We started recording when our conversation was basically already in progress. Oops. The following should help. We touch on abortion, J.D. Vance’s Catholicism, and the very different forms misogyny can take.
The jumping off points are these articles by Ron Dreher:
Dreher reacting to a piece by Paul Kingsnorth about paganism, in which he seems more interested in this piece by David Bentley Hart. Quote from Hart George reads:
Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.
This may seem a somewhat apocalyptic note to sound, at least without any warning or emollient prelude, but I believe I am saying nothing not almost tediously obvious. We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically “good” because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.
This is not to say that—sentimental barbarians that we are—we do not still invite moral and religious constraints upon our actions; none but the most demonic, demented, or adolescent among us genuinely desires to live in a world purged of visible boundaries and hospitable shelters. Thus this man may elect not to buy a particular vehicle because he considers himself an environmentalist; or this woman may choose not to have an abortion midway through her second trimester, because the fetus, at that point in its gestation, seems to her too fully formed, and she—personally—would feel wrong about terminating “it.” But this merely illustrates my point: we take as given the individual’s right not merely to obey or defy the moral law, but to choose which moral standards to adopt, which values to uphold, which fashion of piety to wear and with what accessories.
Dreher reacting to a conversation about J.D. Vance’s Catholicism between James Carville and Andrew Sullivan. Quote George reads:
“If you’re like us,” Carville tells Andrew, “you’re a cradle Catholic, by the time you reach your thirties, you kind of know the deal. You say okay, … I still like the framework, it provides, whatever.”
Ah ha! So it’s not about truth at all for James Carville. It’s about something that “works” to provide a framework, but it’s not true. (Carville rants briefly about being lied to in Catholic school about who wrote the Gospels, but he’s wrong about that.) Andrew doesn’t contradict him. These guys fault J.D. Vance for supposedly instrumentalizing the Catholic faith, but this is what they openly do. And they don’t see it.
Andrew calls J.D. a “fundamentalist.” Whenever I hear a liberal Christian calling someone more conservative than them, within their own tradition, a “fundamentalist,” I’m know I’m being played. “Fundamentalist” is a word from the Protestant world that arose historically to refer to a certain kind of Protestant. But it has become an all-purpose slur word that Christians use to refer to anyone more morally and theologically conservative than they are. True, there are people within the Catholic Church whom you could describe as “fundamentalist” in the way that Andrew uses the term; same is true of Orthodoxy. It might surprise Carville to learn this, but these “Catholic fundamentalists” want nothing to do with me, as someone who left Catholicism. How on earth I bear any responsibility for Vance becoming part of the conservative Catholic network of public intellectuals and politicians is a mystery.
What Carville and Sullivan seem to mean by criticizing Vance as a “fundamentalist” is that he is a Catholic who actually believes what the Church teaches. Well, golly. Heaven forfend!
Other mentions
Article on Unherd about verdict (for general background)
7 in 10 Women Who Have Had an Abortion Identify as a Christian
Our episode on Reading Lolita in Tehran
Our episode on Afghanistan or OnlyFans: The Handmaid's Tale of multiple dystopias
Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress
Newshour segments about new Taliban restrictions on women:
Interview with Afghan education activist Pashtana Durrani, who had to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took back power three years ago.
On the mysteries not being repugnant to natural reason (from Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 2: On the Rational Credibility of Christianity)
It should be noted that I am not claiming here that the mysteries of the faith are believable simply due to the fact that they are coherently explained in their doctrinal, metaphysical, or historical content. On the contrary, such mysteries can only be believed, studied, and understood in virtue of the supernatural gift of faith and under the aegis of the initiatives of divine grace. (So the Catholic Church herself claims.) Nevertheless, one cannot believe things that are inherently unintelligible or contrary to simple intelligence. In reality, one is led to believe in them to the extent that one perceives an inner reality, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty to them. Though the mysteries of faith are enigmatic... they contain nothing intrinsically repugnant to natural reason.
Interlude: The Middle Way