Well, David French is worried about the state of American Christianity, but should I be? I’m not a Christian, and even though I know some very good Christians, I dislike the church. I am not welcome in many Christian churches, and the feeling has become mutual.
French, who’s a columnist in The New York Times, is worried because a bunch of aimless, misdirected young men have found a convenient way to express their hate through religion. These are the people who celebrated the death of reproductive freedom a couple of years ago by shouting, “Your body, my choice.”
So the young conservative Christians are filling up 2900 pages (that have been released) of Telegram chats about venerating Hitler, sending liberals to death camps, and raping women on their way home. JD Vance is on the situation, fortunately, and tells us it’s nothing to worry about.
“I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” he wrote, in a post a couple of days ago.
It’s a gauntlet, but am I going to pick it up?
I could, and have in the past. I struggle with bitterness, which isn’t attractive at any age, let alone old age. I suffer, too, from the absolute conviction that I’m right (fortunately, I am!), and I tell myself that subscribing to the theory of intolerance is a dangerous first step on a very slippery slope.
The theory of intolerance (if I get it right) is that we can, we must, and we get to be tolerant to absolutely everybody in the world…
…except…
…intolerant people.
Intolerant people? Like, the people who disagree with me?
Or is it that we really shouldn’t be giving coffee and donuts to Nazis?
I’m fighting with myself, even now, to remain dispassionate. Actually, I’m struggling to be humane, since I am human instead and feeling exactly about them as they are feeling about me.
Let’s hate each other.
Let’s get it over with. I will burn down your churches and you will put me in the cattle cars.
Let the best man win.
Let nobody win.
What!?
Where did that come from? True, I guess, that in every system besides capitalism, nobody wins if somebody loses (well, there’s also evolution, and a few other things, but you get my point.) Anyway, at some point I will not have to walk past your churches and you will not have to listen to me. We can drop the polite smiles and the clutched pearls and reach for the AK-47’s, or whatever they are.
We can live in armed camps, and we’ll all be happy. I hate you—you hate me. It’s a trade-off we can live with. Actually, we’ll all benefit in the end. My thoughts are poison to you, as yours are to me.
Unfortunately, we have to share the same land, and that’s a shame, because I really love that land. The walk down the road from my mother’s house in rural Wisconsin is one I haven’t taken in a decade and a half, and will never take again.
I can’t go back there.
You guys won.
It’s in me, of course, since I walk that road with everything except my feet quite a lot. I remember the walnut tree that killed the drunk driver, as he careened down Wisconsin’s second biggest hill. I remember my mother’s neighbor, a farmer, telling me that a walnut tree could take out a full acre of usable land, it sucks up so much water. I remember the white frame house that was so well nestled next to the verdant hill that it looked like an Andrew Wyeth painting.
Into my heart an air that chills,
From yon, far country blows
What are those blue-remembered hills?
What farms, what spires are those?
Sorry—poetry.
Bad habit.
So I’ll burn your churches and you’ll put me in the cattle car. The train will take me past my blue-remembered hills and past your burning church, and that will be enough. The orange flames leaping into the blue sky, the acrid smoke choking our lungs—we’ll feel the beauty of destruction.
Nor will we miss it, what is gone.
Your church, my life.
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went,
And cannot come again.
(Thanks to A. E. Housman and the Shropshire Lad….)
