7 Takes to the End of the World
A Huge Thank You, the End of Literacy, the Great Apostasy, Ignoring Unbelievers, Episcopalians Try to Get Out the Vote, A Cool Conference, and Tucker Discovers Aldi
Can someone write a hymn of Thanksgiving for me getting all the way to the end of the week and to FriYay? In Morning Prayer, we had to say Manasseh’s song of penitence in between the Old and New Testament readings, and it was too bracing—not quite the tone of triumph I was longing for. Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve done a jumble post, which means that I have all kinds of thoughts and articles backed up. This week, though, they all lean toward the hilarity of the dystopian apocalypse we’re living in. If you don’t laugh, you’ll probably cry, and it’s too early in Lent to do that.
One
Before all the depressing stuff, let me extend a huge, warm, delighted welcome to all you new subscribers of the last three weeks. Many of you found your way here through my post Alistair Begg and the Loving Thing, so many in a few days that I was quite bowled over. Indeed, I became backed up on everything, but most especially comment reading. A lot—both old-timers and newcomers—have commented on all kinds of posts in the intervening days. I am so grateful and am enjoying them slowly in batches when I get a minute of clear head space.
On the subject of comments, those on the Elizabeth Elliot post have been most insightful. I keep coming across well-reasoned thoughts about her. Both people who found her work crucial in their Christian formation and those who “had a hard time with her” as I’ve seen many people post.
I look forward to many more interesting posts about Elliot and Begg in the coming months. In the “reckoning” of evangelicalism going apace, I hope there will be heaps of thoughtful and provocative content that—this is part where I shudder with a twinge of apprehension—is demonstrably Christian in perspective.
Two
Content that is nothing like this horrible article. Someone named Sarah Jones in the New York Intelligencer is railing against someone named John Fea for trying to defend James Dobson in the Atlantic. The piece is full of lines like this:
Though a parent should not crush a child’s will, they should shape it — and one way to do that, he argues, is through corporal punishment, or child abuse.
Of course, a person might try to make a biblical case against the use of corporal punishment—it would be hard, but go ahead and try—but if you read something like this, you should click away because it’s from an unbeliever. Corporal punishment, by itself, does not constitute child abuse. It can become abusive, when other factors are present, but carried out in a godly manner, it isn’t abusive. Indeed, every civilization that has ever survived has availed itself of this sanity-producing option for the rearing of children.
Lest you think I’m being too dismissive of Sarah Jones, she goes on to write this:
Beyond this, Dobson is an antifeminist and an influential purveyor of anti-LGBT bigotry…For decades he railed against same-sex marriage and taught, falsely, that LGBT people could change sexual orientations and that homosexuality is a psychological disorder. Boys might suffer from “prehomosexuality,” a condition that parents should recognize and root out, he wrote in Bringing Up Boys. Child abuse takes many forms.
This seems like a really good place to plunk this meme:
She’s also really mad that anyone dared criticize Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr:
He instead takes aim at historians Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr, who are Christians themselves, and their recent books, which contain nuanced, if critical, portrayals of Dobson. They have produced “woefully flat” works of Evangelical history because they allegedly “do not explain historically the story of my father and, I imagine, millions of other men and women who learned from Dobson how to love their families as Jesus loves his church,” he writes. (Du Mez has responded to Fea on her Substack, writing that her book, Jesus and John Wayne, is not a history of Evangelicalism but of “white evangelical masculinity & militarism,” and argues persuasively that Fea has mischaracterized her work.) Fea’s overarching argument — that Evangelicalism, like Dobson, has been flattened by its critics — works by omission. Context weakens it. If we are to believe, as Fea writes, that American Evangelicalism hasn’t completely earned all its negative coverage, we have to ignore much of what Evangelicals say, and do.
Um, I would just like to remind everyone, that in so far as KK du Mez, or any professing Christian really, has become affirming, we know that that person has formally departed the Christian faith, but I do love that line “who are Christians themselves.” How would Sarah Jones even know that? Just saying it doesn’t make it so.
Anyway, the end was so epic, I couldn’t bear to let it go by without a chuckle:
James Dobson may have wanted parents to love their families. He also taught them to abuse their children, and he inflicted serious damage on generations of Evangelical youth. Evangelicalism fares little better under scrutiny. It’s easy to blame journalists — even other historians — for “overemphasizing the negative,” as Fea puts it. “Let’s tell the whole story,” he writes. The truth can be difficult to accept: Perhaps Evangelicalism has earned that negative coverage. The occasional act of mercy or justice has not been enough to save the tradition from itself. That is the whole story.
See guys! It’s over and done! Give up and go home. There’s no point even trying.
Three
While Sarah Jones is over there freaking out that some Christians are still Christian, Adam Kotsko over at Slate is saying more of the quiet part out loud—the Apocalypse is just around the corner. He writes this:
I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
This should completely appall anyone who is interested in the world not descending into total mayhem. And yet, the people in charge of educating children seem only to be making things worse, not better. Kotsko goes on to enumerate the reasons why he thinks this is happening:
The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyone’s ability to focus—the ubiquitous smartphone.
Well yes, guilty along with everyone else. And then:
The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. The impact will inevitably continue to be felt for the next decade or more, until the last cohort affected by the mass “pivot to online” finally graduates.
My kids were already online when the pandemic hit, taking university-style classes at a classical school that is well-known to most homeschoolers. They suffered not at all, academically, except that when my oldest child was ready to go to college, she didn’t see a teacher’s full face without a mask for her first two years. She had a hard time hearing lectures in larger rooms. She felt alienated and has had trouble getting to know people. It’s better now, and she’s much more confident, but she constantly second-guesses herself because of how basic communication was altered for those long months.
Anyway, the third cause is something he calls “vibes-based literacy.”
I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.
And then, finally, Common Core “standards:”
Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding.
It’s pretty amazing when a publication like Slate is willing to notice this. He thinks, and I agree with him, basic literacy is a matter of justice:
This is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice. I recognize that not everyone centers their lives on books as much as a humanities professor does. I think they’re missing out, but they’re adults and they can choose how to spend their time. What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choose—for no real reason or benefit. We can and must stop perpetrating this crime on our young people.
I don’t know about “can.” Of course we “must,” but I don’t think it’s possible to correct this at a national level. It’s so terrible when necessary institutions fail—terrible for everyone—but when something like the Department of Education is as wrecked and corrupt as it is, I don’t think you can fix it.
Four
A friend sent me this funny thing with the question, “Is this Christian Nationalism?” It’s from The Episcopal News Service about their get out the vote efforts:
Kim Hayes was part of the inaugural 2022 cohort of Episcopal Election Activators, a program launched by The Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations to encourage voter engagement during that year’s elections. Hayes, now 71, renewed her commitment to the program again for 2024 because she still feels a “sense of urgency” in this work, especially in a presidential election year. “It’s just really important for people to get out and vote and take responsibility for [electing] who is representing us,” Hayes, a member of the Diocese of Western North Carolina who lives near Asheville, told Episcopal News Service. She is one of 55 Episcopalians signed up so far with Episcopal Election Activators, and the Washington, D.C.-based Office of Government Relations is encouraging more to participate. As Election Activators, they receive training in voter registration and other engagement strategies while benefiting from the support of their peers in the network and the office’s staff.
Mmmm, I love the smell of “democracy” in the morning:
“As Episcopalians, I think we’re supposed to be the hands and feet in our community and our daily lives, so this is a way we can make a difference,” Hopkins said. “It empowers people.”
Member how a few minutes ago everyone was supposed to be “the hands and feet of Jesus?” Now we can just be “hands and feet in our community.” I’m sorry, what exactly is empowering to people? The act of voting? That’s adorable. This is my favorite part, though:
This year, she and other Election Activators will be working in their congregations and communities to counteract that lethargy, reminding people of the importance of making their voices heard through their votes.
You know it’s the end of the world when Episcopalians are lethargic about getting to the polls. If even they know it’s a total sham, what hope is there for the whole wretched “system?”
Five
For a little bit of a white pill, there is this super funny person:
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Also, this one is so instructive for understanding why it is literaleigh the apocalypse:
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You might remember how she was so easily almost turned into a Trad when a man was nice to her:
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Apparently, according to this article Matt just sent me,
a high percent of Millennial Christians (27 percent) and born-again Millennial Christians (28 percent) describe themselves as LGBTQ, even though many faith groups endorse only heterosexual marriage and are sometimes dismissed as homophobic by gay rights advocates.
While the large number of Millennials who identify as LGBTQ is attention-grabbing, Barna says what he found "really interesting is that 40 percent of them fall into the category of what we call the 'don'ts;' they don't believe that God exists, they don't care if God exists. That's the highest we have seen for any generation, ever."
It was deeply unnerving to get through that article right after having read Romans 1 in Morning Prayer. I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think the time for totally freaking out will soon be upon us.
Six
Or, if you’re in the South and are ready to give up and go down in sorrow to Sheol, I’m told this is going to be an excellent time. From the main page:
We invite you to attend The Anglican Way’s annual conference, this year entitled “The Once And Future Liturgy: The Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Identity,” at St. John’s Church in Savannah, GA from March 7th-8th. This year’s conference aims to explore how the Prayer Book informed, shaped, expressed, and established boundary markers for the Anglican identity and its continued value to that identity today.
Wish I could be there! It looks like it’s going to be an awesome time.
Seven
So anyway, have a nice day!
The stats on Millennial Christians makes me want to weep.
LOVED the last clip with @madihart_soccer ... "I felt the feminism leaving my body."
Guys ... pay attention -- this is a clear way forward!