David French is known by some of his opponents as “nice,” even as they point out that the battle he’s been fighting is one long retreat. But nice is not my appellation. He's a Christian and he never lets you forget it. But he's a special kind of Christian. He reminds you that Jesus commanded you to love your enemies. And David French does. It's his friends that he hates.
Christians once believed in the existence of sin and the possibility of redemption. That was long, long ago. The church has “grown” and sin is now just another lifestyle choice. But not for David French who is very happy to judge your soul, examine your life and pass judgment. And right now, his judgment is that Donald J. Trump is a bad, bad man, unfit in every way to lead America.
French – as a symbol - was the subject of a recent critical article by Sohrab Ahmari who finds French the embodiment of the “… conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016.” He calls it French-ism.
What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. …
It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” …
I added, “The only way is through”—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.
French prefers a different Christian strategy, and his guileless public mien and strategic preferences bespeak a particular political theology (though he would never use that term), one with which I take issue. Thus, my complaint about his politeness wasn’t a wanton attack; it implicated deeper matters.
French rose in his own defense. He calls the depiction of himself by Ahmari as fictional and describes himself as a fighter. He cites his courtroom victories defending religious freedom and says:
I’ve also written, spoken, and advocated for significant federal reforms designed to deter and punish university illiberalism, and while Ahmari says I have an “airy above-it-all mentality,” I didn’t feel “above” anything on that night at Tufts University when I literally placed my body between a small group of Christian students and a collection of roughly 100 protesters who were trying to intimidate them in a darkened hallway.
I’m neither a lawyer, nor do I write for a living, but I am submerged in the culture and am aware of the tide of the times. The tide is not coming in for Conservatism or Christians. In fact, Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world.
So for all the skirmishes David French claims to have won, Christianity - which he claims animates his philosophy - is going down. But he doesn't think it's critical or an emergency.
I’m old enough to remember when speakers at Harvard were not shouted down. Some were even conservative.
There was a time within my lifetime when Christian students were not mobbed at Tufts and instructors at Yale were not mobbed for defending the right to wear the Halloween costume of your choice.
It was not that many years ago that bakers could bake cakes and wedding photographers could pick and choose the jobs that reflected their values without being fined.
French has no problem living cheek by jowl with pagans, atheists, LGBT activists and those radical Leftist professors who are transforming impressionable kids and turning them into those mobs that roam academia. The may hate him, his skin color, his sexual orientation and the fact that he's part of the male patriarchal oppressor class. Live and let live and turn the other cheek. But he draws the line at Trump who has done more to protect religious freedom than his recent predecessors. The President preceding Trump was busy suing the Little Sisters of the Poor. Trump signed an executive order protecting religious liberty.
He raises the specter of "Christian statism" (what is that?) and believes that Kamala Harris will be dissuaded by Christian niceness from implementing her plans which include:
· Supports public funding for abortion services.
· Opposes parental notification for abortions by minors.
· Keep federal funding for family planning clinics.
· Supports restrictions on right to bear arms.
For reasons which I can’t fathom, French actually believes that being nice to Kamala Harris – or any of the other radicals, socialist or Marxists currently vying for the Democrat party’s nomination – will persuade them to leave us alone. By the sheer power of his Christian witness and nice personality, he will convince President Harris that she should not proceed to make fourth-trimester abortions the law of the land. And keep in mind that French’s stated goal is (in his own words):
It’s the formulation that renders the government primarily responsible for safeguarding liberty, and the people primarily responsible for exercising that liberty for virtuous purposes. … I firmly believe that the defense of these political and cultural values must be conducted in accordance with scriptural admonitions to love your enemies, to bless those who persecute you, with full knowledge that the “Lord’s servant” must be “kind to everyone, able to teach, and patiently endure evil.”
During my lifetime I have seen this country evolve. My home town had a rifle club in the high school basement and a creche in the public park at Christmas time. Where men and women got married and had children, in that order, more often than not. Where women did not celebrate their abortions. Where babies were given to their mothers instead of made comfortable while doctor and mother debate whether it should be killed. Where high school valedictorians were actually allowed to proclaim their love of Christ. Where racial integration and color blindness was the goal to which good people strived. Today 75 American colleges offer Black-only graduation ceremonies and 43% offer segregated residence halls.
It was a time when America was hailed as a beacon of freedom rather than condemned as the focus of evil in this world.
What French-ism means is the “nice” decision to lose the culture war, encapsulated in the 1992 speech by Patrick Buchanan. The Right’s intellectual and political leaders set the agenda, rallied the troops, asked for our support and our dollars. Most of them talked a good fight, but they were not the ones losing their jobs as their mines, mills, and factories closed. It took a brash, guy with balls of steel to virtually single-handed show how it’s possible to actually win, in contrast to French and scores of people like him were losing the culture and the country they claimed to love. But what they really loved was pretending to be in charge, bathing in self-esteem, seeing their names in print. Today, they are simply ankle biters who have been made irrelevant by someone who fights and knows how to win.
No comments:
Post a Comment