Thinking about civility and Orthodox centrism

  • Recently, talk of civil­ity has been in the news. It’s also some­thing I’ve heard Ortho­dox friends bemoan. Too much shrill­ness, not enough man­nerly dialoguing.

    That’s right, of course, when it comes to things that don’t really mat­ter. But the closer you get to the front lines, the louder the noise gets. It is true that we gen­tle church-going folk need to step away from the fra­cas this Lent to a quiet place where we can spend time with our church and our fam­ily, reflect on our own pod­vig, pon­der God’s grace in our lives.

    But I think we make a mis­take to leave it to oth­ers to defend our com­mon cul­ture, which is becom­ing more Christianity-challenged all the time. Con­ser­v­a­tives have been doing the heavy lift­ing for decades, but most Ortho­dox, in my expe­ri­ence, not only won’t lend a hand, but crit­i­cize them almost as much as lib­er­als do. I don’t mind that Ortho­dox don’t like to argue, but it bugs me that we silence those who can, even when the alter­na­tive is giv­ing ground when we can least afford to. I sym­pa­thize in some ways — it’s more con­sis­tent with our out­look to be gen­tle as doves than to be wise as ser­pents. But I don’t know if the times we live in allow us to cherry-pick that much.

    There are prob­lems, of course, with some of the mes­sen­gers on the right, just as there are on the left. But I find that most of my cen­trist friends are far more dis­mis­sive of bad mes­sen­gers on the left than the right. And even more amaz­ingly to me, incred­i­ble stereo­types about those on the right are taken at face value, despite daily evi­dence that the media is might­ily prac­tic­ing a dou­ble stan­dard. When a Wis­con­sin Demo­c­rat yells to a Wis­con­sin Repub­li­can “You’re f***ing dead!” it doesn’t make  head­lines. But some­how when Sarah Palin’s office uses images of crosshairs over con­gres­sional dis­tricts, THAT’s deemed inap­pro­pri­ate (a year later — but hey, some­times rage takes a while). And it would get bor­ing to go into the myr­iad other examples.

    I used to just blame the media for not report­ing things like this, but I’ve noticed that when the sto­ries do get reported, cen­trists retreat from them and pre­fer the sim­pler answer of gen­tler times: You can trust a left-leaning nar­ra­tive more than any other; you can trust media voices on the left more than others.

    Their very lib­eral friends may lose them when they go way, WAY too far, but they are usu­ally indulged in their right to do so, and after­wards, their sound-bytes are deemed benign. When these are really crazy peo­ple, the assump­tion is that they are really harm­less. When they are media voices, there’s a kind of assump­tion that they know what they’re doing.

    There’s a rea­son I’m try­ing to fig­ure this out. Greg and I are start­ing out on a ven­ture that will put us into the afore­men­tioned fra­cas on the right-of-center side. I’ve been think­ing about how to square that with my church life and my per­sonal life. And it’s not like I won’t have my work cut out for me, but I wish I knew why things in the Ortho­dox world seem so stacked against conservatism.

    Feel free to weigh in.


    Related posts:

    1. Cra­dle and con­vert Orthodox
    2. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist
    3. The Ortho­dox con­vert list
    4. Is Ortho­dox con­ver­sion on the rise?
    5. The Ortho­dox prob­lem in Jerusalem

    March 9th, 2011 | Grace | 7 Comments |

7 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 03.09.2011

    Hm. I thought Ortho­doxy was stacked against lib­er­al­ism, espe­cially among con­verts. Must be the cir­cles I run in.

  • Anam Cara

    I find that as a whole the folks in my church are way more lib­eral polit­i­cally than I am. If it weren’t for the fact that I am sure in Ortho­doxy “We have seen the true light; we have received the heav­enly Spirit; we have found the true faith, wor­ship­ing the undi­vided Trin­ity, for the Trin­ity has saved us.” I would be back in and Angli­can break-away church. Polit­i­cally, they are much closer to where I am.

    Could it be that the con­cept of God’s love tri­umphs over all lends one to a social pol­icy that is more lib­eral than the indi­vid­u­al­ism one sees in Evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles that, while help­ing the TRULY poor, demands more per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity and there­fore is more conservative?

  • Anam Cara

    Last night when I went to church for the Great Canon, I parked behind a car with a McCain Palin sticker on it. I won­der who THAT bel­ogns to?

  • Grace

    s-p:
    You know, you’re right, now that I think of it. “Out-there” libs or con­servs tend to get a neutral-to-frosty response.

    You make me real­ize that it’s not the Out-there stuff I’m talk­ing about — I don’t like those guys either. I need to spend a lit­tle bit more time fig­ur­ing out just what I *am* talk­ing about. I didn’t bother to define it, but I should. May need to carry that over onto a new post, if I’m going to blather on (which I prob­a­bly will).

  • Grace

    AC:
    I liked how you con­densed down “the mes­sage” of con­ser­vatism. I real­ize that it’s the mes­sage I’m really talk­ing about. It seems so obvi­ous to me that the cul­ture is dom­i­nated by a secular-humanist nar­ra­tive that I can’t under­stand how Ortho­dox could still con­sider some of the biggest shills for that world­view as cred­i­ble sources.

    There’s another dynamic that I’ve been try­ing to get to, but haven’t done a very good job. When lib­er­als talk — even if they’re shrill — they’re indulged by cen­trists and some­times believed. When con­ser­v­a­tives take issue with lib­er­als — which we HAVE to do, because lib­er­als have been the dom­i­nant culture-creators for some time — we’re per­ceived as being obnox­ious, con­tentious and all the rest of the stereotype.

    But since Ortho­dox peo­ple KNOW that the world’s cul­ture isn’t our cul­ture, why don’t they take issue with the Old Guard of culture-creators. Why do so many of them buy into the very weak­est lib­eral lip-service of being kind­hearted, when their poli­cies are any­thing but? I still can’t under­stand that.

  • James the Thickheade

    There is a blind­ness to lib­er­al­ism. The anti­dote is real­ism. Real­ism is nei­ther right nor left.

    There is also tra­di­tion­al­ism. I think one of the things that struck me when I went to one of the first parish life con­fer­ences a few years ago was how much I felt as if I were in a time warp to an ear­lier gen­er­a­tion. The con­fi­dence in God, the con­fi­dence that there is a pub­lic place and role for the church… sim­ply weren’t under­mined. And the peo­ple and their fam­ily focus seemed to give off the sense of insight into a dif­fer­ent Amer­ica… more like the one that made/built the coun­try than the one that “lived off the fat of the land”.

    I think this is some of the dif­fer­ence with Ortho­doxy. Now where an indi­vid­ual takes it from there can really go any direc­tion. What’s changed is our sense of bear­ings through media oblit­er­a­tion is that we see in one-dimension most of the time, and what’s missed is how this nar­rows the vision and reduces realism.

  • Grace

    James:
    Blind­ness, etc. — I think this is what I’m afraid of. The nice, cen­trist peo­ple that I know seem to show an end­less capac­ity to buy into the benign lib­eral sound-bytes that are con­stantly being broad­casted at them. If they notice that there’s a basic prob­lem and a basic men­dac­ity, they turn into cyn­i­cal real­ists and don’t want to believe in any­thing (sort of like lapsed Catholics that become atheists).

    If that only affected world pol­i­tics or some­thing, it would be ter­ri­bly off-message for me to dive into it here. But since, in the words of Fr. Schme­mann, “All of cul­ture and all that is in cul­ture is about the King­dom of God — either for or against,” I feel like I’m see­ing so many peo­ple that I know gen­tly glid­ing over a cliff.

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