Letters

Streaming The Word

I appreciated Fr. Lusvardi’s excellent and most thoughtful article “Screens and Sacraments” (November 2024), seeing how online Masses appear to be treating the holy things of Christ in an uncomfortably irreverent way. But I wonder if his apparent comfort with broadcasting the Liturgy of the Word is warranted.

Isn’t the proclamation of the Word by Christ’s called and ordained servants just as much a “sacrament” as is the Lord’s Supper? Martin Luther certainly thought so, and he seems to have good company among the Church Fathers West and East who came before him. It was clear to them that the proclamation of the Word is not merely sharing information but is the Holy Spirit having his way with his people to make them holy, too. I recall Newman apologizing in “Arians of the Fourth Century” for “exhibiting the mysteries of the faith to the uninitiated.” He also seemed to believe the Liturgy of the Word is just as much a divine mystery and gift of grace as the Supper.

I was strong-armed against my better judgment into Zooming the liturgy during the first year of the pandemic (we stopped at the distribution of the Lord’s body and blood), but I stopped the whole thing because it seemed wrong for the reasons Fr. Lusvardi elucidated much more eloquently and cogently than I was able to. I would be most interested in hearing Fr. Lusvardi expound on why (or if?) the Liturgy of the Word is less “sacramental” than the Eucharist, such that it can be “screened” in a way that is not irreverent?

Kevin Martin
raleigh, north carolina

Adopting Priorities

I appreciated J. M. Milhauer’s nuanced examination of the pro-life stance regarding in vitro fertilization (“Overheard: Two Pro-Lifers Having a Chat,” November 2024). Milhauer effectively challenges common cultural platitudes supporting IVF, particularly through his portrayal of Harry, a pro-life advocate who supports IVF. This characterization resonates with many evangelicals who grapple with IVF’s implications.

However, one argument in Milhauer’s piece troubles me. In Sally’s final plea, she emotionally advocates for traditional adoption over the adoption of frozen embryos, stating, “If you have the desire and resources to adopt a child, then just look around. Our world is full of children in need of adoption.” While Sally’s intent is clear, this perspective poses significant issues.

Firstly, this line of reasoning inadvertently undermines a core tenet of the pro-life movement. Like pro-choice advocates, Sally makes a value judgment about the dignity of different forms of human life by prioritizing the adoption of “living children” over the adoption of embryos. The pro-life position asserts that life begins at conception; thus, an IVF embryo—a fertilized egg—represents a human life. Favoring traditional adoption over embryonic adoption resembles the pro-choice fallacy of assigning varying values to human lives.

Pro-choice proponents often establish a hierarchy of human worth, with certain children deemed more valuable based on factors like race, socioeconomic status, and health. In this framework, affluent children are less likely to be aborted, while those from marginalized backgrounds may be viewed as expendable. Milhauer’s argument, while distinct from typical pro-choice rhetoric, nonetheless replicates a similar error by suggesting that the adoption of already-born children is inherently more worthy than adopting frozen embryos.

Secondly, Milhauer presents a false dichotomy. When Harry asks, “So you don’t want to use IVF even to rescue some of those frozen embryos?” Sally’s response implies that we should prioritize traditional adoption until all available children are placed. This creates an unnecessary division. Adoption should be viewed holistically; IVF adoption of embryos is just as valuable as adopting already-born children. All human life is created in God’s image, and being truly pro-life does not necessitate choosing between these two options. Embracing both avenues respects the dignity of all human life, affirming that every child—born and unborn—deserves a loving home.

Daniel Nealon
littleton, colorado

A Man of His Time

Nearly twenty years ago, Renaud Camus described “The Second Career of Adolf Hitler”: Western Europe’s “obsession” with Hitler as “a negative pole par excellence.” Haunted by this “ghost,” Europe remade itself into an “ultra-antiracist, post-Hitlerian society.” Antiracism, coupled with the deracinating incentives of a post-industrial financial economy, soon birthed “replacism” (a term that prevents Camus from being discussed in polite company today). The nations that embraced replacism attempted “to exit history”: disavowing and suppressing their own histories and cultures, and eventually welcoming the replacement of their very populations.

In “The End of the Age of Hitler” (November 2024), Alec Ryrie ably describes this replacement in his cultural history of the last century. He also wonders whether “anti-Nazi values” have become personally more fundamental than “Christian values.” This is a fruitful, and difficult, question for every Christian to ask. Ryrie seems to have begun to pose it to himself. He is, by his own account, viscerally, emotionally enthralled by this myth, its speeches, stories, and films. Has this enthrallment affected Ryrie’s own treatment of the very myth whose cultural power he is exposing and criticizing? It seems to have, in at least two ways.

First, Ryrie seems to uncritically reproduce the myth’s narrative when he describes how European Christians failed “the modern age’s keenest moral test.” He calls this test “World War II,” but what he actually means is deficient Christian resistance to “Nazi or fascist rule.” The equation between “World War II” and anti-fascism and anti-Nazism—which, for us, means that World War II was essentially a war against the Holocaust—is a sign that Ryrie is still thinking in the myth’s preferred terms. Perhaps for this reason, he downplays communism’s role in provoking fascism and Nazism and in motivating Christian cooperation with or obtuseness to those movements. He presents “cruelty, warmongering, and systematic murder” as essential to Nazism and fascism, without even intimating that they might be equally, or even more so, and certainly more evidently so at the time, essential to communism. He suggests that the “devil’s bargain” made by European Christians was “based on a Christian hierarchy of values,” but describes the fact that “the communists were kept out” as of a piece with “the trains ran on time.” By the mid-1930s, communists had slaughtered many more victims in Europe than would be killed in the Holocaust. Yet Ryrie gives us little reason to take seriously the anti-communism of European Christians. Bonhoeffer remains one of “a tiny handful of visionaries” able to see the crisis as we do retrospectively. It is hard, in Ryrie’s framing, not to have self-satisfied contempt for the religion of the manifold non-“visionary” Christians of the period.

Second, Ryrie still seems enthralled by the “age of Hitler” in his conclusion, which suffers as a result. Ryrie’s goal is “synthesis” between today’s partisans: to “underpin with deeper traditions” the “secular values” of the left and to “bring to fruition” “secular-progressive values” by “infus[ing] them with the beauty, richness, and strength of religion and other deep traditions.” This is precisely the framing that has become dominant among conservative Christians in the last half century: to try to persuade a post-Christian society that Christianity is useful for its own “secular-progressive” purposes. When Ryrie begins to “draw on our deeper cultural wells, namely our religious and philosophical traditions, which offer positive rather than negative values,” all he returns with is “humility, repentance, and forgiveness.” I don’t mean to disparage these virtues, only to note they are precisely the Christian “values” that today’s globalist managers find acceptable, because they are unthreatening to their rule and their religion.

Deeper draughts from our cultural wells could return with the virtue of pietas as described by Thomas Aquinas, which might make sense of the (to us) shocking celebration of particular “ethnical communities” in Mit brennender Sorge; with the unsettling observation that philosophers have been replacing the summum bonum with a summum malum since Thomas Hobbes, which might mean that Christians should reevaluate the very foundations of modern politics; and with forthright answers to the question Ryrie alludes to when he observes, “Knowledge of what to love is the only position from which victory in our culture wars is possible”: God, and the neighbors He has given us, beginning with our own kith and kin and country.

Pavlos Papadopoulos
wyoming catholic college
lander, wyoming

Happily Ever After

Thank you to Patricia Snow (“Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution,” November 2024) for her brilliant exposition of the non-theological theology of Taylor Swift’s relationships with men under a motif of break ups, feminine identity, and the loss of Christian consensus. As I was reading the piece, I found myself longing the ending Snow provided, a conclusion to the roller coaster of guilt, blame, and hope.

A piece like this begs for a happy ending, because “it’s a love story.” And while Patricia Snow seems to wave a happy ending for a tidal wave of female solidarity, the best one can do is hope for the existence of an “unambiguously righteous cause” to rally around. A Christianity without Christ, however, leads to an atomization of many Christs, none sacrificing for the same cause and none capable of sacrificing for all. So we are back to “every woman for herself.” Keep singing, Taylor.

Larry Pahl
crossville, tennessee

Liberation Crusade

Nathan Pinkoski (“Actually Existing Postliberalism,” November 2024) has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between the public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction and which thus—to cut to the point—grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of twentieth century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security, a new paradigm pioneered by the U.S. government after 9/11, when it launched an expansive effort to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so, he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which the fusion of state and society, politics and economics, means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But I would issue a challenge on the question of whether or not this obsessively managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state. But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which, after all, is right there in the name).

Liberationism is absolutely central to the managerial ideology that dominates the West today. For a managerial regime—which hopes to progressively reduce all of society to technocratic management from the top down—there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere—any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any hometown, region, or today even nation—is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of the managerial class). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers. Thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is a frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, managerial liberalism requires the establishment of perfect control.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been at the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And thus I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of managerial liberalism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed—or, rather, reconstructed—out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberalism has always sought to tear apart and devour.

N. S. Lyons
washington, d.c.

Nathan Pinkoski replies:

In equating liberalism with “liberationism,” N. S. Lyons paints with too broad a brush. He is right that there is a kind of liberalism that engenders pernicious liberationism. However, I think this approach puts too much emphasis on ideas as the cause of change, rather than on transformations in our political form, institutions, and laws. It is these concrete changes that place certain pressures on our habits, our character, and ultimately our soul, and thereby deform us in particular ways. As I hint at in my essay, here are a few of those pressures:

1. The post-1989 decision to transform America into a permanent empire has reshaped our republican national character, leading us to believe that defending American liberal constitutionalism means not learning the art of self-government, but pursuing regime change in far-off corners of the world.
2. The expansion of this empire relies on the weaponization of finance and information technology, which makes a mockery of our pretensions to impartiality and habituates our leadership class to hypocrisy and double standards.
3. This overreliance on financial imperialism exacerbates gnostic temptations. Elite exhortations about defending liberal democracy revolve around identifying our lack of willpower. They never discuss our physical and material limits. They diminish the significance of material reality, encouraging us to believe that national industry and manufacturing (for example, producing basic weapons components such as artillery shells) aren’t important to national greatness or maintaining a competitive edge in great power rivalry. Power gets projected too far. Our liabilities exceed our capacities.
4. The civil rights revolution creates a leadership ecosystem that turns everyone into a snitch, and subjects the dissidents to “unpersoning”—administrative expulsion or cancellation. If one wants an early example of what this new post-1989 elite looks like, the 1992 classic, Scent of a Woman, outlines it well.
5. The drive to keep expanding and deepening this new political imperial form rests on a civic religion of anti-fascist and anti-racist innocence signaling. This civic religion paralyzes efforts to interrogate what’s happened in the past few decades, and thereby obstructs attempts to chart a different course for the nation and for the West.

Right-leaning intellectuals are at a crossroads. They can continue to pursue intricate intellectual genealogies of liberalism and modernity, but the good work on this has already been done. What we’re missing is a close study of which institutions have changed and which ratchets have been pulled in past years. These are the precise mechanisms that tighten the asphyxiating grip of anti-human managerialism. If we study those, there’s a fighting chance that we can spot weakened levers to reverse—or ones to pull to our advantage.

Image by Janez Šubic, public domain. Image cropped.