Alan Jacobs

One time I met a guy who had invented a heart valve that saved half a million people. He and I got to talking, and he had a habit of pausing to think before he answered a question, a cool habit, and I got into the habit of thinking about the people his heart valve had saved while he thought about his next answer. Moms and dads and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and grandparents and godparents and cousins and neighbors and fellow parishioners and old teammates and sorority sisters and work colleagues and every relation of ours in this lonely world. He had a seamed cheerful face with eyebrows that leapt in every direction like they had once been electrified and never fully recovered from the shock. Most every dad who had his life extended by that heart valve had a kid or kids who were probably thrilled beyond articulation that their dad didn’t die. How can you measure how happy you are that your dad didn’t die? My dad is cheerfully and wittily alive, and I try every day to articulate how glorious it is to have my dad, and I fail like hell. It’s really hard to measure love.  

The inventor then answers one question so gently and thoughtfully and honestly and nakedly that I jot down every word and read it back to him twice to make sure I have every word in the right order and to his credit he doesn’t edit or massage or manipulate or soften his remark but just nods and grins. I ask him another question, and he looks out the window for a while, and this time I think about all the little kids who didn’t die because of his valve. I bet that of a half a million people, thousands were little kids, right? And some of those thousands were four-year-olds, right? And is there anything cooler and funnier and holier in this world than a four-year-old? So if you save the lives of lots of four-year-olds, doesn’t that make you a totally great heroic person? I ask him this question, and he says no, he is not great and not heroic, he is just a guy who likes to fiddle with inventions and machines and tools and things, he is a tinkering kind of guy, he actually says this, a tinkering kind of guy, and I write it down…. You would think being the guy who saved half a million kids of every age would make you arrogant about how cool you were, but I tell you, shivering again now as I write this, that I never saw a hint or shred or splinter of arrogance in the late Donald Shiley. When I have dark days about arrogance and bluster and lies and pomposity, I think of him, and cheer right back up again.

from Wake in Progress

[gallery] from Wake in Progress

It seems obvious that Obama, Putnam, and the liberal elites they speak for want to believe that American Christians are narrow-minded and obsessed to the point of being uncaring. This is an utterly delusional way of discounting the tremendous, literally and figuratively livesaving work of American Christians. But to think about them any other way would be to actually wrestle with the fact that, while we’re all imperfect, any political disagreements Christians have be over hot button cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage might actually be motivated by genuine concern and compassion. Those are, not coincidentally, the same reasons that have made fighting poverty one the church’s most vital and important missions for millennia.

Mark Hemingway, speaking truth to power. I don’t think that Robert Putnam and President Obama are simply lying when they say the demonstrably false things they say about American Christians. It may be, depending on how you run your moral calculus, worse than that: they are speaking out of an absolute indifference to truth, because questions of truth and falsehood, being empirical, consistently trouble the purity of one’s chosen political narrative. This is political tribalism trumping facts — or rather, erasing facts, rendering them nugatory.

I can’t avoid the conclusion that traditionally-minded Christians are now simply The Enemy for the American left and center-left. As I’ve commented before, I haven’t voted for a major-party politician in about a quarter of a century, but on days like this I fear that the Democrats will make a Republican of me yet.

Finally, if you think that what Christians truly madly deeply care about can be discerned by how they spend their money, run the numbers. Robert Putnam and President Obama sure as hell won’t.

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The decision by corporate leaders to take a political stand over a controversial issue is therefore of great interest. Corporations and business leaders almost always avoid political statements and announcements, recognizing that such declarations have the effect of unnecessarily alienating potential customers. Corporations live in constant fear of bad pub­licity that can ruin a brand carefully erected through millions of dollars of advertising and publicity. Why step into a heated political debate and ­unnecessarily turn half of your customers away? Corporations exist to make money, not to advance political and social causes—except for those that help them make money, of course.  

And that’s just the point: The decision by Apple, Walmart, Eli Lilly, Angie’s List, and so on was a business decision—even more, a marketing decision. Coming out in opposition to the Indiana RFRA law was one of the shrewdest marketing coups since E.T. followed a trail of Reese’s Pieces. The decision to #BoycottIndiana was not made because it was the politically courageous thing to do; it was made because it was the profitable thing to do. The establishment could express support for a fashionable social norm while exerting very little effort, incurring no actual cost, and making no sacrifice to secure the goal. It had the further advantage of distracting most people from the fact that corporations like Apple have no compunction doing business in places with outright oppression of gays, women, and Christians. Those real forms of repression and discrimination didn’t matter; Indiana’s purported oppression of gays did.

The decision by corporate leaders to take a political stand over a controversial issue is therefore of great interest. Corporations and business leaders almost always avoid political statements and announcements, recognizing that such declarations have the effect of unnecessarily alienating potential customers. Corporations live in constant fear of bad pub­licity that can ruin a brand carefully erected through millions of dollars of advertising and publicity. Why step into a heated political debate and ­unnecessarily turn half of your customers away? Corporations exist to make money, not to advance political and social causes—except for those that help them make money, of course.  

And that’s just the point: The decision by Apple, Walmart, Eli Lilly, Angie’s List, and so on was a business decision—even more, a marketing decision. Coming out in opposition to the Indiana RFRA law was one of the shrewdest marketing coups since E.T. followed a trail of Reese’s Pieces. The decision to #BoycottIndiana was not made because it was the politically courageous thing to do; it was made because it was the profitable thing to do. The establishment could express support for a fashionable social norm while exerting very little effort, incurring no actual cost, and making no sacrifice to secure the goal. It had the further advantage of distracting most people from the fact that corporations like Apple have no compunction doing business in places with outright oppression of gays, women, and Christians. Those real forms of repression and discrimination didn’t matter; Indiana’s purported oppression of gays did.

My immensely talented friend Claire Holley has a new record coming out and it is really special.

God bless Rod Dreher for continuing to post critiques of his Benedict Option. But I still haven’t seen a critique that is genuinely to the point — they all seem to be responding to things that Rod hasn’t said and to be emphasizing their commitment to the undisputed claim that Christians need to be active in the world in order to bear witness. Well, sure. What Christian would say otherwise?

But here’s the key thing. What do they always tell you before the plane takes off? Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others. When Christians stride confidently out to change the world without having first taken care to be fully shaped and formed by the Christian account of things, they (a) have very little that’s distinctive to offer others and (b) are themselves easily swayed by thoroughly non-Christian ways of thinking and acting, with results we have recently had thoroughly documented for us.

Ultimately, whatever specific form the Benedict Option takes, this is what it’s about: securing our own oxygen mask first before attempting to assist others.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D38BLb5RCvg?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]

My immensely talented friend Claire Holley has a new record coming out and it is really special.

God bless Rod Dreher for continuing to post critiques of his Benedict Option. But I still haven’t seen a critique that is genuinely to the point — they all seem to be responding to things that Rod hasn’t said and to be emphasizing their commitment to the undisputed claim that Christians need to be active in the world in order to bear witness. Well, sure. What Christian would say otherwise?

But here’s the key thing. What do they always tell you before the plane takes off? Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others. When Christians stride confidently out to change the world without having first taken care to be fully shaped and formed by the Christian account of things, they (a) have very little that’s distinctive to offer others and (b) are themselves easily swayed by thoroughly non-Christian ways of thinking and acting, with results we have recently had thoroughly documented for us.

Ultimately, whatever specific form the Benedict Option takes, this is what it’s about: securing our own oxygen mask first before attempting to assist others.

UPDATE: I might have known that Jamie Smith would’ve gotten there first — thanks to Doug Sikkema for the link.