I appreciate your post Aaron as it illuminates the fantasy many of us traditionals live in hoping to resurrect past modes with Don Quixote-esque larping. Our analysis of the world and response should be attainable and realistic.
I read your article through the lens of comparing modernity to the premodern era. I would posit that modernity seems to be a different entity than previous civilizational shifts. Urbanization, Industrialization, Digitization, Atomization in the androgynous, world we are in is difficult as old patterns and archetypes don’t seem to apply. Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Paul Kingsnorth are good reference points who describe the modern world as disturbingly disconnected from the premodern era. The unifying them is a system with unlimited capacity for progressing with no ability with no natural balance or proportionality.
The question that I am trying to answer is how to put limits on myself and family when living in a system designed to be limitless
A good illustration of this can be found in the story behind Rod Dreher's book, 'The Little way of Ruthie Leming'. While the book was widely celebrated and is very much in line with the traditionalist return to small town and family theme, the real life story ended up being him compromising the welfare of his own family so he could live a life his father would approve of (his father being a former KKK member who disapproved of him). Dreher was not dishonest, he was all in after all, but he was constructing and chasing an illusion.
Steve Skojec, founder of the traditionalist Catholic publication 1 Peter 5, ended up selling out after his experience with Catholic traditionalism caused him to lose his faith altogether.
Of course, with so much of contemporary evangelicalism being made up on the go (Paula White), some form of intellectual tradition may not be bad.
I haven't read the book, but reading Dreher's shorter newsletter account of his return to Louisiana had me cringing at many points. As someone who was always very future-oriented but raised more or less in southern culture (or at least adjacent to it), I am quite familiar with the pull toward nostalgia – and even reverence – for the past.
But there's a lot of truth to the saying that you can't go home again. There is only forward. And I guess the Church needs to learn that every so often, as well.
Anyone who thinks he can "go back" to some pristine past is really revealing that he never learned how to study history. There are no real Golden Ages, in the Roman Church or any other--there are simply social systems with benefits, tradeoffs, and lots of surrounding circumstances. Any historical situation has a lot to learn from ("the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there") but the idea that we can simply step out of time and let it pass us by is the dream of a few who should know better by the time they've studied enough of the past to recreate it!
Spot on. While the traditionalists are at least a little better than modern culture (e.g., in at least acknowledging that people from more than five minutes ago had some moral judgment we could learn from), there is something still ahistorical about the movement.
Bishop Barron has a typically concise and clear answer on Catholic traditionalism:
Great article, Aaron. This was a hard read, but as much as I want to move on from the pontificate of Pope Francis, there is some truth to rigid traditionalism claims outside of his usual context. As I've engaged with Traditional Latin Catholics online it seems sometimes traditionalism gets in the way more than it helps on what seemingly is becoming more frequent when listening to traditional Catholic content. In fact, I am genuinely worried that most would gladly put any ecumenical efforts with the Orthodox that were made in the past 500+ years to the dustbin almost immediately just by going of their inability to not remind the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox that they're better than them. People can trash Vatican II as being modernist, but it effectively saved the liturgies and "traditional rites" in the Eastern Catholic circles that was continuously become more Latinized, and not in the TLM way. It also healed some rifts with the Greeks, albeit not perfectly.
In regards to the now dirty word "pastoral", it did at one point have a place and when genuinely understood and used in good faith by priests there is a place for it. Trads can in cases have a tendency to tell the alcoholic to, "just stop drinking." We've been bludgeoned and made cynical by the woke and the liberals entrenched in our faith so much that we can't differentiate from someone who has no interest in learning or aligning with our faith, and someone genuinely struggling. Compassion was weaponized against us, and we're going to have to learn to feel it again without feeling like someone is manipulating us.
In regards to governance, Christendom isn't coming back anytime soon, Constantinople isn't returning to us, and we're not retaking the Holy Land. Though I do hope for a converted and convicted America one day.
"Francis is the bête noire of American trad Catholics. I am not Catholic myself and I certainly have my differences with Francis on a range of topics. But Francis seems to be theologically orthodox. And he also has some trenchant critiques of conservative religion that both Catholic and non-Catholic traditionalists would do well to consider."
There's a lot to unpack here, but briefly:
*Pope Francis is seen by many as someone who hates the American Catholic Church, writ large. That includes me, and I am not a Trad. It involves far more than the Trads. He has an allergy to much of the past--to the point of despising it--which is a destructive posture for a Church one of whose chief claims is the strength of tradition over conformity to the eternally changing enthusiasms of the world.
*In many parishes where it was more widely allowed to flourish, Trad communities were the only ones not only with growing membership but *young* growing membership and young families. (There are a few stragglers out there but if he continues as pope for long enough, it's widely thought he'll extinguish those).
*While theologicaly orthodox in some important ways, he's made a lot of wink-and-nod statements that are walked back by his staff (not him), and wink-and-nod appointments that are not.
*He completely reversed a couple millenia of what we were taught to be unalterable doctrine concerning capital punishment. That is not the sort of thing we were led to believe "development of doctine" meant.
This isn't on-point regarding tradition, but it's shamefully easy to make a case that he's protective of prominent sex-abusing Catholic clerics provided they support him. But I mention it because it definitley colors how many of us view him, outside of that calamity.
That being said, there's much to admire in your view that "Religious conservatives need to draw on the past without living in it," I think that's well-put. Where to draw those lines is always the question. For one thing I'm not an integralist, if for no other reason of having lived through the decades-long disaster of Catholic clerical coverup of sexual abuse.
I'm Protestant myself, but my wife is devoutly Catholic, as are many of my close friends. I would analogize the more extreme Tridentine-Rite Catholics to King-James-Only Protestants. Both groups are entitled to their aesthetic preference for ancient things, but they go astray when they start coming up with cockamamie reasons why their preferred version is theologically superior to every modern alternative, and when they look down on those outside their group as inferior Christians.
This is a great point! One of the things I like to point out when a conservative calls me a "postmodernist" is that this kind of traditionalism is a fundamentally postmodern attitude. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern position on temporality as "epitemporal," which is the translation of the temporal past into a series of spatial places. Rather than understanding the past as a flow from which we cannot return, it's just another location which we can revisit. Postmodern approaches to the past create epitemporal spaces where the past and present are brought adjacent to one another and overlap. Frederic Jameson calls this the historicity of pastiche. The 50's become a theme or a style rather than a time, and by imitating that style we can in some way blend the present-day to the pastiche-past. We delude ourselves into thinking that we've crossed that chasm of past and present in the stylized re-presentation of the past.
Conservatives who want to roll back the clock, to return to the past by imposing a past-stylization on present social forms is an entirely postmodern approach. As much as they squeal about anything postmodern, they're the very epitome of the conditions of postmodernity.
I appreciate your post Aaron as it illuminates the fantasy many of us traditionals live in hoping to resurrect past modes with Don Quixote-esque larping. Our analysis of the world and response should be attainable and realistic.
I read your article through the lens of comparing modernity to the premodern era. I would posit that modernity seems to be a different entity than previous civilizational shifts. Urbanization, Industrialization, Digitization, Atomization in the androgynous, world we are in is difficult as old patterns and archetypes don’t seem to apply. Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Paul Kingsnorth are good reference points who describe the modern world as disturbingly disconnected from the premodern era. The unifying them is a system with unlimited capacity for progressing with no ability with no natural balance or proportionality.
The question that I am trying to answer is how to put limits on myself and family when living in a system designed to be limitless
A good illustration of this can be found in the story behind Rod Dreher's book, 'The Little way of Ruthie Leming'. While the book was widely celebrated and is very much in line with the traditionalist return to small town and family theme, the real life story ended up being him compromising the welfare of his own family so he could live a life his father would approve of (his father being a former KKK member who disapproved of him). Dreher was not dishonest, he was all in after all, but he was constructing and chasing an illusion.
Steve Skojec, founder of the traditionalist Catholic publication 1 Peter 5, ended up selling out after his experience with Catholic traditionalism caused him to lose his faith altogether.
Of course, with so much of contemporary evangelicalism being made up on the go (Paula White), some form of intellectual tradition may not be bad.
I haven't read the book, but reading Dreher's shorter newsletter account of his return to Louisiana had me cringing at many points. As someone who was always very future-oriented but raised more or less in southern culture (or at least adjacent to it), I am quite familiar with the pull toward nostalgia – and even reverence – for the past.
But there's a lot of truth to the saying that you can't go home again. There is only forward. And I guess the Church needs to learn that every so often, as well.
Anyone who thinks he can "go back" to some pristine past is really revealing that he never learned how to study history. There are no real Golden Ages, in the Roman Church or any other--there are simply social systems with benefits, tradeoffs, and lots of surrounding circumstances. Any historical situation has a lot to learn from ("the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there") but the idea that we can simply step out of time and let it pass us by is the dream of a few who should know better by the time they've studied enough of the past to recreate it!
Spot on. While the traditionalists are at least a little better than modern culture (e.g., in at least acknowledging that people from more than five minutes ago had some moral judgment we could learn from), there is something still ahistorical about the movement.
Bishop Barron has a typically concise and clear answer on Catholic traditionalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4h2ntfF76k
Great article, Aaron. This was a hard read, but as much as I want to move on from the pontificate of Pope Francis, there is some truth to rigid traditionalism claims outside of his usual context. As I've engaged with Traditional Latin Catholics online it seems sometimes traditionalism gets in the way more than it helps on what seemingly is becoming more frequent when listening to traditional Catholic content. In fact, I am genuinely worried that most would gladly put any ecumenical efforts with the Orthodox that were made in the past 500+ years to the dustbin almost immediately just by going of their inability to not remind the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox that they're better than them. People can trash Vatican II as being modernist, but it effectively saved the liturgies and "traditional rites" in the Eastern Catholic circles that was continuously become more Latinized, and not in the TLM way. It also healed some rifts with the Greeks, albeit not perfectly.
In regards to the now dirty word "pastoral", it did at one point have a place and when genuinely understood and used in good faith by priests there is a place for it. Trads can in cases have a tendency to tell the alcoholic to, "just stop drinking." We've been bludgeoned and made cynical by the woke and the liberals entrenched in our faith so much that we can't differentiate from someone who has no interest in learning or aligning with our faith, and someone genuinely struggling. Compassion was weaponized against us, and we're going to have to learn to feel it again without feeling like someone is manipulating us.
In regards to governance, Christendom isn't coming back anytime soon, Constantinople isn't returning to us, and we're not retaking the Holy Land. Though I do hope for a converted and convicted America one day.
"Francis is the bête noire of American trad Catholics. I am not Catholic myself and I certainly have my differences with Francis on a range of topics. But Francis seems to be theologically orthodox. And he also has some trenchant critiques of conservative religion that both Catholic and non-Catholic traditionalists would do well to consider."
There's a lot to unpack here, but briefly:
*Pope Francis is seen by many as someone who hates the American Catholic Church, writ large. That includes me, and I am not a Trad. It involves far more than the Trads. He has an allergy to much of the past--to the point of despising it--which is a destructive posture for a Church one of whose chief claims is the strength of tradition over conformity to the eternally changing enthusiasms of the world.
*In many parishes where it was more widely allowed to flourish, Trad communities were the only ones not only with growing membership but *young* growing membership and young families. (There are a few stragglers out there but if he continues as pope for long enough, it's widely thought he'll extinguish those).
*While theologicaly orthodox in some important ways, he's made a lot of wink-and-nod statements that are walked back by his staff (not him), and wink-and-nod appointments that are not.
*He completely reversed a couple millenia of what we were taught to be unalterable doctrine concerning capital punishment. That is not the sort of thing we were led to believe "development of doctine" meant.
This isn't on-point regarding tradition, but it's shamefully easy to make a case that he's protective of prominent sex-abusing Catholic clerics provided they support him. But I mention it because it definitley colors how many of us view him, outside of that calamity.
That being said, there's much to admire in your view that "Religious conservatives need to draw on the past without living in it," I think that's well-put. Where to draw those lines is always the question. For one thing I'm not an integralist, if for no other reason of having lived through the decades-long disaster of Catholic clerical coverup of sexual abuse.
That being said,
Excellent article!
I'm Protestant myself, but my wife is devoutly Catholic, as are many of my close friends. I would analogize the more extreme Tridentine-Rite Catholics to King-James-Only Protestants. Both groups are entitled to their aesthetic preference for ancient things, but they go astray when they start coming up with cockamamie reasons why their preferred version is theologically superior to every modern alternative, and when they look down on those outside their group as inferior Christians.
This is a great point! One of the things I like to point out when a conservative calls me a "postmodernist" is that this kind of traditionalism is a fundamentally postmodern attitude. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern position on temporality as "epitemporal," which is the translation of the temporal past into a series of spatial places. Rather than understanding the past as a flow from which we cannot return, it's just another location which we can revisit. Postmodern approaches to the past create epitemporal spaces where the past and present are brought adjacent to one another and overlap. Frederic Jameson calls this the historicity of pastiche. The 50's become a theme or a style rather than a time, and by imitating that style we can in some way blend the present-day to the pastiche-past. We delude ourselves into thinking that we've crossed that chasm of past and present in the stylized re-presentation of the past.
Conservatives who want to roll back the clock, to return to the past by imposing a past-stylization on present social forms is an entirely postmodern approach. As much as they squeal about anything postmodern, they're the very epitome of the conditions of postmodernity.
Thanks!