Vulgarity and Vice

I was in the New York Times this week, in this piece about rising vulgarity in the Christian world. I argued that Donald Trump is a product of changes in the world rather than its cause.

“I consider Trump a product of the changes in the world,” said Aaron Renn, a conservative writer who has written about Mr. Trump’s appeal but admonished Christians to “reject vice.”

After flirting with running for president for decades, Mr. Trump finally ran seriously in 2016 because “he sensed the world is different today, the old standards that meant someone” like Mr. Trump “would no longer be considered a viable candidate are no longer operative in society at large,” Mr. Renn said.

There’s an incredible irony here. Twenty-five years ago, someone like Donald Trump wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the Oval Office. He was a casino operator, a philanderer, and a greedy, vulgar braggart. Today, gambling, free love, greed, and even vulgarity are now completely accepted in mainstream society. The destruction of those old standards that previously would have kept Trump outside of governing society was promoted by many of the same people who today are so horrified by him.

Life in the Negative World Roundup

Here’s a roundup of this week’s coverage of my new book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture.

There was a very interesting review from Colin Redemer at Ad Fontes Journal. Here’s a paragraph that I agree with and allude to in the book:

Here is one suggestion that will sound controversial, but could actually reduce the intensity of intra-evangelical conflict as well as evangelical conflict with the broader American public, all while saving our strength for more productive activities: our institutional leaders need to hold themselves less responsible for the common good. That is not to say they should not talk about the common good, or seek the common good. However in the negative world the achievement of the common good is far outside their scope of influence. They should still hold out a vision for such a good for the rest of society. But social, material, and political capital will need to be deployed more strategically to accomplish limited goals that have clearly defined benefits for core constituents.

There was also a review this week in the UK site Premier Christianity. The noted Muslim writer Haroon Moghul published an interview with me about the book.

I also had a freewheeling conversation about the book and many other things with Paul VanderKlay. I recorded a live podcast about the book at an event in DC hosted by American Moment. Thanks to them for putting this on. And I was on Uri Brito’s podcast as well.

If you haven’t yet, please do buy the book - and be sure to leave a review as well.

More on Vice

Brad Littlejohn had an interesting follow-up post to my arguments in favor of rejecting vice.

The very concept of “vice” is apt to feel passé, a throwback to medieval morality manuals or perhaps mid-20th century “vice squads”—police units responsible for busting gambling or prostitution rings. And if there’s anything that Christians in 2024 are nervous about, reeling from a string of culture-war defeats, it’s seeming old-fashioned or “puritanical.”

…

Largely cut off from the rich categories of older Christian moral thought, late 20th-century evangelicals tended to think about morality in intensely black-and-white and individualistic terms. Something was either a “sin” (a violation of God’s law), or it was fine. Sins were only committed by individuals against other individuals (or against God). The older language of “vice,” though, hailed from a more complex moral universe. Vice was not exactly the same as “sin.” It was the opposite of virtue, which is to say the habituation of one’s character in a form of wise living. Such virtue ensured the flourishing of an individual, but also of a community, as others benefited from the spillover effects of virtuous living and consciously or subconsciously sought to imitate the virtuous person. Vice, then, was the habituation of one’s character in a form of foolish living. Such folly, as the Book of Proverbs teaches, cannot be reduced to a simple list of do’s and don’ts, but it is real, and it leads to destruction—not just self-destruction, but the degradation of any community in which it becomes endemic.

Lacking this richer moral vocabulary, American Christians in the Neutral World found it increasingly difficult to maintain a principled opposition to vice even within their own communities. Most evangelicals have casually habituated themselves to profanity, obscene films, over-consumption of alcohol, and even the use of marijuana, and most pastors are embarrassed to address such topics. “It’s a Christian liberty issue,” is the standard response to any warning, forgetting that in the New Testament, Christian liberty is manifested above all in self-control.

Samuel James also had thoughts on the subject.

Part of the cycle that modern American culture finds itself in is that the more vice becomes mainstreamed by institutions and tastemakers, the more it influences how regular people talk and act and think; conversely, the more people become used to and accepting of vice in public, the more “authentic” vice becomes, which is a signal to those in pop culture and education to keep pumping out more vice. Question: Is the drive for “porn literacy” in public schools a consequence of many children being exposed to pornography at young ages, or is it a cause? How can it not be both?

Profanity is a good example of the symbiotic relationship between popular habits and cultural gatekeepers. It was very recently that no serious intellectual magazine would print the unobfuscated “f-word.” Now, they do. This means that the same outlets that are considered important and authoritative sources on everything from politics to books are, in effect, commending the use of profanity to their readers. Yet it’s also the case that a young editor for one of those magazines is likely to have been influenced by the growing public profanity in music, film, TV, and literature. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Best of the Web

Jeff Giesea: Be the elite you wish to see

Alexander Turok has a very interesting review of Rob Henderson’s book Troubled.

Speaking of Rob Henderson, he made a recent appearance on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. While I haven’t yet listened, I did read Rob’s writeup on the conversation. I found this nugget of interest: “Although many people claim that their sexuality is fundamental to who they are, very few people will say that their actual sexual past is fundamental to who they are.”

The Atlantic: Don’t Tell America the Babysitter’s Dead - On the decline of teenaged babysitting

American Reformer: Raising Neurotic Wrecks - A review of Abagail Shrier’s Bad Therapy.

USA Today: NBA League Pass to directly integrate real time betting - what could possibly go wrong?

Pew Research: 8 in 10 Americans Say Religion Is Losing Influence in Public Life

The Atlantic: Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?

The New York Times had a great Upshot feature on the impact of school closures on learning loss. The results were not pretty.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from Rod Dreher.

My main monthly newsletter came out on Monday and was about cultural insurgency and William Lind’s concept of 4th Generation War.

I followed up with a post on institutional triage.