Megan Garber fields the cult of celebrity at The Atlantic Monthly and propose that the veneration of celebrity is a shared American civic religion

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/harvey-weinstein-and-the-power-of-celebrity-exceptionalism/542880/

...

Through the years, one of Polanski’s most vocal defenders, to the extent that Polanski has needed defenders at all, has been Harvey Weinstein. In 2009, the producer helped to circulate a petition among the Hollywood powerful demanding that Polanski be freed after he was arrested in Switzerland. (Polanski had come to Zurich to accept a lifetime achievement award at the city’s film festival.) As one element of the aggressive publicity campaign Weinstein mounted on Polanski’s behalf—Weinstein has been very skilled at waging publicity campaigns—the producer wrote an opinion piece for the U.K.’s Independent newspaper. The column mentioned not just Weinstein himself, but also Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, Warren Beatty, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Evans, and the then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy—famous name after famous name, all dropped in service to the thesis that Polanski, whatever had “happened in 1977,” is “a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world.”

 

The column anticipated, in its genuflections to fame, the remarkable apology Weinstein would issue to the Times on his own behalf, eight years later. In it, Weinstein emphasized that Polanski was “a great artist” and “a humanist.” He reminded readers that Polanski had gone “through the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family,” and that he had emerged from tragedy to win the French Legion of Honour. Weinstein quoted Martin Scorsese as saying, “Polanski’s films have influenced me as an artist all these years and his terrible political situation has been something we have all had to suffer through.” In 1977, Weinstein suggested, one thing “happened” to one (unnamed) person; for decades, though, a great artist named Roman Polanski had been happening to the whole world. The one situation simply outweighed the other.

What Weinstein was doing, essentially, was constructing a more nuanced version of Donald Trump’s pronouncement to Billy Bush: He was making a case for Hollywood exceptionalism. He was summoning the idea that celebrity, in America, functions as a secular religion, with good and evil, with gods and monsters, with humans that, through the alchemy of fame, turn into stars. Celebrities are with us, but more to the point they are above us. They transcend our earthbound assumptions. They are soaring; we are small. How can the things that sparkle in the firmament be held to account for humans’ fleshy flaws? [emphasis added]

 
 It is a logic that is infused not just in the transactions of Hollywood, but also in the world of American sports. And the world of American tech. And the world of American politics. And the world of American science. And the world of American academia. The famous are famous, the idea goes—the powerful are powerful—the stars shine above us—because they are, somehow, touched: with talent, with genius, with the capacity to make the things that, in turn, make the world richer and better. “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” Harvey Weinstein told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, defending a man who had pled guilty to raping a 13-year-old. Debra Winger agreed: “The whole art world suffers” when someone like Polanski is arrested, she said. When Jeffrey Toobin wrote of Polanski’s legal troubles for The New Yorker, in December of 2009, his piece was headlined “The Celebrity Defense.” When the “free Polanski” petition circulated that same year, more than 100 of Hollywood’s most prominent people—including David Lynch, Michael Mann, Mike Nichols, and Woody Allen—signed it.

American evangelicalism has its prosperity theology; but American celebrity, too, has knelt before an altar of exceptionalism. Star by star, sin by sin, we have allowed the famous and the rich and the artistic to abide by a different set of rules, a different mode of morality. [emphasis added] The gospel of celebrity was invoked when Mel Gibson, after hitting his girlfriend and calling her a “pig in heat,” returned to filmmaking—and was rewarded with an Oscar nomination. The gospel was invoked when it was announced that the guy who insisted that “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” would be playing a wacky role in Daddy’s Home 2. It was invoked when Bill O’Reilly left the Fox News Channel with a parachute amounting to the tens of millions, and when Roger Ailes left with one amounting to $60 million, and when actors clamor to be featured in the next Woody Allen film, and when the world delights at Bill Clinton playing with balloons, and when Bill Cosby walks free. It is there when Donald Trump brags about being able to do anything, and then proves it by winning the White House.

We Americans are good at many things, but one of our most finely honed skills is our ability to be surgically selective in our vision and our outrage. Double standards drip among the stars in our synthetic firmament. The American flag is sacred, unless it isn’t. Drug addiction is a menace deserving of consternation, unless it’s a crisis deserving of compassion. Celebrities are just like us, unless they’re not. They have been elevated by the brute physics of fame. They have done whatever they have wanted. We have helped them. [emphasis added]

...

And this week, the stars that remain, in Hollywood and beyond, have been flooding the world with their public condemnations of Harvey Weinstein. That is itself suggestive of changing norms, of new assumptions, of a shift in what Americans will tolerate from their celebrities—and what they will no longer. It is at this point extraordinarily difficult to imagine a scenario in which Weinstein has not permanently plummeted from celebrity’s stratosphere. It is hard to imagine that the world, now that his “open secret” is secret no more, hasn’t been in some small way transformed. There are surely more stories to be told, and there is surely more work to be done. But fame, it seems, does not inoculate as it once did. Celebrity is no longer its own justification. When you’re a star, they let you do it. Until they don’t.

Recently I blogged about how in evangelicalism and American Christianity some men who were found unfit for ministry have, nonetheless, made their way back into ministry.  There's an American religion of "grace" that says we should welcome these Christian celebrities back into pulpits because God can so mightily use these people. 

My reply to that sort of assertion is to say that the kinds of celebrity Christian propagandists, who are being promoted as deserving a place behind a pulpit and a shot at "redemption" and "grace", are not shepherds in any sense that would have been traditionally understood prior to the advent of mass media entertainment in American society.  We are being asked to accept this or that Christian celebrity back from having "fallen" into their real roles, that of being celebrity propagandists for a particular flavor of Christian media.  It's not really about whether or not men and women who, upon careful examination and by earlier standards of Christian doctrine and praxis, would have and should have never become celebrities, would have been in formal ministry because by those lights we wouldn't know who some of these people are. 

In the wake of the demise of Mars Hill Church in Washington state the temptation has no doubt been great for people to say this or that set of people was the reason for the downfall.  Some of Justin Dean's interviews since the Mark Driscoll resignation have seemed to suggest that Mars Hill was not prepared to do battle with the full fury of liberal secular media.  Now liberal secular media in Seattle would probably love to take credit for having "taken out" Mark Driscoll but that was never the case.  If anything the public contrasts between men like Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll was synergistically beneficial to both celebrities.  Giving a secular press credit for having damaged the reputation of Mark Driscoll plays into the myth of the enemy liberal secular media.  It's a myth that American evangelicals need to dispense with in the case of Mark Driscoll because the journalistic document of the fall of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill shows us otherwise.  It's not like WORLD magazine is full of devotees of the Frankfurt school or that Janet Mefferd is on the same page as Dan Savage.  The way Driscoll conducted himself behind the closed doors of leadership cultures came to light because fairly conventionally conservative Christian publications shed light on what Driscoll and Mars Hill's leadership culture had done. 

The most trenchant preserved criticisms of Mark Driscoll were not just from secularists, feminists and political liberals (though they had important contributions to make to the public discourse).  There were equally significant criticisms of Mark Driscoll from within the Reformed scene in American Christianity.  Nobody could really claim that Janet Mefferd or Carl Trueman are particularly liberal about much of anything.  Mark Driscoll's plagiarism scandal was not launched in an interview on The View but a conversation with Janet Mefferd.  Rachel Held Evans never documented the evidence that Mark Driscoll had not adequately cited sources that he and Grace Driscoll were provably influenced by in Real Marriage. 

If in American evangelicalism a megachurch pastor can publish a marriage book in which he plainly states he concluded the cure for his moodiness and depression was getting more sex from his wife there's no place for American evangelicals to act as if now is the time to take aim at rock stars or athletes or film-makers and this is not simply just because evangelicalism itself may be rife with a rotten underbelly of sexual abuse and exploitation.

It would also be because when so much of what the American idea of powerful evangelism is consists simply in celebrity conversion, getting one of those celebrities from athletics or music or film or politics or academia on board the Christian celebrity wagon. Let's just be deliberately mean about this and propose it's a vaguely pseudo-Kuyperian gambit in which Anglo-American evangelicals hope that by landing the right sort of celebrity convert from some other field (maybe a C. S. Lewis or appropriating some other actually influential Christian of some never-actually-American-evangelical-type into the American-evangelical cause (Bonhoeffer, for instance)) a new and powerful agent of cultural change can be enlisted to make society look more legitimately Christian, at least in the way that a certain strata of American Christians conceive of Christianity. 

This isn't merely some strictly "red state" thing, it's not just a Mark Driscoll, it's also a Rachel Held Evans.  It's not just a Pat Robertson, it can also be a Tony Jones or a Tony Campolo.  The actual platform is less significant than the medium of presentation, the Christian celebrity. It's not so much that conservative/evangelical Americans are special about this flaw compared to others, they may just have a cultural milieu that is more loathe to admit that this is a goal than other groups.  Hollywood may be a land of vice but they have absolutely no qualms about using celebrity to stump for social and political causes.  Just because American Christianity across some red-blue divide has more of a bad conscious (if that's even true) about resorting to this set of idols rather than preaching Christ could simply mean that they have a bad conscience of some sort about where they think the real power of their message comes from--it's supposed to be all about Jesus but people need to see the celebrity.  It's not like I never thought about this being the damning reality underneath the "all about Jesus" bromides at Mars Hill over the years.  If it is all about Jesus then the celebrities can vanish.

But as we see how different the rules are by which celebrities are measured compared to the rank and file perhaps we should step back and remind ourselves that these men and women are just mortal men and women, not gods and goddesses.  There really is no reason they should be able to get away with doing the kinds of things that should get people fired or arrested for gross misconduct and criminal activity.  But perhaps what's creepiest about these cults of celebrity is that they will endure because rather than confront the cruelties and double standards of these celebrity cults it will be safer to displace the vices of "our" preferred cult onto the "their" cult. 

Or ... here's a late-night thought for the weekend, what if one of the stranger things about the cult of celebrity could be that celebrity is imbued with a desire to go easy on fellow celebrities at the lower rungs? 

How different can these rules by for the Christian celebrity compared to your frustrating Facebook friend or Twitter contact or people making vitriolic comments on a Youtube video?  Well ... let's go back and revisit some things Jonathan Merritt wrote in 2014 about Mark Driscoll.

http://religionnews.com/2014/08/04/accept-mark-driscolls-apology/

...

This means that there must be grace for the abused and the abuser, for the oppressed and the oppressor, for Mark Driscoll and for all those he has hurt. If we Christians have now arrived at a point where grace has run dry or is only available to some, let us abandon this whole Jesus way and join those who have no hope.

I’m a tough critic–perhaps too tough on occasion. But this situation has reminded me that the Christian community must be as generous with the salve of forgiveness as we are with the acid of criticism. If we can learn this, we will take a step closer to walking as Jesus did. And maybe then we can, with the dearly departed Brennan Manning, dare to whisper the ragamuffin’s rumor:

ALL. IS. GRACE.

http://religionnews.com/2014/08/24/mark-driscoll-resign-mars-hill-christians-celebrate/
...
There is no doubt that Driscoll should have stepped down–and for a lot longer than six measly weeks, if you ask me. I say this not because I believe in the myth of the perfect preacher who resides in an ivory tower and lives more righteously than others. But rather, because his patterns of behavior seem to illustrate instability of his emotional state and have resulted in the harm of others. I hope he receives help from a professional. (I know firsthand the difference that counseling can make.)

So in the wake of this news, I find myself relieved but not gleeful. I’m relieved the spiritual abuse is beginning to end. I’m relieved that I won’t have to wake to another one of Mark’s hurtful comments trickling down my twitterfeed. I’m relieved that I won’t have to tell another non-Christian friend, “He doesn’t speak for most of us.” I’m relieved, even as I grieve that the story did not have a happier ending.

Yes, I am relieved but I cannot rejoice. For when we celebrate the demise of another, we wake to realize we are also celebrating our own.

Driscoll's resignation would be announced later in 2014 in October.

When we celebrate the demise of another we wake to realize we are also celebrating our own?  Seriously?  Did Deborah and Barak celebrate their own demise when singing the song that ended up in Judges 5 where they sang the praises of Jael for killing Sisera with a tent peg?  What about "I will sing unto the Lord ... "celebrating how Yahweh destroyed the Egyptians?  Celebrating the demise of the wicked is so commonplace in the Old Testament it's impossible to see how Merritt could have written his pious bromides about Mark Driscoll with any seriousness if what he was working from was anything in the Bible.

But ... in a way ... it makes sense if the measure is not of something in the Christian Bible or the Jewish Torah but is, instead, a bromide from within the confines of an American Christian celebrity culture.

These pieces by Merritt were confounding back in 2014 because it seemed he had no clear idea how deep-seated the problems in the leadership culture of Mars Hill really were. What on earth was Merritt's idea of a "happier ending" for Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill?  It was hard to shake the sensation that Merritt was pulling punches not because he ever agreed with Driscoll on much of anything but because there might be, to put it in terms informed by Megan Garber's recent piece, some kind of Christian celebrity code.  Don't rip on a guy too much or he might bounce back a bigger celebrity than before. 

Still, longtime readers of the blog know I published "Pussified Nation" because I believed it was necessary to preserve for public record what Mark Driscoll wrote as William Wallace II.  And, of course, for folks who might want to read or read about Jacques Ellul, I used Ellul's writings on propaganda as a way to explicate the combination of "Pussified Nation" with Dead Men as a pivotal moment in the history of Mars Hill.  Perhaps it would be best to summarily say that I found it hard to take Merritt seriously when he said we should accept Mark Driscoll's apology.  A man like King Saul can be apologetic about the results of acts that he would keep on doing.  That was how it seemed Mark Driscoll was handling things in 2014 and his resignation confirmed rather than disproved this interpretation of how he was dealing with the controversies that surrounded his speech and conduct.

But a question has lingered since the year of Driscoll's resignation and the recent firestorm of coverage related to Harvey Weinstein has brought the question back into my thoughts--if a guy like Mark Driscoll had not been a Christian celebrity to begin with would it have taken so long to have reprimanded him to the point where he decided to resign rather than stay submitted to the eldership he claimed to submit to?

at Mere O. Jake Meador fields ecclesiology and the zombie pastors with a cover photo of Mark Driscoll, while Mere O blogger Samuel D James has had a history of imploring Christians to never start watchdog blogs and to not "follow Mark Driscoll around"

https://mereorthodoxy.com/zombie-pastors/

A brief note on the furor surrounding Patheos’s decision to add Mark Driscoll to their Evangelical channel: One of the common responses when something like this hits the press is for evangelicals, self-lacerating sorts that we are, to say that we need more institutional accountability, more safety measures in place to protect against “this sort of thing.”

One problem: When it comes to folks like Driscoll, that usually isn’t the problem. To be sure, in parish churches with a bad pastor, some institutional structure and accountability can go a long way. I grew up in an independent church. I know how bad it can get when there isn’t accountability. So none of this should be taken as a dismissal of ecclesial structure and accountability in general. That said, in the case of people like Driscoll I tend to think the problem is decidedly not one of polity.

Remember, after all, that Driscoll has been disciplined by ecclesial structures. Acts 29 removed him from leadership. After facing mounting pressure from the church, Driscoll resigned at Mars Hill. Did the process take longer than it should have? Probably, though it’s hard for me to say much in any direction on that since I’m such an outsider to the process. The point is that eventually something was done, Driscoll was ousted, and the recovery process began.

This point is worth making because oftentimes evangelicals, particularly evangelical Anglicans, are prone to thinking that our institutional safety measures failed when actually they worked just fine. The problem wasn’t the safety measures. Those did their job. The problem isn’t the lack of structure in evangelicalism. It’s the evangelicals themselves.

How and why Mark Driscoll claimed to received a divine exemption from having to follow the kind of pastoral advice he used to give from the pulpit has been documented here at some length.

Here's a diachronic survey of the roughly half-dozen accounts that were available in the post-resignation period (starting from the day of the resignation of Mark Driscoll proper) through to more recent accounts.

Here's a long-form analysis of the transcript interview Sheila Walsh and Randy Robison had with Mark Driscoll earlier this 2017.  The series is in eight parts and is, admittedly, long and that by necessity. 

And to commemorate the 10th anniversary of some controversial firings at what was once Mars Hill, there's a post that sets those firings in the context of intra-Mars Hill politics regarding governance, power, influence and the eventually public disclosure of those conflicts from about 2012 through to the end of Mars Hill in the 2014-2015 period.

Further, there's even a blog post that did a survey of some things that emerged in the lives of those who endorsed the 2012 Driscoll book Real Marriage, with an emphasis on controversies and questions that swirled around those endorsers. The Parrotts endorsed the book, for instance, and turned out to have made use of Result Source in promoting one of their books.  That's relatively innocuous compared to what came to be discovered about Boy Coy or Darrin Patrick. 

So there's all that and "that", if you haven't inferred it by now, is an awful lot of material to cover in terms of American evangelical history.  That formal institutions were in place that proved to have no capacity to constrain or limit Mark Driscoll seems pretty readily granted by everyone.  Not even Mark Driscoll himself could really contest the point by now, not least because he resigned and left the disciplinary procedure he said he agreed (at first) to submit to.

Meador has a point in saying that the problem doesn't seem to have been that there were no disciplinary protocols in place in a formal sense.  But for those more intimately acquainted with the power structures that were set up in Mars Hill history (i.e. the constitution and bylaws) it's possible to contest that the governance and disciplinary procedures did their job in one basic respect--those familiar with Meyer and Petry's objections to the 2007 bylaws could say the concerns they raised were that the formalities in place were more likely designed to preclude the accountability in practice that was promised at the level of formality.  What former leaders of Mars Hill realized too late was that not ultimately keeping Mark Driscoll accountable in terms of formal governance began to seem to many members and leaders to be a feature rather than a bug in the formal systems and informal culture. 

That at some practical levels the failures were a feature and not a bug may seem like a controversial proposal but in the wake of a torrent of stories about Harvey Weinstein it may be possible that Meador's take is a soft-pedal rather than a blunt truth.  Given what we've seen written about some of the men whom Mark Driscoll claimed were around to keep him accountable, it's not at all clear why anyone should have had confidence that the formal systems were going to accomplish anything like real accountability.  Certainly Paul Tripp indicated he did not think it was possible to have external accountability when he resigned from the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability. 

Take, for instance, Darrin Patrick, a man whom Mark Driscoll once described as "he's my pastor, you know" here at this blog.  Patrick himself ended up being removed from eldership last year, wasn't it?
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/in-light-of-darrin-patrick-news-lets.html

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/04/12/darrin-patrick-has-been-relieved-of-pastoral-duties-at-the-journey/

http://www.acts29.com/statement-regarding-darrin-patrick/
By Acts 29
April 14, 2016
It is with deep sadness that we have accepted the resignation of Darrin Patrick from the Board of Acts 29, and removed him as Vice-President and a member. We have taken these steps to respect, honour and affirm the decision and process of the elders at The Journey. ...

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2016/april/darrin-patrick-removed-acts-29-megachurch-journey.html
...
Darrin Patrick, vice president of the Acts 29 church planting network and founding pastor of The Journey megachurch in St. Louis, has been fired for violating his duties as a pastor.

The Journey cited a range of ongoing sinful behaviors over the past few years including manipulation, domineering, lack of biblical community, and “a history of building his identity through ministry and media platforms.”

 

In a letter announcing its lead pastor’s removal after 14 years of leadership, the church clarified that adultery was not a factor, though elders looked into inappropriate interactions with two women.

http://www.worldmag.com/2016/04/darrin_patrick_commits_to_restoration_process

A years-long pattern of sin led to the dismissal this week of Darrin Patrick, lead pastor of The Journey, a St. Louis, Mo., megachurch. While the reconciliation process is underway, an expert in pastoral crisis management who was called in to work with the church said Patrick’s restoration could take as long as his undoing. He does not expect Patrick to return to ministry anytime soon.
 
After confirming “substantive allegations of pastoral misconduct … combined with deep historical patterns of sin,” the elders of The Journey this week called for Patrick’s removal. He also resigned as vice president of the board of Acts 29, a church-planting network of congregations, which includes The Journey. 
...
http://theresurgence.com/2008/04/07/question-and-answer-with-mark-driscoll-video
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/qa-with-mark-driscoll/
 (starts at 00:31:52)

Q. How do you lead staff who are your best friends?Do you want the honest answer or should I punt? 
... You can't. ... you can't.

I hate to tell you that. ... Deep down in your gut you know if you're best friends and someone works for you that changes the relationship. Right? Because you can fire them. Of course you want to be friends with your elders and the people you work with. I mean, we're a church. I mean you wanna, you NEED to love the people you work with. But one of the hardest things, and only the lead guy gets this. Nobody else on staff even understands what I'm talking about. When you're the lead guy you wear multiple hats. Say it's someone who works with you and they're a good friend. You wear the "Hey, we're buddies" hat. We're friends. We go on vacation. We hang out. We do 
dinner. We're friends.
...

Does that make any sense? The best thing is if you have a best friend maybe the best thing to do is not have them work with you.  Or if they do have them work under someone else. And to also pursue good friendships with people outside of your church. Some of my dearest friends today are not at Mars Hill, they're also pastors of other churches. Darrin Patrick is here, Vice-President of Acts 29. I love him. He's a brother. He's the guy I call. ... He's a pastor to me, you know?  Matt Chandler is here. I count as a friend. By God's Grace, C. J. Mahaney, I count as a friend. [emphasis added]...

Good luck finding the original audio for that, unfortunately.   One of the challenges of writing a blog like this is that so many people purged so much content from so many platforms online directing people to primary source audio, video and transcript can be challenging precisely because the powers that be occasionally get inspired to purge any trace of this or that thing, person or event from the internet; sometimes people even introduce robots.txt to preclude the use of search engines, too.

What all these guys ranging from Mark Driscoll to Mahaney to Piper to Patrick to Chandler don't seem to have answered is how, if they believe they have been given spiritual discernment of some kind or another, they didn't discern all this stuff.  Cessationists could, I suppose, be able to plea that secret sins are eventually found out but don't always rise to the surface but these seem to have all been guys open to the idea of spiritual gifts and spiritual discernment.  So ... where was that discernment?  What was being discerned?  If Mark Driscoll was submitted to Darrin Patrick and it turned out that Darrin Patrick had his own issues for being unfit for ministry even while making a public declaration by way of Acts 29 as to why Mark Driscoll had been shown unfit for ministry then, well, sometimes the question can seem to be who's qualified or if qualifications matter at all.  We know they're supposed to matter and that they do matter but I'm thinking lately that the issue is not necessarily the standards themselves but selectivity in application. 

Regular readers won't be surprised to see this proposal but I have begun to think in the last few years that a common denominator we might find in all these men is that they are ultimately not shepherds but propagandists, masters of wielding multi-media platforms to convey a message of some kind in our society.  They aren't shepherds, though, and to the extent that they aren't shepherds they have no business being pastors and had no business being pastors.  Yet because American evangelicalism has been so steeped in propagandistic technique as the baseline for understanding what a uniquely American approach to "pastoral" life is supposed to be (with books and speaking engagements and film and so on) we have people in the evangelical and liberal wings of American Christianity who are presented as pastors and ministers who are motivational speakers and marketers but not shepherds who can assist Christians in their spiritual lives. You can have all the best institutional checks and balances in place but if your conception of what a minister of the Gospel even is to begin with is defined by a mastery of propagandistic technique rather than being a shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep then the checks and balances will only work on a propagandist who decides to "let them" work--otherwise what we'll see is what we've seen, that propagandist who is marketed as a pastor just finds a new market to work in.

So ... let's get back to Meador's blog post:
...
The problem of evangelical corruption and undead celebrity pastors will not be resolved by more stringent institutional standards. Indeed, there is not even the means within evangelical ecclesiology to provide structures with the kind of authority that many pursuing this line of thought desire: You need a magisterium for that. And if you’re ready to accept a magisterium, it’s time to buy some swimwear and make your way to the Tiber.

The reality when it comes to dealing with men like Driscoll and Tchividjian is far more basic: There is no replacement for virtue, good judgment, and a certain indifference to the allure of fame, money, and earthly success. If there is a lesson to the Driscoll, Tchividjian, and Patrick sagas, that lesson is probably not unlike the lesson we should have learned from Donald Trump: Until evangelicals care more about truth than they do fame, our moral witness will be hopelessly compromised.
...
Of course if crossing the Tiber meant anything in and of itself for the prevention of abusive leaders then movies like Spotlight would have never been made.  One of the illusions harbored by those who have embrace a high liturgical path (which I'm not necessarily against, just to be clear) is that the formal and institutional history is some kind of check against moral evil.  This is clearly not the case, any more than it's the case that a low church and informal or anti-high-liturgical approach ensures anything like rectitude and transparency in an institutional or cultural system. 

So, no, not all of us even think that having a magisterium improves the odds of reducing abuse even if there could be cases made for why a magisterium of some kind could or should exist.  Israel went into exile despite having the Mosaic law and a divinely appointed king or two over its pre-exilic history.  But more than just a handful of prophets whose literary warnings have been preserved in Scripture for us had stern warnings about how nobody should presume upon the givenness of scriptural revelation and laws would, in and of itself, ensure that God's people were never going to have to worry about judgment or exile.  Having these things meant they had a higher rather than a lower standard to consider.

Still, Meador's got a very good point, until evangelicals care more about truth than they do fame (or "influence" or the prestige of having publicly recognized intellectuals, etc) our moral witness will be hopelessly compromised.  In that respect evangelicalism is not unlike Hollywood in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein news.  Or, to cast about for controversy in intra-Christian circles, those who believe John Howard Yoder's ideas regarding violence and power are worth consideration can't altogether skip past how he treated women.  If anything how Yoder treated women makes his failure to apply some of his ideas about authority and aggression more pressing. 

But there's a caveat even in making this kind of observation.  Everyone is capable of being a hypocrite.  Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisees and legal experts was not "just" about them being hypocrites.  Sinners fail to live by the perfection of the law.  What Jesus condemned included that many of these self-appointed men we could describe in the contemporary jargon of being "thought leaders" and influencers insisted that men and women of the common rabble lived by a set of rules that these leaders did not bother to adhere to themselves.  The contemporary colloquialism that seems to describe this is that people in the big leagues have double standards about what they can get away with that ordinary people cannot and should not be allowed to get away with.

But the thing is, while I can agree with several basic ideas Jake Meador presented at Mere Orthodoxy there's another contributor who's joined Mere Orthodoxy over the last few years who seems to have had a different set of convictions with respect to megachurch pastor types.  We've looked at the blogging of Samuel D James a couple of times in the past but his blogging is worth looking at again.

It seemed pretty naïve to me back in November 2014 and it seems naïve now but it's worth revisiting because back in 2014 there were obviously some guys in evangelicalism who didn't think that Driscoll was going to rebound so quickly back into public ministry.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inklingations/2014/11/11/to-christian-bloggers-from-a-pastors-kid-dont-follow-mark-driscoll-around/
https://web.archive.org/web/20141115184929/http://www.patheos.com:80/blogs/inklingations/2014/11/11/to-christian-bloggers-from-a-pastors-kid-dont-follow-mark-driscoll-around/

Christian bloggers, please don’t report on the movements of Mark Driscoll. I’ll give you four reasons:

1) It really serves no good purpose. Driscoll has been publicly rebuked and has lost his ministry. As bad as Driscoll may have been in leadership, as potentially disqualified as he was from the pastorate, and as much damage as his actions have done to Christian witness, there is no godly or compelling reason to keep tabs on where he goes. I say “no godly reason” because I suspect much of the post-Mars Hill blogging will be driven by personal animus and a desire to see Driscoll fail wherever he goes. I say “no compelling reason” because even if one objects that we must protect other people from Driscoll, writing copious amounts of innuendo on him is hardly going to prevent those who want to be near him from doing so. The right measures have been taken in response to Driscoll’s actions. Continuing to report on him isn’t a right measure.

2) It obscures Christian forgiveness. Hear me carefully: I am not saying that Christian forgiveness means Driscoll should get a shiny new pastorate any day now. Nor am I saying that opposition to continued influence and ministry is tantamount to a withholding of forgiveness from anyone. What I am saying is that fixating on Driscoll even beyond his pastoral exit stokes the flames of bitterness and resentment that many people, understandably in many cases, feel towards Driscoll and towards his ministry. What those people should be doing is praying for Driscoll’s restoration, not merely his continued exile. Again, I am not saying that Driscoll is entitled to new ministry or authority (he’s not). I am merely speaking of helping those who struggle to extend forgiveness. I doubt that the “Driscoll beat” helps them.

3) It empowers skepticism towards the local church. One of the most lamentable features of the millennial generation is an attitude of deep distrust towards local church institutions. This is a disastrous development for young Christians. It prevents them from living life in close community the way Christ intended, and enables wrong, broad-brush beliefs about what pastors and churches are like. I’m not saying that ignorance is bliss, nor that churches are infallible or should always be given the benefit of the doubt. What I am saying is that somewhere there are young adults whose feelings of antipathy towards God’s people are being built up with the aid of the Christian Tabloid. When Christian culture gets in the way of Christian mission, it’s time to change the culture.

4) Finally, it punishes Driscoll’s family. I say this because I am a pastor’s kid, whose father was never disqualified from ministry and yet who was slandered, lied about, and dishonored publicly for self-serving reasons. Children of ministers bear the burdens of their fathers in ways that non-PKs cannot fully understand. Driscoll has opened up publicly about the toll that the recent controveries have taken on his family, saying that they have been forced to move multiple times and endure physical attacks on their house. Constant reporting about what Driscoll is up to puts his entire family in a vulnerable position where they can be preyed on by those with no legitimate motivations.

Please, Christian blogosphere, do not fixate on one man, nor make his comings and goings what the unbelieving world sees most clearly in the church. Frankly, wasn’t that the mistake we all made in the first place?

We've addressed a few of those points in the past.  Driscoll chose to resign rather than continue submitting to the disciplinary process he said he invited.  So reporting those facts as conveyed by none other than Mark Driscoll himself was worth doing. Samuel James, by now, has to be aware that Mark Driscoll gave himself a shiny new ministry and church and that it has the support of a few men who believe Driscoll deserves another shot.  So the plea that bloggers not follow Driscoll around might have made sense in a time and place where one could somehow assume that Mark Driscoll wasn't and would not end up in a new church leadership role within a calendar year of resignation; but we know by now that Driscoll lost pretty little time getting back on the conference circuit and setting up a new base of ministry.

By now almost anyone who has even heard of this blog knows what this blog has been known for.  That this blog has devoted hundreds of thousands of words to documenting the life and times of what was Mars Hill probably goes without saying much of the time.  If Samuel D. James had meant to say that bloggers who were not acquainted with all three co-founding elders of Mars Hill Church should refrain from blogging I'd actually agree with that sentiment.  But for those of us who saw what Mars Hill once was and what it became in its dying years I'd say that there's a moral and journalistic obligation to keep things available for the public record.  I'm not sure that Samuel D. James, who has identified himself as a pastor's kid, can entirely separate his distrust of a watchdog blog from his experiences as a PK. 

Had Mark Driscoll not insisted upon making himself a public figure he wouldn't be one.  But James' tendency when blogging about bloggers who might blog about churches has been moderately consistent.  Take this old post from an earlier Patheos era of blogging.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150508160636/http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inklingations/2015/05/07/what-not-to-do-when-a-fellow-christian-embarrasses-the-rest-of-us/
...
7) Don’t start a “watchdog blog.” Seriously, don’t ever.
8) Don’t read the comments.
9) Don’t leave a comment.

That led to enough commentary that James ended up writing the following:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150518011923/http://www.patheos.com:80/blogs/inklingations/2015/05/12/for-whom-the-blog-trolls-a-drama-in-10-acts/

Then it was taken down later in the wake of some journalistic commentary, it seems.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2015/july/blogging-truth-to-power.html?paging=off#comments

Now the reason it's significant Marlena Graves wrote the CT piece is because she was one of the people who co-interviewed Driscoll regarding the 2012 Real Marriage book.  It's worth revisiting that to see that Mark Driscoll was willing to tell Graves and her co-interviewer that he and Grace were both virgins when they met despite the fact that in the pages of Real Marriage itself the Driscolls said NEITHER of them were virgins when they met each other.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/mark-driscoll-told-christianity-today.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/januaryweb-only/mark-driscoll-sex-marriage.html
 Interview by Katelyn Beaty and Marlena Graves/ January 5, 2012
...
M[ark Driscoll]: No, and for us, we sinned, quite frankly. We were virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend.  Then Grace came back to Christ, and I came to Christ in college, so we had to stop sinning sexually. I'd say if we both could go back and rewrite history and change one thing, that would probably be the thing we would change. But we did repent and met with our pastor. And then we did get married, between our junior and senior years of college.

Of course now you have to be a registered participant in things CT to even read any of this so if that's not your deal, Wenatchee The Hatchet quoted the pertinent sections back when they were publicly accessible. 

So in the case of Mark Driscoll, people had an opportunity to establish that Mark Driscoll told flatly irreconcilable narratives about his sex life during just the promotion of his 2012 book.  Either he was a virgin when he met Grace or he wasn't and when Mark Driscoll testified that he wasn't in more than one of his books the question as to why he'd tell a journalist writing for Christianity Today that he was, in fact, a virgin, when he met Grace Martin is just one of those inescapable questions.  It's germane to Samuel D. James' previously stated concern that Christian bloggers not follow Mark Driscoll around. 

Certainly people can feel they're standing up for a principle but one of the difficulties of our age is that for those who are ensconced in media for a living it can seem as though what is depressingly clearer and clear about the cultures of mass media is that there are double standards.  Whether we're talking about a man with a history of gambling or a history of getting a church in debt through real estate acquisitions; or perhaps a man with a history of vitriolic language and a hair-trigger temper; or a man who turns out to have been pursuing multiple women for sexual relationships; or a man who was discovered to have cribbed a bunch of material without citation, what American Christians across the conventional blue and red divides are showing is that, within the realm of media empires, the celebrities get pleas for clemency after they've been caught doing any number of things that would get normal people some kind of church discipline or at the very least fired from their jobs in a more conventional world. 

This is not so much a conservative thing or a liberal thing.  For those who might still defend a Mark Driscoll there have been those who have defended the histories of people like Tony Jones, too.  The base line is not red or blue or conservative or liberal.  No, the base line seems to be that Americans want to defend their celebrities and in the case of Americans who identify as Christians they want to defend their celebrities much the same way fans of film-makers want to defend their favorite celebrities and power brokers. 

Way back in 2011 I blogged something called "we have the same ethics because we worship the same idols". It was about American evangelicals and their veneration of sex specifically, but I was thinking about Americans more generally, too.  Back in 2013 I wrote another blog post that was called "Mars Hill and the idol of social media"  Lately I think that the veneration of celebrity and partisanship at the expense of character and conduct may be another realm in which liberal and conservative Christians in America are ultimately more American than Christian, whether we're talking about a liberal or conservative in the conventional newspaper article sense. 

The preferred hue does nothing to change the foundational praxis, which favors the celebrity as having the rights and privileges to get away with things the rank and file would generally get punished for.  Now that we have so many men who showed themselves unfit for pastoral ministry in one capacity or another diving right back into the public eye it seems that there might have to be a sequel essay called "we have the same ethics because we worship the same idols" about celebrity propagandists in popular American Christianity.  The conventional red/blue divides are all the more convenient to mask the reality that there are likely moral equivalents of Harvey Weinsteins throughout American media-driven Christianity and that so long as sufficient fealty is paid by celebrities to the talismanic divisions of red or blue the egregious acts and words of the celebrities will not only be forgiven but defended. In the wake of the demise of Mars Hill people who went there may be tempted to double down on going as blue as they can in reaction to what they felt was Mark Driscoll's toxic red-state gospel.  That will be a fatal mistake, too.  There's no Gospel in Americanism, regardless of the formal color, the poison is ultimately the same. 

The quest for a kind of Christian celebrity seems endemic to the whole gamut of American media Christianity.  There's no real reason to be outraged at the recent reports of the conduct of a Harvey Weinstein if what Americans in the proverbially "red" and "blue" leaning Christian industries want is to have more A-list celebrities to get the message out.  If McLuhan's bromide about the medium being the message is to have any possibility of warning for American Christians regardless of political and economic convictions the warning should be that just as you cannot love both God and Mammon you can't love both Christ and celebrity. 

But it seems that across the American spectrum celebrity is what we really love.

in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations, John Halle highlights the history of Weinstein's advocacy for Clintons

One of the commonplace observations among publications ranging from Slate to The New Republic is what the allegations about Harvey Weinstein's conduct reveal about the nature of Hollywood and of what can be thought of as its exploitive approach to women, as a symbol or synchedoche for the West more generally, or at least the United States.

https://newrepublic.com/article/145269/hollywoods-inequality-enabled-harvey-weinstein

 

 

...

 

as Times film critic Manohla Dargis and others have noted, the basic structure of abuse in the Weinstein case (the powerful producer preying on young actresses) has existed since the beginning of Hollywood. The first known use of the  phrase “casting couch” was in 1931, and the reality it describes was already familiar by then. Structurally, the casting couch reflects a core inequality within the film industry: There are many young women who want to work in Hollywood and only a few powerful producers who have the access to the money needed to make movies.

 

These young women also exist in an attention economy, which often ensures that the only chips they have to bargain with are their attractiveness and sexual availability. The studio bosses, meanwhile, have the power of capital behind them. Movies are extremely expensive, and only the studio producers can green light a project or build up a career. Of course, once an actress becomes famous, she has a little bit more leverage, but she can only gain that power by going through the producer. And as the career of stars like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe show, even famous female stars can be abused.

 

Beyond economic power, producers have sway over the vast publicity industries that flourish around Hollywood. Weinstein in particular was a master of the publicity machine, thanks to his relationship with figures like Tina Brown, the Condé Nast magazine line, and the gossip columns of the New York Post. Indeed, it could be argued that Weinstein’s true talent wasn’t so much as a filmmaker (where his taste was frankly middlebrow) but rather in publicity. He knew how to create buzz around even mediocre movies like Shakespeare in Love, winning them countless Academy Awards

 

Of course, for Weinstein and his professional cohort of super-producers, could destroy careers just as easily. As Ronan Farrow reports in The New Yorker, “Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to [actress Ambra Battilan Gutierrez’s] case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages.” Weinstein was able to get way with his alleged abuse because of the massive inequality between him and his victims. He had star power, wealth, and a compliant media network. None of the normal institutional checks that might restrain a powerful person applied to him.

 

...

 

Weinstein’s power to abuse came from his position at the top of a hierarchy. And as New York’s Rebecca Traister noted [https://www.thecut.com/2017/10/why-the-weinstein-sexual-harassment-allegations-came-out-now.html ], Weinstein’s downfall might have been triggered by his slow but steady fall. She saw him earlier this year at a Planned Parenthood celebration, and “struck by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane. He has also lost power in the movie industry, is no longer the titan of independent film, the indie mogul who could make or break an actor’s Oscar chances.”

 

Is there any way to challenge figures like Weinstein while they are still in power? This is a question that has implications far beyond Hollywood. Star power, bolstered by economic inequality, is pervasive in American society. The United States now has a TV star president who is also a serial sexual abuser. CEOs are also treated like stars, even when they allow abuse to flourish, as with Uber. And abusive stars have long been tolerated in the media (Bill O’Reilly) and sports (Floyd Mayweather Jr.).

 

If a name like Rebecca Traister doesn't jump out for you, it jumped out for John Halle, a composer, music professor, and blogger.

 

https://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/big-club-aint/

 

 

 

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/harvey-weinstein-urged-clinton-campaign-to-silence-sanderss-black-lives-matter-message/

 

 

An Intercept piece from last year by Zaid Jilani contains the useful observation that now disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein was not only one of the chief bankrollers of the Clinton campaign, he was an informal campaign advisor. In frequent contact with Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, Weinstein was particularly concerned with Sanders’ inroads into Clinton’s support among women and African American voters.

 

One component of the strategy to head this off involved tarring Sanders male supporters as “Bernie Bros“. Those on the receiving end of the smear will recall that it consisted of raising doubts about Sanders supporters’ commitment to civil rights while accusing them of opposing Clinton based on their inability to accept female leadership. Some of them, it was claimed, went farther in directing obscene misogynist attacks on Clinton’s supporters on social media platforms. 

 

... 

 

What is worth mentioning are not the smears themselves but those who were circulating them. Among them were New York pundits Rebecca Traister, Joan Walsh and others who were quick to point to Sanders’s supporters “reminding their feminist peers that misogyny and bitter gender resentments are not — as they have never been — the sole province of the American right,” thereby doing their part to foment the myth that they were comparable to and in some cases little better than the benighted “deplorables” on the other side of the aisle.

 

This was dishonest and plenty reprehensible then. What makes it in retrospect even more so is that, as we now know, Weinstein’s predations were common knowledge to Traister, Walsh and others in the elite media circles they inhabit.

 

Indeed, Traister herself now admits [https://www.thecut.com/2017/10/why-the-weinstein-sexual-harassment-allegations-came-out-now.html] that she had a front row seat, Weinstein having called her a “cunt” after she confronted him with an “impertinent question.”

 

 

But she “never really thought of trying to write the story” about Weinstein’s predations, even though she was aware of many incidents similar to those which have now come to light. She is only speaking out now that others have taken the risk-and not incidentally only after Weinstein’s checks were banked by the Clinton campaign and cashed by many of Traister’s friends working within it.

 

How do Traister and others justify giving Weinstein a pass on his all too real assaults while circulating smears against those whose only crime was supporting a candidate disapproved of by the Democratic Party Wall Street wing? [emphasis added]

 

No doubt they will not deign to answer “impertinent” questions from media unknowns like myself.

 

But the main conclusion is unescapable: when they emanate from the purveyors of respectable conventional wisdom, charges of sexism, racism and anti-semitism have nothing to do with achieving justice for the victims. Rather they often function as a weapon against those attempting challenges to Weinstein and similar plutocrats who have owned and operated the Democratic Party for decades.

 

None of this, of course, is meant to deny the existence of institutional white supremacy, misogyny and even anti-semtism.

 

But compromised sources such as Traister should be viewed with extreme suspicion: their accusations along these lines invariably have an agenda-one which involves protecting those in the club. Which is, as George Carlin famously noted, the same club that they use to beat over the head those of us who aren’t in it, and never will be.

 

It is worth wondering, a little bit, why Harvey Weinstein's reputation and conduct have only come up for public examination with respect to his treatment of women after Clinton's campaign lost the electoral vote to Donald Trump.  A particularly jaded and cynical proposal might have it that inside of a calendar year from Clinton losing to Trump, Hollywood and other elite industry top-tier people found it was no longer worthwhile to look the other way amidst the allegations that could have been made earlier against Weinstein.  It's not clear yet that what we're having is a moment of increased cultural awareness.  People in all sorts of industries may continue to be as nasty and rapacious and exploitive as they have been for generations.  But what may have changed since the election of Trump is that in the midst of a reality-TV star gaining power after having said what he could get away with to someone within the Hollywood scene, Hollywood has to divest itself of blue state practitioners of such things in order to retain any slight shred of foundation for moral outrage at the current President's track record for dealing with women. 

 

But, as Halle has noted with more than an implication of complaint, the journalists who have only lately decided it was okay to share what they saw and heard about Weinstein were, last year, some of the people warning about "Bernie bros".  I can't remember a single supporter of Sanders I knew in the Seattle area who could have been called a Bernie bro, whatever that meant.  if in the long run Clinton campaign sidelining of Sanders played a role in the rise of Trump as a candidate whom Clinton couldn't defeat in the Electoral College then one of the explanations for the rise of Trump could be the mendacity with which journalists impugned the Sanders campaign in favor of Clinton despite having decades of knowledge that someone among the Clinton patronage culture was reportedly no better toward women than the Republican candidate. 

Jake Meador fields the topic of "zombie pastors" at Mere Orthodoxy with a photo of Driscoll--if evangelicals are going to care about truth more than about fame might that not require evangelicals to confront the character of its internal prestige systems and quest for respectability?

https://mereorthodoxy.com/zombie-pastors/

....

 
 
The problem of evangelical corruption and undead celebrity pastors will not be resolved by more stringent institutional standards. Indeed, there is not even the means within evangelical ecclesiology to provide structures with the kind of authority that many pursuing this line of thought desire: You need a magisterium for that. And if you’re ready to accept a magisterium, it’s time to buy some swimwear and make your way to the Tiber.

The reality when it comes to dealing with men like Driscoll and Tchividjian is far more basic: There is no replacement for virtue, good judgment, and a certain indifference to the allure of fame, money, and earthly success. If there is a lesson to the Driscoll, Tchividjian, and Patrick sagas, that lesson is probably not unlike the lesson we should have learned from Donald Trump: Until evangelicals care more about truth than they do fame, our moral witness will be hopelessly compromised.

Indeed, it will be non-existent.

We'll get to the topic of the writing in more detail maybe by the weekend but there's such a thing as having a social life and a creative life.  Been composing music again and the prospect of composing a fugue for slide guitar in the vein of country legends was irresistible.  Also finished a guitar sonata a few weeks back.

But in the case of Mere O contributors in particular there's stuff that seems necessary to flesh out at some length that deserves more detailed attention some time this weekend.  Samuel D James in particular has a track record of having insisted that nobody "follow Mark Driscoll" around that we've addressed here at this blog a while back.  If Mere O wants to talk about the problems of Christian celebrity speakers never managing to have careers die despite the evidence that can be mounted against continued ministerial activity there might need to be some more cumulatively "on message" agreement between contributors like Meador and James.  Just because a few volatile blog posts from the Patheos iteration of Inklingations got pulled doesn't mean they can't be pulled up, for instance. 

For that matter, as a commenter put it ...

David Wolf Peter Gaultney • 2 hours ago

Excellent point. Federal vision is a good example of that kind of thing, though these days I'm pretty sure the only place they end up after being ousted (or near-ousted) by one denomination is to end up in the CREC. Which doesn't seem like a bad deal

 
The dry joke that defrocked ministers seeking asylum to continue being pastors fleeing to the CREC is funny as long as your humor gravitates toward the mordent.  Can't recall if the Mere O crew directly addressed the plagiarism controversy that led Douglas Wilson and Randy Booth to retract A Justice Primer in the wake of a plagiarism controversy that was brought to light by a blogger. I've got plenty of reason to doubt that men like Driscoll or Darrin Patrick or Tchividjian should be in formal ministry but the collective track record of Mere O contributors is spotty about the Driscoll case in the sense that, well, we'll just wait to get to that for some time this weekend.

But the large point that formal institutions are no safeguard in themselves against abusive practices would seem like a gimme, not least because of headlines about Harvey Weinstein.  The take-away here should probably be that it really doesn't matter where what spectrum a group may land, American institutions and cultures of "inner rings" are all likely so rotten to the core they shouldn't last much longer even if it's likely they probably will.

lengthy POSTSCRIPT 10-11-2017 11:00 pm
Rod Dreher cross references a David Brooks review of Alan Jacobs' How to Think.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/alan-jacobs-inner-ring-how-to-think/

Dreher goes on to describe via quotation a warning from C. S. Lewis about the Inner Ring, an informal prestige racket existing inside a culture.  There are those who seek to join the Inner Ring and others who seek to attack the Inner Ring but the Inner Ring ends up defining things.  Dreher describes himself as having been for Gulf War 2 and convincing himself that anyone who was against Gulf War 2 or just considered it a bad idea as being a bad person.
...
We’re all at risk of falling victim to this process, are we not? In France last week, I recounted the story for some friends about how my rage over 9/11 was so overwhelming that it slammed my mind shut on the question of the Iraq War’s advisability. I truly thought that anybody who opposed the war was a coward or a fool. I was perfectly serene in my conviction. I told myself that I was listening to their arguments, and found those arguments unconvincing, but only in retrospect did I grasp that I had made my mind up from the beginning, and only considered as “reasonable” those facts and syllogisms that served the conclusion I had already reached. And I concealed this process from myself unknowingly. 

The recollection of how I did this really does shake me up, even to this day. If it happened to me once, might it happen again? The only protection I have against that possibility is awareness that it happened, and a resolution to be as vigilant as I can against it in the future. But we humans are fallible. For me, one of the great lessons of my life is the fallibility of human reason. It ought to be the lesson everyone learns as they get older. It’s called gaining wisdom.
...
Dreher went on to write:

...
When I moved to New York and started writing a column for the New York Post, I started getting invited on cable TV a fair amount. I was not a good guest. I tried to listen to what my opponents were saying, and respond in kind. What the producers actually wanted was for me (and all the guests) to be combative, and to double down on our initially stated opinion. The point was not to argue as a means to understand, but rather to inflame one’s own side, and, with luck, humiliate the other. It’s interesting to observe how this idea has been widely absorbed in our society. It’s what drives the Social Justice Warriors on campus who are attempting to silence any dissent, but this approach is more general than we care to consider.
...

Now whether or not a person thinks Dreher isn't still doing this flames-fanning could be set aside as a topic for another day or another venue but it's interesting that Dreher, at least here, can consider that the expectation from the producers was that the role he was supposed to play was an incendiary one.  To use Ellul's taxonomy of propagandas, Dreher described an expectation that he was to be a producer of propaganda of agitation.

Dreher wrapped up the blog post with an anecdote and a moral judgment:

...

I am thinking at this moment of a well-known conservative Christian intellectual. During the Bush years, he was once asked — not by me — how he could support publicly the position of other public intellectuals on the Right (national security hawks, if memory serves) who believed things he opposed. How do you justify that? asked his interlocutor. The Christian intellectual’s response: people like me need to do that to get the things we want, politically, like pro-life legislation.
There is a certain logic to that. The mutual friend of mine and this intellectual’s who repeated the story told it as an account of how political strategizing had corrupted our friend’s thought. And he was right, to a point. But I knew the Christian intellectual well enough to understand that the deepest truth about him was that he was a vain main who considered himself to be part of the Inner Ring — and loved it. [emphasis added]

...

Let's suppose for the sake of mulling over implications that there's an Inner Ring of movers and shakers in the entertainment industry that is known as Christian media and publication and that the rainmakers, even B or C lister sorts who have controversies swirling around them, are considered too valuable as assets to be dispensed with.  They may have been A grade at one point but controversy erupted and popular men fall.  But they aren't allowed to fall altogether out of ministry, they may fall from A lister to B lister or C lister and for those sorts of men there is "redemption", which is handed out in the way of giving them some quiet, out of the way spot from which they can see if they can make a bit to be A lister people again.  Meador seems to, at one level, get that repudiating this kind of cultural dynamic is important. 

But at another level, the dynamics of an Inner Ring aren't alien to academia and yet Mere Orthodoxy guys have wondered where the Christian intellectuals are, and who might be among the ranks of Christian intellectuals.  How exactly do you repudiate the prestige racket of an Inner Circle if you're upset that Christians of your set of convictions don't have Inner Circle level respectability or prestige?  People by and large never equate "evangelical Christian" with intellectual activity of any kind at all, let alone scholarly work.  This may be unfair in all sorts of ways but as the adage goes, stereotypes are usually based on something.  Not all fame is necessarily about money.  I'm not against scholarship by any means but I do think that in the quest for some kind of evangelical presence that can be described as "Christian intellectual" Mere Orthodoxy contributors need to consider whether joining the prestige racket that permeates contemporary American academia is worth bothering with.  It's also not always clear to me whether it's the scholarship or the prestige that evangelicals want.  The scholarship can be done just fine without any of the prestige, after all.

a rebuttal to a Ta-nehisi Coates piece about Trump as the first white president

If we wanted to look back to racists presidents we could easily look back a century ago to Woodrow Wilson but in the current political climate presenting  Trump as a racist has currency.  If he is a racist he can't be the first racist president who's been white, since, again, Woodrow Wilson.  But Coates was willing to write of Obama that "he was my president", despite Obama, by Coates' account, saying he hadn't seen any compelling evidence that reparations actually worked.  If government funding in reparation for past wrongs led to economic revitalization in and of itself would the state of Native American tribes on reservations be a potential proof for Coates' advocacy that reparations can and should be done? 

But at another level, if the establishment is as racist as Coates has sometimes indicated it seems to be then wouldn't reparations be interpretable as ultimately being some kind of blood money?  It could be a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation for a polemicist working with Coates' argument whether or not Coates himself might reach such a conclusion.

But despite not liking Trump at all, the bromide that Trump's administration represents fascism even though Obama's administration didn't seem like it was a fascist regime with the same basic set of executive powers seems hard to buy.  It's not that we might not be living in a giant surveillance state, mind you, it's that blue and left partisans have a history of only granting the reality of this when there are too many red partisans in seats of power.  It's why even though I think the libertarian approach to the human condition is ultimately idiotic they at least have some points when some of them say that maybe the central government has too much power regardless of who happens to be wielding it.

In the last month The Atlantic ran a rebuttal from an author who saw fit to question the nature of Coates' public polemic regarding Trump and white supremacist ideologies. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/coates-trump/541158/

...

Yet none of these points actually demonstrate that the dominating force behind the success of Trump’s campaign was white supremacy. The answer to Coates’s rhetorical question of whether Barack Obama could have gotten into office after a record of sexual assault is obviously no. But Coates does not contemplate the possibility that what made people willing to excuse Trump’s boorish behavior was not his whiteness, but his status as a celebrity entertainer in which his vulgarity was a widely accepted aspect of his persona. So when Coates asks whether we can “imagine a black felon running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well,” the proper parallel would be imagining a well-known entertainer whose social capital has accrued in the past few decades of television and digital media. Kanye 2020 anyone? [WtH  or would R. Kelly be a better example?]

But the broader issue with the essay is that in the world that Coates has constructed for his reader, it is impossible for the source of the problem to be anything but whiteness, [emphasis added] “that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.” Maybe the majority of Trump’s white supporters wanted to repeal the former president’s legislation because of actual policy disagreements; or, maybe they, like others, harbored deep dislike for Hillary Clinton. After all, Clinton lost critical states like Michigan and, as Omri Ben-Shahar wrote in Forbes, Clinton did so less because Trump gained new voters in these states than because registered Democrats did not show up on Election Day, possibly due to voter-ID laws and other factors. “Wisconsin tells the same numbers story,” he wrote. “Trump got no new votes. He received exactly the same number of votes in America’s dairyland as Romney did in 2012 … But Clinton again could not spark many Obama voters to turn out for her: she tallied 230,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. This is how a 200,000-vote margin for Obama in the Badger State became a 30,000-vote defeat for Clinton.
 

The distribution of minority votes tells a similar story. National Public Radio’s Domenico Montanaro points out that although Latinos made up a greater share of the electorate than in previous elections, “a significant share … went third party.” Indeed, that 6 percent may have made a significant difference. In North Carolina, black voters made up 20 percent of the electorate in 2016, a 3 percent decline from their share in 2012. Charles Ellison of the Philadelphia Tribune notes that between 2012 and 2016 there was “an alarming 11.4 percent reduction in Black votes.”

At the very least, this demonstrates that decreased democratic turnout had as much if not more of an impact in the election than Trump’s ability to rally supporters. Of course, none of this is to absolve Trump supporters for making unwise voting decisions, but if Coates wants to prove that white supremacy was the dominating force fueling the rise of Trump, he must demonstrate that all other possible motives are implausible—which he doesn’t. [emphasis added]

...

Coates writes that since among working-class Americans, 61 percent of whites—but only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks—supported Trump, only “whiteness” can be the culprit. But why did any percentage of working class blacks and Hispanics vote for Trump? Do they also secretly harbor white-supremacist viewpoints? Did they too inherit the all-powerful white heirloom? Or is it possible that all of these groups were motivated by a variety of factors, not least among them a visceral and uncompromising dislike of Hillary Clinton? [emphasis added]

Beware the deceptive allure of binary choices that masquerade as arguments. Coates’s failure to imagine complexity in human motives yields the assumption that such complexity cannot possibly exist.

Coates is at his best when he confronts the shortcomings of his progressives peers like Mark Lilla and George Packer who do not consider the possibility of intricate motives fueling voting blocs. Packer “offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on ‘elites,’ much less their views on racism,” Coates writes, critiquing his reductionist impulse to say Trump’s rise is only or mostly due to economic grievance. But Coates himself is equally reductive in concluding that it is due to white supremacy.

His essay contributes to a politically toxic environment in which challenging the orthodoxies of the left and the right becomes heresy. Echo chambers are fortified. An us vs. them mentality becomes the only possible explanation for what’s going on.
...

 

White supremacism was basically how and why the Pacific Northwest got settled, a historical fact that people in Portland, for instance, can never afford to forget.  It's also something people should not ignore in Seattle.  No matter how blue-state the electoral tendencies up here the legacy of racism and white supremacist utopianism hasn't gone away.  But Coates' polemics are not necessarily going to help improve things if he distills the rise of Trump down to just white supremacism.  Sure, it no doubt played a role but the left and liberals have begun to be easier to distinguish since Trump got elected and while people at Slate are aghast still that Trump one folks at The Baffler have come up with ways to explain the rise of Trump that don't involve just invocations of racism and white supremacist ideologies.

In the wake of OscarsSoWhite it's not really clear that the entertainment industry doesn't favor whites disproportionately.  If Trump hadn't been made into a reality television show star would he have had as much of a platform from which to make a bid to be the President of the United States?  There's a sense in which Hollywood being aghast that Trump became president could represent a case study in being upset that a man they helped keep a C-list at best star in the spotlight long enough for him to seize it.  White supremacist ideologies may have played a part in Trump's rise, but should the media industries scapegoat white racism at the expense of examining how and why they let him stay a reality television star long enough to go for political office? 

two haiku composed during a laconic Friday

1.

There’s much wisdom in

The proverb,  “Don’t do, just be”

But be a doer

 

2.

Be true to yourself

But know that identities

Can be too tailored