Wednesday, January 1, 2020

A NATION UNRAVELS, WALL STREET LOOTS, CONGRESS SUCKS IN THE BRIBES AND MEXICO INVADES, OCCUPIES AND LOOTS

LET THE FUCKERS FEEL OUR ANGER!

Where I went wrong in 2019: Letting the church off the hook for its decline



Annually, I dedicate a year-end column to “pundit atonement.” I confess where I went wrong: my erroneous predictions, my gross misreads, my lapses of judgment, and my plain old errors.
This time, I won’t dwell on my worst moment of 2019 but actually my best work.
Alienated America is the book I started working on in late 2015 when Donald Trump was surging and I wondered why so many people agreed with him that the American dream was dead. The book came out in February 2019, and, while it never made the New York Times bestseller list, I consider it a success.
I argued that working-class woe in America is real. It was not some imagined suffering by those bitter at losing their privilege. The root cause was not purely economic, I contended. Rather, the collapse of community institutions was causing a variety of maladies, such as the winnowing of the labor force, a plague of drug addiction, the breakdown of the family, and increasing political rancor.
And the most important institution to collapse in the United States, I argued, has been the church. Religious congregations — Catholic, mainline, evangelical, black, white, Jewish, Muslim — have always been the core institution of civil society for America’s working and middle classes. Half of all civic activity originates in religious organizations, Robert Putnam found in Bowling Alone.
The secularization of America, then, is a deadly plague. What caused it? In answering this question, I made my gravest omission of the year. I rightly pointed to technology and modernity. I pointed to a changing morality that is more at odds with the teachings of most faiths. I pointed to an active effort by the Left to drive the church out of the public square.
But I let the greatest culprit of all off the hook — the church itself.
In Alienated America, I acknowledged that my own Catholic Church, along with Protestant denominations, had driven people away with a multitude of their own sins. But the culpability here deserved far more attention than the passing mention I gave it.
Catholic priests raped and abused children, young men, and young women, and the hierarchy covered it up. It’s hard to imagine a greater violation of Christ’s commandment to care for the least among us. It’s hard to imagine a greater abdication of the duty to be like the Good Shepherd. The church's shepherds were, in fact, protecting a flock of wolves.
Many of the direct victims of this abuse have never recovered. But there’s a second set of victims of this scandal: those who have fallen away from church or seen church fall away from them.
Just before Alienated America was released, I was editing some op-eds at the pub near my home, with an early copy of my book sitting on the bar. The guy on the stool next to me asked about the book. When I got to the part about church closings, he told me he was a former Catholic.
The little evangelist awoke inside me, and I tried to gently prod him to come back. Then he told me his story.
Sometime last decade, he wanted to volunteer to teach some basics of his trade to the children of his parish as part of a broader vocational education event. But the pastor would not let him because he hadn’t gone through the background check and training regimen the diocese required to guard against pedophiles.
Sure enough, though, it wasn't long before a priest who had been in that same parish was credibly accused of sexual assault.
The hypocrisy was just too much for this man, and his story was too much for me to rebut. What's more, his story isn’t that rare — many people have left the church, spurred by similar events. As attendance has dropped, local parishes have closed, and so still more people have dropped out. The folks left behind without a spiritual home are left alienated, at the mercies of the plagues afflicting the working class.
Much less serious sins than that have undermined the churches of this country. Many churches have replaced spirituality with politics. Others have abandoned their duty to feed the poor, happily handing that over to government or the professionals. I could go on. And I should have gone on.
This problem deserved maybe a whole chapter in my book on alienation. I gave it only a few sentences.
For these and all my omissions, I apologize to my readers.

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