How to be unconvincing

A reader sent me this last Tuesday and I promised to post something about it. Better late than never, I guess.

Are you, too, lost in a dark wood spiritually? If not, here are a number of wonderful stories telling you how you could be if you only tried a little harder. Remember, as Rod has told us over and over, stories are the way to really get your cultural marketing across.

And now, successfully lost lamb, are you ready to be found? The Great One is there to help with another, even more powerful dream story. But what's this?

I had enough self-awareness to know that it was impossible for me to read these books lucidly. The cloud of darkness around me was like stinging flies. What I recall learning from all that was that the Catholic case for Roman primacy was not nearly as airtight as I had believed. I had only seriously considered the Roman claim versus Protestant claims. Orthodoxy was a new thing.

Well, Pilgrim, are you gonna keep trying to get the Devil out of those filthy spiritual clothes over and over with that tired old lard-based soap and a rock, or are you going to try new, improved Orthodoxy the way your Dream Teacher has just laid out for you?

Tax-deductible, of course.

Another reader on the sender's email list then delivered this opinion:

Actually, I wouldn’t mind his far-fetched dream-state Orthodoxy stories so much if he focused on the blessings that Orthodoxy has brought to him. But he simply can’t do that except by comparison to the mean old not-as-important-as-it-thinks Roman Catholic Church (“Did you hear about the Scandal? Huh? Huh?”).

And I find it interesting that the Story of The Great Conversion continues to change over time, just like The Day That Rod Was There. It’s always something new, which means what we’ve been told previously (as well as now) is as likely to be false as true.

I see it just as click-bait. What better way to harvest comments by throwing out FOUR threads for people to bash and tout various faiths.

Here's my initial email response:

I likewise find the lack of focus on Orthodoxy qua Orthodoxy in his writing telling. It’s always “Orthodoxy for the doubting and/or disaffected Catholic”. But there is something else missing. Any kind of serious intellectual apologetic effort. He writes:

....Orthodoxy was a new thing. The Orthodox arguments were making some headway with me, but they were far from a slam-dunk, at least with me. What they did was loosen my confidence in the solidity of the Catholic claim. Yet I was highly aware that my own mental and emotional state was inflamed by anger and distrust, such that I was not sure to what extent my deliberations could be trusted.

What is missing is the details on these Orthodox arguments. The only thing we get is “What they did was loosen my confidence in the solidity of the Catholic claim,” so again, his Orthodoxy is relative to the Catholic faith. It isn’t the Eastern Orthodox Church’s/Churches’ claim to positive moral authority, it’s the negative claim against the Catholic Church. And he never even allows us a peek at those. Instead we get a full 15-minutes of exciting dream-footage in technicolor with spiders and magic prayer ropes.

Those were my initial musings, but I'll expound on them here.

Say a person just became a serious Christian and decided he really wanted to follow Christ's teachings. So he decided to study the claims of the ancient Christian communions. He'd heard that there is a blogger who writes prolifically about his conversion out of one ancient Christian communion (Roman Catholic) into another (Eastern Orthodox). So he decided to check out some of these many posts to discover why.

I don't think this person would find any advice for his own spiritual journey from this blogger named Rod Dreher who, by the way, really does write prolifically about his conversion out of Roman Catholicism. He'd learn that the blogger left the Catholic church over horrible abuse scandals which, the blogger doesn't deny, also exist in his current orthodox communion. He'd also learn that the blogger also left over the sometimes horrible mishandling of the scandals, but that the blogger admits that this mishandling sometimes happens in his present communion.

Not only is there not much of an effort at intellectual apologetics for Orthodoxy, but there isn't really any reference to an outside source for said apologetics which were "making some headway" with him *. I think that the this lacuna is possibly intentional for two reasons. The first is that for Rod Dreher, intellectual effort is completely unnecessary—you either get it or you don't. I think that in this case, prattling on ceaselessly about it is sort of pointless so I don't know why he would bother. But smug people doubling down on smugness quite often should surprise no one who has any worldly experience.

The second reason, and one which is more likely to my mind, is that any intellectual argument for Orthodoxy over Catholicism would present a vulnerable target. If regular readers here attack Rod Dreher's decision to leave the Catholic Church it is very easy for Dreher's defenders to dismiss us by saying "You just don't like him." Fair enough; we don't. But by not presenting foundational absolutes or general principles for why he left the Catholic church, his choice to do so comes across as individualistic, relativistic and circumstantial. He might have presented the idea elsewhere that the small and the particular are virtuous attributes, but in the consequential decisions of life, they don't provide for strong arguments.

This would account for another aspect of his famous conversion which I've noticed from the outset. There is no proportional recruiting effort. If indeed Catholicism is so bad and Orthodoxy so good then he should be trying to pull good people that way. But I think this ignores the particularity and individualistic nature of Dreher's conversion. This choice of Orthodoxy, he always seems to emphasize, was tailor made for him, reinforced by many and diverse subjective experiences including even his own dreams which, we all know, men never lie about except in pick-up lines.

Before I converted to Catholicism in the early nineties, I considered Eastern Orthodoxy. I even read Peter Gillquist's book Becoming Orthodox about a group of Evangelical Protestants at a college campus who all joined the Orthodox Church after studying the ancient liturgy. At the time I remember thinking that it was well-written and very convincing about the liturgy and the sacraments, but there was really no substantive reason why their conclusion couldn't have been to all become Roman Catholic. The year after I converted I remember reading the late Father Ray Ryland's article Evangelicals Who Journey East in the magazine This Rock. In this article, Ryland exposes the fact that at many points along during the journey of these Evangelicals, there was a sub- or semi-conscious desire on the part of the members of the group to steer away from considering the Roman Church. This desire was what drove the decision, not objective inquiry, and it made for an easier way forward for the group that avoided the more rigorous stances taken by the Catholic Church which we have before noted. Ryland demonstrates how they even borrowed arguments from protestantism in order to bolster their newly found Eastern Orthodox belief system.

So this is my conclusion. I believe that in the same way as those Evangelicals under Gillquist had a predisposition to avoid Roman conclusions, Rod Dreher as a Catholic had a desire to get out of the church once the going got tough, and the abuse scandal presented the opening he'd been longing for. He breathed a sigh of relief after leaving with seeming integrity, but, as Father Ryland opined, the "breath was not deep." The lack of depth has proved itself ever since through the ever-declining force of his words in his ever-changing narratives.

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* - I realize that he discounts these arguments as determinative by stating "[T]hey were far from a slam-dunk, at least with me.... ...I was highly aware that my own mental and emotional state was inflamed by anger and distrust, such that I was not sure to what extent my deliberations could be trusted." But the fact is that he did leave the Catholic Church and he did become Eastern Orthodox. So it is impossible to conclude that he was not convinced to become Orthodox because that church professes the correct ecclesiology—unless you hold to an opinion that Rod Dreher joined the Orthodox church merely on a pretense. I choose to believe the former; it is the more charitable course. Yet the will is supposed to allow itself to be informed by the intellect. It is not supposed to ignore it.