It has been said, correctly in my view, that you can learn quite a bit about a man's character by knowing who his enemies/detractors/critics are. As far as I am concerned, there is no higher praise in the current times, than that David French is disagreeing with you. So, on that score, bravo!
As for French, he is nothing more than a shallow, virtue signaling, moral preener who wears his "holier than thou" cloak for all the world to see. DJT broke him and Covid/Vaccines finished him off. He is a fool and is a dangerous man shilling for evil and perversion.
I mean, the Left and the Democrat Party has LITERALLY become the PARTY OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH!!! And since the Left controls all of this country's institutions, both private and public sector, they are forcing the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah down our throats.
Anyone who can survey the cultural landscape of 2022 and say, "nothing has changed", is a complete and total fool. Naivete is cute and adorable in a small child. It is dangerous and will lead directly to EVIL when men and women practice it.
The bible tells us clearly in Psalsm 97:10 the "those who love God, must HATE EVIL". There is not enough hate of evil in the modern day church. In fact, the mainline protestant churches embraced evil long ago. The evangelical movement has been playing footsie with evil for a couple of decades now and is quickly becoming irrelevant in the battle against evil. All in service to what I call, "The Niceness Doctrine".
Jeez, when you have TOTALLY secular pols in European countries saying publicly that they don't' want the woke cultural rot that has infested American to come to their shores, I think that really says it all.
Moore's article hits a pet peeve of mine, so I'll trot out the argument I've used for it since I started working in Christian Ed.
1. Christ said that if someone slaps you, turn the other cheek. Nowhere does he say that if someone shanks you, turn the other kidney. Lots of educated theologians have spent gallons of ink on the contextual cultural significance of this verse. It's about being forbearing with insults and disrespect, not against self-defense.
2. Martin Luther, the Great Reformer, addresses this in his political pamphlets. You may feel obligated to refrain from self-defense. That is a right under freedom of conscience, that only you can decide for yourself. You may not, however, decide this on behalf of others in the community of Christ. In fact, every Christian has an affirmative obligation to defend one's "brethren, wives, children, and homes" (Neh 4:14) from attacks by the forces of the Evil One. To turn the cheek of an innocent one for them, to make them defenseless either through action or inaction, is to materially contribute to evil. When a brother or sister is attacked, we are obliged to come to their aid in whatever way is situationally appropriate and relevant, up to and including military defense of fellow Christian commonwealths.
3. Russell Moore is a bad faith actor engaged in bad-faith argumentation. We have all seen him demand Christians engage in aggressive political action in favor of whatever absurd and irrelevant political cause du jour has him riled up in the moment. He is only offended because the particular cause under consideration - defending the freedom of conscience, faith, and participation of authentic Christians from aggressive overreach by an alien religion and a pagan government - is one that he doesn't favor. Like anyone else whose ethics are purely situational and partisan, it's just the bloviating hot air of a gasbag spewing forth its vileness.
"But one of the ongoing themes in my writings here, which you can see in my coverage of the online men’s movements and the dissident right, is the growth of a post-Christian right, especially in youth cohorts. This will have profound consequences for our politics."
I often wonder how hard the reaction will be. I can imagine a future where many who thought the Moral Majority was the scariest bogeyman will wish for it instead.
Ross Douthat (I think — maybe David Brooks) said something to the effect: If you don’t like the Christian right, wait until you see the post-Christian right.
Interesting connection with natural law, but I think it is spot on. There has been a huge mental shift that is larger than evangelicalism, and evangelicals would be wise to recognize it if they really want to engage the world for Christ.
1. His first response was "Christians in the Bible belt used to commit immoral acts in their lives, therefore there was no such thing as a Positive World." Many of us pointed out to him that you were talking about the RECEPTION of Christians, not claiming there was some sort of Christian utopia in terms of behavior. He has apparently at least figured out what the model is and no longer takes that tack.
2. Part of his current argument is: He dislikes the possibility that the "retake America" crowd might latch onto the Three Worlds model. So, consequentialism and factionalism rule his thought rather than discussing whether the model is true or not. As you point out, the "retake America" approach is actually incompatible with Negative World, because we are in the minority now, with an openly hostile majority opposing us.
3. Finally, "as far away as Australia" is an ignorant remark. Other countries within the Anglosphere tend to be influential on American political thought more so than Germany, Eastern Europe, Asia, etc. The continental Europeans (e.g. Macron) have noted that a lot of woke lunacy seems to be an Anglosphere contagion that they want to keep out of the continent. The American left cites Anglosphere gun control and single-payer medical care all the time as a model for us. Just as what happens in crazy California tends to show up in other states a couple of decades later, what happens in Australia can be an omen for Americans.
I would also like to reply to Tim Keller: Would you have been censured at Princeton 25 years ago? If not, please stop speaking as if nothing has really changed.
French’s criticism is partially explained by the calculation that one should reject and attack that which (seems to) support or inspire one’s enemies. French sees his enemies as “post-liberal” conservatives, especially any that he thinks make excuses for Trump and the tendencies he represents on the right. Thus, while temperamentally or on some substantive questions French might not be so far from a Renn or Dreher, he wants to undermine their theses and projects, because he sees these as adding fuel to right-wing/Christian illiberalism.
I don’t know whether this is a conscious motive on French’s part (or the other critics mentioned by Renn) or unconscious bias. Maybe he looks out and truly sees nothing different in the last 40 years, or maybe he gets what Renn is saying but sees no good coming from calling attention to the problem. Probably a bit of both. This represents a natural human tendency, of course, but it’s one that has gained a lot of traction over the last decade or so in the U.S.: don’t give any quarter to the enemy, don’t acknowledge the plausibility of ideas that they like and make use of. Many people have lost the ability to see things outside the lens of ideological battle.
French is probably especially bothered by the rhetorical implications of the terms “negative world” and “Benedict Option,” suggesting as they do (somewhat against the authors’ intentions) a certain hopelessness, which can feed the dangerous “sense of siege” he warns about.
Good observations. I strive to be fair-minded and to always prioritize the search for truth over scoring points for my side. I imagine French sees himself that same way which is why, he would tell you, he spends a lot of time attacking what is supposed to be his own side. But saying that he sees absolutely ZERO change, really comes across to me as an argument that is trying to score rhetorical points rather than searching for truth.
It would be a little more credible to me if French said, "Well, here's what has changed for the better, here is what has changed for the worse, and I can see how some people think the 'for the worse' column is greater, but here's why I disagree."
And psychologically, I think that French has personally endured more attacks from the right. And for sure, some of those attacks have been gross, superlative, cruel, out of bounds, etc. I've seen people online mock him for adopting an African child, for example. Not cool, guys. He's in the Christian right's crosshairs a lot more than those of anyone on the left, because why would anyone on the left go out of their way to attack him? It would be like someone on the right going out of his way to attack an anti-Woke leftist writer like Freddie deBoer.
So I can see how some men like French get caught up in this vicious circle of criticism and counter-criticism that allows the Christian right to become a bigger problem in their minds than the left. But if French could just put on the shoes of more ordinary American Christians, it should also be clear how this vicious circle doesn't have much to do with their experience, even the experience of those to his political left that still attend theologically conservative churches.
Meanwhile, threats that are abstract to him, like the risk of one's livelihood being destroyed for refusing to bow before the Rainbow Flag, are actually top of mind for more and more of us.
But to him: "Faraway Australia!" A tribe has been wiped off its icefield. The lights have gone out in Rome.
The core of French's argument is really just "No True Scotsman," isn't it? True Christians have always been persecuted, in all times and places. If there was ever a time when True Christians appear to have been treated better than in the past, then either you're wrong about their good treatment or wrong about them being True Christians.
Framed this way, his argument is essentially unfalsifiable. Though just to clarify things, I'd like to come out and ask him whether every time and place has been "Negative World" to the exact same degree as the Roman Empire during the height of the Great Persecution.
If not, then perhaps that sort of change didn't suddenly stop at some point in the past, and maybe things have changed just a teensy bit in our lifetimes.
If so, then even if he doesn't think it matters in the end to what degree the dominant culture is engaged in an active campaign to destroy the Christian religion entirely, perhaps he can at least see how other Christians might.
I have always struggled with the the amount of attention and seriousness David French gets treated with. Since I first read him at National Review, I thought his writing and reasoning were shallow and that he has delusions as to his own importance. Without a subscription to the Dispatch, I can only see a brief sample of his criticism of your work.
French claims he has received more intense criticism for opposing Trump than he did from the left prior to that. It appears he genuinely doesn't understand differences between the two. Prior to his consideration of a vanity Presidential campaign in 2016, French's name recognition on the left would have been very low. Much of the criticism he got for his anti-Trump stuff at National Review was coming from NR readers and subscribers. I was commenting there regularly at the time, some were fans of his who felt he had gone off the rails or betrayed them. This is going to come at a writer more intensely and in a much higher volume than people who are loyal to the other side. Much of it was mockery and shock that he considered himself a viable Presidential candidate. He and Moore both have consistently taken criticism from the left, particularly from non Christians much more seriously and respectfully than from their right. I hope we get to a point where they are simply dismissed out of hand as relics of a past era, like what has happened to George Will and few other political pundits.
Agree that Rigney's point about natural law is a valuable complement to your three-worlds framework. In thinking about French's critique this weekend, I arrived at some similar conclusions:
1. Slavery and racial discrimination are evil/sinful. But that go-to example of French et al does NOT represent a continuity with current "negative" world for two reasons. First, the history of mankind is shot through with racial animosity and slavery. Second, there are simplistic/misleading ways of reading scripture selectively that can be used to justify slavery and discrimination. Doesn't make it ok, but does make it (very) different from present day, where the animosity toward Christian morality based on sexual ethics is fundamentally "new" AND without any (false) sense of scriptural defense.
2. The abuses (and abuse) in the church that French points to are not defended by anyone. You can and should find cover-ups and denials to be wrong/sinful/bad, but no one is ultimately endorsing them or endorsing the things being covered up. So the fact that "people - including the church - have always been sinners" is not false, but it falsely equates that reality with the shift in today's culture. Ironically, the equivalence would come if such abuse were celebrated / endorsed - but the fact that there were coverups proves that (thankfully) the Tao still holds in terms of expectations (not behaviors) in this area.
Therefore, the negative world really is new/different and hostile in a non-traditional way.
It has been said, correctly in my view, that you can learn quite a bit about a man's character by knowing who his enemies/detractors/critics are. As far as I am concerned, there is no higher praise in the current times, than that David French is disagreeing with you. So, on that score, bravo!
As for French, he is nothing more than a shallow, virtue signaling, moral preener who wears his "holier than thou" cloak for all the world to see. DJT broke him and Covid/Vaccines finished him off. He is a fool and is a dangerous man shilling for evil and perversion.
I mean, the Left and the Democrat Party has LITERALLY become the PARTY OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH!!! And since the Left controls all of this country's institutions, both private and public sector, they are forcing the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah down our throats.
Anyone who can survey the cultural landscape of 2022 and say, "nothing has changed", is a complete and total fool. Naivete is cute and adorable in a small child. It is dangerous and will lead directly to EVIL when men and women practice it.
The bible tells us clearly in Psalsm 97:10 the "those who love God, must HATE EVIL". There is not enough hate of evil in the modern day church. In fact, the mainline protestant churches embraced evil long ago. The evangelical movement has been playing footsie with evil for a couple of decades now and is quickly becoming irrelevant in the battle against evil. All in service to what I call, "The Niceness Doctrine".
Jeez, when you have TOTALLY secular pols in European countries saying publicly that they don't' want the woke cultural rot that has infested American to come to their shores, I think that really says it all.
Moore's article hits a pet peeve of mine, so I'll trot out the argument I've used for it since I started working in Christian Ed.
1. Christ said that if someone slaps you, turn the other cheek. Nowhere does he say that if someone shanks you, turn the other kidney. Lots of educated theologians have spent gallons of ink on the contextual cultural significance of this verse. It's about being forbearing with insults and disrespect, not against self-defense.
2. Martin Luther, the Great Reformer, addresses this in his political pamphlets. You may feel obligated to refrain from self-defense. That is a right under freedom of conscience, that only you can decide for yourself. You may not, however, decide this on behalf of others in the community of Christ. In fact, every Christian has an affirmative obligation to defend one's "brethren, wives, children, and homes" (Neh 4:14) from attacks by the forces of the Evil One. To turn the cheek of an innocent one for them, to make them defenseless either through action or inaction, is to materially contribute to evil. When a brother or sister is attacked, we are obliged to come to their aid in whatever way is situationally appropriate and relevant, up to and including military defense of fellow Christian commonwealths.
3. Russell Moore is a bad faith actor engaged in bad-faith argumentation. We have all seen him demand Christians engage in aggressive political action in favor of whatever absurd and irrelevant political cause du jour has him riled up in the moment. He is only offended because the particular cause under consideration - defending the freedom of conscience, faith, and participation of authentic Christians from aggressive overreach by an alien religion and a pagan government - is one that he doesn't favor. Like anyone else whose ethics are purely situational and partisan, it's just the bloviating hot air of a gasbag spewing forth its vileness.
"But one of the ongoing themes in my writings here, which you can see in my coverage of the online men’s movements and the dissident right, is the growth of a post-Christian right, especially in youth cohorts. This will have profound consequences for our politics."
I often wonder how hard the reaction will be. I can imagine a future where many who thought the Moral Majority was the scariest bogeyman will wish for it instead.
Praying for you and your family.
Ross Douthat (I think — maybe David Brooks) said something to the effect: If you don’t like the Christian right, wait until you see the post-Christian right.
Interesting connection with natural law, but I think it is spot on. There has been a huge mental shift that is larger than evangelicalism, and evangelicals would be wise to recognize it if they really want to engage the world for Christ.
Just want to say: keep up the good work, Aaron!
A few observations about David French.
1. His first response was "Christians in the Bible belt used to commit immoral acts in their lives, therefore there was no such thing as a Positive World." Many of us pointed out to him that you were talking about the RECEPTION of Christians, not claiming there was some sort of Christian utopia in terms of behavior. He has apparently at least figured out what the model is and no longer takes that tack.
2. Part of his current argument is: He dislikes the possibility that the "retake America" crowd might latch onto the Three Worlds model. So, consequentialism and factionalism rule his thought rather than discussing whether the model is true or not. As you point out, the "retake America" approach is actually incompatible with Negative World, because we are in the minority now, with an openly hostile majority opposing us.
3. Finally, "as far away as Australia" is an ignorant remark. Other countries within the Anglosphere tend to be influential on American political thought more so than Germany, Eastern Europe, Asia, etc. The continental Europeans (e.g. Macron) have noted that a lot of woke lunacy seems to be an Anglosphere contagion that they want to keep out of the continent. The American left cites Anglosphere gun control and single-payer medical care all the time as a model for us. Just as what happens in crazy California tends to show up in other states a couple of decades later, what happens in Australia can be an omen for Americans.
I would also like to reply to Tim Keller: Would you have been censured at Princeton 25 years ago? If not, please stop speaking as if nothing has really changed.
Very good points. (My own comment was essentially #2, but you say it more clearly.)
Disagreement from Moore and French is validation. Keep going.
French’s criticism is partially explained by the calculation that one should reject and attack that which (seems to) support or inspire one’s enemies. French sees his enemies as “post-liberal” conservatives, especially any that he thinks make excuses for Trump and the tendencies he represents on the right. Thus, while temperamentally or on some substantive questions French might not be so far from a Renn or Dreher, he wants to undermine their theses and projects, because he sees these as adding fuel to right-wing/Christian illiberalism.
I don’t know whether this is a conscious motive on French’s part (or the other critics mentioned by Renn) or unconscious bias. Maybe he looks out and truly sees nothing different in the last 40 years, or maybe he gets what Renn is saying but sees no good coming from calling attention to the problem. Probably a bit of both. This represents a natural human tendency, of course, but it’s one that has gained a lot of traction over the last decade or so in the U.S.: don’t give any quarter to the enemy, don’t acknowledge the plausibility of ideas that they like and make use of. Many people have lost the ability to see things outside the lens of ideological battle.
French is probably especially bothered by the rhetorical implications of the terms “negative world” and “Benedict Option,” suggesting as they do (somewhat against the authors’ intentions) a certain hopelessness, which can feed the dangerous “sense of siege” he warns about.
Interesting - especially since I'm not a post-liberal
Yes, I know. My point was that French fears the three worlds notion being used by post-liberals, and that fear colors his criticism of it.
FWIW, since I think my comment can be misread, I’m basically Team Renn here rather than Team French (or Team Ahmari).
Good observations. I strive to be fair-minded and to always prioritize the search for truth over scoring points for my side. I imagine French sees himself that same way which is why, he would tell you, he spends a lot of time attacking what is supposed to be his own side. But saying that he sees absolutely ZERO change, really comes across to me as an argument that is trying to score rhetorical points rather than searching for truth.
It would be a little more credible to me if French said, "Well, here's what has changed for the better, here is what has changed for the worse, and I can see how some people think the 'for the worse' column is greater, but here's why I disagree."
And psychologically, I think that French has personally endured more attacks from the right. And for sure, some of those attacks have been gross, superlative, cruel, out of bounds, etc. I've seen people online mock him for adopting an African child, for example. Not cool, guys. He's in the Christian right's crosshairs a lot more than those of anyone on the left, because why would anyone on the left go out of their way to attack him? It would be like someone on the right going out of his way to attack an anti-Woke leftist writer like Freddie deBoer.
So I can see how some men like French get caught up in this vicious circle of criticism and counter-criticism that allows the Christian right to become a bigger problem in their minds than the left. But if French could just put on the shoes of more ordinary American Christians, it should also be clear how this vicious circle doesn't have much to do with their experience, even the experience of those to his political left that still attend theologically conservative churches.
Meanwhile, threats that are abstract to him, like the risk of one's livelihood being destroyed for refusing to bow before the Rainbow Flag, are actually top of mind for more and more of us.
But to him: "Faraway Australia!" A tribe has been wiped off its icefield. The lights have gone out in Rome.
The core of French's argument is really just "No True Scotsman," isn't it? True Christians have always been persecuted, in all times and places. If there was ever a time when True Christians appear to have been treated better than in the past, then either you're wrong about their good treatment or wrong about them being True Christians.
Framed this way, his argument is essentially unfalsifiable. Though just to clarify things, I'd like to come out and ask him whether every time and place has been "Negative World" to the exact same degree as the Roman Empire during the height of the Great Persecution.
If not, then perhaps that sort of change didn't suddenly stop at some point in the past, and maybe things have changed just a teensy bit in our lifetimes.
If so, then even if he doesn't think it matters in the end to what degree the dominant culture is engaged in an active campaign to destroy the Christian religion entirely, perhaps he can at least see how other Christians might.
I have always struggled with the the amount of attention and seriousness David French gets treated with. Since I first read him at National Review, I thought his writing and reasoning were shallow and that he has delusions as to his own importance. Without a subscription to the Dispatch, I can only see a brief sample of his criticism of your work.
French claims he has received more intense criticism for opposing Trump than he did from the left prior to that. It appears he genuinely doesn't understand differences between the two. Prior to his consideration of a vanity Presidential campaign in 2016, French's name recognition on the left would have been very low. Much of the criticism he got for his anti-Trump stuff at National Review was coming from NR readers and subscribers. I was commenting there regularly at the time, some were fans of his who felt he had gone off the rails or betrayed them. This is going to come at a writer more intensely and in a much higher volume than people who are loyal to the other side. Much of it was mockery and shock that he considered himself a viable Presidential candidate. He and Moore both have consistently taken criticism from the left, particularly from non Christians much more seriously and respectfully than from their right. I hope we get to a point where they are simply dismissed out of hand as relics of a past era, like what has happened to George Will and few other political pundits.
Agree that Rigney's point about natural law is a valuable complement to your three-worlds framework. In thinking about French's critique this weekend, I arrived at some similar conclusions:
1. Slavery and racial discrimination are evil/sinful. But that go-to example of French et al does NOT represent a continuity with current "negative" world for two reasons. First, the history of mankind is shot through with racial animosity and slavery. Second, there are simplistic/misleading ways of reading scripture selectively that can be used to justify slavery and discrimination. Doesn't make it ok, but does make it (very) different from present day, where the animosity toward Christian morality based on sexual ethics is fundamentally "new" AND without any (false) sense of scriptural defense.
2. The abuses (and abuse) in the church that French points to are not defended by anyone. You can and should find cover-ups and denials to be wrong/sinful/bad, but no one is ultimately endorsing them or endorsing the things being covered up. So the fact that "people - including the church - have always been sinners" is not false, but it falsely equates that reality with the shift in today's culture. Ironically, the equivalence would come if such abuse were celebrated / endorsed - but the fact that there were coverups proves that (thankfully) the Tao still holds in terms of expectations (not behaviors) in this area.
Therefore, the negative world really is new/different and hostile in a non-traditional way.