How I Met Your Mother
Spotify founder Daniel Ek's marriage, donor intent litigation, "I got mine" conservatism and more in this week's digest.
Next week there will be no podcast and no digest because I am traveling the entire week.
Learning from Spotify Founder Daniel Ek
A Financial Times piece about Spotify founder Daniel Ek contained this nugget I found of interest:
Ek has two children with his wife, Sofia Levander, a Swedish journalist he met when she approached him in a restaurant for an interview. Afterwards, she emailed him “about how rude I was and how stuck-up and things like that, and that caught my interest”, he said.
We can see a few things here about the way intersexual dynamics works. First, she approached him in a restaurant. This may have been legitimately about an interview, but perhaps she had some level of interest right out of the gate.
She also sends him an email to complain about his behavior. He correctly understands that her sending this email was itself an indicator of interest. Had she really been creeped out by him or something, she would have been unlikely to initiate contact (a second time, I might note).
We also see that despite the fact that she believes he behaved in a stuck up and rude manner, she’s still interested. Ek did the exact opposite of what men are typically told to do to attract women. He’s not trying to impress her, flatter her, show what a good servant leader he is, etc. In fact, he does the opposite - and it works!
I don’t advocate being rude to women, but if there’s one thing to take away from this it is that you have to reprogram your mind to understand that all of the ways today’s men have been told they should act in order to attract women don’t work and are often counter-productive.
Nothing validates the manosphere more than that it gives directionally correct advice to young men about the opposite sex - a primal domain where mainstream authorities are giving out terrible advice.
I’ll also note that Ek appears to be some kind of an “alpha male” himself as he correctly understands what his happening, and acts accordingly. Now he’s married to and has a family with her. A happy ending.
Donor Intent Litigation Trust
Famous contemporary Christian singer Amy Grant has won a multi-million dollar battle to retake control of the church her great-grandfather founded. A man named Shawn Matthis was alleged to have gained control over the church by nefarious means, renamed it, stopping holding services, and held only some kind of online ministry.
What enabled Grant to regain control of the property was a stipulation in the original gift of property by her family to the church:
Under the provisions of a 1925 deed when the church was founded, the building must operate as a church, or it would revert to the Burton estate. The court order ruled that the church violated the deed. Under the agreement, the building must be sold at fair market value, with the bulk of the proceeds going to the Burton estate.
This property is worth an estimated $11 million, so there was huge money at stake.
This piece is a powerful validator of the Donor Intent Litigation Trust idea that has been put forward by Rev. Jake Dell. He described this in my podcast with him.
His argument is that mainline churches and institutions - including potentially big ones like Yale University - are sitting on huge amounts of property and assets that were donated for specific purposes that are no longer being honored.
He wants to establish a non-profit to obtain an assignment of rights from heirs like Grant, then litigate to regain control of the property. Some of the resulting gains would go to the heirs, while the remainder would flow into Christian ministry in line with the original donor intent.
The Grant case shows that there’s real merit in this idea. It’s millions of dollars from just one lawsuit. Enterprising lawyers or funders should reach out to Dell about this.
Protestant LARPing
Bob Thune had an interesting essay in Mere Orthodoxy responding to a Brad East piece about the pending death of Protestantism. Protestantism in this case referring to the historic Lutheran and Reformed traditions in contrast to the non-denominational evangelicalism that’s devoured them.
Thune wonders if East is effectively arguing that we should administer the coup de grâce to traditional Protestantism. He takes issue specifically with East’s claim that in light of the break with the Protestant tradition, it’s difficult to impossible for it to be recovered. East had written:
Moreover, even where desire is present, participation in a tradition cannot be reverse-engineered. The movements that emerged from the magisterial Reformation were and are living liturgical and doctrinal traditions, embodied in institutions, confessions, and practices. A start-up church founded seven years ago by a twentysomething fresh out of seminary cannot “become” a part of such a tradition, however much the head pastor may admire the writings and theology of, say, the Lutheran scholastics. Theoretically such a church might join the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, but at the price of losing all its members.
Thune claims to be a counter-example:
My journey to historic Protestant convictions was a gradual one. I was raised in “mere evangelicalism” of the dispensationalist/fundamentalist variety. The Holy Spirit used that tribe to draw me to Christ and form me in faith. During college, I was introduced to the broader stream of classic Protestant spirituality. I started devouring church history; I pursued a degree from a Reformed seminary; I flirted with Rome and Canterbury before staking my claim with Luther and Calvin and their counterparts.
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I was quite confident the same sort of “gospel awakening” would happen for others when they encountered the Reformers’ vision of the grace and glory of God. So I set out to plant a church ordered toward that end. After being duly ordained and commissioned by the elders of my existing church (a dispensational “Bible church” with Wesleyan/holiness roots), I gathered a small core team around the vision of a liturgical, creedal, Reformational, confessional approach to worship and mission. If you were to attend Coram Deo Church today, you’d notice the via media of the Reformers on full display
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Perhaps one-third of our congregation grew up nominally Catholic and have been born again to vibrant faith in Christ through the preaching of the gospel. Another third are former low-church evangelicals who came to us already converted, but then discovered the richness of the Protestant heritage through our ministry. The final third is split between religious-but-not-converted churchgoers and unchurched skeptics in search of meaning and hope.
Thune is a good example of what I was talking about in my essay on excarnated Christianity.
If your entire church, including the pastor, is made up of converts, then in critical ways it is not an authentic expression of the tradition it seeks to be a part of, no matter what it’s beliefs and practices. It’s like having the words but not the music. It’s a form of LARPing (Live Action Role Playing).
That’s actually ok at some level. America is a protean nation where we are always in a sense LARPing out the future (e.g., “fake it till you make it”). It’s also true that the Reformers did something similar. But they also ended up creating something new that, while it embodied authentic Christian tradition, also represented a genuine break from Rome.
It will be the same here. There’s value in Thune’s project, but let’s be honest about the fact that if successful it will result in something new as well.
I Got Mine
There’s been a big debate on the right about eliminating property taxes. Ron DeSantis wants to abolish property taxes for homeowners, for example. The dissident right writer Scott Greer had a fantastic take on this movement.
Property taxes have gotten out of hand in certain areas, so it makes sense for lawmakers to respond to the issue. But the answer is not to eliminate them entirely. Property taxes, unlike many of our other taxes, actually go to services and goods we benefit from on a daily basis. Roads, bridges, police, fire departments, schools, public parks, sanitation, and many other things are supported by these taxes. Paying property taxes is just the price to pay to live in a nice community. Without them, America’s crumbling infrastructure would further deteriorate and your local community would turn into an unlivable hellhole.
People persist in supporting this idea [property tax abolition] thanks to the common sentiment of “f— you, I got mine.” It’s an antisocial tendency that imagines there is no assumption of public obligations or duties. Your neighbors and community can all go to hell. All that matters is the individual and his own property. The man doesn’t believe he’s a member of any community. He is an island unto himself.
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The average person, especially the boomers set to benefit the most from property taxes [being eliminated?], are entirely dependent on the public services provided by these taxes. They aren’t going to maintain their own sewer system, act as their own police department, put out fires at their neighbors homes, or fix potholes on roads. Americans are a very passive citizenry. We expect other people to do these things for us. Many of us hardly know our own neighbors, further preventing non-government initiative to solve these problems….Many Americans view their house as their own self-contained castle. They fail to see the roads that lead to their house and the first responders who protect it as an obligation they need to support. All of this is just supposed to magically exist on its own regardless if you pay your property taxes.
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America’s current individualism is built on the expectation of benefits rather than the realization of self-sufficiency. There is no sense of obligations and duties. It’s all about individual rights and entitlements that only the state can protect and provide. This dependency further atomizes us and makes us not care about our neighbors, our community, or even our nation’s future. It’s all about getting yours, no matter the expense.
Click over to read the whole thing. After the torrent of hate he received for it, he wrote a follow-up on anti-social libertarianism.
As with the debates on public land, this reveals a big fissure on the right. Given fundamentally different definitions on what the good life and the general welfare should be in America, these different groups are not natural political allies.
My own state of Indiana is dominated by the kind of thinking Greer described. In my view it’s been extremely debilitating, and helps account for the fact that we are one the poorest and least educated states in the country.
Best of the Web
The Observer: Felix Baumgartner: the highs and lows of a life of extremes - the guy who parachuted from a balloon at 127,000 feet.
NYT: Who Can Afford Three Kids in New York City? (gift link) - The number of city households with three or more children has dropped by nearly 17 percent over the past decade as families struggle with the cost of child care and rent
NYT: They Got to Live a Life of Luxury. Then Came the Fine Print (gift link) - ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ has built a delirious new culture of consumption — and trapped users in a vortex of debt - Crazy stuff
Eric Kaufman: Why are fewer young people identifying as trans? - Apparently there’s been a steep decline.
Pew Research Center: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society and sports
WSJ: These Parents Are Willing to Pay Up to $15,000 to Get Their Kids Into High School
Joel Kotkin: Why God came back - Includes a mention of me
Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe: Voyages to the End of the World - A great look at the Antichrist in literature.
New Content and Media Mentions
I gave a brief talk recently at the Network State conference. Unfortunately, it ended up being remote thanks to a fiasco at United Airlines that kept me from getting to Singapore in a timely fashion. It’s about the application of the network state concept to Christianity today.
Here’s my article on network states that I reference in the talk.
New this week:
The Tax Attorney Hermeneutic - The PCA’s battle over women in church office exposes a deeper question: how should scripture shape gender roles in a changing culture?
The Gerontocracy Rolls On - In a world where 94-year-old moguls and 75-year-old editors hold sway, is gerontocracy here to stay?
My podcast this week is with the very interesting A. M. Hickman on land, liberty, and living cheaply.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Cover photo: Daniel Ek via the European Union, CC BY 4.0
I was a cradle Catholic. I never read the Bible, didn't feel particularly close to God, believed that if I left the Catholic church I was going to hell. I was educated by nuns who were more interested in telling us how bad sex was (in both senses of the word "bad") than instilling in us (girls) respect for our bodies and our own bodily autonomy (i.e., help in telling our boyfriends "no." Turns out sex wasn't bad, it was enjoyable.) The meme about boys wanting to date Catholic girls was not a joke.
I left the Catholic Church when I got married. We didn't go to any church until one day (after we had been married about 6 or 7 years) some Mormon missionaries knocked on our door. My husband insisted we join, implying that our difficult marriage would end if we didn't join. The Mormons told me that the Catholic Church was no longer God's religion because of apostasy and that the Protestants didn't have a leg to stand on because they had broken away from God's religion and that Jesus had also come to the Americas before he ascended heaven and that Joseph Smith found golden plates that proved that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was now God's religion. My marriage fell apart and I left the Mormon (LDS) church.
A number of years later my son was attending a Presbyterian Church (the liberal branch) and so wanting to go back to church, I went there. It was good place to be, but I wasn't really looking for God, I was looking to belong somewhere.
So, I've run the gamut. I've been exploring a small evangelical church near me and will likely join it. In order to join, I needed to attend 8 classes in which they explain in detail exactly what they are and what they believe and how it affects what they are as a church. They get right down to the basics in the Bible and don't embellish it with other claims to righteousness or authenticity. They don't try to tell me that I must belong to this specific church or denomination in order to go to heaven, they teach me about God's love and Jesus's sacrifice and that I need to acknowledge Jesus as my Lord and Savior in order to go to heaven. They are not claiming a direct line from Peter, but they are basing their church on the those created by Jesus's disciples following that example.
Yes, their services are a bunch of hymns played by a piano and guitars, a pastor in blue jeans and things projected on the wall. But when I watch the congregants, I see people who are clearly engaged, who are clearly feeling in touch with God. Would I like a little Rock of Ages? Sure, but I can play that at home.
For the first time, I'm working on an actual relationship with God and Jesus, rather than on whether I am attending the church claiming the best credentials. It's early days, but I already feel as if this might be the church for me. Somehow I feel like this might be what it was like in the early days with the Apostles.
I sometimes attend an evangelical Anglican church that is very "low" in its general style (drums and guitars, Hillsong-type music with words projected on screens, pastor in jeans, even little plastic cups of what looks suspiciously like cranberry juice at Communion (though I don't commune there). Until recently, you could honestly have attended there for months and not realised you were in an Anglican church. Now, though, the pastor is preaching through the Thirty-Nine Articles, one Article a week. It seems to me a hopeful sign of the church rediscovering its identity.