What to Do About Vice

Vice and liberalism, David Brooks' farewell, doomers in love and more in this week's digest.

I’m very excited that scholar of religion Ryan Burge will be coming here to Indianapolis to speak at Tabernacle Presbyterian Church on March 1. If you are local to me, you definitely want to mark this on your calendar.

I was a guest this week on First Things magazine’s The Editor’s Desk podcast, discussing my essay on the lack of an evangelical elite with R. R. Reno.

First Things is also starting a new newsletter on the Protestant Mind. Be sure to check it out.

Ross Douthat wrote a piece for the New York Times (gift link) talking about vice that engaged with my own WSJ piece on the subject. It’s a great column. I was struck by this section.

And it’s here that the stronger forms of religiously minded post-liberalism make their case. Whether in their Catholic integralist or Protestant “Christian nationalist” forms, they argue that American liberalism was able to restrain vice only because of its religious inheritance, the secularizing aspects of the liberal order have destroyed that inheritance, and so only an explicitly Christian politics that repudiates liberalism can restore the moral order.

I’ve written elsewhere, at some length, about the problems with this vision. Among other things, it lacks a persuasive account of why integralism lost to liberalism in the first place, a compelling theory of how to get the diverse and divided American public to vote for a politics of faith and virtue and an adequate engagement with why post-liberal experiments in the 20th century defaulted so often to authoritarianisms that corrupted Christianity rather than restoring it.

But the alternative vision can also feel inadequate. If you think the liberal order needs some version of what we once enjoyed with American Protestantism, some kind of “softly institutionalized” moral and religious vision that prevents us from devolving into addiction and despair, but you don’t think that politics can do much more than gently create preconditions for that vision, then aren’t you still stuck inside the Yglesian framework, hand-waving vaguely at the social problems that are eating your order from within?

This is the problem. The old unofficial institutionalization of a generic Protestantism was a product of an America that no longer exists. It wasn’t created by the government in the first place, and can’t be recreated by political means. The fundamental social reality when it comes to vice is that Americans at present want it to be legal and socially approved of.

So what can we do? It’s not obvious but here are a few tracks.

• We can work to mitigate the worst negatives, such as by tightly controlling marijuana distribution and its public use, or making it more difficult for minors to access porn.

• People can begin incubating new, outside of the Overton Window cultural and moral movements. This is how social liberalization was achieved.

• Various subcultures and organizations, such as churches, can firmly reject vice as a condition of membership.

• The American leadership class can re-adopt a vision that they abandoned long ago of our people as our country’s greatest asset. Elevating our people, developing our human capital, is critical to America functioning well and to our economic competitiveness. To the extent we are working on this, we will be working on vice, even if only indirectly.

David Brooks and Nihilism

David Brooks is leaving the New York Times to become full time at the Atlantic, where here’s long been a contributor, authoring a number of major pieces there.

His farewell column for the Times (gift link) hits one of his big themes, namely the loss of a shared moral order in America.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

He calls on “true humanism” as an “antidote to nihilism.” Though he doesn’t reference James Davison Hunter in the piece, he seems to be channeling some of the themes from that sociologist’s latest book Democracy and Solidarity.

Unfortunately, Brooks again falls prey to the same nihilism he decries. He views America in Manichean terms, seeing it as a venue for an epic struggle between Good and Evil:

Sometimes it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn, bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other.

He sees himself as on the side of Good of course. The not limited to them, the side of Evil is, of course, people who support Donald Trump. He writes:

Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. Selfishness, egoism and the lust for power drive human affairs. Altruism, generosity, honor, integrity and hospitality are mirages. Ideals are shams that the selfish use to mask their greed. Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places. In 2024, 77 million American voters looked at Trump and saw nothing morally disqualifying about the man.

I can certainly understand why people might denounce Donald Trump personally, or even various people in his inner circles. But demonizing 77 million people is exactly what Brooks himself says he is against.

One of Hunter’s points is that almost all of us have fallen prey to nihilism at some level. It’s not just a matter of left or right, extremes or center. The problem is much deeper than just one faction or another. I don’t think I’m immune from it myself, and have to constantly be on guard against seeing the world in these terms.

I think David Brooks has a potentially important role to play in our society as the moral conscience of our elite. He could make a good mainline pastor, and in fact I think it would be good if he went to seminary and got ordained in the PCUSA.

But he can only do that effectively if he’s able to open his heart to the big share of the country that falls into the populist-Trumpist camp. Not that he has to endorse them. But he has to recognize that they are his fellow-citizens and aren’t going anywhere. And that maybe they have some perspectives and legitimate grievances that deserve to be taken seriously, if not accepted wholesale.

As Brooks himself observed immediately after that passage above, “It’s tempting to say that Trump corrupted America. But the shredding of values from the top was preceded by a decades-long collapse of values from within.”

I’d encourage him to emulate his mentor Tim Keller here, who never talked about other people in this way. Even when recognizing there were very conservative evangelical groups he couldn’t partner with, Keller’s approach was to say that we should divide with grace and tears, not acrimony.

Having said that, Brooks fingering of the lack of a shared moral order - what I’ve referred to as our informal, softly institutionalized generic Protestantism, and later generic Judeo-Christianity - is absolutely correct. I also think we need to see something like a modern version of the capital-P Progressive Movement that Brooks cites approvingly. (That was, among other things, focused on elevating our people, as I discussed above).

He also rightly notes the dynamic, protean nature of America, and the need to restore American dynamism:

The most astute of those observers have always noted that beneath the crass, striving materialism of American life, there is a propulsive spiritual wind, driving Americans to move, innovate, self-improve, venture boldly into the future. This is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s energy infusing the musical “Hamilton”: “I’m just like my country. / I’m young, scrappy and hungry.” This is John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.” If America could once again restore its secure emotional, material and spiritual base, maybe we could recover a smidgen of our earlier audacity.

This is something I very much agree with. Click over to read the whole thing.

Doomers in Love

The Point is arguably America’s best little magazine. The new issue has a great essay by Mana Afsari on the challenges and dysfunctions of dating for young people today.

I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”

…

I sympathize with the desire to distance oneself from the romantic and physical humiliations of hookup culture, which are variously—and sloppily—attributed to heterosexuality, to men as a whole, to women as a whole, to patriarchy or to the moral degeneracy of the age. The moment I learned that it wasn’t romantic suicide to reject the sexual bidding war that is the dating market, I opted out. I began to “date to marry,” not because I wanted to be married in my early twenties (I didn’t), but because I felt I had to draw a hard line against the pervasive heterosexual standard of situationships, where no one was at the wheel. Despite being raised an atheist, I, like many in my age group in recent years, took up some hard-line rules from Christian sexual ethics, which, compared to the high-strung dating discourse, seemed to offer a less baroque, if sometimes still too crude, filter for what I really wanted from love.

…

But there is a reason that these seemingly arbitrary standards hold such appeal. The new technologies, we’re told, give us more freedom and choice, and they do. Yet they also undermine the moral and practical heuristics we need to know how to make a good choice. In the absence of norms or models, however imperfect, we turn each relationship into an elaborate contract dispute. Without a clear path or end goal we inspect little red flags along the road as signals for whether to end things, searching for decisive forks in a missing trail. Amid the collapse of authority on sex and gender, and in this radical freedom, we are all forced to become existentialists in dating, in blue-bubbled messages, on our endless social media feeds and in strained conversations: What do you want? Where are we going? What are we?

Click over to read the whole thing.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

St. Louis’ PBS station hosted an interesting hour long conversation with a demographer talking about the birth dearth and its implications for the region. This is one of the best and accessible introductions to demographics I’ve seen. While it might be too wonky for some, this is a must-listen for local leaders in most American cities.

This discussion is a great complement to Ryan Burge’s recent piece about how long it will be before church denominations lose half their members.

Burge noted that the decline of the American church has been at such a slow bleed that dealing with it has been manageable. But soon there will be a steep decline as Baby Boomers pass on.

Ness Sándovol makes a similar case about cities. Demographic reality is going to be catching up with the St. Louis’ of this world sooner rather than later. He thinks the region only has about five years to change its trajectory.

While St. Louis is probably an advanced case, much of the country is going to be dealing with similar issues. Leaders have not really taken stock of the implications for their communities.

Best of the Web

WSJ: A Solution for Crowded Cemeteries: Turn Loved Ones Into Gardening Soil (gift link) - This an article talking about the trend of - I’m not joking - composting dead people’s bodies. It’s another example of how burial practices show a fundamentally post-Christian society. It notes that cremation is already used for 60% of deaths, and is projected to hit 82% by 2045. Traditionally, Christianity rejected cremation as a denial of the resurrection of the body. French writer Emmanuel Todd used the rise of cremation as one of his indicators of our arrival at a religious “zero state.”

WaPo: Christianity at the Super Bowl defies a trend (gift link)

Pirate Wires: Meet the Secret Society Where Young Tech Debates the Future of the West - The Hamilton Society, which interestingly appears to be a Catholic organization, or at least Catholic-centric.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention at First Things and American Reformer.

New this week:

• I have an essay on vice in the Wall Street Journal (gift link)

• American Transition - The old American order is gone. A new one hasn’t arrived. What the transition looks like—and why it still holds promise.

• The Plight of the Protestant Scholar - Guest writer John Ahern on why theological distinctives help the whole church and the whole academy

• This month’s podcast for Members only is my thoughts on the very non-controversial subject of Israel. My Member program is the community of my closest supporters. You can learn more on my Support page.

Cover image: A man smoking pot in Las Vegas by Vapor Vanity/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0