Today’s readings begin with a moving story of the Prophet Elisha rewarding a pious woman for her generosity by blessing her with a son. That’s very lovely. But then, perhaps confusingly, we end up here:

Jesus said to his apostles:
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.”

Matthew 10:37-39

The first story makes clear that family is indeed one of the most precious things in this life. But the Gospel gives us some important context: we can only love family properly when we love God first. And indeed, this is true of all natural loves. Even the highest and noblest natural attachments can become a spiritual stumbling block if they are not subordinated to the transcendent love of God.

This is a fitting starting point for a week in which Americans honor the 250^th birthday of our country. I love my country. I feel blessed to have been born here, and I’m proud of the role it has played in the world. I’ll say more about that this coming week. At the same time, it’s very clear that the love of country can be distorted into some very ugly forms of idolatry. We should be cautious about that, moderating our attachments through reason, but also keeping in mind that there is only one real solution. Only one purifier of natural loves: God.

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation;
announce the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Amen.

The Weekly Wrap-Up is back! I’m summing up a very active week here at Christendom Reborn in which I discussed some of the Christian tradition’s “keepers,” in particular great books and traditional sexual morals. (Not a complete list.) Next week will be America-themed in honor of her 250th, and the week after that I’ll consider some new things that I also regard with favor.

Here’s the quick summary of how the week unfolded:

Last Sunday I reflected on fathers and divine vengeance (in that order).

Monday I laid out my “Old Things/New Things” theme and recommended a Law & Liberty forum on coping with modernity.

Tuesday I made the case for the Great Books and why we should still study them.

Wednesday I recommended a superb essay from Elizabeth Anscombe on Christian sexual ethics and why it extends to artificial contraception.

Thursday I unrolled my essay on why sex, by nature, is unsafe.

Friday featured a “from the archives” on Great Books in the Lu household. It’s a fun little piece from Education Next in which I explained how and why I read to my own kids. The major take-away is that I do, in fact, share the books with them that I myself think are most vitally important.

Stay tuned for New Things week (Rerum Novarum?) coming soon.

Closing Quote

What people are for is, we believe, like guided missiles, to home in on God, God who is the one truth it is infinitely worth knowing, the possession of which you could never get tired of, like the water which if you have you can never thirst again, because your thirst is slaked forever and always. It’s this potentiality, this incredible possibility, of the knowledge of God of such a kind as even to be sharing in his nature, which Christianity holds out to people; and because of this potentiality every life, right up to the last, must be treated as precious. Its potentialities in all things the world cares about may be slight; but there is always the possibility of what it’s for. We can’t ever know that the time of possibility of gaining eternal life is over, however old, wretched, “useless” someone has become.

This has been a fun week. It’s great to be up and rolling again.

I’m going to wrap it up by posting this little piece in which I explain how I read with my kids. It grew out of an email exchange with AEI’s Rick Hess, in which I was telling him how I still read to all five of my boys together (even though my eldest is 16), and how this has become an important part of our family life. He said, “That’s good stuff, why don’t you write it up for Education Next?” And put me in touch with them.

It seemed like a good follow-up to my Tuesday post on Great Books. At least you can see that I’m not a hypocrite; I myself make a priority of sharing things with my kids that seem vitally important to me.

By nature, I’m very much a “mentor-parent,” and I worry sometimes that I’m not enough of an authority figure. (My friend Liz Matthews is all over that topic nowadays, and I warmly support her work but wouldn’t have felt qualified to do it myself.) Partly, I just think this is one of the best things you can do for your kids: Give them the best of yourself. Share the things you really love and understand.

It’s also the most fun way to parent. For years now, I haven’t really had time to revisit favorite books for my own pleasure, but if you’re doing it with the kids, that’s just good momming.

Anyway. Thanks to everyone who participated this week. Enjoy my little missive, “Reading to Your Kids Can Be Far More Than a Routine.”

The thesis of this post is straightforward. I made it the title, in fact. Sex, by nature, is highly unsafe.

The associated risks are various in kind, and that being the case, it is sometimes possible to choose among them. For instance, we can diminish physical risk at the cost of greater moral and emotional risk. Fewer high-risk pregnancies, more betrayal and illegitimacy. Another kind of reshuffle might yield less pregnancy in general, fewer broken relationships, and more loneliness. One way or another though, sex is risky. This cannot be changed.

It’s hard to be a sexual being. At some point in life, I think nearly everyone looks at his or her “sex life” (understood broadly to include not just sex itself, but also sexual relationships, or possibly the lack of them, and everything that follows from all that) and says, “This is too hard.” Or “this is not how it should be.” I don’t plan to go “full Freud” here because I don’t truly believe that everything in life is about sex. It’s big, though. Our worst betrayals, our most bizarre perversions, our most desperate yearnings, and our most devastating experiences of heartbreak, very often relate to sex. And yet, it’s also a defining part of some of our deepest bonds, our most admirable achievements, our highest examples of self-sacrifice. It’s a tricksy thing, being sexed.

Sex certainly holds deep mysteries, and yet its gravity is not totally inexplicable. To capture its gravity and weight, I would submit the following three points:

1) Sex is the source of new life. In the course of mere minutes, two human beings can bring another unique, morally precious human being into existence. That is an extraordinary thing, and clearly not trivial.

2) Together with its actual life-giving power, sex has a strong tendency to lead to idolatry. Sometimes this is directed at sexual activity itself. Sometimes it’s a particular object of sexual desire. Either way, sex can inspire obsession, even derangement, a kind of madness in which the object seems to matter immensely, perhaps more than any other thing. People will do terribly destructive things for the sake of sex. (See: the Trojan War)

3) Sex opens wide pathways for people to exploit, betray, and take advantage of one another. This isn’t really so surprising when one considers how, in sex, the gratification of a physical appetite naturally involves another person, and can have immense and potentially ruinous consequences for them.

Here’s another point that’s interesting to contemplate. In sex, humans are at our most bestial in some fairly obvious ways. Animals also breed, and they likewise seem to find the experience fairly, shall we say, intense. “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.” That’s a lighthearted little song, but there’s a serious point underneath: in sex, we really are quite similar to the chimps and the squirrels.

Is sex necessarily base, then? I don’t actually think so, but I do think we should approach it with the assumption that it will take considerable effort to love like men, not like beasts. “Good loving” is often the work of a lifetime, as well as a major goal of culture and custom. It takes discipline, self-sacrifice, exertion. And even if you check all those boxes, the thing can still go off the rails in ways that are beyond your control. I repeat once again: sex is not safe.

What should we do, then? Well, obviously, we need some rules. Let’s be clear, though. The point of the rules is not to make sex safe. The point is to make it ethical. A good sexual ethic doesn’t guarantee that sex will “work out” in any kind of this-worldly sense. It mostly definitely can’t promise to turn sexual activity into “good clean fun.” The point of a well-ordered sexual ethic is simply to ensure that if sex destroys you, your demise will be the result of honorable self-sacrifice, not merited punishment for selfishness and predation. If you wipe out, you’ll do it as a good person, not a bad one.

One wants to add, cheerfully, “And you will at least be somewhat safer even in the obvious sense, likelier to be blissfully happy and less likely to end up heartbroken, destitute, or prematurely dead.” Maybe? One hopes? But honestly, I’m not sure. Love is monstrously risky, and “good sex” carries massive liabilities in that regard. I’m aware that there’s a whole cottage industry of people (the sort that work at the Institute for Family Studies) working to show, basically, that Good Love helps people to thrive. I’m not dismissive really, and I follow that kind of work with real interest, but it’s awfully hard sometimes to know what to make of the sociologist’s “good love” picture. What’s really being measured when people self-report that they are happy, or describe their marriage as “high-quality”? When are apples being compared to other apples, and when do the studies just confirm that the already-fortunate are also likelier to be lucky in love? And on the less-lucky side of the spectrum, where happy marriages and prosperous families are harder to attain, how does bruising failure measure against a quiet life of placid consumption? It is surely easier in many ways, and safer, not to open oneself to too much love.

I care about this topic here at Christendom Reborn because it is central to the question of vocation, which, as previously discussed, is a key Christian strategy for coping with the intensely demanding reality of individual uniqueness and worth. As discussed in that week, an intensely demanding sexual morality has always been a defining feature of the Christian tradition, as has meticulous regulation of marriage. In modern times, as in the ancient world, this has become one of Christianity’s least-popular features, almost certainly the one most people (including most self-described Christians!) would vote to change if Christ’s own teachings could be altered by democratic process. Many people sincerely believe that Christian teachings on sex are outdated, unjust, perhaps a product of prejudice more than prudence, and certainly not appropriate to our time. A recent comment thread here at Christendom Reborn gave voice to such an opinion:

People want rules, and they understand that living responsibly takes real effort. But they don’t want wink-wink-nudge-nudge rules where it’s a given that they’ll be broken, nor are they willing to burden themselves with unnecessary rules, when life is hard enough. I’d consider it the responsibility of any religious leadership to give them the lightest yoke necessary, and ensure it is one that can actually be borne. Otherwise, the failure isn’t the flock’s, it’s the shepherds’.

That’s well put, and sets up my own point, which is really rather simple. Traditional Christian teachings are “the lightest yoke necessary” for ethical sex. You can lighten that yoke only by lying to people about the nature of sex, and its real consequences and hazards. I don’t think shepherds should lie to their flock.

The traditional Christian view is consistent and elegant. It is a profound expression of the Christian commitment to persons, in all their precious uniqueness. It’s also excruciating. There are cases (many, in fact!) in which we want to relax the rules because they simply seem unreasonably demanding. I understand this, and I don’t really expect to enter anytime soon into a world in which most people want to join me in biting the hard bullets, holding people to painful and possibly life-blighting standards instead of just granting exemptions whenever it appears to us that The Consistent View is unreasonable. Sometimes leniency looks pretty manageable; the anticipated consequences don’t look particularly bad.

That judgment may or may not be accurate, but for the present I’m just going to say this. If one is seeking a consistent view of sex, philosophically sound and fit for application to all related questions, there is really just one option. That’s the traditional view. The “natural sex” view. You can say “the Catholic view” if you want, though I generally avoid that because it’s not unique to Catholics. (But, I do think the Catholic church has developed and articulated the view with particular clarity, and anyone who wants a lucid philosophical explanation should pull up the article I posted yesterday.) I obviously won’t make the absurd claim that everyone who rejects this view is functionally in the same place, but I will go this far: If you reject The Consistent View, you’ll necessarily find yourself relying at times on circumstantial human judgment to fill the gaps in our formal understanding of sexuality and human nature. You’ll have to work without a map in adjudicating some potentially-weighty questions. Maybe that’s okay. Then again, looking at the world around us, you might worry that circumstantial human judgment is often pretty badly wrong when it comes to sex.

The Consistent View has two key planks. The first is that men need to love as men and not as beasts. Our sexual behavior needs to be consistent with our nature as rational and loving beings. It’s not okay to use other people to fill our own needs (physical, emotional, or otherwise) without assuming some responsibility for their good. And as already noted, sex can bring new people into existence, so we need to take responsibility for that reality too. Avoiding sexual exploitation is a weighty task, which from the get-go lays a lot of demands on people reaching far beyond “consent.”

The second plank might initially seem odd or even paradoxical: even as we’re busy loving “as men” we need to respect the natural character of sex itself, which is fundamentally reproductive. This is, if you like, how humans breed. That doesn’t mean that every sexual act needs to make a baby (which isn’t “how it naturally works”), or that every pair of lovers needs to be trying to make a baby, but we do need to understand that sex is a baby-making activity and, you might say, “leave it as it is.” That of course raises particular challenges for gays and lesbians, since same-sex couples cannot naturally reproduce. Heterosexual couples (especially young!) may face a different challenge: hyperfertility. A pair of healthy twenty-somethings can make a lot of babies in (say) 10-15 years of marriage. I warned you that this would get hard.

Canon law can get extremely complicated if we dig into the intricacies, but take a moment to appreciate the beautiful simplicity of The Consistent View. It is truly quite profound. In our sex lives, we must strive to love as men (rational, loving, embracing persons in their full preciousness) without hiding from the natural, organic (even a bit bestial?) character of the thing. By accepting both requirements, we stand a chance of steering a path between exploitation and idolatry. We may be able to be good lovers while still submitting to a law higher than ourselves. That’s huge. It is not the only thing we’re called to do on this earth, but actually, handling the “sexual being” aspect of life with honor and prudence truly is one of the most defining aspects of our success as humans.

One can always furnish examples of people who skirted a few rules of “the Consistent View” without (apparently) coming to much grief. Great. I don’t wish to see people coming to grief, nor do I spend my time dreaming up reasons why people who reject that view (which, let’s be honest, includes almost everyone nowadays) are more vicious than they may appear. As with any law (natural, human, or divine) there are elements of “moral hazard” to this: one can sometimes fudge a bit without coming to serious harm, but then again the consequences may be more severe than we expect, at which point we may be startled to find ourselves compromised in unexpected ways. I’m aware that that risk will often seem worth it to people in hard places. I’ve already reiterated several times that sex just isn’t safe.

I think it’s pretty clear though that as the traditional view loses its hold, with fewer people accepting or even understanding its logic, the social consequences have been fairly agonizing. Many people – like my interlocutor above – recognize the need for more “rules” but no one has yet piloted a particularly good, novel solution. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t one. And if that’s true, it may in turn add up to a pretty good argument for walking back some of the “compassionate” adjustments to the traditional view, which were often made for very understandable reasons but which left us making a lot of weighty decisions without much of a map. Stepping back and looking at the arc of the past century or so, it should be clear that sex is as bruising, as exploitative, as “risky” as ever. We’ve moved some of those risks around, but the most obvious result was to make it harder for people to shoulder the burdens honorably.

To be clear, I have every expectation that full-fledged, consistent “natural sex” advocates like me will remain rare for the foreseeable future. But there’s rare, and there’s “freakish and marginalized outsiders whose perspective most people find incomprehensible.” Rare would be better. If chastity, as traditionally understood, is the best remedy for what ails us, any dose is better than none.

In some ways, the proponents of gender ideology did a wonderful thing by selecting the motto “Love is love” to promote their recommended reforms. It’s a perfect counterpoint to Christian sexual ethics. On one level it’s just a tautology, and yet it feels right to many because it channels the idea that all human love is fundamentally good, that it’s essentially all the same in character, and that we shouldn’t allow rules, circumstantial context, or higher principles or ideals to govern our judgment or choices when it comes to love. I think many people really believed they were saying something profoundly true. They genuinely wanted to affirm both love and human relationships.

They forgot something important, however. Sex isn’t safe. It often brings out the worst in us, and even “good loving” can turn out to be life-blighting. A Christian sexual ethic won’t protect you from suffering, nor will it guarantee happiness. It’s grounded in truth though, and that’s a good place to start.

Tomorrow I hope to finish (finally!) my essay on why “sex is not safe.” Today, in preparation, I am recommending this article from Elizabeth Anscombe, which is at least as outrageous today as when it was written in 1972. But I still believe it. Anscombe’s position is pretty much my own. (And look! We’re both philosophically trained women with a bunch of kids. Only she was much more brilliant than me, and also had more kids.)

Anscombe was, to reiterate, brilliant. And this article certainly deploys her philosophical expertise (for instance concerning intention). But another of the many fine features of this article is its reminder that Christian sexual morals have always been difficult, and often deeply countercultural. People sometimes argue that traditional morals can’t possibly be upheld; the ask has become too difficult. But… wasn’t it always? Telling pagan men that they weren’t allowed to fornicate anymore was a hard bullet. So was the mandate to bear and nurture all babies that were conceived. (In the ancient world it was widely considered acceptable to toss the unwanted ones by the roadside. See, Planned Parenthood isn’t a new idea at all.)

Modernity has changed many things, but not the difficulty of Christian sexual teachings. That’s a constant. Some will argue, “Yes, but back in the day people had little choice but to live with them, because the consequences of doing otherwise were too terrible, but today we can embrace an easier sexual ethic with little cost.”

Are you sure about that? Look at the world around us. Are you really sure?

If you want to stir a tempest in a conservative teapot, here’s a good way: trash the Great Books. You can always enrage someone by goring that sacred cow.

Patrick Deneen played this card several years ago with a piece “Against Great Books” at First Things. Deneen noted that “great” books are the source of bad ideas as well as good ones (indeed, one of the primary sources of bad ideas!), and that sliding them all into a single curriculum can turn people into moral relativists. More recently, Alex Petkas took a similar line with his essay on how “’Great Books’ Is for Losers.” Though a bit less bruising than Deneen, Petkas isn’t much inspired by scholars sitting in seminar rooms discussing a text. He wants to lean into Great Men with their manly, thumotic virtues. Warriors! Heroes! We should be making our sons into Achilles, not Aristotle! (And our daughters… well… Petkas is far less interested in the education of daughters.)

Last week this topic raged on Twitter again, with Aaron Renn amplifying critiques similar to Petkas’; he thinks the Great Books are too pedantic and ill-suited to address many of the challenges of our own age. (“Please do study them if they are of interest,” he says, while acknowledging he doesn’t consider this necessary.) T. Greer complains that the traditional canon is too narrow, too “Western” (but not German enough), and inattentive to the East and to the post-WWII era. Naturally, many others weighed in; Ross Douthat for instance worries that Great Books programs often short-shrift the American contribution.

I mean… maybe? Let me make an obvious point, then a less-obvious point.

The obvious point is that young Americans are so ignorant, their reading skills so poor, that it would be exceedingly foolish to spike almost any initiative that successfully persuades people to read books that are 1) old and 2) hard. It’s honestly quite confusing to me that Renn doesn’t see the urgency of this. Smothering ignorance and a five-second attention span aren’t a problem for the young? I’ll consider exceptions on a case by case basis (Islamic Terrorist School?) but I think old and hard is truly the place to start: “Old” breaks them out of their algorithm-and-bureaucracy-engineered bubble, and “hard” puts their brains through the paces in a way that their entertainment machines just won’t do. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter whether the kids read Homer or Aristotle or Victor Hugo. Just that any of the above will put them ahead of most of their peers.

In fairness, many of the above critics would agree with this. Petkas would kind of agree (while indulging in a lot of snide remarks that make Great Books stalwarts like Hutchins and Adler sound like pathetic weenies), but I’m guessing Greer and Douthat would very much agree and I’m not a bit bothered by rousing debates over the old “what should the canon include” question. That’s part of the fun of a Great Books curriculum! We get to fight about what should be in it!

Don’t lose the forest for the trees, though. If we were living in the kind of society where young people were taught to parrot the Wisdom of Ancestors by rote, with a reverence that smothered all critical reflection and debate, it might be fine to engage in bruising critiques of “the wrong kind of Great Books program.” That’s not our situation! We’re more like the Robinson Crusoes of modernity, trying to salvage whatever treasures we can from antiquity. Our society is hurtling heedlessly forward with very little sense of what lies behind. Letting go of the wisdom of the past will leave us severely vulnerable to repeating its mistakes. But the ironic upside of sweeping ignorance is that paths to remedy are extremely numerous. It’s only reasonable, therefore, that those who recognize the larger-scale problem should try, as far as possible, to stay friends, acknowledging that someone else’s approach might have its own merits.

Inevitably though, we do tend to look for paradigms to help us select the worthiest fragments. I would simply advise this. Teach the things that matter. Let those decisions be made in the context of our own good-faith efforts to use the past to answer the looming questions that are currently most pressing, most arresting, most defining of our age. I don’t know that there’s a “right answer” as to whether we should think most about “great men” or “great ideas,” closely analyze texts or look for sweeping themes, read quietly or revel in dramatic oratory. All of those things can be good! What’s not good is sitting down and deciding What Kids Should Know based on some idealized vision of the society we’d like to have. We need the Great Books to enrich and inform a dynamic conversation about where we are and where we’re going. Our instruction should initiate our children into that same conversation.

A new kind of world is emerging. None of us presently sees it with much clarity. It would be pure hubris to think we could engineer the world we want through the things we teach our kids. Or, if the goal is to closet them away in BenOp bunkers, that’s both foolish and naïve. They’re going to have to live in this still-emerging future, and ideally help in forging it. A Great Books curriculum should be drawing them into that effort, equipping them with the tools that, in our own best evaluation, seem most needed.

The harsh truth is that there isn’t a canon anymore. There is no agreement in our own time about what educated people should all know. They should surely know something, including some knowledge of things that happened or were written before they were even born (gasp!), but from there we have a lot of decisions to make and our own prejudices and concerns will necessarily guide the selection. Which will lead to some mistakes. But I think it’s better to accept that than to try to program our children with something we’ve persuaded ourselves is Objectively Correct. If we’re honest, we should acknowledge that we aren’t in a great position to discern that.

So maybe that does add up to an argument for “educating for liberty,” probing the works that laid the foundation for free societies. Or maybe it explores the human condition through a deep examination of both morality and the self, in the spirit of Charles Taylor or Alasdair MacIntyre. Some people have basically devoted themselves to reinvigorating once-vaunted, traditional canons (think “stuff aristocrats would have been expected to know a century or two ago”), which does actually make real sense. (There’s an integrity there, and a weight of long-considered judgment, that we from our present vantage point would struggle to recapture.) Or maybe we try to awaken the kids’ humane sensibilities through a recovery of beautiful things, or to instill thumotic virtues through dramatic oratory, as Petkas wishes to do.

I’m basically supportive of all such efforts, but my enthusiasm wanes as the dynamic pursuit of excellence devolves into “a program,” whether that’s manhood training, a virtue agenda, or whatever else. Be honest. We’re a little bit adrift here; we don’t really know what tools will prove most crucial for our kids in years to come. If scholars in seminar rooms are engaging the young with the texts they genuinely value, that’s far more real (even manlier?) than some of the silly suggestions I read from self-styled educational reformers who seem to want to train our children like seals. (And the boys shall skin animals! And the girls shall milk cows! Not making this up, friends. Some people really are recommending those things.)

Trashing the Great Books is contemptible. It’s a short-term clickbait tactic that exploits the uncertainty and fragility that necessarily accompany all efforts to draw wisdom from the past, in an age that is largely uninterested in it. Don’t be that guy. But if you do want to assist in the effort, my best advice is to keep in mind C.S. Lewis’ distinction between “propagation” and “propaganda” in The Abolition of Man. The poultry-keeper raises young birds into whatever he wants them to be (plump and juicy, probably), but older birds seek to initiate fledglings into their own pattern of life. One wants to eat the kids; the other wants them to fly. Let’s teach them to fly.

Summer is a season of uncertainty. I expect my “normal” Substack schedule will be derailed again here and there, but I’m going to try to stay on track for a bit, starting with this week’s theme: “old things worth keeping.” I plan to pair that with a “new things worth keeping” week soon, though perhaps not next week because… America 250. Obviously, next week has to be America-themed.

My “normal schedule,” as a reminder, features original essays on Tuesday and Thursday, a “from the stacks” selection of my own work Friday, and a wrap-up post Saturday. Monday and Wednesday I may post a quote, a link, or a book recommendation. It’s low key. Sunday I post faith reflections.

In the spirit of last Friday’s reflection, “Old Things” week will look at aspects of Christian tradition that I think hold up pretty well, even though they are often dismissed as dated, prejudiced, or otherwise useless. My major essays will discuss Great Books (a hot subject over this past week) and traditional sexual morals. Spoiler alert: I think they’re both good! I will acknowledge some non-ridiculous critiques, and discuss possible adaptations to “the old ways,” but in the end I am robustly pro-classics, and also a straight-down-the-line Christian moralist when it comes to sex. Without apology. I appreciate that this is a hard teaching, but I still think it’s the truest, and therefore worth keeping.

I realize that some readers may find this confusing. Isn’t Christendom Reborn’s message about adaptation and dynamism? Do we really want to be wedded to old books and onerous moral teachings? My reply: Yes.

I don’t really mind if you want to dismiss me as a hidebound reactionary, but at least let me give you advance warning that my “new things worth keeping” week will include essays on free enterprise and feminism. I don’t always hate new things!

For today though, I just want to recommend to readers this forum, hosted this month by my own Law & Liberty, on modernity and what we should make of it. The lead essay was written by my friend Lee Oser, whose writing on “the radical middle” has shaped my thinking on many of the themes of Christendom Reborn. There are smart, substantive replies from my friend Elizabeth Corey, Hillsdale’s Jason Peters, and my Law & Liberty colleague Michael Lucchese (coming Wednesday). You should be warned that this is heady stuff, not optimal for phone skimming. Well worth the effort though. I’ll acknowledge that I’m proud of this forum, as the primary instigator and editor. Planning fora like this is part of my job, of course, but sometimes one has a “bright idea,” issues invitations, and finds the result… a little disappointing. This was not one of those times.

Lee’s final reply will go up on June 30. As you see then, this Substack may just be part of a deep plot to get everyone to read Law & Liberty.

Happy Father’s Day! Much gratitude to my own dad, my husband, and all the dedicated fathers out there who make such a huge difference in the world. A few words on fathers, before getting to my Scripture reflection.

Fatherhood is rather an interesting topic for reflection, in the spirit of Christendom Reborn, as something simultaneously deeply traditional (patriarchy!) and adaptable. Consider this: in an age when very few people of any political persuasion are satisfied with the present state of men, nearly everyone has a highly favorable view of fathers. And it’s widely agreed by everyone now that fatherhood is extremely important. Glorifying single motherhood isn’t much of a thing anymore. What particular outcome do you most care about in kids? Physical health? Safety? Academic performance? Avoidance of criminality and addiction? Transmission of faith and moral standards?

Fathers. Pretty much every outcome is rosier when kids have fathers, especially if they have good relationships with their dads (but usually even if they don’t). This is now pretty widely known. TV sitcoms may still serve up the occasional “doofus dad,” and “patriarchy” is still a fairly hot button, but to my eyes, fatherhood’s stock is pretty high. Justifiably! It’s great to see the world come back around to such an obvious truth!

At the same time, it’s worth noting that this isn’t just a case of tradition weathering the test of time. Fathers themselves have also adapted to changing circumstances. Nobody nowadays supposes for a moment that it’s enough for a dad to bring home the bacon and preside magisterially over the family dinner table. They’re putting in the time going to the concerts and sporting events, playing the board games, building relationships. They seem, in general, to have very positive feelings about this. And it’s clearly very good for the kids. Hooray for old-but-adapted things! For young men seeking a path to both meaning and social approval, there’s one fairly obvious answer: fatherhood. Everyone approves of dedicated dads.

In honor of their day, we’ve got a very fun set of readings, in which the Prophet Jeremiah, lamenting the hardships of being an outcast and social pariah, offers the Lord the following entreaty:

O LORD of hosts, you who test the just,
who probe mind and heart,
let me witness the vengeance you take on them,
for to you I have entrusted my cause.

Jeremiah 20:12

This is one of those scriptures that makes me want to laugh out loud. And possibly cheer. “Lord, vindicate me. Oh, and by the way, when you punish my enemies… can I watch?”

It’s possibly a tiny bit disturbing to see a prophet venting such vengeful impulses, and yet we can understand. Certainly, anyone who has had the experience of “being canceled” (as the kids now say) can readily understand. Kat Rosenfeld recently posted her “cancellation story,” and her account had some good insights, which will inspire a rueful nod from anyone who has experienced anything of this kind. (I have, though Rosenfeld’s case is considerably worse than anything that ever happened to me.)

Getting canceled, to be clear, is much more than just getting piled on for something controversial that you said. It involves losing things: People who once employed or sought association with you go sprinting the other way. But paired with that, it has an element of fantasy and fabrication. You do your best to defend yourself with truth, and it’s made clear to you that the truth does not matter here. Your enemies have their story put together and it’s working for them. You might do a sincere moral analysis of your own behavior and confess to a few things (a too-sharp word here or contextually-imprudent line of analysis there), but that would just enrage them. You’re a meme now, a prop in a constructed storyline. You can’t have understandable (even mixed!) motives or nuanced thoughts. Your personal fate is unimportant. The Cause (whatever that is) demands you as collateral damage.

At moments like that, the phrase “post-truth society” starts to feel very apt. Even if truth still exists, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything. There is only “influence.” “Messaging.” “The narrative.” If you’ve lost those things, you’re done here.

We should try very hard to be honest with ourselves about whether and when truth is really on our side. Being fallen, most of us do have mixed motives when we say a controversial thing (even if we weren’t particularly expecting it to be so explosive). But in the end, we should take comfort in the knowledge that the truth is never really vanquished. God always sees.

Fear no one.
Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed,
nor secret that will not be known.

Matthew 10:26

Nor are we ourselves truly forgotten.

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?
Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
Even all the hairs of your head are counted.
So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Matthew 10 29-31

Jeremiah may have been a bit hungry for vengeance, but may it was more about vindication and truth. Which is very relatable. But anytime you’re tempted to think of yourself as a “truth warrior,” I recommend mentally setting your case before Jesus, an exquisitely fair judge who certainly cares about both you and the truth. Quite often, you’ll find at least a few things in your own behavior that could stand to be improved. Nevertheless, the truth does matter, and if you can keep that North Star in view, steadfastly enduring as his witness, he will never sprint the other way. You will always have an advocate.

If not… it doesn’t really matter who controls the narrative for a day.

I was mostly off grid this past week, up in Rocky Mountain National Park celebrating my parents’ Golden Anniversary. It was a powerful nostalgia trip and I’m still sifting through the emotions. Colorado was my home from the second grade through high school graduation. My family then moved on, exactly when I did. It was a pretty sharp break. It was my childhood home, and suddenly, just two weeks after my graduation date, I no longer had any family in Colorado. And never would again (or at least not to date).

It was my parents’ decision, not mine, but there was a huge upside for me: I got a free Notre Dame education. They relocated to South Bend, IN, so that my father could join the law faculty there, and my (and my brother’s) admission and tuition were effectively rolled into the deal. As you see, I was a true nepo admit, and this wholly unexpected and unmerited blessing left me quite abashed. I’d never for a moment set my sights so high. It’s not the sort of gift you send back though, so I did my best to pay it forward.

That turned out to be transformative for my life. I think college did more for me than for many, not least because up through that point I mostly saw myself as a person of average intelligence who happened to be related to a lot of smart people. I acknowledged, too, that since long habit had made me comfortable around smart people, I did have a knack for befriending them. But I definitely tended to view myself as a sidekick-type figure, facilitating the genius of the more brilliant. (Every Holmes needs his Watson, right?) When a Notre Dame education fell into my lap, I was excited but also genuinely terrified that I might not be able to hack it, so I threw myself into the work. I discovered that I was not quite as dumb as I’d believed. I graduated summa cum laude, found my way to an Ivy League graduate program, and embarked on a somewhat different life from what I’d envisioned.

I know my parents made real sacrifices to give me, and my siblings, those chances. I’m grateful. But when I breathe that light, dry air again, and hear the wind through the pines I used to love, part of me does want to sit and cry a little for what my family lost in that move. In the short term it affected my parents and younger siblings the most; we older kids, after all, were already headed out the door. But looking back across decades, I now understand that despite the very significant gains, we older kids paid a real price too. We lost a much-loved childhood home and never got it back. You don’t get to grow up again. The closing of the Colorado chapter relegated our childhood to albums and anecdotes. My own sons have visited my parents’ childhood stomping grounds (in Idaho Falls, where we still have family) more than mine.

Our parents would eventually settle in Southern California, where they built a very good life for themselves. They’re still there, as is my youngest brother, fully habituated to coastal culture. It’s a fun place to visit but it’s never been home to me. Last Monday, when the purple-blue shapes of the Rockies first appeared like old ghosts on the horizon, I found myself humming the folk tune Shenandoah, which initially seemed odd: that’s a totally different part of the country (where I’ve never lived). On reflection I saw the dots that my subconscious had already connected. Shenandoah is about Western settlers looking back nostalgically on the home they left behind, in the gorgeous Shenandoah River Valley. It was clearly a much-loved place, and its loss makes them sad. But they’re not going back. Away, we’re bound away…

There’s a point to this nostalgic reflection, of relevance to Christendom Reborn. Many people have a funny idea that Christianity is ill-suited to modern life, with its rapid and relentless change. Modern people, we are told, are too alienated, rootless, and disconnected from tradition to make sense of Christianity. One needs context (or so the story goes) to find it meaningful; as that soil gets washed away in the currents of modernity, the roots wither and the faith will die. It sounds plausible, but in some ways is an exact inversion of the truth. Alienation, rootlessness, and loss of context are characteristic modern problems, and Christians struggle with them like everyone else, but the faith, far from becoming obsolete, is all the more relevant when other traditional sources of meaning are passing away. It makes the losses bearable, in part because we know that nothing precious is truly lost forever. It can hold onto memories without being crippled by them, honoring history without idolizing it.

It’s perfectly true of course that faith and family are strongly connected, and their fragmentation also tends to track. Unsurprisingly, people are much likelier to be practicing Christians in adulthood if their parents read the Bible aloud and taught them to pray. They’re also likelier to marry and form families if they are rooted in Christian faith. The two things are mutually reinforcing. That however is not really a unique feature of Christianity. The dynamic holds to a large extent across all faiths and even just “traditions” in a very general sense. There are lots of benefits to staying put, perpetuating a way of life, imitating your parents and grandparents. The further people get from the ways of their fathers, the likelier they are to end up adrift on life’s high seas.

Even so, it’s neither possible nor wise to imitate one’s ancestors blindly. People can have excellent reasons for moving, breaking with the past, and forging new pathways into the future. You get a chance to give your kids a Notre Dame education and decide that it’s worth it, even though the Rocky Mountains are too big to pack. It’s tricky at times to find the right balance between tradition and traditionalism (the living faith of the dead and the dead faith of the living). We need the capacity to remember, but also, sometimes, to retranslate.

It was comforting to reflect on those themes this week as I took my kids (and their cousins) on once-beloved hikes, walked through sunny pine forests again, joined my siblings in revisiting old trips and reunions and the ridiculous songs we made up in the car. I thought about the grain of wheat that falls and dies. I reflected on how all things are held in the eternal memory of God. I cried a little as we stopped in Boulder on the way back East, and I took my boys on one last hike through Chautauqua Park, so saturated in memories of good times and old friends. Away, we’re bound away…

At moments like this, it’s easy to get a little envious of families like one in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who are so immersed in a faith-oriented culture (or subculture) that theology, blood, history, and custom seem to fuse together in a thick, unified whole. It would be nice to feel less fragmented, less alienated, not constantly pressed by the weight of competing goods. And yet, I do really think that my family is extraordinary too. In some ways absence and distance actually accentuate how much we do have in common, when in fact we find ourselves gathered in one place. It’s beautiful, in a way, to be able to gather together in a place that was once home, sing the songs, rehash the memories, argue a few points of philosophy or politics… and return to the lives we’ve built now. Which we have done. We’ve landed in many different places, but all of us have set our hands to one plough or another. We’re scattered, but not really drifting. Moving mountains? Or maybe someday?

No earthly roots are truly strong enough to withstand the ravages of time. In the end there is only one table around which we can gather eternally. Fifty years is a long time to be married, but what we really admire in long-married couples is not just their success in hanging on, but the many things they discovered, built, and nurtured together. You look at those fresh-faced wedding photos, and then at their lives and our family, and feel overwhelmed. The bittersweet notes have ultimately become part of a glorious whole.

If all that can come from the union of two people, how much more from Christ and his Church?

So I took a week off from Christendom Reborn. I missed it! But it was a major crunch week: two major deadlines, a family visit, and the job of holding the wheel at Law & Liberty while our editor was away on vacation. Coming off of that sort of week, it actually felt like a bit of a relief to return to the inauspiciously titled “14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time.” I’m still decompressing a little, and can appreciate a little normalcy. Every day doesn’t have to be a feast.

There’s something very appropriate, in fact, about stepping out of a season of feasting and into a reminder that “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Alright, party’s over. Back to work, everybody!

Here’s a remarkable fact that I reflect on from time to time. Roughly 7% of all the people who have ever lived are currently alive today. Advances in agriculture, medicine, and technology enabled a population explosion over the past 150 years. (Even the last 50.) We may be headed back the other way now, but there are still a lot of people alive right now. Jesus’ Apostles obviously accomplished some amazing things. But even if they had succeeded in converting every single soul on Earth (at that time) it would have been, at most, about as many souls as are presently living just here in the United States.

Friends, the harvest is truly plentiful. Anyone tempted to hunker down and wait for a more promising hour, “BenOp” fashion, should consider that we may be seeing “peak population” at least for the foreseeable future, and it’d be a real shame to quit the field at the exact moment when there are more souls than ever to be saved.

Laborers aren’t quite as scarce as in Jesus’ day, happily. At least, there are a lot more Christians now, but to reap a harvest we of course have to be willing to work the fields. How many of us are doing that? Could we do it better? Seems like a good question to reflect on as one eases back into “ordinary time.”

Understandably, most of us find it a little difficult at times to figure out what work God has for us in a given moment. Our “assignments” generally aren’t delivered in printed instructions, or delivered through orations from angelic messengers. Unfortunately. Or perhaps fortunately. I go back and forth on that one.

I won’t pretend to have any great solution to this puzzle, but I will offer just two thoughts.

First of all, when I read the lives of great saints, I am struck by how often they find themselves changing course, getting diverted from their original plan and finding a way to roll with the punches. Occasionally they do get an angelic messenger, but more often not. They read the room, as it were. Even if they don’t like the room at all. If you don’t have some willingness to do that, you probably won’t be a particularly useful servant, because God’s providential view is obviously much better and clearer than ours.

Here’s the second thing. When I reflect on the things I’ve done in life that may have “made a difference,” one thing that comes back to me is the handful of conversations (not many of these, but the rare occasion certainly sticks with you) when a reader has told me (perhaps approaching me after a lecture, or sending me an email) that something I wrote impacted a major life choice. “I was so moved by your column on X that I talked to my husband and we decided, yes, we should have another baby, even though we’re not sure we can afford it. It’s worth it. And she’s beautiful, we’re so happy we did.”

Again, I haven’t had lots of those conversations, but a few. And they’re immensely humbling. The column in question wasn’t necessarily even a particularly good one (in my own highfalutin evaluation!), or I might be struggling to recall which column they’re even referencing… but that doesn’t really matter of course. I was just the butterfly, flapping a wing somewhere, which God in his Providence was able to use for good. It could have been any of a hundred or a thousand people, easily able to write columns as good or better than mine… but what an honor, right? To be permitted to be the butterfly. To be of use for some larger divine purpose far beyond my ken. Of course, that can be any of us, on any ordinary day. I find it fun to muse sometimes that “perhaps the most objectively important thing I ever did, in a cosmic and providential sense, was some little service rendered or stray thought expressed, which in my own mind had no real importance at all.” Perhaps.

I’m not suggesting that we should meander through life doing nothing-in-particular. Quite the contrary! We should be as energetic as possible in looking for places to put in an oar. The Apostles certainly were. But realistically, our best-laid plans often go awry. And when they do… well, who knows? God can do a lot sometimes with failed attempts and mangled plans.

Keep at it, laborers! Still plenty of harvest left to bring in.

Happy Feast of Corpus Christi! I was originally planning to write a Sunday Faith Reflection today on Sacraments, which are not a major theme of Christendom Reborn but a big part of Christian life. However, I’m going to defer that for another time, because I think today is the day to talk about my book.

It began like this. In the spring of 2024, I found myself in a bit of a rut professionally. I’d pursued a couple of possible jobs that hadn’t ultimately panned out. It wasn’t crushing; it wasn’t a “dream job” situation so much as “responsible effort to build my career and keep up with the school tuition.” And the reasons it didn’t succeed were banal, not bruising. Even so, prepping for interviews, developing media strategies for potential employers etc, had consumed so much mental energy that the (unsuccessful) conclusion left me feeling curiously disoriented. What now?

I decided to indulge myself in a day or two of unapologetic daydreaming. What would I want to do, given the leisure? This is a dangerous indulgence for a writer.

I would write a book, of course. I’ve spent years platforming other people’s books and filling short-term commissions for quick cash. The pace is perpetually frantic. “Finish it, finish it, finish it” is the motto of the freelancer. You’re also heavily tied to other people’s content needs. How wonderful would it be to have the space to develop my own long-term project?

Next question: What would that project be? I’d mused on various book projects over the years of course, but none felt quite right for this present moment. For half a day or so, my mind was fairly blank. Then the idea appeared. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.

It was too big. I gave myself that lecture again and again. Cut it down to something manageable! Trying to explain everything in the world is the ultimate rookie move. But the core of the thing was expansive by nature, and I couldn’t seem to chop it, only hone it, so my mind immediately began applying itself to that task. Six weeks later, still unable to get it out of my mind, I opened a file on my computer and started a book proposal. Why not. Just see where it goes. No matter what happens, I’ll surely have learned something.

The original motivating question, as I related in my first few posts, came out of my weariness and frustration with the endless right-wing doomerism. Yes, I know that our culture has some serious problems. But Christianity has been around a long time, and weathered what sometimes seemed like very long odds. Instead of explaining all the reasons why it’s over, why not ask: Why is it is still here? Perhaps the answer to that question could set us up to develop survival strategies for our own time.

For the next 18 months or so, this was what I thought about in all those spare moments: chopping onions, stuck in traffic, waiting for a kid outside the school. At the band concert when it wasn’t my kid playing. (Or possibly when it was.) On the sidelines of all the sportsball games. I was thinking about it continually, though actually working on the proposal was more of a motivational treat, reserved for times when I’d handled all my editing tasks and filled all looming commissions. That meant of course that I could go a few weeks together without even opening the file. When I did clear a few days for proposal work though, there was generally a lot of mentally backlogged material that seemed to flow right onto the page.

Working through all these questions in my mind, I eventually developed a three-part answer to my original (“Why are we still here?”) question. Christianity’s longevity and adaptability, I decided, is best explained through three features, what I eventually came to call the “Three Keys” of the Christian tradition. Of course I’ve talked about them all here at Christendom Reborn: faith and reason, God and Caesar, and love. The philosophical, the political, the personal. My book proposal has an intricate, braided structure that weaves the three together in an interlocking sequence. The book contains three parts, and each part contains three chapters, one for each Dynamic Key.

My working title is World Without End. That’s because the book’s parts are named according to the phrasing of the ancient prayer sometimes known as the “Glory Be.” The first section, As it was in the beginning, considers how each Key has functioned in Christian history. The second, As it is now, argues that the Keys are in fact well adapted to contemporary challenges. The final section, As it ever shall be takes a more normative tone and lays out suggestions for what work Christians need to do moving forward. Past, present, and future. World without end, Amen.

Across those months it all started to cohere in my head. On paper I chipped away at it, and last summer finally got the thing where I wanted it. Then I briefly joined Publishers Marketplace, cold pitched some agents, and found one who liked the project and was interested in working with me. He had some recommendations for fairly big-picture revisions, which seemed good, so I spent a few more months reworking it and sent him a substantially revised version this last March. He liked it. It went out to publishing houses Easter Monday.

Then I started collecting rejections. Such kind rejections, though! It was really a very curious experience. People said many warm and encouraging things about the writing, the ideas, the structure of the project itself. But ultimately they tended to wind back to the same ending note: platform too small for a commercial launch.

“Platform,” for those not in the publishing industry, is sort of a nebulous term for “influencer currency.” It includes your reputation, job, connections, social media followers, anything you yourself bring to the table that would help convince people to buy your book. Basically, I need to get famouser. Not necessarily broadly famous (e.g. a household name), but poised to pitch my book to all the people who might want to buy it.

This wasn’t exactly shocking to me. I’m aware that I’m not super-famous! But the process did leave me with an odd mix of cheerful feelings (people don’t think this is boring or dumb! I’ve communicated the ideas successfully!) and demoralization. Because there’s not much point in substantially revising a proposal that people already liked. The problem was me, not my ideas.

A few weeks into this process, as that writing was emerging on the wall, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about Substack. Would it be interesting to experiment with that? It would at any rate be a new way to unfold the ideas, get feedback, possibly cultivate an audience. I had never even considered doing a Substack before, because… do I need more writing obligations? Please. But lying awake in the dark, I started noodling on all the potential benefits, and how liberating it could be just to do some writing, without the relentless demand to tailor everything to the needs of this or that publication. Unable to sleep, I ended up at my computer screen that same night, writing the first few posts of this Substack. (It would sure make life easier if I could install a nice, non-violent, temporary “off” switch on my brain. Once it gets stuck on something… yeah.)

A week or so later I launched it. What the heck. Life is short. Let’s just see where this goes.

I devised a 6-week “opening sequence” for the Substack, which I have now completed. To review, it went like this:

Week 1: Introduce basic framework

Week 2: Book Week (in which I position myself vis a vis five broadly-known books)

Week 3: Autopsy Week (exploring the question “who killed Christendom?”)

Week 4: Faith and Reason Week

Week 5: God and Caesar Week

Week 6: Love Week

Appropriately enough, it ended on Corpus Christi, which I always think of as the very final day of the most holy, exciting, and grace-filled season of the liturgical year. (Starting on Ash Wednesday, of course. The Lent-and-Easter sequence.) This one has certainly been exciting! And I have indeed learned some things. For instance, I’ve learned that I could use a bigger platform! But not just that. Thinking back to that post-failed-interview moment, it’s clear I’ve come a considerable way to answering the question, “What sort of project, given a chance, would I like to do?” I’ve remembered what it’s like to punch out 1500 words in 90-120 minutes, which is much faster than I write when I’m filling commissions. I’m aware that it’s less polished than the writing I do for magazines, but then again, there are ideas I’ve worked over a lot, so they flow pretty fast. I hope it’s not too hard to follow and engage.

Despite my recent reminders of the smallness of my platform, I haven’t really tried all that hard to “sell” the Substack. I richly appreciate the subscribers I have! It just seems to me though, that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to aggressively promote a thing you’ve hardly begun building. There needs to be a “there” there. So, I built a front porch. There’s something here. Now I can dig deeper into the questions. Engage other writers and Substacks. Work on my own “media strategy.”

With respect to the book, I’m still thinking and strategizing. The publishing houses that rejected it were mostly major commercial publishers; there are certainly other ways to skin that cat. Most of my professor friends have very small platforms and are constantly writing books (often extremely interesting!) that may or may not find a significant readership. I however am an editor and freelancer, not an academic, and I also have five boys to raise, and bills to pay. I can’t write whole books on subjects that just interest me and then go checking around to see if they interest anyone else. Anyhow, to make it a good book (and for that matter to maintain Christendom Reborn as a lively and interesting Substack over the long haul), I’d need to free up more time and attention for it, and for that I need a professional (and financial!) justification. I wouldn’t be remotely ashamed to publish a book with a smaller or academic press, but there are complications there since they generally can’t do as much for you (financially or professionally). So, I’m thinking through the strategic possibilities. Funding sources. Platforms. We’ll see.

What I definitely can say is that my mind is still working over these questions fairly relentlessly. And I have a lot of themes, essays, and discussion topics I’m excited to launch here at Christendom Reborn, now that I’ve finished my opening sequence. This next two weeks might be a little spotty, because I have a couple of commissions that desperately need filling, after which I’m heading off to go celebrate my parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary. But we’ll get back into it all quite soon.

Warm thanks to everyone who’s been with me up to this point. Here’s to Christendom, and rebirth.

!

My plans for this week got a little derailed by my actual job (so unfair), two kids’ birthdays, and a family visit. So, I have another essay that I’ll probably end up posting as one of next week’s, inspired by this week’s discussion, on why there’s no such thing as “safe sex.” (It’s very unsafe. By nature. Welcome to life.)

But in the meantime, I’m posting the two “From the Archives” pieces I was planning to put up yesterday, pertinent to the subject of “vocation.” It was sort of fun, actually. I went through my files and found two pieces on maternity and vocation written a decade apart! Ha. You can see how my views on the matter evolved from early motherhood to middle motherhood.

I’ll be sending out my Weekly Wrap-Up either tonight or tomorrow. Right now I’m off on a birthday outing… I now officially have three teenagers under my roof! Rejoice?

From Aleteia, August 2014, my essay “Children Are a Burden and So Is Love”:

Given that love really is good for us, why should we dwell on the burdens? Because selflessness can be punishingly difficult in the shorter term, and modern people have trouble understanding this. In our modern parlance, “love” means little more than “a strong preference, the satisfaction of which is particularly important to one’s personal happiness.” We understand that love can be sweet, but we don’t want to accept the attendant burdens.

So obsessed are we with the language of rights that we allow love itself to be co-opted into that world. People of the same sex, we are told, have a right to love one another as spouses, in a way exactly equivalent to heterosexual love. Anyone who experiences maternal or paternal yearnings has a right to a child, which is why we must enable all interested parties to acquire children, through adoption, artificial insemination or surrogacy. The welfare of the children is very much a secondary concern. Anyone who desires parenthood (and has the resources to finance the physiological process) is entitled to offspring, regardless of their other personal circumstances.

Of course, all people want to love and be loved. This longing is fundamental to human nature. It’s hardly surprising, then, that people yearn for relationships that are not appropriate for them, given their personal circumstances. We should regard these kinds of frustrations with compassion, and where possible help to fill the breach. But we should never allow ourselves to forget that love cannot be an entitlement. It begins with the assumption of burdens, and only later yields its bountiful rewards.

Then from Word on Fire, November 2024, “Tradwives and Traditional Women,” in which I reflect on how a serious view of vocation makes the gender cosplay of the Tradwives feel pointless and unnecessary.

Here’s what I actually see among the traditional women I know. They’re practical. They’re hardworking. And they’re positively entrepreneurial about taking advantage of new technologies, tools, resources, or opportunities to meet their family’s needs. They have close, cooperative relationships with their husbands, working in tandem on a day-to-day basis to get it done. This is simply necessary, because traditional Catholic families are attempting something very difficult in a broader cultural climate that is often deeply unsupportive. We want our kids to thrive, just like everyone else, but we’re trying to raise many children into healthy, well-adjusted, marriageable and employable adults, with limited resources. When you’re climbing that crag, there’s no time for cosplay. There’s no money for period wardrobes. Who cares about such silly things? We’re focused on the task at hand: raising honorable men and women who are prepared to serve the Lord.

Naturally, the people who choose to put their lives on the internet will always be the most visible, so it’s not surprising that they form people’s assumptions about traditional women. But it is unfortunate in many ways, because it’s quite misleading. Here is an example. Reading tradwife debates on the internet, one would easily conclude that the old “mommy wars” are raging as hot as ever. Moms are absolutely tearing one another apart over the question of whether they should work. But the real Catholic moms I know, whether they have two children or twelve, don’t seem energized in the least by those tired old questions. They may have been of interest to us when we were seventeen. But now, we’re too busy worrying about the meal planning, the bills, the shower mildew, the games, concerts, and dances, and that funny sound the van has been making. We’re trying to hang on through the maelstrom of parenting. In the midst of that, who has time or energy for evaluating everyone else’s work-and-family arrangements?

As you see, the “rewards” I was anticipating were bountiful indeed. So much shower mildew! So many dirty socks!

Anyway, as we close out Love Week, here’s to embracing the actual, messy, exhausting, and bountiful burdens of love—starting with this weekend’s birthday chaos. Have a wonderful weekend!

How can one instill order in a Christian society? That’s today’s question. I realize that many people will see it as somewhat strange and irrelevant.

Why worry about the needs of “a Christian society” when what we actually have is a post-Christian society? Or perhaps we have a pagan society, a consumerist society, a society of godless materialists. If we had a Christian society, surely things would be far more orderly. (That opinion, interestingly, would probably be shared by many people who view it as both a good and a bad thing.)

In the end of course I agree that Christian society is better than all those alternatives. But, as I argued in my last essay, the “Pandora’s Box” of Christian universalism has unleashed some genuinely difficult problems on modern society. Ordering a Christian society really is quite hard! Christians combined a lofty, Greek-like appreciation for human excellence with an uncompromising universalism, and seasoned it with the view that any person, from any walk of life, might potentially receive a divine calling to some other liminal life, transcending normal civic and familial obligations. That’s a hard starting-point from which to build an orderly civil society! And yet, Christians historically have managed to do this with some success, and a look at the strategies they employed may give us some good ideas for how to move forward today.

In the early years, there was a certain amount of chaos. Those were the years of the desert hermits, the stylites, and a fair number of people spontaneously giving up all their earthly possessions to live in poverty. Over time and as Christianity became mainstream, some baseline of normalcy had to be established, so Christian societies developed some tools to help instill that order, without jettisoning the radical Christian ethic of love. On a philosophical level (the “ethics of love”), the key concept was the ordo amoris, the order of love. I’ll leave that topic for another time. Practically speaking, the most important ordering principle was vocation. It was understood that different people were called to different sorts of work, and subject to certain rules and expectations connected with that calling.

Now, in Catholic circles at least, this subject tends to stir furious debate about the true number of vocations. Some argue that only priests and religious (that is, members of religious orders) can truly be said to “have a vocation,” the idea being that they are called out of the normal pattern of life while the married are merely “doing the done thing.” Others stick firmly to two primary vocations (the priesthood/religious life and marriage) while still others want us to multiply categories expansively to cover a whole range of other things people might feel called to do their lives. This can get complicated, and I don’t plan to settle it here.

For present purposes I’m going with the two-track model, setting aside edge cases like hermits and married priests. I’m not really going to say much about the secular priesthood generally, in fact. I’m looking primarily here at marriage and religious life, because those cases best illustrate the point at hand, though I will also note at the end that the concept of “vocation” does naturally expand outwards, in ways that can be read as variations on the theme.

The theme is this. For healthy adaptation to occur, something has to stay fixed. Then other things can move.

People can do all sorts of valuable things in this life, and it’s often quite good to be creative, entrepreneurial, driven. But a healthy creativity has to be bounded and restrained in various ways. It must be disciplined. If there are no rules, no forms, nothing fixed or required, the result is simply chaos.

This general principle applies to many things. In a sport or a board game chaos it means “confusing and not fun”; in music or art it likely means “a meaningless mess of color or sound.” In social terms, “chaos” probably means betrayal, loneliness, violence, predation on the innocent, anarchy. It also generally means poverty, because a certain level of order and stability is generally necessary for the generation of wealth.

Something has to be fixed if we want other things to move in purposeful ways. People need some expectations and limits to be their best selves.

As already mentioned, the early Church, had a good number of radicals: hermits, stylites, and the like. There are some great success stories here, like St. Anthony, St. Evagrius, or St. Gerasimus; they left us deep spiritual wisdom as well as a stock of excellent folk stories that Christian children still love. However, there were many others who sought the liminal life and came to grief. Total isolation led some would-be holy men (or women) to psychosis, despair, or raging megalomania; some rapidly starved or died of exposure, bringing tremendous grief of their families; some alienated their families by giving up all their property, only to realize a short while later that they lacked the fortitude to embrace the life of a beggar. Eventually, some wise people realized that a less radical path was needed for those who wanted to give themselves to God. And the monastery was born.

Monastic communities had rules, disciplines, and hierarchical structures. They began springing up in the 4th century, first in Egypt, then in Turkey and Palestine, and finally in the West. By the time St. Benedict wrote his famous Rule in the 6th century, the monastic experiment had been running awhile. But the Rule is justly famous, for its brevity and simplicity, its prudent balance of discipline and compassion, and its applicability to people of all classes and backgrounds. It’s just 13,000 words, easily fit into a sweet little 75-page volume, and yet it lasted centuries and grounded one of history’s greatest and longest-surviving institutions. St. Benedict created a discipline that ordinary people could live, rooted in work and prayer, which nevertheless enabled them to grow, build and discover in all sorts of extraordinary ways. They pushed the boundaries of science, engineering, agriculture, viticulture, medicine. As the Rule ordered life in the monastery, so the Benedictine Order became a pillar of order in the West.

See how this works? Something stays fixed. Then other things move, not randomly and chaotically but purposefully, adaptively, fruitfully. Religious orders, by providing that order and discipline, channeled spiritual zeal in ways that were transformative for society at large.

Christianity’s impact on marriage was no less dramatic. They didn’t invent it of course, but from the very beginning they startled the pagan world with their inflexible rules and high expectations. Christians appeared to the Romans as “monogamy fanatics.” It was truly strange to many pagans how they were relatively relaxed about food, but extremely strict in their sexual morals, demanding marital fidelity from wives and husbands and forbidding fornication. This makes perfect sense when one understands that Christianity is a religion of love. Sex can very easily be exploitative, in particular enabling men to exploit women. By placing a very high bar on “licit sex” (permissible only with lifelong commitment and an ordering towards parenthood), Christians recognized the interpersonal significance of sex, while strongly discouraging sexual exploitation. It’s really quite extraordinary that so many modern people still think of Christianity as a major engine of female oppression.

Over time, the Christian discipline associated with matrimony gave rise to its own entire body of legal theory. Canon law, in turn, also left a deep mark on Western society. A rather surprising witness to this truth is secular scholar Joseph Henrich, in his fascinating book The WEIRDest People in the World. Henrich explains how the Church, by forbidding cousin marriage and discouraging arranged marriages, broke up tribal networks and made it far more difficult to consolidate wealth and power within a family line. Ultimately he sees this as an important catalyst for Western morality, individualism, and also institutionalism: deprived of close kinship networks, people had to learn how to work together with strangers, and they ended up building universities, guilds, eventually joint-stock corporations.

Henrich, with a background in anthropology, evolutionary biology, and economics, views the matter from a strictly secular, naturalistic angle. He isn’t interested in defending the Church on theological grounds. Sometimes his explanations are awfully crass. For instance, he doesn’t give Christian authorities a huge amount of credit for spiritual or moral motives in launching the “Marriage and Family Program” (as he calls it); he mostly sees it as a self-interested attempt to motivate more people to leave their worldly goods to the Church. But in some ways that only makes it more interesting that he sees Christian marriage as a catalyst to innovation and social transformation.

Once again, we see it. Something stays fixed. Then other things can move.

Importantly, people entered into these life states voluntarily. They may have had constrained choices of course, but vocations still require an adult decision. Instead of simply being assigned a social role, one accepts the mission. As the Middle Ages advanced, there was a profusion of organizations, guilds, chivalric orders and the like, which also offered “missions” along with rules, disciplines, obligations. These were not exclusive of other vocations, but they still had some of the character of vocation, a voluntary embrace of that proved enormously fruitful across many Christian centuries.

In a vocation-based social framework, people do make choices, but life isn’t a whimsical choose-your-own-adventure. The choices are ordered, bounded, and defined. Sometimes, depending on one’s circumstances, the demands can be very, very hard. And yet, the rules of each vocation are not exhaustive, nor tyrannical. There’s still room to move, develop, and innovate within the supplied framework. This is the genius of Christian vocation.

To my eyes, the modern world is screaming for this kind of order. People are directionless, lonely, and longing for purpose. Vocation enables everyone to be Harry Potter or Bilbo Baggins, called to some genuinely important life work. How, without this concept, can we possibly cope with the chaos of the Pandora’s Box of Christian Love? The strategy is time-tested. The need is obvious. Let’s rediscover the magic of rules and promises.

Even as I was finishing up my Pandora’s Box essay last night, I considered whether to add something about AI. I ended up deciding against it, because the essay had come around rather nicely, and it’s generally a bad idea to introduce major complications right at the end of a piece.

Nevertheless, the connection was certainly in my mind when I wrote that,

For centuries, the unyielding demands of necessity (the basic imperative to keep people fed and warm) shielded human cultures to a great extent from the hard task of grappling fully with the immense complexity and diversity of human persons. Those “protections” have been falling with terrifying speed, and modern societies are scrambling to come to grips with the new reality.

We’re still working through the implications of an AI-oriented world, I think it’s clear that even more of those “protections” will fall, pushing us to reckon not only with the question “what is this amazing technology” but also, more uncomfortably, “what are we?”

There are many hard questions here, and happily Yuval Levin has raised many of them in his rich and interesting response to Pope Leo’s new encyclical in the New Atlantis. It’s very respectful but also has some serious, substantive critiques. The final paragraphs (but read the whole thing!):

This care about the formation of our souls seems to be where Pope Leo wants to point us. But to do so more effectively, he will need to grapple more fully with the potential, promise, and peril of the extraordinarily transformative power now increasingly falling into our hands. Magnifica Humanitas is too dismissive of what this power involves, what these technologies are likely to be capable of, and what that will mean for how we understand ourselves.

The transformation we are now embarking on will humble us. Like a number of prior advances in our understanding of the universe, it will force us to narrow the range of what we take to be uniquely human, but also to sharpen our focus upon it.

That kind of humbling comes with pain, and is most naturally experienced as loss. If we are instead to experience it as a deeper learning about the nature of the human person, we are going to need guidance from people well versed in what that nature consists of. It seems to me, from a distance, that Pope Leo XIV is such a person. I hope that he, and others of his caliber in other communities of learning or faith (including my own), are up to the teaching task before them. It’s not yet clear if anyone is.

A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

John 13 34-35

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

1 John 4:16

Christianity is a religion of love. That’s not gooey sentimentality. It’s theology. Christianity teaches that God himself is love. That the Supreme Creator of the Universe made every single human being as a unique and precious individual. And that he desires an intimate, loving relationship with each one.

This is foundational to Christianity, which is foundational to the West, so it’s not surprising that we sometimes lose sight of how radical this teaching really is. In the ancient world it would have struck many people as nonsensical, not to mention deeply disruptive to the established social order. Clearly many people did think that, as we see in the way that some pagans ridiculed the Christians for their naivete in being willing to care for passing strangers or brand new converts. (Lucian’s Passing of Peregrinus is a particularly famous example of biting satire at the early Christians’ expense.)

Of course, the same features that made Christianity threatening and disruptive, also made it beautiful and attractive, especially to the poor. When Rome was hit by plague, Christians stayed in the city to care for victims, disregarding the risk to themselves. Sociologist Rodney Stark suggests that this humanitarian impulse probably brought them an influx of new converts. Their willingness to welcome slaves, women, and the very poor subjected them to ridicule by Romans who saw them as a ragtag band of misfits; also inspired and uplifted many others, including some wealthy patricians who seemingly had a bad conscience about Roman social practices.

Christians’ willingness to countenance the possibility that anyone might have a “special assignment” (to radical poverty, celibacy, religious life etc.) generated another form of energy, and indeed, many did embrace some very unusual lifestyles in those early centuries. There was a kind of spiritual energy (entrepreneurship?) to those early years that we sometimes yearn to recapture, and yet, it’s not per se surprising that the Romans sometimes regarded Christianity as threatening, a mania that was best eradicated.

It has always been the business of Christians to affirm the preciousness of human life, and the value of loving relationship. To insist that everyone matters. That beautiful and humane vision has made the faith meaningful, and served as a beacon for converts, in every age.

But even in an age that is deeply (albeit often unreflectively) rooted in a Christian paradigm, the teaching that “God is love” remains radical to this day. At the least, it’s very demanding, and still very capable of upending any established order. It’s actually rather interesting to think about the cultural pathologies of our own day as an unexpected consequence of this demanding Christian teaching. Having taken for granted that love is supposed to be central to human life and society, we struggle to get any perspective on the more demanding implications of that view. Truthfully, this really isn’t the sort of thing one is meant to take for granted. It’s a very hard teaching. In every age. We should expect it to be hard.

It’s hard, in the first place, for practical reasons. There are lots of unglamorous things in this world that simply need to be done, and to decide who does them, most societies rely on some sort of established social order. How else would we do it? But those generally involve hierarchies, castes or class structures, imposed obligations. High-flown “everyone is unique and special” rhetoric might be fine for Sunday School, but afterwards someone has to clean up the church. Feed the children. Wash the altar linens. Generally, human societies have allotted tasks like that through fairly unnuanced forms of categorizing and stereotyping. “You’re this kind of person, so it’s your job to do that.” Are we allowed to do that anymore? Infinite uniqueness and specialness potentially opens the door to a lot of social disorder. So many unswept streets and unwashed dishes. How do we get around that problem?

There’s also the issue of perverse incentives and perverse people. Lucian (the anti-Christian satirist mentioned above) wasn’t entirely wrong to see that organic social orders give people reasons to be productive and orderly, which an indiscriminate ethic of care may obliterate. It would be nice to think that people who feel both unconditionally loved and totally confident of support and care, would respond by becoming loving and caring themselves. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not reliably. Christians often repeat that we should “hate the sin and love the sinner,” regarding the world, as St. Augustine said, “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum” — with love for mankind and hatred of sins. But that’s often easier said than done, especially because sinners themselves often come to identify with their sins. Is there a good way to “love” classes of people who are in fact a social menace? Perhaps on a personal level one still can (e.g. the mother of the thief or murderer can still love him), but can we collectively do it? What would that mean?

We might present the big-picture problem like this. Humans are so immensely complex, so varied in their talents and preferences and experiences of the world, that it’s impossible to create a functional social order without filtering out some of that complexity. Leaving certain potentialities undeveloped. “Assigning” certain people to particular roles for reasons that are banal, practical, and to some extent arbitrary. In principle, perhaps, it is possible to do that without forgetting that everyone has immense potential and infinite worth, far beyond what we immediately see. Maybe, with effort, we can make ourselves glimpse a potential poet laureate within the bricklayer. But in practice, most people find that quite hard. We see the bricklayer as a bricklayer, the poet as a poet, and value them accordingly.

In some ways the modern world really has made it a little easier to break out of that paradigm. The bricklayer almost certainly won’t become a poet laureate, but his son (or daughter?) possibly could, given sufficient talent. That would have been exceedingly unlikely until very recently, the disruptive Christian ethic notwithstanding. Despite the restless energy of those early years, it remains true that for most people across the centuries, sheer practicality has supplied powerful incentives not to stray too far from what we might call “natural, organic life scripts.” Now, Christianity did still leave its stamp on that “organic” script, in ways I’ll discuss in my next essay. But still, most people were farmers who married, raised children, and were ultimately buried very close to where they were born. In a very settled social world like that, it’s surely very hard not to see people through the lens of their assigned social space.

Perhaps it’s good, then, that people today have more opportunity, leisure, and resources, potentially enabling them to realize just a bit more of their natural potential. Might that make it just a bit easier to appreciate the immense variety, uniqueness, and complexity of human souls? I think it does, actually. I suspect that modern people really are, on balance, a little more averse to stereotyping, more sensitive to the variation and complexity of human personalities, more eager to see real talents discovered and developed. But that all comes at a price. Wealth and opportunity, the gifts of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, have opened a Pandora’s Box of other problems. This can be seen in the number of people who are idle, directionless, lonely and atomized, envious, resentful, or soulless social climbers. In falling birth and marriage rates, and an epidemic of mental illness.

More opportunity means more people crushed by a sense of personal failure. Along with the gift of greater personal freedom, we inherit the burden of needing to carve out a space for ourselves in a bewildering adult world.

Right-wing social critics love to rail against the evils of “individualism” and the modern obsession with equality. Some of those insights are important. Nevertheless, this is the sobering truth. Christianity sowed the seed for all those problems. It wasn’t Karl Marx who taught the world that every individual soul matters, nor Freud who taught us that all persons are unique. That came from Jesus.

It’s not wrong to attribute many of our modern pathologies to perversions of Christian teachings, and yet, it’s probably worth considering that many of the hardest puzzles of our own time would probably have arisen inevitably as humans built societies with more freedom, greater resources, and a complex and varied labor force. Christians have believed for millennia that human souls were immensely precious and unique, and that belief did leave its mark on the world. But for centuries, the unyielding demands of necessity (the basic imperative to keep people fed and warm) shielded human cultures to a great extent from the hard task of grappling fully with the immense complexity and diversity of human persons. Those “protections” have been falling with terrifying speed, and modern societies are scrambling to come to grips with the new reality.

Christian personalists, it’s time to step up.

As a former Mormon, I think of Trinity Sunday as “Dogma Day.” It is a solemnity dedicated to a dogmatic principle. Isn’t that exactly what you would expect from the Catholic Church? A critic might snarkily ask: When is Patriarchy Day? Guilt Day? Tacky Candle Day?

I’m not sure, but it’s clear that The Patriarchs have got their hooks in me, because I love dogma. With a deep and genuine gratitude. I love it as someone who wandered around without it for a considerable period, and experienced the discovery, not as a stifling constraint, but as a kind of fertile oasis in the desert. Or, to switch metaphors, perhaps it was more like the headlamp that transformed the same landscape from an oppressive thicket to a romantic moon-drenched woodland.

Dogma is a great gift. It supplies order and direction to the searching mind, enabling it to work productively on pressing questions, instead of meandering around fruitlessly with mounting frustration. My own (genuinely transformative) first experience of this related to the dogma of the Creation and the Fall, not the Trinity, but the point stands for all dogma. It is the scaffold that enables philosophy (and all other disciplines) to build with confidence.

It’s interesting to note that the Church Fathers, in hammering out Christian dogma through the early Ecumenical Councils, had a habit of rejecting the most obvious or natural resolution of pressing philosophical questions, instead embracing the harder or more confounding view. Over the long run, those choices proved justified.

The Trinity is an excellent example of this. I was taught, in Mormon Sunday School, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were just separate persons, full stop. Now and again a teacher would scoff a little at the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo of mainstream Christian dogma: One in Being? What in the world does that mean? I was told that they were one in purpose, not Being, which does of course seem far more reasonable to ordinary human intuition. They’re like three guys who share common goals and agree about all the important things. Makes sense, got it. (To be clear, scoffing at mainstream Christian dogma wasn’t a major fixation of my Mormon youth. Mostly people ignored it. But now and again we did get little compare-and-contrasts.)

I disputed a lot of things with my Sunday School teachers, but felt no inclination to make the case for “One in Being.” I didn’t understand it either. Sounded like empty philosopher-speak.

It turns out, this dogma bridges Christian metaphysics and ethics in a spectacular way, enabling a particular, embodied-in-time story (first of a unique people and their relationship to God, then of a single man and his life in Palestine in the first century) to amplify into The Story of the Universe. It’s rather an extraordinary thing! And it turns out that the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is key to making it possible, but unsurprisingly, my adolescent mind did not grasp that. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but it’s much too much for anyone to work out on their own.

Working through those mental knots is not just a matter of mental hygiene or personal intellectual satisfaction. It is salvific. The Gospel (the one you see painted on people’s cheeks at football games!) richly underscores that point, not only urging people to believe, but also showing how belief and love are intimately connected within the inner life of the Trinity, and how the Incarnation also flows from that tight connection:

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

John 3 16-18

Believe! And Happy Dogma Day.

In my initial 6-week plan for Christendom Reborn, this week was scheduled for politics. I was planning to talk about “God and Caesar,” my Second Key of Christian dynamism. I was a bit distressed therefore when I noticed that the week began on Memorial Day. Memorial Day is for solidarity among Americans, appreciating our country and those who died for it. It didn’t seem fitting to open a particularly contentious topic on that day.

So I adjusted, and instead posted a short reflection on President James Garfield’s Memorial Day address, delivered at Arlington Cemetery in 1868. It’s a moving speech, which does touch on some of the themes for the week, but in ways appropriate to the occasion. “The voices of these dead will forever fill the land like holy benedictions.” A lovely sentiment, which Garfield no doubt felt keenly, as a former Union officer and fervent believer in the anti-slavery cause.

Tuesday I moved into the substance of the week with an essay on “Why I Am Not a Postliberal.” I wrote this essay after lengthy reflection on how to start talking about politics without constantly shadow-boxing postliberals. I’m aware that I look like a postliberal in some important ways. There are reasons for that, and yet, I very self-consciously chose not to align myself with that camp, and there are reasons for that too. It seemed important to clarify those lines. After musing for some time on how to approach this, it finally occurred to me that this is the beauty of a personal Substack: There’s no need to angle around other people’s editorial lines. You can just sit down and explain yourself. Which I did. I explain in this essay how I became the last lonely soul on the right to come around to a kind of Buckleyite fusionism (just after the mainstream moved on from it).

After that I needed a bit of a mental recharge, but Wednesday I did post a recent essay from Law & Liberty on “The Young Oikophobes,” a review of Antonia Senior’s book on the Cambridge 5. I read this as a harrowing example of what can happen when young people grow up hating their own country. Patriotism is undoubtedly a very complex love, but there are actually reasons why we should love our own land and people (as much as circumstance allows), and teach our children the same.

Thursday I posted my second major essay of the week, “A Template for a True Christian Politics.” This title is… a little tongue in cheek. I’ll leave it at that for now.

To finish the week, an old essay from National Review on “Confessions of a ‘Christian Nationalist’,” looking now to the left, and the secular liberals’ blind spots in the God-Caesar terrain.

Recapping the Conversation

Dan Hugger added an interesting note this week by asking about left postliberalism, a topic I’ve never gotten around to exploring in depth. He did though, and suggests that it offers “interesting historical and theological narrative that was strongly critical of state power but also took the more humanistic elements of Marx seriously.”

Blake expressed some sympathy with my “post-Christian template” (or rejection of the same) but suggested that I may not have taken seriously enough the postliberal argument that “the ideology of liberalism (at least in its modern, postwar form) is crumbling.”

All I would say to that for right now is that I’m all in favor of learning from the mistakes of the postwar era, but I also want us to learn from their insights and successes. It seems to me that the postliberals have locked themselves, to an unfortunate degree, into a “hermeneutic of rupture,” a hard, rejectionist stance towards the 20th century conservative tradition that makes reasoned discourse rather difficult. But it’s also true that liberal ideology (including in its modern, postwar form) includes some real errors. By all means, let’s correct those.

Nathan Smith raised some interesting questions about whether Jesus commanded Christians to give Caesar loyalty or just obedience. I’m still reflecting on that one, but my favorite Nathan Smith comment from the week was in response to my “Young Oikophobes” column:

Just kind of underscores the egregious contradictions within post-liberalism. They want to be for tradition, but actual traditions favor liberalism, so they tie themselves in crazy knots. They want to be for community, but the community people actually believe in and feel part of is rooted in natural rights and freedom and constitutionalism... So the post-liberals have to sacrifice actual community to some sort of imagined community projected from their ideology, and usually very clumsily imagined, too.

Oikophobes that are so mad about Americans not being neighborly enough, that they have to move to Europe to get away from it.

Indeed.

As a reminder, I have set up this Substack so that subscribers have the option to receive only this weekly digest, not the mid-week posts. Feel free to do that if the volume of email gets overwhelming! And come back next week for the Third Key of Christian dynamism: Christian personalism.

Or, we could just call it “Love Week.”

Final Quote

The American premise is that the state is not the whole of society, still less the whole of human life. The state is only a part of society... Therefore the state is a limited order of action. The Church, on the other hand, exists in the totality of human life. She is not a part of the state; she is entirely distinct from it, and she is free.

John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths

Earlier this week, I wrote a rather lengthy essay explaining why I’m not a postliberal. To end the week, I thought it would make sense to balance that by re-upping this 2022 National Review piece on why I am a Christian Nationalist.

To be clear, I didn’t realize that until I read the survey data from sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry. It came as a real surprise, given that I’m comfortable with religious pluralism, a firm believer in religious freedom, and not very hawkish on immigration. The things you learn about yourself reading pop sociology!

Obviously, the real point is that it’s unfair to act as though postliberals are the only people parading oversimplified and intolerant views in the public square. Secularists do it too, and I’m pretty sure on balance there are a lot more of them in positions of influence. One kind of error doesn’t justify another, but we should try to keep the full field in view. There are real problems with the kind of liberal secularism that demands strict separation between church and state, with the latter potentially expanding to include all public institutions and public spaces generally.

Over time one can reach a place where traditional faiths are expected to relegate defining beliefs, practices, and imagery to strictly segregated spaces, while political ideologies (religions?) are free to take over public institutions, guzzle public funds, and censor detractors without compunction because hey! Their defining convictions didn’t come from an ancient holy book. They couldn’t possibly become repressive or illiberal!

That kind of problem is obviously very real in Western countries today. I think we should be a little careful about comparing it to, say, communism (which was clearly much worse), but it’s not a trivial problem. And it’s pretty glaring on the Christian Nationalism issue. As I note in this piece:

Fundamentally, Whitehead and Perry pathologize religious traditionalists, using vague statements to spread a wide net and then connecting everyone in it to obviously bad phenomena such as the January 6 Capitol riots. Their approach leaves no theoretical space for the possibility that some Christians might have principled, complex positions on church and state. For progressives this may be a fun exercise in confirmation bias, but they’ve probably revealed more about themselves than about the people they claim to be studying.

I should mention here that if you really want to understand more about the pathologizing of “Christian Nationalists,” the source you want is my brother, Jesse Smith.

This three-week stretch here at Christendom Reborn is dedicated to my “Three Keys,” one for each, laying some groundwork. Then I can return to explore the questions at greater length. I’m sticking with that plan, but I do feel a little sheepish moving on with such a brief dip into such enormous questions. I’ll return to them. Meanwhile, thanks for reading.

Consider the following three episodes from Western history.

476 AD: The Roman Empire falls. Constantinople preserves a portion of it in the East, but in the West a collection of Germanic tribes (barbarians?) breach the borders, sack Rome, and assume the governance of formerly Roman territory. Roman Christians are stunned and struggle to make sense of it all. Up to that point, Christianity seemed to be on a steady, upwards trajectory. With Rome’s fall, that pleasing narrative fell apart. As the Empire began to falter there were some grumbles to the effect that Christianity may have weakened the Empire and precipitated its downfall; St. Augustine wrote a stern rejoinder in The City of God, reminding the faithful that God’s Providential purposes don’t move in lockstep with man’s earthly ambitions. It’s a masterpiece of political theory, but it doesn’t stop the Empire from falling. A few centuries on, there are far fewer men in the West able to read The City of God.

1073 AD: Hildebrand of Sovana becomes Pope Gregory VII, and vows to restore “the glory of the Apostles” to the papacy and the Church. For some time now, Rome has been a relative backwater, powerfully shrouded in myth and mystery but ineffective on the level of ecclesial governance. Gregory resolves to change that by curbing corruption and exercising real authority as the Vicar of Christ. His campaign provokes a power struggle with secular rulers, especially over the right to appoint local ecclesial officials such as bishops or abbots. (It’s a valuable privilege for monarchs, but Gregory insists that this is entirely the Church’s prerogative.) King Henry IV is so defiant that Gregory excommunicates him, provoking a rebellion against Henry among lower-level princes and lords; to shore up his situation, the king dons a hairshirt, travels to Canossa (in the Northern Apennines in Italy) and sits outside Gregory’s window in the snow for days until the pope is pressured into absolving him. Unfortunately for Gregory, Henry was not truly a changed man. He used this bit of political theater to shore up support, and ended up besieging Rome and driving Gregory out.

1648: The Treaty of Westphalia is signed, officially ending the Thirty Years’ War, along with the Eighty Years’ War (in which the Dutch pushed for independence from Spain). French, Spanish, Swedish, Austrian, and Dutch representatives hammered out an agreement, which most notably included the rights of princes to determine the official faith of their own realm. The Church’s political power was dramatically curtailed, and the Holy Roman Empire became little more than a loose confederation of autonomous states. European leaders also agree to make at least some allowances for the private worship for religious minorities, and to permit emigration for those truly dissatisfied with their religious situation.

Obviously, these are quick, oversimplified summaries of complex transitions, but these were genuinely important moments for Christendom, and I’d call particular attention to three things. First of all, these were all moments of tectonic political change, in which relations between Church and state shifted dramatically. Unsurprisingly then, they all provoked furious discussions of political theology, as theologians and statesmen alike tried to boundaries between the realms of God and Caesar. Second, these moments all contributed something significant to the West’s political development and theory. Changing events led to a new equilibrium, and all of those changes built something meaningful into the political structure that we presently inhabit. But, third, the middle-term consequences of that process were never quite what anyone at the time would have expected.

Rome’s fall led to an extended period of what you might call “decentralized government,” or, less cheerfully, intermittent anarchy. Various tribes and warlords battled for control, and the few remaining elites yearned for centuries to re-establish order and peace in a more Roman-Empire-like form. Now and then (most obviously under Charlemagne and the Franks) it looked like it might be happening… but it never really did. Meanwhile, though, the “Dark Ages” were anything but calamitous for Christian faith, which spread all through the West and became a deep and defining part of its culture.

The dramatic standoff at Canossa sets up a fun debate: Who won? Henry was forced to humble himself to keep his throne; Gregory died in exile. Though he personally came to a sticky end, the Gregorian Reform really did initiate a new era for the Church, with a more powerful papacy. Somewhat ironically though, the political theorists of the next few centuries poured considerable energy into spelling out proper constraints on ecclesial power, and expounding on the proper sphere of secular power. Both in the theorizing and in practice, the Middle Ages now unfolds before us as a kind of ongoing experiment in the interplay of secular and ecclesial authority. A whole range of players (popes, kings, emperors, lords, abbots, bishops) maneuvered around one another, jockeying for status and influence, while the scholars and intellectuals debated the process in the new-but-fast-rising universities. Gregory’s reforms empowered the papacy but also led to a much clearer articulation of its limits.

Westphalia surely did not end European wars, but it did largely defuse the Wars of Religion, to the great relief of the Continent. In many ways though, this set the stage for church-state conflicts of a more existential kind. A century and a half later, the French Revolution broke out, and kings and bishops both found themselves with their backs to the wall. In the modern era, far more people have been murdered by militant secularists than by Christian crusaders, and at the same time princes have lost both their thrones and, where they’ve survived, meaningful control over the faith within their realm. There’s plenty of room for debating how we feel about all this, but this much is clear. It’s not at all what the Westphalian architects had in mind.

How will later generations describe our era? It’s a fascinating question. We seem to be living through another period of political transition. Things feel unstable, in part because all of the load-bearing walls are showing some cracks. Nation-states are still central to our entire global system, but they’re feeling a lot of strain. They’re overcommitted in their social obligations, beset by warring political ideologies, and struggling with a hard slate of practical and moral questions raised by mass global migration. The great powers are again eyeing one another with suspicion, and the possibility of large-scale global conflict seems real in a way it didn’t a decade or two ago. Transnational institutions like the UN, NATO, and the EU are facing hard existential challenges, and on a sub-national level, community and family ties seem to be eroding at an alarming rate while people are vociferously debating the causal story behind falling birth rates. It’s disorienting. It’s alarming. It’s entirely unsurprising that political theology has again become the subject of vociferous debate.

Here are my Bold Predictions. A new equilibrium will eventually be found. Christianity will be very much alive in this new world order, likely more robust than it is today. But beyond that… there will be a lot of surprises. It’s not going to look quite like anything anyone is envisioning now. It never does.

Both secular liberals and postliberals often talk as though we basically know the broad form that church-state relations need to take. And of course, we can say some things; history does contain useful lessons that we would be foolish to ignore, and there are political and moral principles that can be properly derived from natural law and tradition. Still, in the heat of partisan fervor, we tend to overestimate the extent to which our present insecurities stem from Those People Over There refusing to do the right thing. We don’t always know what that is. In fact, I’ll go further: In the big picture, we really don’t know what the world will or should look like a century hence. That’s what we get for living in Interesting Times.

It’s fine to go on theorizing about it, but for Christians the basic “assignment” is always to go on honoring God and Caesar as well as we can. That’s often quite difficult because, as my historical survey hopefully highlights, these two powers have been locked in a kind of non-stop wrestling match across all of Christian history. The sum never gets definitively worked out. It’s not that kind of puzzle. Nevertheless, we are charged with remaining loyal to Caesar so far as our moral and spiritual obligations allow. That duty was underscored by Jesus himself, referring most immediately to a pagan overlord who would sack Jerusalem mere decades after the words were uttered. If the injunction applied to Jews living under the shadow of Roman legions, I’m pretty sure it also applies to us.

What does that mean? It’s a big question, which we’ll continue to explore here at Christendom Reborn. Start here, though. Christianity will survive. It always does. It played a large role in getting us here, and it will continue to leave its stamp on the course of world events.

We won’t win, though, by brandishing “the Christian template” for proper church-state relations, and strong-arming everyone into compliance. There is no Christian template. The church-state question can only be answered in context, and the answers are typically worked out over time.

Take out a quarter and note whose face is on it. Some things never change.

Since patriotism is a theme of this week, I’m going to post last week’s column from Law & Liberty, “The Young Oikophobes.” It’s on the Cambridge 5, a group of starry-eyed, fancy-free college students who got recruited by the Soviets, betrayed their own country, and spent years passing industrial quantities of top-secret information to communists. Kim Philby is the most notorious, and with reason. He was a sociopath who probably got hundreds of people murdered by Stalin. Creepily enough, he’s still something of a hero in Russia. The Soviets showered him with honors, and Putin has resurrected his cult once again.

I read Stalin’s Apostles partly just as a bit of a break from heavier, more theory-laden books. I loved spy stories as a teen, so I guess this is my version of a beach read. But one shouldn’t take it too lightly, because considering the gravity of what these men did, it was truly a terrible thing, which happened in part because a generation of young Brits grew up casually loathing their own nation and legacy.

The worst of it, as I note, is:

The Cambridge Five are harrowing not because their actions are inexplicable, but because they are explicable. They were young, vain, and bored. They were disillusioned with their own society, and eager for a new mission that felt purposeful and exciting. They found, at least initially, that it was quite thrilling to live high, dupe their elders, and meditate happily on their immense historical consequence.

Do we have any young people like that?

Yes, it’s possible for nationalism to run amok and motivate some horrifying things. Oikophobia isn’t pretty either, though.