Funerals Mandatory

The stages of life, evangelical voting, Catholic reactionaries, and more in this week's digest.

Last weekend, my family spent Good Friday at Spring Mill State Park in Southern Indiana. We stayed overnight at the Inn there. The Spring Mill Inn was built by the CCC over 85 years ago. Many New Deal projects across the country like this one are still serving our citizens after many decades. Forward thinking programs like that are in all too short a supply today.

Saturday I attended the funeral of one my college friends who died of cancer. I’ve reached the age where I’m starting to reconnect with people I have not seen in a very long time because we are attending the same funerals.

As I’ve said before, until about age 35, people cannot emotionally connect with the idea that they will continue changing into the future. They know they have changed - oh, how we know we’ve grown and changed - but don’t really understand in more than a nominal intellectual sense the story arc of life.

Today, I understand that I’m going to start having new thinking and new experiences as I pass through different stages of life. This seeing people at funerals thing wasn’t one that I had anticipated in advance, but it doesn’t surprise me. I know expect that I’ll be running into these new experiences and shifts regularly.

The failure of younger people to understand their future life course all too often leads them to make decisions with profound long term consequences they do not fully realize.

I’ve always been one of the most peripherally attached members of all of my friend groups. But I’ve made a commitment to try my best to attend any funerals for people I’ve been connected to over the years. In a book he wrote long ago, Rudy Giuliani had a chapter called “Weddings Optional, Funerals Mandatory.” I’ve come to appreciate that in ways I didn’t when I was younger.

Prudential Parochialism vs. Neo-Tocquevillianism

Someone on X asked me a very good question about my piece earlier this week on pluralism. He asked how my idea of prudential parochialism differs from the neo-Tocquevillianism that I’ve criticized before.

I’m actually not against neo-Tocquevillian solutions, or the small scale, “little platoons” type of social or civic community building. I like the idea of having people come hang out on the front porch, for example.

Here’s where I think I have some differences:

• Advocates of neo-Tocquevillians tend to be very hostile to anyone pursuing different or more ambitious approaches. They tend to see those as illegitimate. By contrast, I’m open to a variety of big changes. In fact, I think we need a large scale institutional refresh in our country. Practically speaking, most of us have no ability to pull something like that off. But I’m not opposed to people trying.

• My impression is that advocates of neo-Tocquevillianism want to try to regenerate a broad, shared civil society from the bottom up. Whereas prudential parochialism anticipates a more “federated” model, in which different communities have their own infrastructure (though will prudentially participate in shared infrastructure as well).

• I think prudential parochialism can scale to levels bigger than the inherently small scale neo-Tocquevillian visions (though I’m not sure what that might look like).

But on the whole I do think there are some parallels between the two approaches.

Catholic Reactionaries

The Wall Street Journal published an article the day Pope Francis died about the how the conservative wing of the Catholic Church is pushing the church to the right.

Personified by Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. While their numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential, say observers—in the struggle for the Church’s future and that of the nation.

The conservatives are more likely to be kneeling in pews on Sunday and managing parish affairs while others stay home. Their worldview has found purchase in the Trump administration’s policies—be it the introduction of sweeping tariffs or its mass deportation of immigrants who entered the country illegally. And they are building a network of universities and media outlets to educate future cadres.

…

The Catholic Project offered a stark measure of the conservatives’ rise in a 2022 survey of more than 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests. Among those ordained since 2020, it found, some 80% identified as “conservative/orthodox.” By contrast, those identifying as progressives and liberals were facing a “virtual collapse.”

“Among priests, it’s a massive shift,” said White, who views the conservative Catholic renewal as “a piece of the populism that seems to be spreading not just in the United States but over most of the Western world.”

…

Behind the scenes, though, the conservatives were gathering strength in America, bound together by a conviction that liberalism in its many guises—political, social, theological—has run aground. While it may have generated material wealth, they say, it has undermined communities and wrought the social “carnage” that President Trump invoked during his first inauguration in 2016.

For the Catholic Church, in particular, they believe that a project to embrace modernity and make itself more appealing to a younger generation instead yielded empty pews and confusion. In its place, they want to build a post-liberal world that is rooted in traditions of the past.

“For a lot of progressives, they think that if the Church could just accommodate the modern world, it will stop its decline. But everywhere the Church has accepted the modern world and its contemporary values, it’s died,” said Timothy Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school of theology that emphasizes a return to the rigors of scripture and tradition and is one of the movement’s leading lights.

…

Many of their students are embracing practices from an ancient, unreformed Catholicism that had seemed to be fading into obsolescence. The most striking may be the traditional Latin Mass, codified in the late 1500s and practiced into the 1960s, and which Francis had discouraged. In it, the priest keeps his back to worshipers so as to face God and speaks in Latin—while in the contemporary Mass that superseded it, the priest faces the congregation and gives the worshipers more opportunities to pray out loud in response.

…

Their appeal, he argued, was a kind of false nostalgia like that fueling populist political movements across the West. “From my sense, in these times of conflict and cultural change, many people find comfort in an exclusive church that offers absolute, universal answers,” he said, adding: “Certitude is attractive but only an illusion.” [emphasis added]

What’s notable is that with some minor exceptions such as the use of digital media and a reference to Evie magazine (the “conservative Cosmopolitan”), everything about this movement is backwards looking, reactionary. I highlighted some explicitly anti-modern passages.

Trad Catholicism - as particularly epitomized by the Latin Mass - is having a moment, and deserves to enjoy it. But the fundamentally reactionary nature of the project suggests to me that it won’t ultimately prove durable.

Catholicism is a religion of the past, with trad Catholicism almost explicitly being positioned in those terms. Protestantism is a religion of the future, indeed which has created the future, the modern world in which we live.

Catholicism’s strength its is tradition. One of Protestantism’s strengths is its relationship to modernity. I don’t see that Catholicism has really come up with a compelling answer to the modern world apart from rejectionism. Catholicism only thrived in modernity to the extent that it culturally Protestantized, as in America. (In fact, the buzz around trad Catholicism is a quintessentially American phenomenon, one in which religious groups in a pluralistic marketplace compete for share). Trying to get rid of that enculturation - such as by rejecting liberalism and modernity - probably won’t lead where people think it does.

Speaking of Pope Francis, I saw an evangelical pastor post this to mark his passing. I’ve redacted his identity.

Why do evangelicals behave like this? Every time someone dies, you can count on at least some evangelicals to publicly trash him.

Such utterly boorish - and theologically dubious - behavior is repulsive to normal people. Unfortunately it’s deeply embedded into the culture of fundamentalist inflected evangelicalism. I can understand why some churches and pastors structure their ministries to counter-signal against certain other evangelicals.

I think it also shows again that while elite or upper middle class evangelicalism is very Catholic friendly - again, maybe too Catholic friendly - the evangelical base is often still deeply hostile to Catholicism.

Related from NY Post: Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse

Related from Elizabeth Bruenig/The Atlantic: Progressive Christianity’s Bleak Future - Pope Francis leaves behind a Church that is moving away from the faith he championed

Evangelical Voting

Ryan Burge put out a great analysis of evangelical voting in the 2024 election. Despite a very visible contingent of Never Trump evangelical leaders, evangelicals as a whole have actually been trending even more Republican. White evangelicals voted 83% Trump in 2024. And incredibly, Trump’s share of the non-white evangelical vote was also way up. He got almost half of it.

There’s a lot more interesting findings in there, so click over to check it out.

Related in the NYT: Christianity in the White House - President Trump has significantly expanded the power and influence of conservative Christians in government

Best of the Web

NY Post: Braves reporter gets female fan’s number during live segment — and his peers are furious - People who aren’t willing to act don’t like people who do. This guy saw and seized opportunity.

Abby Farson Pratt: The lost desire for children

Darel Paul/First Things: Feminism Against Fertility

Tech Crunch: Cofertility’s radical model for women: Freeze your eggs for free by donating half of them

Carl Trueman: Protestantism’s Conservative Catholic Converts

Jeff Giesea: Headphone Americans - a new archetype

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned in week in Christianity Today, Mere Orthodoxy, and Houstonia magazine.

New this week:

• My podcast was with Vice President Mike Pence on faith, marriage, and life in the public square.

• There's No Turning Back from Pluralism in America - America’s diverse population and divided culture are here to stay, challenging both left and right to rethink their visions for the nation’s future

• Renaud Camus' Great Replacement - From gay atheist socialist to "far-right" icon, Camus’ writings on immigration and deculturation stir global controversy

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.