The Epistle of Brooks to the Philistians

World-famous moderate leftist David Brooks out to troll his friends in the Twilight Zone! I don't think we've seen him doing that since Romney was running for president.

Henri Balland's smoked haddock (I think) from Le Boeuf d'Argent, Lyon.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Next Culture War", New York Times, June 30 2015:

I fully understand the pain and despair you guys must be going through as orthodox Christianity vanishes from our society, but a Benedict Option of the kind proposed by Rod Dreher where you all withdraw from the world to contemplate the Last Days in prayer and anguish might not be the best way to go from the political standpoint. Why don't you make use of all that selfless love and commitment like my homegirl Dorothy Day, serving the poor in the urban jungle?

Not a bad idea at all, especially since Dreher's Benedict idea seems to involve leaving the prayer and anguish to the wives, while he and his bros console themselves with the haute gastronomie at the Boeuf d'Argent and the Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, as we learned from Edroso last week. Because let's face it, nothing says martyrdom quite like a Nénuphar de Noix de Saint Jacques Marinés à l'Huile d'Olive d'Italie, plongées dans la Fraîcheur de la Verveine, or maybe Fraîcheur du Haddock Fumé aux herbes de Printemps, senteur de Vinaigre de Mangue et Huile d’Olive Vierge d’Italie for starters.

For himself, of course, Brooks adopts a kind of Brahmanical perspective of swadharma, the duty of what one was born to do; just as Arjuna in the Baghavad-Gita must fulfill his personal dharma by killing his cousins and friends in the forthcoming battle, so the self-describedly congenitally shallow Brooks must stay true to his destiny as narcissistic blowhard, so there's no Dorothy Day option for him, much as he might enjoy it. Though he and Mark Shields do their act for an annual lunch at the Conference of Catholic Bishops Social Ministry Gathering (which he refers to falsely in interviews as a lunch for Catholic Relief Services, making it sound as if it's meant to raise money for the poor or something rather than to entertain the young Leaders) and I expect he does all sorts of volunteery things in fact.

I do wish he would stop using the term "orthodox Christian", Dreher-style (Dreher does it with characteristic dishonesty to encourage a confusion between "right" Christianity and his own capital-O Orthodox church), as if there was some universally recognized checklist for adhesion to the faith you could use, as there is for Judaism in the form of the Law. You can talk about being orthodox Catholic or orthodox Lutheran or orthodox Orthodox, but orthodox Baptist or orthodox Methodist, say, would be completely contrary to the tenets of the respective denomination, and given the range of different articles of faith, the summary idea of "orthodox Christian" is just total nonsense, as in

American culture is shifting away from orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues.

The current range of LGTB-affirming dominations includes at least branches of everybody from Pentecostals to Episcopalians, and a number of whole mainline denominations. Divorce is only an issue for Catholics, and contraception (and abortion, a word which is not found at all in today's column) used to be too until the Holy Rollers made their diabolical alliance with the Scarlet Woman; surely virtually all conservative Protestants and Orthodox Christians still accept birth control, except for some ill-informed Christianists on the question of those particular methods, IUDs and Mifeprestone, that they regard as sneaky abortions.

More and more Christians feel estranged from mainstream culture. They fear they will soon be treated as social pariahs, the moral equivalent of segregationists because of their adherence to scriptural teaching on gay marriage.

What scriptural teaching on gay marriage? There certainly appear to be some hostile words on sodomitical practices, but "gay marriage" is absolutely not mentioned; as we've heard this week from all kinds of sources the Scripture says a good deal more on a man's obligation to marry his dead brother's widow, even if he's married to somebody else already, than it does about buttsex, and Jesus pointedly refuses to criticize the doctrine in all three synoptic Gospels.

As for being treated as social pariahs, you won't make a lot of friends if you're always on about the Divine Right of Kings, either, or if you keep pigs in your house as Chinese peasants used to do. If you deliberately adopt a retrograde identity and keep it in everybody's face you are going to be confining yourself to a retrograde community, so stop whining.

They fear their colleges will be decertified, their religious institutions will lose their tax-exempt status, their religious liberty will come under greater assault.

Honestly, some of those colleges ought to be decertified because they're committing educational malpractice, and the churches should pay taxes if they can't stop meddling in politics. Nobody's stopped them from firing gay organists and pregnant secretaries on religious grounds, though, their desire to give their employees contraceptive-free health insurance has been honored to the point of insanity, and if you think the liberalization of marriage law is going to have some special different effect on the situation—well, I wish I could be so optimistic.

What will happen in the next decades will come from the people; women need contraception, and every once in a while there's one who needs an abortion, and everybody now has out gay friends, and the position of social conservatives is becoming untenable because everybody knows it's stupid. Bakers who can't in conscience bake a cake for a gay wedding will be driven out of business not by the 21 state governments that allow fines for such misbehavior, because the fines are virtually never assessed, but by customers who don't want to patronize such stupid, backward, cranky-tempered outfits.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer.

Oh right, are you still here? I was forgetting all about you. I believe they pay no attention to you whatsoever. You write for the New York Times.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

That line read better in the original German.

Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex.

It's not a communications disaster, it's a theological disaster; they've reduced the entire religion to a public obsession with sex, and there's nothing left.

We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. 

Especially the bonds. I told you to diversify your portfolio.

Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital.

"Fluid" is one of his favorite words. I won't make fun of "social capital" (we used to be socially fairly well off, but Daddy was speculating at the time of the social crash and it all went down the shithole) because it's Robert Putnam's. Oops, I guess I just did.

Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.

He likes "barbaric" too. I guess you can see where he's going here.

Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society.

Like my sinews? I just had them rewoven.

They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love.

They're Buddhists?

They can serve as examples of commitment.

I hope everybody's as offended as they need to be by the idea that you won't see any examples of commitment unless some weird-ass white rightwinger shows up in your neighborhood.

They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans.

Not to mention the idea of your faulty vocabulary.

They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

"Hi, I'm Rick Santorum and I heard you were lonely. Would it be OK if I nurtured you a little? In private?"

Where we're going, then, is to say, Why don't you guys do that in public, so you can make some political hay out of it?

Somehow I don't think that's the problem. We know for instance that Rick Santorum doesn't hesitate to publicize his charitable activity, but it spends most of its money on fundraising, administration, and office rental paid to his political allies. We know that Erich Erichsson would love to do some of that community building, but it's really hard, and best to start small by having your friends over for dinner. And Mr. Rod Dreher already thought of it but he's pretty sure it's not going to work.

Now, we ought to react to the rest of the world with kindness, empathy, and respect not as an evangelism strategy, but because it’s the right thing to do. That said, I think it’s simply true as a general matter that you can be as nice as you can be, and the world will still hate you. This is massively true when it comes to the gay rights question. There’s a racist joke that speaks to an ugly truth here: “Q: What do you call a millionaire black brain surgeon? A. [racial slur].”* The idea is that for people who hate black folks, nothing that black folks do matters; it’s who they are that the racist cares about. Similarly, for many (though certainly not all) modern people liberal conviction, it doesn’t matter that orthodox Christians serve the poor, or do good in their own communities. What matters is their stance on homosexuality.

Or, as we "modern people liberal conviction" might put it, however nice you are to me, if you're stupid and vicious politically I still won't vote for you. I think Rod's right here for once. I mean, outside of his possibly excellent taste in eats. Kind of you to think of them, Brooksy, but I'm afraid they're not listening.

*Why exactly is that a racist joke? Because he's telling it wrong; I had to go to Dr. Google to remember how it goes. The correct answer is, "A brain surgeon, you racist." Where did Dreher's version come from? (And why does he have to qualify the brain surgeon as a millionaire? If she's just a middle-income brain surgeon you don't have to take her seriously?)

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