Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Old habits die hard

Old habits die hard

Last updated on: June 26, 2023 at 6:17 pm by Fred Clark

0 Comments

Old habits die hard 2023-06-26T18:17:34-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

If you asked ChatGPT to imitate George Will’s baseball writing, the bot might produce something like this sentence: “Baseball is woven into so many of our lives because it is that sphere where childhood dreams play out and lifetime memories are made, where communities come together in triumph and disappointment.”

That’s from David Brooks’ latest column, and it seems even more soul-less and inauthentic in context. It’s s sentence that convinces the reader only that its writer has neither childhood dreams, nor lifetime memories involving baseball, and that the game has never been, in any meaningful way, “woven into” his life.

Fortunately, most of Brooks’ column isn’t about baseball. Unfortunately, the rest of it is even worse — more pretentious, more confused, and less sincere.

Why waste any more time on this habitually disingenuous hack — this second-generation Reader’s Forum shopper and lifelong capicola-eater? Because Brooks’ column is, I think, confused in some helpfully clarifying ways. It is an attempted “Kuyperian” attack against “little platoons.” It’s a criticism of “the politics of spectacle” that is, itself, an example of “the politics of spectacle.” And, above all, it’s a vivid demonstration of one representative Old White Guy’s bewildered failure to understand that 2023 is not 1983, and thus comes across like a boilerplate “shut up and dribble” rant of the sort that Brooks’ predecessors cranked out about Branch Rickey in 1947.

When I was a seminary TA, I had to grade papers on Jim Skillen’s book about the Reformed political theology of Abraham Kuyper. It wasn’t hard to tell which students had read the book and which ones were just riffing based on a loose grasp of the class discussion. Brooks’ column reads like the latter.

“Sphere sovereignty” was Kuyper’s Protestant/democratic revision of subsidiarity — an attempt to preserve its insights without the hierarchical Great Chain of Being baggage in the original. Brooks enlists this language forgetting that Kuyper’s spheres are distinct, but still “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Brooks seems to think of these spheres as existing in conflict, competition, or tension — as though civic groups, families, and churches were engaged in a tense standoff like the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

This is not what “sphere sovereignty” means.

That’s not how this works. Subsidiarity and/or “sphere sovereignty” are descriptions of and guides to neighborliness, not ground rules for a game of musical chairs. The greatest danger to neighborliness and to justice is not the usurpation Brooks fears — “when one sphere tries to take over another sphere.” The threat to justice, to neighborliness, and to every mutually bound “sphere” of society, rather, is the problem of abdication. When one sphere drops the ball, refusing or failing to meet its responsibilities, the others are forced to step up to do more.

For a real-world example of what that looks like, consider the civic association that is the subject of Brooks’ column and of his scorn: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

The Sisters are a group of drag queens who dress as nuns. Their original habits were the genuine article — donations provided for an all-male production of The Sound of Music by actual Catholic nuns who got the joke. The ad hoc “order” of Sisters sprang from that as a social club — a civic group no different, in pretentious Kuyperian categories, from the Rotarians or the Elks or Masons or Mummers (although their costumes weren’t quite as flamboyant as those of the latter two). They formed a softball team and played against the Gay Men’s Chorus and the Metropolitan Community Church (baseball has been “woven into” the group since its earliest days).

The Sisters were always spectacular, but their early days didn’t involve anything like what Brooks condemns as “the politics of spectacle.” They were certainly political, in the sense that any group that refuses to comply when told they have no right to exist is inherently political. But they didn’t pick that fight and they didn’t start it. And anyone who critiques a politics of resistance without acknowledging the explicit, pre-existing, overwhelming politics it is resisting against is either a fool or a fascist.

What the Sisters mostly did, early on, was Bingo. They hosted Bingo to raise money for community groups and they were good at it because they were funny and fabulous and anyone who isn’t utterly dead inside is bound to have a good time playing charity bingo hosted by a bunch of bawdy drag queens dressed as nuns. This is a time-tested formula that we humans have found fun and funny since the origins of Panto centuries ago.

Things changed for the Sisters when everything changed in the 1980s with the arrival of “gay cancer” and “GRID” and what eventually came to be called AIDS. This is where the abdication of the spheres dragged this social club into a more explicit form of politics.

Look again at Brooks’ list of Kuyperian spheres: “There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc.” Consider how utterly and thoroughly most of those failed in their duties and responsibilities when confronted with the crisis of the AIDS epidemic. But the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence stepped up, raising their voices, raising attention, raising a ruckus, and raising funds to care for and to fight for people who were being abandoned by their families, churches, and governments.

Which of these do you think was a neighbor? Go and do likewise.

That last bit is from a famous Jesus story about a despised outcast who stepped up when other “spheres” refused to fulfill their neighborly obligations. The care, decency, and responsibility of the Good Samaritan in that story shamed the careless indecency and irresponsibility of the priest and the levite. That shaming was not the Samaritan’s intention, but it was an inevitable consequence of his neighborly action being offset by the background of their callous, indifferent inaction.

How dare an unclean, unholy Samaritan bring shame on distinguished authority figures like a priest and a levite? That, in essence, is Brooks’ complaint in his column. He scolds the Sisters for “narcissism” and for “inflaming hatred,” and for failing to embrace some proper-channel, tone-policed politics of respectability. Brooks begrudgingly acknowledges that the Sisters “provided invaluable services to those in their community, especially during the AIDS crisis,” but every other phrase about them in his column reads like it was written by Anita Bryant in 1983.

Brooks also misunderstands the relationship between the Sisters and, well, the Sisters. He imagines that their attire “dishonors the nuns who live in poverty serving the poor.” And he performs offendedness on behalf of these imagined sisters.

That’s not how that works either. Very broadly speaking, there are two types of Catholic sisters. There’s the kind who put on full habits with wimples so they can protest outside of movie theaters or Dodger Stadium or on EWTN, and then there’s the kind who “live in poverty serving the poor.” The latter group isn’t offended by the antics of their old friends in the Sisters because they’ve been working alongside them for decades. They’ve long been allies in more than one sense. (The former group is, of course, offended by everything.)

David Brooks chose to be vicariously offended when the Dodgers awarded the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for their community service before a game played on Pride Night — refusing even to notice the team’s magnanimity in honoring a San Francisco-based group before a game against the Giants. “When the Dodgers embraced the culture war spectacle, even just a little, they eroded the integrity of their sphere,” he wrote.

This is exactly what columnists like David Brooks were saying on April 15, 1947. I think Brooks half-realizes that, which is why he tries to qualify that a bit in his next sentence: “Personally, I think it’s great for teams to honor groups in their fan base, as with Pride Night or Hispanic Heritage Night; but I think it’s wrong for teams to honor organizations that ridicule other groups in their fan base.”

So no more group tickets for the Knights of Columbus, I guess.

But, again, what Brooks calls “ridicule” there is simply the deserved, earned shame that always falls to those who “pass by on the other side.” The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence didn’t make a mockery of the church. The church’s disdainful inaction throughout the AIDS crisis did that.

I said above that this column reminds me of something written about the Dodgers in 1947 or about gay activists in 1983, but let me give you one more date that everything Brooks says here recalls in vivid detail: October 3, 1992. Brooks is making the same muffled and muffling defense of injustice that — to our shame — we all nodded along with after Sinead O’Connor tore up that picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live:

And just seconds after that moment, with astonishing rapidity, we’ll hear the comforting voices of the pre-written consensus, the reasonable-sounding song of the Very Serious People reassuring us that we do not need to trouble ourselves with asking those rabble-rousing prophets and sages and scribes what it was they were trying to get us to look at. We’ll swiftly be told that even if it might have been brave or commendably idealistic for those misguided souls to have interrupted us all like that, there’s no need to disturb ourselves overmuch because if it were anything really important those people would have gone through the proper channels. Even if we vaguely suspect we might abstractly agree with the goals they seek, it’s more important in that moment to condemn their methods. After all, whatever it was those folks were so upset about, whatever made them so upsetting to us, it’s their fault that it’s still a problem because they didn’t have the decency to go about addressing it in the right way. Shouldn’t we go about things in the right and proper way?

That was more than 30 years ago, before “the Boston Globe’s investigation, and the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, and the Houston Chronicle’s recent series,” before “the investigation of the Magdalene laundries and the Ryan Report and the mass-graves at Tuam.” Before the death of Savita Halappanavar and of all the American Savitas and Savitas-to-be now living in a post-Dobbs world.

It was, in other words, a time when more people might be expected to share the illusion that shapes Brooks’ entire column — the assumption that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops somehow possesses a moral high ground from which to look down upon the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Previous Post

June 22, 2023

Smart people saying smart things (6.22.23)

Next Post

June 30, 2023 Amos and Acts

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"I've only ever been in two Cheesecake Factories, and I expect that the place would ..."

Evan Tarlton

On the aesthetics of Saddam Hussein

"It's amazing to me that Liz Truss was a government minister for 10 years and ..."

Two Pi Man

Cycling down the widening gyre

"I can't imagine it pleasant to try to poke into someone's mind for truths while ..."

Rakka

On the aesthetics of Saddam Hussein

"Oh the content on mine was weird too. The scenario was the boss calls you ..."

Two Pi Man

Cycling down the widening gyre

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who asked Jesus, "What is truth?"

Select your answer to see how you score.

Pilate Nicodemus Caiaphas Herod