Hi folks,
This week on the podcast I have an interesting conversation with the late Queen Elizabeth II’s former chaplain Gavin Ashenden, on the conundrum the monarchy finds itself in as we head further into the post-modern age. At The European Conservative, I have a review of Wendell Berry’s latest Port William short story collection titled “Ties that Bind: Wendell Berry, the Bible, and Port William.”
As always, I’ve got some short, regular culture updates on The Bridgehead (including one on Sam Smith’s demonic performance at the Grammies), and you can get a copy of Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield here and here, and my other books here. On to today’s essay, which was first published in The European Conservative.
Community in the Post-Christian West:
An Interview with Jake Meador
A couple of years ago, I began reading Jake Meador’s work on the recommendation of a friend. Meador is a Presbyterian from Lincoln, Nebraska, who has written for many of the usual outlets for those engaged in the public debate about our post-Christian culture (First Things, Christianity Today, National Review) and currently serves as editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, an online Christian publication. He is also a contributing editor at Plough, a brilliant little magazine of “stories, ideas, and culture” that is one of the best reads out there.
Meador’s work is a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of how Christians should face this new era of endings. I particularly appreciate his engagement with the work of Rod Dreher (among others). While honestly addressing the gravity of our post-Christian moment, Meador rejects both reactionism and panic. This approach makes both of his books—In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World and What are Christians for? Life Together at the End of the World—well worth reading for anyone interested in a multifaceted and beautifully written approach.
Jake Meador kindly agreed to discuss the ideas he has been dealing with in his books and commentary.
You noted, in a recent piece advising against “moral panic mode,” that we are in a strange pregnant-widow moment—the Christian era is (at least in the West) over, but we do not yet know what will come next. This makes politics feel like an incredibly high-stakes game. Let’s take two issues: the horrifying trend of sex change ‘treatments’ for minors, and the destruction of prenatal human life through abortion. These are emergency issues that are destroying young lives. How do you suggest Christians respond to them with the appropriate diagnostic rhetoric without succumbing to moral panic mode?
There are two layers to the appropriate Christian response to the transgender and abortion problems. The first is in the political realm. Politics are meant to help our necessary social relationships be mutually beneficial and delightful. The government has a positive role to play in the moral life of the nation. So the laws of the nation should comport with the moral law. This is not to say that the laws of nations should be equivalent to the moral law, of course. There is a difference between crime and sin. There are often situations when prudence dictates that governments take a more careful, modest approach, rather than a maximalist approach, to moral policy.
However, we certainly should not have laws or norms that violently contradict the moral law. For that reason, promoting policies that ban abortion, ban gender-reassignment surgeries on minors, and so on are appropriate policies to pursue. Some might raise concerns about whether or not enough is being done to support vulnerable pregnant mothers or young people struggling with gender-identity questions. But I think we can both address those questions through non-political means and say that it is good to enact laws that protect the vulnerable and, in so doing, reflect the heart of God as revealed to us in the moral law. We need to recognize that there are multiple communities addressing the problems from different angles and with different resources. Families are not governments, are not churches, are not neighborhoods or towns. Government solutions are not the only answer, but they do matter and should still be ordered rightly. Second, there are many non-political elements to these issues. Most of us do not have a great deal of agency when it comes to defining public policies, drafting legislative bills, passing laws, and so on. But we all have a calling to care for the vulnerable, to work for the good of our neighbor, and to fulfill our various vocations in ways that advance God’s purposes in the world.
For most of us the problem of abortion isn’t primarily about laws and public policies, over which we have no control, but rather is chiefly about our posture toward our neighbors, our awareness of the challenges facing women in our local communities, and the ways we can help make it easier for vulnerable mothers to choose life. This can take many forms, of course—everything from volunteering or giving to pregnancy resource centers, supporting young couples and families (recall that the majority of women seeking abortion already have children and are dealing with economic hardships), and creating forms of common life in your neighborhood that make it easier to have children, include children, and care for children.
Similarly, as it concerns the trans question, it seems self-evident to me that a great deal of what is driving this amongst minors is a social contagion brought about by mass media and, in particular, therapeutically-inclined social media such as Instagram and TikTok. Taking steps to marginalize or remove access to smartphones and social networks for young people would be an immense help. Of course, the lack of in-person community often drives young people toward an online social life. So a further task for us is to create households and church communities that are accessible and hospitable to all people.
There are many ways that the culture war posture hurts us, but one of the foremost, I think, is that it sets us up to regard neighbors we are called to love in purely antagonistic or fear-driven terms. This has two detrimental outcomes. First, it makes us evangelistically impotent to people outside of our communities. You can’t calmly and kindly engage with people who only trigger feelings of immense fear and anger in you. Second, when we engage the world with angry reactivity and jittery, anxious energy, our young people watch and learn. Specifically, they learn that there is something in the world that terrifies us, that we think might somehow overcome us. They will naturally wonder what that something is and want to learn more about it themselves.
What is needed, instead, is a calming presence that suggests we are secure within ourselves because we are secure in the truths of our principles and beliefs. Christians, of all people, should be immune to such things, for we know how the story of our world ends. That knowledge should help us to engage our neighbors, even our neighbors who wish us ill or believe horrifying things, from a place of settled conviction that doesn’t delight in triggering them or fear offending them.
Calm confidence is an attractive strategy. But how would you respond to those who would push back and quote Flannery O’Connor (as Rod Dreher often does): “When the world is deaf, you have to shout”? Where would the work of Matt Walsh on exposing what’s going on in hospitals with transgender surgeries, or Libs of TikTok videos (which can give the impression that every city teems with drag queens), or Christopher Rufo’s work on public school curriculum fall into this approach? Is there ever a time when calm confidence gives way to rhetoric that sounds the alarm, like the abolitionists did in the face of slavery? Or is this genuinely counter-productive for the reasons you mention?
It’s important to distinguish between two different things that a figure like Rufo does. On the one hand, I think there is great value in simply documenting what is happening in hospitals, schools, large corporations, and so on with regards to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion requirements and gender-identity issues. Because of the way information is concealed and misrepresented by many progressives, I think their work is enormously helpful.
That being said, Rufo in particular has been fairly candid about his project, saying that,
We have successfully frozen their brand—“critical race theory”—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
The problem here is that this is fundamentally dishonest argumentation. To say that our campaign is to redefine established terms to mean what we want, such that average Americans think critical race theory is a shorthand for anything I dislike or think is crazy, is to endorse deception, lying, and propaganda as viable forms of public speech. For Christians, the 9th commandment will not allow us to use these tactics. Additionally, if the Ten Commandments are simply a codification of the natural law, as many historic Christians have argued, then it isn’t simply that Christians are forbidden to use these tactics, but that all people are because such tactics are dishonorable. This becomes especially apparent if one considers how the church has historically understood this commandment.
Finally, I do worry that the O’Connor line is overused. It’s actually not clear to me that shouting will work today. If anything, I suspect our current cultural somnambulance is a function of being yelled at all the time. So if our strategy to get people’s attention is to shout … well, that’s everyone‘s strategy.
What’s more, if you pair my second point about honesty and character with this later point about noise, I think it’s worth thinking very carefully about whose turf we are playing on when we participate in the noisy, angry, vituperative public square that now exists. In Screwtape Letters, Lewis likens hell to a kingdom of noise. Cardinal Sarah has made similar arguments in his own work. If we simply construct new loud noise to go against the noise we don’t like, we have to ask ourselves what matters more: That our loud noise is slightly different, or that it’s still a loud noise?
A friend was listening to a podcast with Aaron Renn recently where a quote from Eric Voeglein was shared: “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.” I think that’s right. But if the spiritual crisis of our society is broader than a narrow set of questions around sex and gender ideology—and certainly that’s the argument Cardinal Sarah would make, as would the three most recent pontiffs—then I think we need to be more attentive to the underlying structure of that crisis and take the steps necessary to insure that we are not taking part in it.
That brings me to something that underpins all of this. We are in a post-Christian society, but there are different views on what this means. Chantal Delsol believes we are seeing the rise of a new paganism. Rod Dreher believes that persecution is inevitable, even in America. The sheer number of historical parallels I’ve seen drawn in the last few months alone (4th century AD; Spanish Civil War; Weimar) illustrates a lack of consensus on this. What is your view of our trajectory and its implications?
In the first season of the This Cultural Moment podcast, Mark Sayers and John Mark Comer suggest that we should distinguish between a post-Christian culture—which is going to basically define itself in terms of repudiating Christianity as often and loudly as possible—and cultures that might not be Christian but also aren’t necessarily obsessed with repudiating or negating Christianity; they mostly don’t care about the faith.
Sayers suggests that we have left the post-Christian moment behind in the West and are in something new: a moment of political religion. In other words, we are now looking to politics to provide a sense of fulfillment, meaning, and purpose that was traditionally found in religious faith and practice. If you think about it in these terms, it’s not hard to see why Sayers would make that argument. Indeed, many conservative commentators have already made this observation concerning progressivism as it relates to gay and trans rights. But I don’t think it’s terribly hard to spot a similar religious fervor at a Donald Trump rally or to see how Christian symbolism gets twisted and perverted toward nationalist ends. When church choirs sing ‘hymns’ called “Make America Great Again” as part of a purportedly Christian public worship service, I think it’s clear that we have adopted a deeply religious posture toward political parties and figures.
What I’m leery of is developing over-determined, over-confident readings of what is going on. I expect things will get fairly difficult for Christians in blue states, particularly the states that are in the process of shredding parental rights, like Washington state. That said, even in blue states, the current pattern of our Supreme Court suggests that virtually all cases will be decided in favor of more expansive conceptions of religious liberty. It’s not clear that progressives can do anything about it—court packing remains mostly a fever dream amongst “The Squad” that will never get anywhere as long as the Democratic senate caucus includes figures like Manchin and Sinema. It is very possible that the GOP will retake the White House in 2024—particularly if Ron DeSantis is the nominee. There are also hopeful signs from political institutions in red states, like the success of DeSantis’ anti-’woke’ agenda in Florida.
Obviously, this doesn’t necessarily help with overweening HR teams at large corporations. On that point, I think it will be vital for Christians to practice solidarity and trust with one another so as to effectively provide an anti-cancelation resource (including financial help) for their members who suffer professionally for their Christian beliefs.
All of which is to say: I think rightly labeling cultural pathologies and ideologies is actually pretty difficult, and we should be careful of over-reading specific trends in ways that ignore or neglect other equally real trends and patterns. Those qualifications aside, my instinct is to side with Jon Askonas in arguing that the decisive factors shaping our culture most significantly right now are technological.
First industrial and now digital technology are the acids that have dissolved a great deal of the basis for common life in the West and in the world more generally. So if I had to pick a single lens to focus on in critiquing contemporary culture, it would be technology and my constructive project would be to try and develop a positive account of creatureliness. (Kirsten Sanders, who sometimes writes for us at Mere Orthodoxy and who wrote a reply to Jon’s article on technology, is working on precisely this problem.)
So the kind of projects that most interest me are political projects that attempt to target big tech and tech addiction and communal practices that help us rediscover creatureliness.
READ THE REST OF THIS CONVERSATION AT THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE