Here's that NYTimes Magazine piece from last year about how megachurches are providing a sense of community -- the only sense of community -- for all the transplants moving to the new exurbs. Key quotes:
This is not the megachurch of the 1980's, where baby boomers turned up once a week to passively take in a 45-minute service -- ''religion as accessory,'' as Tom Beaudoin, an assistant professor of religion at Santa Clara University, has described the phenomenon. In a sense, the new breed of megachurches has more in common with the frontier churches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which served as gathering places for pioneers who had gone West in search of opportunity. In sprawling, decentralized exurbs like Surprise, where housing developments rarely include porches, parks, stoops or any of the other features that have historically brought neighbors together, megachurches provide a locus for community. In many places, they operate almost like surrogate governments, offering residents day care, athletic facilities, counseling, even schools. Taking the comparison one step further, there's even a tax, albeit a voluntary one: members are encouraged to tithe, or donate 10 percent of their income to the church. At Radiant, McFarland says, about one-quarter of the members do.
It's hard to imagine a more effective method of religious outreach, which is, after all, the goal of evangelical churches like Radiant. As McFarland told me: ''I'm just trying to get people in the door.'' To that end, Radiant has designed its new 55,000-square-foot church to look more like an overgrown ski lodge than a place of worship. ''For people who haven't been to church, or went once and got burned, the anxiety level is really high,'' McFarland says. '' 'Is it going to be freaky? Is it going to be like what I see on Christian TV?' So we've tried to bring down those visual cues that scare people off.''
In fact, everything about Radiant has been designed to lure people away from other potential weekend destinations. The foyer includes five 50-inch plasma-screen televisions, a bookstore and a cafe with a Starbucks-trained staff making espresso drinks. (For those who are in a rush, there's a drive-through latte stand outside the main building.) Krispy Kreme doughnuts are served at every service. (Radiant's annual Krispy Kreme budget is $16,000). For kids there are Xboxes (10 for fifth and sixth graders alone). ''That's what they're into,'' McFarland says. ''You can either fight it or say they're a tool for God.'' The dress code is lax: most worshipers wear jeans, sweats or shorts, depending on the season. (''At my old church, we thought we were casual because we wore mock turtlenecks under our blazers,'' Radiant's youth pastor told me.) Even the baptism pool is seductive: Radiant keeps the water at 101 degrees. ''We've had people say, 'No, leave me under,' '' McFarland says. ''It's like taking a dip in a spa.''
Now, let me be clear: this sort of place makes me crazy. I believe it turns religion into a consumer product, a sideshow, you name it. A baptismal pool like a spa? Vomit. I wouldn't want to go to this place.
But I cannot dismiss it, because churches like this are responding to something people are hungry for: real community. You can't have real community without a shared moral vision, which is what these folks, whatever their flaws, do seem to have. I am wondering if this is what Alasdair Macintyre had in mind when he said that our fragmenting American society, where the moral center is no longer holding, would produce people who would pioneer new forms of community? It must be.
Is this a bad thing? If so, how could it be made a better thing?
The Democrats aren't sure what to do next. Some say the party should hang back and let the Republicans hang themselves -- in other words, run simply on "Had enough?" Others say the party should press forward with a bold agenda, to give the voters something to vote for instead of relying on them voting against the GOP.
Me, I'd like to see them take some bold steps instead of this tactical nickel-and-diming. But I gotta say, when the public faces of your party are Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and Hillary Rodham Clinton, you've got a long way to go to sell any agenda.
Caleb Stegall appreciates this passage from John Lukacs:
[T]he main question of the twenty-first century, the main problem, perhaps especially for Americans: the necessity to rethink the entire meaning of “progress.” … Our “conservatives” care not for the conservation of the country, and of the American land. Yet: more than tax policy, more than education policy, more than national security policy, more even than the painful abortion issue, this is where the main division is beginning to occur. So it is in my township. It is the division between people who want to develop, to build up, to pour more concrete and cement on the land, and those who wish to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where they live. (Landscape, not wilderness. The propagation of wilderness, the exaltation of “nature” against all human presence, is the fatal shortcoming of many American environmentalists.) Beneath that division I sometimes detect the division between a true love of one’s country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless “growth.”
The "near-nomadic life" is something we've all come to accept as an inevitable part of life in the modern economy. Again, going back to a theme in our California discussion, is this nomadism a liberation, or a prison? When I was in California visiting with P., we talked about how our fathers could barely conceive of leaving their hometowns behind ... and yet both of us couldn't wait to do so. It was liberation for us to be free to follow our own dreams of career, of personal fulfillment, and so forth. And yet, what have we (that is, we Americans) lost in the process? Is it possible to regain it? Are we prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to regain it? Or is that even possible? That is, has the economy been built on a nomadic culture, such that many Americans have no choice but to be a nomad if they want to stay gainfully employed?
Who is the real conservative: the person who figures out a way to dig in and stay, or the person who leaves in search of opportunity (financial or otherwise)? And whether they vote Democratic or Republican, does that ultimately matter?
I talked to a colleague this morning, also a non-Texan by birth, who said that most of his friends aren't Dallas natives, and that very few of them have an abiding interest in what goes on in this city beyond their own narrow circles. He was talking about this as a modern condition for more and more of us. We aren't encouraged to think about the wider community, or to set down roots, because either we look forward to the next job that will cause us to uproot ourselves, or we work in a sector of the economy that will probably force us to uproot ourselves and move on as the economy shifts.
This colleague, who is non-religious, pointed to how in the northern Dallas suburbs, all these rootless folks are gravitating to their churches for a sense of community. Which is normal, and natural. And, if you think about it, Benedictine. But it doesn't bode well for the future of communities and communitarianism, at least in the way we've understood them till now.
Clark Stooksbury notices that the excitable lads over at Contra-Crunchy are engaging in creative conspiracy-mongering over why the title for the paperback edition of "Crunchy Cons" is going to be a lot shorter. Clark sensibly suggests an alternative explanation: "How about this -- the original subtitle was simply way too long?"
That, I'm afraid, is the correct answer. The original subtitle was there in part as a marketing decision; few people would have known what a "crunchy conservative" was, but putting words like "organic," "Evangelical," "gun-loving," "homeschooling," etc. on the cover telegraphed important information to the casual browser. We can afford to make it a lot shorter on the paperback version (which will now be subtitled, "The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots," and will have a new chapter too).
In the latest California thread below, Paddy O hits on something important in defining the California (and probably the Western) sensibility, versus the Eastern and Southern one:
Even as you feel anxiety about having nothing permanent I, as a Californian, feel that to be an adventure.
Americans have a unity, but we in different regions are still very different. The Western man is not the Southern man even if we watch the same television shows and pray to the same God.
Well said. I mentioned to a colleague of mine yesterday (she's a Kansan) how I had the feeling in California that "anything could happen." She said, "Why is that a bad thing?" Which is, I guess, Paddy O's point. Californians, broadly speaking, like the fact that they can be anything they want to be in that lovely, free country. For somebody like me, that "lightness of being" is almost unbearable. A friend of mine, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, explained to me about 15 years ago that the people who built his native Vancouver were Canadians who ran away from an Eastern establishment that they considered oppressive. He used his own parents as an example of this, and until then, I had never quite thought of it that way with regard to our own West Coast, and its culture.
A reader in Dallas wrote to say that I got Joan Didion all wrong, that she wasn't saying California is unlike the rest of us, but that it is more like us than we are ourselves. What he meant -- and this is a point I agree with -- is that Californians are the ultimate Americans, if you conceive of Americans as people who left behind the weight and constraints of the Old World to create a world in their own image. I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought otherwise in my discussion of Didion. I do believe, as the reader says, that California is the ultimate result of the American experiment, which is why trends that start there manage to roll so easily through the rest of the country: we are culturally prepared for it by virtue of the fact that we are Americans, and all the descendants of restless people.
Today I received a wonderful e-mail from an old friend who'd read "Crunchy Cons" and sent word that he'd very much enjoyed it. The friend is Father Winthrop Brainerd, the very fine Catholic priest who instructed me in the faith and ushered me into the Catholic Church (at the hands of Cardinal Hickey) back in 1993. Last I'd heard, he was prospering greatly at a parish in Georgetown, where his traditionalism had boosted attendance greatly. That sort of thing apparently put him crossways Cardinal McCarrick, the Archbishop of Washington and the Jersey Shore Beach House, who forcibly retired him and sent Fr. Brainerd to a suburban Maryland parish. Happily, Father Brainerd seems to be serving his people well there, and it was a real pleasure to hear from him again, especially because he found the book's themes so congenial. And get this: it was Father Brainerd who celebrated and preached the memorial mass for Russell Kirk!
I've been telling various conservative friends about how strange I found my reaction to northern California: that it was extraordinarily beautiful and welcoming and easygoing, but that I felt unnerved by it, as if there were something ... unhinged about the place, as if its prosperity, its beauty and thoroughgoing pleasantness were a thin veneer over something chaotic. Oddly enough, several of them report having had the same feeling, and not being able to explain it. A conservative journalist friend I spoke with this afternoon said that a former girlfriend was driving him around southern California a few years ago, and remarked, "Can't you feel your will just slipping away?" Yes, that's it! But why should it be so? And why California? I've lived up and down the East Coast, and traveled all over Europe, but I've never had the same feeling anywhere.
I remarked to my pals that somehow driving around there helped me understand Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," a stunning journalistic account of moral collapse among privileged young Americans living in San Francisco, who had lost their center entirely. Didion has said that reporting and writing the essay left her depressed, because it forced her to confront directly the fact that "things fall apart." Here's a key passage from that piece:
At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. ... These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.
They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.
The unnerving sense that there is a society out there with no center, at least no center that a traditionalist recognizes as having gravity, and the power to bind you to earth, must be at the root of my anxiety. I remember telling a friend the first time I went to California (to L.A., in 1992) that I had the feeling that I might just float off the edge of the continent, because nothing seemed tethered to anything permanent. That's what I felt even more in northern California -- probably because there is no chance that I'd find SoCal alluring, but the Bay Area is something far more enticing to me.
Don't get me wrong, all the sins of northern California are plain to see here in Texas. But there is still here among Texans a strong sense of sin, of a moral center Whose orbit we can never quite escape collectively. I can see how easy it would be to believe that the Bay Area, about whose beauty I cannot say enough, is Eden. Except there's no such thing. Hence the problem.
Here's the other problem: how do you come from a place as screwed up in many ways as Texas (or Alabama, or Georgia, or any other Red State) and tell people who live in that materialist paradise (I know, I know, Silicon Valley Steve ... a relative paradise, but hang with me here) that they're worse off than they think, and that they should repent? What happens if there is no center, but contra Yeats and Didion, things don't fall apart, not really? What then?
In England, they've been killing babies in their mother's wombs for the crime of having minor, easily correctible birth defects. If the mother should have the right to abort her child up until the point of birth, as she does in the USA (the "mental health of the mother" hole in Roe), then why shouldn't she do this? Why shouldn't mothers abort their unborn children because they are females, as they do in some Asian countries? If unborn life is not sacred, but the mother's choice is, then this practice is morally justified.
Why, as Amy suggests, does no one ask these questions in the MSM?
You watch: if scientists should ever discover a gay gene, homosexuals will be aborted out of existence, just as people with Down syndrome now are being done. Good liberals will justify their decision as a merciful one, saying it is wrong to bring a gay child into this world of bigotry (maybe they'll even believe it themselves). And the only people fighting to stop this crime against humanity will be Catholics and other pro-life Christians.
William Saletan says we ought to quit killing the meat we eat, and instead grow our London broils in test tubes. Reader Jason, who brought this to my attention, writes, "This guy, with ideas like this and his marriage 'solutions' is about as far from sacramentality as one could get."
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan thinks Saletan is onto something. What do you think?
I know I'm late to the story, but the reaction of the Republican-led Congress to the FBI's raid on Rep. William Jefferson's office is flat-out berserk. This Congress has rolled over like a neutered golden lab in the face of the executive branch's expansion of power post-9/11. It had nothing to say when the Boston Globe reported that Bush essentially reserved the right to himself to enforce only those portions of laws that he agreed with -- in other words, effectively vetoing them without giving Congress the chance to override. But when one of their own members (who happens to be a Democrat) gets his rear end in a crack with the FBI in a bribery investigation, boy oh boy, then it's time for the Republicans to take a bold and principled stand against the alleged overreach of the executive branch.
What hooey. I completely agree with Andy McCarthy at NRO today, who said Congress in this instance is not defending its rights, but "perverting a privilege." And all good on Attorney General Gonzales and his team for threatening to resign if President Bush had returned lawfully seized evidence to Congress. Not all Capitol Hill Republicans have lost their minds over this issue. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said, sensibly enough, "I think this outcry from congressional leaders just looks self-serving and defensive to the American people." Yeah you right, Senator. Your House colleagues are essentially arguing that the offices of members of Congress are sacrosanct, not subject to the reach of the law -- even though in this case, the FBI had to establish probable cause to search Rep. Jefferson's office.
The House GOP will have to explain to voters why it believes that members of Congress should have privileges to be exempt from criminal search of their offices when ordinary people don't. Don't get me wrong, I think the Congress ought to have been standing up to executive branch overreaching ... but this is a sorry place to make a stand.
Ah, so, back from the temporal sunshine of a spotless vacation, and once again into the real-world breach. What the heck is going on in the Catholic Diocese of Orange? This is a place where the idea of "mortal sin" has been a bizarre and alien concept for decades, but now it's being invoked against those bumptious heretics who have the temerity to kneel during Mass? It boggles the mind. TMatt discusses coverage on Get Religion, noting correctly that this is a huge story that's "about" more than it's about.
The twist here is that orthodox believers know quite well that the bishop and the pastor are abusing their (the orthodox') fidelity to Church teaching and legitimate authority to force them to toe the line. The orthodox are in a quandary here, because they are the first to complain about bishops not using their authority to enforce standards. Don't get me wrong, I find Church officials' behavior appalling here, especially because a well-informed source tells me that the previous pastor was a highly orthodox and dynamic priest who built a thriving parish on tradition and Catholic orthodoxy. Some bishops see that kind of success as a threat (we had a similar thing happen in Dallas a couple of years ago), one that must be arrested. With all the problems going on in the Catholic Church today, is it really the case that kneeling during the consecration must be crushed, on pain of mortal sin? This is a real scandal. What kind of witness does it send to young Catholics, or those who might consider the Catholic faith, that the hierarchy -- well, at least Bishop Tod Brown -- is publicly willing to deny Catholics the sacraments not for, say, living together in a sexual relationship outside of wedlock, or supporting the murder of unborn children, or any other grave sin. But kneeling during the consecration? Off with their heads!
I so admire my friend P., an immigrant who is living out his dream of starting and running his own business in Silicon Valley. America was built on the vision and drive of men like him. We talked at length about how this modern world and its economy gave both of us opportunities to follow our vocational dreams that our fathers and mothers couldn't have imagined. Both sets of parents still live in the small towns -- in France and Louisiana, respectively -- where they were born. It would have been impossible for P. and I to have accomplished what we've done professionally had we remained at home. And yet, here we both are, in our late thirties and with families of our own to raise, counting up the cost of being so far away from our families back home.
I told P. that I had only experienced the pull of home, and my father's intense desire that I live there and raise my family there, as oppressive. But when I had my first child, things got a lot more complicated (as I wrote here). Mind you, I couldn't afford to move to my hometown if I wanted to. There is nothing for someone of my skills to do there. It occurs to me as well that many, probably most, of the college-educated young people move away, because ... aside from teachers, there's not a lot vocationally for them to do there. P. and I talked about the psychological shift that took place between our fathers' generation and our own. For our dads, it was assumed that you'd stay in or very close to your hometown, so you'd just have to find something to do there (or perhaps there would be a natural push to diversify the local economy to make room for people with various skills and talents). In our generation, that one would be mobile for the sake of employment was a given. It didn't occur to many of us in my generation that we'd be moving back home; in fact, the possibility of mobility struck many of us -- certainly Your Working Boy -- as liberation.
But now, I'm not so sure. If the choice to move away in search of individual fulfillment is so free and easy, people will make it. I wouldn't want to be bound to the place like my dad was. Yet I perceive a different kind of liberation in the dedication my father has to place. P. and I are doing well in our chosen vocations, and providing amply for our children, but we are both pretty much deracinated. It's striking that I am more likely to find something to talk about with this French guy working in Silicon Valley than I am to do the same thing with a guy from my hometown who works in a factory. There's something wrong with that, isn't it? It destroys any sense of loyalty to place. I am completely given over to the thing I decry and lament. The thought of my own precious children growing up and moving away to New York or Washington, DC -- two places I moved to in my career -- to pursue their vocations is painful to me. Yet I have to give them the same freedom I expected my dad to give me ... and I will have to suffer the same pain of loss that I inflicted on my father.
Meanwhile, our society becomes ever less stable because of this mobility, and people become ever more malleable because they have little or no connection to place. I wrote earlier about my friend I., and how she's a fish out of water as an orthodox Catholic in the Bay Area, but how she can't imagine leaving because ... that is her place. That's honorable, don't you think?
Speaking of staying in touch with reality, it is impossible to be in that part of the country, especially in Silicon Valley, without noticing how incredibly prosperous it is. It really does lend the place a sense of unreality -- the great wealth, plus the perfect climate. Julie and I were talking about the awful state of the Catholic Church there ("Isn't that the university that drove off Father Fessio?"), and Julie observed, "You know, if you lived here, you might genuinely not perceive a need for God." She meant that the wealth and the mild climate, as well as the natural beauty, can give people the illusion that they are totally self-sufficient, and that the stern God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is incompatible with the easygoing lifestyle of the Bay Area. I often wonder why the Christian churches in that part of our world stray so far from orthodoxy. Well, to spend some time there is to feel in your bones why the temptation to apostasy is ever-present. Or so it seems to me. I said to Julie that visiting there is to understand a bit better what Jesus meant when he said that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. You might easily get the feeling that technology and wealth can protect you from anything. Don't get me wrong: there are parts of Dallas that can give you that illusion. But those parts aren't tempting to me in the way that northern California is. Though I wouldn't trade it for the Bay Area, Dallas is oppressively hot and unbeautiful, so there's rarely the chance to mistake it for Paradise.
And yet, there's a whopper of a memento mori running right through the middle of the place. It's called the San Andreas fault. I was admiring a lake at the base of the mountain where we were staying, and P. said, "That was formed by the San Andreas fault. It pretty much runs straight along Highway 280." Oh yeah, that. Everything that the people there have, and have built, could come to ruin in a moment if that fault broke open, which it could do at any moment, without much warning. In a real sense, the prosperity the Bay Area people enjoy is built on a bubble. But isn't that true for all of us? The other day, driving back from the Muir Woods, we heard on the radio that the road from 280 to the top of the mountain, where our hosts live, was blocked because an accident. We took the back way, and arrived just as the police were re-opening the road. We stopped at the country store to pick up some milk, and while Julie ran in, I went over to take a look at the smashed-up motorcycle. Turns out the driver took one of the sharp curves on the winding mountain road too fast, fell off his bike, and was run over by an SUV coming from the opposite direction. The cop didn't know if the man had made it, but he didn't look hopeful. We had passed that way a few hours earlier, and oohed and aahed the whole way down. I couldn't stop looking at that expensive, gorgeous bike, now a ruin, thinking that its owner, who might be dead, cranked it up just a few hours ago and thought about the fun ride he would have up the mountain on the back of his exquisite machine. And now look.
Well, that was great. Got back last night from our vacation to northern California. Texas never felt so flat nor so hot. The odd thing, at least to me, is that northern California is just about perfect as far as climate and topography is concerned, but I couldn't imagine living there. It feels so culturally alien. I don't mean this disparagingly: we had a fantastic time, and hated to come home so early. It's just that I can't imagine calling that beautiful place home forever. At the end of the day, I really am a Southerner and a cultural conservative. But I do better understand my dear friend I., a native of the area and a devout orthodox Catholic. In most ways, she is culturally at sea in the Bay Area, and certainly in terms of her faith and worship. But she told me when we spent the afternoon talking the other day that she and her husband, who are nearing retirement age, find it impossible to think of living anywhere else, given the natural beauty and all the interesting things to do there. I get that. I really do. But they don't have kids, and they own their own house (that is, they don't have to finance one in an insane real estate market) -- two factors that make the area off limits to people like me.
Still, what a national treasure that part of our country is. We took the kids and went to a state beach park with a picnic lunch (including garlic artichoke bread fresh from the oven, purchased at a general store in the tiny coastal town of Pescadero), and had a great chilly time. The Pacific Coast Highway is jaw-droppingly beautiful. On Saturday, my friend P. and I drove up to Sonoma with our oldest sons in tow, and visited a couple of wineries in the Russian River Valley. This one is pretty much a garage affair, run by a married couple, old friends of P. from the husband's Silicon Valley days, who love wine so much they decided to start making it themselves. Unlike the posher wineries in that part of the country, the tasting room was a couple of card tables set up under a canopy outside the garage. Their wine is very good, by the way, especially their Chardonnay. We stopped at another winery just down the street, another very small affair run by a young guy with a passion for winemaking. I'm not a fan of Zinfandel -- it's usually too big-shouldered for my taste -- but his Zins were absolutely the best I've ever had, and I brought home a couple of bottles.
While we were doing the tasting, I observed the owner, who was spending his Saturday behind the counter in his shorts, pouring the fruits of his labor for visitors, talking with an older couple from down the road who grow grapes. The owner introduced them to one of his buddies, a baby-faced guy who couldn't have been a day older than 28, and told the older couple that his pal was getting into the grape-growing business himself. Maybe it's just me, but I have this idea that winemaking is a rarefied thing, but here I was looking at ordinary people -- young people, even -- who have discovered a passion for this agricultural way of life, and who were devoting themselves to it, and to mastering the art and craft of winemaking. It made me think of my friends the Hales and the Hutchinses, the Evangelical livestock farmers here in Texas, and what an inspiration it is to see people returning to the land to accept a vocation on it.
On the car ride back home, P., who is from the wine-making Loire Valley in France, told me that he always learns something when he goes back home and spends time with grape farmers and wine makers. P. is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and he's come a long way from his roots. Those grape farmers and wine makers from his home region can't talk about semiconductors, or high-tech advances, or the vagaries of globalism like P. can; but they do know about the rising and setting of the sun, and about the rhythms of life, and all the things that farmers know simply by being farmers
, like their fathers and fathers' fathers were. P. said, in so many words, that talking to small farmers who live a traditional life is to confront the difference between knowledge and wisdom. In "Crunchy Cons," the farmer Joel Salatin, if memory serves, told me the same thing: that living close to the land, with the rhythms of nature, keeps one in close touch with reality.
On the agenda today: 1) Go to the Muir Woods; 2) Go to a winery in Sonoma where they promise to show kids how wineries work; 3) visit a cheese-making shop for same; 4) stop at a Russian Orthodox cathedral in San Francisco to pray before the incorrupt relics of St. John Maximovitch.
With a six-year-old boy and a two-year-old boy in tow.
Well, we made it to the Muir Woods, which is an astonishing place. You can see why people become Druids, is all I'm saying. Seriously, at one point I stopped to pray thanksgiving for these trees, and those who saved them, and who care for them now. To be in the presence of those ancient creatures is to feel the natural piety that traditionalist conservatives say a proper understanding of man's relationship to nature will inspire. It was T.S. Eliot who said that all problems relating to nature are ultimately problems relating to God. It's amazing to think that if not for the naturalist John Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt, and others, this magnificent, old-growth redwood forest would have gone the way of all the others like it on the coast: into the sawmill. Muir, who founded the Sierra Club, famously wrote:
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides....God has cared for these trees, saved them...but he cannot save them from fools -- only Uncle Sam can do that.
Driving up to our friends' house, north on Hwy 280 from the San Jose Airport, Julie commented on how stunningly beautiful the countryside is along the freeway, especially because it's not marred by billboards and strip malls selling fast food and the usual crap. Beatrice, our hostess, said that's because the state forbids it. I was reminded of something my friend Irene, a conservative Bay Area Catholic, told me as we were driving down the Pacific Coast Highway the last time I was out here: "We have to thank the liberal enviros for keeping this stuff preserved. If it had been left up to our side, it would have all been paved over and developed."
Anyway, after the Muir Woods, and lunch, our patience with the kids, and theirs with us, came to an end. We figured we had time only to visit the cathedral to pray before the relics of St. John Maximovitch. I was deeply moved. Matthew said later he thought the saint's brown, withered hands were scary. Yeah, I guess a six-year-old would think that. Maybe you don't have to be six to think that. But I love signs of the miraculous, and find them inspiring. I attribute it wholly to the intercession of St. John that I didn't pull the car over on the way home and strip those two little heathens to the roof so we could make it through rush hour traffic in peace.
As I often tell friends, I have every expectation of gaining heaven sooner than I otherwise might have, because I live through the Purgatory of summer in Dallas. Did you know it hit 100 degrees two days this past April? "Summer" begins in April and doesn't really end till late October. Gloom! Despair! Agony on me!
Well, I'm writing this morning from atop some mini-mountain in northern California, above Silicon Valley, where we're staying with old friends for a few days. It's 60 degrees and cool outside. There could be marauding bands of Wahhabi Sasquatches lurking at the base of the mountain (hill, whatever: anything taller than a traffic bump is considered a mountain in flat north Texas) and it could not disturb my tranquillity. Today, we're off with the chirren to the Muir Woods, where I intend to get in touch with my inner Ent. And then to a small winery, and a cheesemaking operation. And then to an Orthodox cathedral in San Francisco to see the relics of St. John Maximovitch. My idea of a vacation, I tell ya!
OK, so the conference just ended, and Your Working Boy is out of here, headed back to Dallas. I'll be in the Bay Area for the rest of the week, so blogging will be light (okay, lightish), but colorful, I'm sure.
John Siniff of USA Today asks Hunter to expand on his statement that what conservatives have gained in politics they've lost culturally.
Hunter says Evangelicals have been playing a defensive game in this conflict. Their defense has been a political one. They say to themselves if we can just get our person into the White House, our people onto the Supreme Court, and so on, we can halt this slippery slide into a kind of libertarian decadence. They are trying to hold back something that is taking place culturally. Certain vulgarization of popular entertainment, the disintegration of the family -- "they've become extremely sophisticated in how to mobilize money, people and other resources to achieve those political ends."
But culture is more important than politics, says Hunter, and it seems to him that the culture, especially among cultural elites, had come to a consensus about the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay marriage far earlier than any kind of legislation or court decisions that would ratify that consensus. So politics is a short-term solution, and because it's a short-term solution, it's not really a solution. "Nothing is challenging what I think is an already established consensus among cultural elites for the kinds of things that Evangelicals and other religious conservatives really find worrisome."
Mike Cromartie objects to Hunter, saying he wouldn't called a political solution a "failed solution" for civil rights laws. Hunter replies: there's an underlying narrative in our culture, at the deepest levels, about freedom. Brown v. Board and a lot of the civil rights legislation, and the court decisions, were all ahead of the culture and public opinion -- but it was still part of this narrative move. And that is part of the success of the gay rights movement -- they have tapped into this deep narrative flow in American culture, so that when conservatives challenge gay rights, it sounds like they're against freedom. "And that's a losing proposition."
Wolfe adds that he's surprised to keep seeing that issues involving the body and sexuality are far more important to conservative Christians than other issues, such as poverty and torture. For these Christians, this is not just cherry-picking, Wolfe admits; this is a profoundly serious concern, especially when it comes to raising children in this culture.
"The idea, however, that this is the fault of liberals is going to be an increasingly problematic [point of view] in the future," Wolfe said. How much longer can you blame liberals if the government is run by conservatives? he added. How can you account for the fact that divorce rates and other indicators of cultural breakdown are as high or higher in Red America than Blue America?
"At some point, you have to ask, 'Is something wrong with us? Is something wrong with the way we are raising our children?' And this is what I mean by the turning away from politics," Wolfe adds. "At some point, it's got to come home [for conservatives.]"
(This is the first thing Wolfe has said all morning that I agree wholeheartedly with!)
Alan Wolfe is passionate this morning about the inappropriateness of using the term "war" to describe American politics. The language itself is hyperbolic, he says, and forces us to conceive of normal politics as being at each other's throats. Wolfe says that using the word "war" to describe politics undermines the need to respect rules for the sake of reaching political consensus. Politics is not supposed to be civil war by other means.
Hunter responded by saying that the Civil War, when it broke out, was preceded for 30 years of arguing over the culture-war issues that the shooting war was ultimately fought over. "Real wars don't always follow culture wars, but you never have a real war without a prior culture war."
This is something that a democracy, especially in context of a post-Enlightenment world, needs to pay attention to, says Hunter. "Culture wars become especially bloody over one issue, and that is: who is a member of the political community? Who is a member of a common community, and therefore worthy of its protections? You start excluding people, and culture wars tend to become violent wars. You see this in all sorts of cases historically."
A questioner replied that there is nothing today like the issue of slavery, which was at the moral heart of the Civil War. Replies Hunter: Au contraire -- there's a reason why abortion has been at the center of the culture war for the past 30 years.
The culture war is fueled by radically different concepts of authority. I asked about the Alasdair MacIntyre view that you cannot have a cohesive society without a commonly shared morality. Given the radical individualism of American society, are we headed toward a political situation in America in which people feel not loyal to their country, but merely obedient to our government?
Wolfe says MacIntyre's "After Virtue" is a poetic book, "but there's not one grain of truth in it." Hunter says that American society is in fact fragmenting, and not because we have to have a common religion. He says, "My sense of the center is that it isn't coherent, it isn't vibrant, and that they're all sorts of other things going on, including the commodification and politicization of everything -- and that this is deeply problematic for whatever center we would hope to emerge."
"At the end of the day, authority, it seems to me -- in my most pessimistic moments, I sense that authority is devolving into power," he continues. "I see that again with the increase in law. It's a straightforward measure. Law is the language of the state, and the state is many things, but at the end of the day, the state is about coercion. It seems to me that opponents in the culture war appeal to law so quickly because what they're doing is appealing to the patronage of the state. And when you have the patronage of the state, it means you don't need a moral consensus: you force it."
The trajectory of Evangelicals in America for the past 150 years has been a movement from the center to the periphery, says Hunter. So much of the religious politics of the 20th century, from Scopes to the present, has been an attempt to find some place within the center, or to defend its place within the center. Hunter's sense is that Evangelicals in particular, especially on issues having to do with the family, they feel so marginalized, and politics have been such a failure to achieve the aims that they want, that they will be disaffected from politics altogether. That's a real possibility.
The question is put to Wolfe: Why would you think that conservative Protestants, having spent 40 years building a powerful political machine, would abandon it?
Because, says Wolfe, its leaders are having an epiphany about what their role as Christians in this culture are supposed to be, and to do. Leaders like Rick Warren are genuinely more interested in fighting poverty and relieving suffering, not fighting in the political realm. There is an authentic re-thinking of Christian mission, of Christian public purpose, among the younger generation of Evangelical leaders.
Hunter says that because Evangelicalism is more and more defined by emotional experience, a nascent Evangelical political progressivism is easy to foresee. You can see this especially among the emerging Evangelical elites. Says Hunter, "Most of the Evangelicals I know at the University of Virginia, I only know one who voted for Bush in the last election."
Hunter says cultural conservatives, like everyone else, has sought political solutions to the issues that trouble them the most: abortion, gay marriage, school issues, etc. "It is precisely because they have chosen a political strategy, which is in effect a short-term strategy primarily about the instrumentality of power rather than the kind of foundational normative consensus-building, that I think [explains why] conservatives are going to lose. Alan is exactly right [when he says] that conservatives have done extremely well mobilizing within the Republican Party, [but] these are short-term successes. While they have gained in politics, they have lost in the culture, and it is precisely for that reason that they will lose politics as well."
Hunter says the bigger question is not about polarization, but about the center itself. To say that conflict is not the main story is not the same thing as saying that citizens are becoming civic-minded, or that civic participation is increasing, or that concern for the most vulnerable is increasing. "My sense is that what is referred to as the center is a statistical phenomenon," Hunter says. "It is not rooted in common political ideals. It is not motivated in those ways. ... The center is not clear and purposeful."
Add to Del.icio.us 
Digg This 
Fave on Technorati