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  • Message to my Liberal Friends: You Can't Pick and Choose Your Wars

    Last week, we saw our Congress (the opposite of progress) in recess, getting an earful of anti-war sentiment from their constituents.  (And not just from “blue” districts and states either).  Our President, meanwhile, shot some rounds of golf and didn’t make much more headway with the G20 than those in Congress did with their constituents.  But now everyone’s back in Washington (a bad sign) and there should be some voting done on whether Congress will authorise attacking Syria or not.

    It’s no surprise that the neocons are out in force to support American intervention.  That’s what neocons do.  The neocon problem is that the rest of the Republican Party, who has supplied much of the cannon fodder for the previous adventures in the Middle East, has had enough.  And it’s not a surprise either that the left-wing power holders are itching for a fight, to assuage their moral outrage with the blood of others.

    The real surprise has come from much of the left, both secular and Christian, which are either waffling, AWOL (as is the case with Hollywood) or actually support this adventure.  People who I never thought would support a war are actually either doing it or toying with the idea.  This piece is for those kinds of people.

    I’ve discussed the merits and demerits of intervention in Syria before, and won’t repeat all of that.  Leaving aside the moral issues, the Syrious question is this: would American intervention really improve the situation?  We know that it’s bad that Assad’s people have been gassed.  But if we look back on the wreckage of our recent interventions (Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to say nothing of our playing footsies with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) it’s not a very cheery picture, for them or us.  Or would we be better off letting the international system, such as it is, gum Assad to death with a “political solution” (which may involve Syria’s partition)?

    But anti-war people don’t usually think in these terms.  Ever since Vietnam, we have been told that war is bad for living things.  Pacifists, if they are true to that belief, never condone a war for any reason.  Christian pacifists, who base their idea on the New Testament, are equally adamant.  So why are these people either waffling or all in for intervention?

    I think the answer is simple: it’s being proposed by a Democrat, and more simply Barack Obama, the darling of the human race.  (That term, for those of you having a classical senior moment, was Flavius Josephus’ term for the Roman Emperor Titus, who won the Jewish War and razed the Temple along with most of Jerusalem).  People who wouldn’t support a war by anyone else (and in recent times one President in particular) are ready to support this one just because it’s done by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, or some other excuse.

    But there are two things to consider.

    The first is that Barack Obama’s drive for intervention is a shame-honour reaction.  He was shamed by someone using chemical weapons after he drew a “red line” on the subject, so he must recover his honour by attacking Syria.  To do this, he must use the military, which he has little regard for except now when he needs it.

    The second is that, if you’re going to be anti-war and a pacifist, you can’t choose your wars.  That gets us to the “just war” theory, and no self-respecting pacifist will support such.  And look at the recent past.  Did anyone advocate intervention with Pol Pot’s massacres, which are far greater than these?  Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, and we still had opposition from some of the same people against intervention in Iraq who are now considering supporting this attack.

    It’s time for pacifists, Christian and otherwise, to face facts and the consequences of their own philosophy.  If you really oppose all wars, oppose them all.  If you don’t, you’re no “better” than the rest of us.  It doesn’t matter whether you like the person starting it or not.

    Hopefully Congress will have the sense to vote against intervention.  When Parliament did so, David Cameron got the message.  If Obama goes ahead with it in spite of congressional disapproval, then we will know that democratic process is worthless in this country, at which point our response to events in Syria will be the least of our problems.

  • The Thankless End of the United Thank Offering–and a Reminder of the Consequences

    And most of its board (until now with some autonomy from the Episcopal Church) aren’t happy about it:

    With the stroke of a pen, the United Thank Offering Board (UTO) will possibly be rendered powerless and voiceless by Episcopal Church leadership. This is a complete reversal of a three-year study process that resulted in the General Convention ratifying the report of a Study Committee (INC-055 AdHoc) in 2012. The report praised the UTO Board’s work and declared:

    We believe that the United Thank Offering must continue to be autonomous but interdependent as regards the corporate entity that constitutes The Episcopal Church.

    The United Thank Offering is a venerable institution within the Episcopal Church.  Up until now it has been under control of the Episcopal Church Women, a group of people who have had to put up with a lot over the years (such as, the unceremonious ejection of my mother’s ladies’ guild’s rummage sale from the parish hall, which resulted in Palm Beach’s premier resale shop).  But, in its centralising rage, TEC has yanked their autonomy also.

    Although I have blog readers who disagree, I try to avoid visceral, emotion-charged rants.  One exception was The Church of the Palm Crosses becomes the Church of the Double Cross, over what I feel is the Episcopal Church’s shameful handling of its property disputes.  At the time I stated that, IMHO, TEC’s leaders “are only in it for the money“.  Stuff like this only confirms my suspicion.

    But do not be deceived: any church or charity which takes money for one purpose and funnels it into another–the usual result of moves like this–will demoralise its donor base in a hurry.  (I think there are some legal problems with that, but TEC seems to be Teflon coated most of the time).  And when you demoralise your donor base, you will stop them from giving.  This is not a good strategy for an institution whose demographics are as unfavourable as TEC’s and which needs all the happy donors it can get.

    And I’ll repeat this from that same rant:

    I’ve said many nasty things about Episcopalians and their church, but I’d never have believed that I would come to that conclusion about this church.  The Episcopal Church was supposed to be the place where this kind of thing didn’t happen, but happened it did.  In the past Episcopalians, lay and cleric alike, could comfort themselves in the conceit that, while rude “Bible-thumpers” went on television to enrich themselves at the expense of the impecunious, the Episcopal church was basically above such tasteless social climbing.  One can only conclude that the church is currently held captive by a bunch of left-wing arrivistes who, while attempting to maintain the appearances of the past, are at best no better than those they ridicule.

  • Achor and Friends: Hosanna to the Son of David

    Dove 54 (1978)

    Achor, the North London group which put together these albums, got some friends together and did yet another one.  The music is very much in the tradition of the previous albums: good, straightforward Christian folk with an emphasis on songs taken directly from the Scriptures.  And the benefits of that (esp. with Scripture memorisation) cannot be underestimated, especially since that practice of the “Jesus Music” era (it appeared on both Protestant and Catholic albums) has sadly gone out of fashion.

    The singers:

    • Alice Charles
    • Mavis Ford
    • Sue Martin
    • Claire White
    • Irene Wilkie
    • Ann Woodroffe
    • David Bolton
    • Chris Head
    • Brook Trickett
    • John White
    • Alan Woodroffe

    The musicians:

    • Mavis Ford: electric piano, string synthesiser
    • David Bolton: acoustic guitar
    • Mark Ford: drums
    • David Gillard: acoustic & electric guitar; pedal steel guitar
    • Chris Head: acoustic & bass guitar; percussion; electric piano; string synthesiser
    • Frank Jeffrey: electric piano; string synthesiser
    • Paul Mitchell: viola
    • Producer: Chris Head
    • Arrangements by Chris Head & Mavis Ford
    • Engineer: Brook Trickett
    • Recorded at Soundree Studios, Biggin Hill
    • Sleeve Design: Gerry Copas

    My thanks to Rob for furnishing this music, and to all the Achor artists for their kind comments and support of my earlier postings.

    More Music

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  • Another Democrat War in the Making

    Back in 1976, when Bob Dole was running for Vice President, during his debate with Walter Mondale he made the following statement:

    I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans — enough to fill the city of Detroit.

    It didn’t do him any good, although it’s debatable it did him any harm either.  He and Gerald Ford, running as Republicans in the wake of Watergate, had a thankless job, although many people came to regret the outcome of that election.

    Dole had good standing to make that remark: he was badly wounded in World War II, and Richard Nixon, demonised as he was, had ended the Vietnam War.  Today, however, we have a President, whose snooping has far exceeded anything Richard Nixon did, about to put us in another “Democrat war,” this time in Syria.  The Syrians have supposedly crossed a “red line” with chemical weapons, and American moral outrage always demands someone’s blood somewhere or another.

    There’s not much support among the American people for this kind of adventure; in fact, I think it’s safe to say that the stomach of the American people for interventionism is the lowest it has been in my lifetime, and this in our supremely connected world.  But our inept leadership (and that includes Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham) cannot resist another intervention to confirm our moral superiority when in fact each intervention erodes it.

    Problem #1 here is simple: the last decade plus has demonstrated that our entire political caste, divided as it is, is united in its supreme ignorance of the Middle East.  They don’t understand the chronic careerism, the shame-honour dynamic, the power holder/power challenger dynamic, the money favouring.  It’s not that we don’t have those here; indeed they’ve gotten worse in recent times.  It’s just that they are blinded by their inability to understand anyone who is unlike them, all the education and travel notwithstanding.

    With George Bush, we had the siren call of “democracy in the Middle East” and that didn’t work out.  With Barack Obama, we have the ideal of a rapprochement with Islam, which is made more meaningful if Islam is the hegemon in the Middle East, and specifically the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies.  That went up in smoke in Egypt, where, as Mohammed el-Baradei put it, you can’t eat Sharia.

    You’d think that a man who courted the anti-war crowed the way Barack Obama did would just pull out and stay out.  He allowed his European “allies” to rope him into what was frankly a colonialist attack on Libya, the real intent concealed by the “Arab Spring”.  The blowback from that–the attack on the consulate in Benghazi–still dogs him.  (Personally I think what he is covering up is the fact that those who attacked the consulate were being furnished arms by the US for an attack on Syria, but it makes people angry to think about it).

    And that leads us to Syria.  There is no good outcome here.  Assad stays, the Sunni majority suffers.  Assad goes, the Christian, Alawi and Druze minorities suffer, along probably with the Shi’a Muslims.  It’s a slaughterhouse any way you slice it.  There’s no moral high ground here.  Our government is attempting to find it in the use of chemical weapons.  But who used them?  Where is the evidence?  Was this a set-up?  Are our people in Washington too stupid to know if it is?

    As for a Christian response, beyond our usual prayers and succour for the victims of this mess (and both are in progress), it’s yet another good time to encourage an exit of the followers of Christ from the military.  I’ve discussed this recently and won’t belabour the point, but the truth is that our military has been made into a mercenary tool of our feckless elites, not the general defenders of our liberty.  They ought to revert to the name “Department of War”; it’s a more honest title these days.  I know that many have sacrificed, but we must face present reality before it consumes us.

  • Justin Welby's "Drunk Man" Needs to Sober Up. So Does Justin Welby.

    It may come as a surprise to some of my Anglican friends, but I actually made one attempt to formally return to the Episcopal Church.  That took place about thirty-five years ago.  I attended and moved my membership to a small Episcopal church.  One Sunday the selection from the Psalter was Psalm 69, which includes the following:

    Those who sit at the gate gossip about me, and drunkards make up songs about me. (Psalms 69:12 GW)

    In the homily, the rector thought the idea of drunkards making songs about someone was silly.  Having come from a family where alcoholism was frequent and dislike of my spiritual inclinations equally frequent, I knew otherwise, although putting their sentiments to music was beyond their talent set.  (They preferred letters and sharp-tongued speech).  This and other strange unrealities about the rector and his church led me to seek pastures elsewhere.

    Today the newly minted Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, sits atop of what he thinks is a “drunk man”:

    “I sometimes worry that as Anglicans we are drifting back in that direction,” he said. “Not consciously, of course, but in an unconscious way that is more dangerous. Like a drunk man walking near the edge of a cliff, we trip and totter and slip and wander, ever nearer to the edge of the precipice.

    “It is a dangerous place, a narrow path we walk as Anglicans at present.

    “On one side is the steep fall into an absence of any core beliefs, a chasm where we lose touch with God, and thus we rely only on ourselves and our own message. On the other side there is a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion. It is for those who claim all truth, and exclude any who question.”

    Jokes aside about Anglicans and drinking going together, like my last rector Welby needs a reality check on several levels.

    Let’s start with his dichotomy.  As a businessperson Welby is well familiar with people who self-reliance is a religion to them.  But that’s not what generally goes on at the “reappraiser” side these days; what the church is really competing with is reliance on the State as opposed to God.  That reliance is expressed in several ways, from the vastness of the dole to the proliferation of thought control expressed as anti-discrimination legislation.  It’s the latter that’s got the CoE in such a pickle these days about same-sex civil marriage.

    On the other side are those “many small churches” which supposedly embody the narrow-minded thinking Welby decries.  That may have some traction in the CoE itself (and then again maybe not; conservative churches have always done better on both sides of the Atlantic, which is why TEC is so zealous in fighting for the property) but looking at the Anglican Communion as a whole it’s ridiculous.  Both the numbers and the poverty of the membership–and if you can’t endure the idea of being in a church with the poor, you can’t really make a fuss about helping them–are with the very conservative churches.

    Welby’s response to date has been what any good businessman would do: he’s trying to induce the two sides to cut a deal, not only with each other but with the state which is breathing down his neck.  Rowan Williams tried to gum the two sides into doing the same thing, although to his credit Williams didn’t seem to have as much zeal to please his masters in Whitehall as Welby does.  But that too won’t work.

    What you’ve got here are two sides whose differences are irreconcilable.  On the one hand the Christian sexual ethic is a part of the package, whether anyone likes it or not.  Trying to edge it with “beauty pageant Christianity” the way Evangelicals have tried to do will only make the situation worse.  Also trying to paper over things by extolling the virtues of committed relationships won’t help either, as Deborah Pitt attempted to explain to Welby’s predecessor.  Both of these have helped as much as anything to deepen the mess that Western Christianity is in these days.

    On the other hand you have the LGBT people, whose well-financed take-no-prisoners strategy has made a successful end run around human rights enshrined in the Anglophone world at least for centuries, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  They’re the ones with the least incentive to cut a deal, and they know it.

    Welby’s strategy (such as it is) is a loser.  If anyone needs to “sober up” here, it’s Welby.  He needs to either do it God’s way or become the pliant servant of a secularly minded state bought and paid for by well-moneyed and powerful interests.  If he chooses the latter, though, he may need some asbestos underwear on the other side.

    If not, he can continue in Psalm 69:

    May my prayer come to you at an acceptable time, O LORD. O God, out of the greatness of your mercy, answer me with the truth of your salvation. (Psalms 69:13 GW)

  • The Filioque and the "Field Hands"

    Last year this blog featured Frederick Gere and Milton Williams’ The Winds of God, which was one of the earliest Episcopal “folk Masses” produced.  Attempting to break out of the traditional Episcopal mould of music, the folk Mass featured several types of music.  One of them was the Nicene Creed, where choir director Milton Williams sang it antiphonally with the choir responding.

    Antiphonal music isn’t a novelty in the Anglican world, but the style is.  Rather than drawing from the English tradition, Williams turned to an African-American style.  It had its roots in slavery and agricultural work; the rhythmic music helped to ease the hard tedium of working in the fields in the hot South.  It appears in compositions such as Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (which I highly recommend you see if you get the chance).

    The “field hands” Williams had to work with were the youth of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Burlingame, CA.  Although the result is quite charming, I’m sure that Williams got a good laugh at the business of having a largely white, middle class choir singing in a style which had been (and probably still was at the time) sung by poor black people picking cotton.

    And, of course, the Nicene Creed sung included the “filoque” clause, which has created such a headache these days in the Anglican-Episcopal world.

    It’s been a long time since this was recorded, but some more contemporary observations are in order.

    The first is a question: how many of these fine Episcopal youth “stayed on the plantation” after the convulsions of the 1960’s and 1970’s turned into the church’s first major shedding of membership?

    The second is that, during the second shedding of membership, the orthodox African provinces came and helped give cover to the “Anglican Revolt”.  The Africans also found out that some of the “field hands” they took on weren’t as amenable to oversight as expected, which only shows that some people are better at dishing it out than taking it.

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  • Rowan Williams' Dismissial of Western Christians' Persecution is Premature

    The man who couldn’t stay ahead of the realities of the Anglican Communion is a little behind the curve on this one too:

    Lord Williams said religious believers should be wary of complaining about their treatment in the Western world, with those claiming they are “persecuted” making him “very uneasy”.

    He added the level of “not being taken very seriously” or “being made fun of” in Britain and the United States is not comparable to the “murderous hostility” faced by others in different parts of the world.

    Williams, like many on both sides of the debate, is evidently working under the assumption that things will stay the way they are in the West about human rights.  That’s simply not a given:

    1. The whole state of human rights in the West is undergoing profound changes that few understand, although the recent revelations about the NSA (and its counterparts in the UK are busy, too) should put everyone on notice about this.  The centralisation of wealth and the fear of terror have eroded rights in ways that many simply choose to ignore, but that doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real.
    2. Real Christianity is something that those in the upper reaches have never had much use for, and could more easily ignore if it weren’t for those pesky things called elections.  Thinking about the upper reaches, same have generally had two policies on the subject: they either manage the religion (and the Church of England is the management par excellence, which explains a lot of what the Anglican Communion has been about) or end it, as the third century Roman Empire tried to do.
    3. The ability of the modern state and its pliant media to use social pressure to bully people should never be underestimated.  I noticed that Sojo thinks Williams is right; they should objectively consider the experience of their own Jim Wallis with the LGBT community, the current vanguard of our elites.

    When pushed, Williams himself will admit that the current government isn’t helping matters:

    “Their fears may be exaggerated because few in the UK are actually persecuted, but the Prime Minister has done more than any other recent political leader to feed these anxieties,” he said…

    He added “many Christians” doubted the sincerity of Mr Cameron’s pledge to support their rights, with a recent poll showing two-thirds believed they are now part of a “persecuted minority”

    Well they should doubt Cameron’s sincerity, or that of his counterparts on this side of the Atlantic.  For someone not given to bold statement, Lord Williams should think twice before criticising those who are more prescient than he.

  • Should Have Worn a Hijab and a Confederate Flag

    Failure to do so resulted in this:

    Jay McDowell, an economics teacher, bought one of those shirts and wore it in class that day. McDowell then showed his students a video about a gay teenager who committed suicide, and devoted the rest of the class period to discussion.

    Daniel entered McDowell’s classroom for the sixth period that day. McDowell noticed that one of the girls in class was wearing a belt buckle with the Confederate flag. He ordered her to take it off, because it offended him. Daniel then asked the obvious question. Why should it be all right for so many students and teachers to wear the purple T-shirts, but not all right for the girl to wear the belt buckle?…

    McDowell then, predictably, told Glowacki that the Confederate flag was a symbol of hateful things, like “the slashing and hanging of [African Americans].” It was discriminatory against blacks. Glowacki responded that the purple T-shirts were discriminatory against Catholics. This prompted a heated exchange. The young man is no theologian, and the teacher no moral philosopher. McDowell says that he told Glowacki that it was all right if his religion said that homosexual behavior was wrong, but that Glowacki could not say that in class. He also says, missing the illogic and the aggressiveness of his statement, that he told Glowacki that to say “I don’t accept gays” is like saying “I don’t accept blacks.” When Glowacki replied, “I don’t accept gays,” McDowell threw him out and began disciplinary action against him.

    Howell, MI, where this took place, is north-west of Detroit, whose main claim to fame these days is going broke.  Wonder if teachers such as McDowell would have been so aggressive in, say, Dearborn, not so far away, where he would have faced a class with many Muslims and women wearing hijabs?  Or hijabs and Confederate belt buckles?  (I’ve never seen a Muslim wearing both, but there’s a first time for everything, especially in the South).

    I commented on this trend back in 2007 in my piece What It Takes to Experience Discrimination.  I also noted liberals’ tendency to back off from/play games with Islam in my 2010 piece Strange Bedfellows: Liberals and Muslims.

  • The Provincial Boors Get Their Comeuppance

    Or more properly the (Alexander) Boot:

    What comes naturally to most Americans is ‘the pursuit of happiness’ stipulated in their founding document – not the pursuit of beauty or, God forbid, the truth. This has produced the happiest society in the West, and also the least Western. There’s a price to pay for secularism, and in America’s case the most prominent rubric on the bill is aesthetic.

    Few Americans stop to think why just about everything man-made in their country is ugly, and even when such a thought crosses their minds they do not gasp with horror. Real life isn’t about beauty.

    This vehement (but not unique) rant brings the following thoughts:

    1. His post got a lot more glasses raised on this side of the Atlantic than one might think, and not just from the Canadians.  Europhilia is more strongly rooted in the message people get here in an élite upbringing than many realise.  That ethic is buttressed by a simple fact: European countries (and now the EU itself) have strong centripetal tendencies, something any élite would like to see in its own country.
    2. Attempts to Europeanise this country via public policy (like this one) will not take root and flourish in the way some would like to think they will.  The U.S. has been successful being itself; attempting to make it in another continent’s image and likeness runs the real risk of failure.
    3. Much has been made of Americans being “better travelled”, but as Boot’s illustration shows, a lot of that money was flushed down the toilet from the standpoint of “broadening”.  It’s easier for people to travel physically than it is from the standpoint of learning something you didn’t know before.

  • Global Citizen. Really?

    It’s the goal of @pbenedictii, the new Headmaster of my old Episcopal prep school, St. Andrew’s in Boca Raton:

    Q. What would you say is your priority?

    A. We have to prepare our students to be global citizens and will change the curriculum to understand that citizenship.

    Meanwhile across town we have the blog of Charles Rubin, tax attorney and expert on international tax matters.  Following his blog, and other information tidbits on the subject that creep onto the internet, it becomes clear that our country has no intentions of making it easy for its citizens to relocate themselves, make a living in another place, and move the fruits of their labour to that place if they so wish.  That comes through our restrictive tax laws, our chauvinistic treatment of dual citizenship, and the plethora of legal and regulatory restrictions unique to this country which tend both to exclude others and give those therein an “inside track” for success that is really not transferable elsewhere (although those born and raised here are notorious for “blowing their lead” in this regard).

    The ability to do this is, IMHO, a reasonable prerequisite for “global citizenship”, an iffy concept from a purely legal standpoint.  If we look at things as they are from that standpoint, what we have is a global citizenship with some very restrictive internal passports, a concept familiar to those in place like the old Soviet Union.

    My suggestion to the new Headmaster would be to have Mr. Rubin out to explain some of these aspects to the “global citizens” being developed.  Since one of the goals of a school like St. Andrew’s is to prepare people for success, a good overview of the government’s response to that success would be in order.  Who knows, perhaps a St. Andrew’s graduate could help do something about it.

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