“I used to be disgusted,” Elvis Costello once sang, “Now I try to be amused.”
With me and church matters, it’s just the opposite. For a long time, when I saw ridiculous stunts that progressive churchmen pulled in an effort to stay relevant to the post-Christian culture, or to broadcast their woke bona fides (even before we had the word ‘woke’), I would roll my eyes, crack wise, and move on.
That was fun, but it was probably a mistake. Ironically distancing oneself from these desecrations, however minor they may have seemed at the time, opened the door for more serious ones. Last week in Oxford, I left a beautiful prayer service in an Anglican chapel, and was stopped cold by the sight of a large Pride flag hanging in the narthex.
The standard of a conqueror, I thought. It sent the message: orthodox Anglicans, indeed all orthodox Christians, are unwelcome here.
And then there was the revolting rave in the nave, the ‘silent disco’ that the gay dean of Canterbury Cathedral hosted last week in the ancient mother church of English Christianity. This, on the site of the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket. Gavin Ashenden, a layman who, prior to his conversion to Catholicism, was a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, has been writing movingly about the pain of this desecration.
Ashenden is, like me, well into middle age. But we are not the only ones made angry by this sort of thing. Esmé Partridge, a rising academic star at Cambridge, wrote last week that her generation, Generation Z, doesn’t want disco cathedrals. Partridge writes:
It is far more subversive, as a member of Gen Z, to seek “re-enchantment”—something which entails treating sacred spaces with reverence—than raving in a nave. This is a generation intrigued by pagan sacred sites and spiritually-infused ecology, not the desacralisation of an ancient place of worship.
Those who think this is—or should be—the future of the church ought to take this into account.
This makes sense. In research for my forthcoming book on enchantment, I have learned that Zoomers (members of Generation Z), on the whole, are far more interested in mysticism and transcendence than in the sorts of questions and answers that preoccupied older generations. This is not to say that they are interested in Christianity per se; in fact, large numbers of them are turning to psychedelic drugs, the occult, or some self-curated syncretic bricolage religion.
They are seeking re-enchantment—that is, a palpable connection to a transcendent realm. However misguided their search may be, it is sincere, and it is worthy of respect. Churchmen who turn holy places into profane fun fairs close off a portal to transcendence to those who are searching. They make the sacred ridiculous. Christian clerics who do this send the message: We don’t take this seriously, so why should you?
The Anglican theologian John Milbank took to X this week to express displeasure with the Canterbury rave in the nave.
Milbank expressed fear that “Gen Z will likely try to restore trad Anglicanism.” He went on to say that he opposes both “modernism”—disco churches and suchlike—and “fake stuck trad.”
One is grateful that a theologian of his caliber opposes cabaret cathedrals, but he should not make an enemy of traditionalists by demeaning them as inauthentic and fixated.
Stuck on what? Theological orthodoxy? The idea that the tradition is something we should receive, and that should shape us, not molding clay for us to make idols of ourselves? The basic point of being a traditionalist, in Anglicanism or any other form of the faith, is to renounce the modernists’ rejection of tradition.
Presumably Milbank opposes those he imagines are strict legalists and manualists, for whom the faith is primarily about doctrines and laws. If that is the case, then he has a point. The only thing about as grim as being in the company of progressive Christian commissars is finding oneself trapped in a joyless conclave of rad trads, who drink deep of bitterness to sharpen their vision, as they are ever on the lookout for the slightest deviation from the law.
These people exist, and they are unattractive. But they are at the powerless fringe. And to be fair, their bitterness comes from somewhere real. Years ago, when I was still Catholic, I tried several times to join with the Latin Mass traditionalists, to whom I was mostly sympathetic. It didn’t work, because the miserabilist rigorism I encountered was deeply off-putting. Others have had better experiences.
Nevertheless, when one surveyed what the Vatican II generation in power had done to the sacred tradition that was their birthright, only someone with a heart of stone could fail to sympathize with their sense of loss. Whatever their shortcomings, the trads are not the problem. Any solution that will ensure Christianity’s survival, both in Catholicism and in Anglicanism, will have to involve them at the core—precisely because they are the only ones who have any memory of what came before, and any passion for restoring it.
As to the ‘fake’ smear, the truth is, all traditionalism in our wretched age is a bit fake. How could it not be? The fundamental experience of modernity is the shattering of all authoritative traditions and narratives. We can’t escape that. As Charles Taylor, pre-eminently among many others, has observed, even when we affirm tradition today, we do so with the knowledge that we could do otherwise.
I saw this play out in my own family, when as a young man I told my father that I was going to convert to Catholicism. He was dumbstruck by the thought. “But the Drehers have always been Methodist!” he protested. In fact, the first Drehers to move to North America were Lutherans, and not too many generations before that, were Catholics. And for that matter, my dad rarely went to church, which sent a signal to me about how lightly he took his Methodism.
Decades later, having left Catholicism for Orthodoxy in part because I was seeking even deeper roots in tradition, I had to face the fact that my father had a more traditional mindset, and I was, paradoxically, the modernist. That is, my father may not have had much belief in Methodist Christianity, but he accepted that Methodism was part of our collective identity. The Drehers rarely go to church, and the church they rarely go to is the Methodist church, because that’s how it has always been.
What my late father, who was born in 1934, failed to understand is that his children were born into a world that takes almost nothing for granted. His son, in his mid-twenties, was becoming Catholic because he had become more serious about the Christian faith, and had come to believe that the pursuit of truth led him in this direction. Yet when I took up the practice of the Catholic faith, for a long time I felt like an impostor, performing rituals that did not come naturally to me, though they would in time.
It was even more radical when I lost my Catholic faith, and was rescued by Orthodoxy, a form of Christianity that is alien to the West. A well-known Orthodox theologian once, in my presence, called us converts fake—as if Orthodoxy was something that you had to be born into. This is an absurd position for a theologian of a universalist religion that spreads by evangelism to take.
Yet having been Orthodox now for nearly 18 years, I can see how silly converts can behave at first. For example, it’s amusing to witness middle-class Americans from the heartland suddenly identifying with the concerns of Slavic hotheads half a world away. It’s easier now for me to see why cradle Orthodox can get annoyed by converts. You’re not Pyotr of Pskov, dude; you are Todd from Plano. And that’s okay!
Even so, it’s the LARPers, the eccentrics, and all others willing to be criticized as ‘fake’ are the very people whose devotion to tradition, however skewed and silly, will carry us through the darkness and confusion of the present moment. To be sure, it is absurdly easy for such people to fall in love with the tradition itself, and make an idol of the Latin Mass, the smells and the bells, the vestments and all the accouterments and pomps of a glorious past, both real and imagined. The answer to this is not to mock and dismiss it, but to help people so captivated come to understand that all this beauty is not a destination, but a portal to the ultimate destination, which is communion with God.
After all, who would go to a man in full swoon from romantic love, and tell him that his passion for his lady is inauthentic? Older men who have the experience of marriage behind them have a duty to honor the younger man’s adoration, however candied and theatrical it may seem, and guide him into a more realistic relationship with his beloved.
Tolkien once told his son that men err when they regard women as a sort of goddess; in fact, he said, they are “companions in shipwreck.” Having personally gone from idealism to radical disillusionment, to a kind of reconciliation, I can say with confidence that it’s the same way with the church.
On the other hand, the eyes of youth may perceive truths of which the more jaundiced vision of the old have lost sight. You’d have to be a mean old fool to look upon the wide eyes of a convert being received into the church, or the pure faces of young men on their ordination day, and think of them as chumps. Yes, they are bearing witness to the triumph of hope over experience, but how does anything human endure if not for that hope?
There is greater wisdom in what the Rev. Daniel French, a Gen X Anglican vicar, said in response to Milbank. Though agreeing there are “very real spiritual dangers” facing the young traditionalists, he said “let’s be pastorally generous, because these young people may be the only ones left in [the coming decades] running anything near to Christianity in Europe.”
It’s true. Back in 2018, I went to France to promote the French-language edition of The Benedict Option. I was surprised to see that Catholics my age (I was 51 at the time) and older were weirdly hostile to the book, while those younger than me were generally eager to know more. After a while I figured it out.
Catholics in middle-age and older desperately needed to believe that Catholicism still had a meaningful role to play in French society. The premise of my book was that those days are over, and now Christians of all churches need to focus on shoring up what we can as a defense against the dissolving currents of modernity. Younger Catholics, by contrast, had no illusions about the future of Christianity within post-Christian society; they simply wanted to know how to live with joyful fidelity. Some of these young people were Latin Mass-goers; others attended Novus Ordo celebrations. In both cases, though, they were faithful to a more or less traditional idea of Catholicism.
And they—not the middling sort favored by the Milbanks—are the only ones showing up on Sunday. They are the ones who don’t care what respectable society thinks of them. Are some of them rigid and legalistic? Yes. Are some of them, so to speak, high on incense and made delirious by the sound of tinkling bells at the consecration? Sure. But they can grow out of it, can be purified of their excesses. In any case, theirs is the kind of love and dedication that will see the churches through this crisis.
We are living through the period that young Father Joseph Ratzinger foresaw in this 1969 address predicting a harsh purification for the Church. Especially this part:
The Church [of the future] will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
Yes, all trads are a little fake. Given what the previous generations have taken from them, they have to be. My Baby Boomer mother thought me a pretentious oddball when I taught myself how to cook like my grandparents did. I had to bear her judgment in order to learn those traditions, to keep them alive. In retrospect, I think that my mom, like so many of her generation, spited her Gen X son’s interest in culinary tradition because she secretly took it as a rebuke on her for disdaining kitchen liturgies of old as oppressive. Something similar is going on here with Christians like Milbank sneering at the young trads, I think.
If Anglicanism has a future—if Catholicism, and any and all forms of Christianity in the West has a future—it is among the outsiders, the dreamers, the marginalized, and the weirdos who, against all expectation, really believe in what historical, traditional Christianity stands for, and want to make it live again. These are the people who have watched over and over the normie older conservatives fail to defeat the radicals within the institutions, and who have no faith in them. As a normie conservative, this hurts, but they’re not wrong.
As Father French observed in his remark on X, these young people are going to pay a price for their faith. Their kind of Christian is not the sort that gets you endowed professorships in our universities, but then again, Christianity arose from the ranks of the cultural outlaws of their time and place.
In Defense of Neo-Traditionalist Zoomers
“I used to be disgusted,” Elvis Costello once sang, “Now I try to be amused.”
With me and church matters, it’s just the opposite. For a long time, when I saw ridiculous stunts that progressive churchmen pulled in an effort to stay relevant to the post-Christian culture, or to broadcast their woke bona fides (even before we had the word ‘woke’), I would roll my eyes, crack wise, and move on.
That was fun, but it was probably a mistake. Ironically distancing oneself from these desecrations, however minor they may have seemed at the time, opened the door for more serious ones. Last week in Oxford, I left a beautiful prayer service in an Anglican chapel, and was stopped cold by the sight of a large Pride flag hanging in the narthex.
The standard of a conqueror, I thought. It sent the message: orthodox Anglicans, indeed all orthodox Christians, are unwelcome here.
And then there was the revolting rave in the nave, the ‘silent disco’ that the gay dean of Canterbury Cathedral hosted last week in the ancient mother church of English Christianity. This, on the site of the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket. Gavin Ashenden, a layman who, prior to his conversion to Catholicism, was a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, has been writing movingly about the pain of this desecration.
Ashenden is, like me, well into middle age. But we are not the only ones made angry by this sort of thing. Esmé Partridge, a rising academic star at Cambridge, wrote last week that her generation, Generation Z, doesn’t want disco cathedrals. Partridge writes:
This makes sense. In research for my forthcoming book on enchantment, I have learned that Zoomers (members of Generation Z), on the whole, are far more interested in mysticism and transcendence than in the sorts of questions and answers that preoccupied older generations. This is not to say that they are interested in Christianity per se; in fact, large numbers of them are turning to psychedelic drugs, the occult, or some self-curated syncretic bricolage religion.
They are seeking re-enchantment—that is, a palpable connection to a transcendent realm. However misguided their search may be, it is sincere, and it is worthy of respect. Churchmen who turn holy places into profane fun fairs close off a portal to transcendence to those who are searching. They make the sacred ridiculous. Christian clerics who do this send the message: We don’t take this seriously, so why should you?
The Anglican theologian John Milbank took to X this week to express displeasure with the Canterbury rave in the nave.
Milbank expressed fear that “Gen Z will likely try to restore trad Anglicanism.” He went on to say that he opposes both “modernism”—disco churches and suchlike—and “fake stuck trad.”
One is grateful that a theologian of his caliber opposes cabaret cathedrals, but he should not make an enemy of traditionalists by demeaning them as inauthentic and fixated.
Stuck on what? Theological orthodoxy? The idea that the tradition is something we should receive, and that should shape us, not molding clay for us to make idols of ourselves? The basic point of being a traditionalist, in Anglicanism or any other form of the faith, is to renounce the modernists’ rejection of tradition.
Presumably Milbank opposes those he imagines are strict legalists and manualists, for whom the faith is primarily about doctrines and laws. If that is the case, then he has a point. The only thing about as grim as being in the company of progressive Christian commissars is finding oneself trapped in a joyless conclave of rad trads, who drink deep of bitterness to sharpen their vision, as they are ever on the lookout for the slightest deviation from the law.
These people exist, and they are unattractive. But they are at the powerless fringe. And to be fair, their bitterness comes from somewhere real. Years ago, when I was still Catholic, I tried several times to join with the Latin Mass traditionalists, to whom I was mostly sympathetic. It didn’t work, because the miserabilist rigorism I encountered was deeply off-putting. Others have had better experiences.
Nevertheless, when one surveyed what the Vatican II generation in power had done to the sacred tradition that was their birthright, only someone with a heart of stone could fail to sympathize with their sense of loss. Whatever their shortcomings, the trads are not the problem. Any solution that will ensure Christianity’s survival, both in Catholicism and in Anglicanism, will have to involve them at the core—precisely because they are the only ones who have any memory of what came before, and any passion for restoring it.
As to the ‘fake’ smear, the truth is, all traditionalism in our wretched age is a bit fake. How could it not be? The fundamental experience of modernity is the shattering of all authoritative traditions and narratives. We can’t escape that. As Charles Taylor, pre-eminently among many others, has observed, even when we affirm tradition today, we do so with the knowledge that we could do otherwise.
I saw this play out in my own family, when as a young man I told my father that I was going to convert to Catholicism. He was dumbstruck by the thought. “But the Drehers have always been Methodist!” he protested. In fact, the first Drehers to move to North America were Lutherans, and not too many generations before that, were Catholics. And for that matter, my dad rarely went to church, which sent a signal to me about how lightly he took his Methodism.
Decades later, having left Catholicism for Orthodoxy in part because I was seeking even deeper roots in tradition, I had to face the fact that my father had a more traditional mindset, and I was, paradoxically, the modernist. That is, my father may not have had much belief in Methodist Christianity, but he accepted that Methodism was part of our collective identity. The Drehers rarely go to church, and the church they rarely go to is the Methodist church, because that’s how it has always been.
What my late father, who was born in 1934, failed to understand is that his children were born into a world that takes almost nothing for granted. His son, in his mid-twenties, was becoming Catholic because he had become more serious about the Christian faith, and had come to believe that the pursuit of truth led him in this direction. Yet when I took up the practice of the Catholic faith, for a long time I felt like an impostor, performing rituals that did not come naturally to me, though they would in time.
It was even more radical when I lost my Catholic faith, and was rescued by Orthodoxy, a form of Christianity that is alien to the West. A well-known Orthodox theologian once, in my presence, called us converts fake—as if Orthodoxy was something that you had to be born into. This is an absurd position for a theologian of a universalist religion that spreads by evangelism to take.
Yet having been Orthodox now for nearly 18 years, I can see how silly converts can behave at first. For example, it’s amusing to witness middle-class Americans from the heartland suddenly identifying with the concerns of Slavic hotheads half a world away. It’s easier now for me to see why cradle Orthodox can get annoyed by converts. You’re not Pyotr of Pskov, dude; you are Todd from Plano. And that’s okay!
Even so, it’s the LARPers, the eccentrics, and all others willing to be criticized as ‘fake’ are the very people whose devotion to tradition, however skewed and silly, will carry us through the darkness and confusion of the present moment. To be sure, it is absurdly easy for such people to fall in love with the tradition itself, and make an idol of the Latin Mass, the smells and the bells, the vestments and all the accouterments and pomps of a glorious past, both real and imagined. The answer to this is not to mock and dismiss it, but to help people so captivated come to understand that all this beauty is not a destination, but a portal to the ultimate destination, which is communion with God.
After all, who would go to a man in full swoon from romantic love, and tell him that his passion for his lady is inauthentic? Older men who have the experience of marriage behind them have a duty to honor the younger man’s adoration, however candied and theatrical it may seem, and guide him into a more realistic relationship with his beloved.
Tolkien once told his son that men err when they regard women as a sort of goddess; in fact, he said, they are “companions in shipwreck.” Having personally gone from idealism to radical disillusionment, to a kind of reconciliation, I can say with confidence that it’s the same way with the church.
On the other hand, the eyes of youth may perceive truths of which the more jaundiced vision of the old have lost sight. You’d have to be a mean old fool to look upon the wide eyes of a convert being received into the church, or the pure faces of young men on their ordination day, and think of them as chumps. Yes, they are bearing witness to the triumph of hope over experience, but how does anything human endure if not for that hope?
There is greater wisdom in what the Rev. Daniel French, a Gen X Anglican vicar, said in response to Milbank. Though agreeing there are “very real spiritual dangers” facing the young traditionalists, he said “let’s be pastorally generous, because these young people may be the only ones left in [the coming decades] running anything near to Christianity in Europe.”
It’s true. Back in 2018, I went to France to promote the French-language edition of The Benedict Option. I was surprised to see that Catholics my age (I was 51 at the time) and older were weirdly hostile to the book, while those younger than me were generally eager to know more. After a while I figured it out.
Catholics in middle-age and older desperately needed to believe that Catholicism still had a meaningful role to play in French society. The premise of my book was that those days are over, and now Christians of all churches need to focus on shoring up what we can as a defense against the dissolving currents of modernity. Younger Catholics, by contrast, had no illusions about the future of Christianity within post-Christian society; they simply wanted to know how to live with joyful fidelity. Some of these young people were Latin Mass-goers; others attended Novus Ordo celebrations. In both cases, though, they were faithful to a more or less traditional idea of Catholicism.
And they—not the middling sort favored by the Milbanks—are the only ones showing up on Sunday. They are the ones who don’t care what respectable society thinks of them. Are some of them rigid and legalistic? Yes. Are some of them, so to speak, high on incense and made delirious by the sound of tinkling bells at the consecration? Sure. But they can grow out of it, can be purified of their excesses. In any case, theirs is the kind of love and dedication that will see the churches through this crisis.
We are living through the period that young Father Joseph Ratzinger foresaw in this 1969 address predicting a harsh purification for the Church. Especially this part:
Yes, all trads are a little fake. Given what the previous generations have taken from them, they have to be. My Baby Boomer mother thought me a pretentious oddball when I taught myself how to cook like my grandparents did. I had to bear her judgment in order to learn those traditions, to keep them alive. In retrospect, I think that my mom, like so many of her generation, spited her Gen X son’s interest in culinary tradition because she secretly took it as a rebuke on her for disdaining kitchen liturgies of old as oppressive. Something similar is going on here with Christians like Milbank sneering at the young trads, I think.
If Anglicanism has a future—if Catholicism, and any and all forms of Christianity in the West has a future—it is among the outsiders, the dreamers, the marginalized, and the weirdos who, against all expectation, really believe in what historical, traditional Christianity stands for, and want to make it live again. These are the people who have watched over and over the normie older conservatives fail to defeat the radicals within the institutions, and who have no faith in them. As a normie conservative, this hurts, but they’re not wrong.
As Father French observed in his remark on X, these young people are going to pay a price for their faith. Their kind of Christian is not the sort that gets you endowed professorships in our universities, but then again, Christianity arose from the ranks of the cultural outlaws of their time and place.
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