Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone, is a disturbing read, but I saw one glimmer of hope in it: namely, that he tends to assume that trends go forever in a straight line. But trends zig and zag. Perhaps Europe is going to start halving its population every few decades, but isn’t it also possible (though it seems improbable) that large families might come back?
Joshua Livestro has a nice piece in The Weekly Standard about an upsurge in Christian faith in, of all countries, heavily secular Holland:
In his living room in the old university town of Leiden, Kees Westhuis, 41, explains the essence of the house church idea: “We don’t want to go to church, we want to be a church.” Westhuis was raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition, but found himself increasingly frustrated with the worldly concerns of his local church: “During one meeting of the church elders, debate turned to the cost of refurbishing the church buildings. I found myself wondering whether, instead of spending all this money on bricks and mortar, we wouldn’t be better off spending it on evangelizing in the community.”
[snip]
The Dutch house church movement, according to recent studies, has witnessed remarkable growth over the past decade or so: from a mere handful in the 1970s to just under 20 in 1990 to around 100 in 2000, and continuing upwards since then. Henk Vink runs a website offering support and facilities to budding home churches. He estimates that most of Holland’s 200 cities now have at least one home church in them. The first time Vink realized something big was happening was when he organized a series of regional conferences for people interested in house churches. He’d expected small groups of maybe 10 people per meeting; instead more than 50 people showed up at each of the 12 regional meetings: “It’s evidence of a growing spiritual hunger in society. People are really searching for truth.”
He may well be right. The question, though, is whether Christianity is best placed to profit from this development. For better or for worse, Dutch Christianity is now largely an underground phenomenon. If an average Dutchman has any picture of Christianity, it is of empty pews and derelict church buildings. Dutch Christians have increasingly withdrawn from the public sphere, either voluntarily—as in the case of the house churches and the youth church movement—or because they lack the confidence to speak publicly about their faith to an unbelieving audience. If they do enter the public sphere, as in the case of the Alpha course, they do so under a neutered, de-Christianized guise: not imposing their views, merely inviting people to come along, have a meal, and ask any questions they like. They may be successful, but a city upon a hill they are not—more like a city in wartime, its lights hidden behind thick dark curtains. Any genuine seeker might stumble past it without knowing it was even there.
The whole article is a worth a read, and Livestro does deal with the rise in Islam. It looks like Christian Europe might not be finished yet. I know that I tend to be too optimistic, and that one swallow does not make a Summer, but perhaps Christianity is emerging from Winter nonetheless.
Hubbard posted this at 12:35 PM EST on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 as Those Wacky Foreigners, Faith
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The Orange County Register has published my op-ed on why liberals should oppose nationalized health care.
conor friedersdorf posted this at 1:31 PM EST on Friday, December 29th, 2006 as Uncategorized
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‘Tis the season for honey on sugar, so I thought I’d point out some wonderful squirts of vinegar in the press. Everybody has been so generous to Gerald Ford lately—he was so nice and so wonderful and so sweet—that Robert Novak and John Podhoretz gagged. First, Novak:
I had been tipped that House Republican Leader Ford was performing a confidential mission at President Richard Nixon’s request: to ask Republican members of Congress how they would react to presidential clemency or even a pardon for Lt. William Calley, sentenced a day earlier for the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians. I called Ford to ask whether Nixon had met with him to pursue that endeavor. Ford replied that was incorrect. I had covered Ford for 14 years, and I accepted his word.
Thirty minutes later, Ford called me back. “Bob, you asked me the wrong question,” he said. He had not met with Nixon, but the president had phoned him from San Clemente to make the improper request. No news source ever bailed me out the way Ford did that day. But why did he not give me a straight answer in the first place?
The incident foretold ambivalence in Ford’s two-year presidency. Declaring after succeeding Nixon that “our long national nightmare is over,” Ford soothed his troubled fellow citizens. The accidental president seemed on the brink of great achievements. In fact, his tenure was plagued by blunders and occasional pettiness.
Podhoretz elaborate in the NY Post about what was so bad:
Ford was a fine man and a distinguished public servant, and he deserves to be remembered warmly. But the idea that his presidency saved America is ahistorical sentimentality.
Through no fault of Ford’s, the man from Michigan presided over two of the worst years in American history. It would not be fair to call his presidency a failure, since he found himself in an impossible situation and managed as best he could. But there’s no sense pretending that the 30 months between August 1974 and January 1977 were anything but dire.
The inflation rate skyrocketed. The nation’s largest city, this one, went broke. The national crime wave continued to wreak havoc. In September 1975, Ford himself was the subject of two separate assassination attempts.
The most notable, and most awful, moment of the Ford years came on April 30, 1975, as the last American helicopter seemed to scurry into the sky off the roof of an apartment building in downtown Saigon days after the city fell to the Communists.
If you want to kick around some other Republicans, how about King George the Incompetent? No, not Bush—Pataki:
Those who first engineered Pataki’s victory eventually concluded they had made a terrible mistake. Nobody was more important in first electing Pataki than then-U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, who recently said this about Pataki to a friend: “What he did broke my heart.”
The magnitude of Pataki’s betrayals—of his allies, of his obligations as a government administrator and, most importantly, of the people of New York—is hard to capture in a single column. Indeed, it’s hard to believe unless you’ve seen it first hand.
Here are some more unvarnished truths that help explain why this three-term governor’s departure is widely welcomed at the Capitol:
* Rarely did Pataki work at his job. When he could no longer avoid making a decision, he resorted to late-night cramming sessions. Friends calculated Pataki averaged about 15 hours a week of real work.
That left most of the work of actually governing New York to a ragtag collection of private-sector political consultants and public-sector political hacks, whose often-ignorant and abusive treatment of the state workforce destroyed a once-proud corps of professional administrators.
* He further alienated many in the press and political classes by walling off historically public hallways at the Capitol. This “Fort Pataki” served to deny public view of the stream of lobbyists, political consultants and other special interests that regularly trooped into the governor’s office.
* He held no more than three Cabinet meetings during his entire 12 years in office. He frequently didn’t know the names of his commissioners and occasionally mispronounced them, even in public.
* Pataki broke virtually every political promise he ever made.
Before taking office, he said he wouldn’t put his name on state Transportation Department signs that greet motorists entering New York because it was wrong to use public monies for self-promotion. Instead, he put his name, face and voice in more than $100 million worth of state-financed TV and radio ads.
He pledged to sell the state aircraft fleet, then expanded and used it like never before; said he’d send his kids to public schools, then never did; insisted he’d never have the state take over the Long Island Lighting Company, then did; attacked his predecessor for making paid speeches, then did so himself; said he’d never serve more than two terms, then did.
* His much-acclaimed use of public money to buy or restrict development on 1 million acres of rural land turned the historic rationale for conservationism on its head.
Pataki acted not to forestall the damaging effects of industrial expansion and population growth but to do just the opposite, to make sure there would be no industrial expansion or population growth that could encroach on the enclaves of the super-wealthy whose company he kept.
Pataki helped turn much of upstate’s rural population into a new form of peonage—servants to the Manhattan and Westchester leisure classes—to a degree even the smug Dutch Patroons would never have imagined.
* Pataki’s wife, Libby—the first lady of New York—regularly took hundreds of thousands of dollars from breast-cancer and wheelchair charities as a “consultant.” And the governor himself was notorious for his de minimus contributions to charity. Is that what’s known as leading by example?
* Pataki ruined the long tradition of public disclosure and government transparency that was taken for granted before he took office. He was to public information what Jack Kevorkian was to medicine.
At least there’s still some good invective around this holiday season.
Update: I missed Slate’s Hitch-slap to Gerald Ford:
To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.
Christopher Hitchens is a bit harsh—I think the Mayaguez incident was handled better than he gives Ford credit for—but on the whole, a useful corrective to the schmaltz.
Hubbard posted this at 8:01 PM EST on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grumblin Mumblins
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As I watch Bob Wright and Andrew Sullivan discuss Christianity on Bloggingheads.tv, I find myself reaching the conclusion that blogging is a bad outlet for Andrew Sullivan’s talents.
On television, on bloggingheads and in lengthier pieces of writing he seems so much more reasonable than he does on his blog, when it seems his emotions and impulse for winning the argument at the expense of being right seem to hurt him.
Unlike most bloggers, Andrew Sullivan can make a living and get his ideas out in the book and magazine world.
Hence my advice: give up the blog, and stick with mediums better suited to your strengths, and less vulnerable to your weaknesses.
conor friedersdorf posted this at 7:14 AM EST on Monday, December 25th, 2006 as Uncategorized
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The so-called war on Christmas is overblown and thereby misses the point. If Christianity can survive Jacobins and Bolsheviks, it can certainly withstand the yipping of the ACLU. The more serious point is that a double standard is tolerated in the treatment of religions. Compare America’s reluctance to bomb during Ramadan with Islamists’ suicide bombs during Advent (or Islamists’ launching of wars during Yom Kippur). One could write a thesis about the arguments over happy holidays and merry Christmas, so I’ll attempt to get it down to a thesis statement: be equally sensitive or equally insensitive to all religions, but don’t be sensitive about one and obnoxious about the other.
On a lighter note, despite my issues with Ayn Rand, she did get something right in her defense of Christmas:
It is appropriate [for an atheist] to celebrate Christmas. A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
She may consider O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi to be a “sadistic horror story,” but Rand at least got this one right. Sometimes I think Rand is as perceptive as one can be without love.
Hubbard posted this at 9:59 PM EST on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 as Kulturkampf, Faith, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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The good news is that after this illegal immigration advocates don’t have anywhere left to go.
conor friedersdorf posted this at 12:14 AM EST on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 as Uncategorized
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While on the subject of large animals fighting for my personal amusement, Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell have started what could easily be the most amusing celebrity battle in months:
“This woman is totally out of control,” he told the Daily News. “I’m worth billions of dollars, and I have to listen to this fat slob?” Trump’s outburst came after O’Donnell ripped him on ABC’s “The View” as a philandering blow-hard who had no business letting hard-partying Miss USA Tara Conner keep her crown.
This morning, they showed part of this interview on Fox and Friends, and I nearly choked on my oats. It starts off with Trump saying, “Well Rosie is a loser. Rosie’s been a loser for a long time.” Lots of good lines, a solid investment of 3:34 of your time, but the best comes about twenty seconds from the end: “Rosie is a very unattractive woman. But as unattractive as she is on the outside, she’s even worse on the inside.”
I’d watch The View to see what Rosie says today, but then I’d be watching The View.
Apollo posted this at 9:44 AM EST on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 as Pop Culture Is Filth
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