Hieronymus
2d ago
As much as I LARP hard as a TradCath, I get worried that St. Marys, KS could turn into Waco 2.
I am (gallows-humorously?) tickled by the two possible interpretations of this sentence, and I hope you meant both of them.
At various times he was all of a zealous evangelical from Louisiana…
As much as I’d like to claim him, I don’t think he’s ever been a zealous evangelical. He was raised a cultural Methodist.
I've heard some shady rumours about TradCath households receiving visits from CPS because their neighbors were worried about six or seven kids running around.
Yeah, I am never sure what to think on that front. On the one hand, you hear stories of CPS folks who have seen enough real abuse to laugh off accusations against merely countercultural Christians, and I believe it. But then you hear about cases where the investigators have gone completely off the rails.
One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities. Originally the question was how evangelical churches should relate to the mainline churches. Another question followed about how evangelical churches’ worship should relate to evangelism, which is often addressed to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with evangelical culture. But more pertinent here is the question of how evangelical Christians should conduct ourselves in fields like academia and politics.
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
There is a widespread perception within evangelicalism that David French has compromised more and more of his evangelical convictions to be seen as “one of the good ones” by the secular commentariat. I think that this explains his position on transgenderism in the public square, for example, better than principled classical liberalism does. So I don’t see French as an exemplar of classically liberal evangelicals.
To an extent Trump makes sense as a result of the evangelical absence of institutional leadership and embrace of charismatic leaders - if they're going to have a political vision, it will be grounded in dynamic individual leaders hostile to traditional institutions, like Trump himself.
Evangelical support for George W. Bush was much earlier and more heartfelt than evangelical support for Trump has been. Bush’s faith is, as far as I can tell, sincere. But while he himself may have had sympathy for the religious right, he also shared his father’s neoconservative convictions, and virtually all of his political appointments reflected the latter rather than the former. Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms: His political capital was spent on the War on Terror.
The Obama administration, by contrast, saw a flurry of progressive activity. The president did not shy away from using either the federal bureaucracy or the judiciary as a weapon against social conservatives. His administration issued a series of Dear Colleague letters threatening schools and colleges into complying with progressive norms on discipline, sexual assault accusations, and gender identity. He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception and the (Evangelical Protestant) owners of Hobby Lobby that it wasn’t enough to pay for several forms of contraception, they had to include those with abortifacient effects. Thankfully the Supreme Court forbade this, basing its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 rather than the Constitution. At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state. In reaction, the legislature passed another law effectively gutting the RFRA.
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
The more that evangelicals continue to feel that they're doing badly, or that their fortunes are sliding, the more seductive such leaders will be for them.
Yes! When it becomes clear that certain institutions are only used against us, why would we want leaders who leave them lying around?
I had hoped that Pence would come out of the first Trump administration with an awareness of the threat from progressive-controlled institutions and the need to fight them. Combined with his strong evangelical convictions and his small-government conservatism, that had the potential to make him a fantastic future president. But it’s not the lesson he took from his time under Trump, and maybe January 6 would have cut off that opportunity anyway. It remains to be seen what lessons (Catholic convert) J. D. Vance will take from his term as V.P.
They use a number of different names for it - Deneen's 'aristopopulism', Vermeule's 'common-good constitutionalism', and so on - but what unites this group is the conviction that it is both possible and desirable for the United States to be governed in conformance with Catholic social teaching. Liberal democracy should be limited in its scope, fundamentally reframed, or (in the most extreme cases) abolished entirely.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
The obvious criticism to make of this option is that it is a counsel of despair - it takes for granted that the public is lost. While Dreher himself denies that he calls for any kind of 'retreat', this denial has always been unconvincing at best. … The Benedict Option itself is primarily a plea for evangelical Protestants and Catholics to try this. You can indeed find people in those traditions taking an option like this, though so far it's too early to see how generative their efforts are. I don't predict entire evangelical or Catholic communities taking this approach, though, until it's clear that they have no other choice.
I would call it a semi-retreat, or maybe a fighting retreat to a more defensible position. But the question is: Is it defensible? I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms. If you built such a community – and you were successful enough to be noticed – you could reasonably expect to face creative applications of the laws on land use, housing, health care, education, employment, and so on, to impose progressive values.
There is a fourth approach bandied about, but it’s almost as unlikely as Catholic integralism. When “Christian nationalism” became a vague talking point among some Democrats, a few different evangelicals decided to claim the term. One wrote a book on it, which I haven’t read. What they seem to have in common is that they want an arrangement like that the one that existed in America before the progressive movement, with evangelical Christianity in the place of mainline Christianity as normative, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tolerated but not normative, and non-Christian religions legal but marginalized to one degree or another. (This last in particular varies by thinker.) It would take some pretty radical social shifts to make that even vaguely plausible. And while radical social shifts have happened before, that’s not the kind of thing you can accomplish with a political program.
Those are a lot of words to say that I don’t know the best path forward. But hopefully they contribute to understanding the situation.
Hieronymus
2d ago
No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.
A principle that has served me well for twenty four years: If he calls someone a coward who isn't, don't trust him. This applies regardless of his target's other vices.
Hieronymus
12d ago
If a man married a virgin and then lost sexual interest in her after the wedding night, when she was no longer a virgin, it would be fair to say that he suffered from a virginity fetish. But as a practical matter I've never heard of that happening, which suggests that something else is going on.
Do you just mean that they find purity a sexually appealing trait? If so, that's not surprising, and I don't see how that would cast doubt on their other reasons. Or do you mean something more than that?
Edit: If you could give a relatively SFW example, that would be helpful.
Hieronymus
13d ago
If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
Could you explain this? I don’t follow. Also, it would help if you could clarify what you mean by tradwives here; there are several very different ways the word is used, and I can’t figure out which you mean from context.
Hieronymus
28d ago
At one point I hoped that open source, decentralized social media would be more resistant to censorship. Apparently some of its pioneers had the same dream. It seems crazy naïve now.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
(The Catholics and Orthodox consider each other's apostolic successions and sacraments valid).
It’s a tangent, but is there a clear Eastern Orthodox consensus on this? E.O. attitudes toward the Western churches seem to vary quite a lot, and I have never been able to get a handle on which takes on the issue, if any, are mainstream within their communion.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Natural law is the moral order inherent in the order of creation, particularly human nature, as distinct from social custom or positive law such as statutes. In the ancient world it could be discussed by Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists, but in 21st-century America it is mostly a Christian idea.
… how do you guarantee that your reforms don't change, and revert back to standard liberalism?
This is an open question, and a vital one. I have some thoughts but not a satisfactory answer. Realistically, many of these policies couldn’t happen unless there were social change underway already, and I am not optimistic about that change happening absent a black swan event like another Great Awakening. I don’t want to pretend that wise social policy can fix things by itself.
Many of your proscriptions/desires/policies, resemble those of 1950s America, and we know for a fact that those changed to align with progressive mores.
True. I’d argue that the 1950s were kind of unstable to begin with, that the social legacies of the 1920s and of the New Deal had yet to be worked out.
Experience now gives the lie to some naïve past arguments for liberalization in a way that would make them harder to repeat. In the push for no-fault divorce, people argued (seriously!) that it wouldn’t increase divorce rates. Afterward, social psychologists said that divorce would be good for children. Those are arguments you can’t make with a straight face in 2025. If you wanted to restore no-fault divorce after a change in the status quo, you’d have to argue that no-fault divorce is worth the costs, not that there are no costs.
That is empirical evidence that, no, conservative laws are not naturally resistant to progressive agitation, and in fact, seem very vulnerable to them; hell, conservative customs aren't very resistant to liberalization. So how can you be sure you won't just repeat the cycle all over again?
I can’t be sure.
Western societies were Christian before they were liberal, and liberalism benefited from the customs and ideas laid down under centuries of Christendom. One of the outstanding questions on the modern Christian right is whether classical liberalism necessarily erodes that foundation: Did it have to be that way, or was that just how it worked out? I don’t know.
I think that laws that make it easier to have healthy families and churches and so on will lead to more of them, and that having more of them will feed back into policy. That’s the virtuous cycle I mentioned. I can’t promise that it won’t be outweighed by other factors, but I still think it represents movement in the right direction. It’s just not a silver bullet.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I’ve been thinking about the best way to answer. To be specific and even gesture at the scope of the issue would take an effortpost that I don’t have in me right now. But I can give a few examples:
- Ban abortion and assisted suicide.
- Reverse government recognition of gay marriage. The reason this one comes so early is that gay marriage makes a bunch of the other changes to family policy harder.
- Require a demonstration of (considerable) fault to obtain a divorce.
- Take fault into account when deciding what responsibilities the spouses have to one another in the distribution of property, etc.
- Acknowledge that people will abuse this if they can get away with it, and so treat perjury in divorce proceedings seriously.
I have ideas at various stages of development about how the state can make male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families a realistic option for more of those who want them; better respect parents’ rights and duties in raising their children; defend those who speak the truth on culture issues; protect the right of self-defense; and acknowledge the independence of churches. I am sure this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what comes to the tips of my fingers for now.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I don't know. Absent a revival, which is an act of God, I think by far the most likely outcome continues to be decadence as a state-enforced right.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
I’d like to break the “retvrn question” down along two axes. One is the criteria of evaluation: truth, helpfulness, and social attainability. The other is the spectrum of ideologies under discussion: groups who agree on critiques of liberal modernity have very different ideas of the right path forward.
Truth
The criterion of truth is the most important, and it’s the only one to apply to questions of metaphysics and religious doctrine. You, I, and society should seek to believe true things. Is willingness to buck the social consensus here liberal? Not necessarily. First-century Jewish Christians stood against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin; first-century gentile Christians contrasted even more starkly with the pagan social order.
This does contradict some critics of liberalism: neoreactionaries and some rightward-inclined rationalists want to talk about religion in utilitarian terms. But they are wrong to do so. We have a duty to the truth; even if we didn’t, the cost of ignoring it is beating one’s head fruitlessly against the brick wall of reality.
Helpfulness
Helpfulness is, if not more controversial, then definitely less objective. There are always tradeoffs to be made. And the variety of liberalism’s critics becomes obvious here. You may be thinking about neoreactionaries or integralists. But I, as someone who loves American classical liberalism, share concerns with these other critics.
One is that increased social and religious diversity has exposed cracks in liberal principles that were safely papered over in a more coherent society. Much discourse and litigation over religious liberty since the middle of the twentieth century is a fight between three groups of people: people who want to pass laws and to expect those laws to be followed, people who expect freedom of religion to keep the government from making their religious duties illegal, and people who expect freedom from religion to exclude religious considerations from the regulated sphere of life.
Another is that the synthesis of progressivism and liberalism seeks state intervention to free individuals from the influences of their families, churches, and other societies of private life. No-fault divorce is now ubiquitous. Governments forbid male-only fraternal organizations. Some state universities de facto ban religious student groups by requiring them to admit as members or officers those who don’t share their convictions. After a while one begins to think that liberalism as it exists will not leave well enough alone; and if the state is to intervene, I want it intervening to support my idea of the good and not to ban it.
I think there are more people in this camp than there are neoreactionaries and integralists. We thought parts of liberalism were pretty swell, but they haven’t worked out as promised. Was that contingent on the winds of politics? Or could liberalism only support a healthy society so long as there was enough of Christendom left as a foundation? It’s difficult to say.
Social Attainability
I really don’t know what is attainable, particularly in the long run. I don’t think we Americans in 2006 could predict where the country would be in 2015, less than a decade later. Heck, I don’t think that in January 2016 we could predict where we would be in November 2016. Much is in flux.
You are right that we won’t see a return to medieval Christendom. But that’s not the only alternative to liberalism. And I worry that we’ve lost healthy classical liberalism anyway, that that option is no longer attainable.
(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)
I am emphatically not a mod. But, as a nontweeter myself, I’d like to suggest providing both Twitter and Nitter links for tweets. Using just a Nitter link is iffy because Nitter can struggle whenever Twitter changes something.
There is an option in the Motte account settings to rewrite twitter dot com links to nitter dot net links, but it was inherited as part of the codebase and not updated for x dot com. Every once in a while I think I should put in a feature request to update it, then I think I should submit a patch like a decent person, then I realize I don’t have an environment to test the patch in and I let the matter drop.
So, @ZorbaTHut, please consider this a low-priority feature request: It would be nice to have a Twitter domain option that works like the Reddit domain option, rewriting Twitter/X/Nitter/XCancel links into the user’s choice of X, Nitter, or XCancel links. If that’s too fiddly, tweaking the existing Nitter option to rewrite the new Twitter domain as well as the old one would give 90% of the benefit for 10% of the effort.
(Edit: Wow, autolinking domains did a number on the formatting of this post. Please excuse my weird typographic choices to make it more readable.)
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Is there a reason it's committing to vote with the board rather than abstain from voting?
Hieronymus
2mo ago
((There's also some messiness involving Intel ARC, which is both strategically very important to the Western world's military, not obvious, and which has an entertainment business case that it's only barely starting to credibly begin to compete with kinda, but is a short investment away from being a really big deal.))
This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?
Certainly the whole computer gaming world has been begging Intel not to kill off Arc before it's reached maturity. Everybody expected it to lose money for the first couple generations, but Intel has been incredibly strapped for cash, so it wouldn't be a shock to see it sacrifice long-term interests for short-term ones.
The current CEO and board have been abandoning new development processes since December of last year.
This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.
Maybe that's what a government stake in Intel is supposed to resolve?
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Society doesn't seem to have the right model for it. "Oh, he's an abusive husband because he yells and throws things, he's using his emotions to control you." I don't think it was that calculated….
I 110% respect your insight here. Modern society is quick to lump unlike things together and label them all abuse.
… (and for the record, he never laid a hand on me).
Given the circumstances, I would encourage you to explicitly communicate your respect for this and to thank him if you haven’t already. I bet it will mean more to him than you think.
I agree with the comments below that older boys and men can rarely give unfiltered expressions of emotion, particularly anger and particularly to women, without their being misconstrued. Often swallowing one’s emotions is the right answer. The teen years are the right time to learn this, but if your son is on the autism spectrum he’s going to have trouble.
I would try to get his dad’s input if you can, even – perhaps particularly – given his dad’s struggles. You might also consider asking a male teacher for his perspective; if he has a male teacher who hasn’t called you I would consider him first.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Aspects of Encanto are great, but central plot elements are treated in a very unsatisfying way.
The magic of the setting appears in several different guises: Roman Catholic folk miracles, brujería, Disney princess magic; but it doesn't behave consistently with any of them, doing instead whatever the writers thought was dramatically appropriate at the moment. The movie collapses the object and meta levels of its major symbol in an unprincipled way that feels like a cop out. And even once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?
Great animation, good songs, exasperating writing.
The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.
Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.
If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.
I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.
People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I was just watching this review of the Framework desktop based on that chip earlier today. If you need more RAM and memory bandwidth than you do compute, it seems neat.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
enemy areas
This is, on one level, my actual impression of many places. I live in a blue state, so casual pride flags happen. But once you get above a certain threshold of rainbow density in a nominally public place, it’s clear that there’s a dynamic of deliberate hostility to those of us with other convictions.
Still, I’d not open with that phrase on the Motte. Mistake theory is not altogether dead here, the way it usually is there.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Yeah, I feel like epistemic uncertainty is still the right state. Some percentage of those accidental discharges will be negligent, but whether it’s 5% or 99% – who knows? And Sig’s P.R. team has not exactly earned a lot of trust here, either.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I saw folks on Twitter complaining that, on medical questions, the new model continues to emphatically repeat the most likely answer according to the current consensus, while the old one was more willing to thoroughly explore the possibility space. Seems related.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.
Someone once described the first two groups as people “who worship Satan by pretending to worship Satan.” As an assessment it depends on Satan’s existence, but if you accept that it describes the situation well. It’s still worth distinguishing them from those who deliberately and unironically worship Satan, of course.
Remember that the standard for right-wing support in the 2016 general election was “better than Hillary Clinton.” I don’t think that anyone really expected to control him. He was occasionally analogized to Cyrus, king of Persia, who freed the Jews from exile – a pagan whose actions benefit the people of God, whether from benevolence or from reasons of his own.
In the gospels, Christ is not nearly so understated as this implies. But, in any case, Christians in general and evangelicals in particular do quite a lot of charity. We mostly don’t do it for influence, which is good because we do not win much influence from it.
Many people are in social circles or media bubbles where they get told over and over again that socially conservative takes are acts of hatred. My personal experience is that high decouplers who know you well can sometimes overcome this to see that you are coming from a place of love. But low decouplers struggle with this; if they live in one of those bubbles, they will most often reject their past experience of your love in order to conform to the social norm that regards people like you as haters. This has been a source of frustration and sadness for me.
That applies to politics as well. We don’t support socially conservative policies because we want you to eat your Brussels sprouts or whatever; we support them because they are conducive to human flourishing. Gender transitioning children is a sin, yes; but it’s also profoundly bad for the children, and we should reject it for that reason. That is in fact a politics of love.
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