You say Liturgy, I say Lechery
October 11, 2006
Here is some noteworthy flotsam. Maggie Gallagher rebukes Rod Dreher and his crunchy legions for being big fakers:
We have lots of choices in our society but we don’t have the choice to be genuinely traditional, as far as I can see, and nothing in your book suggests otherwise. Yes, the absence of traditional bases for identity creates a genuine hunger. If you want to try to satisfy that hunger by “attaching” to a tradition, I have no objections. I really don’t. I just can’t look at that process and see that its will achieve what you claim for it. Its not being traditional, its choosing tradition as the best of all available consumer goods. You make that choice, other people make other choices. God bless, I hope it works for you. … I personally think the benefits of the modern condition seriously outweigh its liabilities (and so there we may differ). But don’t imagine you are recreating a traditional world. It’s not true. You are creating a personal world.Not directly related, here is Damon Linker of Theocon infamy blugeoning Ross Douthat with the necessity of the “liberal bargain”:
Is my opposition to theoconservative ideology not better understood as opposition to orthodox Catholicism? Can you and Neuhaus, as Catholics, be good citizens of a liberal polity like the United States? My answer is simple: Of course you can–on one condition. Like every other citizen, you must be willing to accept what I call “the liberal bargain.” In my book, I describe this bargain as the act of believers giving up their “ambition to political rule in the name of their faith” in exchange for the freedom to worship God however they wish, without state interference. What does this mean, in practical terms? It means that your belief in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches is irrelevant, politically speaking. It simply shouldn’t matter whether or not you think that justice has a divine underpinning, anymore than it should matter whether you prefer Jane Austen to Dostoevsky. In a word, liberal politics presumes that it’s possible and desirable for political life to be decoupled from theological questions and disputes.In other words, the liberal bargain requires that we all forsake the notion of tradition as a living, authoritative matrix for life. Good liberal citizens must accept a bastardized version of tradition as a consumer product chosen to aleviate certain “itches” that are understood in an entirely materialistic and personalist way. Liturgy for you, lechery for me, it makes no difference.
In this sense, Gallagher is the perfect pin-up girl for Linker’s vision of America, even though he would likely describe her as one of the theocon boogeymen. What a fraud this entire discussion is!
The bottom line is this: both Linker and Gallagher are utter ninnies. They would be completely worthless in any real political fight. Well, that is not entirely true. They are effective enough noisemakers to provide distracting cover for the real political actors. Which is to say that both, in their way, are dupes and stooges for the prevailing political consensus of middling liberalism.
If there is any valid critique of Dreher’s “crunchy cons,” surely it is their predilection to easy distraction. They, by and large, still want to be nice. Where are the crunchy bare knucklers, or better yet, brass knucklers? Where are the stem-winders and latter-day Elijahs set to call down fire upon the prophets of the liberal order? Where are the anarchists and wild-eyed populists infused with righteous rage who will say not just “no” but “Hell No!” to the Linker/Gallagher bargain?
I see the sage of New Mexico is making a good start. He says again what I have been saying for some time now:
As Ross knows, American Christians are perfectly content with the liberal order (though they will object to a thousand and one policies or legal rulings within that order), because it is the only kind they have ever known and indeed the more intensely Christian Americans are the more they (typically) invest the American system of government and political culture with quasi-religious significance. Actual anti-liberal Christians are as rare as gold in this country, not least because so many Christians have persuaded themselves that America is a “Christian country,” and not just in a historical-cultural sense, which causes them to intellectually bend themselves into pretzels to demonstrate the religious origins of the Union. The “Christian country” spiel is just the “proposition nation” claim for people who go to church, and is just about as substantial, but it is very effective in keeping people on board with the project. American Christians have seen Christianity excluded from the public square more and more each decade, and have mustered by and large limited resistance to this trend. Who now fights for prayer in school–not a minute of silence, not “one nation under God” hokum, but actual prayer? To ask the question is to acknowledge the extent of the defeat. In fact, you would be fairly hard-pressed to find a religious conservative today who would lament this development in print. Unlike Christians in fights with liberalism in Europe–which the liberals tended to lose in the early decades when they provoked the Christians about vital issues pertaining to education or social policy–American Christians are locked into some form of liberalism and, through the work of theocons, have developed an entire argument for why they are basically not only in harmony with this liberalism but are the essential protectors of it. They cannot mount an effective counterattack on the ravages of secularism, because they are so committed to the procedural rules of the game to which they constantly appeal in arguments with secularists, while the secularists have no scruples about altering the political and legal landscape through ever-more outrageous and preposterous readings of the law. Each time they change the rules, religious conservatives cry foul but then set about convincing themselves that they must abide by the new rules. If this is the backlash against secularism and liberalism, I would hate to see what accommodation looks like. More to the point, if this is what has resulted from half a century of galloping secularism, the secularists have nothing to fear from any more serious backlash in the future. Seen this way, the theocons are certainly not laying siege to secular America, which appears here as an entirely ludicrous claim, but might as well be opening the gates to the secularists with their half-hearted, “We’re Christians, but we love liberalism!” defense.
This is You say Liturgy, I say Lechery in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Stegall Against Walmart and Cheap Soup | Next: A Jape In Wolfe’s Clothing? |