On Politics and Joylessness
Also, a new pantry pasta recipe
Hi friends,
Every time I carved out time to work on this post, it seemed another project would fall into my lap. I wrote for The Washington Post on Trump’s visit to McLean Bible Church. I wrote for The New York Times’ Sunday Review on Democrats and abortion politics. Also, just published at Tributaries this week, I did a written interview on my Catapult essay and Lydia Kiesling’s essay “A Mother’s Clock.” I’ve been wanting to share about Lydia’s incredible writing in a more formal way for a while, and I’m glad I was able to do so here.
But here we are now, and there is no time like the present. There are a few big news items I want to discuss, and I’ll also share a recipe, some music and who knows what else.
-Michael
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Fear, Joy and American Evangelicals
There is a much longer essay (book?) to be written about the mainstreaming of criticism of evangelicals, but it is a reality of our public life right now. This criticism comes not only from those who are not evangelicals, but from those who are evangelical themselves. It comes not only from the left, but from the right—theologically and politically. Much of the criticism is based on what I consider to be an over-reliance on the political activity of those evangelicals that are politically active, but of course this is pretty small caveat compared to the extent to which so many evangelicals themselves seem to believe their politics has nothing to do with their faith or character (not to mention, it seems, the faith or character of the current president).
There has been one diagnosis of evangelicals’, primarily white evangelicals, sickness, that both cuts deep while also seeming to lack personal animus: they have succumbed to fear.
I have written this critique. David French recently argued this for Time. Pete Wehner has hit the note as well. It’s almost conventional wisdom, and probably would be if there were more people who cared enough to think about evangelicals in more than the most instrumental, practical kind of way. Even so, it’s been quite something to see non-evangelical journalists, politicians and others come to this kind of critique as well. It is now commonplace to see non-evangelical journalists, politicians and others question the faith commitment of evangelicals. Dallas Willard once observed that the world likes to beat Christians with their own stick. That this kind of critique is so often correct is a shame, of course, but it also says something that it is the Christian standard Christianity’s critics choose to apply. This holds today. The principal charge against evangelical supporters of Trump is hypocrisy. I see quite regularly on my Twitter timeline non-Christians telling Christians that if they really believe in Jesus, they wouldn’t be acting so poorly. For Christians who are evangelistically-minded, it would seem we should be attentive to this trend as it offers a potential opening for the sharing of the gospel. But, who’s evangelistically-minded these days, amirite!?
Back to the critique of evangelicals…
I’ve become convinced that while the fear critique has merit, it’s not the deepest story of what is going on among the kinds of evangelicals we’re talking about when we talk about “the evangelicals” in political discourse: culture warring, Trump-voting with no inhibitions, scared of America’s future, etc. Fear cannot be at the foundational level of what is going on here as it is neither a de facto sin, nor is it reflected in the Fruit of the Spirit.
(Note: Do not forget that running right alongside the stream of evangelicalism that is prone to fear-based political engagement is another stream that is prone to aloof quietism. This latter set is not the subject of this post, but I’ll quickly say there that the issue is more a lack of love and neighborliness, which also needs to be addressed.)
The fundamental issue here is not fear, but joylessness. It is joylessness that is a sin, and it is joylessness that is at the root of much of what is wrong with American evangelicalism (and, I’d add, in different ways, for many other streams of the American church that should not think that because evangelicalism is under fire now that the implication is that they are just crushing it).
I do not mean here that American evangelicals do not smile enough. I do not mean that they are not “happy-clappy” enough. We have such an impoverished view of joy, of Christian joy, that we must clear out in order to see that it is lacking.
Dallas Willard defined joy as a “pervasive, constant sense of well-being.” Christians are people of joy not because we are ignorant of reasons to mourn, or unable to deal with reality as it is. Rather, Christians are people of joy because of what is most real. The twenty-third psalm is one of Christian joy. Few lines of scripture convey Christian joy better than “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”
As I was thinking and writing about this, John Starke, a friend and pastor in New York, tweeted this:
He later called it a “dad joke,” but I, king of dad jokes even before I was a dad, think it’s right on the money. A Psalm 23 Christianity is deeply inconvenient to President Trump’s politics of chaos, burden-placing and embattlement. We have never had a president who placed as much emotional stress on the American people as Donald Trump does today. We have a politics right now that depends on placing emotional stress on voters, and hoping to use that stress to direct voters in some desired political direction. In the case of Trump, he lacks even a coherent ideology or policy vision as an end goal within politics. His end is himself.
What pastors and all Christians must understand—and I think many of them do—is that our politics right now is not just cultivating fear of political loss, but a joylessness that is saturating more and more of our common life together and the human spirit. As politics encroaches on more and more of our public and personal lives, citizens invest more of their hope in politics, which then opens the door for politics to take more and more of us.
This is a problem, first and foremost, of discipleship and formation. This is about the kind of people we are and the kind of people we are becoming. People cannot be simply told not to fear, but who to trust and where to find their security. People cannot be simply told not to give in to identity politics, but where to find their identity. The answer to our political crisis will come from addressing no less than that.
Serwer and the Ahmari/French Debate
Adam Serwer has written three essential essays since his essay on the Ahmari/French debate (the man is on a roll) that we’ve covered here at this newsletter, but it’s the one I want to discuss now.
I admire writers who take the “other side” seriously enough to jump into their arguments. I think this is critical to a healthy democracy, and Serwer does it here. See his explanation of what sets the backdrop for the religious conservative split:
Many religious conservatives see antidiscrimination laws that compel owners of public accommodations to serve all customers, laws that might compel priests to break the seal of confession if they are told of child abuse, and the growing acceptance of trans people as a kind of impending apocalypse. It is no surprise that among their co-partisans, Ahmari seems to have the upper hand here; in such circles, “Crush your enemies” almost always plays better than “The other side has rights too.”
The concerns Ahmari airs are not wholly without merit: Religious conservatives are not paranoid to imagine themselves pariahs someday in the future because of their views; it was not so long ago that liberal champions such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton held public positions that today would be described by the left as bigotry. Nor should the left expect to win every battle with the right over matters of religious conscience; there will be moments when its opponents are correct. The same wall between Church and state that prevents the state from being dominated by the Church also bars the state from dictating the religious commitments of the Church. A law that compels Catholic priests to break the seal of confession, for example, likely runs afoul of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, despite the state’s obvious and compelling interest in preventing child abuse, and despite the Church’s abysmal record in doing so.
This is a clear, though certainly not totalizing, description of the kinds of concerns shared among social conservatives. Serwer even goes so far as to draw a line, somewhere. He chooses laws compelling priests to “break the seal of confession,” which is not the most hot-ticket item, but it’s still noteworthy. I have called for Democratic politicians to draw lines wherever they can, to give social conservatives some backstop that could limit the effects of Trumpian appeals…not many have taken up that responsibility so far, so I appreciate Serwer doing so here.
Serwer continues to describe what this current context leads those like Ahmari to tolerate:
This understanding also helps illuminate the right’s eruption over YouTube’s decision to demonetize (but not remove) the channel of Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber who called the Vox reporter Carlos Maza a “lispy queer,” among other slurs. A world in which one can refer to gay people as “lispy queers” without repercussion is one in which the illiberal right is winning the culture war, so it matters little that YouTube is no less a private business than Masterpiece Cakeshop, and has a right to define the rules for using its platform. The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour. The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle, and that requires destigmatizing anew the kind of bigotry that was once powerful enough to sway elections.
Indeed, the illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed, a man whose major legislative accomplishment is slashing taxes on the wealthy, and whose most significant contribution to the institution of the family is destroying thousands of them on purpose. It is power that is the motivator here, and the best that could be said for these American Orbánists is that they believe that asserting an iron grip on American politics and culture would offer the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Every authoritarian movement has felt the same way.
There has been criticism of Serwer for amplifying the Crowder controversy, as it wasn’t too big of a deal, but I think the more significant point Serwer’s aiming at here is that the very tactics aimed at placing certain points of view as outside of the mainstream which rightly concern social conservatives now, were tactics wielded without mercy (as Serwer notes) by the Religious Right when they had greater cultural and political power and demographic representation. Yes, the Crowder thing wasn’t an earth-shattering controversy, but the Crowder thing was basically every week in the 90s. James Dobson was always boycotting this or that company. Political-religious leaders were often using their power to declare what was “extreme.” There is an argument to make that some things should be off-limits and stigmatized, and power ought to be deployed to make it so, but if you’re going to take that argument you forego the ability to critique others for using the same kinds of tactics against you and those who share your views.
Serwer goes on to engage a Douthat column on the whole debate, and Ross replied on Twitter. Here’s the beginning of Ross’ reply where he screenshots the relevant section of Serwer’s essay, and it’s worth reading:
I think Ross makes some good points in response to Serwer’s powerful argument.
Here’s the main question I’ve been considering concerning this whole debate, and particularly Serwer’s essay: does the left have any desire, and if so, a plan, to support David French’s side of this argument? Moreover, is the left committed to liberalism should French’s politics, on say, religious freedom, win out in key areas through the political process? How can this commitment be shown, and to what extent do those who need to show it even see the constituency that desires to be appealed to by the left/Democrats in this way?
In his essay, Serwer basically considers the political options and choices facing a stringent Religious Right, that definitely exists, but does not represent the policy preferences of all social conservatives:
The rapidity of that cultural shift, though, should not obscure the contours of the society that the religious right still aspires to preserve: a world where women have no control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, same-sex marriage is illegal, and gays and lesbians can be arrested and incarcerated for having sex in their own homes and be barred from raising children. The religious right showed no mercy and no charity toward these groups when it had the power to impose its will, but when it lost that power, it turned to invoking the importance of religious tolerance and pluralism in a democratic society.
The left must decide, of course, whether it wants to turn the same tools against the Religious Right. Ahmari is convinced they will do so, and that this has already begun. French believes some will try, but our system gives his side a fighting chance. What hangs over all of this is a lack of understanding of what various centers of power on the left want. What is their vision for religious conservatives in this country? Not just the kind Serwer outlines above, but those who believe that abortion rights should be restricted, but not obliterated; that same-sex marriage should remain legal, but that it should not dictate entirely how local communities organize themselves, nor be used to squeeze religious people and institutions who disagree out of public life. How much should those people demand to be seen and recognized?
One problem Donald Trump’s election has created is that it has taught many of us that we cannot afford to discount extremism in favor of focusing on more moderate voices in any given political coalition. We are all wary of making concessions to our political opponents, because of who they count as allies. I often argue for a stronger consideration of those voters and ideas that are between the poles of our political debates, and one reaction to Serwer’s essay is that there’s a part of me that wishes he had considered those “between the poles” more himself. But there is a tug on my conscience as I make that argument. Moderates have a serious ethical dilemma on their hands because of how polarized our politics has become. Is there really any feasible pathway for our “reasonable” ideas and our “compromise positions” to attain power in this environment? Or is our ultimate role in making a political coalition bent on uncompromising, extreme ideas just broad enough to win?
What is the value of our moderate views, if they only end up enabling extremism?
Note: My book, Reclaiming Hope, is in part an attempt to help Democrats and the left understand the rational, substantive concerns of religious conservatives that helped make Trump possible. I think it’s still relevant when it comes to this discussion.
Planned Parenthood Fires Its CEO
In The New York Times last week, Dr. Leana Wen wrote an op-ed to explain why she left Planned Parenthood.
In my farewell message to colleagues, I cited philosophical differences over the best way to protect reproductive health. While the traditional approach has been through prioritizing advocating for abortion rights, I have long believed that the most effective way to advance reproductive health is to be clear that it is not a political issue but a health care one. I believed we could expand support for Planned Parenthood — and ultimately for abortion access — by finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who can unite behind the goal of improving the health and well-being of women and children.
Wen writes that she viewed Planned Parenthood as, first and foremost, a health care organization and wanted to run it as such, emphasizing a full-slate of reproductive health care services. She also wanted to “depoliticize” Planned Parenthood:
I had been leading our organization’s fights against these attacks, and believe they offer even more reason for Planned Parenthood to emphasize its role in providing essential health care to millions of underserved women and families. People depend on Planned Parenthood for breast exams, cervical cancer screenings, H.I.V. testing and family planning. To counter those who associate the organization with only abortion and use this misconception to attack its mission, I wanted to tell the story of all of its services — and in so doing, to normalize abortion care as the health care it is.
I was struck that her op-ed seemed to echo calls I had made in my essay for the Times just days earlier. Like here:
But the team that I brought in, experts in public health and health policy, faced daily internal opposition from those who saw my goals as mission creep. There was even more criticism as we worked to change the perception that Planned Parenthood was just a progressive political entity and show that it was first and foremost a mainstream health care organization.
Perhaps the greatest area of tension was over our work to be inclusive of those with nuanced views about abortion. I reached out to people who wrestle with abortion’s moral complexities, but who will speak out against government interference in personal medical decisions. I engaged those who identify as being pro-life, but who support safe, legal abortion access because they don’t want women to die from back-alley abortions. I even worked with people who oppose abortion but support Planned Parenthood because of the preventive services we provide — we share the desire to reduce the need for abortion through sex education and birth control.
Dr. Wen’s leadership was an attempt to correct course not of Cecile Richards’ entire reign, but of Richards’ last four or five years. Planned Parenthood was not always such a looming political entity. Planned Parenthood did do outreach and inclusive work in the past. I remember when I was in The White House, we talked quite a bit about The Cradle in Illinois, an adoption agency that basically co-locates with a Planned Parenthood to facilitate adoption for mothers who want to pursue that route. We obviously worked with Planned Parenthood during the multi-year effort to find common ground on abortion during President Obama’s first-term.
It has only been over the last four or five years that Planned Parenthood has sought to dominate Democratic politics, and use its power to squeeze out dissent. Some associated with the organization would claim that this political turn was a response to Republican attacks, but Wen offered an alternative: deescalation. The problem with deescalation, however, is that it’s hard to raise money off of it. If you punch back, if you take a more aggressive posture, you can raise a ton of money off of that. And it seems necessary! See Lily Adams, daughter of Cecile Richards and communications director for Senator Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign:
What Lily and others on the pro-choice side who take this position have to contend with is that their strategy has not worked very well. Politics might be a necessity, yes, but what if your mode of politics is actually counter-productive? This seems to be what Wen thought, and she has a case to make. She came to Planned Parenthood just as Justice Brett Kavanaugh was getting the go-ahead to take his seat on the Supreme Court. She came in just as Republicans had locked in control of the Senate for a full decade, after Planned Parenthood touted candidates lost in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin and other winnable states.
Well, Wen is out, and an advocate, Alexis McGill Johnson, is now in as interim CEO. We’ll see if a politically-aggressive, abortion-first organization is a political winner in this environment.
House Republicans Embrace Trump’s Politics
In terms of the culture of our politics, this is an article everyone must read. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Republican House’s campaign arm was employing Trump’s tactics of name-calling and insults on behalf of their 2020 candidates.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, with the blessing of House Republican leaders, has adopted a no-holds-barred strategy to win back the House majority next year, borrowing heavily from President Trump’s playbook in deploying such taunts and name-calling. After losing 40 seats and the House majority in November, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the committee’s new chairman, and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, decided that their messaging needed to be ruthless.
The offensive hinges largely on the relatively facile notion that by tagging all House Democrats as socialists, anti-Semites or far-left extremists, Republicans will be able to alienate swing-state voters. On Tuesday night, after the House voted to condemn as racist President Trump’s attacks on four congresswoman, the campaign arm’s communications team deluged reporters’ inboxes with message after message calling vulnerable Democratic lawmakers “deranged.”
This is why it is not just about Trump, and why after Trump is gone we’ll still have to deal with the damage he’s done—not just policy-wise, but the damage he’s caused to the culture of our politics.
Shame on anyone who views Trump as someone to emulate. Shame on these political professionals who are willing to cause even more psychological, emotional and spiritual harm for the purposes of an election cycle. We must continue to push back against this destructive politics no matter where we find it.
Recipes, Music and Other Worthwhile Things
OK, this has been a heavy post. Let’s move on to other serious, but more fun, topics.
First, check out these birds. The 2019 Audubon Photography Awards.
Here’s one of the birds
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Last week, Melissa wanted some pasta and it was the week of our anniversary so I couldn’t just make her any pasta. Full disclosure: I rarely feel I can make her just any pasta, anniversary or not.
So I went into the refrigerator and saw that I still had a red onion left over from making panzanella earlier in the week, and I still had bacon from earlier in the week. I saw the beginnings of a kind of Amatriciana. I turned on the oven to about 400 degrees and took out my box grater. I had a quarter of a loaf of two-day old bread left over from the, you guessed it, panzanella, and I grated it using the side with the largest holes. I placed the breadcrumbs in a baking sheet, and layered over the breadcrumbs four slices of bacon. Popped it into the oven.
I threw a large pot of heavily salted water onto the stove and took out a saute pan and set it over medium-high heat with some very good EVOO. It was late, and I’ve grown to view chopping garlic as a nuisance, but fortunately I had a bag of garlic and peperoncino flakes from Italy that I sprinkled into the now hot EVOO. I threw whole wheat spaghetti into pot of boiling water. The saute pan now sizzling, and I put sliced red onions into the pan. Added salt. I crushed 3-4 San Marzano tomatoes by hand, and threw those bad boys in along with some of the puree from the can. A bit more salt. The sauce thickened.
I removed the bacon and the now-bacon fat crisped breadcrumbs from the oven. I chopped the bacon, leaving the breadcrumb crust that had formed around some bits. I removed the pasta with tongs and placed it into the saute pan, allowing a bit of the water to drip into the pan along with it. I ran outside to grab some basil. Ran back inside and the sauce had thickened around the strands of spaghetti. I took the pan off the burner, and toppled the bacon and breadcrumbs into it. I mixed it all up carefully, sprinkling in the basil halfway through. If I had pecorino, I would have put in some grated pecorino, but it didn’t really need it. It just needed a final drizzle of EVOO.
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Finally, try not to weep, laugh, shout and otherwise lose control of your body watching this