Everybody's So Ferocious
A Meandering thought about Getting a Cold, David French, Modern Love, And a Lot of Bellyaching
Super sorry not to have written anything over the last three days. I succumbed to Matt’s cold (which he doesn’t even have anymore) and also—in a haze of congestion and mental fog—hammered out parts of a long draft about David French for CRJ. I’m hoping to have it polished up by the end of the week, along with all the stuff I didn’t do while lying flat in bed contemplating my inevitable demise. I don’t get sick very often, so when I do, I always assume the worst. If I survive, my first act of gratitude will be a Read the Comments.
Part of writing about Mr. French meant re-upping my New York Times subscription for a hot minute, which meant coming across many other strange items besides Mr. French’s explanation for why “fundamentalists” love Donald Trump—more on that in a minute.
The first is this strange box-checking phenomenon. I didn’t mean to, I swear, but I have clicked two hundred boxes. Please join in the fray, if only to make me feel better.
Then I read this heart-rending thing:
She had planted the seed seven years into our marriage as I was finishing seminary. At the time, I was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as “worship pastor bro.” My Christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. I could begin to imagine a life without God, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, I struggled to imagine a career without Him. By contrast, Corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful. One night, seven years into our marriage, she said, “Do you ever wish we had slept around a bunch in college before getting married?” Corrie was a fiery social worker whose face could never hide what she felt — annoyance, attraction, embarrassment. Behind this question was an expression of excitement.
It being the modern love section of America’s paper of record, and the writer being a good person, even though he “wanted to be enough for her,” he “didn’t want to be an object of regret or a gatekeeper to her happiness.” Not to be pedantic, but isn’t “gatekeeping” one of the chief ends of marriage? Isn’t being “enough” kind of the point?
Anyway, he began to see other women. And, because writers in the NY Times at least have to be brilliant at the craft, the next part is intolerably moving:
My reintroduction to dating was a disaster. I spent the moments before my first date dry heaving in an alley behind the restaurant. Months later, in another woman’s bed for the first time, I was unable to become aroused. And I felt even more uncomfortable watching Corrie date. I knew she wouldn’t leave me for someone else, but I felt utterly debilitated, something bigger than jealousy. Among the stack of books about non-monogamy and polyamory that now sat on my night stand, I learned the term “primal panic,” a destabilizing jolt to one’s nervous system coming from the potential abandonment of an attachment figure. I didn’t like to think of myself having a childlike attachment to my wife, but I had spent too much time sobbing in the shower not to see that simple truth. We were children when we first got together. It wasn’t just that neither of us had dated or slept around before getting married. We also had never been dumped, been single in our 20s, or lived alone. Corrie was now finding an identity that transcended our relationship. I had no idea who I was outside of us.
Eventually, the writer found a woman who was attracted to him, who also loved him, and so he got divorced and married her, though his former wife remained a good friend. I know I wouldn’t go overboard with “peak 2024” but I feel like it keeps happening. He concludes the piece this way:
Our lives together require an expansive view of love. Although I have stopped being non-monogamous, I have also stopped depending on romantic love for a sense of identity. For that, I’m grateful for polyamory.
I love how “expansive” actually means desolation, trauma, and sin. Anyway, last week I came upon a tweet that said, and I quote:
do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam
This must be the Tweet version of Get Off My Lawn. For an ordinary man, even a deconstructing one, to have to go through the insanity of being grateful for the fresh hell of polyamory adultery, I feel like, bear with me here, maybe we have lost the thread. And this is before this interesting and kind person staked her all on a person who turned out to be a blankity blank ass.
Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of columns from Mr. French, and he is not excited about how many Christian people have gotten on the Trump Wagon. In his piece on Fundamentalists, he said this:
After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.
His intuitive data was backed up by actual data from Ryan Burge, whose statistical analysis is virtually unassailable. Except that, I dunno, I’m technically a homeschooler, amongst many homeschoolers—indeed, my church is overridden with them—and you could not, in a million thousand years, call anyone “militant” about anything except for…well…our local troubles don’t deserve the scrutiny of the world. Maybe it’s just our “context,” but “militantly pro-Trump” is literally not a thing. So, perhaps Mr. French is not thinking of us. Let’s just see, though:
How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.
I pulled this quote and this article because I’m almost stick a fork in it done. I’m living in an endless Dead Parrot sketch. How could such a clever man miss such a massive amount of data? Shall I explain it again? Only more loudly, and slower, for the unintelligent people at the back?
Erstwhile and beleaguered Conservatives who couldn’t ever have imagined voting for Trump in 2016 did consider him in 2020, even though he was a boob and a knave because he was the first American President who threw Conservatives a bone since Theodore Roosevelt.
It’s not rocket surgery. People who were staunchly pro-life finally gave up and noticed that every single Republican candidate, no matter the office, didn’t give the merest inclination of actually being pro-life once they gained office, except the non-conservative non-republican with the hair and the three wives and the allegation of the liaison with the porn-star. “Embarrassment” doesn’t even begin to be the full lived experience of “conservatives” in the “modern” age.
Lived experience is all that matters anymore, so let me just go on the record and say that I got a BA from Cornell University in 1999. I went there because, well, it’s complicated. I transferred. I was in love with a boy— a really nice person who was extremely intelligent. That nice young person was studying something real—something in the sciences. I wasn’t quite so bright, though as a transfer student who wasn’t completely dumb, I got in and signed up for a lot of classes that have proven to be prescient—critical theory, the life and times of Judith Butler, everything Gay, how to deconstruct everything and yet sound intelligent instead of moronic.
David French also went to Cornell. Only not to the stupid part—like me—but to the Law School. And yet, none of us ever progress past our childhood:
I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
So here we are. It’s 2024. An actual Christian is using the word “ferocity” as if we haven’t had to endure Untamed and Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire. Am I being gaslighted? I know—KNOW—it is the unhinged theologically vapid deconstructor who is using the ferocity trope. Maybe the most knowelgabel man in Conservative politics just isn’t up on Jen and Glennon?
Anyway, here we are, up on another Election. It’s back, don’t you know it, to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. As usual, neither of them are pro-life. It’s almost like we’re caught in that wretched play—"L'enfer, c'est les autres."
I don’t want to be a “fundamentalist.” But I do know a certain number of things with absolute certainty. A man whose wife abandons him because she feels attracted to other women is actually wicked. A man who cajoles a woman into marrying him, against her religious principles, has two sons with her, and then abandons her is completely wicked. People who are committed to the Law, the law that revives the soul, rejoices the heart, gives wisdom to the simple are not the problem here.
The great irony is that Mr. French is certain, ferocious, and solidaire—to employ the French version—with people who would never give me the time of day. Which is to say, I am probably the fundamentalist. And if that is how the chips are falling where they may, So Be It. I have a cold
"Eventually, the writer found a woman who was attracted to him, who also loved him, and so he got divorced and married her, though his former wife remained a good friend."
Cindy and I have long puzzled over couples who split up and can remain good friends. We have taken vows to each other that if we ever split up, we shall become mortal enemies. Yet another reason to stay together. Yay!!
Your quote about why people voted for Trump in 2020 is spot on. It truly isn’t rocket science. I’m not happy about it, but that’s how and why I voted.
Re: the polyamory- thank you for calling it what it is- sin, wicked, destructive, tragic.
What I don’t get is the common theme of the symptoms (dry heaving, sobbing, anxiety, etc) continually ignored. I’ve read similar accounts from multiple people. It is as if body, soul, and spirit are providing every opportunity to stop, turn, and go back to a life giving way. God truly designed us for life.
Basically, all that’s left is for a donkey to come along and state “you’re headed for destruction, pal. Stop it!”
Its heart wrenching to watch hearts become calloused. Excellent article.