- Sex. Here is my comment on his web-log article, mostly aimed at some styles of Protestant: If you make an ultimatum, great, they’re gone. Which would you really have somebody do: be a Lothario who still comes to church every Sunday, or be a Lothario who never comes to church again? I’d prefer the former, especially if he realizes that it’s wrong (it would be a little different if he were agitating for that lifestyle choice, but I’d still prefer it). I’d rather kick out the greedy people than the lustful.
Further, you know, this is the sort of thing that drives a lot of people out of the church when they get to college (or earlier): they get a girlfriend, start having sex, and then stop attending church because they know that sex outside of marriage is wrong according to the church. Especially if they’re in some Protestant establishment that makes it the biggest sin, the one unforgivable offense. Once they’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, they’re forbidden to return (in their mind). And some people, like the aforementioned friend, explicitly make it the case! That is a horrible outcome and I don’t doubt that the priests (or pastors, in the Protestant case) are horrified by it, as it is explicitly not what they want.
- Being poor, unemployed, or criminal. Blessed are the poor, except when they're making your church look shabby. Fortunately, this mindset is an isolated one. I hope our nation is changing its mind about the acceptability of a criminal record, too, as increasing numbers of our politicians seem to be ending up in jail. Unfortunately, the banking sector seems not to have been hit very hard. They will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
- Not being happy-clappy. There are many parts of the country where unhappiness is a sin and anything other than the "joy of Jesus" is a sure sign that you are not one of the elect. It may not be licit to be sad at a funeral, even. Showing up to church unhappy means something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. It is best not to show up if you don't want to be - or are incapable of being - "fixed". Orthodoxy seems to take the opposite point of view, fortunately, as smiling in the Old Country on any day other than Pascha or perhaps the Nativity is seen as a sign of simple-mindedness.
- Doubt. Or any sort of questioning. It is not permitted these days to have a "complicated" relationship with God. The only possible states you can be in are complete, undivided belief and utter rejection. This is, of course, silly. Having questions does not mean you no longer have faith, it means you have questions. Read the Psalms or the Book of Job if you want to see what that is like. But if modern man and sometimes even a church says that certain modes of relating to God mean that you're an unbeliever, well, it must be the case! Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, do not go to church anymore, and certainly do not read a wide variety of discussions the saints of both the East and West had about the precise phenomenon you are currently experiencing which they experienced too on their way to becoming saints - and which they say was in no way meaning they were bad people incapable of being good Christians. I think rather it means you have more potential than the simple-minded, happy-clappy, non-doubting folks.
Some time in the next couple weeks I might write a little bit about burnout because I saw some converty type on some message board asking about it. The short answer to their problem is this: stop doing so much and just go to church - don't even listen to AFR.
9 comments:
Not to excuse the rich, but when people write stuff like:
"I am a Socialist because I see Capital crushing and leveling the small, the old, the family. I am convinced that in the world to come, the socialist ideal is the closest we have imagined to how it will be. Some say that is utopia making, that we cannot achieve it in this world, in this time. To a certain extent I agree, but we need utopias and ideals. Can we achieve socialism? I think not. That does not mean we should not strive intensely to get there..."
... it comes across as kind of historically illiterate and passive-aggressive.
Most settled people lived pretty close to the Malthusian margin for most of history. There was a brief historical window recently in which citizens of industrialized countries managed to make mass prosperity possible. But now this has created new problems: it's rendered a lot of people "superfluous" kind of in the same way that cars rendered horses superfluous. Once you routinize and automate production, you've cut the legs out from under everyone who can't provide high-value-added services.
This is a problem and it causes a lot of human misery. But it's a problem that's associated with the massive economic surpluses that we've temporarily been able to produce. In a low-productivity economy with no energy inputs beyond sun, wind, and muscle, more people could find economic niches, but everyone was unfathomably poor.
The implication behind "I see Capital crushing and leveling the small, the old, the family" is that the small and the old were better off before Capital started ruining everything. Well, that's just wrong. The small and the old lived even worse than everyone else. Somewhere, Orwell mentions giving a crust of bread to a crone in Algeria whom he'd met on the road. She was carrying a huge bundle of sticks, bent almost double. She was so surprised to be given extra food that she screamed. I'm pretty sure that no one is that poor in Chicago today, including the homeless guy who blew his nose on me on the red line this morning.
As for "social democracy," first, that's basically capitalism, and second, while it takes some of the rough edges off (which is why everyone has a welfare state now, certainly not excluding the USA) it does nothing to mitigate the superfluity and alienation that come with the elimination of many economic niches. And in practice, it creates its own abuses - e.g., crowding-out effects in entry-level jobs which, not surprisingly, disproportionately hurt minorities, poor people, etc. and indirectly serve as spurs to further automation.
It's surely true that in the world to come, there will be a greater "brotherhood of man," probably in ways that we can't begin to imagine now. But TBQH I don't see how you get from that to any particular political platform, other than by sleight of hand.
-NS
Yes, that comment was a bit much.
The other thing I'd say, having slept on it, is that evangelical megachurches etc. are lower caste, even if their scale allows them to concentrate wealth as institutions. They focus on sex partly because they are unimaginative and lame, sure, but also partly because the disruptions of the sexual revolution hit their target constituency harder than they hit overeducated converts like you, me, or for that matter F. Mathewes-Green (there's a name with instant class connotations,) R. Dreher, et al.
As I'm sure you know, rates of childbearing outside of marriage are in the low single digits among educated, upscale people like us. We can afford to be fairly chill about sexual morality because it isn't our ox that's gored; high future time orientation and a basically cerebral approach to life ensures that we can, as C. S. Lewis's Mr. Sensible said in The Pilgrim's Regress, "indulge in Venus and fear no impertinent bastard."
But for society as a whole, the disruptive effects of sexual liberation are hard to exaggerate. 1/3 of American children are born out of wedlock, and not because their parents are feminists opposed to marriage as a patriarchal institution. We can argue about cause and effect, the sociological-analytical dimension, etc., but the evangelicals are out there on the front lines fighting back. In their characteristically maladroit and rather polyester way, sure, but if they don't do it, who else will?
-NS
NS,
When I say that capital flattens the old and small, I am more or less referring to capitalism's effects upon homogenizing culture, generally in a bad way. This is explicitly so for smaller and poorer cultures, where languages disappear and customs, art, ect are replaced with pop kitsch. Similarly, capital has been particularly destructive to family structures.
People are better off, generally, in the era of capitalism. I nev said or implied otherwise. But just as American slaves were generally better off as sharecroppers, that does not mean that the system is good, right or moral, it just means that it is better than what preceded it. So, any sort of "passive aggressive" tendencies you read into my post were of your own making.
You are welcome to your economic theories (unemployment because we produce too much stuff... Really?) I don't plan on getting into that here.
Most modern Social Democratic parties have abandoned their projects and are now really welfare state parties, which is capitalism. No argument there. The idea behind Social Democracy is to reach Socialism through reform, rather than revolution, which no Social Democratic state has reached yet, but neither has any revolution, for that matter. I'm not really sure what your point is.
Lotar,
"When I say that capital flattens the old and small, I am more or less referring to capitalism's effects upon homogenizing culture, generally in a bad way. This is explicitly so for smaller and poorer cultures, where languages disappear and customs, art, ect are replaced with pop kitsch."
This sounds like a problem of scale, not of capital. I don't know what you even mean by "capital" at this point. Poor peasants always had tastes for a certain kind of kitsch, so doesn't that mean that your objection is really to the emergence of a culture industry to service it rather than to any real change in taste? Also, Communist and Third World countries spontaneously and independently developed culture industries. Mass media doesn't need capitalism to work.
In any case, liberalism and socialism are great at destroying traditional societies. At current rates of precipitous demographic decline, it's quite possible that some European languages will go extinct in a the next 100 years. (At a birthrate of 1.4 children/woman, the birth cohort halves every two generations.)
"You are welcome to your economic theories (unemployment because we produce too much stuff... Really?)"
Snark tells like "Really?" or "Seriously?" signal an appeal to the audience (what audience?) or to the utterer's putative authority. Also, it's pretty funny when someone with a Latin-titled blog lapses into tics that would be more at home in Gawker articles.
But what I actually wrote was: "Once you routinize and automate production, you've cut the legs out from under everyone who can't provide high-value-added services." In other words, the most productive people are now much more productive relative to a baseline of unskilled and semi-skilled labor than they were 50 years ago. This is expressed as, among other things, greater automation, which contributes to the growing wealth gap. This is hardly "my [eccentric, bizarre] economic theory." See here for a lengthy article about the decline of labor-intensive manufacturing in America: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/.
signed, NS
GZT,
I think my wife put it quite well today, there is no room or sympathy for human weakness. It is not so much that sins are considered "unforgivable", in the absolute sense, but rather that it is unacceptable to struggle with them. While other sins, generally the less explicitly carnal ones, the favorites of the bourgeoisie, are ignored. It is not so much that they are forgivable, but that they do not even exist, or not to a great enough degree to be a "real" sins.
NS,
You can find my response on my blog. I think we've derailed the subject enough here.
NS - I think that's a legitimate observation, there's a certain tension that needs to be kept up between two opposing problems here. I don't mean to diminish the horrors of sexual sin and pretend that there isn't some bias from privilege (and there always has been: the rich historically wouldn't care about having bastards - see the English royal family - though it might cause problems for the bourgeois - who became Methodies in reaction to the looseness of the rich). It's just one more thing you have to keep in mind, especially when catechizing the youth.
GZT:
There's also a line-drawing problem with money that makes it harder to preach about than sex. With sex, it's pretty clear that certain acts are sinful, while with money, there start to be evidentiary problems. Maybe Bob's Landscaping, which is barely scraping by, is more exploitative than Jim's Dentistry Associates. Virtually no clergymen are in a position to audit the books and find out who's Capital and who's a pure-hearted Socialist.
The more upscale the denomination, the more its adherents talk about the evils of money. You're much more likely to hear about money sins from the UCC or the Anglican hierarchy than Rev'd Daddy Love's Storefront Ministry and Appliance Repair. And the more upscale the denomination, the less they talk about sex or, these days, the more they talk about its moral insignificance. To an impartial observer, it might seem that their view was that trying to stop people from having sex is the only sexual sin.
It's obviously better to have sinful people trying to come to church and repent than it is to chase them away. On the other hand, I think churches are much more likely to err on the side of excessive permissiveness than of excessive severity on the subject of sex.
Church teachings help set social norms, and those norms have basically collapsed in the last few decades. Considering that the US illegitimacy rate is now at about 40%, the churches have to try to do something. I'm not willing to beat up on the Evangelicals for getting involved when, like I said, no one else appears to be doing anything about it.
-NS
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