The room was overflowing, the applause thunderous. Novelist, activist, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth delivered a galvanizing Erasmus Lecture in late October. It was one of the most bracing and exciting in our long series of Erasmus Lectures. I’m delighted to publish “Against Christian Civilization” in this issue.
Kingsnorth is a talented writer. But there are further reasons why his voice wins applause. And these reasons illuminate and clarify something about the strange and daunting times in which we live.
Kingsnorth’s writing features a strong current of censure and condemnation: nature desecrated, an economy feasting on greed and lust. The Machine is Kingsnorth’s image for today’s relentless empire of dominion, the effort to bring everything under the rule of man, to make the entire world serve our purposes. It’s billed as a humanitarian project, an expression of the modern “religion of humanity.” (Daniel J. Mahoney recently wrote a fine book on this topic, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.) Francis Bacon was one of the early architects of the Machine. He argued that reason’s purpose is to torture nature’s secrets out of her so that they might be used for the relief of man’s estate. Although the intention is philanthropic, the upshot is dystopian: a world of insatiable wants that impel us to destroy all limits. We construct and fuel the Machine because it promises to make us gods—a goal that requires us to transform everything into a resource, including our humanity.
One might think that such dire talk would make Kingsnorth off-putting. Perhaps it might have in decades past, when we had confidence in progress. But not so today. Many of us suspect that our troubles run deep, even as we are discouraged from thinking too much about how broken things are. For such people (and I count myself among them), Kingsnorth’s unsparing observations about contemporary society are welcome. He has the courage to see and say what we half-know but shrink from admitting.
Allow me to give an example. The use of reproductive technologies is accelerating rapidly. These procedures include the selection of embryos based on genetic testing. Although we prefer to think otherwise, it is glaringly obvious that doctors, public health officials, insurance companies, the Gates Foundation, moralists, and not a few church leaders—the Machine—will nudge more and more couples into artificial means of child production so as to prevent birth defects and thus reduce human suffering—the supreme imperative of the humanitarian religion of humanity.
Although Kingsnorth does not address IVF and related technologies in his Erasmus Lecture, he challenges the grip of the Machine. He helps us confront an all too likely future. Just as failure to use contraception has been disparaged as “unplanned parenthood” among the poor, natural means of reproduction will be condemned as irresponsible among the wealthy. But we are not undone by our situation, bad as it might be. Kingsnorth is not a prophet of doom. We have a place to stand. St. Paul mocked the world’s pretensions. Tribulation? Distress? Persecution? Famine? Peril? The sword? “In all these things,” Paul instructs us, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). Christ has overcome the world. As we cleave to him, we pursue the victory of endurance.
Kingsnorth often returns to the deepest source of human freedom: It is always possible to do as God commands. St. John Paul II identified this foundation of freedom in Veritatis Splendor, perhaps the most important and lasting encyclical of his long pontificate. The martyrs and the saints witness to a perfect freedom, which is available to us as well, even as we stumble and fall. As Jesus teaches, with God all things are possible.
In “Against Christian Civilization,” Kingsnorth underscores our freedom in Christ by emphasizing Jesus’s most demanding strictures. Love your enemy. Do not resist evil. Sell all that you have and give to the poor. These are imposing demands, which can be met only by someone with Christlike holiness and purity of heart. It’s humiliating to acknowledge how lacking we are in those qualities. But it’s also ennobling to know that we are called to labor in the Lord’s vineyard as knowers and doers of his Word. We have it within our power to resist the Machine’s dominion. This does not mean victory, at least not as the world defines victory. Rather, freedom in Christ allows us to sustain our humanity, even as the world becomes more disordered and inhuman.
I share Kingsnorth’s judgment that the pillars of Western civilization are crumbling. Our institutions seem exhausted. Our political culture is strangely supercilious and hysterical. The globalized market economy universalizes the vices of the West while undermining our virtues. Demographic change has accelerated.
Kingsnorth urges us to avoid regarding Christianity as a “tool” to fix these problems. His message is straightforward: Beware seeking Christian renewal in order to revitalize Western civilization. Wise counsel. Our faith seeks union with God in Christ, not the success of a cultural-political project.
Nevertheless, I am an American citizen, formed by Western civilization. I have natural duties, including the duty to seek repair when repair is needed, to buttress columns when they are wobbling. Fulfilling these duties is no more a betrayal of Christ than are my efforts to be a good husband and father. What’s decisive is the order of our loves. Our earthly ties and affections, even the most intimate and wholesome, must be subordinate to our love of God. As Jesus warns, to follow him we must be prepared to hate our mother and father, brother and sister. The same holds for Western civilization.
I do not agree with every aspect of Kingsnorth’s assessment of our situation. I am less suspicious of cities, which can be places of grandeur and community, not just rapacious exploitation and sterile individualism. Everything produced by man after our primordial sin in Adam has two aspects, one noble and capable of being ordered toward love of God, the other base, seducing us toward love of self. This is true even of the sword. Jesus warns us that living by the sword will be our undoing—and St. Paul teaches that the sword is the divinely ordained instrument for the restraint of evil. As St. Augustine recognized, in this life the City of God and the City of Man are intermixed and intertwined.
Still, Kingsnorth is surely right in his main points. As a friend once forcefully put it to me, “Our Lord did not die on the cross in order to establish Western civilization!” And Christ certainly did not promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against the United States of America.
As the classic gospel song puts it, “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger / Traveling through this world below.” So, yes, we should be good citizens and promote the politics and policies we think best. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). And in these efforts in the world, let’s keep the final lines of that old-time song in mind: “I’m just going over Jordan / I’m just going over home.” Blessed is the warrior who fights for the future of Western civilization knowing that his endeavor is subordinate to the spiritual struggle for the future of his soul.
End of an Era
The election results in November were remarkable. Donald Trump’s victory was decisive. And it was impressive. He overcame the nearly universal opposition of establishment voices and institutions. An establishment enforces norms and standards in public life. It determines what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. Trump’s ability to stiff-arm his establishment critics and gain a majority of the popular vote—in the face of their vociferous and unstinting smears, censure, and lawfare—suggests that his triumph foretells something far greater than the usual change of parties in power.
In my 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, I argue that we are finally reaching the end of the twentieth century. 1914 marked the beginning of a senseless conflict that consumed millions of lives in inconclusive battles. Communist revolution in Russia led to the deaths of millions more. In 1939, an even more destructive war began, one marked by indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and haunted by genocide. Jews use the word Shoah to refer to the Nazi genocide. It is a Hebrew word meaning “disaster,” “catastrophe,” “ruin.” One can rightly say that Auschwitz came at the end of an era of ruin. The decades from 1914 to 1945 were dark with calamity. The first half of the twentieth century was a civilizational Shoah.
In reaction, after World War II, the West settled upon an American-led open-society consensus. It blamed the disaster on authoritarianism and other forms of over-consolidated authority. Against these perils, the open-society consensus emphasized anti-totalitarianism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, this consensus was deemed victorious, and it became even more powerful.
Our establishment remains the custodian of the open-society consensus and the enforcer of its anti- imperatives. In the summer of 2020, the contagion of Black Lives Matter swept through every major institution, not because black Americans were subject to discrimination, but rather because anti-racism had long ago become a bedrock imperative, a cause always to be championed. And one was never, never to be accused of lacking vigilance in opposition to racism. Early in his term as president, Joe Biden denounced electoral reform in Georgia as “Jim Crow 2.0.” In so doing, he was sure that he stood on high ground. And he was confident that such rhetoric would score points for him in his battle against Republican opposition.
Biden was born in 1942. He came of age in the postwar era. As a young senator, he was surrounded by older men who had fought against German fascism and Japanese militarism. It’s not surprising, therefore, that in his 2024 State of the Union address he reached for what he imagined were the most powerful rhetorical weapons in the political arsenal. He evoked the specter of Adolf Hitler, and he reminded his listeners of America’s epic battle against fascism. He recalled Abraham Lincoln and the struggle to overcome slavery. Those dangers have reemerged, Biden warned. Vladimir Putin (whom he named in his address) and Trump (to whom he gestured without naming) are on the march. “Freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”
The implication was clear. Our president would lead us into an election in which we, the American people, would be called to affirm freedom, democracy, the Constitution, indeed, decency itself—and reject the standard-bearer of a racist, sexist, fascist darkness that lurks in the shadows of American society.
Freedom versus fascism? All that is good and true versus Hitler? My synopsis makes Biden’s rhetoric sound more than slightly mad. And it was. Weren’t voters more concerned about inflation, immigration, and endless foreign wars than by nightmares of Hitler returning to power? But the truth of the matter is that madness reigns. Our establishment seems unable to resist transforming an early twenty-first-century populist challenge to establishment power into a Manichean struggle against evil. Take a look at The Atlantic. This fall, tens of thousands of words were devoted to depicting Trump as a political bogeyman. Anne Applebaum turned the volume up to eleven, associating the New York real estate developer with every dictator of the twentieth century (“Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,” The Atlantic, October 18, 2024). Her breathless warnings amounted to a self-parody of a way of speaking that has been all too common in the last eight years.
The French writer Renaud Camus has written about the role Hitler plays in our collective imagination. (See “The Second Career of Adolf Hitler” in the recently published collection of Camus’s work, Enemy of Disaster: Selected Political Writings.) In the November issue of First Things, Alec Ryrie chronicled the way in which the West lost its collective conception of pure goodness and defaulted to a consensus about absolute evil (“The End of the Age of Hitler”). Both writers note that the German dictator may have died in a Berlin bunker in the final days of World War II, but he haunts the West, alive as the embodiment of civilizational disaster. In our political culture, the name of Hitler serves as (in Camus’s words) “an absolute weapon of language, as its supreme fulmination, the atomic bomb of maledictions.”
What’s striking about November 5, 2024, is that the atomic bomb did not explode. The supreme fulmination had no effect. The establishment rattled on like a machine gun about Trump’s threat to “our democracy,” but it was shooting blanks.
The open-society consensus has economic dimensions that dovetail with the cultural project of breaking down boundaries and creating a more inclusive society. As I detail in Return of the Strong Gods, free-market advocates made a moral case against socialism by arguing that markets coordinate buyers and sellers without relying on coercion. After the end of the Cold War, our establishment fixed on this promise. Free trade knits the world together, we were told. Freedom, peace, and prosperity flow from capitalism.
Michael Novak was an exemplary spokesman for the moral and spiritual benefits of free markets. His seminal book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), fused the anti-authoritarian thrust of the open-society consensus with the dynamism and adventuresome spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism. Novak recognized the importance of stable and unchanging moral truths, as well as the indispensable anchor of religious authority. He was not a proponent of openness without limits. But his emphasis fell on the need to crack open over-consolidated and coercive societies and thus release the creative potential of the human condition.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, our establishment supported a left–right open-society consensus. Democrats embraced economic globalization, the foundations for which were laid during the Clinton administration. Republicans accommodated the cultural transformations wrought by the sexual revolution and echoed the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. In effect, the left was pro-capitalist, while promising to mitigate the excesses of capitalism through welfare spending. The right was pro-liberation, while promising to protect social conservatives by defending religious liberty.
The open society of diversity, equity, and inclusion is a utopian ideal, as is the open economy and its dream of the frictionless free movement of capital, goods, and labor. The ideal of a life without limits and a world without borders is always under threat from dark forces: racism, xenophobia, and close-mindedness; nationalism, isolationism, and protectionism.
Our establishment has been trumpeting these dangers in recent years, but to little effect. The reason is simple. A decade ago, a plurality of Americans (and citizens of other countries in the West) became aware that they were victims of the open-society consensus, not beneficiaries. The free movement of capital and goods in the globalized economy had undermined working-class prosperity. Immigration disrupted cultural continuity. The erosion of marriage and the decline in religious observance had made life less stable and emotionally secure. The censorship regime, created to squelch dissent from the open-society consensus, annoyed and alienated many.
The recent election indicates that this plurality has grown to a majority, and for good reason. As I wrote two months ago, our greatest challenges flow from the excesses of the open-society consensus (“Our Problem Is Disintegration,” November 2024). Many commentators note that Trump enjoyed significant support from voters because he called for rigorous enforcement of our southern border. No doubt that is true. But a sensible observer must wonder why the border had become so porous in the first place. Other commentators claim that an ad faulting Kamala Harris for transgender extremism gained Trump crucial support in the final weeks of his campaign. Again, in all likelihood that observation is true. And, again, one asks: Why would an entire political party allow itself to become hostage to such an unpopular cause?
Note well, both issues concern borders and boundaries, one between countries, one between the sexes. Our establishment, wedded to the open-society consensus, cannot endorse strong boundaries. To do so would be to court a dangerous and xenophobic nationalism (which is to say, fascism)—or transphobia, a gateway illness to homophobia, which is in turn linked to racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of the “other.” In short, at this late stage of the open-society consensus, it’s either open borders or Hitler, “gender-affirming care” or Jim Crow 2.0.
Once again, I’ve framed Trump’s electoral victory in ways that seem absurdly simplistic. Either open borders or Hitler? “Nobody talks that way,” some are certain to say. They’re wrong. In the last few years I’ve heard the name of Hitler and charges of fascism in the public square more often than in all the previous decades of my life combined. This frenzy of accusations, all aiming to root out long-past evils, bespeaks the senescence of the open-society consensus. It may have served good purposes two or three generations ago, but today its effects are destructive.
In Return of the Strong Gods, I dwell on Karl Popper’s 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which exercised great influence in its day. I’ve entertained the notion of writing a book to oppose Popper: The Love Society and Its Enemies. Love is jealous. It seeks to defend, protect, and promote the beloved. To this end, it establishes boundaries and enforces borders. It defends thresholds and fences altars. And when loves are shared, solidarity is strengthened. Put simply, love makes a home.
Our establishment, animated by the open-society consensus, has mounted a sustained assault on love. We are not to love our country, for to do so makes us racists, fascists, and nationalists. We are not to love our civilization, for to do so makes us xenophobes. We are not to love even the truth, for doing so paves the way for authoritarianism. (Karl Popper makes this argument.) And we’re certainly not to love God, the paradigmatic totalitarian who demands our devotion, heart, mind, and soul.
This assault on love has done great damage. It’s long time past for us to reject the open-society consensus and retire Adolf Hitler from public life.
Boomer Christianity Ages Out
James LaGrand observes a conservative turn in Protestantism (“A Surprising Generational Rift in the Christian Reformed Church,” Public Discourse, November 13, 2024). The Christian Reformed Church (CRC), a Calvinist denomination that sponsors Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently formalized its commitment to a biblical sexual ethic. At its national synod last June, representatives voted to make official the teaching that sexual activity is morally proper only within the marriage of a man and a woman, and it put congregations that publicly celebrated its LGBTQ members on “limited suspension.”
At the synod, debate exposed a generational divide. Baby Boomer church leaders opposed the actions. LaGrand notes that they spoke of “gentleness, grace, and understanding toward those desiring a same-sex partner.” A group of young pastors argued the opposite. They spoke of the need to clarify biblical teaching and impose appropriate church discipline.
“At first blush,” LaGrand observes, “this episode might seem surprising and counterintuitive. Is it not the young who are to lead their foot-dragging elders toward the right side of history, toward progressive views on social and cultural issues, including human sexuality?” But closer examination suggests otherwise. Although young people in general often support the Rainbow agenda, those who attend church adopt counter-cultural attitudes. And in 2024, being countercultural means standing against the sexual revolution.
Boomer Christians grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of remarkable homogeneity, against which they often rebelled. The civil rights and feminist movements “were formative in their development as young adults,” LaGrand remarks. They cheered the open-society consensus, in which the cause of gay rights was deemed a fitting extension of the battles against racism and sexism. Retired CRC minister Al Mulder lamented after last summer’s synod, “It puzzles me when CRC congregations firmly committed to racial and ethnic diversity, equity and inclusion at the same time officially embrace discrimination and oppression of sexual minority populations.”
A pastor in his thirties has had very different experiences. He came of age as pro-gay propaganda was gaining momentum and Pride Month became a sacred celebration. Instead of experiencing church as a legalistic culture, quick to condemn, Millennial and Gen X Christians grew up with pastors anxious not to seem judgmental. Rather than being subject to overbearing authority, they’ve suffered from the authority vacuum created by a therapeutic culture.
Baby Boomer church leaders are increasingly frustrated with the young. They are not used to being challenged. LaGrand reports: “In the months following this meeting, some long-time [read: Boomer] church members in the moderate-to-progressive camp expressed indignation about the role that both young people and denominational newcomers had played in passing the traditionalist statement.” How dare they resist the arc of history!
We are living in a time of transition. Young people have little interest in theologized versions of the open-society consensus. They are not coming to church to hear a DEI gospel, the same gospel that is being preached relentlessly by secular institutions. Nor are they coming to faith to be “affirmed.” Rather than relevance, they want truth. Rather than human-focused diversity, they want God-focused worship. Rather than be “included,” they want to experience the transformative power of God’s love. They want a church that is a counterculture, not a subculture.
May their tribe increase.
WHILE WE'RE AT IT
♦ Paul Kingsnorth opens his Erasmus Lecture with a visit to the hilltop where the flamboyant Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and his troops died in a confrontation with Indian warriors commanded by Sitting Bull. I, too, have visited Little Bighorn. On that September day the chill of fall was already in the wind that swept the landscape. I looked upon the vastness of the treeless horizon and marveled at the small number of men who had been engaged there in mortal combat. It is a famous encounter, yet the battle was inconsequential. The might of white America had long before doomed the Indian nations. Perhaps that’s why the place is eerie. We throw ourselves into our projects. We strain against the harness of life, often to magnificent and noble effect. Yet we are but small figures on a great stage, acting, living, and dying within a providential history we’d be foolish to think we grasp and understand.
♦ I’m writing in the final weeks of Ordinary Time, when the liturgical calendar emphasizes readings that evoke final judgment. The Old Testament reading for Sunday, November 17, comprises the opening verses of the twelfth chapter of the Daniel. They tell of the day in which the Archangel Michael will rise and the affairs of men will be brought to conclusion in judgment and redemption. In his regular commentary, “Words on the Word,” Bishop Erik Varden writes: “The book of Daniel is hardly reassuring reading. . . . It speaks of the end of time and of cosmic battle. It reminds us that our life in this world is ephemeral, that all human enterprise is relative to its finality, which exceeds our projection.”
♦ A reader asks: Should the Roman Catholic Church be a spiritual NATO and not a United Nations?
♦ In “The Revolt of the Elites,” from his 1994 collection, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch draws attention to the ways in which upper-middle-class liberals punch down. This cohort censures those who cling to their guns and their religion, deeming them racists and homophobes who want to keep women in their place (“angry white men”). Conjoined to this intense political moralism is a demand for liberation from traditional moral norms, a paradoxically obligatory antinomianism. Lasch observes:
When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, [rich liberals] betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold. They become petulant, self-righteous, intolerant. In the heat of political controversy, they find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light—those who “just don’t get it,” in the self-satisfied jargon of political rectitude.
Well before they came onto the scene, Lasch had described Barack and Michelle Obama very accurately.
♦ It’s not just the Obamas. Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole’s response to Trump’s election oozes liberal contempt. He ascribes Trump’s victory to “his potent cocktail of race- and gender-based phobias with raw rotgut chauvinism.” Those who voted for Trump merit denunciation. “The comprehensive nature of his victory suggests that alongside the very large cohort of voters who are thrilled by his misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and mendacity, there are many more who are at the very least not repelled by his ever more extreme indulgence in those sadistic pleasures. They know what he’s like and don’t much mind.” In his frenzy, O’Toole seems unable to contemplate the possibility that the majority of Americans are aware of his contempt, and that they voted against people like him as much as for Donald Trump.
♦ Internet sleuth Benjamin Ryan noticed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez no longer lists her preferred pronouns (for the record, she/her) on her X bio. A search of internet archives shows that this sign of obeisance to the Rainbow Reich was deleted sometime between August 2023 and May 2024. At times, Ocasio-Cortez has shown herself to be a canny politician. Was she early in recognizing that the trans issue was a big loser for Democrats?
♦ Jeff Shafer is a lawyer and director of the Hale Institute at New Saint Andrews College. In early November, Matthew Crawford and N. S. Lyons published on their Substacks (Archedelia and The Upheaval) Shafer’s essay, “Machine Antihumanism and the Inversion of Family Law.” Shafer observes that artificial reproductive technology (ART) transforms conception and gestation into commercial transactions: “Because the ART is a project of baby making, it veritably demands the law apply a consumer paradigm,” which includes the requirement of customer satisfaction. Shafer makes a chilling observation about the future of children-as-products:
Here we may think back to the beginning of the Ukraine war and the photos that made international news showing rows of cribs containing uncollected infants in Ukrainian surrogacy facilities. The ongoing war had kept consumers from flying in to retrieve the children they had ordered. Certain of these children may ultimately live out what they already symbolically represent: abandoned inventory, and display models for the new archetype of humanity.
Radical abortion laws and referenda passed since Dobbs underscore the children-as-products logic. In many states, a mother can declare herself unsatisfied with the “fetal product” in her womb at any point until birth.
♦ In the introduction to The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (2023), James Kalb provides a general description of our predicament:
What is man, and who is this particular man? Nothing very definite, we are now told: the habit of classifying human beings, even the concept of “human nature,” is oppressive. But that means that when we deal with people we cannot be guided by what they are as human beings or the particular kind of people they are. We must consider them from some other perspective—perhaps as creators of who they are, or alternatively as resources for the projects of others. We are marching into a post-human future in which man, depending on point of view, is either a god or less than a beast.
As a matter of fact, only a small number of people have the status and wealth to be self-creators. In our brave new world, most become resources for the projects of others, raw material for the enterprises of the powerful. Case in point: the unborn.
♦ A reader in Chicago took daily walks last summer along Lake Michigan. He reports that the majority of strollers were occupied by pets, not children.
♦ Nottingham University offers a class, “Chaucer and His Contemporaries.” Ever concerned for the delicate sensibilities of its students, the institution issued a warning: The assigned texts related “incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith.” No doubt the bureaucrats at Nottingham would affix a warning label to First Things.
♦ On his Substack Archedelia, Matthew Crawford observes, “The great political divide in U.S. politics at present is not between men and women, as is often reported, but rather between never-married and childless women and everyone else.” David Samuels calls this cohort of women “Brides of the State.” His assessment at UnHerd (quoted by Crawford): “Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. These single women are a most reliable voting block for the Democratic Party.” A recent Pew survey reports: “Women who have never married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” As Crawford notes, in 1980, only 6 percent of women over forty had never married. Now that cohort is 22 percent of all women and rising. A recent study predicted that 45 percent of women aged twenty-five to forty-four will be single by 2030.
♦ Writing in the New Yorker, anthropology professor Manvir Singh reports his skepticism about objective morality (“Are Your Morals Too Good to be True?” September 16, 2024). There is no moral truth, he decides. But fear not, we can adopt “moral fictionalism,” which commits us to act as though moral truth were real, even though, as a proponent of “moral fictionalism,” we suspects that it is not. Retired philosophy professor Joel Marks has no time for such solutions. He does not object to the hypocrisy of pretending to believe what one thinks is false. No, truth is dangerous. Writing in a letter to the editor (The New Yorker, October 14, 2024):
What [Singh’s] approach overlooks . . . is that a belief in objective morality also has considerable downsides. In a meta-ethical sense, it encourages hypocrisy, arrogance, and the adoption of intransigent positions that promote endless conflict. Fortunately, a number of ethicists have come to the conclusion that humans have sufficiently robust mental resources to adopt an alternative way of thinking. I, for one, would have us rely on our considered desires. The cultivation of rationality and compassion can go a long way toward remedying and even precluding various human behaviors and societal ills without the superfluous discord that moral judgments and attitudes so often introduce.
One is hard pressed to formulate a calmer and more complacent expression of the open-society consensus. Truth is dangerous and oppressive, and a love of truth takes us down the road to mean-spirited intransigence and conflict. Imagine the horrifying prospect: a medical student who refuses to be trained to perform abortions!
♦ The Center for Christian Studies co-sponsors our annual lecture in Austin, Texas. The Center also offers short courses addressing essential topics for Christians seeking to live faithfully in a post-Christian world. This winter, a seven-week class will be led by the Center’s director, Keith Stanglin: “In Defense of Hope: Why Christianity Makes Sense.” The class will meet on Monday evenings (January 27–March 10). You can participate in person or on Zoom. The class fee is $150. If you are a First Things subscriber, the fee is $100, a $50 discount. For more information, visit christian-studies.org.
The Center for Christian Studies publishes the Journal of Christian Studies, which I strongly recommend. If you subscribe, you’ll receive an additional $50 discount on class fees for the Center’s winter course.
♦ I’m delighted to welcome Virginia Aabram to our editorial staff. A graduate of Hillsdale College, Virginia has written for the Washington Examiner and other publications. She is serving as associate editor.
♦ Pip Donahoe of Chatum, New Jersey, would like to form a ROFTers group. If you’d like to meet once a month to discuss articles in First Things, get in touch with her: pipdonahoe@gmail.com.
The ROFTers group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is looking for new members. Contact Elizabeth Siegel to join: eesiegel@aol.com.
♦ Our year-end letter asking for donations is in the mail as I write. First Things thrives because of the generous support of readers like you. Please consider donating as 2024 comes to an end.
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