I apologize to my patient readers for the delay in chronicling my continued London summer adventures. Hopefully this very beefy second-day report of the ARC conference will be worth the wait. After a generous preview, it will mostly be reserved for paid readers, but free material is coming soon. I have successfully avoided missing out on the discourse of the month and seen Christopher Nolan’s buzzy new adaptation of The Odyssey. Everyone has a take, and I’m sure you’re all on tenterhooks for mine. As a hint of what that take will be, I have a feeling this discourse and the memory of the movie that inspired it will have evaporated in approximately 11 days, so I’m aiming to put thoughts together before then. On the bright side, the movie did inspire me to go back and read the whole poem cover to cover, and I don’t seem to be alone, so I suppose we can all thank Sir Christopher for that much at least. Stay tuned!

Day 2 of ARC was my favorite, despite the fact that the venue’s air conditioning broke down—a most inopportune time, given the heat wave that had me showering every morning and night. Ross Douthat was experiencing the same disaster at his family’s Airbnb, and he shrewdly seized the moment to incorporate this misfortune into his opening speech. His presence injected an energy into the whole event that was genuinely fresh and insightful and otherwise somewhat lacking. I dropped out of a different lunchtime event to switch over for a livestream audience-driven chat he hosted on AI and human flourishing, also featuring Mary Harrington and Jonathan Pageau—for my money the most philosophically and practically interesting discussion of the conference, but not one ARC seems interested in releasing on their channel, so it’s a good thing I recorded it. Then that evening, we had our choice of different dinner panel discussions at historic locations around the city, and I again wasn’t disappointed by a panel he led on the spiritual foundations of the West. For that discussion, the organizers made the interesting choice to mix him up with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Os Guinness, and the atheist analyst James Lindsay, who’s very good at diagnosing the ills of postmodernism but has an awkward relationship with Christianity. But it did make the conversation interesting!

Another major highlight was that I got the opportunity to spend time with Judd Saul, founder of a remarkable organization called Equipping the Persecuted that works on the ground with Christians in Nigeria. Judd and his team not only offer care for attack victims but intel and preparation tactics against future attacks. When I walked away from our conversation, I had the distinct feeling that I’d just encountered a modern-day saint. Perhaps you will too.

This day also yielded by far my most memorable cabby chat of the trip. Such a colorful character that when I recreate our convo I’m going to obscure his name a bit just to ensure he doesn’t get into any trouble, England not being a free country and all. The man had Opinions.

Finally, this day gave me my first little taste of the posh London club scene, as I got invited to a mixer that fortunately began an hour earlier than my evening dinner. It would turn out not to be the last posh London club invite I got that week. As I floated about at these things, sipping champagne and meeting quirky characters and handing out the occasional business card, it dawned on me that perhaps I’ve spent my life being a bit of a closeted socialite. I couldn’t sustain that pace day in and day out, but for the occasional week of fantasy roleplaying, I can play the part better than I thought.

Back to the meat of the week: With Douthat’s morning speech, I was impressed that though it was pitched positively, it didn’t feel like a variation on the prosperity gospel either. Last time, I was reflecting that conferences like this have the feeling of handing you a checklist on How to Save the West, etc. But Douthat is one of those analysts who really understands the tragic vision, something that came through movingly in a recent podcast he recorded that week in the city with Rod Dreher. Dreher’s work has taken on an increasingly doom-laden tone as he’s watched various edifices in his personal life crumble, and Douthat found a moment in their conversation to observe gently that perhaps Dreher had spent much of his career assuming the Right Things would happen to the Right People, only to discover this wasn’t necessarily so.

That depth of insight gives Douthat’s positive vision a weight that others lack. On one hand, his ARC speech proposed optimistically that the Christian faith offers resilience and permanence, and with it what one might call a culturally evolutionary edge as so many permanent goods are washed out on the tide of technological progress. On the other hand, he wasn’t sanguine about the shape of the future in which that faith will be tested: a future in which digital goods are substituted for tangible ones, where disconnection becomes our default way of life, and where human labor is increasingly seen as obsolete.

I also thought this speech deftly drew together all the themes of the conference in one place: our civilizational moment, the social fabric, the tech revolution, and the mundane nuts and bolts of a functional society. I may not have stuck around to hear the talks on free enterprise, energy policy and so on, but Douthat in a way was reminding me why those speakers were there. People need light by which to read the great books, after all. And, of course, air conditioning. “What will save Europe from a long slide into a dark night of barbarism? Air conditioning. What will enable us to think great thoughts and dare greatly and build great things? Obviously, air conditioning.”

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My mind has been uneasily occupied this week with dark thoughts of two murders, one old and one new. The new news is the shocking murder of a British Catholic politician, Ann Widdecombe, a lovable Old Tory battleaxe who staunchly held unpopular views in public, but did so with such panache and force of personality that even political opponents admired her. She was 78 years old and unmarried, enjoying her retirement in a quiet rural home, where it now appears the killer hunted her down in a targeted assassination.

The old news is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, back in the discourse cycle as the public has been processing a just-closed preliminary hearing before his alleged killer goes to trial this fall. While not all the evidence shown has been publicly released, various clips are circulating, along with reports of the emotion in the courtroom as family and friends watched high-definition footage of the murder. It’s hard to fathom what an ordeal this has surely been for Kirk’s widow and parents. My heart has broken to read about how they literally clung to each other through the worst moments. And through it all, unnervingly, young Tyler Robinson betrayed no signs of human emotion. He simply sat there, dead-eyed, as the evidence against him piled higher and higher.

These murders are uncannily similar in their suddenness, their viciousness, and the matching viciousness of the reactions they’ve inspired from people who hate what the victims stood for—reactions that sit in grotesque juxtaposition with the warmth, good humor, and generosity of spirit both Kirk and Widdecombe showed even their enemies in life. In their different ways, they exuded a zest for life that felt unquenchable. It boggles the mind and oppresses the soul to think that in each of their cases, a wretched lone killer had the means, motive and opportunity to snuff them out, just like that. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But the evidence is undeniable.

Or at least, it should be. Yet in Charlie Kirk’s case, certain powerful media figures are betting the future of their brands on people’s inability to weigh evidence, and they appear to be winning big. Candace Owens has accused everyone in Kirk’s inner ring of conspiring in the crime, including his widow, together with usual suspects like The Jews. This summary of the preliminary hearing surveys just a sample of the insanity she’s been peddling. Tucker Carlson, unlike Owens, will at least admit that Tyler Robinson is the killer…though of course brainwashed/recruited by You Get Three Guesses Who.

I’m uninterested in plumbing the depths of these people’s psychology. They are soulless ghouls, hollowed-out shells of people who are surely not under any actual illusions about the truth. It is simply convenient for their purposes to build an empire on lies.

I have, however, been thinking about why it is that a Candace Owens figure can command such large audiences. I asked Grok to give me a few quick and dirty statistics about the measure of her success: Consistently charts in the top 10-50 on various platforms like Apple Podcasts, peaked at worldwide #1 for downloads/views per episode in the immediate wake of Kirk’s murder, and racks up millions of views per channel clip. Fans plan watch parties around new episodes as if it’s an unfolding Netflix drama. Women seem especially invested, including many married women. Bored housewives compare notes and chatter about what Candace might drop next.

In other words, these aren’t a handful of sad losers frittering life away in Mom’s basement. These are people who in Internet slang would be called “normies” — regular decent Americans with families and jobs and productive lives. So why are they buying what Owens is selling?

There are many possible answers, but I submit one underexplored answer: When Owens sells conspiracy, she is really selling comfort.

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This year, I was offered a discounted ticket to return to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, which I experienced for the first time last year. That was my first experience of London, so I enjoyed myself very much, though in the end I found it more valuable as a networking opportunity than as a conference. This time, I returned in a way that gave myself more bang for my buck, spending a good week and a half in the city. The weekend before ARC, I participated in a small event called Breakwater, which was essentially an experiment in bringing Christians and atheists together for candid dialogue about religion, culture, and evangelism. That was also a good experience in its very different way, including some fascinating conversation outside the conference itself, and I want to write about it, but it needs a little more time to stew in my head.

What this means is that I’m going to write about all my London adventures eventually, just somewhat out of order. To make sure my paying readers get their money’s worth, I’ll reserve much of it for them. This first free installment will give you my impressions of the first day of the ARC conference, followed by my impressions of an evening at the literary salon Verdurin. I was invited by the salon’s proprietor, art critic Pierre d’Alancaisez, who co-edited the collection of contrarian gay essays I recently reviewed here. When he’s not editing books or running the shop, Pierre writes scalding short reviews of postmodern “art”. Pierre, you may be inferring, is a Character. He was at ARC too, briefly, but as you will see very much not of it. On this evening, he was hosting a book launch with the American author Jacob Siegel, for Siegel’s fascinating book The Information State. Pierre predicted that this would be a spicier use of my evening than ARC’s historically underwhelming drinks mixer, and he was correct. So, if you enjoy all this, and if your appetite is whetted for more, smash the blue button and help me begin to recoup my exorbitant expenses in London cab fees. My flash sale of $30/annum is being extended for ONE DAY MORE:

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So what is ARC, exactly? Last year, I came away with the impression that it wasn’t completely sure how to answer that question for itself. At the time, I said that it seemed to be pitching itself as “the world’s largest networking point for people who want to reclaim a conservative, humanist-in-a-good-way vision for the West.” Or, “the opposite of whatever Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum are doing.” Yet with some of the same grandiose vibes and intonation as WEF. At an afterparty this year, someone reflected to me that he was dubious about this whole approach of keeping WEF vibes while swapping in anti-woke content. The speeches are very polished and self-serious, the whole event smells of money, and the audience skews older and well-heeled. Much is said about the plight of the working class, but it’s in the nature of this sort of conference that actual working-class people are pretty much nowhere in sight. (The only real exception on the stage was one-hit wonder musician Oliver Anthony, who gave a punchy, poignant speech about reclaiming our pioneer heritage.)

I’m not saying that any of this is inherently bad or sinister, and in fact I find myself agreeing with most of the sentiments in most of the speeches. It’s the sort of conference at which lots of time is spent earnestly talking about how to Save the West, Repair the Social Fabric, and Relay the Spiritual Foundations of Our Civilizational Something-Something. I have nothing against all that. I do but observe.

Logistically, this year’s installment was a big improvement over last year. Last year, it was held in the ExCel, a massive, aesthetically ugly building in which you had to walk for what felt like a mile to reach the actual event. Finding toilets or water also felt like a heroic quest. This year’s venue was the Olympia, vastly more elegant and accessible in every way. There were other cute touches too, like an “ARC village” with street signs pointing the way to different areas, including a bookshop. Also new this year were the “Corners,” where people could briefly meet and greet with the speakers from each session. I didn’t end up making use of these however, partly because they were harder to find, partly because I was too busy catching up with fellow attendees. And partly because I had already discovered it wasn’t as hard as I thought to slip into the Gold Room, aka the VIP Room, aka the Room Where You’re Technically Not Supposed to Be Unless You’ve Paid a Ridiculous Amount of Money. (More on these adventures later!)

As last year, the sessions were themed. Mornings were dedicated to reflections on Our Civilizational Moment and the Social Fabric, afternoons focused on policy discussions about economics, energy, and occasionally foreign policy, and then evenings focused on all things tech and AI. Leftwing media likes to paint the conference as “far-right,” but the actual far-right never thinks it’s right-wing enough. As an American, I find its politics a little hard to get a handle on, as I generally find it hard to get a handle on the British “right,” which doesn’t look like the American right. Kemi Badenoch showed up to make a sales pitch no one is buying for small “c” conservatism, which sounds rather bland and centrist to American ears. But I would say the overall thrust of the event felt broadly fusionist, although I notice with interest that very little (possibly nothing, unless I missed it?) was said about abortion. Social conservatism was represented though, probably most boldly in Katy Faust’s talk about the social imperative to raise children in a heterosexual two-parent home. The hysteria about “far-right” what-not is maybe largely due to ARC’s willingness to import this kind of “edgy” American commentary:

I showed up in time to sit in on Tuesday morning’s kickoff speeches, squeezing my way past some protestors holding signs about “fascists” and fossil fuels. A few of them seemed to be wearing frog suits for some reason. It seemed prudent to keep walking, but I now wish I’d taken a picture. My mind went back to them as I listened to Artemis astronaut Victor Glover, who among other uncontroversially inspiring things talked about the importance of stewarding our planet well. This spring, I opened a byline at the Wall Street Journal with a piece about how he sent Reddit atheists into a conniption by talking about God in space. Mr. Glover is an impressive man, and it was moving to hear him reflect on the mission, especially the moment when the moon came into view and someone said, “Oh my God,” which he believed to be precisely the correct response. There was a small crowd around him at the meet and greet corner afterwards. Sadly, no selfies were permitted, but I did snap a couple pictures.

Next up was Ignat Solzhenitsyn, son of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. At the time, I was so sleep and caffeine-deprived that I didn’t realize Ignat was not reading his own speech but his father’s iconic address to Harvard University. It was a curious choice for a conference like this, as a sustained Eastern criticism of the West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment roots. Solzhenitsyn was very concerned to address the bad kind of “humanism,” the sort of aggressively secularized anthropocentrism that pushes God out of the civilizational picture. And yet, it was the East that succumbed to communism.

I’m not sure the conference organizers really thought this tension through, especially given that another one of their first speakers was neo-Renaissance sculptor Sabin Howard. Howard would describe himself as a humanist artist, but in the good sense, the sense in which I hand out business cards with the tag “Notes from a Christian humanist.” In fact, as Howard spoke passionately about his latest project, a 250th independence anniversary arch depicting “a people who rise to be their best version,” his language echoed Solzhenitsyn’s closing vision of anthropological ascent. (And you could say that in Victor Glover we have a quite literal manifestation of that “ascent.”) I personally prefer Howard’s World War I memorial as a piece of art, but it was charming to hear him rail against postmodernism (“I refuse to be represented by a cold pile of bricks on a cement gallery floor!”), and it occurs to me that at least some degree of anthropocentric pride is necessary to keep our civilizational immune system from breaking down.

It was quite interesting in this context to hear from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I appreciated the fact that Konstantin Kisin asked her to say a few words specifically addressing this question of good versus bad humanism. Her answer was that at least in the past, the remedy against narcissistic humanism was “built into the system” in the form of Christianity, which engendered a sense of individual responsibility. Where she came from, everyone was constantly hunting for a scapegoat—the Jews, the Westerners, some outside threat to the collective “us.” There was none of that sentiment expressed in Chesterton’s answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” (“I am.”) Christianity is a check on this narcissism, a reminder that Christ is history’s singular Victim, and we commit a kind of blasphemy when we constantly read ourselves into his rightful place on the cross.

But this picture gets complicated when we consider the fact that increasing numbers of young men are now being drawn to versions of Christianity, including Eastern Orthodoxy, that engage in their own kinds of scapegoating. I want to be careful not to say that this characterizes all men in the Eastern Orthodox church (in fact I met an enthusiastic new EO reader at this very conference, so if you’re reading this, welcome, please don’t go!) But quite a few so-called “Orthobros” are engaged in their own campaign of “It’s fill-in-the-blank’s fault,” where the blank can be filled in by Jews, by women, etc. And, in fairness, there are Catholic and Reformed Protestant versions of this problem playing themselves out as well.

I think the conference would have benefited from a speaker or two who could have addressed this more precisely, specifically homing in on how Christian language can intersect with both left and right-wing identity politics. At a certain point, one hits diminishing returns with classical liberal pundits recycling anti-woke-left talking points. It’s not that I think they’re wrong, but they need to be supplemented by some deeper analysis. There were flashes of more depth here and there though. I was impressed by this speech from Nick Freitas, a pundit I wasn’t familiar with, but he spoke well about the boy crisis. He discussed how among other things, boys today are left craving a sense of tribe, which leaves them vulnerable to tribal anti-woke ideologies:

The “Social Fabric” section also featured Carl Trueman, who basically delivered a 12-minute summary of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. I found this book interesting because I sort of agreed and disagreed with it at the same time. A lot of Trueman’s analysis is astute, but I suppose I am more inclined than he is to think that expressive individualism isn’t such a bad thing. Again, referring to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it is that focus on the individual man that can when properly circumscribed provide a bulwark against the tyranny of the collective. But I do appreciate Trueman’s reflections on the “psychologized self,” particularly in connection with the unraveling of marriage and the sexual binary. Sex became political via the arrival of Freud and “orientation” essentialism, because the rules that governed sexual behavior became “rules about the kind of person that society will let you be.” And now, with the transgenderist reductio, we see “a rebellion against the last irresistible external authority that will tell you you are not who you think you are,” namely the body.

It’s good that ARC is actively inviting this sort of explicitly Christian analysis, which is in a sense simultaneously more optimistic and more pessimistic than some of the material I heard from non-Christian analysts. There was a panel including Freya India, a young writer who’s done good work about how Gen Z girls are encouraged to turn themselves into digital products. Full disclosure, I still need to read her book, but I get the general impression that she’s diagnosed the problem as something happening to girls. But girls also make free choices, as do boys.

ARC brands itself as a conference of Solutions to our civilizational problems, with speakers telling people the checklist of steps to Saving the West, Saving Our Kids, and so on. In its place, this is fine. But I’m reminded of the fact that Jordan Peterson initially rose to prominence because even while he was offering “rules for life,” he was also unafraid to acknowledge the fact that sometimes life just sucks, and then you die. Sometimes every possible thing that can go wrong will go wrong. Sometimes you won’t save the kids, or the school, or the country. Life, in other words, is a tragedy by default. The aversion of tragedy is the exception to the norm.

In an overlap of social fabric and tech themes, we watched a short film called “Another Way,” directed by Fabio D’Andrea. It tells two alternative narratives about an upper-middle-class family whose son is cyberbullied by his schoolmates. In the first narrative, the family’s blind spot around phones and social media makes them miss warning signs until it’s too late and their son is dead by suicide. In the second narrative, the parents are hands-on and proactively monitor their children’s device use. The son is still bullied, but his story ends “another way.” I couldn’t fault the message or the earnestness, but it felt very safe and tidy. It would have been less safe but more relevant to tell a story about digital pornography, and about the grueling tug of war between parents and children determined to crack every safeguard.

I’ll have more thoughts on ARC’s approach to the tech revolution later, but I thought this topic yielded some of the most interesting discussion, as well as some interesting internal tension between tech-optimist and tech-pessimist strains. On the tech-pessimist side, we heard a strong talk from actress/royal/education activist Sophie Winkleman, who has long campaigned against screens in schools and has now come out swinging against AI-mediated ed, especially for primary students. She did an excellent job with limited time articulating why the medium is detrimental, regardless of the message it’s conveying. Also she positively quoted Randi Weingarten for some reason, but apart from that, very good speech:

We also heard a talk from Chloe Lubinski, who works for Anthropic. I feel a little sorry for Anthropic. They’ve been treated quite shabbily by the Trump administration. If you don’t follow tech news, the very short version is that the Anthropic CEO expressed an objection to certain ways the admin wanted to use his tech (e.g., in military targeting), and as petty retaliation the Department of War declared them a “supply-chain risk.” It was typical of how this admin operates, and lefty or not Anthropic appeared to me clearly in the right (as it were). But because the company continues earnestly trying to make friends with as many people as possible, including the right-leaning people behind ARC, the left-wing media has also been in hysterics over the fact that they sent representatives to this “far-right” conference. So it seems they can’t win with anyone.

At the same time, I admit that I also cringe whenever their researchers try to talk about philosophy, metaphysics, AI maybe-consciousness, and so on. And there was a bit of that cringe in this talk by Lubinski. At the same time, there’s something to the point that she’s making, which is essentially that an LLM has the potential to make game-theoretic calculations in favor of “bad” choices depending on how it’s trained. This means human AI trainers carry a heavy moral responsibility. These machines learn by imitation. What templates are we giving them? A question worth asking:

During this talk, attendees were asked to vote in a poll asking whether we saw AI as chiefly a threat or chiefly an opportunity. I left early, but the tech-optimists were winning out, and someone told me later that their lead held. As a card-carrying tech-pessimist, I duly registered my minority dissent. While I’m not a Luddite, and I do recognize the positive potential for this tech, I think the cost is proving too heavy, especially in the education sector. This is something I might see if I can coax my father into doing some guest-writing about here, because as both a philosophy professor and an amateur software developer, he’s uniquely placed to weigh these pros and cons. British investor Paul Marshall observed in his mainstage speech that tech people don’t understand philosophy, and philosophers don’t understand tech, which rather neatly sums up the problem.

Before I get on to my evening at Verdurin, I want to highlight two worthy organizations whose booths I visited this afternoon. First, Hope for Justice is a group working to combat human trafficking around the globe. I enjoyed a chat over lunch with one of their representatives in the VIP room, which I wandered into in all innocence because an acquaintance reported that the food line was shorter there. (Once inside, I bumped into a speaker who told me the powers that be weren’t going to kick out lowly plebs as long as they behaved themselves. Though someone did eventually try, but that’s for Wednesday’s report!) Anyway, I visited the booth later, had a lovely chat, and picked up a plastic padlock with a QR code that leads to a page full of survivor stories, called the Freedom Wall—a clever and moving bit of branding. The other org I want to highlight is Freedom in the Arts, an advocacy group for artists, promoters, etc., who have been boycotted for not toeing the political party line. They’ve prepared a depressing report here, which among other things unearths a shocking amount of anti-Semitism.

As I exited the building to catch a cab, I encountered a new set of climate protestors, equally muddled, but at least they were peaceful. This time I did snap a couple shots of their signs. I give them points for symbolic creativity!

My cabby and I had a difficult time finding each other, since my location “pin” was off, and he was indistinguishable in the rush-hour sea of black cabs. Already I was sweating in the city’s historic heatwave. But my hero persevered stubbornly, and we had a lovely ride. Native London cabbies are an essential part of The London Experience, a great informal way to take the pulse of the working-class populace. The friendlier ones will call you “love” and “darling” and don’t at all mind having a bit of a chat. (And of course, they know the city. On this ride we passed through a very posh neighborhood which I was told included Simon Cowell’s house.) As we talked away, I explained what I do and said I was going to a book launch about how the government controls people through information. The cabby said it felt to him as if there was a “higher power” at work even above the government. “Divide and control, know what I mean?” We also talked about COVID, and I shared how those years had affected me personally through my mother’s vaccine injury and subsequent chronic pain. He said his wife had found relief from chronic pain through acupuncture. For forty pounds an hour, he swore it worked “like a miracle.”

I arrived a little early at Verdurin, where Pierre had proudly advertised that they had air conditioning, and indeed it did not disappoint. He greeted me warmly at the door and subsequently took an avuncular interest in making sure I mingled properly before the event started. It was a cozy shop space, gradually filled by an eccentric little group of regulars and visitors. Not knowing anyone, I initially stood apart a bit awkwardly waiting to shake Jacob Siegel’s hand. Pierre’s eagle eye fell on me from across the room, and with a gentle scolding and a regal handwave he paired me off with a just-arrived cheerful lesbian couple.

Verdurin was initially born as, let us say, a COVID-era experiment in community-building. It advertises itself as “a place for challenging the ideas you hold dear, finding new ones, and taking them back to your bunker with you.” Inspired by Proust’s Madame Verdurin, Pierre conceived it as a third space that could simultaneously serve as shop, book club, classroom, and theater, where a diverse array of people are invited to come together and discuss a diverse array of ideas. Academics are sometimes welcome so long as they understand that they are not at an academic conference, at which point the hope is that they will actually begin to say something interesting.

Pierre didn’t mince words in his verdict on ARC. “I don’t believe any of them,” he told me. “None of them believes what they’re saying.” He thinks if they were really serious about the conference’s stated goals, they would do as Pierre does and invest in “creating culture.” On day one, he was briefly there to help man the Freedom in the Arts booth, but he ignored all the speeches. “I have no interest in being evangelized. I am more left-wing than all of them. And more right-wing.”

I did my small part to invest in Pierre’s culture creation by sampling some of the shop’s wares. Pictured below, a typical Verdurin shelf. The concept is to stock everything one would need in the event of an apocalypse. So there are books, but there is also quince jam, fermented tea, and artisanal black squid ink pasta. As Pierre explained, “The bomb goes off, you’re in your bunker, you’ll have to reach for your copy of The Iliad, and then you’re going to have to eat something.” (And yes, The Iliad is in stock.)

To carry my purchases, I bought the tote bag on the bottom. Pierre explained that the convoluted file name was the actual name of the file for the UK’s publicly released COVID recovery plan:

I also brought home a bag of squid ink pasta and made garlic brown butter shrimp with it. Recipe at the end as a reward for those who read that far.

As for the actual book launch, it was a stimulating treat (thanks not just to Jacob and Pierre but also the audience, including a woman who contributed her own insights as an expert on the history of communism). Jacob introduced himself with a backstory I could relate to, about growing up as the son of a maverick professor who disliked academia but inspired intensely intellectual dinner-table conversations. He was also the grandson of a World War II veteran, which instilled him with a natural and uncomplicated sense of patriotism. Though he wasn’t inclined to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, the shock of 9/11 compelled him to enlist. His experience as an intelligence officer provided the inspiration for The Information State. In a former writing life, he was part of a veterans’ writing group, conceived as a kind of therapy, except that no one there wanted therapy, they just wanted to write. He worked on a volume of short stories with Phil Klay, who would go on to a celebrated career and whom I’ve long admired as a great fictional and non-fictional war writer.

To set the stage for the book’s argument, Siegel offered fascinating candid impressions of our failed Middle East campaigns. As an intelligence officer, he had an “overawing” level of informational mastery, and he described how this tempted him to develop an almost “ritualistic” relationship with the data—believing somehow, somewhere, it must hold the secrets to winning the war, if only we could call on and extract it properly. But in fact, what he realized is that it was precisely this mentality that was losing the war. The tech couldn’t substitute for human decision-making, motivation, and will to fight. And yet, paradoxically, the more the tech fails to deliver on its promises, the more dependent we have all become on it, in every area of our lives.

Siegel traces the birth of the American information state back to Woodrow Wilson, arguing that the need to control information is “deep in the ethos of progressivism.” Wilson openly disliked the Constitution and believed “rule by experts” must be established over folk democracy. Within this ethos, “propaganda” isn’t a dirty word. In the COVID years, you could see how figures like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins have inherited that legacy, as I wrote about in one of my more popular articles here.

But the thesis of the book really isn’t partisan, as both political sides in their distinctive ways have raced to harness technology for their controlling purposes. It was after all the Bush era that gave us the Patriot Act. And during COVID, hawks came in red and blue. In my contribution to the Q & A, I reflected on the fact that I encountered the most hostile pushback for my COVID contrarianism from Never Trump conservative types, who regarded me as something of a class traitor. Siegel’s chapter on those years brought back many bitter memories for me.

Siegel wrote the book too early to comment much on where Trump’s second administration fits into all of this, but at the launch he spontaneously coined the phrase “informational Caesarism” for the current chaotic state of things. Earlier I mentioned Trump’s feud with Anthropic, which seems to me quite self-defeating in its pettiness. Trump is so undisciplined, it seems that all he truly cares about is personal beef, meaning he’s willing to sacrifice the administration’s access to cutting-edge tech for the sake of settling a score. Meanwhile, all the infrastructure for reestablishing the information state is still there. Siegel predicts the Democrats will reascend in 2028, but he thinks their tactics will be subtler and more sophisticated than in the Biden era.

Beyond politics, Siegel also reflected soberly on how the digital age is functioning as a “cosmic reordering” of how humans interact with the world. It’s been observed that young people are increasingly not even literate. Siegel frames all this as a great reset, an unraveling of the Enlightenment and a return to a kind of new medievalism. “The power of reason” is an Enlightenment relic that will not survive the digital era. With this will come a new culture of morality, as well as new forms of idol worship. Here Siegel’s orthodox Judaism came out in an interesting way, as he discussed the rabbinical understanding of idolatry as not merely a rejection of God but a kind of longing for God.

The end of the evening put an unintentionally humorous period on these very serious reflections, as it transpired that all the kosher restaurants were closed. Jacob was unbothered by this, being an all-round mensch as well as a good writer, and after some more animated conversation we all went our separate ways.

And now, speaking of food, here as promised is the recipe I made with Pierre’s black squid ink pasta:

Garlic Brown Butter Shrimp Pasta

Ingredients:

1 package of shrimp deveined etc.
1 pint of cherry tomatoes
pasta
most of a butter stick
lots of garlic
lots of parsley
a little white wine
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Chop up and blister the tomatoes in some butter. Salt and pepper. Remove and set aside.

2. Set pasta going. Meanwhile melt the almost-stick of butter and slowly brown it. Stir and monitor closely. Do not take a bathroom break, do not wander off to read The Iliad, do not look out the window. Give it 3-5-ish minutes on medium-ish heat, and not much more.

3. Add the garlic. When I say lots I really do mean lots. I chopped up four very fat cloves plus one thin one. It’s a free country. No one cares. Add a little more salt and pepper. After about a minute, pour in half a cup of white wine and let it boil for a couple minutes.

4. Pat the shrimp dryish, salt and pepper it, then cook in the garlic sauce, a few minutes per side. Add some pasta water as desired.

5. Toss in the pasta, add back the tomatoes, squeeze in some lemon juice and/or parmesan or pecorino cheese as desired. Garnish with fresh parsley.

And there you are! In the event of an AI apocalypse, at least you will know how to cook garlic brown butter shrimp pasta.

In honor of #America250, I am running a flash sale and lowering my annual subscription price to a mere $30 per annum. Upgrade today!

Meanwhile, enjoy this free re-run of an old essay I originally put out in 2023. I never know exactly what I’m going to find when I overhaul old work. Sometimes it doesn’t age very well, but I think this piece remains timely, and I hope it inspires reflection on this special anniversary. Since writing it, I have moved back to my hometown, where I have been given new reasons to be grateful for this land that I love, and for her people.

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I normally try to come up with Substacks for national holidays, feast days, etc. But I was thinking of letting today’s festivities go by without one, because nothing especially brilliant or original was coming to mind. Fortunately, as often happens, someone tweeted something I disagreed with.

In context, there was some discussion about what exactly we’re celebrating when we celebrate Independence Day. My friendly Twitter acquaintance said he found it “surreal” to “go to church to sing dated patriotic songs about virtues of a country that no longer exists.” Why, he asks, are we over here still singing “America the Beautiful,” when it would make more sense to sing about the need for collective repentance? If this is just “an exercise in sentimental affection for the idea of a place,” then “we might as well be singing about Atlantis or Numenor.”

Now, I don’t often disagree with this friendly Twitter acquaintance, because we’re both young curmudgeons in training who lament the same national ills. If America has “national sins,” we would probably agree on what many of those sins might be. We lament the unborn children slaughtered under the regime of Roe vs. Wade. We lament the Biden administration’s jack-booted rainbow fascism. We lament all the blindly arrogant encroachments on individual liberties during the pandemic, and what they signaled about how lightly our governing authorities will value those liberties in our future. So many things. So much to lament.

Why, then, do I disagree with his take on Independence Day? Don’t we agree that in some sense, the country so movingly hymned in “America the Beautiful” really does no longer exist?

Well, yes and no. I suppose it comes down to this question: What is a country?

I remember once finding some old documentary footage about Westboro Baptist Church, featuring a very young Megan Phelps-Roper before her transition out of the cult. Megan herself still comes across as personable and earnest, even in this phase, just very deeply indoctrinated. But I had a very visceral, angry reaction to the rest of the footage as older members of the church justified their work. At one point, Megan’s mother matter-of-factly discusses their practices of flag desecration—holding it upside down, wearing it at their waists. She talks about how her 10-year-old son was once arrested for stepping on it, launching into a disquisition about free speech. “Everyone in the whole country knows that you can not only stand on a flag, you can burn a flag.”

Purely from a First Amendment perspective, she has a point, I guess. But my God, I thought. Picketing fallen soldiers’ funerals with signs saying they aren’t heroes and God hates their country? Singing a vile parody of “America the Beautiful” where you celebrate the 9/11 attacks? On this hill, you plant your upside-down flag?

I should stress that I don’t at all intend to lump my acquaintance in with the Westboro cultists. I believe he genuinely laments the passage of something he genuinely loves. But I don’t hear lament or love from Westboro. Just glib, pig-headed triumphalism. I find my mind returning to them now only because I’m trying to put my finger on what made me so furiously angry, with people who claim to share my same faith, my same values. What was it inside me that wanted to scream “No!” when I heard Megan’s mother talk so casually about desecrating the flag? Why, when I listened to them warbling their bastardized “Oh Beautiful,” did it feel like a violation of something sacred?

What is a country? My memory wanders still further back in search of the answer. It conjures up a dark, rainy day. My family is driving past a gas station, when my dad notices the flag in the mud. He stops the car and dashes out to pick it up. After delivering it to the people inside, he comes back and we drive on. It all happens in a couple of minutes. He says he just couldn’t leave it on the ground in the rain.

A little further back, we’re all gathered with local friends in our piano room to sing hymns, for the first of what will become many “hymn sings.” It’s the fall of 2001, very shortly after 9/11. Someone requests “Oh Beautiful.” We begin singing it, and though I’m too young, my mom and dad and others are finding it difficult to get through the verse about heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.

Maybe this is why. Maybe this is what I want to say when the picketers wave their sign saying, “There are no heroes.” Yes, there are. There are. There are soldiers and firemen and policemen. There’s the Texas cop whose bodycam footage of a mass shooting was just released, showing him chasing down the killer right after telling two cute little kids to wear their seatbelts.

There are ordinary heroes too. Like Estella, an old Jamaican woman I met sitting on a bench in New York. She told me she used to work at a Baptist hospital before it closed many years ago. She then became an in-home caregiver for the elderly, working until arthritis forced her to live on social security. Her rent was $800 a month. She eked things out with food stamps. “We are one people,” she said to me. “We have to look out for each other. We have to watch each other’s backs.” “You sit here,” she gestured to the bench, “We talk…and that’s it, you know. We are people. We are people. We are one people.”

What is a country? Is it the land? The literal land—the rocks and rills, the Pennsylvania hills where my father grew up, the waves of grain that spring up all around the little rural Michigan high school where I gave my last couple of teaching years? Is it the people? Is it the maintenance guy from Texas who lives upstairs from me and owns multiple guns and would give you the shirt off his back? Is it the old ladies who were making peanut butter jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk with me in a basement church kitchen? Is it the single mom we handed it to?

Yes. It’s the land I love, and it’s the people. All of it. All of them.

I can only speak for myself, but when I sing “America the Beautiful,” I don’t just see it as a sentimental exercise. Look again at the lyrics. “May God thy gold refine.” “God mend thine every flaw.” The patriot dream sees beyond the years. It looks for alabaster cities “undimmed by human tears.” You could say this dream is unfulfillable. Perhaps you would be right. Perhaps it will never be realized, until that day when all tears are wiped away.

But meanwhile, I don’t live in Atlantis, or Numenor. I don’t get choked up at the thought of Atlantian trees changing colors in the fall. I don’t greet Numenoreans walking down the street, going shopping, going to work, chatting with the person in the plane seat next to me who I’ll never meet again.

Don’t be ridiculous, you say. I should know good and well there are Americans who would like nothing better than to curb-stomp me and my rights under a fluttering Pride flag. There are Americans who would spit at me if they saw me holding a pro-life sign. There are Americans whose ideal vision of America is an America without people like me in it. And, well, yes, I do know that, good and well. And frankly, for my part, I think some of them are dangerous too. So dangerous that I’m not at all convinced we can coexist peacefully in the same public square.

What is a country? I understand the question. And I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to say with this answer. Maybe I don’t fully know. Maybe I’m still working it out. What I can say, what I do know, is that I could never be other than an American. Some people can, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I would be lost.

What is my country? For better or worse, it is my home. It is the land I love. It always has been. It always will be.

Happy July, gentle readers! I spent the last couple of weeks traveling to London (and subsequently recovering from said travels) where I had a whirlwind time of networking around not one but two conferences. As last year, I’ll be writing up a travel diary of my various adventures in conferencing, sightseeing, and people-watching. Unfortunately, it was logistically difficult for me to get much writing done around said adventures, hence the quietness around here. To my subscribers old and new, including those I met in London, thank you so much for your readership!

As our nation’s 250th birthday approaches, I’ve felt bad that I haven’t had the bandwidth to come up with more content appropriate to the occasion. As I lay around sniffling from an airport cold the other day, I came across a little news special in which various celebrities chose favorite American songs in honor of the occasion. (The celebrity lineup included some people who made sense and others who didn’t, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.) This inspired me to think about what my own list of definitive American tunes would look like. If I was putting together a capsule for the aliens that said, “Hey aliens, this is America!” what tracks would I include? (A slightly different question from “What are my personal favorite American songs ever?” though some overlap is inevitable.)

Sick and wan as I was, I still had the energy to browse around YouTube listening to music, and pretty soon a playlist took shape: 25 songs, consisting of five picks each from the five genres of Gospel, Great American Songbook, Rock and Roll, Country/Americana, and Pop. I now present it to you, dear readers, mostly for those of you who are paying me, but for those still loitering in my free tier, I’ll open up my thoughts on the top pick from each genre. Please join me in this musical celebration of the greatest country on earth. And should any of my inclusions or omissions make you upset, readers with comment privileges are welcome to lodge their protests below. You can even lodge your protest at my genre choices, though I wouldn’t recommend spending much time trying to convince me that hip-hop is music.

Essential Gospel Songs, #1: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Fisk University Jubilee Quartet

Our best guess as to the composer of this tune is Wallace Willis, who was among the “Choctaw Freedmen” emancipated in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War. He was hired to teach at a Choctaw boys’ school, where sources say that he taught the children this song. We apparently owe its preservation and circulation to the headmaster who wrote it down.

Like all great standard tunes, this can be interpreted in a myriad ways and lose none of its power. It can be slow or rollicking, a plaintive lament or a celebration. It can be raw and bluesy or carried up in the clouds by an ethereal soprano or tenor. It can be carried by a lone voice or by a chorus of harmonies. There is really almost no way to go wrong with it.

I could put any of these interpretations into “the capsule.” There’s the great B. B. King’s exuberant take, blending it with “Swing Down Chariot” (echoed in The Plantation Singers’ version). There’s Joan Baez’s acapella take. There’s this stunning interpretation by the classical soprano Afrika Hayes (introduced back in the day when the phrase “Negro spiritual” was still politically correct).

In the interests of historical preservation, I would probably settle on the first known recording, by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet. I have always had a weakness for male quartet singing, and I find something especially moving and dignified in the work of early black “conservatory” vocalists—classically trained, but still distinctive.

Essential Great American Songbook Songs, #1: God Bless America, Irving Berlin

The great Jewish-American songsmith Irving Berlin (formerly Israel Baline) first wrote a version of this tune in 1918, then dusted it off 20 years later and gave it to the now-forgotten Kate Smith, who made it a standard. You can read all about its fascinating history at La Wik, including the trivia bit that it opens with a fragment from a Jewish novelty song called “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band.” As one might imagine, it was not a favorite with the KKK. I can’t think of a song more emblematic of the Jewish immigrant’s indelible stamp on our culture. I hear it and I think of every great musician, every great comedian, every kid who decided that if baseball was America’s national sport, he would not be outdone in his love for it.

With apologies to Miss Kate, I prefer to hear Berlin singing his own creation—a little quavery, but full of patriotic fervor.

Essential Country/Americana Songs, #1: Wayfaring Stranger, Rhiannon Giddens

Properly, country should be separated from bluegrass, which in turn should be separated from folk, but if I tried to give all these genres their full due, this post would become even longer than it’s already going to be, and I would lose the numerical neatness of 25 tunes to mark our 250th birthday. So hopefully the reader will forgive some handwaving here.

The precise origins of this song are lost to time. Since its emergence in the 19th century, it has been performed with different lyrical variations, dressed in different styles. Like the best American folk classics, and like the Negro spirituals with which it shares DNA, it is a song of deep yearning for a home beyond this land of sickness, toil, and danger. We look back on songs like this as the children of an affluent age and realize with some shame that we no longer understand what it’s like to live these lyrics, really live them. Then again, it is not as though in our general affluence we have solved depression, or loneliness, or for that matter even poverty.

I like the simplicity of Rhiannon Giddens’ take, but if you have another preference, do share.

Essential Rock and Roll Songs, #1: Piano Man, Billy Joel

Billy Joel was among a number of living songwriters pointedly snubbed in a recent New York Times list of “greatest living songwriters.” Thankfully I wasn’t the only one to notice and protest the snub. It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why Joel can’t get no respect, but when you’re as loved as he is, you don’t really need it.

Various Joel songs make a case for their inclusion in “the capsule.” I very nearly picked “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” which considered purely as a piece of rock music I don’t think Joel ever topped. “New York State of Mind” is a strong contender here too, as is “Miami 2017.” But in the end it really has to be “Piano Man.” The lyrics have that sardonic edge that would become Joel’s calling card, but where I think songs like “Scenes” tilt a bit into meanness, “Piano Man” has a sympathetic eye for its characters. Apparently they were based on real characters Joel observed in his early days of bar pianist obscurity. (“And the waitress was my first ex-wife…And Davy was in the Navy…and probably still is…”) And they are all of them very American, each playing out their dissatisfaction with the American dream, including the piano man himself.

Essential Pop Songs, #1: Walking in Memphis, Marc Cohn

Marc Cohn burst onto the pop music scene with this record, winning Best New Artist at the 1992 Grammies. When you look at who he beat out — Boyz 2 Men, Seal, etc. — he stands out as the folksy Jewish white boy who doesn’t belong. But this white boy had soul. He also had class, on display in an acceptance speech that ran too long because he wouldn’t stop until he had thanked everyone who in his opinion deserved to be thanked.

For whatever reason, Cohn never made another record that caught fire on this level, and he would pass into the industry’s collective memory as a one-hit wonder. But if one had to be known for just one song, what a song to be known for, and what a story behind it. A late bloomer, Cohn drifted into Memphis in his late 20s, wondering why he still hadn’t been struck by creative lightning. That was where he encountered a seasoned black church musician named Muriel Davis Wilkins, who really did play every Friday at the Hollywood Café, where there really was catfish on the table and gospel in the air. Her son, himself a musician, would later recall that she never charged a church for her talents. Sensing that Cohn was lonely and depressed, Muriel took the budding young talent under her great maternal wing and invited him to join her on stage. Cohn likes to joke that she had been playing “His Eye is On the Sparrow,” “Nearer My God to Thee,” and other “greatest hits of Hebrew school.” But “Amazing Grace” was one he knew, and they sang it together. When they were done, she said, “Child, you can go home and write those songs you been meaning to write.”

You couldn’t write a more quintessentially American origin story for a song: a wandering Jewish kid, finding himself in the heart of black gospel country, singing “Amazing Grace.” Although Muriel didn’t live to see this tune become a hit, she was able to hear the record it came from when he came back to Memphis to give her a private listening party. She liked them all, but “The one where you mention me? That’s the best one you got.”

When I saw Cohn live a few years ago, it seemed to me that in some sense he was still wandering, still searching. I hoped he would find what he sought, one day.

And now, below the fold, please enjoy the rest of the best!

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Gay men are in crisis, propose the editors of new essay collection Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual (available direct from publisher here). Not a crisis of oppression, but a crisis for the contributors far more terrifying: a crisis of boredom.

Once confident in their social role as taboo breakers and deviants on the margins of polite society, gay men today have won the right to perform normalcy. They are the recipients of unlimited political privilege, cultural pandering, and medical tech designed to save them from themselves. At the same time, they find themselves in a new caste system of sexual deviancy, expected to defer to identity groups ranked higher on the privilege ladder. Queer theory has gone mainstream, with the result that the rules of this caste system even contradict each other.

Where precisely does this leave yesterday’s deviants? What might an internal intervention into their crisis look like? Are they prepared for the fact that such an intervention might yield distinctly unflattering results? Does homosexuality have any intelligible purpose, any telos biological, cultural, or otherwise? Dare we ask if it ever did? Dare we ask if its current crisis might even “be constitutive of the thing itself”?

This is the terrain Inversion provocatively sets out to cover, though not towards a conservative goal per se. Although it allows some space for the straightforward traditional moral solution to the gay man’s conundrum, it is mostly shaped by voices rejecting it, yet more or less willing to admit the bleakness of the alternative. In this way, it functions as an attempt to reset the discourse to a dialogue primarily between honest trads and honest heathens.

Preliminary note #1: The editors provided me with a free review copy while aware that I am one of the aforementioned honest trads. A positive review was not required.

Preliminary note #2: This collection will be a useful resource for people interested in the recent history of ideas around homosexuality, as well as people interested in exploring actual diversity of thought around current cultural trends. Readers of mine who do academic, critical/journalistic, or even pastoral work in this realm might find it worth adding to their libraries. However, it is by design quite dark and at times quite graphic. So, caveat emptor.

There are a dozen essays in this collection, some of which held my attention better than others. (The final entry isn’t strictly an essay but more of a Proustian semi-autobiographical semi-fictional experiment. In my judgment, it doesn’t succeed as non-fiction or fiction, but then I’m not the target audience for Proust either.) Since space doesn’t permit a full treatment of all the collection’s themes and sub-themes, this review will focus on the three running threads that struck me as most salient: community, identity, and suffering.

Co-editor Pierre d’Alancaisez contributes “Freedom of Disassociation,” a charmingly morose reflection on gay “community,” or the lack thereof. It’s been observed many times that “LGBT community” is a contradiction in terms, but d’Alancaisez asserts that gay men are ill-constituted even for community with each other, narcissistic and irresponsible creatures that they are. This elevates the essay beyond yet another retread of LGB without the T talking points.

Also, like several pieces here, it’s a refreshing attack on the gay propaganda industrial complex which shields young gay men from having to confront their actual history. The supposed homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard, for example, is the quintessential gay myth that won’t die, even despite being debunked by a gay journalist. As the gaytekeepers openly admitted in their own words, Shepard was “too important, both as an individual and as a symbol,” with a “sacrosanct” place in American history. (I’ve written here about the interesting parallels between the gaytekeepers and a certain mainline form of Christianity that insists on the “higher truth” of Jesus’ life while treating the truth of the gospels as mere details.)

As a side note from my own research on intra-church “gay wars,” I recall once watching a Christian conference talk framed as “baby’s first gay history” for a naive young audience. The presenter put himself forward as a celibate gay Christian, but he was clearly a willing foot soldier in the pink propaganda war. Among other things, he held his listeners spellbound with the tale of a tragic arson incident in 1970s New Orleans which destroyed a gay hangout spot. The prime suspect turned out to be a disgruntled patron, a fact the presenter smoothly omitted. It is a sad fact that unapologetically practicing gay men are sometimes more honest about this history than men who fancy themselves standard-bearers (after some fashion, it’s not always clear) of a Christian sexual ethic. Hence the usefulness of work like this collection even for Christian readers.

My main criticism of d’Alancaisez here is that he presents his thesis as a rebuttal of Anita Bryant’s old line about how gays “recruit” (since they can’t reproduce). For this to be true, there would have to be such a meaningful concept as the gay “community,” and he argues (correctly) that no such concept exists. I respond that d’Alancaisez and Bryant are not contradictory but rather feeling different parts of the pink elephant. I remember once drawing the unpleasant attention of a mob outside a Planned Parenthood where a brave young woman was trying to share her story of gender detransition. This pathetic motley crew of young people apparently deemed it worth skipping work on a weekday for this “community” activity. They made a whole day of it too, complete with pizza and “music” blaring from a speaker. Perhaps the lesbians really hated the gay men who really hated the men in dresses, but it appeared at least in the moment that they were all having rather a good time together. Just because there is no honor among thieves does not mean they’re incapable of effectively pooling their resources towards the shared goal of stealing children’s innocence.

Other essays here do more exploration of the various political, cultural, or artistic ways gay men have formed “community” pockets over the decades, attempting to see if there’s anything at all meaningful to be salvaged beyond the one very obvious thing that, well, brings them together. A recurring theme is the unquestioned assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes made explicit—that unfettered erotic energy is the lifeblood of the creative self. Through this lens, the traditional sexual ethic appears as a threat to drain away that lifeblood, leaving a drab, uninspired Puritan shell of oneself behind. Oh God, make me anything, but please don’t make me BORING.

This idea finds its most flamboyant expression in Travis Jeppesen’s lament for the lost transgressive art of “gay shame,” which among other things declares that having copious amounts of sex is a necessary precondition to being “any kind of artist.” But as a good friend of mine colorfully put it when we were discussing this, copious sex is only truly generative within the parameters of the Torah, and refraining from sex when appropriate is generative in its own right. The decline of Oscar Wilde is instructive here, as drawn in films like The Happy Prince, in which the literary icon pisses away his last days on booze and boys while inventing variations on the fiction that he’s completed and sold a new masterwork.

The contributors lodge protests in various keys of the contemporary notion of “gay identity,” preferring to shift the focus to the sexual act itself. Yet at least some of them still want to retain an idea that ongoingly practicing that act constitutes “being true to oneself,” as Roger Lancaster’s essay says in so many words. This insistence is curious given Lancaster’s equally confident assertion that gay identity “is not something that exists, a fixed, fast-frozen thing.”

In this context I find it interesting to note that gay provocateur Quentin Crisp, that most colorful icon of “being yourself, no matter what they say,” was known to say in his usual cheeky fashion that homosexuals are not “real people.” This is dramatized in the film An Englishman in New York, in a scene where a lesbian stands up to chide Crisp for this verbiage during one of his performances. She admonishes him to “be more careful,” and he agrees, but he maintains that “I do think of myself as artificial, as an invention.” Who was the true Quentin Crisp? It seemed that even Quentin Crisp didn’t know.

Young Israeli philosopher Ran Heilbrunn’s essay “Abolish Queer Theory!” proposes that queer theory and traditional sex moralism are two sides of the same coin, each “burdening” and functionally desexualizing the sexual act by “reading values and ideas into the sexual realm.” Au contraire, values do exist in the sexual realm whether we would like them to or not, making certain acts objectively sacred and others objectively perverse. But this follows from the inherent nature and telos of the sex organs, as opposed to those “values” conjured out of thin air in the precise shape of the queer theorist’s masturbatory fantasies. Heilbrunn also fails to understand Christianity as an incarnational religion, within which we are in fact designed to experience an intensification of physical pleasure when that pleasure is appropriately circumscribed. Indeed, despite all the stereotypes, actual Puritan literature is quite lustily sex-positive.

Still, Heilbrunn’s contribution retains academic and entertainment value as a spirited assault on postmodernism and all its pomps. Tracing the evolution of queer theory from its birth among the “screaming queens” of the 1970s to its present-day academic inanities, Heilbrunn diagnoses it as at root “a paranoid persecution complex.” The calls to “abolish” all societal norms and indeed society itself are an attempt to shift the blame for a sexuality “mired in jealousy, aggression, and obsession.” All of human culture becomes the scapegoat “for the undeniable pain and suffering of sexual non-conformity.” When leading queer theorist Michael Warner sets out to read his personal oppression into every civilizational document, he arrogantly casts himself “as Western culture’s eternal victim.”

Though Heilbrunn does not draw this connection, he touches here on the precise place where indeed all attempts to situate the gay rights movement in a genealogical straight line from Christianity will fail. For within Christianity, there is only one eternal Victim, and he is not Michael Warner.

Stephen Adubato’s essay “The Deception of Orientation Essentialism” stands out as the only contribution acknowledging the Christian case for celibacy, within the frame of Catholic natural law. Adubato lays his own traditionalist Catholic cards on the table upfront, though he pauses for a time-wasting side comment that the opposite view could be “reasonably” argued. But the piece on the whole is a welcome counterweight, and it reflects well in turn on the editors that they believed such was needed. Adubato puts the pastoral yet frank voice of Cardinal Ratzinger in conversation with Camille Paglia’s equally frank sex-realist hedonism, suggesting not only that they are each other’s proper opponents but that they are the only perspectives worth significant discourse bandwidth. Mushy middle-dwellers — from secular consumerist gays to progressive “Christian” gays — market themselves to “normies” by presenting gayness as a way of being while glossing over the sodomitic act. Neither Ratzinger nor Paglia will allow them off the hook so easily.

Nowhere has this deceptive marketing been more blatant (or more culturally successful) than in the AIDS history racket. In this collection’s spirit of exposing gay propaganda, Adubato rightly scorns the manipulative tactics of activist groups like ACT UP, which built their authoritarian brand on blaming every establishment for the epidemic except the gay establishment. (By contrast, Randy Shilts at least had the integrity to make an equal-opportunity anti-establishment case in And the Band Played On.) It was in fact the opposite of “hateful” for Cardinal O’Connor to preach celibacy, the one sure-fire way for gay men to spare themselves from the disease. But in order for the wheels of the pink propaganda machine to keep turning, he had to become the enemy. Figures like him were the answer to the question provocatively asked by another contributor to this collection, David Moulton: “If gays are the new Jews, who were the Nazis supposed to be?”

At the same time that they were insistently shutting out voices of spiritual authority, homosexuals demanded substitute salvation from the medical industrial complex. Though early treatments ironically proved worse than the disease, the PrEP drug would eventually emerge as the gay man’s escape from the consequences of risky sex. As the plague and its victims drift out of living memory, new generations live by the promise of modern medical tech that reality needn’t inhibit their self-actualization. Though not sharing Adubato’s traditionalist stance, Moulton does share his contempt for this paternalistic biopolitics—Big Brother keeping gay men at heel by promising to save them from themselves. His contribution “Towards a Gay Art of Suffering” connects his suspicion of this “utopian project” with the “endless biomedical interventions” thrust upon us during COVID.

Moulton develops his anti-utopian thesis from a literary angle, lambasting contemporary work that airbrushes out the sad griminess of “LGBT” life. He is especially unnerved by little children’s books that make gender transition appear fun and cute. At the same time, he too-generously forgives the people who write such books and stock them in libraries, supposing that they don’t intend to “exploit children sexually” but are simply too hasty to shield hypothetically gay children from pain. Whether the authors are sexually fixated on children or not, the conservative would argue this literature is designed to normalize that which is fundamentally abnormal, and as such it is corrupting little children’s natural intuitions (“A boy can’t marry another boy!”) And whether the children themselves are being viewed as potential “recruits” or potential “allies,” the point is to flood their plastic brains early and often with propaganda protesting too much that This Is Normal.

Moulton traces his own adolescent awakening through gay cult classic works like Jean Genet’s masturbatory prose poem Our Lady of the Flowers, which hardly conveyed the message that This Is Normal but seduced the sheltered Moulton by exoticizing sexual deviance. Genet wrote the autobiographical work in prison for “indecency,” constructing it as a series of stream-of-consciousness fantasies about the various wretched characters of his street life. Moulton correctly predicts the conservative assessment that this was simply a “snootier” form of literary seduction than today’s lowbrow offerings (a seduction that bore sad fruit in the phase of his own life when he was turning tricks on the streets of San Francisco to pay rent). It also must be said that merely being highbrow doesn’t make a work valuable even as art, and that a compulsive obsession with sex is counterproductive to artistic and moral goals alike.

But Moulton still wants to argue that Genet’s work, like the work of other favorite authors, retains the value of honesty about gay suffering. Even more provocatively, he proposes that Genet is “heeding Jesus’ call to love the least among us when he writes: ‘My loved ones will be those whom you would call ‘hoodlums of the worst sort.’” Genet “does Christianity one better,” even, because “he loves the most wretched not despite but because of their wretchedness.” Yet one cannot truly and completely love the wretched while loving the wretchedness that contains them in the prison of their own making (or inviting them into yours). Hence the well-worn cliché “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” which despite being a cliché is nonetheless conveying something importantly true. Genet’s “love” for the “hoodlums” is a possessive, rapacious simulacrum of love, a blend of pure objectification and gratification at finding souls who make him feel less isolated in his own wretchedness.

I initially mistyped the name of this essay as “towards an art of gay suffering,” an apt slip, as it is really the only kind of suffering in focus throughout Moulton’s piece. To the extent that art truthfully reflects sexual dysfunction, it does at least have the virtue of honesty over pure propaganda. But truly memorable “art of suffering” points to a suffering beyond the self-inflicted kind.

By way of a better example even from the shelves of relatively disposable gay lit, I would point to Andrew Holleran. In the epistolary framing prologue to Dancer From the Dance, the narrator somewhat channels Genet when he expresses his fascination with the “doomed queens” who drive their cars right off the cliff, the “fags who consider themselves worthless.” “It was those whom Christ befriended,” the character declares with feeling, “not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February! Those people bore me to DEATH!”

But Holleran’s work is not solely preoccupied by their debauchery. It is also haunted by the call to take on the burden of actually meaningful suffering, in the real world outside the prison of endless self-pleasuring. The narrator’s Southern correspondent is a friend who has escaped New York, that metaphorical prison, and reflects on how leaving the gay scene behind has freed him to participate in self-giving acts like the care of a sick elderly Cuban woman. In her room, there is “LIFE, not the hothouse, artificial, desperate life we led up there in Gotham, but LIFE as it is in all its complexity and richness.”

Holleran would return to that image in The Beauty of Men, which juxtaposes the narrator’s empty nocturnal pursuits with days spent caring for his paralyzed mother. Though dispiriting, this participation in his mother’s innocent suffering is still the real stuff of real “LIFE.” Not that this guides the work to an especially hopeful conclusion—it is still a gay novel, after all.

But if there is to be a hopeful conclusion to the actual real-life narratives shaping this essay collection, it would be in the channeling of their suffering into an others-focused self-abnegation. This isn’t the prescription recommended by Unherd’s Jarryd Bartle, who ends his review with a patronizing exasperation that these guys can’t seem to just settle down with a boyfriend and stop being so damn depressed. A little “sunlight, cardio, and tender affection” should cure what’s ailing them, he predicts. But this is a brave new world, and like Huxley’s heroine they demand the right to be unhappy.

Pierre d’Alancaisez’s essay concludes that the gay man is best understood “freely disassociating from a community that he is no longer able to imagine, deserving neither pity nor rescue.” Indeed, none of us do, but they are offered anyway, and with them that Love which is joy and beauty, which we have sought in a thousand streets and for which we have wept and clawed our pillows.

When Michael Jackson was taken to court for alleged child molestation in 2005, the prosecution launched their case with what they thought was an unbeatable opening gambit: rolling the entire “Living with Michael Jackson” documentary, in which British journalist Martin Bashir had gained unprecedented access to the superstar’s inner sanctum. Over nearly two hours, Bashir holds on for the bizarre theme park ride that is life with Michael Jackson—buying out a flea market, touring the world, dodging throngs of fans and paparazzi, handling (or mishandling) three small children whose mothers apparently bore them for the sole purpose of being adopted by Jackson. Jackson is coy about these unsavory paternity arrangements, just like he’s coy about how many plastic surgeries he’s had. Just two nose jobs, he insists, but of course Bashir knows this is a crock, and of course Jackson knows that he knows. They are practicing a slow dance, the world’s most famous man and the tabloid journalist circling him like the world’s most patient shark.

Amazingly, the whole thing had been Jackson’s idea. His record sales were declining, and ever since his first messy scandal in 1993, he’d never shaken off the swirling suspicion about his open secret obsession with young boys. But if he flung wide the gates of Neverland, the sprawling California ranch he had converted into his own private Disneyworld, he reasoned that it would show the world how magical and innocent it all was. He especially wanted the journalist to meet a boy he had helped, an “underprivileged” young cancer survivor named Gavin Arvizo.

As the starstruck Gavin earnestly praises Jackson, something feels off about the whole tableau. The boy rests his head on the man’s shoulder, the camera lingering on their intertwined fingers as Bashir starts asking uncomfortable pointed questions. Has Gavin ever shared a bed with Jackson? Well, not quite. They say Jackson gave up the bed and slept on the floor. But couldn’t Gavin have stayed in one of the place’s numerous spare rooms, or spare houses? Yes…but all kids who visit Neverland “want to stay with me.” Midway through the awkward scene, you can watch Jackson’s eyes and see the moment when he realizes he’s made a misstep in this dance.

A year later, all hell broke loose when young Gavin accused the star of “lewd acts,” as well as plying the boy with alcohol and pornography. A decade earlier, Jackson had hushed up the family of his most dangerous young accuser, Jordan Chandler, to the tune of $20 million. But he wouldn’t be able to spend this problem away. The Arvizos would have their day in court.

And yet, as the jury watched the scene from the Bashir documentary where Jackson teaches the journalist how to moonwalk, the entire courtroom started to bob their heads to the beat of “Billie Jean.” Even senior deputy DA Ron Zonen couldn’t help tapping along. He hardly realized what he was doing until the chief DA leaned over and hissed in his ear, “Would you stop moving your foot?”

It was then that journalist Diane Dimond began to worry. For twelve years, she had prided herself on being a thorn in Jackson’s side, undeterred by threats veiled or overt. Now she had a front row seat to what could be the crashing end of the whole saga. The End of Michael Jackson. Or…perhaps not. Perhaps they would spend week after week hearing evidence and counter-evidence, examination and cross-examination, only for the man sitting statue-still in the middle of it all to get up and moonwalk away.

Five long months later, when the verdict came down, “Not guilty,” the fans outside started screaming. A young preschool teacher, who had quit her job to make a pilgrimage to the trial and won a drawing to be inside the courtroom, collapsed in a dead faint. A weeping woman released a pair of doves. Asked for comment, Jackson’s imposing ace lawyer Tom Mesereau said with conviction, “The man’s innocent. He always was.”

For young Gavin Arvizo and his family, the message was clear: If you come at the King, you’d best not miss.

There were no cameras allowed inside the courtroom, which meant that people’s impressions of the trial were filtered through print. But a new Netflix docuseries, The Verdict, has recreated it through witness testimonies, court sketches, and archival footage. The series arrives as if on cue to play gritty true crime counterweight to the gauzy biopic Michael, which is currently soaring towards a global record-breaking 1 billion at the box office.

Taken together, film and series encapsulate the perpetual Rorschach test that is Michael Jackson’s public image. Clearly, his fans aren’t going anywhere. Indeed, their ranks are swelling with new members too young to remember the 80s, or even the 90s. But so, too, are the ranks of Jackson’s alleged abuse victims, as yet another family has come forward just this year with four siblings’ distinct, lurid accounts of violation. Try as everyone might, neither narrative seems able to drive the other out of the public square.

Did he or didn’t he? Now, as then, it depends on who you ask.

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In Netflix’s documentary Inside the Manosphere, there is a wrenching scene between mild-mannered host Louis Theroux and two fanboys of Justin Waller, one of the odious streamers Theroux has set out (with mixed success) to deflate. Unlike their idol, these young men come across as nice lads, albeit hopelessly lost. One of them reveals that he first moved to Miami to try to “make it big” when he was wrestling with grief over his brother’s suicide. At first, he was living out of his car, “feeling sorry for myself, crying every night.” Then, he tells us, he had an epiphany: “Maybe, as men, we’re meant to suffer. We’re not meant to be happy.”

That sentiment has been echoed almost word for word by Braden Peters, the young streamer known as “Clavicular” who has become infamous for “looksmaxxing”: a macabre regimen of self-harm deceptively pitched as a form of self-improvement, towards the ultimate goal of making your face as beautiful as possible. Most gruesomely, this regimen includes lightly tapping one’s face with a hammer to induce hypertrophy as the bones heal. There are also various drugs that are supposed to boost this whole process if you inject yourself with them. The streamer has undergone multiple surgeries to reshape his jaw and nose too. None of this sounds like fun at all, but as he explains solemnly in one interview, “Men aren’t supposed to be happy.” Most things in life that a man does to improve himself aren’t designed for his happiness, after all. One doesn’t go to the gym to be “happy.” Peters sees his “looksmaxxing” program as something like a particularly extreme gym regimen. It’s grueling, but he undergoes it to “ascend” to the highest level he can as a man.

In isolation, one could agree that young Peters is expressing a true saying. As Job says, “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.” I can actually see why certain young men would be drawn to this. They crave an ancient tonic against complacent, soft modernity. They don’t want to be carried through life on flowery beds of ease. They want a challenge. This is the need Jordan Peterson rose to meet in his prime. To quote his famous catchphrase: “Pick up your cross and carry it up the Gawddamn hill!”

But the tortured professor would go on to collapse very publicly under the weight of his own cross. In his absence, all manner of unsavory characters have rushed in, offering lost boys a simulacrum of tough masculinity stripped of anything resembling integrity or virtue. There’s a moment in the Netflix documentary where Justin Waller talks about how these boys constantly stop him on the street to thank him for “helping” them. It was a depressing reminder of how often Peterson used to say the same.

The “looksmaxxing” trend is perhaps the most disturbing variation on the theme of snake-oil masculinity, sadder and more twisted even than the decadence sold by an Andrew Tate figure. Although Peters does indulge in various decadent pleasures (drugs, women), it’s been observed that his program of fleshly mortification presents more like a twisted form of ascetic monasticism. It sounds insane to ordinary people, but he counts his sufferings not worthy to be compared to the glories of “ascending” and “mogging” (that is, upstaging the less beautiful faces in your vicinity). He has even said he would gladly accept a shorter life if it meant he could mog more. Earlier this year he was hospitalized with a drug overdose, but he immediately proceeded to get back on his beat and open a new club after being discharged. “The worst part of tonight,” he informed the public in a selfie caption after the ordeal, “was my face descending from the life support mask.”

There is an unintentional poetry in the fact that while this grim Digital Age Picture of Dorian Gray is unraveling in front of us, we are simultaneously watching the slow public death of former senator Ben Sasse—from a disease whose treatment has, among other things, ravaged the skin of his face.

Though he appears better made-up in other contexts, Sasse was bleeding freely throughout his Interesting Times conversation with Ross Douthat. For all his self-deprecation, Sasse still retains his boyish good looks, but Peters would say he is “descending.” Though odds are that the former senator isn’t even on the boy’s radar. The lack of knowledge appears mutual: When Sasse joked that Douthat must have invited him “for my looks,” Douthat joked back that they’d tried and failed to get Clavicular, and Sasse confessed blissful ignorance. Douthat pronounced this a “small mercy” and moved on.

When Douthat asked Sasse how his face was feeling, he replied cheerfully, “Nuclear.” The visual Passion parallels were inescapable. Douthat said later that he felt as if he was looking into the face of Christ. So are we all, as Sasse chooses to put the daily trials of his white martyrdom on display. He is, one might say, suffering as efficiently as is Christianly possible. I’m reminded of how Fr. Richard Neuhaus described his impressions of the painfully slow death of Pope John XXIII. As the pope declined, regular news bulletins reported that he was offering up each day’s suffering for another group of suffering people—cancer sufferers, mothers with difficult pregnancies, homeless refugees, and so forth. Neuhaus, a young minister at the time, was powerfully affected by how this holy man was wasting none of his pain.

Sasse frames his trials in Protestant language, but like the former Holy Father, he in his own way is offering them up—for God’s glory, for the world’s edification, and for his own sanctification. This suffering, he would say, is purposeful. It is meaningful. And it is uniting him ever more deeply with Christ’s suffering.

This is the necessary complement to the truth that men are born to suffer: They are not born to suffer meaninglessly, nor to suffer alone. They are created by a God who offers up Himself as the perfect pattern of suffering manhood.

Suffering with a cheerful smile is not a necessary condition of suffering well, but it is difficult not to notice that Sasse appears consistently joyful through his various public appearances, while young Braden Peters appears consistently miserable. Both men are suffering intensely—Sasse from his mortal illness, Peters from whatever inner torment is driving him to destroy himself. But only one is suffering alone.

Peters is not unaware of Christianity, but he declines to recognize it as the true antidote to an emasculating modernity: a way of life that prepares men for life’s inevitable trials, but on God’s terms, not their own. When Michael Knowles tried to nudge him towards the contemplation of something deeper than “mogging,” it emerged that Peters can only conceive of a spiritual practice as something like deciding to teach yourself French or take up the trombone—a hypothetically nice, cool thing to do some day, when you have the time and energy. Most people lack such time and energy, so he encourages them to do as he does: put it off for another day. But as Ben Sasse understands well, we are not promised another day.

There’s a moving little book by the Christian musician Michael Card called The Walk, about his close friend and mentor William Lane. Lane was a formidable biblical studies professor who became like a second father to the budding young artist. Decades later, when Lane was diagnosed with cancer, he and his wife chose to relocate and spend his last days near Card’s family in Tennessee. Explaining this choice, Lane told Card, “I want to show you how a Christian man dies.”

By tragic coincidence, Card’s teenage nephew was in the final stages of his own cancer battle at the time. Lane took it upon himself to spend as much time as he could with the boy. On his last visit, he opened up a favorite psalm, Psalm 91. Card reflects candidly on how curious it is that Lane took such comfort from David’s bold assurance of being spared from “deadly pestilence and plague.” Neither the dying man nor the dying boy he prayed over had been saved from anything. But they believed they would be saved through it.

Lane lived just long enough to participate in the boy’s funeral—barely able to stand, but managing to deliver a prayer and a last reading of the psalm. He died two months later.

The gift William Lane gave to Card, to Card’s nephew, and to all who were with him in his final days, is the gift Ben Sasse now gives to all of us: the gift of a true manly suffering that has not gone to waste. But I fear that those who most desperately need that gift have no men in their lives who can offer it to them—or else, perhaps, they have shut those men out. Maybe one day, they will understand. One day, they will see how a Christian man dies.

This spring, an American YouTube entrepreneur and his wife, accustomed to turning every other aspect of their life into Content, decided to do the same with their birth journey. After the initial reaction video, the gender reveal, the ultrasound showing the baby developed to a quite visibly babyish stage, they were crushed to learn he probably had Trisomy 21. I will not link to the video they subsequently made where the diagnosis was confirmed. The YouTuber opens the report on his phone while his wife is already crying in fearful anticipation. When he reads it out, she begins wailing. The contrast between her cries and his attempt to keep up a painfully stilted little stream of Content Creator patter for the camera is excruciating. They’d been hoping for a “little ray of sunlight,” he tells us, but this was obviously not that.

This week, he made a long Twitter post explaining to his audience that they had made “the very difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy.” The whole post is just as eerie and depressing as you would imagine, including an obligatory “we appreciate you” to fans who have autism, Down’s syndrome, etc. and might find this announcement disturbing (you think?) He’s glad their parents didn’t kill them in utero, but he and his wife have simply made a different choice. They hope for “a better outcome” in the future. After the backlash, he returned with an indignant followup congratulating himself for the “bravery” to start this “conversation.”

Richard Dawkins once said that when he affirmed the basic commonsensical goodness of targeted abortion for children with disabilities, he was saying nothing controversial. He was simply saying the quiet part out loud for all the parents who share exactly his view but are a little too embarrassed to admit it in public. I thought Dawkins’s view was repulsive, but I also didn’t think he was that wrong about the social reality. In the US, it’s estimated that something like 2/3 of babies who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome are aborted. (Meanwhile, in Iceland, only a couple of babies per year will survive the diagnosis to birth.)

The eugenicist pundit Richard Hanania is always lurking around the corner to chime in ghoulishly whenever there’s a new discourse about killing disabled babies. Right on cue he popped up again here to inform everyone that only the super-duper “religious” would say this couple is wrong, but thankfully, most normal people are ignoring them. Richard himself has shared with the class that having children of his own has only made him more pro-choice, and it’s just lucky that he and his wife never got a bad prenatal diagnosis. Phew.

Now, I don’t actually believe Richard is correct about this. I’m positive you could find cases of couples who were not super-duper Christian or religious but simply had a strong human intuition that killing their baby was not a thing they should do. As we’ve also seen in the euthanasia discourse, various disability rights groups even pride themselves on making their case without recourse to religious principles. (Whether they’re borrowing without wanting to admit it is a separate question.)

What is true, however, is that it is very difficult for couples to choose life outside of a collective body willing to make that choice together with them. I don’t just mean economically difficult. This couple, the Ridgways, are multi-millionaires. One of the first videos to pop up if you visit their channel is a tour of their million-dollar lake house. Suffice it to say, theirs was not a decision made out of financial distress. They do not need friends with money. What they need, and apparently lack, are friends willing and able to normalize suffering.

Heartbreakingly, it appears that the people in the Ridgways’ life—friends, medical professionals—told them the precise opposite of what they needed to hear. Instead of “You’re not weird to want this baby. This is a good thing. Let’s celebrate together,” they heard, “This will ruin your life. This will ruin your child’s life. There’s a simple way to make this go away.”

By chance, yesterday the algorithm fed me this clip from a podcast with Sam Harris and Winston Marshall, in which Harris rehashes his usual complaints about society’s perplexing inability to move on from the Abrahamic religions. Marshall puts it to him that the story of Christ’s passion has endured because “it is the ultimate story of suffering, and suffering is the human universal.” But it’s more than a story of a suffering, Harris counters. It’s a story of human sacrifice. And goodness knows everyone moved on from that long ago. Didn’t we?

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Happy Memorial Day. I never do this, but since I’ve gained so many readers since this essay was first published back in 2023, and since it’s always been one of my personal favorites, I’m dusting it off today. It’s free to share, so share away.

My childhood was unusually defined by radio. We didn’t have cable, so the time other kids spent watching television was time I spent listening to kids’ radio programs. My favorite was a particularly long-running, popular show called Adventures in Odyssey, a small-town sitcom in evangelical Christian perspective. It wasn’t high art, but it was clever and earnest and well-presented. Among other wholesome things it gave me, various episodes instilled a healthy respect for American veterans. The writers weren’t interested in complexifying simple values like patriotism, duty, and courage, for which in hindsight I’m grateful. I was a child, and I didn’t need this stuff to be complicated. More nuance would come later, but it was important that my foundation was laid without cynicism.

The show first aired in 1987, when Vietnam was still a fresh wound and World War II was still within living memory for the fictional town’s wise older characters. Several throwback episodes revisited those memories, Old Hollywood style. But the couple episodes handling Vietnam had a different flavor. They didn’t give the listener a “worm’s-eye view” of the Vietnam conflict. The writers knew there would be no good way to do this without making the show too grim for a child. Instead, they explored the memories of the families left behind—the man whose big brother chose not to dodge the draft, the widow whose husband didn’t live to meet his son.

Even these episodes, sad as they were, remained consistently patriotic. The noble big brother, modeled on the writer’s own brother, is contrasted in memory with a scruffy, draft-dodging hippie friend. The widow delivers a stirring Memorial Day speech pushing back on the anti-war sentiment her son has encountered in school. The take-home message is that however messy the conflict, honor and courage still mean something, should still be memorialized.

I still believe in that message. And yet, in revisiting the episode about the war widow this weekend, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the character of the teacher who gives his student an anti-Vietnam book. Unaware that the student’s mother is a war widow, he launches into a bit of heavy-handed dialogue about how all the soldiers “went over there and died for nothing,” or worse, became murderers. The town’s father figure, a World War II veteran, later pays a visit to chide the teacher for the damage he’s unknowingly caused. Predictably, it emerges that the teacher lost a brother in the war. One really feels sorry for everyone in the story—both the teacher whose grief is inevitably mixed with anger and the boy now haunted by dreams where his father is accused of being a murderer.

There’s a philosophy of war within which even though the boy’s father was not a murderer, he was still, in some sense, indirectly complicit in murder. By participating in the system, in the “machine,” he still struck a terrible bargain. He became a cog in a wheel. He lost himself. Then he died, for nothing.

The episode rejects this philosophy to place the focus back on the individual soldier, the individual honorable man who lives and dies with his own hands clean. By Memorial Day, the son has lost his appetite for battle reenactments. So, for the first time, his mother stands up and reads her husband’s last letter, where he anticipates what will be written about the war in future years. He can only write from what he has seen and done, and all he’s ever seen and done has been about fighting evil and protecting the innocent. These are the memories he shares. This is the legacy he leaves.

But I still understand that teacher. I understand him, because I hear in his voice the same dull ache that I hear in the voices of my own generation. Like the war writer Phil Klay in this essay passage about visiting the graves of 90s kids at Arlington, he can’t simply grieve. He can’t simply memorialize:

Their mission, we were told, “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” They would conduct “supervise, train and assist” missions. They wouldn’t constitute “boots on the ground.”

So when they die, our government does what former defense secretary Robert Gates calls “semantic backflips” to avoid saying that our troops are in combat. At a recent press conference where journalists repeatedly asked the Pentagon press secretary whether or not we were “in combat,” he had the unenviable job of explaining that, well, they’re “in harm’s way” or “in combat situations,” or “they have found themselves under fire.”

Such evasions grate on me, especially around Memorial Day. This year’s war dead—nine so far—didn’t slip, trip, and find themselves in combat. We sent them there to fight a war on our behalf, whether we like to acknowledge that or not. They went, they fought, and they died.

So my sadness this weekend, the same sadness I felt walking through Arlington, is mixed with something else. I can’t simply reflect on the dead of my war. I can’t simply memorialize.

Last year, I had a high school student who was very earnestly considering a career in the Marines. He talked quietly about the videogames he’d grown up on, the things he looked up to in veterans, the longing to experience the brotherhood of war. A gentle, thoughtful kid. Privately, I hoped he would take a different path. When he decided to go to trade school instead, I breathed a sigh of relief.

There’s a cliché that only two men ever died for you: Jesus Christ and the American soldier. Growing up, I heard and earnestly loved a number of very well-meaning songs built on that premise. Later, I came to feel an unease around them—not because my respect for the dead American soldier had grown any dimmer, but because my understanding of his death had grown sadder. Because he wasn’t Jesus, and because his wasn’t the blood that could take away the sins of the world, or the nation.

Did the soldiers of Vietnam die for nothing? Did the soldiers of my war, and every other sad, murky, messy war we’ve ever tried to fight, die for nothing? How do you answer these things, quantify them? And as you try to answer, how do you look the widow in the eye, and the widow’s son?

To do this, you would have to define “nothing.” And “something.” And in trying to do this, you would find that there is no one way to do this. A man enters a war of dubious origins, with dubious outcomes. He does what he can. He loves his family. He loves his brothers in arms. One day, he gives his life for them. Is that “nothing”? He didn’t have to fight this war. It was not a necessary war. It was not a necessary death. It was a death that, through another career choice, could have been avoided as honorably as it was embraced. But was it “nothing”?

Perhaps not, in his case, because his death had meaning through sacrifice. But what of the soldier who’s robbed of such meaning in death, who never does anything heroic, unless one counts the simple act of risking a meaningless death? What of him?

We remember him. Today, we remember him. That is all we can do.

Greetings, dear readers! Things have been quiet hereabouts, unusually so, for which I humbly ask everyone’s forgiveness. This piece will be a long overdue offering for my paying subscribers. If you’re a recent free subscriber, I hope the free preview piques your curiosity. My posting is typically more frequent, but I’ve been occupied with well and truly moving into my newly purchased home, a whirlwind process very graciously assisted by local friends. I want to write something about becoming/being a homeowner, but for now I’m just wandering around in a daze and pinching myself.

While I’ve been getting settled, I’ve been following an entertaining little scandal in the world of literary publishing. The magazine Granta had a deal that its website would publish the finalists for the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. After they were announced and published, three out of five of these entries came under suspicion of using AI. Each was submitted from a different region of the world. The Caribbean entry was so bad it went viral. It was “written” by a Jamir Nazir from Trinidad and Tobago, whose previous literary achievements seem to consist mostly of some terrible romantic poetry. Entitled “The Serpent in the Grove,” it’s a mish-mash of “exotic” prose and incoherent metaphors wrapped around half a plot—so, a perfect imitation of what currently passes for literature among the sort of people who judge this sort of thing.

One can’t decide whether to mock Mr. Nazir or thank him for exposing just how unserious the whole “literary” enterprise has become in postmodern times. The story was briefly taken down but appears to have been restored. We’ll see how long it lasts. Read it here for now if you want a good chuckle. And if you really want to risk spewing your morning coffee, read this old Onion gem that’s getting a new lease on life as people are reminded of it, in which advice column questions are answered by an Elderly Black Woman As Depicted By A Sophomore Creative Writing Major.

The plot has thickened as both the Commonwealth prize committee and Granta have made laughably inadequate official statements. Most amusingly, Granta said they had been consulting AI to try to figure out whether the work was AI or not—a long and complex process, apparently.

But among the mockery, I’ve seen a few responses from readers who somehow didn’t pick up the artificial tells and were genuinely disappointed to hear about the scandal. They had connected emotionally with the piece. AI or not, it made them feel something. And once a piece of writing can do that, how much does it matter?

As the AI writing debate has evolved, I’ve heard this question more than once, as well as people asking how much it matters as long as a piece “conveys information effectively.” They don’t see a problem with liberal AI use in a variety of contexts, including non-fiction books or even sermons. Sometimes, this gets framed in strange class warfare terms, as if an amorphous elite “they” are painting AI as evil so that the proletariat can’t seize and advance with this new tech. But with increasingly more examples of “elite” writers shamelessly using it themselves, I’m unconvinced by this framing. The rot is setting in everywhere, Sam Altman’s assurances to the contrary. So now seems like a good moment to ask, “What is writing actually for?”

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The First Law of Content Creation is that you have no way of predicting what pieces of your content will be ignored and what will explode. One day you can sweat and strain like Van Gogh over your little masterpiece and have everyone miss your artistry. The next day you can dash something off in five minutes and come back an hour later to find it going viral, along with the inevitable small dumpster fires in your comments.

That second kind of day was my day yesterday. It all started with a comment on some much smaller-scale threading I’d done about male loneliness and Christian vocation. A whole topic unto itself, sparked by some very sad breaking church news about a conservative Anglican minister who was burdened with being a poster boy for “gay Christian” celibacy and has now confessed a moral failing. The basic gist of my thread was that unhappy celibacy can make a ministry leadership vocation imprudent, and this is one of many reasons why it’s important not to make earnestly restless Christian men feel inferior for not applying their gifts in a “ministry”-specific context. I’ll probably develop those thoughts some more, but I prefer to wait a minute on writing a full Take when heavy news like this is barely a couple days old.

Anyway, one of my most annoying regular followers decided to do some armchair psychologizing and declare that that thread was really all about me justifying my own “desire not to marry.” He then asked me (“serious question”) whether if I were Catholic, I would be a nun. I suppose I should have been mad, but it was just too ludicrously funny. To keep the joke going, another reader consulted Grok and concluded that I do look pretty good in a habit. Sound of Music references ensued. Then again, it was noted that for Maria, being a nun actually was a viable strategy for meeting a man. Let the record show that I too would accept marrying a young Christopher Plummer as the solution to my problem.

Where was I? Oh yes, so, inspired by this fatuous bit of psychologizing, I decided to write a thread solely devoted to Reasons Why Your Single Friends Aren’t Married Yet. “Straight” and “Christian” were unspoken but implied modifiers. I have various thoughts about how best to serve people who aren’t romantically inclined towards the opposite sex, but that wasn’t my focus here. Meanwhile, although some of these reasons are universal, I had a Christian audience in mind and wrote them from within a Christian frame, where premarital sex and marriage outside the faith are off the table. (I would also argue that deliberately childless marriage is off the table, but that’s a little hotter for some people to handle.) I had no great expectations for these musings. I was just irritated, and as I tend to do when I’m irritated, I posted through it.

As I write, this thread has accumulated thousands of likes, hundreds of bookmarks, and the aforementioned very lively replies. I should hasten to stress that comments have been overwhelmingly thoughtful, positive and encouraging, with various fellow singles thanking me for making them feel seen. It was a nice but strange new feeling for me, because I don’t do very much writing around this topic. The last time I touched on it hereabouts is here. Frankly, it’s a little personal, and I’m a little shy about personal essay-ing in general. Plus, I dread coming across as a whiner, which if I’m being brutally honest, some Professionally Single Christians kind of do. By whining I mean, for example, complaining when churches single out mothers on Mother’s Day and give them roses or something. Or guilt-tripping married couples for not “adopting” them like some kind of third wheel. I wish I was making this up. But things in this vein dominate much of the “Christian singleness” landscape, and it’s deeply embarrassing for those of us who are just trying to go about our normal single lives.

At the same time, I also think misconceptions can spring up about exactly what’s keeping us singles single. It can be assumed that this is something we’re all deliberately prolonging because we want a career more than we want a family, or because we simply like the freedom singleness offers. I don’t deny that we do find things to like about that freedom, but I speak for many people when I say it’s ongoingly touched with melancholy. To those who wonder, “Well in that case, why not just get married?” this is my attempt to start explaining why it’s not necessarily that simple. There were originally twelve “reasons,” but for tidiness, I have decided to collapse them into ten.

1. We missed the “school dating” boat.

Maybe we went to a high school where the pickings were slim. Maybe we were homeschooled and spent most of our social time hanging out with elderly folks, families, and little kids. Maybe we were just really awkward and nerdy, had no fashion sense, and never put ourselves out there on the teen dating market.

Then in college and/or graduate school, maybe we went to public universities where, for the Christian committed to not dating outside the faith, once again the pickings were slim. Or maybe we went to single-sex schools. One way or another, we missed this boat too.

2. We missed the “career dating” boat.

“In this economy,” we must all take the work we can get, and for many Christians this will look like taking work that doesn’t put them in ongoing contact with like-minded believing colleagues. They’re not teaching at a Christian university, working for a Christian magazine or think tank, or in other lines of work where they are surrounded by potentially dateable peers. And even if they are blessed to have “Christian ideas work,” it could be remote work that doesn’t provide many tangible mingling opportunities.

3. We missed the “church dating” boat.

Some of us simply didn’t grow up in churches where we had many opportunities to hang out with people of our own age. People raised in “big-box evangelical” subculture with youth groups etc. won’t be able to relate so much to this, but it was my own experience as someone raised in a very tiny splinter denomination where my fellow congregants were almost exclusively elderly. People might also be able to relate if they grew up in more conservative churches where social ties were built more family to family—which, to be clear, I don’t think is a bad thing at all. It just made it more likely that your first dating experience was going to happen somewhere else.

As for trying to date in “church pools” now, it’s a challenge for anyone north of 30 who looks around and sees congregations filled with mostly families, college kids, and older folks. This is particularly true in smaller towns. Once kids grow up, they tend to move away to school, move away to buy property, and if they don’t marry their high school sweethearts, they find love in another city.

4. We are regionally challenged.

But some of us never moved to the big cities, because honestly, we didn’t really want to. We preferred not to move across the country from our parents, if we could help it. We preferred to live in a town where we could own a car and drive it to all our errands and appointments in a timely fashion. We preferred rent that was under $2000 a month.

The tradeoff for all this is that we’ve never experienced what it’s like to “network” in the flesh with a critical mass of like-minded, young, upwardly mobile Christian peers in a city like New York, or Washington, D. C. We’re okay with this tradeoff. But when we occasionally touch down in one of these places to see how the other half lives, we wonder idly what could have been.

5. We don’t love the apps.

Look, it’s not that we’re totally closed. Maybe we’ll try them again, one of these days. But they’re time-consuming, and the nicer ones cost money. And they’re kind of soul-crushing.

6. We’re choosy.

This is the most complicated and delicate one to explain, and the one for which I think singles take the most heat. We’re often warned against having a “Disneyfied” view of romance in which we demand to be “swept off our feet” by our “soulmate.” We’re told that passion is overrated, that finding someone who checks all your boxes or shares your interests is overrated, that we should just be grateful if we meet a kind, decent fellow Christian who doesn’t outright turn us off.

I think this advice is reductive and misguided. And as I think anyone with some dating experience can attest, romantic attraction is a many-splendored, many-layered, and sometimes frankly mysterious thing. People can find an intellectual spark but not be drawn to each other physically. They can find each other physically attractive but realize for whatever complicated reason that their personalities aren’t meshing. They can struggle to find a commonality of tastes, of loves, of things that get them excitedly talking to whoever has the patience to listen. Or maybe they do share a number of tastes in common, but one feels an uncomfortable sense of perpetually having to catch up with the other. Of course, not all of these things will matter to everyone, but we are all wired differently. Those of us who spend our waking hours obsessively playing with ideas know that we need someone who can play with us. For intellectually inclined women, it’s particularly important to find a man who is neither intimidated by us nor full of self-importance (and experience has taught us that sometimes these are really the same thing).

Even a single variable, like physical attraction, has many facets. Maybe a man is drawn to a woman’s body but finds her voice robotic. Maybe a woman finds a man handsome but wishes he moved and spoke more confidently. Someone could say this sort of thing is being too picky, and as a relationship deepens you can see sides of a person that shift your perspective. That is certainly possible. But sometimes these things are simply not in our power to control or change, and it’s better to know ourselves, admit what we need, and admit when something isn’t working than to shame ourselves into painfully trying to make it work. Christians need to find ways of talking maturely but forthrightly about all this instead of insisting that it’s “all about the heart,” thus leaving a vacuum where pickup artists and other cynical influencers can rush in.

Finally, for those of us who take theology seriously, there are additional challenges that can present themselves in certain kinds of cross-denominational dating. As a Protestant, I am disinclined to date a Catholic, because if he’s a good Catholic he will need to require that our children be raised Catholic as well. And then even within conservative Protestantism, important conversations need to happen about whether, say, children will be baptized as infants. One happy couple I know sat down to hash out this question early in their dating process, because they came from traditions with different answers. Because they were mature and thoughtful and falling quickly in love, they reached an agreement, and they’re now having adorable babies and living happily ever after.

Lord, I see what you’ve done for them, etc.

7. We have scars.

Many of us hesitate to throw ourselves into the dating pool as energetically as we could because we have painful memories of serious relationships that didn’t work. Whatever the circumstances, whichever side broke things off, our biggest fear is repeating old mistakes and reopening old wounds. We simply can’t bear the thought of being hurt again, or of causing hurt. We realize we need to get over this and try again, but it’s easier said than done.

8. Our pool is shrinking.

The older we get, the less likely it is that we’ll find viable choices at all, and increasingly our pool will be dominated by men and women who may be godly but have a sexual history (digital or physical), or a marital history. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe the past is unredeemable, nor do I believe that all remarriage after divorce is unbiblical. I’ve seen friends and acquaintances find healing in such marriages after being abandoned. Unions between the never-married and the innocently divorced can be fruitful. It’s just a very different sort of landscape to navigate.

9. Men are waiting for stability.

Even if there is an understanding that the woman will keep up some sort of partial/remote work she enjoys, a traditional Christian man ideally hopes to provide well enough that his wife can devote herself to their children. The economy is not kind to such men. They’re not being consumeristic, they’re not just overly attached to their soy lattes and Netflix subscriptions, they’re trying to reach basically solid financial ground. Unless they either strike it very lucky very early or enter a career path with the promise of a payoff on the other side of debt, this will take time. And the longer it takes for them to find their feet, the more defeated they feel.

10. Women are waiting for men.

Meanwhile, traditional Christian women are not feminists by nature, even if they have careers and higher degrees. They’re still waiting for a man to make the first move. It just feels wrong, on some fundamental level, to ask him out on a date. Now if you’re on the apps, this sort of thing can get evened out a bit more, but even so, the discomfort persists.

Thus, the single non-feminist Christian woman without a spiritual vocation to celibacy finds herself in a paradoxical position: She wants to be led by a man, but in the absence of a man, she must proceed to take control of her own future as productively as possible—launching a career, buying property by herself, eventually caring for aging parents by herself. And as she settles into the rhythms of this life she never foresaw, she admits that in many ways it’s a good life. She grows used to it. She’s content. Content, but never quite complete.

So those are the ten reasons. Now for the “what you can do about it,” where “you” are not single and earnestly wondering how to help your single brethren and sistren.

First, just see us. It sounds basic, but it means a lot to be seen.

Next, while I recognize that some of our aforementioned embarrassing single siblings might have turned you off of trying to matchmake, I can tell you not all singles resent this! However, what I will say is that we do appreciate being known and understood well enough that you have a reasonable sense of what we’re looking for. Be sensitive to the complexities and challenges I sketched in reason #6. And if you make a suggestion and it doesn’t work out, don’t feel too bad or take it too personally.

Finally, take an interest in our work, recognizing that if we never have children, our work is all that we will leave behind. And in the event that nothing ever does work out, that we seem called to carry on in that content not-quite-completeness of life as single people, continue to see us.

The Catholic journalist Julia Yost wrote an interesting piece recently about Catholicism among “the TikTok generation.” She is cautious not to strike a triumphalist tone about a “revival” that doesn’t exist, admitting that Catholicism is still losing a dozen deconverts for every convert it gains. Still, she notes that this Easter saw an uptick in converts who are skewing disproportionately young, and she observes the emergence of a Catholic subculture among urban young professionals. What could explain this?

She proposes that there’s the beginning of an answer in how different manifestations of Christianity pair with different stages in the evolution of online culture. In the Age of the Blog, we saw the rise of the Young, Restless and Reformed, because Reformed Protestantism inherently lent itself to long, verbally dense arguments. And Protestantism in general heavily emphasizes the Word. But in a postliterate Internet where Image trumps Word, Catholicism has the edge:

Protestantism, which began as a revolution against idolatry — the whitewashing of church interiors, the stripping of altars — has image-aversion in its DNA. The visual language of American Protestantism is accordingly limited. White steeples, Puritan clothing, snake handling: not much for an influencer to work with. Catholicism has icons and incense; rosaries, chapel veils and ashes; priestly black, cardinal red and papal white. … An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.

There’s an awful lot going on here. I don’t think Yost is on to nothing, but I suspect she might be overselling the “trending” status of Catholicism. I clicked through to one of the Instagram pages she linked where some account was hyping Catholic clerical “drip.” What I found was a wall of chatbot text. Not a terribly aesthetic pitch, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, I also believe Yost short sells the resources of Protestantism. However, a proper discussion of this will require us to establish what we’re talking about when we talk about Protestantism. For any newcomers who don’t know my own background, I grew up in the Anglo-Catholic Church, which began life as a tiny conservative offshoot of the Episcopalian church. This meant that I was exposed early and often to the aesthetics of Anglicanism—with a Catholic twist, but the Catholic twists always felt optional. The Anglican aesthetic was very much its own well-defined thing. At the same time, I understood evangelicalism fairly well, since that was the tradition my parents came out of and since that was where we built most of our local community (because elderly Episcopalian refugees don’t really “do” community). And theologically, I retained a few lower Protestant distinctives.

The upshot is that I have always felt like I have one foot there, one foot in the magisterial Protestant tradition. I’ve jokingly called myself everything from a bad Anglican to a “high-Church Baptist.” I still think the Baptists have it right on some things, yet I’ve found it difficult to enter fully into the spirit of the service when I visit a Baptist church, because I feel no sense of separation between what’s happening on my side of the sanctuary and what’s happening at the front. With no altar, no sacrament, no sense that something different is going on up there, I feel rather adrift. The “stage” could just as well be the platform for a conference speaker.

Given all this, naturally I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on these interdenominational discourses.

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I rarely see movies even once in the theater, let alone twice. I have now seen Project Hail Mary twice, and with the directors’ decision to release a TheaterEars commentary track (just the latest in a string of brilliant marketing decisions), I am even considering a return for thirds. Having gone into the movie blind before reading the original Andy Weir novel, I then purchased the audiobook, another thing I almost never do, and was bedazzled beginning to end by Ray Porter’s performance. And of course, I also have the book on Kindle. I have now spent more money on more versions of this one story than I have on any other one story I can recall at the moment. It is that engrossing.

The novel is hard sci-fi made easily digestible by being such a ripping good yarn, as the Brits would say. The movie, back in IMAX this weekend by popular demand, is old-school exuberant blockbuster filmmaking at its best, a visual and sonic feast whose cinematic magic is grounded in practical effects. The most magical of these effects is our hero’s alien sidekick, who has to be one of the best alien characters in all sci-fi. To film their scenes, Ryan Gosling physically interacted on physical sets every day with puppeteer James Ortiz, who not only handled but voiced the lovable creature in the venerable tradition of great puppeteers past like Frank Oz. Fans of the book complained that the alien’s reveal in the movie trailer was kind of a spoiler, but now that good old Rocky is everywhere, I feel okay acknowledging his existence (though I’ll be issuing a Major Spoiler Warning later in this piece for all who require it).

While Rocky has some qualities of a loyal pet, he is in fact what C. S. Lewis in his Ransom Trilogy would have called hnau—a fully rational creature, complete with his own intricate language, culture, and grand Quest, which turns out to be the same Quest on which Dr. Ryland Grace has found himself embarked. Through their combined heroically nerdy efforts, they must race to avert planetary apocalypse by thwarting a star-eating parasite. Their galactic buddy comedy is somehow managing to rescue heartfelt, wholesome masculine friendship from the cultural gutter, despite the modest limitation that one of the “men” is a faceless rock spider. Key to its success is the fact that beneath the comedy runs an undercurrent of deep melancholy. The story has been called optimistic, but its optimism has an inescapably tragic tinge, for it is the story of a man without a planet.

We meet Dr. Grace first as a terrified, apparently untrained astronaut who has woken up on a spaceship light-years away from Earth unable to recall his own name, with no companions except two long-dead fellow crewmembers and a robot. Through flashbacks, he slowly remembers the sweetly shy, overqualified middle-school science teacher he used to be before his particular research skills were abruptly…required. His life was happy enough then, if a bit isolated. As he goes through his crew’s kits in search of clues, he finds pictures of the dead astronauts with their families, but in his own kit there is only one picture of himself, alone. How exactly he got from there to here is a mystery whose full payoff will not be revealed for some time.

Recently, Andy Weir let his true feelings be known about the latest iterations of Star Trek and how far it’s fallen from its first conception. It is clear that he aspires to craft sci-fi in the spirit of the best Trek—funny but not too wacky, serious but not too preachy, and above all, full of heart. There was also in the best old Trek a willingness to grapple with painful moral conundrums, sometimes towards conclusions I didn’t agree with, but framed compellingly. The classic episode “City On the Edge of Forever” stands out, in which Captain Kirk holds the fate of a single innocent woman in one hand and the rest of the world’s fate in the other. For reasons I’ll be explicitly spoiling in a moment, that episode particularly came back to mind as I watched/read Project Hail Mary. The fascinating thing is that while on one level the film is a faithful adaptation, on another level it diverges so much that book and film appear to answer the story’s moral conundrum in nearly opposite ways. I find the reasons for this divergence understandable, but I am still forced to conclude that while the book gets my unreserved recommendation, the movie for all its ten thousand charms is ultimately built on a lie.

MAJOR SPOILERS NOW FOLLOW! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! COME BACK WHEN YOU HAVE READ, OR WATCHED, OR BOTH!

The story’s third major character, a Dutchwoman suggestively named Eva Stratt, is the person into whose hands all global authority has been delivered in this crisis. By the same token, it is her hands that will bear the damned spot of whatever blood is shed along the way. Her original book incarnation is, in Weir’s words, “an ice queen on heels,” setting about her tasks with a blood-chilling Germanic efficiency. If the Sahara Desert must be paved, it is done. If Antarctica must be nuked, she will make it so. And if a few brave souls must be sent to a corner of the universe so remote there will be no return journey, on a research mission whose chances of success are near-zero, she will unflinchingly orchestrate their desperate suicides for the greater good. Hence the name of the ship, and the project: Hail Mary. But no one will comfort Eve.

Stratt’s film incarnation, as played by the luminous Sandra Hüller, appears as a character with the same name who feels like a different woman. Where book Stratt is constantly, brutally reminding Dr. Grace that she has recruited him solely as a means to the end of saving the planet, movie Stratt nurtures him with a maternal warmth that occasionally edges into something more. This is felt most intensely in a film-exclusive scene where she delivers a karaoke performance that feels personally directed to Grace. Because Hüller and Ryan Gosling share the gift of being able to speak volumes with their eyes alone, the original cut of the scene was significantly trimmed in an attempt to tone down their unspoken chemistry. Volumes are spoken anyway:

In the end, for reasons that are explained far better in the book than the film, circumstances conspire to suddenly make Dr. Grace Stratt’s top candidate for the doomed spaceship’s science expert. For a few hours, she lets Grace think that he has a choice in the matter. When he comes back with a “No,” he discovers that she was lying. Book Stratt does this with barely a twinge, explaining precisely how she plans to trick the “annoyingly honorable” ship’s captain into believing Grace volunteered. In her final conversation with Grace, at the end of which he tells her to “go to hell,” she assures him, “Oh, I will.”

By contrast, movie Stratt seals his fate with obvious agony, watching out the window through tears as men chase him down and forcibly sedate him. “This may feel like betraying you,” she says, “but it’s actually me believing in you.” She is backed up by a government agent named Carl, who Grace thought was his best friend, and whose name is the last word he speaks on Earth. “You know who you are,” Carl says encouragingly. “You’re gonna do great.” When Dr. Grace emerges from his induced coma, we see the words “GOOD LUCK!” in sharpie on his bag.

This twist has functioned like a Rorschach blot, with opinions about equally split as to whether Stratt is making an excruciating but righteous choice or a pernicious choice. It seems clear that the filmmakers want to spin it as the former, while Weir himself meant it to be the latter. He’s said that at first he vigorously protested the karaoke scene because it didn’t fit book Stratt’s character, but this suggests a failure to grasp how movie Stratt was being rewritten top to bottom from the start. Had movie Stratt hewed more closely to book Stratt, the creators would have had an explicitly darker product on their hands, much harder to market to the whole-family audiences they wanted to court. It’s dark enough as it is, but spoonfuls of sugar are being added to try to make the medicine go down. Book Stratt in one sense “believes in” Grace, but with no trace of love. Movie Stratt, we are meant to think, really does love him. It’s just that love sometimes looks like forcing someone to sacrifice himself for the greater good. We might need someone else to believe in us before we can believe in ourselves. Or something.

Disturbingly, I’ve found that even some Christians are falling into this ethical trap as they discuss the story around the water cooler. Many basic distinctions are being missed in the arguments I see, like the difference between being ordered to make a calculated sacrificial risk and being ordered to commit suicide. (The book really drives home the creepiness of the fact that the astronauts are being offered their choice of suicide methods as if from a menu, so they don’t just have to starve slowly in space.) Someone shared a famous clip from the submarine thriller U-571 in which a formidable young Matthew McConaughey sends an even younger sailor to do a highly dangerous task only he can physically attempt. The boy panics, and the officer orders him with a pained, loving harshness to “Do your job, sailor!” Predictably, the task proves fatal, and though the ship is saved, the officer will be haunted forever. It’s a brutal scene, but disanalogous to the setup of Project Hail Mary. Better would be an example of an officer giving not merely dangerous but unequivocally suicidal orders, of which there are plenty of examples in military history, which of course does not make them ethical.

As I was discussing this with a friend who shared my intuition, he brought up the COVID crisis, and it flicked on a lightbulb in my mind. In that real-world scenario, as in this story, agents with far too much unchecked power took it upon themselves to force people into certain choices against their will, in the name of the “greater good,” against an ominous impersonal invader, because they elevated the priority of not dying from the virus above all else. And there, as here, I was startled by how many Christians matter-of-factly accepted this. Aside from the absolute wrongness of the choice, there is a hubristic failure to consider other factors. It’s left especially hand-wavy how movie Stratt is so sure that movie Grace—panicky, frightened, lacking astronaut training—could even complete the mission (never mind the actual eventuality that an accident wipes out the rest of the crew, forcing him to learn things he wasn’t supposed to have to learn).

Ironically, Stratt’s position is steelmanned better in the book, but as part of elevating the entire debate into a serious, full-bodied ethical clash. Grace makes the entirely reasonable case that even if against all odds the mission succeeds, Earth is looking at a brutal next 20-odd years, years for which a rising generation will have to be trained up. So why should he not stay in the classroom where he belongs, with kids he loves like the kids he never had? And in the likely event that no solution was found, why shouldn’t he be allowed to die comforting them? The argument is reminiscent of the case for allowing people to gather, touch, and embrace each other in defiance of the virus.

Someone pushing back on my take here was astonished that I favored Grace’s “just passively accepting death” on Earth as the sun dies, versus making some effort however insane to save it. It struck me that this person had an impoverished view of what it means to die. Death, from a Christian perspective, is not merely passive but active. This is perfectly captured in the great Catholic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which an abbot is left behind to perish in the last nuclear holocaust while one monk is chosen to lead a remnant of the Church into space. The majority of Earth’s people will perish, but those Christians like the brave abbot who remain at their earthly posts while the world burns are no less active than those blasting off in a rocket. It is understood that they, too, have a calling to fulfil. Meanwhile, the scene where the young monk is chosen to lead the space-bound flock feels like a photo-negative of the scene where Grace receives his grim orders. Like Grace, the monk is a timid man daunted by the task before him, asking for a few hours to think it over. But unlike Grace, he is being sent to his life, not to his death.

Of course, Stratt has no way of knowing that Grace will meet his salvation, in the form of a pure-hearted alien whose ethical system is innocently free of consequentialism. From the moment they first meet and begin the thrilling process of learning each other’s languages, Rocky sees Grace as end in himself, not a means to an end. He has also suffered the loss of his crew, except he has spent many more lonely years in space without them (his people, Eridians, are a long-lived species). When Grace miraculously appears before his “eyes” which aren’t really eyes, because he “sees” by echolocation, he immediately loves the friendly, lonely human. He doesn't know how to do otherwise than love the person before him. And neither does Grace. And so friendship is born at that moment when they each say, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”

All of this, the film conveys beautifully. We are certainly meant to care deeply for Grace, to root at every turn for his survival and flourishing as Rocky carries him to heights he never dreamed of. But the film fails to understand that the Way of Rocky cannot be forced into a tenderly forgiving coexistence with the way of Stratt. In the book, her self-damning “Oh, I will” is understood to be final. Book Grace reflects bitterly that she was “right,” insofar as her ruthless game-theoretic calculations were not wrong. She was right that there was no one better qualified. She was right that he would know what to do once he was there. And she was right that even when the final knife-twist flashed back to him, he would be so invested, and so fundamentally decent, that he wouldn’t withhold whatever discoveries he’d made. But none of these things make her, in the fullest moral sense of the word, right.

This is sealed in the book’s choice to have Rocky deliver the triumphant news that Grace’s dispatched research landed safely, and our Sun has been restored. The deeply emotional moment is theirs to celebrate together. In the film, it is treated as a moment between Grace and Stratt, albeit asynchronous, as she bursts into tears while watching his breakthrough dispatches and prepares her team to get to work. That is not a moment book Stratt has earned, and so it’s reserved for those who have.

Of course, the great paradox of the story is that without Stratt’s betrayal, Grace would never have met Rocky. The biblically-flavored catch-phrases write themselves. “You meant evil against me, but Rocky meant it for good.” “Rocky works all things together for good.” “But Rocky!”

In the end, as Grace takes his place in another classroom, on another planet, clapping his hands in the way he does when he is brimming over with joy, he appears as a man stepping into his afterlife. This is actually felt more strongly in the film than in the book, where Grace is content but older, wearier, touched with a little more melancholy as he considers his last decades on this planet that can never really be his home. In the film, Grace’s biodome appears much more paradisal and earthlike, even including a beach with foamy waves. In the words of the uncannily chosen closing credits song, he feels better, so much better, since he laid his burdens down.

Every now and then, a public intellectual pops up in the discourse with a new book/podcast/whatever, and you think, “Oh yeah, that guy. He’s still doing stuff?” I had this feeling when I saw that Bart Ehrman is making the rounds to promote his newest work. Ehrman is best known for writing sophistical popular-level books about the New Testament. But Love Thy Stranger, similar to his book The Triumph of Christianity, is one of these “Why Christianity is still good for the world and stuff while of course not being literally true” affairs—not strictly against Christianity, but rendering a vaguely patronizing verdict on its historical impact. I’m not rushing out to procure a copy, but I got the gist from a recent debate with Sean McDowell, in which Ehrman repeatedly asserted that there are no moral absolutes, McDowell politely demurred with actual arguments, and Ehrman waved his hands and feigned exasperation in lieu of making a coherent counterargument. I would say Ehrman shouldn’t quit his day job to become a moral philosopher, but then of course I don’t think he’s good at his day job either. Perhaps he missed his true calling as a used car salesman.

However, I was very entertained by Ehrman’s appearance on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, which continues to be essential listening. (Or reading, if you prefer a transcript.) Douthat has mastered the art of the very gentle sick burn when guests say something especially dubious, and he was in fine form here. I was especially interested to hear how Douthat would handle Ehrman around New Testament questions, since Ehrman is famous for steamrolling anyone who tries to catch his sophistry and pin it down. It’s possible Ehrman assumed that since Douthat is a fellow elite, a non-specialist, and a non-evangelical, he could be easily steamrolled. If so, that was a mistake. In fact, I come away from the interview inclined to think that when it comes to public discourse about religion and the Bible, we are approaching the End of an Era—or I should say, an Ehra.

For those familiar with Ehrman’s schtick, there are no surprises here. He played his greatest hits—the Humean Tap Dance, the Gospel Contradictions Polka, all the classics. One of his favorite assertions, per Hume, is the claim that historians can never “establish” a miracle. My father, Tim McGrew, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on miracles, neatly repackages Ehrman’s version of this old chestnut in premise-conclusion form:

1. A miracle is by definition the most improbable of events; the probability of a miracle is infinitesimally remote.

2. An historian can establish only what probably happened in the past.

Therefore,

3. An historian can never establish that a miracle happened.

Dad then goes on: “Waiving the tendentious definition in premise 1, the supposed contradiction involved in denying the conclusion — ‘that the most improbable event is the most probable’ (Ehrman 2003: 229)—is merely verbal, arising from a failure to distinguish between the probability of a miracle claim considered apart from the evidence and the probability of the claim given that evidence.”

In other words, no, Dr. Ehrman didn’t really pull the quarter out of your ear. Moving on.

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Happy Easter to all my readers! For those new to the Stack, you can enjoy older Easter reflections here. As always, thank you so much for reading.

Two summers ago, I had the chance to spend a week in Europe connecting with old friends and making some new ones. We enjoyed loosely structured conversations around a plethora of topics, everyone bringing his own distinct perspective. A number of us were Christians of an evangelical stripe, but some weren’t, which meant there was never a dull moment. Some of them were Jewish, and the events of the previous October were heavy on their minds. One Israeli friend, a Messianic Jew, wore a yellow ribbon pin. Before giving a brief talk, he said people had been asking him how he was doing, and he pointed to the pin and said bluntly, “Not well.” Under the Florence sun, we would all sit and chat and walk around a garden paradise in twos or threes, lifting our eyes to the hills, talking of wars and rumors of wars.

One scientist was devoting his constant research energy to the problem of how (or whether) we can save the world from apocalypse. To his way of thinking, the Christians were altogether too resigned to the end of everything, too ready to give up and accept it without a fight. If the rest of us wanted to sit around waiting for the apocalyptic tsunami, that was fine. Not him. He had too much European Jew in him, he liked to say. He told a joke about world leaders giving their last speeches as the end drew nigh. The American President and the British Prime Minister say some noble, flowery words about going down bravely, wishing everyone Godspeed, saying God bless this great nation, and so on and so forth. The Israeli Prime Minister stands up and simply says, “You all have 27 minutes to learn how to live underwater.”

Recently Benjamin Netanyahu found himself unexpectedly in the middle of an Internet discourse over a speech in which he hat-tipped Will and Ariel Durant on Genghis Khan and Jesus. In their book Lessons of History, the Durants describe history as “at bottom a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives no favors.” This is part of their extended narrative of the decline of religious faith in the West, whose leaders “assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end.” But alas, they conclude, “the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.”  Netanyahu underscored this not with the goal of patronizing Jesus, but of justifying the constant vigilantly warlike ways of Israel to the rest of the world. Israel, along with all of the world’s democracies, has “no choice” but to “oppose their enemies in time, while there’s still time.” Otherwise, per the Durants, there is nothing to stop evil from overcoming good, like it has so many times before.  Evil prospers when good men do nothing.

Of course, as soon as the clip escaped containment on Twitter, everyone took turns hearing what they wanted to hear. Netanyahu attempted to issue an apology and clarification, but such things rarely change minds. I understood and sympathized with what he meant. Still, I watched Christian reactions and Jewish counterreactions with great interest. Jewish Twitter had a right to be annoyed with bad Christian takes, but I also detected some of that same general exasperation I detected from the scientist who’s always thinking about the apocalypse, the idea that Christians are just constitutionally incapable of getting Jews. The history of the Jewish people has been a history of repeatedly managing not to die. And now that they have built themselves into a world power, they see themselves not only as the last best hope for their own people, but for all of civilization. They are saving the world right here, right now. What exactly are Christians doing, they’d like to know? Singing songs about flying away to be with Jesus by and by? What kind of luxury belief is that?

We answer that this belief has sustained Christians down the ages through all manner of circumstances—through plague, through war, through famine, through grinding poverty, through sorrows beyond human naming. Indeed, it is those who live least in luxury who are often most unshakably rooted in it. It was in the assurance of that hope that humble working-class Christians like Corrie ten Boom’s family, with little to share except their home, faced death to protect Jews in the Holocaust. And for the first followers of Christ, it was the assurance of what their own eyes had seen, what their own hands had handled, that sustained them through lives of voluntarily undertaken hardship and humiliation, in and out of prison, perpetually poor, perpetually expendable to the ruling authorities.

We answer as well that we have failed to understand Jesus if we understand him as merely a “good man.” It was not for telling us all to “be kind” that he was sentenced to death, but for making himself equal with God. In him alone did he say we would find forgiveness of sins. In him alone did he say we would have life eternal. For however ingenious we may be, however long we may outwit and outrun death, though we plumb the depths of the ocean, though we build a spaceship and blast off in search of a new world to colonize, in Adam we will all die. But in Christ we will be raised incorruptible.

This hope is ours, but the gospel of Christ, the great good news, is that it may be yours as well.

My Messianic Jewish friend, the one who wore the yellow ribbon and was not doing well, is fond of bringing up Jesus with great frequency, even in contexts where it’s implied that one should try to make one’s points while mostly avoiding Jesus, the Bible, etc. We were in such a context once, but as the conversation had turned again to the end of all things, he couldn’t help himself. “I know I’m not ‘supposed’ to do this,” he said, adjusting his glasses and pulling out his phone, “but I’m gonna do it anyway.” And with a firm voice, he began to read from the Book of Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

In my work as a columnist, I try to keep up with the progress of legislation related to so-called “assisted dying” in various states and European countries. It is a generally dispiriting beat for a pro-life journalist, although these stories always have their heroes too, even in defeat. Occasionally you get to cover a victory, like the recent surprise upset of a death bill in Scotland. But the arc of such bills’ history has tended to bend towards injustice.

The debate-floor arguments in favor of these bills follow predictable patterns. People often share testimonies designed to shock about the slow, painfully humiliating ways their loved ones died—or occasionally, like one of the lawmakers who was just voted down in Scotland, testimonies about a loved one who avoided that kind of death by finding the quicker kind in another country. She waxes tearfully eloquent about how beautiful and peaceful her father’s Canadian deathbed was, with all his daughters gathered around, getting to say goodbye properly before he lost his faculties. If others prefer not to make that choice, she says that’s their affair, but they have no right to impose their preference on people like her father.

Recently I wrote about the especially horrifying recent euthanasia of a 25-year-old Spanish girl who had rendered herself paraplegic in a botched suicide attempt. She was suffering severe depression and PTSD from sexual assault, and she repeatedly expressed a desire to end her life. She was not imminently dying. She simply didn’t want to live. So, against her father’s desperate attempts to save her in the courts, the state helped her finish the job properly. A Spanish archbishop lamented the shame of his beloved country. God is dead in Spain, he said, and when God is dead, everything is permitted.

To make things yet more gruesome, her organs were marked for donation, which would have provided a perverse moral incentive if she ever tried to change her mind. I picked up a report claiming she had last-minute second thoughts but was locked in because of this, although on a closer look it seems this was actually referring to a letter she signed two years ago, which was thrown out on the claim that some crazy Christians brainwashed her into doing it. So we’re expected to assume she was lucid enough to sign her death warrant, but not sufficiently lucid to be afraid of death.

One report mentioned the typical humiliating effects of paraplegia that this poor, beautiful young woman had to deal with daily—the incontinence, the need for constant assistance. Not everyone with this condition is depressed, indeed some turn it into their own content creation business. But young Noelia just suffered, and it became her single-minded obsession to end that suffering once and for all.

The ghoulish pundit Richard Hanania has written some of the most deliberately offensive popular pro-euthanasia pieces, and he likes to bang his drum whenever the topic returns to the discourse. This week, he was back on his beat, making fun of pro-lifers who try to point to the inevitable pattern of legal expansion from assisted suicide for the terminally ill only to assisted suicide for people who are just slowly getting more miserable. “This interferes with my desire to see people tortured for decades with no end in sight,” he mockingly imitated them. “Put on those diapers and drool on yourself, because I believe in human dignity.” To which the Jewish pro-life journalist Alexander Raikin replied that all “autonomy” talk is a fig leaf here. Hanania simply believes there’s a certain class of people better off dead than alive, and suicide prevention resources should be rationed accordingly.

In such times, it is especially meaningful to meditate on the fact that Christ did not merely die for us, but he did so humiliatingly. For obvious reasons, Passion films cover his nakedness with a loincloth, but in reality, he was completely exposed to the mocking world. Some of the oldest Passion art we have reflects this before the tradition changed. “The Sovereign has been made unrecognisable by his naked body, and is not even allowed a garment to keep him from view,” writes the 2nd-century Bishop Melito of Sardonis. “That is why the luminaries turned away, and the day was darkened, so that he might hide the one stripped bare upon the tree.” As the death process progressed, it’s plausible that Jesus would have lost control of his bladder and bowels and that his slow suffocation would have caused involuntary erection.

Many books have been written on the theological necessity of Jesus’ dying this particular death. Prophecies foretell it, of course, but then that seems only to push the question back. To me it seems intuitive that in whatever age he chose to be born, his death had to be at once violent, lingering, and humiliating. Had he died of natural causes, this might have been humiliating, but he had to die by way of betrayal and murder. Had he been murdered by some method like beheading or stoning, the ordeal would be violent, but over too soon, and too dignified. Indignity had to be of the essence of his death. While there are a thousand ways for the human body to experience indignity that he didn’t experience, it still had to be said of him, as it will one way or another one day be said of us all, that his body had felt the meaning of the word.

Lately I’ve been both saddened and heartened to watch interviews with former Senator Ben Sasse as he chooses to die of pancreatic cancer in public. He’s always smiling, but he’s always in at least some pain. His face looks raw as he undergoes an aggressive treatment to eke out a few more months before the inevitable. He’s matter-of-factly described how the treatment attacks his skin, and how his face was “falling off” before some skilled oncologists helped him to piece it back together. To make it worse, he’s a stomach sleeper, and he describes how his face would clot against the pillow. Meanwhile, of course there are all the tumors all over his vitals, so many it would be pointless to pluck out a couple here and there with surgery. He’s joked about the indignity of having to answer repeated questions from doctors about how his bowels are doing. He and his family sustain themselves with gallows humor, as one does, as one must.

They also take long walks through cemeteries, a habit he’d practiced in the before times anyway. He recalls a particularly glorious one in New Haven, Connecticut, with big stone columns erected in the height of mid-19th-century industrial pride. Over the entrance is a massive crossbar. In all capital letters, it reads AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.

W. H. Auden, in his commonplace book, jotted down reflections on the exercise of asking ourselves who we would have been on the first Good Friday, and what we would have been doing. It’s hard to imagine oneself as a disciple, or as one of the bigwigs condemning Jesus to death. This is how Auden imagined himself:

In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight — three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, ‘It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute people humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?’ Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.

Greetings! I will be writing something for free and paid subscribers to mark the week, but meanwhile, here’s an exclusive for my paid readers in which I gather together some of what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching to get myself in the proper mood. If in the process I introduce someone to a new favorite something, my work here is done.

What I’m Watching

This week I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew for the first time. This 1964 Italian neo-realist classic is considered by some to be the best life of Christ put to film. I haven’t quite seen enough of them to form a definite opinion, but all I can say is this would be difficult to top. I’m starting to develop a “deeply screwed-up auteur” thesis of the life of Jesus movie, that a director has to be not quite sane or normal to really do the story justice. (Pasolini was a gay Marxist atheist—yes, really, all the things—who was one of these guys always at loggerheads with the church while thinking Jesus was a pretty cool dude. Much of his other work is obscene in the extreme. He was murdered under mysterious circumstances, some thinking a crime syndicate like the Mafia pushed a male prostitute into taking the fall. A colorful life, to say the least.)

This piece was shot in black and white on a very low budget in rural Italy, using non-actors, with no extra dialogue except what’s in the text of the gospel. A critic noted that so far from constricting Pasolini’s cinematic imagination, it actually freed him up to paint with silent imagery and music. From the first appearance of the girlish Virgin Mary, one corner of her lips quirking up like the Mona Lisa, you know you’re watching something special. This is a film-length stress test of the British actor Michael Kitchen’s criticism of a wordy script, “I could do that with a look.” With such spare dialogue, much of its power rests in significant looks, the more impressive because the camera is lingering on the faces of people unused to a camera.

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The great world-tilting scandal of the Christian gospel is that forgiveness of sin is available to whosoever will come and receive it. We might face the just consequences of that sin, in many ways and places, but in Christ Jesus, we are no longer condemned.

Christians with a particularly dark and brutal salvation testimony must consider carefully how to steward that testimony. Some keep it closely guarded and share only with a privileged few. Some choose to make it public in hopes that other sinners will be encouraged and Christ will be glorified. Reasonable arguments could be made for either choice. There is no one-size-fits-all right way for the Christian to proceed here. Much of the choice is down to a variety of factors that will differ from individual to individual, because people are people and not widgets.

This week, a Christian husband named Trevor Sheatz caused an enormous stir by posting his side of his wife Ashley’s testimony, which she’s chosen to share freely online for some years. It’s a heartbreaking story, full of promiscuity, addiction, and abuse. But God, as they say. However, because this woman doesn’t have a large public speaking platform, her story had never gone “viral” in the Internet way. It was just there for anyone to discover in her corner of Christian Twitter.

For some reason, all of that changed when her husband made this long post, including far less detail than she’s shared herself, but reflecting on how God can redeem and transform anyone with such a past. He was replying to an ongoing discourse about whether formerly promiscuous women are “damaged goods” to be permanently avoided by Christian men. Something about the post unlocked the secret to Twitter virality. Who knows why anything goes viral, but maybe it was the “hook” that he contrasted his wife’s former promiscuity with his virginity, to the end of offering hope that God can make this kind of union fruitful. In any case, all hell broke loose in the comments, in some of the most appalling ways you could imagine and some you hopefully couldn’t. (Her wedding picture alone drew an avalanche of ugly comments—a perfectly nice picture, but I guess her nose is a little large, which I guess is a particular trigger for antisemitic trolls, who share Venn diagram overlap with the sort of trolls who call women whores. Anyhow.)

Well, trolls will be trolls. But the backlash didn’t end at the level of Twitter trolling. It stirred up responses from people who present themselves as serious commentators with serious commentating platforms. Most notably, this segment from the Daily Wire, in which Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan took turns mocking the post. All speak as if the man sprang this on his wife out of the blue, apparently lacking basic facts Grok could have handed them with one prompt. Knowles says the husband “called his wife a whore online,” but of course it is Knowles who is doing this, not the husband. Klavan jokes that the millions of impressions must be “all those guys coming back,” and throws in an extra throwaway line that he was one of them (here even Knowles and Shapiro cringe).

Knowles expanded more on his thoughts elsewhere, evidently unchanged by the knowledge that the husband has his wife’s permission. She really shouldn’t have put the story out there either, he suggests, and it would have been appropriate for her husband to stop her, because we should all know less about each other, etc. “Testimony tell-all” culture is a real problem, and we need to recover the lost art of discretion, keeping private sin private, and practicing freedom in Christ by letting the past be the past.

Now, I’m not saying there is nothing to these points. But double standards abound. Klavan’s flippant crudeness is especially…interesting, given that his own memoir (which I’ve recommended widely) is all about his wayward youth and Christian redemption arc, including many casual trysts. Is Knowles going to lecture him about the need for “discretion” when it comes to past sexual sin? No? Didn’t think so. Meanwhile, a little walk down recent memory lane on Knowles’s podcast will turn up multiple interviews with former prostitutes. One was a pastor, Joshua Broome, who’s written an entire book about his former life as a pornographic actor. Then there was former OnlyFans star Nala Ray, who joined Knowles not once but twice to talk about her Christian conversion, the second time with her husband. Knowles has tried to defend himself by saying it’s different when a public figure has made his or her sexual past part of a platform. But allegedly, his whole point was that making one’s sexual past part of a public speaking platform should not be a done thing for Christians.

It would seem this commentary comes with an asterisk: “It should not be a done thing, unless you’ve already gotten kind of famous by doing it, in which case please come on the show so we can harvest your Content together.”

It’s also odd that Knowles wraps this up with a sneer at evangelical testimony culture, in particular. The Daily Wire recently acquired Matt Fradd’s Catholic show Pints With Aquinas, which just invited former Baylor professor Trent Dougherty to come opine at length about his less-than-a-decade-old adulterous fall from grace. I would ask Knowles who has less “discretion”: a distinguished Catholic academic still publicly talking about the adultery he committed in the middle of his Catholic academic career, or an ordinary evangelical woman sharing her testimony of how God rescued her from paganism?

All to say, I’m not interested in Takes from people who run their Takes business on business logic. They should at least be men enough to admit that’s what they’re doing, instead of feigning consistency. Or women enough. The Catholic woman behind Evie Magazine also falls in this category. She held forth with a rather cynical take here, all about how average men are so demoralized that “every girl is on OnlyFans or sleeping around,” and how triggering posts like this are, etc., etc. It didn’t take much googling to find Evie’s glowing profile of the formerly mentioned porn actor turned pastor. Again: Something else besides actual principle is setting the standard here.

It thus falls to the rest of us to find a better and non-hypocritical way to talk about all this. Because I do in fact think there is a broader conversation worth having here about discretion, evangelical “oversharing” culture, testimony-as-content, and all that. There is also a broader conversation worth having about Christians’ place in the dating scene, and how Christians should think about prospects with “a past.”

I myself can think of quite a few people among my Christian friends and acquaintances who have “a past,” some of whom have gone on to have fruitful marriages. My good friend Meg Basham movingly incorporated the story of her prodigal 20s into a book. Another writer, Ashley Lande, wrote a book I blurbed about her past addiction to psychedelics. (My first book blurb, which I took as a sign that I’ve Made It as a writer.) It focuses more on her addiction and less on promiscuity, but that’s an element in there and part of both her and her husband’s testimonies. They’re jointly open about it and enjoy a strong marriage.

But other people I know and respect have approached this differently. One Catholic friend around my age recently sat down and gave me a generous few hours of his time so I could tell his story in a long article I’m working on about men who’ve recently joined the church. Because the story dives into some very weird, dark corners of millennial Internet culture, including homosexual elements, and because he earnestly doesn’t want to scandalize anyone who knows him and his wife in person, he’s requested that I use his middle name. To me this strikes a very healthy prudential balance. His story can still be a blessing, but he and his wife get to keep their privacy. Other people in their friends circle aren’t even aware of it. I think this can be wholly appropriate. I do take issue with church subcultures where people are pressured to “share with the small group,” creating embarrassing moments for everyone involved. As long as the people who need to know already know, the willingness to share one’s past sin openly doesn’t make you more or less Christian.

I also think about the wife of a couple I know who opened up about her wayward youth to me over a meal, but hasn’t even talked about it with her own kids. One criticism of Trevor and Ashley was that their kids shouldn’t know about their mother’s past until they’re grown, because of the problems this could cause with discipline and such. There might be something to this, and likewise there might be something to the criticism that kids should have a say in whether Mom’s past is shared with the Internet. Trevor and Ashley are younger, and I’m not sure if they even have children yet. They’re understandably full of zeal and thinking in terms of how many people could be blessed by the testimony, but there are other factors to consider.

However, I do reject a false dichotomy Matt Walsh set up in his take, though unlike his Daily Wire colleagues he was at least trying to be balanced. He asserted that “your story of past misdeeds is only really a good teaching tool and cautionary tale, and therefore edifying, if your life is right now currently in shambles.” But young Trevor and Ashley are happy and content together now. And “‘I sinned a lot and now I’m happy and not suffering any significant consequences for my evil behavior’ just isn’t a very useful moral lesson for most people.” To which I would ask how Matt knows there have been “zero significant consequences,” for Trevor and Ashley or for anyone whose life isn’t “currently in shambles.” Sexual sin leaves scars. Sometimes it leaves people unable to find a mate at all, or causes problems for a couple. We don’t know the particular intimate challenges Trevor and Ashley may have had to navigate together, nor do we need to.

Walsh, like others, is especially put off by the fact that Trevor calls his wife “more pure than most virgins.” I admit, I also take some issue with that phrasing. Trevor has doubled down, saying it’s true because most virgins aren’t Christians, but I think that shows a tin ear. There were other and better ways to convey what he meant. I also react with mixed feelings when he says his wife can now “more easily live out a life of passionate love for her Savior.” While taking the point that he (or she) who has been forgiven much will love much, I would gently suggest that such things don’t need to be a competition. It is a beautiful paradox that God can bring great good out of great evil, and I think Christians can simply rest in that paradox.

Also, while I think there’s been a fair amount of strawmanning from the “Christian manosphere” (“They want to force all us guys to marry reformed whores!”), I don’t think such ambient pressure is nonexistent either—for both men and women. I interacted a little bit with one woman who literally said she would shame any young Christian woman who restricted her dating pool to Christian men who’ve never used pornography, because pornography usage is so common, and women need to be realistic. As long as a man has been clean for six months (!) or more, this woman said the girl needs to consider him, or else she’s being self-righteous, in ways that will cause problems in her marriage (!!) One hardly knows where to begin with this nonsense, which only enables the troll who protests too much that fornication is “leagues worse” than porn use. I got her to back off slightly on the six months (!), and to sort of agree that these things can come in degrees (are we talking about a man who had a rough patch in high school and is now clean in his 30s? a man who’s had rolling addiction patterns up to two years ago?) but not by too much.

But sure, I admit that as a single 33-year-old woman, I face an uphill slope. I’m personally blessed not to have “a past,” but I realize it’s already not easy to find even a Christian man whose background matches mine, especially if you take porn addiction seriously (which I do), and it will only get worse from here. There’s also the entire subtopic of divorce, which can leave a man entirely blameless, yet also for understandable reasons not a woman’s first dating choice if she’s a virgin (and vice versa when genders are swapped). A girlfriend was curious to know if I’d (hypothetically) be open to dating a man with children, which in my social circles will 9 times out of 10 mean he’s divorced. I said I wasn’t completely closed, but I’d have quite a lot of questions. I’m not prepared to say I would have the mental, emotional and spiritual stamina to take on the baggage such a relationship would bring.

It doesn’t feel fair to categorize this reluctance as precisely the same kind of reluctance I would have about dating a formerly promiscuous man, but we could say there’s some shared DNA. In neither case do I want to be dogmatically closed, but let’s just say other factors would have to be so overridingly powerful that it became a second-tier issue. I think Christian men and women alike should feel comfortable saying this out loud without judgment.

In summary: Jesus saves. Trevor and Ashley didn’t do anything wrong. Trolls are gonna troll, grifters are gonna grift. But also, these things are complicated. It’s important to be able to discuss complicated things normally.

However, this requires people to be normal first. That seems to have been a challenge for a lot of people this week, but the option is still available.

Last week, I caused some outrage in Literary Catholic Twitter by mentioning that I’m not a great fan of the much-revered Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. This is not unusual for me. I hardly miss a chance to air my beef with St. Flannery. For some reason, this time things snowballed to the point where before I knew it, I’d created a whole micro-discourse, with angry lit-Caths (and some vicariously angry lit-Prots) coming out of the woodwork from hither and yon to take their whack at me.

What had begun in good fun got rather aggressively weird rather quickly, and I was glad when it finally blew over. Among other things, a few people thought it would be terribly funny to quote at/about me the most famous line from O’Connor’s most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in which a possessive grandmother is brutally murdered along with her entire family after they take a fatal wrong turn on a road trip. The murderer, who is given an entirely unearned mad-prophet-gone-wrong aura, pronounces the unlucky old woman’s supposedly profound epitaph: “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” For the uninitiated, I have not spoiled this story. I have spared you from it.

Someone graciously said he’d host a piece where I organized my anti-Flannery beef into a more considered shape, and one of these days I mean to take him up on it, but first I wanted to put some somewhat less shapeful thoughts down here, and to encompass more writers than just Flannery. By chance, Chris Rufo also recently got himself into hot water by confessing that he’s not a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. After reading the first 100 pages of The Road and Blood Meridian, he gave up on both works, finding the nihilism too overpowering. Evidently, McCarthy’s fanbase is about as thin-skinned as O’Connor’s. I do, however, think both writers were considerably talented, and I don’t dislike everything they wrote. In fact, I would encourage Rufo to give The Road another try, and in this post I’ll talk a little about why, as well as the one O’Connor story I’m really partial to. Along the way, I want to try to articulate some of my philosophy of dark fiction—why not all dark fiction is created equal, what I look for by way of compensation for the darkness, and why it’s not a sign of uncultured something-something not to care for some writers conventionally considered Great.

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