The Thing about First Things

Last updated on: May 9, 2017 at 8:19 pm by Chase Padusniak

The Thing about First Things 2017-05-09T20:19:41-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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Vide Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option, former champion of Crunchy Cons, and lately proponent of quasi-monastic pseudo-Anabaptism. He declares the Culture Wars finito, lost by conservatives, and advises tactical retreat in the face of a better-armed, Foucault-reading opposition.

Note the similarities here: both Dreher and the emerging (forgive me here) tradbro-like world of First Things proclaim one thing together—the end of the Culture Wars that drove Catholics and other Christians into the willing arms of the Republican Party, the force that brought them to the altars of free-market capitalism and praise of that esteemed liberal Lord Acton.

The bearded, bayou-dwelling journalist counsels retreat, however mediated. The others actively engage the culture from HBO to meme-worlds. The former’s solutions put faith in a recuperation through tactical withdrawal and nurture; the latter, well, let’s parrot Schmitz:

The motto of the tradinistas might be, “Win the class war, win the culture war.” How it is to be won is, in good Marxist fashion, a matter of dispute. Some, after chiding Herbert McCabe for his doctrinal failings, echo his calls for open class struggle. Others seek to overturn the order through lives of quiet virtue. To them, Theodor Adorno’s observation in Minima Moralia that “The long since frigid libertine represents business, while the proper and well brought up lady represents yearning and unromantic sexuality” suggests the possibility of silent subversion.

These guys may and their magazine may not be true, bleeding-heart Tradinistas, but to call them fellow travelers seems not unjust. They’ll quote Adorno and Gómez Dávila and you better like it; personal virtue matters, but it cannot be divorced from the chaos of material social conditions. Schmitz goes on:

It has been hard not to notice that whereas John Paul II spoke of “the culture of death” and Benedict XVI of “the dictatorship of relativism,” Francis instead condemns “the throwaway culture.” His enemy is the same as his predecessors’, but he pays more attention to the economic and material realities that ensnare us in vice. By doing so, he avoids the suggestion that sin stems from a simple lack of personal virtue or mistaken idea left us by Ockham. If welcoming this change places one on the left, I am there alongside more than a few other young Catholics. When it comes to the tradinistas, I think I’m not a contra.

One could argue that the difference is one of age—Dreher is middle aged, my other two examples are younger. Undoubtedly this plays a role. But age is not the whole thing. What we see here are two different visions for Christianity as it emerges from the tumult of the Culture Wars; we see the birth pangs of a thing reborn after a long gestation in the fluids of contra-Soviet nationalism and free-marketeering.

Dreher himself writes for The American Conservative, a publication founded by Pat Buchanan, old enemy of the neoliberal right, the original Trump, as some have called him—the harbinger of the modern “America First.” In a sense, First Things is its American opposite—more polite, more institutional. And yet here we are in 2017, one dominated by the bayou Benedict, the other a greenhouse of irony-laden, Left-leaning, Trad Catholicism.

What a world indeed.

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