenely premature Christmas spirit by giving you my take on It’s a Wonderful Life.

Everyone has one, right? Which makes sense, because that film touches all the cultural sore spots, raising questions about community, capitalism, and the decline of small-town American life. It’s the perfect proxy battleground for our “localism wars.” That makes it a reasonable place to go, following on my series of essays on marriage. Obviously, I believe that loving relationships are essential to human thriving. I’m into commitment. What about community, though?

I agree obviously that community matters. But I tend to think that human community is by nature an ever-shifting and many-hued thing. It should be built around shared loves, shared goals, and hard moral constraints. It’s not particularly great when community itself becomes the focus of a community. Here, I do really seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wendell Berry.

Let’s start with the film, though. Here I must begin by correcting a common mistake: George Bailey is emphatically not “an everyman.” George is an extraordinary man, the best man in town in fact, as everyone clearly sees. From his father (“You’ve got talent, son, I’ve seen it”), to Violet Binks (“I’m proud to know you, George Bailey”), to the shrewd and conniving Potter (who has no difficulty identifying his one true rival), George is easily recognized as the town’s most promising citizen. The board of the Building and Loan will accept no leadership but George’s. (“They’ll vote with Potter otherwise!”) And then of course, there’s Mary, the best woman in town, who “wants her baby to look like George.” More on her in a moment.

George wants to see and do great things. He dreams of skyscrapers and airfields, the chance to “shake the dust of this crummy little town from my feet and see the world.” What he does not want is to “play nurse-maid to a bunch of garlic eaters,” i.e., spending his life handling small mortgages for the citizens of a small town. But that, of course, is the life he gets.

Are we meant to blame him for wanting more? Many people do. Localists are deeply uncomfortable with this movie. They pen essays on George Bailey’s monstrous dark side, or, somewhat less preposterously, how Mary is the film’s true moral exemplar, as the clear-eyed localist, ever steadfast in her love of both husband and home. Mary is indeed a keeper! There’s some gender traditionalism in play here: the superlative man wants transcendence, while for the superlative woman Bedford Falls is “oh, everything.” But let’s not get sidetracked on that. Mary is a veritable miracle worker who picks George above “any man in town” (including Sam Wainwright) because only he can “lasso the moon.” Indeed, in Clarence’s dystopian alter-universe, this stunning woman becomes a lonely spinster quietly locking up her unvisited library, which is unrealistic but a clear signal that apart from George, no man is good enough for her.

They are properly paired. George handles the mortgages; Mary runs the town committees. George prevents Potter from suffocating the town under an exploitative monopoly, and Mary hosts the Christmas party. Together they save Bedford Falls. As the town’s First Couple, they naturally get to live in its grandest old home. Except they have to repair it first.Because it’s on the verge of being condemned.

This is not a movie about the emptiness of worldly ambition. It’s a movie about brain drain. Small towns need their most capable and driven citizens, but they rarely want to stay. As an immigrant with plenty of ambition, Capra well understood the hunger of talented men, and though he gives the film a happy ending, that adorable scene with Zuzu can’t truly bury the reality that Bedford Falls, for all its charm, drove its most illustrious citizen to the brink of suicide with its raw, relentless neediness.

A thousand sentimental Hallmark movies have painted small-town America in gauzy, Norman Rockwell colors, but those puff pieces are generally forgotten by the next morning’s breakfast. It’s a Wonderful Life is seared on the American psyche precisely because it doesn’t try to disguise the difficulty of the core problem. Bedford Falls needs George Bailey, but he’d probably be happier somewhere else.

Anyone who doubts this should note that George’s own ambitions are realized in the film by lesser men who were vaulted to worldly success by George himself. Even proximity to this man tends to produce greatness. Wainwright becomes a titan of business using a tip from George. Harry owes George for his very life, but also his college education and beautiful wife. These men seem rather happy! Nothing in their story arcs suggests that they’re meant to be cautionary tales. Wainwright is kind of a silly man, but then he always was. He seems to be living his best life now. It’s true that Harry, in the final scene, raises his glass to “My big brother George, the richest man in town.” It’s a joke, since they’re standing by a pile of money, but of course we’re meant to understand that his riches go beyond the cash. And yet. The town is still preparing a parade for Harry on the morrow. Their mom is all in a tizzy about it. No reason to think it’s been canceled.

Even Bedford Falls itself celebrates its military heroes more than the man who stayed and literally kept the rain off everyone’s heads. George’s life, we are told, is “wonderful.” But wonderful for whom? He reaps some real rewards. But he would surely have found great satisfaction in applying his talents to larger things.

The problem gets even harder than that, of course. Bedford Falls is at least a charming, pleasant sort of town, but small, insular communities aren’t always like that. They can be riddled with dysfunction and prejudice. Suffused in gossip and internal rivalries. Built around nutty religious cults or misguided political causes. Now obviously, as Wendell Berry’s novels repeatedly remind us, it can be morally salutary to be forced to live with people in all their flaws. If no one is willing to do that, we will all find ourselves alone. But sometimes we have to fall back on the word “wonderful” precisely because “happy” is a harder call. And in a free society that raises further questions. Don’t Americans believe in giving people the chance to “pursue happiness”?

Now, I want to give due credit to Berry here. His talents as a novelist were immense, and he clearly captured the beauty of the small community in very poignant ways. It can happen sometimes that a particular writer brings a lot of people to a true insight (“the modern world is super alienated!”) that you yourself reached long ago by other paths, and it then becomes hard not to be unduly dismissive when those people rave about him. Berry may be like that for me. In truth, I’ve read only a small fraction of his vast corpus, so in a way this isn’t even primarily about him, but more about what you might call his “secondary impact.”

He seems to have become a bit of a totem for the view that we must do absolutely everything to recover True Community. Quit our office jobs. Move to the countryside. Destroy our word processors. Religiously he seems to have been a kind of Christian, but quite heterodox, and very ready to throw the book at other Christians when they didn’t agree with him politically. He didn’t like divorce or abortion but was inclined to view those problems “structurally”; the real key is to fix our soulless economy, cease our wanton destruction of the environment, and obviously sever our soul-destroying attachment to our phones, computers, cars. Then we’ll be less alienated, our communities will flourish, and people will be far less inclined to kill their unborn children and abandon their spouses.

So I bring him up here simply because it’s helpful for illustrating my own position. I am the un-Berry. I contend that True Community, as such, is not the proper goal, for our politics, our culture, or ourselves. We cherish it when we find it, as well we should. But it’s properly found through our shared quests, our shared loves, “the things we do together.” When I think of my own happiest experiences of community, this is always the common thread. We took joy in each other, yes, but that friendship and mutual regard was shaped by what we shared or were trying to do. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Isn’t that the kind of community we really want?

This is not to deny that, like George Bailey, we are sometimes required to sacrifice personal happiness for something larger than ourselves. But I think those commitments need to be cashed out personally. There are things men and women of honor will not do, and things they must do. We confront those demands when they meet us. That might be in the form of a board saying “they’ll vote with Potter otherwise,” or an aged parent requiring attention, or two pink lines on a strip. But however it goes, we must live our lives as persons, not indentured servants of the communal collective.

I appreciate that this view has a built-in vulnerability: it demands purpose instead of supplying it. To the already-alienated it may seem like a counsel of despair. Community can’t heal what ails you! First you have to find purpose,then you can have community. Sounds like the view of an immensely privileged person!

In a sense, it is. But you already know what I’m going to say. In the Christian worldview, every human life isconsequential. Every person that breathes is on a kind of quest: a transcendent quest, imbued with noble purpose. Berry goes to church first and foremost to see his neighbors, and urges people not to fixate too much on dogma and creed. My own advice is to fixate on dogma and creed. Go to church to worship God, and you’ll find over time that the people who join you have become your community. And it will be a community built on something true, not just “we’re stuck with each other,” but Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem.

God bless the George Baileys of this world. We do truly need them. But if we want them to be happy, and not hostages, we need to think carefully about what community can and cannot do.

On April 27 of this year, I posted my very first Substack essay. Today is the half-birthday of Christendom Reborn.

I’ve been trying to think what would be appropriate to post for the occasion. Six months isn’t all that long, but it’s long enough to make some assessment of what I’ve got going here and whether it’s “succeeding.” Here’s what I can say:

1) On the day I launched Christendom Reborn, I set a totally arbitrary goal of getting 1000 subscribers within a year. As of this second, I’m at 395. So I’m less than halfway in raw numbers, but by social media growth metrics, that’s definitely “on track.” Huzzah! And warm thanks to all my subscribers.

2) I’ve put more time into it than I originally “budgeted.” I’m not writing for other outlets nearly as often as I used to.

3) I love it. I badly needed a sustained project of this kind.

I know that some people find it hard to understand why a mom with five kids and a regular day job would continue to write so much. It might feel like an affectation. An indulgence. Aren’t there enough “social critics” in the world already? Do you really think that you’re going to save Western Civilization, Rachel?

These are not stupid questions. We do indeed have far too many would-be influencers in this world. Here’s the thing, though: for certain people in this world, writing is almost a compulsive need. It’s how we work through the questions that trouble and fascinate us. We get ideas and start chewing on them, and if we don’t write them up they eat us from the inside like an acid. We write to communicate, but also for our own sanity. The ideas demand an outlet.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good! A professional editor needs no reminder that people’s desperately cherished pet projects aren’t always good. But sometimes you have to follow these things where they lead.

For me, the 2010s were a somewhat tumultuous decade, professionally speaking. (Personally speaking, I… had five babies. Different kind of tumult.) I accepted that an academic career just wasn’t possible, and started building some real traction and earning power as a popular writer. And then was thrown into total discombobulation when the political right blew up. Professionally, politically, but also philosophically, I was really in the wilderness there. For several years.

Of course, there were all the bruising parts: the friends who no longer spoke to me, the difficulty dredging up work, all of that. But one of the strangest things about it, I remember, is that it felt like every single person on the planet had a theory of what had happened, often advanced with great confidence, but after listening to them all I was keenly aware that I did not understand what had happened. I wished I had a time machine, so I could flash forward and read about us in the history books. Everyone was coping in their various ways (some admirable, others definitely not) but it just didn’t seem like anyone really had it. It was a lonely time. “Low and lonely,” you might say.

In January of 2022, I started working as an editor, which was a very good thing. I didn’t do it for personal therapy, of course! I did it because I badly needed the money. But in retrospect, it was one of the best things that could have happened, especially at an outlet like Law & Liberty that feels hardly any clickbait pressure. If our higher-ups have regularly reminded us of anything, it is that they don’t want us to be grossly partisan. Roger that.

In an editorial role, I was able to use my real abilities again, primarily now to help other people unfold their ideas more cogently. That was satisfying. I was still doing a lot of my own writing, but I guess you could call it “a little of this and that.” Book reviews, random cultural pieces. But I really think at this point that it was my work with other people that helped me the most. People tease me occasionally for this, asking how long it took me to recover from “the trauma of Trump.” Honestly, I see no reason to apologize. It was genuinely harrowing, there in the right-wing-media beast, watching so many friends and acquaintances break off, seemingly mid-sentence, to race panting and squealing after a demagogic figure. But that’s not the whole story of the political right, far less of America, or the West. And editorial work helped me get better perspective on that.

I still love being an editor. It’s important work, with real rewards. I may write a standalone essay on that soon, because people do ask sometimes, “What do editors actually do?” A lot, actually! I’d love to explain.

This piece is about the Substack, though. A couple of years ago, quite suddenly (as I relate here), this book idea popped into my head, and I then could not stop thinking about it for several weeks. I finally started writing those ideas up into a book proposal (“let’s just see where this goes”), which led to an agent and a bunch of rejection letters (“cool idea, platform too small”), which then led to this Substack. I’m still not quite sure what “the plan” is for Christendom Reborn, but I think it’s fairly obvious what happened here. After years of “lying fallow,” my mind finally reconfigured a whole bunch of disparate pieces into a shape. Which then demanded incarnation. The idea made word.

My humblest thanks, therefore, to all readers and subscribers. I know perfectly well that I’m not entitled to an audience. My middle-of-night Writer’s Torment is not your problem. I don’t take for granted a single moment of your attention, and I hope my thoughts have been worthy of your time. To me, it is a tremendous joy and blessing to develop some of my own ideas, and put them in a single place. If I am still in the wilderness, at least I’ve built a cabin here.

But I can’t end on that note! After all the high-flown talk, I need to justify my suspiciously clickbait-like title. But in fact, it is true that the immediate impetus for launching this Substack came from right-wing activist Chris Rufo. I was laughing this morning at this funny irony, so I might as well just tell the story. A fun little half-birthday remembrance.

Mind you, I pay almost no attention to people like Rufo, and I certainly don’t expect him to pay any mind to a small fry like me. In mid-April of this year, the idea for this Substack was already rolling around in my head, and I had perhaps written two or three posts, mostly in that middle-of-night “can’t sleep so might as well write” way. Launching a personal Substack felt ridiculously indulgent. How could I possibly justify the time? But the acid was eating at me, so I was leaning towards doing it anyway.

On April 22, Rufo took a very uncalled-for shot at my friend Elizabeth Corey, who had just made an appearance on our Law & Liberty podcast. I wrote a couple of sentences in her defense on X, went off to do something else, and returned to find my “notifications” feed unexpectedly exploding. Now, I’ve had the “being canceled” experience before, not quite on Kat Rosenfeld’s level, but certainly on a “that editor seems to have lost my address” or “Mrs. Lu, we’ve suddenly realized we don’t need you to give that lecture after all” level. That’s unfun, sort of the adult equivalent of being pounded by the playground bully and his goons. So I do feel a certain apprehension when my feed unexpectedly goes crazy, but this time, scrolling back, I was quickly reassured. Because there was absolutely no way this one was going to go badly for me.

Why in the world did he respond to a piddling little 3000-follower nobody? I hadn’t even bothered to tag him. But clearly he saw my critique, which led him to hunt down some very, very old record from my university-adjunct days, and retort:

If you’re so brilliant and accomplished, why couldn’t you get a tenure-track professorship anywhere? I might have began my career as a humble documentary filmmaker, but I’ve learned enough to understand that this is what academic failure looks like.

I’m no social-media virtuoso, but I know enough to have a little fun with an opportunity like that.

Honestly, Rufo’s preposterous pettiness was a remarkable gift on multiple levels. I was truly moved by the many kind things people said about me that day, and all the private notes I received. I hope I can live up to them. My feelings towards him are quite warm at this point! Though, I would recommend that he do better research in future. Literally everything he needed to know about me was right there in my X profile.

Anyway, basking in the warm glow of all that unexpected affirmation, I reflected that the Algorithm Gods don’t give me a gift like that just any old day. If you’ve got something to say, Rachel, now’s the moment.

I titled my first post In the Beginning. Still waiting to see how it ends.

If you’d like a little more Rachel Lu in your day, go read my review at Law & Liberty of Lois Lowry’s latest book. Written at the tender age of 89! She’s pretty amazing. Now there’s a lady who clearly feels a compulsive need to write.

First, a disclaimer. My post earlier this week on “Making Men Marriageable” was not calculated to provoke a rage-a-thon, for the sake of teeing up the present essay. It just sort of happened that way.

I’m not saying I was greatly surprised. This isn’t my first rodeo! But I truly was just unfolding my thoughts in what seemed like a reasonable progression, and it only occurred to me last night how the week’s teapot-tempest actually paved the way quite nicely to today’s piece. In which I will argue that Christians have ever been brilliant entrepreneurs of marriage and family life, and that it’s time to be that again.

I know! I understand how that sounds. But I promise, this is a very traditional form of entrepreneurship. It’s what Christians have ever done! I’ll get to that, but first, let’s say a bit more about this week’s little dust-up.

It’s not news to anyone that social media easily stirs up toxic gender wars. Even so, it was somewhat convenient to have them (slight cough) flower right here on my own page, a quick-reference reminder of how some people really, really aren’t fine with women’s full involvement in the workforce. That’s not even what the essay was about! I said nothing whatsoever about women’s careers. But it took literally two minutes from the time I clicked “send” to the appearance of the first comment explaining that the solution to the problem of non-thriving men is for women to consent to “be discriminated against” in the workforce. (I’m quoting, yes.) A sentiment speedily echoed by many others.

Aww, gee. And to think, just a few short months ago, I would click “send” on these missives and wonder for hours if anyone was reading!

I’m well aware of course that many traditionalists assume that the only possible road back to cultural health runs through a diminishment of female freedoms and opportunities. And of course there are a range of views here. Mormon adolescence (in the 1990s) exposed me to a fairly mild, homeopathic form of gender traditionalism: no one thought it was inappropriate for us girls to go to college, wear blue jeans, or vote, but we were explicitly taught in Sunday School that maternity and domesticity were our presumptive adult vocation. We heard all the Hallmark-esque stories about women who thought they wanted careers until the blissful moment when they first held that baby and then… etc. Social media gave rise to a harder, more radicalized kind of revanchist: the ones who may in fact think it’s wrong for women to wear pants or vote. (It’s funny how those folks always think they’re going to shock you with their radical countercultural positions. Friends, it feels like I’ve been having this conversation from my cradle.)

Of course people differ, and yet after a while, there is a certain dreary sameness to all the interlocutors who turn out, with a little probing, to be deeply committed to forcing women back into our place. By scaling back our legal rights. Fencing us out of valuable opportunities. Reasserting more commanding paternal or spousal authority. Something. They’d prefer if we went cheerfully, but you know. The details after awhile start to seem less important than the ethos of the thing, the deep conviction that women’s full-fledged inclusion in a free society has been a disastrous mistake that must somehow be corrected.

My own case is particularly funny because I tend to be cast in these conversations as some sort of harpy-girlboss crusader, eager to toss family life on the pyre of the nine-to-five. In fact, I’ve never even worked in an office. My five kids have never spent a single day in daycare. I’ve been interrupted countless times as I’ve typed this by boys demanding things from me. (And broke off halfway through to drive over to the school for a string of parent-teacher conferences.) Perhaps I should qualify as a good example of a woman who made family a high priority? But clearly not, at least not for a certain sort of embittered reactionary. For him, as I’ve come to understand, a person like me really is pure kryptonite, probably much worse in fact than the garden-variety girlboss.

Which actually makes sense. Because I have everything a woman is supposed to want! I should long ago have had that come-to-Jesus Hallmark moment, when I locked eyes with my newborn, and my career drive burned away in the fire of maternal love. Why the heck am I so gosh-darn employed (even at a job a man might want)? That’s just greedy, right? At least with the childless cat ladies, you can smugly reassure yourself that they’ll die unloved and alone.

I don’t wish to be harsh. I do really understand many of the sources of frustration that drive this kind of reactionary radicalism. But we really do have to get past that to go anywhere, so allow me to state the obvious, for those people still yearning for a more rigidly gender-divided world. You cannot have what you want. Human civilization is not moving back towards a world in which women exist in a second-class protectorate. You can try to create it in tiny, cloistered communities, but only at the cost of being marginalized as reactionary cranks.

There’s a good reason for that, in fact, and it’s not “feminism.” The fundamental obstacle here, ironically, is found not in politics or culture, but in nature herself. Woman’s nature just isn’t what the reactionary wants it to be. Given the broad conditions of a free, information-oriented, rarified-labor society, our energies and interests don’t just naturally all flow right back towards hearth and kitchen. And if you look at the world today, I think it’s clear that the yearned-for Reactionary Paradise isn’t attainable anyway, even with intensely repressive tools such as the ayatollahs use. If you try to achieve it, you just find yourself in a despotic spiral, jettisoning one supposedly-cherished principle after another as you race towards “nature most foul.”

Here’s the funny thing, though. For all the pettiness of social media gender wars, and the bitterness of Very Online revanchists, I am still deeply committed to traditional Christian marriage. It is a beautiful and transformative thing. My experience of on-the-ground traditionalists is dramatically different from the online torrents of angst. What I see on the ground in tradition-rooted communities (Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, all sorts) is a lot of cooperation and vitality. Men and women working together harmoniously, as spouses but also as colleagues and fellow parishioners in our churches, schools, and other institutions. Energetic people adapting and experimenting with strategies for arranging households and ordering family life. People finding effective ways to build community, raise thriving kids, and protect human dignity.

It seems obvious to me that traditionalists are able to do this precisely because their sexual ethics and marital expectations are so rooted and robustly defined, not by a chore chart or pay stub, but by deeper and more meaningful things. Their defining relationships are secure enough to adapt without collapsing. It’s also crucial, of course, that doctrine, liturgy, and all the other elements of a full-blooded religious tradition, animate community life more broadly, giving us a robust set of common goals and shared loves.

I absolutely believe that churches and religious communities are going to endure as loci of cultural renewal. And I think, as other elements of society wither, that they will increasingly be beacons to meaning-starved people of all backgrounds, enabling those goods to spill over into a broader culture.

But this is not truly new. It’s what Christianity has always done. We did it in the first few centuries, demanding sexual fidelity from both men and women, and stressing that spouses were moral equals, a divinely commissioned “procreative team” with a very consequential task. Marriage became a great bulwark for protecting human dignity, especially the dignity of women. It’s interesting to note that the late Roman Empire experienced certain struggles eerily similar to our own: falling marriage and birth rates, men and women not particularly liking each other, people opting for comfort and ease over the challenges and anxieties of family life. Christian marriage offered a powerful antidote to all that.

Later on, as canon law developed, the Church became a great force for breaking up tribal kinship networks, using marriage especially as a mechanism. By forbidding cousin marriage, and forcing people to seek spouses outside the clan, Christians pushed the West towards a freer and more expansive kind of civilization, where universities, religious orders, and free markets could spur further growth and discovery. Joseph Henrichs (a social scientist, not a Christian!) has explored this process in his fascinating book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Christian marriage is indeed inflexible in a certain sense, but that very rigidity has sometimes enabled it to drive productive change.

We can do it again. I’m very confident that Christian marriage is strong enough to withstand the disruptive ramifications of women working, and of expanded freedom more generally. My guess is that marriage rates will continue to decline for awhile, as “companionate marriage” (that soft, hedonistic modern creation) continues to fray, and traditional marriage continues to adapt. But marriage will rise again.

Matrimony is a beautiful thing. It’s a hard thing, sometimes appallingly hard, but I find it very moving to contemplate how this thing–pillar of civilization, driver of social change, bulwark of human dignity–is ultimately built on many quiet instances of personal love. On a man and woman refusing to give up on each other. On promises kept and hands joined.

This is the foundation on which Christendom shall be reborn.

Marriageable men are a hot topic lately. There aren’t enough! Perhaps you’ve heard. Many women who would like to marry are unable to find a “marriageable man” and instead raise children either alone or not at all. Labeling a man “unmarriageable” is harsh, but it’s understandable when you assess the complaints. What kind of life can a woman expect to build with a man who is unemployed, seemingly unemployable, and quite possibly wrestling with addiction? Men are getting fewer college degrees than women nowadays, which is really fine insofar as less-credentialed men are still finding gainful employment and establishing themselves, as some in fact do. Those men are now likely to marry college-educated women. But a sizable share unfortunately do not establish themselves, leaving non-college-educated women with very few options.

Unemployment and addiction are the most obvious problems. And while all forms of addiction are problematic, it’s worth noting in particular that pornography has become appallingly widespread, not to mention harder and more pernicious than ever. It’s not hard to understand why women are uninterested in being with men who have spent years marinating in media that grossly objectifies the female body. One wants to believe that the love of an actual woman would be transformative for such a man, speedily maturing him into someone who could look on her as a full-fledged person with her own complex ideas, hopes, commitments. One wants to believe that.

Women have plenty of problems too, of course! For one thing, they also are consuming porn in sizable quantities (albeit still far less than men). I myself also see phenomena like the “romantasy” craze as a kind of female counterpart to porn. Those books are, let us say, “emotionally masturbatory,” training women to expect constant, effortless emotional gratification from men with no real effort on their side. A woman with romantasy-trained sensibilities will be grossly unprepared to build real relationships with real men. And that’s really just the start. I am extremely interested in building and bolstering a more robust cultural respect for womanly honor.

Today’s piece is about men, however! I’ll address the female side of this equation in a separate missive, probably in conjunction with the publication of my remarks from the Women’s Convention. And though I have of course never been a man, I think I do legitimately have some standing to talk about them, as the mother of five sons. I’ve dabbled a bit in women’s advocacy, but I devote far more of my energies to “making men marriageable,” so you should believe me when I tell you that I truly care about this.

That being the case, I am overall pleased to see growing interest across the spectrum in diagnosing and addressing men’s challenges. Tell us what you can, social scientists! Presumably there are at least some things that can be done to make schools friendlier to boys. To create institutions and opportunities that can help young men thrive. At the very least, perhaps the public can be persuaded that overt discrimination against men in hiring is not good, nor likely to benefit women, children, or society at large. There is in fact a sense in which men are biologically “privileged,” first and foremost because their reproductive role is far less onerous than women’s. But that doesn’t make them “natural oppressors.” Societies thrive when they unlock their citizens’ potentialities, instead of resenting them for having those capacities in the first place. “Let’s not hate men for their excellences” is a great place to start in healing our toxic gender wars.

Having said all that, I think the data crunchers and policy analysts are going to run up against some hard limits in their efforts to help men. Masculine thriving requires a proper unfolding of masculine capacities, which in turn demands discipline, motivation, and the developed capacity to make good use of man’s (by nature) greater autonomy. You can’t achieve those things by turning men into a victim class, or teaching them to shill more savvily for their “rights.”

Further, I think our “man problems” are, unfortunately, a fairly natural byproduct of a social structure that leaves a significant share of men with very little to gain or lose through personal striving. You could say, if you like, that we struggle with “structural immaturity.” Undistinguished men are very much the losers of the sort of society we’ve built.

A man may do amazing things when he has something to gain or lose, but men require motivation to be disciplined and productive. When they don’t see prospects for themselves or their families, men tend to fall apart. In our own society, men with education, intelligence, and talent have a lot to gain, while obviously those with careers, social status, and financial security have plenty to lose. Those men are doing fine. They’re productive and highly marriageable. For men of limited intelligence, skill, or social status, the outlook isn’t so rosy. They aren’t likely to get fancy jobs. Their capacity to cultivate high status, earning power, or influence is likewise limited. Our omnipresent media ensures that they are constantly watching other people achieve the things they cannot, which breeds resentment. So it’s a challenge. Motivating non-talented men is inevitably going to be hard.

Now, I think it’s important to note here that this is not just about a lack of prizes. That’s not even the main thing. Because actually, most men historically haven’t had a lot of gaudy prizes in reach; they’ve swung a pick or leaned on a hoe, feeling lucky if they get to have a woman share their bed, and triumphant if their family doesn’t freeze to death or starve. But that’s part of the problem, right? We don’t let people starve or freeze to death. As a provider, a low-achieving man may struggle mightily to compete with the state. As a sexual stimulant, the average woman may struggle mightily to compete with screens and artificial substitutes.

The problem, therefore, is not so much that men are hated, scorned, and impotent to achieve anything. It’s more that the range of possibilities, for the lower-status man, are very compressed. “Winning” doesn’t look that exciting, and “losing” seems fairly tolerable. I say “seems” because to me, the sorts of lives Nick Eberstadt describes in Men Without Work sound genuinely harrowing. I’d much rather die on a battlefield than be a man in my prime, allowing my muscles to slowly atrophy while I play video games 15 hours a day. But the latter is far less frightening from the outside. We have become a society of lotus eaters.

The policy people have various suggestions here, and some seem worth trying. I’m not at all opposed, for instance, to opening doors to vocational training for teens who are not scholastically inclined. Youth sports can be great for boys, and they merit public support. And even though Charles Fain Lehman gets a little over-enthused at times about banning all the sinful things, I do think there are times when bans and restrictions are warranted. But this is mostly window dressing. None of it will meaningfully address the core, structural problem: too little to lose, not enough to gain.

Policymakers cannot simply create a space for struggling men by fiat. You can’t manufacture social respect, nor legislate it from the top. Not everyone wants to accept this, as we see especially in the people on the right who hope to use tariffs and subsidies to distort our labor markets specifically for the sake of creating “breadwinner jobs” for men. The first thing to be said about this is that it’s nearly always a bad idea to treat your economy like a thermostat, tinkering with the dials in hopes of achieving your desired social outcome. It doesn’t work, and there are always negative ramifications.

Here though, even the social goals should be truly offensive to anyone who truly respects masculinity. Men properly earn status by doing worthwhile things. Already, the state has undermined them by stepping in as provider-in-chief to their families. Now, even their jobs are going to be a patronizing gift from the state? You want to frustrate healthy economic development (i.e. make Americans poorer) in order to give men the privilege of punching a clock because Uncle Sam thinks it’s good for them. And this is supposed to achieve manly dignity? Can we stop digging here?

The initiative to “make breadwinner jobs” is silly anyway because America already has a serious need for more carpenters, tradesmen, cops, roofers, electricians, construction workers, and diesel mechanics, as well as teachers, EMTs, male nurses, firefighters. Those are real jobs (many of them quintessentially manly!) that we actually need people to do. I certainly want it to be possible for ordinary men to find respectable employment, marry, and raise families. But they can. That path very much exists.

Five years ago, in conversations about marriage, I was regularly being told that “men won’t take those jobs because there’s nothing in it for them, those hoity-toity college-educated women still won’t think they’re good enough.” I don’t hear that much anymore, probably because the data has clearly shown it to be false. Women are marrying those men. Apparently not everyone wants to be that man.

That’s unfortunate, because no institution, degree program, or labor market tweak will be able to turn normie men into superlative men. Not by worldly standards.

If only there were a philosophy, or worldview, that viewed every human being as intrinsically precious, ordered towards an exalted, supernatural end. One that sees marriage itself as a meaningful and deeply honorable vocation, an arduous but momentous quest. If only there were a place where human fatherhood was seen as surpassingly noble, analogous to God’s own providence over the world. If only.

It’s always seemed oddly appropriate to me that the motto of the same-sex marriage movement was “love is love.” This is a tautology, of course. And as any beginning logic student can tell you, a tautology (though true!) doesn’t explain anything.

It was meant to be romantic. “Let’s not judge and classify people. Let’s just recognize that everyone needs love and intimacy and affirm their efforts to find it.” Everyone does need love and intimacy, but they seem to be scarce commodities nowadays, so here’s a quick question. Has that become more or less true in the years since Obergefell?

Mind you, I’m not positing some simple or direct causal relationship, far less suggesting that we could restore a healthy marriage culture by rolling back a SCOTUS decision. Forcing a re-litigation of that issue, right now and in our present climate, would be a spectacularly bad idea. But I do really think that the energy that pushed it through in the first place had a great deal to do with the deep sympathy people feel nowadays for the fear of being alone. Because we are increasingly alone. Unfortunately, the movement itself exacerbated the problem, becoming the Defining Cause for a whole generation and persuading them that “I’m a little fuzzy on this marriage business, but I do at least know that whatever it is, it must be something two people of the same sex can do.”

I don’t think that was helpful. Love is love, obviously, but we aren’t simply born as good lovers; we have to grow into that. We learn it across years of being asked to shoulder moral responsibilities, which ideally should increase in weight as we develop the capacity to carry them. We grow morally by striving to be better friends, siblings, sons and daughters, and community members, eventually adding new roles such as “colleague” and “adult citizen.” But particularly in marriage, the most serious and deliberate of human relationships, it is vital to commit ourselves up-front to “doing this right.”

That’s quite hard to do if one cannot answer the question: What are we doing here?

Young people are retreating from marriage at an alarming rate. In 1960, only 11% of young men were still unmarried by age thirty; today it’s nearly half. Pew tells us that as of 2021, fully a quarter of 40-year-old American adults still have never married. It’s not that they want to be alone. A sizable majority (69%) say they would like to marry, but that they can’t find the right person or situation.

I don’t imagine many of those people would see this as a definitional problem. They have a sense of what they want from marriage: romance, companionship, emotional support. But they’re like people who desire “professional success,” understand that mainly in terms of status and financial security, and wander around applying for every high-level job they can find. It doesn’t work like that, kids. You’ve got to build a resume and some skills. You’re confusing the rewards of the job with the job itself.

In a similar way, adults in their late 20s or 30s have great difficulty finding that perfect person who is loving and fun to be with, and slots right into the life they’ve already built for themselves. Marriage isn’t a “besties with benefits” program. Neither is it a perquisite that gets rolled into your first big signing bonus.

The good news here is that we have successfully preserved much of the core structure of traditional marriage, despite all the social upheaval of the past several decades. Exclusivity, fidelity, and permanence are still widely embraced as defining features of marriage. When a couple announces their engagement, we assume that their plan is to build a life together, centered around an exclusive sexual relationship. People differ in their tolerance of divorce and spousal abandonment, but hardly anyone thinks it’s appropriate to intend that on the day of the wedding. Polygamy and open marriage put a bit of pressure on this model from the outside, but they don’t seem to be mainstreaming to any noteworthy degree. Moral judgment of those phenomena may have ebbed, but they just aren’t what most people want.

The bad news is that we now find ourselves with a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Fidelity and permanence are pretty big asks, especially “until death do us part.” If you’re going to push all your chips to the center that way, you want to be sure the other person is doing the same. Now though, we see the weakness of a “capstone” or “companionate” model of marriage. What’s the glue? How do we set it up to ensure that both spouses pay the buy-in? That returns us to the question: What are we doing here?

Historically (but still for many people today) the answer was simple. A married couple is a procreative pair. A baby-making team. Essentially every human society has made a point of joining man and woman, with a ceremonial pomp that has no real parallel in any other human relationship, for the obvious reason that man plus woman equals baby. And that momentous reality creates a lot of further need: babies need care, young mothers need protection and support, fathers need a secure connection to offspring they might otherwise never know. Seems like we’ve got a lot of complex but dovetailing interests on the table. Here comes the bride!

The fact that male-female intimacy naturally leads to new life gives it both momentous social significance and a unique emotional character. That’s true before the baby exists, or even if it never does. When a woman says “yes” to a man, she is opening herself to bearing his child, an utterly transformative event for her but also for the universe. That’s just what sex is. And the reality lingers in our psychology no matter what steps we take to bury or efface it. That’s the glue, friends. Any effort to re-engineer marriage entirely without that component is going to struggle to hold. It just won’t be sticky enough.

I’m talking like a Catholic now, which I know not everyone likes, but before I descend from my soapbox, let me make one more point about Catholics and our open-to-life, no-contraceptives-and-no-divorce radicalism. Though there is obviously very substantial overlap with the teachings of other religious traditions, it’s hard to find a better example than Catholicism of a faith with a very well-developed theology of marriage that is radically built around the moral gravity of sex, with its awesome life-producing power. Most people find the demands of this view a bit much, which I understand completely, but even if that’s you, take a moment to appreciate the upsides.

Catholic orthodoxy is extremely stern about the moral implications of sex and marital commitment. It pushes us into some extreme-seeming positions that many people find abhorrent, and even the relatively “healthy and normal” case can look pretty radical-fringe by modern standards. Along with that though, Catholicism is remarkably relaxed about most of the other things that religious traditionalists like to use to make marriage stickier, e.g. gender roles, gendered clothing, patriarchal privilege. Of course at the fringes you can find particular Catholics doing kooky things, but that’s pretty much on their own initiative. The Church isn’t continually trying to browbeat women into submitting to their husbands’ despotic authority. We don’t get hot and bothered about women having advanced degrees or careers. There are no set rules about who occupies which space at the dinner table, or who is permitted to change diapers. You just don’t need all of those reactionary accretions when The Mission itself is so hard. If you know on the day of the wedding that you might be in the delivery room together nine months later, that’s a very high buy-in, powerful enough to cut through the marital Prisoner’s Dilemma. Marriage is your quest, not your capstone, and your spouse is the other sworn member of your Fellowship.

I’m not exactly proffering this as the solution to the erosion of marriage. It is in fact a very effective solution, but most people won’t do it, because it’s too hard. I’m afraid I may sound self-congratulatory here, but please trust me that I mean this quite sincerely: I don’t think it’s realistic to expect many people to choose such a difficult path, unless bolstered by serious religious and moral conviction. This essay isn’t meant primarily as a personal reflection, so I won’t ramble on about (say) what it’s like to give birth three times in four years, but… not easy. There were many times when I prayed, in effect, “Lord, I can’t do this, it’s too hard.” I would have quit, except I didn’t, because in my own mind that would effectively have made me a failed human being. But even though I am deeply grateful for my family and my faith (and will happily confirm that the long-term rewards are rich), I don’t need an explanation of why people aren’t racing to sign up for this marital model. Come on in, folks! The water is ice cold.

My considered view here is that something like the traditional Catholic view, though gloriously consistent and deeply meaningful, is too demanding to be fully realized as a normative model in fallen human societies. Most people won’t commit to it. It can nevertheless supply a kind of scaffolding for social practices that deviate at certain points (where the ask just seems too hard), holding the center without demanding that everyone attach themselves directly to it. All of those deviations carry costs, of course. They’ll leave casualties. Some human societies have stabilized marriage by winking at adultery or prostitution or divorce. Sometimes women have been placed in degrading or just very restricted social positions. In the ancient world infanticide was common; polygamy has been regarded by many societies as a necessary mechanism for ensuring all women have a male protector.

Our society is different. Women have much higher status here, so we aren’t going to subjugate them. (Sniff.) We do in fact value marital friendship and companionship very highly, and we also value individual freedom, so a stringently role-defined marital model won’t work well for us. Now comes the crucial question: What might work for us?

I’ll pick it up there next week.

We had a great time in the corn maze yesterday, and were sad to bid the grandparents farewell this morning. But maybe it’s just as well not to be in the same house tonight as Notre Dame faces off against my parents’ alma mater. I love you, Cougars! But, Go Irish.

As my Dad said before leaving, “Hey, there’s not much at stake here, except the question of which is the One True Faith.” Indeed.

“When did you change your position on marriage?”

It’s not a question I get asked all the time, but I suspect more have wondered than asked. That’s understandable, because I hang with the libertarians now, but in the lead-up to Obergefell I was a pretty staunch marriage traditionalist. Those were the novice years, when words flowed freely and sloppily, and since marriage happened to be the burning issue in America at the time (and one on which I had well-defined views), I wrote quite a bit on the subject. I warmly invite you to not go looking for those pieces.

Not because I was hateful and homophobic. (I really don’t think so, but more on that soon.) There are other reasons a writer cringes when revisiting her maiden efforts. What I’m saying here is that my engagement with politics really did begin on the culture-warring right. And the topic of the hour was marriage.

In those days, marriage traditionalists were the scum of the earth. We were right over there with the white nationalists, the antisemites, the raging sexists. Actually we were raging sexists, dontcha know, and every bit as bad as the racists and skinheads to whom we were regularly compared. In my graduate days (at Cornell! Go Big Red?), I remember hearing peers discuss the subject, reflecting on whether it was reasonable to allow marriage traditionalists to teach in a mainstream university. (Would gay kids feel safe in that classroom?) No comment, friends. By the time I started freelancing, I had basically accepted that people like me had no future in academia, but even as a two-bit opinion writer I assumed that the culture-warring right was my only refuge. Who else would tolerate a one-man-one-woman bigot like me?

So, that was then. Looking back with the benefit of age, wisdom, an experienced editorial eye… I can see that Younger Me was naïve. Caught up in the excitement of the moment. Gosh, I’d like to go back and edit some of her stuff. I had some bruising lessons still to learn about politics, populism, religious conservatives. And I’ve “evolved” on many subjects over the years, but... not really on marriage. I never stopped being a marriage traditionalist; the world just moved on and stopped caring.

Now, I will say that my younger, culture-warring self probably attached too much significance to that particular cultural battle. The early 2010s felt to us like a clutch, civilization-defining moment (which is always the mood of the dewy-eyed culture warrior) but it wasn’t as true as we supposed. I’m not too deeply ashamed of that though, because I remember why it felt that way. Partly, of course, it’s just that young people are young, and it was my first full-bore experience of the ugliness of politics, which can easily inspire some panic. Aging leftist culture warriors like Frank Bruni, who once led the charge for “marriage equality,” like to remember their own younger selves as civil, high-minded cultural reformers, entirely unlike today’s unruly young ideologues, but that… is not how I remember it.

But this wasn’t just about the nastiness of politics. Marriage is absolutely one of the central pillars of civilization; we were right about that. It requires significant legal and cultural support to flourish. We were right about that too. Making marriage into a testing ground for exploring questions about personal identity is completely bonkers, as we clearly and correctly saw. I still remember when Minnesota put the issue on the ballot, and almost every yard on my street was marked with an ugly orange sign reading: “Don’t Limit the Freedom to Marry.” I joked to everyone (except the neighbors) that I wanted to have one printed depicting a ball and chain, and the message: “Marriage Has Nothing To Do with Freedom.” (It’s not quite true, but like a Buddhist koan, might have produced a salutary kind of puzzlement.)

The problem, in short, was that our social fabric was clearly eroding, and we apparently weren’t allowed to do anything about it. We weren’t even allowed to have an intelligent conversation about why it was happening! That was, to put it mildly, concerning.

Let me be clear here: the question of how gays and lesbians can flourish in modern society is genuinely important. Like nearly everyone, I’ve had many gay and lesbian friends across my life, and I want them to be happy and thrive. I could, if asked, discuss how my own views on sexual ethics should be applied to the case of a person who is attracted exclusively to their own sex. But no one needs to ask, nor take my advice if they do. As a Humanae Vitae-embracing Catholic, I am myself in a very small minority in my views on sexual ethics. Hardly anyone wants my advice! I don’t take that personally. We are fallen beings. We spend a lot of our lives muddling through as best we can. I can generally feel sympathy for most anyone who is trying to handle their commitments and relationships honorably, and as I have written before on this Substack, I always remember that sex is not safe, no matter how you handle it. My own experience of marriage and maternity amply confirms this.

The sense of urgency I felt in the Marriage Moment had nothing to do with distress over same-sex couples building lives together. I had no interest in shunning, shaming, or re-instituting sodomy laws. It just seemed like we were taking marriage, the strongest and most enduring of social glues, and tossing it casually over our shoulders in homage to “identity” or “personal expression.” This seemed unconscionable. How can our civilization survive without marriage? But how can we preserve it when we don’t seem to know what it is?

Now, the truth is, people deal regularly with things they don’t fully understand. (What is time, gentle reader?) But there was at that moment a kind of aggressive, willful nihilism surrounding the subject of marriage, to the point where it became impermissible to ask or honestly discuss questions like: What is this thing we call marriage? Why do we have it? What does it require of us? What does it do for us? What counts as success or failure in this sphere? How should law and culture work together to preserve this vital institution?

Would even Bruni claim that marriage reformers were open to broad-minded, civil discussions of those questions? I’m not sure, but take it from me: they were not. I reiterate once again that I did not worry, but rather assumed, that being “outed” as a marriage traditionalist would scuttle the ambitious career I was at the time attempting to pursue. Civil conversation was clearly not on the table. But hey! All they were doing was tearing down a millennia-old assumption of practically the entire human race. Why bother to think that through?

Before I ride too far on my high horse though, let’s get to the points where I was wrong. I think I did, at least in my most zealous moments, view that fight as some sort of Last Battle for Marriage, which in retrospect was fairly silly. I was primed for it, having been raised in socially conservative spheres where it was a commonplace that marriage, within mainstream culture at least, was just sort of disintegrating. That’s true in certain demographics, but marriage has not vanished, nor will it. It’s too necessary to go away.

On an empirical level, marriage clearly has not vanished, or even substantially changed. Fewer people are doing it, but for those that do the “rules” haven’t shifted all that much: fidelity and permanence are still the mainstays. Adultery still ranks as the least socially acceptable (legal) behavior in American life. We are perpetually teased with the possibility that polygamy is about to take the nation by storm (or perhaps it’s “open marriage,” or free love communes) and publications run titillating feature stories on those phenomena, but they read the same today as they did ten years ago (or twenty, or thirty). I suspect these will always be fringe, for the same reason that the “Tide Pod Challenge” was short-lived. It’s dumb and self-destructive, and the truth is that traditional, heterosexual marriage is the arrangement best suited to the freedom and individualism that Western people value. (So, fine. Marriage does have something to do with freedom.)

I really believe that there’s a kind of Marital Darwinism in play here: individuals, sub-cultures, or societies that figure out how to sustain marriage as a viable institution will ultimately dominate those that don’t. It’s not just about “the hand that rocks the cradle.” That’s a factor, but it’s also just true that marriage functions as a kind of core social infrastructure for a healthy society. If you jettison it, or allow it to disintegrate, your “hot mess to productive citizen” ratio tilts in an unfavorable direction. It will survive because it works. I absolutely believe there is a causal relationship (albeit diffuse) between the destructive zeal of the marriage reformers, and the many young people who are unhappily alone today. Love did not win that round. But marriage is still very much a thing, and it’s not going anywhere.

I was wrong about another thing. Completely wrong. I figured, based on my youthful experiences, that marriage traditionalists would be permanently consigned to the margins, either skulking along incognito, or else cloistering themselves away in Ben-Op bunkers. It was astonishing to me how quickly that page turned after Obergefell. Two years later the political right had gone to pieces, I was persona non grata among many of my old friends (because Trump), but The Week was willing to run me, and nobody cared that I had spent several years publicly crusading as a marriage traditionalist. That was some serious whiplash. And it was dramatically underscored every time I wrote something that angered The Week’s leftist readers. They’d go back into the archives of The Federalist, hunting for things that could be used to publicly humiliate me, and they’d trot out stuff on climate change, policing, critiques of Critical Race Theory. No discussion of my (many) columns defending traditional marriage. That chapter was over, apparently. Finis.

I’ve reflected many times on what it all means. There are lessons about cultural mania and groupthink. There are lessons about buying into lazy, monocausal social narratives. I suppose in the end, my key takeaway is just that marriage is simultaneously a very dynamic thing, and also astonishingly stable. The details need to be adjusted constantly, and when we fail to do that the price is simply… a lot of ruined lives. For individuals or communities, this is an enormously consequential thing. Whole societies can be destroyed or severely weakened by the decline of marriage and family.

But marriage, the thing itself, is too bedrock to be destroyed by a court case or activist movement. It will adapt and thrive again. And those who figure out how to adapt it will likely own the future.

In that sense, we marriage traditionalists were well ahead of the curve. We didn’t have fully-fleshed answers, but at least we grasped the problems, far better than the Mark Tushnets or Frank Brunis of the world. And the future can still be ours.

This will probably be my only post for this week, because my parents are visiting, my kids are on their fall break, and I’m picking up some slack for colleagues at Law & Liberty who are helping Liberty Fund host the esteemed Mont Pelerin Society. Next week though, I’ll say a little more about why marriage is such a vital institution, how I see it evolving, and whether anything can be done about the infamous “birth dearth.”

Meanwhile, picture me tearing through corn mazes with my parents and five children. We can still have nice things, people. Dare to dream.

As someone who cheerfully owns the moniker “Rotting-Flesh Reaganite,” I might be expected to love Law & Liberty’s annual “Conservatism and Liberty” conference (which took place last week), at which we read a bunch of mid-century conservative intellectuals. And I do! I’m talking Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, F.A. Hayek, Robert Nisbet, Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott etc. All those august twentieth-century conservative thinkers who laid the groundwork for Reaganism.

Even though I love this conference, though, and hold all those gentlemen in high esteem, I may in this essay cause some surprise here by saying some critical things. There is a sense in which I, Rachel Lu, card-carrying Rotting-Flesh Reaganite, think we need to move beyond those people. Although, as it turns out, my own critique is almost a complete inversion of the one normally heard from postliberals.

I will also explain in this essay why I love Frank Meyer, despite agreeing with many of the usual critiques of him, including some recently published in response to Stephanie Slade’s book. And apparently I’ve transmitted that love across generations, because the art here is actually a copy of the famous Meyer photograph, done in art class by one of my sons. He’s a fan too.

So a year ago, when I was returning from this same conference, I was musing on two things. First, why can’t we have this caliber of conversation now? I’m not saying we don’t still have some smart people, but the conversations of this period seem so much better than the ones we’re having now. In a related vein, I was overcome with indignation at the ludicrously false criticisms modern detractors tend to lob in the (proto)-Reaganites’ general direction. Seriously, could they be any more wrong?

New Right friends like to tell me, for instance, that mid-century conservatism had a blind spot in failing to foresee the impending collapse of marriage, family, and community life. That it didn’t anticipate anything nearly as bad as modern-day leftist ideologies (wokeism, Third Worldism, whatever). That it blithely took for granted the robustness of religious faith in America, whistling right past the graveyard as the churches emptied. They sure were happy campers, those mid-century conservatives!

Except they weren’t at all. The mood of these thinkers tends to range from “wistful resignation” to “apocalyptic despair.” You’ve got your godless conservatives (Oakeshott, Scruton) putting a brave face on late-stage modernity, enjoying their symphony orchestras and rose gardens while they can in what they seem to perceive as the twilight of the West. You’ve got your moral conservatives (Kirk, Weaver) actively tearing their hair out over that same decline. Nisbet explains how we’re in the late stages of a spiral that’s been sucking us downward since the Middle Ages. That’s Weaver’s thesis too, obviously. And Hayek and Meyer chime in to remind us how we’ve all become serfs of the administrative state.

These men wrote volumes on all the declinist trends that they are regularly accused of missing. They were intensely fixated on the decline of faith and family, the collapse of moral standards, the malevolent influence of political ideology. They absolutely anticipated the likelihood of terrible things to come. Nothing about wokeism or Third Worldism would surprise them in the least. I understand that Reagan himself had a somewhat sunnier personality, as did W.F. Buckley, which may now obscure the gloom of the brain trust, but trust me. Plenty of storm clouds. They didn’t miss anything.

But actually, that’s not quite true. This year, re-reading the same texts, I found myself reflecting that the mid-century conservatives did have some major blind spots. I’m thinking now about the positive things! Wasn’t this mid-century period rather a good time for American culture, at least in some important ways? Religious faith was enjoying a major revival, inspired in part by widely-loved, mainstream apologists like Billy Graham and Bl. Fulton Sheen. Marriage and birth rates were high. High trust and strong guardrails! So many manufacturing jobs for honest breadwinners! Now, truthfully, I myself am not nearly so enamored of the 50s as many conservatives, for reasons I won’t get into here. But I would happily grant that there were some very positive things that we should applaud. You sure wouldn’t know it from mood of the conservative intellectuals.

Somewhat ironically, I had just written a piece on contemporary right-wing “despair books” that happened to run at Acton’s Religion and Liberty in the middle of this very conference. So, I mostly stand by this piece, except I may have overstated the extent to which this is a recent phenomenon. A lot of the stuff we were reading definitely seems to qualify as “despair literature.”

That in turn prompted another reflection. Isn’t the New Right really just cribbing off these older thinkers, even as they disparage them? We hear lots of echoes nowadays of Weaver’s thesis about Nefarious Nominalism and its destruction of the West’s moral core. The castigation of “coastal” or “cosmopolitan” or whatever-we-call-them “elites” is powerfully reminiscent of James Burnham and his crowd. Several people have told me that they appreciated Why Liberalism Failed, despite some shortcomings, for its diagnosis of “individualist statism,” the notion that radical individualism and the expansion of the state go hand in hand, destroying the “middle layers” of society where people can actually thrive. So, that is an important insight, but it’s not Deneen’s. He pulled that directly from Nisbet.

Viewing the matter from that angle, I could see more and more ways in which today’s right-wing discourse really is a kind of continuation of this conversation. Unfortunately, it’s pretty debased. It’s a clownified, shock-jockified, take-it-to-11 sort of despair lit, heavy on panic and posturing but light on fresh insights. Weaver, for all his hyperbole, was actually a wonderful writer, and there’s a sort of lightness and even humor to his prose that you definitely don’t find in a Dreher or an Anton. Kirk’s pessimism is lightened considerably by extensive historical context, a high appreciation of the redemptive possibilities of “moral imagination,” and a ready willingness to take a brave stand when occasion presented. Which of our postliberal thinkers keep those factors in good balance today? (Ross Douthat? Possibly?)

Then there was Meyer. Look, the man was not perfect. Set alongside Kirk’s nuanced, gentlemanly essays, he can come across sometimes like a peevish adolescent, and yet I cannot but love him for insisting, doggedly, relentlessly, that freedom cannot be left out of this conversation. It’s so easy, when you’re confident in your ideas and priorities, to throw freedom into a footnote somewhere, a happy side effect of achieving all the other important goals. There are real and often deep tensions between freedom and almost everything else we want: faith, family, morals, community, order, prosperity, a “way of life.” So many reasons to sideline freedom, or even knife it, probably under a label like “radical individualism.”

Look at where we are, though. Libertarianism may not be a sufficient foundation for politics, but it is absolutely true that the growth of the state has massively undermined conditions conducive to virtue. Along with a healthy culture, a rich community life, and all the other good things downstream from a morally healthy citizenry. Sometimes you need a Frank Meyer, willing to dig his heels in and take a stand for freedom. Who is that man today? (Actually we do have some, but the New Right hates them all.)

They were brilliant diagnosticians. They saw many of the bad things coming round the bend, and connected those to deeper currents in modernity, running all the way back to the Medieval world. I really do think the mid-twentieth century was a very good era for conservative political theory, and I think today’s young conservatives should read them.

But their outlook was not sunny. They didn’t have a surfeit of constructive suggestions, nor were they even attentive to things that were already going right in their own day. So maybe they do bear some measure of blame if the right in later decades met a debased culture with debased echoes of their own conversation: less light, more heat, plenty of anger and despair.

It’s time to stop wallowing. Time to recognize that even if modernity has thrown some hard punches, it’s possible for cultures to rebuild themselves, drawing resources from tradition. Time to pay more attention, not only to what’s broken, but also to places where good things are enduring or even being reborn.

Next week, moving back to my October “love” theme, I’ll be thinking about marriage and family. I’ll reflect back on the same-sex marriage fight (in which I was pretty heavily involved at one time), consider what I learned, and speculate on where marriage might be going. I’ll touch back on “libertarian pronatalism” (my personal pet cause), but in the context of thinking about what it might take for parenting and family to move back towards the center of our culture. More generally, what space should family occupy in a civic life, or a well-lived individual life?

My parents will be visiting, so perhaps I can stir up some multi-generational arguments, and pass on any insights that emerge. Thanks for reading!

I started to write a note about this essay from my friend Lane Scott, and it got too long, so I’m just posting it here on my own page. It’s really just an off-the-cuff response.

Lane’s essay is responding to a young woman who wants to know how she (like Lane) can become “somebody.” It’s a great piece, full of Lane’s trademark wisdom, and you should just read it. For me it’s both fun and a little painful precisely because I am nodding so much of the time. I relate deeply to most of what she says. Here’s one passage:

But of course, reaching a point where you think you can say “I’ve made it; I’m somebody!” is in reality alighting onto a high enough perch to get a much clearer view of just how far away you are from mattering. It’s realizing that all the people ahead of you who truly are somebody—fabulous somebodies—would surely look down on a faker imposter fraud like you, should they ever deign to lower their gaze.

My first piece of advice for my dear reader looking to become somebody is to kill that idol stone cold dead, and get to the serious business of not mattering. I confess to you that 99% of my daily life is spent in absolute anonymity as far as my writing and what I accomplish in my work are concerned. I don’t really talk about what I write or do in my career in real life, unless directly asked, and believe me when I tell you that literally no one ever asks.

Yes, so right. I too occasionally get the “tell me the secret, how do you do it” question, but if you want to feel like somebody in regular life, you’d do so much better to head up a committee or have a few fun parties. No, really. I guess I can’t quite endorse that final sentence in my own life, because every once in a very blue moon it has happened to me that someone in the parish or school has said something like, “OK, so this is going to sound ridiculous, but there’s this writer at National Review named Rachel Lu, which is so weird that I just wondered… I mean… I’m feeling dumb now but… that’s surely not you, right?”

Well, so. It is actually me. Any critiques? Great, OK, let’s get these chairs set up, yeah?

Those exchanges are a little awkward and, I repeat, extremely rare. Your writing life doesn’t win you any status in regular life. I say this as a Catholic who has been on the masthead of one of the nation’s leading Catholic magazines (that is, America magazine) for seven years now. Nobody cares.

You maintain a writing life mainly because you can’t not do it. Because you need it. Now and then someone I knew back in the day will tell me, “Yeah, I meant to keep writing but got caught up in XYZ, and the kids, you know.” They seem to feel guilty, and I’m thinking, sister. Why are you apologizing? Millions of people want to express their soul in missives hardly anyone will read. That area is well covered. Your rich family and community life, full of love and service, does not qualify as failure by any standard that matters. I kept writing because I couldn’t seem to live without it; it tortured me not to do it. And since I’m married to a philosopher and have five kids, that drive to write pushed me forward into “trying to squeeze some money out of this, because we sure could use some.” I accept now that this is just how I am, but it makes for a stressful life with way too much “optimization” (the editing on gym pool deck, the frantic car writing, so many home-office graveyard shifts) as well as anxiety-inducing overhead. If you are happy as you are, and your finances are solid, you’re winning big time.

Those are some serious “ifs,” of course. I realize that young women who ask those sorts of questions aren’t necessarily looking for affirmation that “it’s fine just to be a mom!” They maybe do still feel a non-trivial sense of loss over gifts or interests that were left undeveloped. Or they need money, or anticipate needing significantly more money in the near future. Or a combination of those things. I sympathize deeply with both of those motives, and I know too that many of us spend a lot of years trying somehow to do this jiu-jitsu act where we’re properly available for our kids and families and also building some earning power (which our families also need), in ways that don’t leave our own soul entirely without nourishment. It’s truly very hard.

There’s also this piece of it. If you have spent your early adulthood developing yourself and achieving things, and you then lean out and become (primarily) a caretaker, it can be fairly devastating how—even in the old spheres—your status suddenly drops to zero. The treadmill of baby life is relentless, and if you’re someone like me, you probably jump rapidly from “stuff I’m really good at” to a day jam-packed with “stuff no one anywhere, ever identified as a strength of mine,” and that’s pretty demoralizing. It truly cuts you down to size.

So perhaps, to lift your spirits, you move heaven and earth to do something that at least reminds you of your old self (attend a talk, a reception, a conference etc.). And as you’re trying to mingle with people, maybe recapture a shred of a memory of older you, you realize that it is nearly impossible to get anyone to talk to you about anything but baby life. You came specifically to get a ray of not baby life, only to discover that you are absolutely branded now. And the thing is, you can’t even hate people for it, because they aren’t trying to be unkind! In fact, they probably see themselves as generously celebrating your life choices. As the Woman Who Gave It All Up for Babies, you probably love being consulted on your philosophy of naps or spanking. Why would you want to talk about Heidegger? You’ve got more important work now.

What I’m saying is, women who ask how they can be “somebody” (again, or for the first time) may be looking in part for some form of social signaling that can help them indicate to others, “Please recognize me as XYZ sort of person. Not just as Maternity Embodied.” This is not necessarily a ridiculous or vain desire. We all like to be seen as the sort of people we are.

I think I have actually addressed that problem in my own life to some degree. There are spheres of life now where people take me seriously as something other than a mom. And yes, I like that. It doesn’t bleed over much into greater status in mom life, but I do in fact value (to use Lane’s language) my “dual citizenship” in that other country. Maybe I could write an essay at some point on this issue of “social signaling” and strategies to handle that.

Like Lane though, I get a very curious feeling when asked “how I did it,” because it’s just so odd thinking of my life as some great success story. I’ve hit so many walls. So many dead ends. We’ve managed to keep all our kids in Catholic school, and I’m both proud and grateful for that, but given both my level of education and how hard I’ve worked, my earning power is truly unimpressive. And I’m not that young! At conferences I regularly hobnob with people 15-20 years younger than me who undoubtedly earn far more and basically just take this for granted as “the normal career path.” For smart go-getters like them. You know. I meanwhile am continually eyeing the “really essential” to-do list (orthodontics, home repairs, all the things) weighing which are really, really essential, and considering how many commissions I can realistically take over the next few months. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Having said all of that, I do think in the end it comes down to this. The kind of life Lane and I picked cannot be charted and planned in advance. The world does not offer “accommodations” for open-to-life Catholic moms of five. If that’s your road, you’re throwing yourself over a cliff and figuring it out on the way down. It probably won’t be a super-smooth ride, and you will often feel the frustration of all the variables that you can’t control, and all the people who dismiss you up-front because you’re kind of an odd commodity and they don’t really get it.

For all that, throwing yourself over the cliff may not be the worst idea in the world. There are powerful advantages. The kids, obviously! A writing life (and now editing life) that brings me real satisfaction, and makes use of the gifts I actually have. But also a thing that’s harder to quantify, but that I see in spades in women like Lane: a hard-won appreciation of what you really value, which are the things cuckoo media world can’t really take from you. I’m genuinely happy for those high-flying youngsters with all their breezy success, but I also fear for them, because they have so much to lose. There are just so many ways for the world to leverage that against your integrity and your soul.

I enjoy the security of knowing that if I got canceled tomorrow, I could regain and probably exceed my former status in my own community just by having a few fun parties. And then maybe I’d go write the great American novel. Why not?

Strive to be the best version of yourself, and invite God to use you as he wishes. No one can do better than that. And remember that you will never be more of a somebody to anyone on this Earth than you are in the eyes of God.

Is it still possible to be a noble pagan? This is one of those questions I muse on occasionally, in my car or the aisles of a Walmart. If the world is indeed “dechurching,” might that open a space for a resurgence of unbaptized paragons of virtue? More heroes in a (literal) Herculean mode?

Interest in paganism has indeed been rising of late. People have a range of feelings about that: Some wish to celebrate it, while others are screaming in panic at (what they perceive as) its rapid advance. I certainly think that paganism, in some forms at least, can have its own beauty. But I also have to note that the people who are presently most anxious to brand themselves “pagan” aren’t very beautiful. Some are downright hideous. It’s not unkind to observe this, because these are people who revel in hideousness. They want to be monsters. (And if that sounds harsh, please note that “monster” is derived from the Latin verb for “to show.” The same word that gave us “demonstrate.” It’s exactly the right word for someone who embraces performative awfulness as part of a quest to be seen.)

There are exceptions. I’ll name a few at the end. I think noble pagans do walk among us, but I also think that shape is extremely hard to hold in our day. It takes immense strength and a comfort with being a curious outlier. Also a classical education. Or at least, every person I can think of who carries a whiff of the Roman senator also had extensive immersion in history and classical texts. Hardly anyone can pull off the “noble pagan” in our time. But a considerable number have rejected what I’ve termed “the love-centric universe” in favor of unredeemed nature, basically plunging themselves into barbarism. They have succumbed to the siren song of “nature most foul.”

The truth is that the bell has been rung. Christianity has radically rewired the pagan world, to the point where banishing Jesus from your life almost certainly won’t turn you into Marcus Aurelius. It’s perfectly fine to be fascinated by Greeks, Romans, Celts, Etruscans—all those peoples of the ancient world who still hold for us a certain majesty. Even for a Christian, it’s pretty normal to read Edward Gibbon and feel a pang for what was lost when the pagan altars were converted into baptismal fonts. But history doesn’t move backwards.

I must hasten to clarify here that I am not arguing that non-Christians are all doomed to collapse into barbarism. Not at all. Non-Western cultures are a pretty different ballgame, so I’ll just set them to the side for the present. (Is Hinduism “pagan”? Kind of, but… let’s talk about that another day.) Here in the West, Christianity’s influence has been so immense that a furious rejection of it tends to push a person to dark places. But it’s perfectly possible to have a positive relationship to that heritage without being a confessional Christian.

Many people broadly accept a Christian-ish worldview without fully embracing the faith, and some cleave to other established traditions which are distinct but still harmonious. The best example of the latter would of course be Judaism, which developed alongside Christianity, made significant contributions of its own, and now shares considerable ground while also retaining its own rich, distinct tradition. My Jewish friends aren’t looking to banish Jesus; they are themselves deeply invested in the “love-centric” Western architecture that both of our traditions worked to build. Obviously they aren’t the problem.

There are unfortunately just a few self-identified Catholics who are part of the problem, and it’s excruciating to see Catholics (albeit, yes, a tiny and totally unrepresentative fringe) using the phrase “Christ is King” to bully Jews. But I actually think this funnels right into my central point: People who want to throw off the West’s full-blooded legacy (that daunting metaphysical edifice! those demanding ethical principles!) need a target for their performative awfulness. If, like Nick Fuentes, you wish to capture a certain Christian-traditionalist element, Judaism is your main option, and there is an appalling appropriateness to the selection of “Christ is King” as their abusive slogan. A very earthly king, presumably, which is precisely what he refused to be. They have definitively chosen “Caesar,” and not a benevolent or loving Caesar.

Nature has many faces, and though her complexities are fascinating in themselves, the viewer’s broader worldview necessarily provides the frame. St. Francis of Assisi saw nature as the mirror of God’s love. Francis Crick, by contrast, saw it as a mass of meaningless material forces, with human beings amounting to “nothing but a pack of neurons.” The angry revanchists of our own day seem largely to accept this reduced, post-Enlightenment version of nature. They inhabit a universe that has already been stripped of its magical and mystical elements, the ennobling civic virtues of a Cato or a Hector.

Sometimes they dabble a bit in wacky, bloody rituals, like Jack Donovan’s Wolves of Vinland, but that aesthetic rarely goes much beyond the internet memes. In general, theirs is a sorely reduced nature, devoid of sprites or fairies, and unconducive to magnanimity. Like Crick, they embrace it as raw material, but with no interest in winning Nobel Prizes.

Men like Costin Alamariu (Bronze Age Pervert) or Raw Egg Nationalist care little for science, and only slightly more for Druids or the occult. They want to use raw nature as a playground for self-assertion. The typology is pretty clear, really. They’re baby Nietzscheans.

The “baby” part is important. Knockoff Nietzscheans are legion in the present age, but where the original was at least extremely brilliant and insightful, his progeny have considerably less to offer. I’ve read some! The falloff is quite dramatic! I’m not suggesting one can’t learn anything from a Sam Francis or an Alain de Benoist (or, fine, Alamariu), but they seem to excel first and foremost at working Nietzschean themes into just-so stories that fan the prejudices and resentments of their audiences.

For me, the reading experience is perhaps similar to what a man might feel when reading a popular romance novelist or a cheap female-empowerment guru. “Yes, I can see why this thrills a certain kind of audience, but seriously, it’s trash.” If it’s offensive to compare Alamariu to Danielle Steel, let’s make it Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale is effectively a feminist rape fantasy, which I’m comfortable dismissing as “trash,” but it’s not entirely lacking in literary merit. Alamariu seems similar to me. No, he’s not entirely lacking in talent, but really, who cares?

The greatest irony of the baby Nietzscheans is that they revere strength but, as a group, are remarkably marginal and frankly weak. This reality is familiar to anyone who’s encountered them online. They seem prone to emotional breakdown at the smallest provocation. They flip in an instant from roaring about their vitalist powers to weeping over their unjust victimization at the hands of the feminists. (But why were they able to do that, boys, if you’re all so strong and manly? Of course, Nietzsche has an answer to that too, which they seize with wild eagerness, but we needn’t explore that rabbit hole right now.) The performative awfulness, the literal monstrousness, is obviously a cope—a bad-toupee solution for a deficiency that everyone can see. In their self-exile, visibility and delusions of grandeur are all they have left.

This is of course a small group of people overall, petty and probably fairly inconsequential, unless an unhappy convergence of other forces opens a window to momentary influence. (Insofar as one “needs” stormtroopers, assassins, concentration camp guards, and the like, they are generally drawn from this sort of set.) On balance, distorted Christian ideals are surely doing far more harm in the world right now.

But the disciples of “nature most foul” do provide a poignant illustration of where things tend to go when the love-centric universe is rejected. The branches of the Judeo-Christian worldview have spread so very far at this point that you have to walk a good long distance to escape their shade. Some people make the trek! But they don’t end up as thriving Nietzschean supermen. If they truly go all the way, descending to the absolute depths of anti-heroic monstrousness, they may end up dying in a public building somewhere, committing a few meaningless murders before being (justly) crushed by the modern state that they abhor. And a few days later, the world resumes its course almost exactly as before. They’re not Hitler, just some crank loner with “adjustment issues.”

I mentioned above that we might still have a few noble pagans. I think we do. Occasionally one does run across a strong, slightly eccentric person who nevertheless projects a classical sort of majesty. Winston Churchill, perhaps. Rudyard Kipling. I’ve always thought my friend Helen Dale has something of a Roman air to her, in a good way. Even for them, the world is obviously dramatically changed from the days of the Caesars, but the noble-pagan ethic seems rekindled in them in a recognizable way, and it’s pleasant to hear a few of those echoes. They remind us that non-transcendent nature can still have its own nobility.

Most of us can’t be Churchill, though. We aren’t going to become Rudyard Kipling. For most of us, the best option by far is to live in a love-centric universe, accepting the weight of its obligations and using the resources of great faith traditions to elevate our baser impulses. Most of us will be our greatest, truest, and strongest selves if we reject nature’s foulest manifestations and instead say: I believe.

He made it look easy. This, I think, is the short explanation for how St. Francis, the little Poor Man of Assisi, became one of the most beloved human beings of all time. Everyday experience teaches us that love is often arduous, painful, even heartbreaking. He made it look as effortless as breathing.

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, and that’s often true. But there are a few historical persons I’d love to meet, even for just a few minutes, because it seems clear they must have had a presence that affected everyone around them. Achilles. Socrates. Alexander the Great. But Socrates captivated people by winning arguments, Alexander by winning battles. Francis did it by racing to the bottom of the social ladder, then refusing to fight anyone. God’s love just seemed to pour from him like a spigot, watering the world.

He died 800 years ago this very evening. I feel a personal debt to St. Francis (more on that presently), on account of which I have thrown a party in celebration of him every October for the past twenty years. Always incorporating garden produce into the meal. I’m not that much of a party animal, and not that great of a cook, but it feels like the appropriate way to honor a man who seemed always to be bringing people together in joyful camaraderie.

Francis’ example was so lovable and inspiring that many people, including our previous pontiff, have wished to imitate him, themselves becoming “virtuosos of love,” making it look easy with their effusive, theatrical outpourings of good humor and charity. What we learn from them is that it is not easy. Francis was a rare bird.

One of his secrets, it seems, was living with nothing to lose. I don’t mean he lived as if he had nothing to lose. No pride. No possessions. No family except those who chose to follow him, and no comforts except those that happened to fall into his lap, but even then he tended to pass, ardent in his embrace of “Lady Poverty.” St. Francis didn’t “imagine” no possessions (and then lecture other people about it); he simply gave everything away and worked from there.

Most of us probably shouldn’t try to be him. It takes a special calling, and in our influence-obsessed world, the pitfalls and temptations would be harrowing. Anyway, most of us would do real injustice to our loved ones if we “raced to the bottom” in imitation of Francis; our kids would be hungry and our responsibilities unfilled. He was, at the time he heard the call, a dissolute young man with wealthy parents.

So most of us can’t be Francis, any more than we could be Mozart or Michelangelo, but we can enjoy his stories, the way we might enjoy a symphony or a painting. And we can be inspired, in our less-dramatic ways, to be more loving and more joyful, gripping our worldly goods and honors less tightly.

I wrote earlier this week about the many tensions and puzzles that one finds within Jesus’ teachings on love. They leave us with a lot of questions. How do natural and transcendent loves come together? How can we be constant in our commitments without losing sincerity, joy, spontaneity? Francis seemed to navigate all of those faultlines with a remarkable grace. He did love natural things (even the sparrows, or especially them), but saw all as a radiant mirror of God’s love. And in reading about the life of St. Francis, one reflects on how much we need such an exemplar, a man who ministered to the sick and poor but also had time for singing and preaching to sparrows.

Jesus is obviously the greatest example of love, but his life and persona are austere and in many ways deeply mysterious. Mary’s example is immensely beautiful (fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum), but most of her life is shrouded from us. Il Poverello delights us with his scores of quirky, amusing stories, preserved in The Little Flowers roughly a century after his death from oral tradition passed down by his closest friends. His strangeness is endearing, not alienating. His theatrics entertain without ever smacking of insincerity.

There is a further point to be drawn from the life of St. Francis, of great relevance to this Substack. The 13th century was in many ways high times for the medieval Church! Her spiritual dominion over the West was basically uncontested; philosophy was moving towards its zenith; the papacy was arguably at its strongest and most influential. The Benedictines had built wealthy, flourishing centers of intellectual and cultural life. It might seem strange that God would choose that moment to order a young wastrel in Umbria to “rebuild my Church.” Rebuild? Wasn’t it basically flourishing at that time?

That’s sort of the point, though. The mendicant orders (e.g. the Franciscans and Dominicans, which came into existence within a few years of each other) were both the product of this very-Christian age and a rebuke to it. Power and prosperity breed corruption and vice, so against that very considerable political strength, the mendicants functioned as a conscience or counter-weight, advocating for core elements of the Christian vision that were in danger of being forgotten. And they did it quite literally from street corners! Renewal can happen in times and ways that we don’t necessarily expect.

Across history, Christendom is regularly being reborn. And of course, I must note that each of these great orders (still very much in existence, with thousands of members now spanning the globe) had a particular charism, corresponding quite nicely to one of the “dynamic keys of Christianity.” The Dominicans made truth their special province. The Franciscans had a special kind of vocation to personal love.

Before concluding, I promised to expand on my personal debt to St. Francis. It dates back to the time of my Catholic conversion in 2005. I really feel, looking back, that he swam with me, perhaps even pulled me, those final few yards across the Tiber. Those ones can really be the hardest; after gleefully gobbling many of the “goodies” of Catholicism (philosophy! Liturgy! All the colorful history!), and feeling free for many years to browse and sample at leisure, you suddenly find yourself standing at a yawning church doorway, realizing with a certain shock that it’s time for some goodbyes. Not literally, in my case; nobody I loved stopped speaking to me. But I was the first (to my knowledge) from a huge, sprawling, multiple-generation Mormon family to walk right away from the faith of my fathers. Not just to lapse a little but literally to become something else. I knew people would still love me, but things would never be quite the same, and I knew that too. My whole life, indeed, was going to be quite different from what I’d grown up expecting, and in those final few weeks before my Catholic baptism, those losses felt pretty searing. I slept poorly. I found that my subconscious was working continually to produce merely psychological explanations of my religious convictions. And at the same time, the faith all of a sudden seemed strangely without luster. My philosophy books seemed oddly dull. Things that had lit my mind on fire in college now held a haunting aura of sadness. I still prayed my Rosary, but it felt monotonous.

Only one thing still truly appealed: The Little Flowers of St. Francis. It wasn’t a college book! I had known that one from childhood, almost the only Catholic touchpoint (or so it seemed at the time) that stretched all the way back to my earliest years. My father had read us those stories sometimes at bedtime, and they had delighted me; I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the wolf of Gubbio, or know several verses of All Creatures of Our God and King.Francis felt like one friendly face from childhood that didn’t require any kind of farewell. And in him, I found I could still catch some intimations of joy.

So I took St. Francis as my patron, at my baptism and confirmation. Many people found that odd. Wouldn’t a philosopher be the expected choice for me? Yes, maybe. There are certainly many that I love! But Saint Francis was the bridging figure. The guide that delivered me safely to shore. In our darkest, loneliest hours, aren’t we all just ravenous for love?

He always had plenty of it, which he’s showered freely on scores of people, including me. He makes love feel easy, but also readily abundant, surrounding us at every moment of our lives. And here’s the beautiful part. It is.

I apologize for not posting my promised Thursday essay on “Nature Most Foul.” I was at our Law & Liberty “Conservatism and Liberty” conference, and my mind was so full of the conference discussions and readings that I couldn’t quite change gears. (Clearly then, it was a good conference! At a bad conference I’d walk out of a session with the whole post written in my mind.) But I’ll finish that one for Tuesday, and possibly write something for Thursday on the conference and themes relevant to Christendom Reborn.

Right now though, let’s celebrate St. Francis, and 800 years of finding effervescent joy in love.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.”

1 Corinthians 13 1-3

Christianity is a love-based faith. That’s not mere hyperbole, nor Hallmark-card pabulum. Love truly is central to the Christian life, but it’s hard for us to grasp what that means, or to understand how it can be more than high-minded pabulum.

For one thing, love itself is hard. Christ’s teachings were always demanding and radical. But it’s also true that those lofty Christian ideals have been twisted or reduced in many ways, by shills and ideologues, and even makers of Hallmark cards. It’s a commonplace that “love is all you need,” but that message has become elastic to the point of uselessness. And yet. Most of us aren’t quite ready to let go. We still want to live in a love-centric universe.

I say “most of us” because there do seem to be at least a few people who take an impish pleasure in voting against love, usually casting a vote instead for what I think of as “nature most foul.” The pagans. The fascists. The self-appointed Nietzschean supermen. I’ll get back to that crowd in a future essay.

For now, I’ll just note that I’m pro-love. Let’s hang onto it. I mean we could just give up and let the robots lead us into a pitiless, reductive, will-to-power universe, but that doesn’t much appeal. I say, let’s stick with Jesus and all his lofty, universalist commands.

In that spirit, I will now embark on a series of essays loosely organized around the theme “give love a chance.” I’m moving back now to some of the themes I touched on months ago when I wrote about “The Pandora’s Box of Christian Love” and why “Sex is Not Safe.” This will run us into questions about identity and obligation. It’s clear that human beings need loves and attachments to thrive, as well as a sense of self, so what’s the right way to build those things? How does that “healthy sense of self” connect to obligation and commitment? That in turn forces us to think about our badly-eroding social fabric, and what might help to repair it. Finally, I’ll consider the question: can we recapture the good and healthy elements of a Christian worldview without repeating past mistakes?

There will be some history and philosophy. Carl Trueman, Josef Pieper, and Plato will all be mentioned. Plenty to look forward to for this Month of Love!

At the outset though, especially given the many new subscribers (welcome!), it seems fitting to restate the purpose of this Substack, and briefly recap what we’ve already done.

Christendom Reborn is dedicated to exploring the thesis that Christianity, far from fading or becoming obsolete, is in fact in the process of being reborn in a revitalized form. That hope is partly rooted in real, positive developments that I see all around us, which in my view are under-noticed and inadequately celebrated. But I also think it’s important to grasp that Christianity is an extraordinarily resilient faith, with a proven capacity to preserve a tradition-rooted dogmatic and liturgical core while adapting to new political and cultural circumstances. That resilience, I contend, can best be understood with reference to three structural features of Christianity that I refer to as its “dynamic keys.”

The first of these is an immensely rich philosophical tradition that has enabled Christians to answer new questions as they arise, without either “losing contain” or spiraling into fundamentalism. This past summer I did a multiple-week series on Christian philosophy, explaining how I think it achieves this, and why I think it is, if anything, emerging from its early-modern doldrums with a fierce new relevance.

The second “dynamic key” is a political tradition that demands some separation between God and Caesar, forcing Christians of every age to reckon with what that might mean. This past month has largely been dedicated to exploring the theory that modern political conservatism, particularly in a broadly fusionist form, offers a sturdy template for working through those questions in a contemporary context.

I am by no means finished with either philosophy or politics. I have plenty more to say about both. In particular, I’d like to say more about contemporary philosophy, and more about Christian political history. But right now I think it’s time to spend some time with the third “dynamic key” of the Christian tradition. I could give it some august title like “a celebration of human dignity” or “a robust Christian personalism.” But maybe it’s best just to say: “it’s about love.”

As I noted in my “Pandora’s Box” post, the early Christians (developing Jesus’ teachings with some help from both Jews and Greeks) preached the audacious message that all human beings, however lowly, were immensely precious, utterly unique, and personally beloved of God. This was highly disruptive to the Roman social order. It’s rather disruptive, in fact, to any social order, because social orders depend on roles, hierarchies, fixed obligations, people “knowing their place.” The best way to achieve that is by teaching people that, “you’re the sort of person who is meant to fill this particular niche.” Optimally, you persuade them that it is in their nature to fill that role. They were born for it. It’s in their blood. They owe it to the ancestors, perhaps.

There are different ways to spin it, but for the sake of social stability, most societies historically forged strong connections between their understanding of nature, tradition, social approval, and personal thriving. Do The Thing (whatever that implies for you personally) and you can enjoy social respectability and proper pride. Also we’re pretty sure you’ll be happy in that life because, well, look at you!

Christianity is not anti-nature but it does ask a lot of potentially annoying questions. Is it really in the slave’s nature to serve and the king’s to rule, or is that more a reflection of historical happenstance? Even if tradition really is reflecting collected wisdom about human nature (which does happen!), we have to reckon with the awkward reality that human beings have a transcendent destiny far beyond their earthly one. So maybe we’re all supposed to become Socrates eventually, or better than? Nature is still good in the Christian worldview, because God made it. But it may turn out (spoiler: it does) that it’s hard to assess a person’s temperament, gifts, and particular potentialities based on characteristics that are readily ascertainable from the day of their birth. And even when we are filling our proper, God-given roles, we’re still meant to transcend them at some point.

So where does that leave us? Confused. That’s where it leaves us.

By the way, lest we forget, Jesus also taught that “the last will be first” and that “tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” And, nota bene, we’re supposed to pick up our crosses and follow Him (potentially for a long, weary way), but remember! We must remain “like little children” if we want to inherit heaven. It’s best to bear in mind that he who “does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life” can’t be Jesus’ disciple, but you must still honor your father and mother, keeping in mind too that the Pharisees are vain hypocrites because they give their money to religious causes instead of supporting their parents.

Is it impious to note that there are some real tensions here? It’s trendy now to blame “radical individualism” or “the cult of autonomy” for the social chaos of our time, but go read the Gospels. Then ask yourself: is this a clear picture? Should we really blame Foucault for confounding our sense of the natural, or is it Jesus’ fault? The Lord really is quite cryptic at times in his discussions of obligation and identity.

I’ve already thrown some shade at postmodernism, Marxism, the usual baddies, but let’s be honest for a moment. Christians broke the old world. We shattered the pagan hierarchies, abolished the castes, outrageously insisted that every person is a unique individual with a glorious, transcendent destiny. It created a lot of mess, and it is in a very real sense our mess. So maybe it’s time for Christians to man up and take some responsibility.

I’m just one woman, but I’ll do what I can. Starting Thursday with a closer look at “nature most foul.”

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.