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Three Things Conservatives Wrote This Week That Everyone Should Read

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Welcome to TP Ideas‘ weekly roundup of the best conservative writing! Every Friday, we take a look at three pieces by right-leaning writers that constructively articulate core elements of their worldview. The goal isn’t to find conservatives telling us how right liberals are, but rather to pick out writing that helps liberals understand where their ideological foes are coming from.

So let’s get started.

1. “The Death Of The Parish” — David T. Koyzis, First Things

Given the partisan tribal shuffling that’s occurred around climate change and fossil fuels, the going assumption these days is that if someone is a conservative they’ll be a fan of the car-based lifestyle. David T. Koyzis is not one of those conservatives. And this week he published a short piece in First Things arguing that the creation of the automobile has changed church life and Christians’ relationship with their churches, very much for the worst.

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Essentially, by freeing people to travel great distances with ease, cars have allowed everyone to treat which church they attend as a matter of consumer choice. Before the arrival of the automobile, people were largely stuck attending whichever church was within easy distance, and had to deal with whatever the nature of the sermons, the personality of the congregation, the theology of the community and so forth happened to be. By Koyzis’ lights, not only has this change made the ways people relate to their church more shallow, it’s made the ways churches relate to people more shallow as well:

The most important consequence of this trend is that the gathered church — as distinct from the church as corpus Christi, which is all-encompassing — has been reduced to a mere voluntary association of like-minded individuals who can join and quit, or come and go at their discretion. The church, like any other commodity in the marketplace, exists only to serve the needs of its individual members. In this respect John Locke’s definition, scarcely deemed orthodox in seventeenth-century England, seems uncontroversial today: “A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls” (emphases mine). Note the contrast to the scriptural definition of Church as the covenant community of those called by God into a living relationship with him.

The territorial parish cannot easily withstand this new ecclesiology. Near universal automobile ownership has made Christians of virtually every tradition into consumers of perceived spiritual goods. It is de rigueur these days to claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” because religion implies binding obligation within a larger authoritative community, while spirituality leaves the individual in control and need not entail a transformed life and redirected affections. Everyone becomes a seeker and churches are compelled to attract potential members by whatever means necessary. Why? Because no one has to show up, after all. They can easily drive past the nearest church building and find another congregation that better meets their subjective needs. Or they can simply stay home and sleep late. The net effect is that the institutional church has no more authority than its members are willing to grant it. In other words, it is one more voluntary association not essentially different from the local birdwatching society.

What Koyzis is getting at here is an idea that pops up in regular intervals in conservative thought — especially religious conservative thought — about the value of unchosen things and the value of having your life shaped and directed by forces greater than yourself. This can be the neighborhood in which you grew up, the circle of friends you fall into, obviously the family into which you’re born, and also the church community and religious tradition you attend. When we can literally chose every force that structures our lives for ourselves, the bottom drops out of our lives in a way; when all the meaning in our lives is meaning we’ve constructed, it becomes harder to actually see that meaning as having real substance or staying power beyond the momentary passage of our own lives.

“We cannot, of course, return to a pre-automotive past,” Koyzis admits. But he does recommend churches just stop constructing parking lots, and thus force themselves to look for congregates in their immediate vicinity — and hopefully encourage the locals to re-embrace “the parish model” as well.

2. “Palin The Piñata” — Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review Online

Sarah Palin and her family, including her daughter Bristol Palin, apparently got into an altercation recently at a party. Gawker picked up the story and released the explanation an understandably-agitated Bristol Palin gave the police about what happened. This included some man pushing and dragging her while leveling all sorts of derogatory verbal abuse. The story shot around the media and wound up on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, where Sullivan called the incident “an outtake from the old Jerry Springer show” and an example of what John McCain “intended to bring within a heart beat of the presidency.”

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Over at National Review Online, Charles C.W. Cooke is no fan of Sarah Palin. (Or of ThinkProgress, for that matter.) But he found this latest reaction to the Palins a step too far, and came back hard this week at the way “the self-appointed smart-set has treated Palin as a walking, talking source of confirmation bias.”

The first question we might ask of Sullivan and of anyone else who has taken an interest in this story is, Why are we spilling so much ink on this topic at all? Sarah Palin does not hold public office. She is not running for public office. Indeed, she does not even have a television show. Certainly, she is not anonymous — her relentless lust for attention is one of the things I dislike about her — but we might expect that her success in drawing notice would be commensurate with her position. She has no position. Why, then, the obsession?

The second, related, inquiry is this: If it is a sign of poor “judgment” to choose as veep someone whose children are a mess, why does Joe Biden get a pass for the conduct of his son, Hunter, who was kicked out of the Navy Reserve for having been discovered using cocaine? Take a wild guess as to which tale has been of more interest within the Beltway: That of Bristol Palin or that of Hunter Biden. (Hint: It ain’t the one involving the serving politician and his family.) Back when Bristol Palin was a minor, her pregnancy was treated as an indictment of the Republican party’s entire “family values” platform and as an example of the rank hypocrisy of the moral Right. Today, the man who is second in line to the presidency announces that his child has been discovered on the wrong side of a law the breaking of which often ends in imprisonment, and he is unlikely to face so much as an interview with the police. What, pray, does that say about the “bigger picture”?

The third question, as The Week’s Matt Lewis observes, is this: “If Bristol Palin was physically and verbally assaulted by a man, shouldn’t we be up in arms about that, and not about her reaction?” This lattermost wringer is all the more poignant in light of the current focus on domestic violence and sexual assault, and our tendency to regard each and every incident in which a man uses his superior strength for ill as evidence of a broader “war on women” or a “culture of rape.” Who among us can say with a straight face that, if Malia Obama had been attacked at a party or at a concert or at her school, the headlines would have focused on her reaction to the onslaught? Likewise, if Chelsea Clinton had been pushed to the floor, dragged across the grass, and robbed, would we really be breaking down the language she used in the aftermath?

Now, there’s an at least implied dismissal of the sexual assault problem in Cooke’s piece, and a certain chip-on-the-shoulder tone to his earlier paragraphs. But it’s hard to argue with the central guts of his argument: the Palins do indeed seem to often be viewed as fair game in a way the families of other high profile figures are not. And while people are certainly entitled to be silly and get drunk and boisterous at parties from time to time, no one should ever be treated the way this guy apparently treated Bristol Palin.

3. “Sublime Recovery Vs. Banal Recovery” — Eve Tushnet, The American Conservative

Eve Tushnet is a conservative writer, a committed Catholic, a lesbian, a celibate, and has had her battles with alcoholism. (Yes, you are more boring than she is.) She laid out two narrative models of recovery from addiction in The American Conservative this week, which she sees as vying for dominance in modern culture: the “sublime” recovery versus the “banal” recovery. The first is closely associated with the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and is essentially a spiritual and moral transformation involving “humiliation, surrender, and obedience.” The second involves nothing so transcendent, and is simply the end of drug abuse due to a long and unhurried transition out of it, or just a moderation of drug use that’s sufficient to make room for a healthy life.

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After acknowledging the resonance many aspects in the “sublime” model have with her own experience, Tushnet mounts a defense of the alternative route, worrying that “the increased prominence of the dramatic 12-step narrative… may make it harder for us to accept that anything else is ‘real’ recovery at all.”

Maia Szalavitz, a truly invaluable journalist whose work I’ve recommended here before, recently asked, “Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It–Why Is This Widely Denied?” Part of the answer, I think, is that the growing-out-of-it type of recovery is invisible–and it’s invisible because it’s boring. It’s banal. As far as I know there are no novels or sitcoms about banal recovery, because it looks like staying basically the same. You get to keep the self-image you started with: You can keep thinking you’re smart, good, and competent, able to handle whatever life throws at you. You’re able to keep mislabeling your luck as “Good Choices I Made,” if that’s a thing you do.

But this banal recovery, this recovery in which you get to hang onto your ego and keep all your fantasies of competence, makes certain things possible. I know a lot of people who went from destructive use of drugs and alcohol to moderate use, and what that made possible for them was friendship, marriage, babies, honesty, wholehearted religious participation. And these experiences are sublime. People who managed to avoid the unconditional surrender of sublime recovery have so many other, more beautiful paths to surrender.

Marriage is humiliating, parenting is humbling, friendship is a school for gratitude. The fantasies and ego will be burned off by love. Banal recovery makes possible a sublime everyday life.

After noting that the spiritual gauntlet of the sublime route and the 12-step approach has often been embraced by left-wing celebrities and other personalities battling their own drug problems, Tushnet also quotes another essay by Helen Andrews that gets in an interesting jab at liberals. “The irony is that the aspects of AA that seem to resonate with them are the things they hate about organized religion,” Andrews writes. “The admission of powerlessness, the submission to authority, skepticism about the value of thinking for yourself, the rote repetition of phrases that to an outsider seem vapid, sentimental, or silly.” Like Koyzis’ argument in the previous piece for not being able to choose your church, the value of the sublime route lies in its obliteration of the individual, subsuming them into something unchosen and larger than oneself. But the very fact that there are different routes to this sublimity — the ostensibly conservative-preferred religious route and the liberal-preferred spiritual one — suggests the self-contradictory ways we can choose which form of unchosen surrender fits best for us.

However, the banal recovery model gestures at another bit of wisdom that’s popped up in conservatism from time to time: namely, the value of the everyday life simply lived, and the victories won in forging relationships with our friends, our spouses, our families, our neighbors, and so on. To crib a Lord of the Rings reference, grand adventures to slay orc armies and evil dark lords are all well and good. But what really lasts — and what those grand adventures are meant to protect — are the Hobbits’ quiet daily lives in the Shire, built around friends and farming and a cold pint of beer.