Helm reviews Live Not By Lies

Paul Helm reviews Rod Dreher's Live Not By Lies.

Plagues, locusts, and floods

The following is an excerpt from an email from someone named Wyoming Doc who is married to a Chinese woman. Wyoming Doc frequents Rod Dreher's weblog.

I have not been able to comfort my wife in some time. I have never seen her like this. She is a profoundly educated and worldly-wise woman. However, she has now reverted to her people’s former religion of Zen Buddhism – in a way that I find beautiful and scary at the same time. Her grandmother made sure she and her siblings knew their old ways, even in the Maoist China in which she grew up.

She has made from scratch these beautiful garments for herself and our kids. She calls them “mercy garments” — I get the feeling it is something like our version of “sackcloth and ashes”. When this all started, she looked me right in the eye and said, “We Chinese have forgotten our old traditions and our blessed ancestors. They are now telling us that they have not forgotten us.” She has constructed a Buddhist shrine in our front room – pic enclosed – and every evening it is covered in votive candles – and she and the kids bow and perform rituals, and chant. It is like Gregorian chant – but a bit different.

This weekend, I saw the look from the abyss in her eyes once again. If you recall, when her fortune teller wrote her last fall, he stated that the plague would begin in the winter and that Lunar New Year would not be celebrated. The next thing he said would happen would be the complete destruction of the crops — and this would be accomplished with locusts.

You can only imagine the look in her eyes – and the gushing of tears – when Mandarin TV announced that the locust swarms from Africa had arrived in Xinjiang, were gathering strength, and had not been this bad in decades.

[Rod Dreher: The locusts really are there. Here’s today’s agricultural news.]

The Industrial Heartland is now on its knees. If this locust plague begins to spread from Xinjiang into Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia and Sichuan, that would put the Chinese breadbasket on its knees. That is where all the rice and wheat and other grains is grown. My wife’s fortuneteller by the way, stated that after the crops were ruined in the spring, the flooding would begin in the summer.

Again, my wife is a highly educated woman — a degree from their premier university — and up until now has been very secular in her life. I have this feeling that if my wife is behaving this way, it is probably going on all over China.

What is that going to mean for Xi Jinping and the People’s Republic? What would happen in America if large parts of the “Tribulation meme” inexplicably started to come true — what would that do to our cultural and civic life?

Now that China is the 2nd largest economy in the world – what effect will be had when things start to crater? What would the world be like with 1.5 billion Chinese in rebellion or even a Civil War?

[Rod Dreher: I remind you that Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, is one of the places in China where the persecution of Christians by the Communist regime was most severe...This could be a turning point in Chinese history. The early church gained respect and affection among the Romans in part because of the compassion its members showed the sick and dying during a plague time.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/camus-church-china-the-plague-covid19

Is China at breaking point?

[A commenter named Wyoming Doc:] I pray for my wife – all the time. This has been incredibly hard on our family. But we will make it. What I can also tell you – based on my wife’s multiple conversations with friends back home – is that this is really beginning to stir the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. Thoughts about Xi Xinping that would have been never thought to say out loud are being said now – and the whole country seems to be galvanizing around the fact that they have been seriously let down by the Communist Party. I am not sure what will come of that – but this could not have happened at a worse time for Xi – the Hong Kong fiasco – the pork virus disaster – and the trade war with the USA – and now this – the country will soon be at the breaking point.

[A commenter named Alec:] It’s ridiculous. I’m an American living in Shanghai who just traveled across China for the New Year (to Changsha, in Hunan) and have seen nothing like this man’s relatives are breathlessly reporting. I just got back from Starbucks here in Shanghai where I did some work, and though everyone is wearing masks shops are still open and no freedom of movement is curtailed. This article is highly irresponsible.

(Source)

1. I suspect one reason Shanghai and Beijing aren't as hard hit by the coronavirus is because they're farther away from central China where Wuhan is, in a country which has severely restricted travel. Also, I think it's due to the fact that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has involuntarily moved tons of doctors, nurses, and other health staff from various cities in China to Beijing and Shanghai which are their wealthiest cities. If these cities collapse, if things deteriorate enough, the CPC could collapse too.

2. Here's a dilemma. Should one hope China obtains relief from the coronavirus? Or should one hope the coronavirus overwhelms China so much that it ultimately leads to the collapse of the CPC and presumably usher in something better (it's hard to imagine much worse than the CPC)? Perhaps even some kind of representative democracy? I pray for those who are Christians in China and those who will become Christians in China.

Where do we go from here?

A big part of the world has gone crazy. By “big part of the world”, I mean, “lots of people, and lots of institutions”. We know that.

They have rejected God and adopted a form of man-made morality which holds that every person and every culture should be “equal” (a form of morality which is clearly on display in universities and magnified by the media), in such a way that dissenting from this morality can cause you to lose a Facebook or Twitter account, or a job, or a wife and custody of a child, or your life.

How are Christians to deal with this?

Not long ago, Rod Dreher proposed “The Benedict Option”, which he summarized as “communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life”.

I don’t think that is good enough. On the other hand, I’ve long been impressed by Alvin Plantinga’s advice in his “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (from the 1984 essay). While this advice is specific to philosophy students, I think it has broader application for those of us in other situations:

Dismissing “The Benedict Option” In Favor of “The Grace of God” Option

The Benedict Option: Read the Review, not the book

First, a bit of ironic humor: When I speak to Christian groups the question I hear most often is: “How do the Jews keep their children in the fold?” The answer, of course, is that most of us don’t. As the joke goes, the difference between Donald Trump and a liberal Jew is that Trump has Jewish grandchildren.

A question that preoccupies many of us, both in election years and non-election years, is “how can Christians (and Christianity) maintain an influence in a world that seems to trend more ungodly with each passing minute?”

One option put forth is by the Methodist-turned-Roman-Catholic-turned-Eastern-Orthodox writer Rob Dreher, is “The Benedict Option” – not named after “Pope Benedict”. Both “The Benedict Option” and “Pope Benedict” are named after the fifth-century Monastic Benedict of Nursia, who developed the famous “Rule of St. Benedict” not merely for “monasticism”, but for “a confederation of autonomous communities” living apart from the world. It is said that “most religious communities founded throughout the Middle Ages” adhered to this rule.

David Goldman has reviewed “The Benedict Option”, and he has done it in a non-fawning way:

Into and Out of Roman Catholicism

Over at Green Baggins, a commenter named Rooney said:

If a reformed person visits sedevacantist websites like MHFM [“Most Holy Family Monastery”], I think such a person would be hardened more against the current RCC and the chances of converting to the RCC will drop. Reading sedevacantist/traditionalist arguments was one thing that kept me from seriously considering the RCC.

Roman Catholicism has lots of high profile ins-and-outs. Here are just a few of them:

Rod Dreher on Declining Attendance in American Churches

Rod Dreher provides this report on the pitiful state of The Episcopal Church (the mainline denomination):

numbers from the Episcopal Church show a stunning collapse in church attendance between 2000 and 2010. It’s down 23 percent overall, with some dioceses in far steeper decline than that. Pittsburgh, for example, has lost 73 percent of its churchgoing Episcopalians over that time period. That’s nearly three out of four Episcopalians in Pittsburgh, gone within a decade. San Joaquin saw four out of five of its people stop coming to church in the same period.

No diocese is growing, but a handful of them — Tennessee and South Carolina, for example — kept losses down to single digits. Maybe some of you readers who are Episcopalians can explain why. It can’t be simply a Southern thing; other Southern dioceses experienced losses on par with TEC in other regions.

At the end of the article, he provides this update:

UPDATE: The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops voted today to make it against church law not to consider transgenders for ministry. If the House of Deputies goes along with it, as it is expected to, this becomes Episcopal Church law.

Yes, things are bad.

Interestingly, here is one comparison that Dreher makes:

Putnam & Campbell, sifting the data, found that if not for the large influx of Hispanic immigrants, Catholicism in the US would be declining at a rate comparable to that of mainline Protestantism.

Putnam & Campbell are the authors of a 2010 work called American Grace, a study on “the ever-changing religious and political landscape in America”. Here is what they say about that:

• The religious traditions that are losing the most adherents are mainline Protestants (including Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists) and Catholics.

• Roughly 60 percent of Americans raised as Catholics are no longer practicing Catholics – approximately one third have left the church entirely, while another third are only nominally Catholic. No denomination in America has gone through more rapid or wrenching change.

• However, the overall share of the population that is Catholic (just under 25 percent) has held steady. For while "Anglo" Catholics (mainly the grandchildren of European immigrants) have been rushing out of one door, Latino Catholics have been entering through another.

• For Catholics aged 18-34, 59 percent are Latino. Catholicism in America is well on its way to becoming a majority-Latino religion. This transition is not taking place without tension, as some congregations experience strains between older English-speaking parishioners and younger Spanish-speaking ones.

This study, especially the item saying that “roughly 60% of Americans raised as Catholics are no longer practicing Catholics” provides independent confirmation for a Pew Research survey that we had cited recently.

He concludes:

But no Christian church should gloat, and not just out of politeness, either. Putnam & Campbell documented that all Christian churches are seeing declining numbers. We are living through a great shift in religion and society now.