Rr Reno Quotes

It’s also true that religious people are more censorious than nonreligious people, and I submit that this trait, rather than the actual effects of religion on civic life, is the source of faith’s bad reputation today. Religious people are judgmental in the sense that they have definite views about right and wrong.

We want a culture of the people, by the people, and for the people, not defined by white European traditions, male preferences, or any other form of group identity.

empirically well established. Sociological studies show that faith is strongly correlated with social bonding. Religious commitments encourage civic involvement and build social capital.

The stable ground is disappearing. You’re either going up or going down. The upshot is widespread unhappiness. Even the successful are consumed by a spirit of anxious striving. Too often despair overtakes those struggling, stumbling, and falling behind. We

The reconstitution of elite WASP culture as post-Protestant and ethnically diverse but intellectually homogeneous is the most important change in American society of the past half-century. It explains the culture wars of recent decades far more effectively than the standard overemphasis of the role of the Religious Right. Conservative

Educated, well-to-do Baby Boomers are disciplined in their hedonism, careful that their peccadillos don’t impede their scramble for success. For the most part, the rich have developed a relatively safe and moderate approach to drugs, and for the few who haven’t, well, there’s professional help. Decriminalization of marijuana won’t hurt the strong. But what about the weak? Kids who use marijuana regularly get lower test scores, are more likely to drop out of high school, and are less likely to go to college. And who are they? A 2011 study reports that children of parents who have not completed high school are twice as likely to smoke marijuana as children of those who have completed college. Again, new freedoms harm the vulnerable. The

A recent book by University of Chicago professor of philosophy and law Brian Leiter outlines what I believe will become the theoretical consensus that does away with religious liberty in spirit if not in letter. “There is no principled reason,” he writes, “for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection.” . . . Evoking the principle of fairness, Leiter argues that everybody’s conscience should be accorded the same legal protections. Thus he proposes to replace religious liberty with a plenary “liberty of conscience.” Leiter’s argument is libertarian. He wants to get the government out of the business of deciding whose conscience is worth protecting. This mentality seems to expand freedom, but that’s an illusion. In practice it will lead to diminished freedom, as is always the case with any thoroughgoing libertarianism.

Our danger is a dissolving society, not a closed one; the therapeutic personality, not the authoritarian one.

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led.

The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public (and private) life. Our time—this century—begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.

Pursuit of truth requires the courage to consider all the evidence.

In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert Putnam and David Campbell illustrate the political implications of the rise of the Nones. They found that 50 percent of those who say grace before meals identify themselves as Republican, 40 percent as Democrats, and 10 percent as independents. No surprise there. It’s common for the media to speak of religious conservatives as the base of the Republican Party. What’s striking, however, is the intense partisan loyalty of those who never say grace—70 percent of them identify as Democrats and only 20 percent as Republicans. A

The Faithful are much more likely than other parents to “completely agree” that a woman should put family above career, but they also insist with equal vehemence that the same holds for men. Family trumps personal needs and desires.

Engaged Progressives say that divorce is preferable to an unhappy marriage, but like the denizens of Charles Murray’s Belmont, they don’t practice what they preach. They are almost as likely to remain married, in fact, as the Faithful. They are just as likely to eat meals with their children, and Engaged Progressive mothers with preschool kids are nearly as likely to stay at home with them as their Faithful counterparts.

Almost all (93 percent) say that they invest a great deal of effort in shaping the moral character of their children. Their ideology may be permissive, but their actual practice conforms to many old-fashioned values that give them strong families.

The standard story of cultural conflict in America has conservative Christians defending established forms of social authority, while Progressives see themselves as challenging established norms and institutions, a self-assessment that the media accept at face value. The reality is the opposite. The counter-culturalism of the Faithful gives them an independent spirit. The committed core of Christians in America increasingly lives on the peripheries of cultural and institutional power. The Engaged Progressives, in command of civic institutions, are the establishmentarians. A

Our hearth gods are health, wealth, and pleasure. Cigarette smoking among college students has fallen to all-time lows, surpassed by the use of marijuana. The god of health requires sacrifices that are compensated for by the beneficent ministrations of the god of pleasure.

Denying themselves sweets and fatty foods, they cultivate a taste for fine wines and locally produced cheese. This is how we live: asceticism by day and hedonism by night, giving each god its due in its season. One

We must seek to order public life in accord with metaphysical truths higher than the ersatz ends of maximizing utility, encouraging dialogue, and promoting diversity. S

Materialism denies the existence of higher things, and relativism denies we could know about them even if they did exist.

Stephen Greenblatt applauds Lucretius’s spirit of critique, “speaking the truth to power” as they say. But materialism is attractive to people like him because it justifies the status quo. There are no higher truths to serve. Accept things as they are, for they can’t be otherwise.

This, then, is the freedom for which Christ has set us free: to have the law of Christ engraved on our hearts. His way is the perfect law, which is the law of liberty (James 1:25).

Christians are called not to win debates and elections but to build a civilization of love—never

we need to discipline our public witness. Let us shun rhetorical victories that rely on distortions or half-truths. Prevarication produces an atmosphere of distrust. We should likewise face up to the implications of our own positions.

A healthy political culture needs a spirit of innocence as well. Christians must speak the truth even if it is politically inexpedient.

I persevere in my conviction that most Americans, including those in power, want a culture of hospitality and freedom, not denunciation and servitude.

When we can’t imagine alternatives, most of us remain loyal to the ideas that dominate our minds, even when we know they’re false. We can change our minds only when we are able to envision a more powerful truth.

The Democrats, traditionally the party of labor unions, have become the party of the top 20 percent—specifically, those successful people who prefer expert, technocratic management of society. The Republicans may get votes from religious and social conservatives, but they too have become the party of the top 20 percent—specifically, those who like free markets.

We [postmodernists] can safely navigate the danger of life, detached from the true and everlasting dangers of obedience and commitment, for nothing has the right to make a claim on our souls.

Relativism is not a philosophical theory. It is a spiritual truth, a protective dogma designed to fend off any power that might claim our loyalty. It is a habit of mind that insulates postmodern life from the sober potency of arguments and the force of evidence, from the rightful claims of reason and the wisdom of the past.

We resist the gospel because we fear all powers that effect change in us, even as we live in a society that constantly champions progress and development.

This shift away from patriotism is masked by Americans’ sense that, since our country dominates the world, to be an American citizen is to be a global citizen. But we should not be deceived. As we continue “coming apart,” the most powerful and successful Americans increasingly see that their interests lie with a global future, not a national one. A Fortune 500 CEO has more in common with other Davos worthies than with the son of an unemployed steel worker in Youngstown, Ohio. Educated at institutions steeped in multicultural ideology, the elite rise above local loyalties, serving as richly rewarded functionaries in a global empire that has no place for patriotism because it has no patria.

To be free to achieve our most cherished goals we need authorities we can trust, assent to, and make our own.

But there’s a dark side to our national character. A deep sadness comes when we realize, finally, that we’re on our own, which is where secular individualism brings us in the end.

When a culture of freedom becomes a cult of freedom, injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction get explained away as “choices.” The

By my reckoning, a false view of freedom as unimpeded choice and self-definition has led to a deregulation of culture more consequential than market deregulation. This deregulation has benefited the strong and hurt the weak. I outline how and why the seemingly innocent expansion of lifestyle choices has been so harmful. Today’s progressivism is waging a war on the weak. Putting an end to that war is the most important social justice issue of our time. We

The freedom for which Christ makes us free is quite different from the freedom championed by modern liberal culture, the freedom of self-determining, even self-defining, choice that ends up paradoxically reinforcing our slavery to worldly powers.

Freedom comes when we bind ourselves to something worth serving. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized this in his letter from a Birmingham jail, an evocation of the double-barreled authority of America’s founding principles and God’s revealed word. A culture of freedom requires legitimate authority. Freedom is fullest not when it serves itself but when it serves truths freely held.

Taken in isolation, the American dream produces the conditions for ever larger government, more coercive laws, and a culture of denunciation and censure that limits freedom, though always for the sake of a supposedly greater freedom.

And so the American dream of freedom inevitably contradicts itself: We must deploy the coercive power of government to promote freedom; we must limit freedom for the sake of freedom.

Our ongoing insistence on nonjudgmentalism—in spite of the obvious harm it does to the poor and vulnerable—reveals the heartless underside of American society.

This small, almost innocent, yet typical episode of therapeutic hauteur reflects our society’s division by a moral inequality as severe as—and in all likelihood more damaging than—income inequality. The psychologist uses her authority as an expert to undercut a straightforward exercise of parental authority (positional control). She asks instead for a sophisticated verbal exchange between mother and child (personal control). This may be well-meaning, but it is an exercise in class dominance.

Deviation from a set pattern of “individuality” is unlikely, as anyone who has spent time at an elite university knows. The goal in Belmont is to blend an appropriate (to use a pervasive weasel word) conformity with genuine (another weasel word) individuality.

The paradox of Belmont’s official nonjudgmentalism is that while it rejects old-fashioned moral strictness, it nevertheless demands conformity to 1950s-style bourgeois norms. Everybody is an individual—in pretty much the same way. As

Today’s “progressive” is committed to expanding lifestyle freedom, which the rich tend to manage, like economic freedom, to their advantage. But while the benefits of economic freedom do in fact extend even to the poor, what trickles down from lifestyle freedom is dysfunction, disorder, and disarray. The

Yet the life expectancy for white people without a high school diploma has dropped catastrophically since the 1990s—down by five years for women, three years for men—suggesting a cultural crisis among poor whites akin to that in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the morally preening powerful, confident in their supposedly progressive views, largely ignore this collapse and the people suffering from it.

Yale University is famous for its Sex Week. It does not have a Dignity of the Worker Week or even a Save the Planet Week. This self-involved focus speaks volumes about the preoccupations of today’s ruling class.

Our culture wars are driven by the rich, who insist that our shared moral culture serve their interests by promoting freedoms that benefit them and harm the poor. No

But statistics tell an overall story, not personal ones.

The sort of person inclined to say that morality is a psychological projection of the superego or a patriarchal social construction or the upshot of evolution is also likely to affirm an extensive menu of “human rights,” suggesting less a rejection of moral truth than a shift in its focus.

Belmont parents won’t refer to “illegitimacy,” but they succeed in socializing their children to marry before having children.

Like a community with a private, coded language, upper-middle-class parents discipline their children while outwardly observing the pieties of nonjudgmentalism. Murray

Today’s culture warriors on the left trumpet their commitment to justice, but they lord it over the weak, redefining our public culture in countless ways, claiming to serve the marginalized but always empowering those adept at post-conventional enhanced codes—which is to say, themselves. A

The most pressing social justice issue today is the moral exploitation of the poor and vulnerable by the well off and powerful, an exploitation masked by the rhetoric of liberation. P

The well-to-do often scoff at “family values,” but they live by them. They know that family values bring stability, prosperity, and much better chances of a happy, fulfilling life, but they won’t say so in public.

Libertarians see these changes as gains for freedom. No longer under the thumb of traditional marriage and religion, people can make up their own minds about how to live their personal lives, believing what they wish about religion and morality. Maybe so, but that’s no basis for a free society. Codified rights offer limited protection. If the Supreme Court can find a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution, then it can find anything, including dramatically different (and reduced) rights of speech, association, and religion. The most powerful limits to government power are found below and above political life: a strong culture of marriage and family, and robust, assertive religious institutions. A free society depends on strong family loyalties and faith’s indomitable resolve.

It’s hard to get it together when you’re in a community dominated by behavior that tears life apart. Putnam

Today, self-giving and decency are remote, inaccessible ideals for many poor people in America. Basic human dignity seems out of reach.

Dignity—the kind the poor kids in Putnam’s study so often desire for themselves and those they love, however inarticulately they express it—was once widely accessible. Now it’s not. At

Putnam, echoing Charles Murray, points out that America has become rigorously segregated. The functional insulate themselves and their children from the dysfunctional. Imbued with a therapeutic ethos that softens the rigors they impose on themselves and their children, and often cowed by multiculturalism, today’s rich won’t speak up for a common culture that imposes standards on personal behavior. They won’t support the traditional common culture that helped Jesse’s parents achieve their goal of raising a dignified man. Instead, they quietly and covertly pass on social capital to their children. Their kids go to schools that, for all their celebration of “diversity” and “inclusion,” are ruthlessly segregated by social class, ensuring that no “unhealthy” or “anti-social” attitudes infect their charmed world of pleasures without penalties and permissions without punishments. In this controlled, segregated environment, rich kids are prepared for success in today’s hypercompetitive meritocracy. C

Religious people are more generous and more involved. And not just a little more. Religious

In round numbers, regular churchgoers are more than twice as likely to volunteer to help the needy, compared to demographically matched Americans who rarely, if ever, attend church.” Financial

Friedrich Hayek wrote his classic The Road to Serfdom during World War II in the hope of shaping the postwar reconstruction of society. The West, he believed, faced a decisive choice: to affirm individual freedom or to embrace central planning and socialism. Today, however, our greatest threat is untethered individualism. We’re living in a dissolving society, not a collectivist one. In

Atomized, isolated individuals adrift in a deregulated moral culture are easily dominated, whether by political manipulators or the directionless leadership of mass culture. A

As our shared civil life is diminished, a Christian seeks the common good. He criticizes America, but with a spirit of loyalty, resisting the post-patriotic mentality. We mustn’t seek the social weightlessness that liberates the rich and powerful while atomizing and disempowering most citizens. To love our neighbor we need to love our neighborhood.

As G. K. Chesterton observed, the real meaning of “my country right or wrong” is “my mother drunk or sober.

Having forsaken higher things, we undermine the basis for freedom. We think that what people lack is money, when the rich themselves are enslaved to the meritocratic machine of their own invention. Our secular high priests preach materialism, but it’s a counsel of compliance, not freedom.

Christian society does not compel faith or install priests in positions of public authority. But it affirms that we are fully human and more genuinely free when we give ourselves to something higher. A