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The Sign of the Inverted Cross
These pro-abortion maniacs. Yikes.
I wish our bishops were in fact and in deed as pro-life as the people who hate the Catholic Church seem to think they are.
The Catholic Church is officially against abortion, of course — there is no circuitous Jesuitical workaround for “Thou shalt not kill” — but a great many senior figures in the American church are inclined to impersonate country-club Republicans circa 1992: “Sure, we’re against abortion, but let’s not make a whole thing about it.” Pope Francis may be silly about many things — and possibly an outright heretic if you want to get mean about it — but he remains solid on abortion: an “absolute evil,” he calls it. And the pews aren’t any more reliably pro-life than the pulpit: Catholics have on average about the same attitude toward abortion as other Americans, and the horrifying fact is that even a third of those who attend Mass weekly identify themselves as “pro-choice.”
(That is dismaying but not surprising. Jesus and Immanuel Kant both thought of people and institutions in terms of trees: “Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit”; “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Christians have as much trouble going against the grain as anybody else does, and the American church is planted in the same soil as Scientology and Facebook and Gilligan’s Island.)
If you really want to get in the churchgoing faces of some true-believing pro-lifers next Sunday, I could point you in the direction of some promising Presbyterian, foot-washin’ Baptist, and Mormon congregations that are considerably more reliable on the life issue. Or go find an African Methodist Episcopal church to desecrate, if desecrating the churches of pro-life congregations is the sort of thing you have a heart for — which it shouldn’t be, so don’t do that.
But the maniacs remain fixated on Catholics. That is interesting.
Of course, there are a disproportionate number of Catholics on the Supreme Court. They fall on both sides of the abortion issue, and they are a mixed bunch: There are Irish-American parochial-school cradle Catholics such as Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. The Court’s most important intellectual, Clarence Thomas, is a former seminarian who was estranged from the church for some 25 years. The Court’s most drearily rote pro-abortion activist is the lapsed Catholic Sonia Sotomayor, who fills the honorary G. Harrold Carswell seat on the Court. (G. Harrold Who? Carswell, an unimpressive figure, was nominated to the Court by Richard Nixon. About his nomination, Senator Roman Hruska, a Nebraska Republican, observed: “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” The senators rejected him, presumably on the grounds that personifying mediocrity is their job.) The Catholic William Brennan voted in favor of Roe in 1973, and the Catholic Anthony Kennedy (who was on the Court only because “Captain Toke” didn’t make it) was a reliable pro-abortion vote.
(Captain Toke? Douglas Ginsburg, a longtime judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and now a much-admired professor of law at George Mason’s Scalia School of Law, is a remarkable man — he became a law professor at Harvard in his third year out of law school — who was nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan and was forced to withdraw when it was revealed that he had — angels and ministers of grace, defend us! — smoked marijuana while a college professor in the 1970s. He was parodied on Saturday Night Live as “Captain Toke.” In the skit, a student asks, “But, Captain Toke, isn’t marijuana . . . illegal?” Captain Toke, high as a Georgia pine, answers: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Jon Lovitz played Ginsburg, I believe, with a turtleneck and big wooden peace sign around his neck. Related: Justice Kennedy said he had a special bond with Roe v. Wade author Harry Blackmun: They both were third choices — Kennedy following the failed nominations of Robert Bork and Captain Toke, Blackmun following the failed nominations of Clement Haynesworth and the aforementioned G. Harrold Carswell. Randomness plays a big role in many careers.)
So, if Catholics in the general population and Catholics on the Supreme Court are all over the map on abortion, then why the particular focus on Catholics by the pro-abortion savages out there running around in the streets with bags of bloodied baby dolls and untreated psychoses?
About that, I have a theory.
There is a kind of native anti-Catholicism in the United States, a holdover from the Puritan days when anti-Catholicism was a fundamental part of the emerging national identity. In 1647, Massachusetts adopted two interesting laws: One had a name I love, the Old Deluder Satan Act, which was New England’s first public-school law and which was passed with the idea that promoting literacy would protect the children of Massachusetts from the temptations of popery by allowing them to read Scripture themselves; the second, more direct law made it a crime punishable by death for a Jesuit priest to set foot on the soil of Massachusetts. (We think of Boston as being a very Catholic city, but it didn’t have a Catholic church or even a publicly celebrated Mass until the 19th century.) That kind of anti-Catholicism is still very much a part of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in America, as is well appreciated by any Catholic who has been informed umpteen million times that “Catholics worship Mary” and believe that the pope can’t lose a game of checkers and whatever else it is Catholics are supposed to believe. Even well-meaning and good-natured American Protestants have a lot of that in them. These are the epigones of the old Protestant stock whose indictment of Catholics was that they hate sex and have too many children.
The other main kind of religiously rooted anti-Catholicism is the Catholic kind. The kind you see in lapsed Catholics such as Justice Sotomayor and Marxist intellectuals from Catholic Europe and Latin America. Clarence Thomas the seminarian and young black radical broke with the Catholic Church because he was disappointed about his fellow seminarians’ views on race. (And here I don’t mean a dorm-room “microaggression” but cheering the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., that sort of thing.) American college faculties were for years full of angry former seminarians who had quit the church in the 1960s and 1970s over social-justice complaints and became the most vehement anti-Catholic zealots the nation has ever seen, men whose anti-Catholicism would have given pause to Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards.
(I mean the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards, not the hilariously corrupt Democratic poohbah who blew his political career by knocking up a campaign aide and whose Wikipedia page contains these wonderful sentences: “[Campaign aide Andrew] Young further claimed to have set up private meetings between Edwards and Hunter, and that Edwards once calmed an anxious [extramarital lady friend Rielle] Hunter by promising her that after his wife died he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band. Young also maintains that Edwards asked him to ‘get a doctor to fake the DNA results . . . and to steal a diaper from the baby so he could secretly do a DNA test to find out if this [was] indeed his child.’” The Dave Matthews band part is what upgrades this story from tawdry tabloid tale to legend.)
But I think the main source of anti-Catholicism is a fascination with Catholicism, which has a much richer aesthetic, literary, and philosophical storehouse than anything else on offer in the Western world.
Allow me to briefly change gears to illustrate my point.
As some of you may know, I am a fan of the band Slayer, though I should here dispel the rumor that I am actually in the band. That’s not me:
I’m a fair guitarist, but I’m no Kerry King, pictured above. Kerry King of Slayer is in fact such a highly regarded player that the Dean guitar company makes a Kerry King signature guitar. Slayer being Slayer and very much a creature of the 1980s, the schoolboy-Satanist vibe is pretty strong on the guitar — “This has so many inverted crosses on it,” a Dean representative observes. “For those of you who are too sensitive, it’s not for you.”
(Unexpected product review from the Tuesday: I’ve played one, and it’s a terrific guitar if that’s your kind of music. I don’t think I’d take it to jazz night or use in it a Buck Owens tribute band.)
The whole metal-occult thing is straight from the mind of the angry 15-year-old doodling on a textbook cover who is at the spiritual center of every great rock band, and I’ve never thought of it as something to be taken seriously — and the people who take it seriously definitely are not to be taken seriously — but rather as something more akin to enjoying horror movies.
(And not to go off on a whole disquisition on rock music, but the more you move up the spectrum from metal to punk music, the closer you get to the golden age of horror movies, and you ultimately land at the Misfits, a 1950s horror film in the form of a 1970s punk band. I was very amused to learn a few years ago that the Misfits’ cartoonishly ghoulish Jerry Only is buddies with my former National Review colleague Kat Timpf. New York is a weird, small town.)
Those inverted crosses have always struck me as emblematic, but not in the way that they are intended. I’ve written a dozen different variations on these paragraphs and never been quite satisfied with the result, but I’ll try again:
Western civilization has two main parts: The first is the Greco-Roman classical civilization that brought us democracy, imperialism, the rule of law, the familiar pattern of urban life, Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Plato, Julius Caesar, etc. The second part is Christendom. One need not ignore the religious diversity of Christian Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and into the modern era to appreciate the fact that Western civilization is Christian civilization. And that Christian civilization is still alive, unlike its pagan forebear, though it is decaying into high-tech barbarism. But, still, that Christian civilization is the civilization in which we live. And Christian culture, Christian philosophy, and Christian themes dominate our art, literature, and political thinking. This is the case both for believing Christians and non-Christians. Caravaggio probably wasn’t a conventional Christian (he was certainly unorthodox, possibly an atheist), but his themes and subjects, and the milieu in which he worked, were Christian to the core. Caravaggio may have been an atheist, but his work was Christian work — and, more to the point, we don’t have a Caravaggio of atheism, or a Caravaggio of secular humanism, or a Caravaggio of mild, resigned agnosticism. The inverted cross is still the cross, and the underside of Christian civilization is still Christian civilization: The Omen is a scary movie because of its religious context; we don’t have scary movies about liberal humanism or yoga.
(I think you could argue that Midsommar is a horror movie about social democracy, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers for our time.)
The schoolboy Satanism of a Slayer album cover, like its more sophisticated literary equivalents (say, Christopher Hitchens’s religious writing), is pure reaction, an aesthetic and a school of thought that define themselves only in terms of what they reject — having no positive content of their own, they are forever doomed to the condition of intellectual and artistic parasite. The inverted cross is, in its way, a confession: that the cross matters as a symbol, and that those who detest it have nothing to put in its place — all they have the wherewithal to do is to invert that which is already there, which was there long before they were and which will be there long after. Another great rock band, Bad Religion, popularized the symbol of the cross inside an interdictory circle (that’s the red circle-and-slash sign, or “universal no,” as it is sometimes called), another purely reactionary gesture: That band’s main songwriter and aesthetic center, Greg Graffin, is a no-kidding real-world scientist with a Ph.D. from Cornell, and for all his learning, he remains intellectually and aesthetically powerless before the cross — he can mock it or reject it, but he cannot escape it, because he has nothing to put it its place.
(I know: G. K. Chesterton already has written The Ball and the Cross, and there is no need for me to rewrite it here. Go read The Ball and the Cross.)
For a parallel case, I think of a BJP politician who observed that India’s is a Hindu civilization and then was chastised by a secular-minded critic: “No, India’s is a civilization with toleration, pluralism, and diversity.” To which the politician answered: “Yes, India has tolerance and pluralism — because it is Hindu, because India is 80 percent Hindu and 20 percent Muslim rather than the other way around.” With all due respect for the diversity of political practice in the Islamic world, the gentleman had a point. In a similar way, the West has its Jeffersons, Darwins, Marxes, etc., because it is Christian.
(I encountered the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens only once — in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, ironically enough, about 10 in the morning, at Bill Buckley’s funeral. He was drunk.)
I think that much of the appeal of communism in the 20th century was the fact that it was probably the closest thing to a real cultural competitor that Christianity had had for a very long time: It had its own aesthetic (socialist realism), its own art and artists, its own literature, its own symbols, its own flag, its own hymns. And it put its mark on works of art that were genuinely original: Diego Rivera’s paintings, John Steinbeck’s novels, Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy — but, then, the disappointed communist Mikhail Bulgakov ended up writing his most famous work about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, and Soviet communism in particular blew on the spark of New Testament eschatology in Marx.
The aesthetic weight of Catholicism is heavier because the Catholic Church is older and more connected to the ancient world (part of the value of Augustine is that he had a foot in both the Christian and Greco-Roman worlds) and because many Protestant traditions take an essentially Islamic view of artistic depiction of the divine. Orthodox Presbyterians, for example, specifically forbid the display of crucifixes, even in private homes, and many Evangelicals will point you to the Canadian theologian J. I. Packer’s essay, “Why You Should Not Wear a Crucifix.”
(Or you could get real serious about it and read up on the “Puritan Regulative Principle of Worship.” Short version: Any form of worship that is not explicitly commanded in Scripture or that is not derived from the same by “good and necessary consequence” is verboten. The Westminster Confession specifically forbids worship “under any visible representation.” My inner Puritan shares the contempt for idolatry, but I think the definition the Puritans arrived at is excessively encompassing.)
Our Protestant friends may have made themselves superabundantly safe from graven images and good architecture, but there just isn’t as much aesthetic juice in beige carpet and folding chairs as there is in Notre-Dame or Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. You can parody the works of Leonardo, because there is a lot of there there. There isn’t a Methodist Leonardo — the words “Methodist Leonardo” sound like the setup to a joke.
The pro-life movement is not a uniquely Catholic movement — it did not really take off politically until Protestants in the South got on board. As Daniel K. Williams observes in That August Journalistic Institution:
Before the mid-1970s, active opposition to abortion in the United States looked almost exactly like opposition to abortion in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia: It was concentrated mainly among Catholics. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the members of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right to Life Committee, were Catholic. As a result, the states that were most resistant to abortion legalization were, in most cases, the states with the highest concentration of Catholics, most of which were in the North and leaned Democratic.
The pro-life movement is not even a particularly Christian thing. There are Jewish pro-lifers, Muslim pro-lifers, Hindu pro-lifers, Buddhist pro-lifers, etc., even though many of those religious communities do not take a strong corporate stand on abortion. (If you want to make a nice vegan progressive with nine cats and a student loan really uncomfortable, tell her what Tibetan Buddhists actually teach about homosexuality.) There are atheist pro-lifers — my friend Charles C. W. Cooke is a famous one, and “Atheists for Life” are a thing. So are “LGBT Against Abortion.” There are many pro-lifers who don’t have any particular religious affiliation, because there are many Americans who don’t have any particular religious affiliation.
But the pro-abortion zealots, like the evangelical atheists, the schoolboy Satanists, and many others of that kidney, are drawn to Catholic churches, Catholic imagery, the peculiarities of Catholic practice (is there anything more radical in our time than celibacy?). Why are they there? I always think of that famous scene in The Exorcist: “The power of Christ compels you!” And doesn’t it? Why else would people be so entirely and so personally obsessed with something they say they believe to be an irrelevant, childish fiction and a mean-spirited plot against their happiness? They are compelled.
They’d never admit it, of course, but there is a reason they end up standing there, bereft, confused, fearful, lonely, screaming themselves hoarse, full of dread, outside the church. Some advice: The door is always open if you decide you want to come inside. It isn’t any easier on the inside, and in many ways it is much harder. But there is a reason you maniacs come to the church to have your public nervous breakdowns and sad little group-therapy sessions. And I think that you don’t actually understand what that reason is.
“Come and see.”
Words About Words
Last week, I wrote a little about generational suffixes such as Jr., Sr., II, III, etc. I meant to include a bit about middle initials, too. Now I will.
Sometimes, a middle initial is useful for distinguishing a person from someone who has the same name or a very similar one: Our founder, William F. Buckley Jr. (whose “Jr.” I questioned last week) was a contemporary of a few other William and Bill Buckleys, including a famous Australian rugby player. To complicate things, he had almost exactly the same name, very nearly the same year of birth, and some career crossover with another WFB, William Francis Buckley, a special-forces officer and CIA section chief who unhappily was much in the news in the 1980s, when he was kidnapped by Hezbollah, the terrorist outfit that held him hostage and subjected him to torture at the hands of the infamous psychiatrist Aziz al-Abub. He died, probably via execution, while Hezbollah’s hostage. Our WFB was William Frank Buckley, and he worked briefly for the CIA in Mexico as a young man.
There was a Saturday Night Live skit about an accident at a Pittsburgh name-change office, an event witnessed by one Jeffrey B. Epstein, who is irritated when the TV reporter interviewing him keeps omitting the middle initial. “That’s a very important B,” he says. A quick look around the Internet reveals a number of contemporary American men with the name Jeffrey Epstein, many of them using a middle initial.
(Epstein is a “habitational” name, meaning a name connected to a place. There is an Eppstein in Germany, and there probably have been other places with similar names, Eppstein likely being derived from Germanic words meaning water or river and stone. Hence Epstein is equivalent to the English surname Waterstone or the less-common Riverstone.)
I use my middle initial partly because there are a couple of other writers named Kevin Williamson, including the much more famous television-and-movie guy (who is Kevin Meade Williamson) and a Scottish politician and Burns scholar. I have always loved the fact that the guitarist Yngwie J. Malmsteen uses his middle initial — one wouldn’t want to confuse him with all the other Yngwies one encounters. If you don’t know Yngwie’s music, he is a famously virtuosic rock guitarist who incorporates elements of classical music, especially Baroque, into his playing. He is the reason guitarists who grew up in the 1980s all know the harmonic minor scales, and the J. in his name is, almost inevitably, for “Johan.” He was born Lars Johan Yngve Lannerbäck.
You still see “Dwight D. Eisenhower” from time to time, even though you could dispense with his middle initial and his first name entirely without confusion, or cut him all the way down to “Ike,” a nickname for which those mid-century headline writers must have been grateful. There remains a lively debate about the orthography of the name of his predecessor, Harry S Truman — because the S did not actually stand for anything (his parents apparently put the S in there to split the difference between his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young), it is not technically correct to write it with a period: “Harry S. Truman.” According to legend, he wrote his name “Harry S Truman” until the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style chided him for it, after which he used the period or else ran everything together: “HarrySTruman.”
Rampant Prescriptivism
A reader asks about a recent Dan McLaughlin piece at National Review, about the Supreme Court leaker, and points to the sentence: “A clerk who is found out could easily end up fired, disbarred for breaching confidences, and maybe prosecuted.”
The question: Should that maybe be may be?
It may be the case. Maybe.
It certainly is the case that the clerk may be prosecuted, but we also use maybe colloquially to mean possibly. “We’re going to meet after work, have dinner, and maybe talk about the situation with the Finkelstein kid and whether he should be sent to military school.”
There would be slight differences in connotation, but I think Dan could have written that either way and been on solid ground, though if you want to use the verb may be rather than the adverb maybe, then you’d want a subject after that comma and coordinating conjunction: “He could easily end up fired or disbarred, and he may be prosecuted.”
(Yeah, I’m sticking with that neuter he.)
But you wouldn’t write, “May be I’ll take a nap,” or “I maybe wrong.” You will find may be for maybe in earlier English. It means the same thing as perhaps, which is also pretty archaic-sounding if you think about it or if you write it in the original way, as two words: per hap, meaning by chance.
Some familiar guidance applies here: Maybe and may be don’t mean the same thing, so just make sure to use the one you mean.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
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In Other News . . .
With all this abortion craziness going on — the office of a pro-life group was firebombed in Wisconsin — President Joe Biden is out there talking about subsidizing high-speed Internet. America’s poor cry out with one voice: “Please, for the love of God, relieve us of our Oberlin student loans, and knock five bucks a month off our broadband bills!”
Recommended
I hope to write some more on this, but if you are interested in the ongoing fight over public monuments, then check out Erin L. Thompson’s Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments. I disagree with much of the book and expect that many of you will, too, but it is very interesting and probably the best-informed and most thorough treatment of the subject I have read. Thompson’s biography identifies her as a “professor of art crime at the City University of New York,” which sounds like something from a Dan Brown novel, but no sane person wants to read a Dan Brown novel. (Except his publishers and agent, I guess, and the small team of theoretical mathematicians who keep track of his money for him, and maybe Tom Hanks.) There is a particular irony to the fact that so much of our discussion of these historical monuments lacks historical context, and Professor Thompson provides some, a useful public service.
In Closing
This has been a long one. Bonus Pancake:
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