Another Week Ends

1. Let’s jump in the deep end with James Davison Hunter over at the Hedgehog Review, who outlines the challenge of moral formation in our modern democratic society. Pluralism is great, argues Hunter, but one of the side effects of living in a pluralistic society is that communities are losing common virtues that bind together people from otherwise different backgrounds. The shift has gone from “mastery over the soul in service to God and neighbor” and “the training of character in service of civic life” to “self-care and cultivation of personality for the sake of emotional and psychological well-being.” This shift has left little common ground to work with other than, perhaps, safety and happiness. Neither safety or happiness alone, however, provide a robust framework for life in a pluralistic society.

A “safe” morality is not bad in itself, but this kind of safety has come at a cost. In the effort to establish a neutral and inclusive paradigm of formation, moral cosmologies are lifted out of particular cultural and linguistic contexts, detached from the social practices by which they are communally reinforced, and disconnected from the historical narratives that give them weight and significance. Emptied of these particularities, lived moralities lose the very qualities by which they could become coherent to people and binding upon them. The moral is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes.

A morality conceptualized without basic links to a living creed and a lived community imposes few if any moral demands or obligations (such as telling the truth or sharing some of one’s wealth with others), and therefore has few psychic consequences (whether remorse, guilt, or shame — or, conversely, pride in having done the right thing). What you end up with may be politically uncontroversial, but it will add little or nothing to the moral fortitude of the individual.

And in what might be the greatest irony of our ethical evolution, the impoverishment of our moral lives in these ways has contributed directly to the destructive passions that animate our contemporary political scene. Indeed, the deepest political divisions of our time are underwritten by ethical divisions we have no capacity to mediate. This is, in part, because our programs of moral formation (even those provided by many faith-based schools and institutions) have stripped out the moral resources of any and all metaphysically coherent traditions that would allow such mediation. All that is left to ground and guide moral judgments in public and private life are the subjective needs and emotions of autonomous selves. This helps to explain the ease with which even the supposedly devout transfer their allegiance from the teachings of their faith to politicians, parties, or even wild conspiracy theories that make them feel good or empowered. 

Hunter’s insight here regarding politics is remarkable. It is commonly thought to be the case that a less stringent, lowest-common-denominator sense of public virtue would allow more voices to come to the political table. Because, however, those moral frameworks are at the lowest common denominator, they aren’t enough to bolster the deep meaningful engagement required to partner in pluralism. As long as safety and happiness are society’s base values, then anyone with an opposing view becomes a threat to someone’s safety and happiness. Robust psychological, philosophical, and spiritual frameworks, on the other hand, allow for a society to explore compromise alongside integrity.

2. Hunter goes on to talk about how all people will be formed in a moral system, the question is simply not “if” but “which one.” Jay Caspian King argues in the New Yorker that the prevailing moral system of our time is the ideology of the internet:

So what is the ideology of the Internet? An optimist might invoke the idea of democratization, pointing to the medium’s ability to amplify otherwise silent voices, in ways both good and bad. But the Internet is not so much a forum as a language unto itself, one with its own history, predilections, and prejudices. In the early days of online life, there were “flame wars,” performatively absurd and vitriolic debates among the people who posted messages on various bulletin boards. These endless arguments prompted efforts to better moderate discussion. The resulting desire, on the part of posters, to depose the moderators, or “mods,” has been a constant of the Internet’s existence ever since — on Usenet groups, on Reddit, and on every form of social media. Who are the mods? The big ones are establishment institutions that aim to govern and to regulate, to maintain credentials and decorum. The mainstream press, obviously, which includes me and my employer, is a mod, and we are the target of endless ire, often rightly. The academy — particularly its most élite schools, the Harvards and the Yales — is another mod. But the mods have been weakening for some time, a trend that was dramatically accelerated by the pandemic. When the covid-19 lockdowns began, it soon became clear  that the C.D.C. would be regarded as a mod, and its recommendations and warnings would be seen by many as mere attempts to control. The mod media, which, for the most part, trusted the science of the C.D.C., had little power to enforce any consensus, even when millions of lives were on the line.

This war will continually repeat itself because the medium demands it. Huxley, as it turns out, was mostly right about the ability of drivel to entomb dissent in a way that heavy-handed censorship never could. What he couldn’t anticipate was the form that this would take. Today, we live with the irony that the intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray — create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse — millions of little arguments — is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the poster believes that no amount of dissent will actually be heard. And when  that happens, in any forum, the posters blame the mods.

To summarize, the architecture of the internet is unfettered free access to that which is desired, and unchallenged assembly and communication with those who are likeminded. That freedom is not always good, but efforts to curtail that freedom in any particular way by authority figures will be met with resistance. In real life, this translates into a rejection of constraining authorities, whether it’s the mainstream media, government, church, or even the constrains of basic manners. It’s a compelling moral framework, and one that fills a gap in the values question that James Davison Hunter raised in the first article. Arguing that the primary moral framework of modern America is simply an “anti-authority-ism,” we can see why tolerance and safety and happiness become the highest ethical codes of our time. Anything more demanding requires too much authority to execute.

3. At Christianity Today, Kelsey Kramer McGinnis offers a spiritual deep dive into one moral framework booming across social media: the “tradwife.” Short for “traditional wives,” a growing number of right-leaning influencers are showcasing their homesteading, sourdough baking, embroidered apron lives, suggesting, sometimes explicitly, that it is the superior way for women to live. But as McGinnis points out, the tradwife message isn’t so much new as it is bad 90’s gender theology repackaged for a digital generation:

It may be that fundamentalism, rather than a particular set of Christian beliefs, is the common ground that unites the tradwife empire.

Columnist David French recently described fundamentalism as a psychological posture marked by certainty, ferocity, and solidarity. Tradwife content and the communities of followers that gather around these influencers offer all three: certainty in a more fulfilling, God-ordained way to be a woman, wife, and mother; ferocious and persistent advocacy for a particular lifestyle and perfectionistic commitment to its aesthetics; and solidarity with the millions of fellow followers who like, comment, and share.

Separatism, a life set apart, is baked into the pitch that tradwife content offers, appealing to Christians who want to be “in the world, but not of it,” modern-day Proverbs 31 women. These influencers are attractive models for those who want to dress, feed their families, educate their children, or clean their homes differently than we expect in 21st-century American society.

Women who grew up in fundamentalist religious contexts recognize the parallels in tradwife content. It’s selling a lifestyle that they have experienced firsthand, marketed to them by their churches and faith communities. They see it as a new way to spiritualize hyper-feminine womanhood and strictly defined gender roles. It’s content they have seen before, repackaged for a new generation.

Ginnis goes on to rightly articulate the vanity of the trend. Many of the most popular tradwife influencers have extremely rich husbands, win beauty contests, or simply edit out the common messy parts of their lives. Not only is it a standard that most women won’t be able to live up to, but it’s also a fresh attempt to distort the grace of God for women by adding new rules for God’s favor outside of repentance and faith.

For what it’s worth, anyone with passing knowledge of ancient family customs would never call the Proverbs 31 woman literary figure a “tradwife.” While she does uphold the traditional duties of a mother to run the household, the text goes on to describe someone who is buying and investing in real estate, mastering a trade craft, and bargaining a top price for her wholesale goods in the marketplace. Her care goes beyond her household, with charity and generosity set aside for the poor. This is no stay-at-home tradwife, but an entrepreneurial work-from-home girl boss who takes care of the family and the poor in her community while she’s hustling her way through the marketplace to make sure she’s done her part to shore up the family’s income. She certainly wouldn’t have time, from doing all of this, to post about it on Instagram.

The same criticism of distortion applies to the hubub of the royal family’s photoshop’d mother’s day portrait featuring Kate Middleton and kids. Charlie Warzel touches on the inauthenticity of the moment and links it to Jay Caspian King’s anti-authority observations above.

None of these dynamics is particularly new — Adobe Photoshop, the likely culprit of any supposed “manipulation” in the royal portrait, has been around for more than three decades. And although the tools are getting considerably better, the bigger change is cultural. The royal-photo debacle is merely a microcosm of our current moment, where trust in both governing institutions and gatekeeping organizations such as the mainstream press is low.

4. And related to these other two, “Dad Culture Has Nothing to Do With Parenting” presents an opposing but more hopeful view. If tradwife influencers and the royal family oversell the virtues of motherhood and femininity, requiring photoshop to communicate half-truths about the joys and difficulties of parenting, Dad Culture undersells the quiet successful shifts in fatherhood that have taken place over the past thirty years, obscuring a parenting revolution of unconditional love that is ultimately great news for kiddos.

The old model of fatherhood — the hands-off, financial-provider stereotype that involved little participation in bath time or homework — bears less and less resemblance to reality. But cultural conceptions of what a “dad” looks like still seem to reveal a lingering discomfort with masculine caregiving, the central work of fatherhood. Just look at TV fathers, who tend to be either mournful absentees like Ted Lasso, neglectful workaholics like Kendall Roy, or scatterbrained, incompetent sitcom dads like Homer Simpson. Jokes about dads on Father’s Day cards, in television commercials, or on social media mention interests any middle-aged man might have, kids or no kids — golf, grilling, and so on. I love dad rock as much as the next 45-year-old guy does, but I’ve come to believe that clinging to this outdated version of fatherhood prevents us from envisioning a new one — one that can be both silly and serious but that, most important, centers caretaking above all else.

Until then, all of the discussion of “dadcore” and “dad bods” will continue to undersell actual involved fathers, calling attention to their goofiness rather than to the hard work that raising kids demands. As dads have taken on more child-rearing, they’ve been confronted with any of the challenges that caregivers have long faced, including the absence of affordable child care, professional lives that relinquish vanishingly little space for family responsibilities, and a lack of nationally guaranteed paid parental leave. But these issues are still often thought of as the province of mothers alone. The tired stereotypes are a distraction from the support that fathers, and all other parents, desperately need.

5. In humor this week, the Hard Times goes for the jugular with “Family Bible Passed Down for Five Generations Hasn’t Been Read in Five Generations.”

Family psychologist Samuel Briddon was quick to note that it’s far from uncommon for families like the Gibsons to ignore a relic in such a way.

“Families lie about this sort of thing constantly. Whether it’s claiming to still use granddad’s old baseball glove for a game of catch, or dishonestly describing their love of grandma’s pressed flower art, people will say anything to hide their true hideous nature,” said Briddon. “We actually found that 95% of items that are passed down are eventually just thrown away anyway. It just takes a good six or seven decades to do so. All of us die and so should our crap we’ve accumulated over a lifetime.”

Also, “I Would’ve Been Amazing in the Stanford Prison Experiment” is worth a good laugh or two because, well, you know, we’ve all thought it before.

6. The company Liquid Death was recently valued at over a billion dollars, and Jacob Stern has some questions about it at the Atlantic. You’ve likely seen Liquid Death in your convenience store coolers. The outside of the product features the kind of branding you’d expect on a double Russian imperial stout made by a hip microbrewery, with goth-inspired fonts and a flaming skull. But inside, it’s just water — canned water with post-ironic, fourth-wall breaking ad pitches.

You can think of Liquid Death as the apotheosis of meta-advertising. It doesn’t just say Forget the product for a moment while you watch this ad. It dispenses with the product entirely. The advertisement is the product. What Liquid Death is selling is not so much purified water as purified marketing, marketing that has shed its product — the soul without the body. The company writes the principle straight into its manifesto: “We’re just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do,” it reads. “Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.” It’s easy to dismiss Liquid Death as a silly one-off gimmick, but the truth is that many of us routinely fall for just this sort of appeal. The same thing is happening when we respond to the Visible phone service Super Bowl commercial in which Jason Alexander rehashes his “Yada yada” bit from Seinfeld and declares, “I’m in an ad right now.” And how could it not? Marketing is virtually inescapable. Brands are clamoring for our attention at every moment. It’s nice to feel, for a moment, like we’re not being advertised to — like Liquid Death is just a good bit and not, as it now is, a billion-dollar business.

7. Richard Beck, over at his Experimental Theology substack, is offering a multi-part series on the collapse of the “emerging church” movement that defined a sizable portion of American Evangelism in the early 2000’s. It’s not wrong to say that the emerging church movement served as a sort of precursor to today’s Christian deconstruction and exvangelical movements, in that all these movements function as a sort of leading-edge attempt to reform the church in light of modern social concerns. That original emergent movement, however, has ceased to be, and one of the reasons for that collapse in Beck’s autopsy is the embrace of a theology that didn’t translate into everyday life:

You might not have heard of René Girard. Like the emerging church, Girard’s name has slipped from view. And I think the reason for that is that Girard’s view of the atonement became the regulating theory of the atonement for many within the emerging church movement. Consequently, when the emerging church vanished so did Girard’s scapegoat theory. They rose and fell together.

In retrospect, it is not hard to see why. For many within the emerging church, Girard’s view of the atonement was a life-altering, Copernican revolution. The impact of Girard’s ideas was so transformative a zealous, cult-like intensity swirled around him and his ideas. Among the true-believers, Girard had cracked the code. Here was the Master Idea that revealed all knowledge. Girard’s theory was the theological Rosetta Stone that unlocked the secret meanings of the Bible, and especially the death of Jesus.

And yet, herein lurked a problem. […]

“In trying to share these ideas with my own church, I quickly bumped into a problem. You have to do a lot of explaining to get the ideas across. And I do mean a lot of explaining. Girard’s ideas are very theory-heavy. Personally, I think Girard is worth the trip, but most people don’t like being told that they need to listen to a vey long and speculative theological lecture before they can “really understand” the crucifixion of Jesus. Plus, it strikes people as wildly implausible that, for almost 2,000 years, the church fundamentally misunderstood the death of Jesus until some French dude cracked the code in the 1970s.

Here’s my point. When Girard’s scapegoat theory became a dominant, if not the dominant, view of the atonement among the emerging church crowd, the movement stubbed its theological toe, limiting its ability to communicate the gospel to normal, everyday folk. No one wants to be told that you need to learn about “memetic desire” to properly understand Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Say what you will about penal substitution, but it is easy to explain and intuitive to the human conscience. More than this, however, is the importance of what the reformers called “perspicuity” of the Bible: one does not need special knowledge of God, a seminary degree, or a crash course in philosophical anthropology to understand the Bible. If a theology isn’t accessible to everyone, it’s a bad theology, and Beck’s insights about the emergent church here serve as a warning to anyone searching to complicate the gospel.

8. The last word this week goes to Zach Koons, whose church has acquired a unique new processional cross based off of a certain Old Testament serpent. With plans to use it each year for Lent, Koons takes the opportunity to reflect on Moses and the fiery serpents, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the power of placing such a potent symbol in front of the congregation. Here’s his thought process via the Living Church:

Yes, that’s a snake. A bronze serpent, actually — you know the story — set aloft on steel, which serves as the new Lenten processional cross for my parish. We commissioned the work from a local blacksmith artist, Evan Wilson, who makes sculptures out of steel and other metals that I did not know was possible — including abstract interpretations of Caravaggio paintings, a crucified Christ floating in baptismal waters, and birds so realistic they look like they might fly away. His work is worth knowing.

And yes, part of the point of our cross is that you might recoil in horror or disbelief upon first seeing it, because surely that was part of the point for the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness getting bit and killed by snakes. What else were they supposed to think, lying there in fiery pain, when Moses came around the corner with a snake held up on a pole, saying, “Everybody, look!”

What is a snake in this immediate context but the very last thing you want to see? And what is a snake in the bigger story of the people of God up to this point but a symbol of sin (Eden) and idolatry (Egypt)? As if God has given up on Israel’s capacity to interpret his subtle hints, God is now saying the quiet part out loud: The spiritual consequences of your sin have now taken on material form. If you’re going to choose the way of the snake, then I will send you snakes.

But God telling Moses to cast a serpent in bronze and set it on a pole makes it look like God is telling Moses to rub a dog’s face in its mess. The Hebrew word for pole comes from the word used for standard, as in battle standard. And so the symbolic reading of the story appears obvious: What unites these people? What is their calling card? God? No. Their sin. The story makes no sense because the opposite is happening: they are being healed by looking at this reminder of their sin.

What is the cross of Jesus if not something upon which you would — and should! — recoil in horror and disbelief upon seeing for the first time? God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, this unalloyed presence of holiness and love, and we couldn’t handle it. Humanity had an allergic reaction to God’s love. We rebelled so intensely that we decided to kill the best thing that’s ever happened to us. Good Friday is, pure and simple, the worst thing humanity has ever done. But the irony of the bronze serpent is the same irony as the cross of Christ. That which only reminds us of our disobedience becomes the means of our healing. That which is the symbol of us at our worst becomes the instrument of our salvation. That which is hard to look at becomes our saving grace. The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. God uses precisely the worst thing we have ever done as a means of saving us.

Strays:

• Mockingbird friend and award-winning illustrator John Hendrix has a new graphic novel out now featuring the lifelong friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolken.
• Ted Gioia asks Seven Heretical Questions About Progress, including zingers like, “All the experts tell me that AI is the biggest leap of progress of our time, and nothing else is even close—so why do companies that use AI hide it? Why do consumers hate it? Don’t people want progress?
• The problem with media promoting bad news isn’t that the media chooses to produce it, but that viewers want to watch it. A reminder from Carrie McKean at Christianity Today.
• Reflections on the new graphic novel adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor.”