Catholic conservatives fundamentally confuse cause and effect

The firestorm of criticism from conservative Catholics over Pope Francis's controversial statement that a "great majority" of sacramental marriages are "null" has exposed the very heart of the crisis of the Church: namely, that countless millions of Catholics are receiving the sacraments without sufficient spiritual instruction or maturity.

In the strict sense, of course, the Pope's critics have a point: the mere fact that 60-odd percent of Catholic marriages in the West end up in separation (to avoid the term "divorce") doesn't render these sacramental unions invalid to start with. That would deny both the power and the universality of sacramental grace, which as Christians (Catholic or otherwise) we must firmly believe is ultimately independent of human will and actions (i.e. sin or rebellion).

On the other hand, it's undeniable that faith can't work like magic - at least, not in most cases. No less than a child must be continually instructed according to the Catechism for years after first communion and/or confirmation, in order to constantly acquire habits of life that conform to it and shed those that don't, a new married couple must constantly work to maintain and improve their actual state of matrimonial union - an endeavor typically requiring very conscious and deliberate choices to forgive faults which, outside the sacrament's protection, are simply impossible to repair.

That's where it's crucial to really grasp the context of the "provisional culture" that the Holy Father repeatedly speaks of: it's the provisional culture that renders traditional and orthodox conceptions of marriage and family far less exclusively influential than they used to be.

To put it bluntly: asking many couples and families to stay together in this day and age is effectively asking them to suffer more than they would if they split apart. This societal and cultural dynamic simply didn't exist before the era of mass consumerism and women's participation in the workforce.

This is what Catholic (and other Christian) conservatives never seem to understand or, even if they do, concede: where they believe that it's the attack on the family that has corrupted the culture, the reality is that a corrupted culture has severely weakened the family.

In other words, conservatives fundamentally confuse cause and effect, and because they misidentify the source of the powerful forces arrayed against the traditional family, they're always reduced to a highly reactive kind of defensiveness which betrays a deep insecurity, sometimes even bordering on quasi-Apocalyptic foreboding, over the state of the world they inhabit. And the pontificate of Francis has left them distressed to see that even their own leadership has somewhat moved on from such an inflexible nihilist view of God's creation (tainted though it may be).

Anyway, I'm hopeful that sooner or later even conservatives will start reconsidering their self-imposed exile from the realm of contemporary social realities.

Trump's a flip-flopper but not a hypocrite

How is it that Donald Trump can seemingly get away with so much flip-flopping and lack of political consistency?

The answer is deceptively simple: Trump has never pretended to be anything other than a narcissistic egomaniac, anyway. In other words, even with all the flip-flopping, he's not a hypocrite - he's just being The Donald. The same standards and expectations that apply to any normal politician simply don't to someone whose whole life has been a reality TV show of private profiteering to start with.

So where, for instance, orthodox conservatives consider Trump's donations to the Clintons during his long years as a New York Democrat as anathema, his fans muse that he's carried Bill and Hillary around like pocket change.

In the end, Americans want genuineness in their candidates, even if it's a genuine lefty-loony like Sanders or a genuine confidence artist like Trump. What more and more of us can't stand is the mask of altruism of the ruling-class left and the mask of ideological and moral purity of the conservative right.

Don't worry, Donald Trump isn't a wannabe dictator

Financial Times argues that Donald Trump's rise merely caps off what's become a global trend of the resurgence of strongman politics, which has introduced authoritarianism even into established democracies.

While the stylistic similarities between autocratic personalities such as Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping are unmistakable, this fear that America is flirting with fascism in a prospective Trump presidency is wildly overblown.

True, the 2016 GOP primary race has shown that the "middle American street" has become more responsive to neo-collectivist, nativist and nationalist populism than to the increasingly stale rhetoric of "limited government", "free markets", and even (individual) "liberty" itself. This is why some leading conservative figures - including renowned radio host Mark Levin - are still disturbed by Trump's leadership, even after most of the party rank and file and even elite establishment has at least become resigned to it (if still largely hesitant to positively support it): they perceive in it a unique threat to "American exceptionalism", which for them is ultimately the notion that this law-loving country is uniquely well insulated against the baser passions of the lynch mob.

But Trump is very much a creature of the American system, and he has absolutely no interest in tearing it down to imitate Russia or China. Rather, he has merely exposed the sorry reality that our nation isn't working so well anymore, and that this is actually a consequence of a toxic brew of both too little democracy (i.e. regulatory capture by massive banks and corporations) and too much democracy (i.e. partisan bickering and gridlock by elected politicians). Both ills must be confronted and remedied: walls must be erected where bridges are the problem and bridges must be built where walls are the problem. And there's no reason this can't be done completely democratically and within the due processes of our great Constitution.

That being said, these are extraordinary times, and in the American context, they call not so much for extraordinary policies as for extraordinary politicking within an electoral and representative framework underpinned by free flow of news and information. Trump's abrasive style and contempt for niceties make him come off as an authoritarian, but in fact those who fear him might want to ask themselves: Am I so deeply in thrall to my own convictions of how our republic should work that I can't stand being shown up by a shameless narcissist?

US presidential hopefuls better be thinking really big about China

When Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes US president come January 2017, this is what the new leader of the free world will be dealing with on the global stage:

One Belt One Road (OBOR):

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB):

The sheer scale of Beijing's global economic (and hence geopolitical) ambitions presents the US with an arguably greater challenge than either the anti-fascist struggle in World War II or the Cold War against the Soviet Union. From the above maps, it's obvious that Beijing intends to dominate the traditional heartland of world politics - the Eurasian supercontinent.

In its latest play for global supremacy, its largest state bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), has acquired a flagship secret UK gold vault from Barclays in London - instantly adding up to 2,000 tons of physical gold to Beijing's sovereign oversight (if even just a small fraction of it under Chinese ownership or lease) out of a global total physical gold supply estimated at only 35,000 tons, i.e. scooped up access control of nearly 6 percent of the whole planet's gold stockpile.

The Donald, interestingly, has bragged about ICBC's presence as a major tenant in Trump Tower. This is the kind of news that gets him riled up more than ever: while the White House and Pentagon remain preoccupied with the charade of a standoff in the South China Sea, the communist dictatorship is seizing direct control of the Western financial system piece by piece, right under our noses.

Donald's already accustomed to thinking big about China - he's now compelled to think even bigger. And Hillary had better follow suit.

Why Trump is right on abortion

I previously wrote that I voted for Trump because my faith requires winning.

Now let me start to flesh out exactly how I think Trump can help us Christians "win." Let's start off with our flagship sociopolitical cause: abortion. Thanks to The Donald, we may finally have an opportunity to honestly and objectively discuss the whole abortion issue as an economic problem.

Abortion is fundamentally a function of economics. In the first place, notwithstanding the untold tens of thousands of abortions that take place even among the relatively well-off, let's not fool ourselves: stats all across the board show us that not only does abortion disproportionately impact poorer minority and working class communities, especially women and their partners from broken families (itself largely a consequence, in part, of poverty), but historically the rate of abortions has correlated quite well to the business cycle, i.e. it's been higher during recessions and lower during booms. Intuitively, this makes perfect sense.

But even beyond this, intuition and experience tells us something much deeper: even where no clear imperative for abortion might exist, a woman or her partner (or both) may choose to end a pregnancy merely for the sake of their own comfort and convenience.

And there's the rub: in our hyper-materialist consumer culture - of which even Christians are more a part of than we'd like to admit - the pro-life argument boils down to asking free individuals to choose a lower "standard of living" in the conventional economic sense.

Sounds pretty straightforward in theory - after all, that's why we evangelize - but let's not forget that this evangelism also entails actual material and monetary assistance.

And on the whole, we as a society - even we as Christians - have provided nowhere close to the scale and level of financial largess necessary to make the kind of massive dent in the abortion rate that we still think could be achieved by legislation.

It's great to be "pro-life" intellectually and morally; it's a lot more painful to our collective pocketbook to actually pay for the room and the resources that new life demands.

So that's where Mr. Trump comes in. He sees abortion as merely a symptom of the real issue - a materialist culture that can't deliver on its promises of prosperity for most ordinary folks anymore. Either we change our materialism or we actually deliver on prosperity.

Given that the pro-life movement is overwhelmingly white middle class, I don't see how the former is feasible: nobody's asking us to literally follow the footsteps of St. Francis. By default, that means we should focus on making life better and easier for the less fortunate. It's time for our elected representatives to be "pro-life" not merely with letters to prevent destructive decisions, but with the purse to make the alternatives more attractive.

Why I voted for Donald Trump: my Christianity requires winning

I understand the disappointment, even disgust of many of my fellow American Christians at the stunning victory of Donald Trump, the narcissistic reality-TV playboy, over sincerely faith-led candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

But this morning, I heard on the radio a guy from Gaithersburg (where I work) who pretty much summed up the reason that potentially millions of pro-life, conservative and Christian Americans already have and probably will cast their ballot for Trump: we need to start winning again.

This particular guy said that Cruz was his favorite, but he voted for Trump because Trump will give us one small victory at a time so that, eventually, we can actually elect someone like Cruz.

Now, Cruz may not be your personal best idea of a conservative Christian pro-life candidate, but just substitute whoever else that happens to be, and you still get the gist.

For me, as soon as I got over Trump's chauvinism and petulant immaturity - both of which I still think to be genuine personal characteristics that he must constantly master within himself - it became pretty clear just why he was the only logical choice.

The bottom line is, conservatives and Christians have suffered such a crushing string of defeats in the 21st century - primarily in the culture wars, which then naturally translated into ever greater political and legal setbacks - that we've developed a "sore loser" complex which blinds us to the need for an actual strategy to win.

This complex - which can easily be exploited by the evil one - has pushed us in recent years into ever more all-out, all-or-nothing battles against the forces of the left and of secularism that even we ourselves know have already been decisively lost in the realm of public opinion.

It's high time we quit the pitiful rear-guard harassment of trying to preserve the "Judeo-Christian" nature of our public spaces and institutions when even we can't deny that they've long since been reduced to little more than a hollow veneer - lone islands of exclusive dogmatism in an ocean of postmodern universalism.

Trump is an insurgent, and we are looking at fighting an insurgency. We can't count on the conventional or mainstream tools and institutions to change the prevailing culture back to where it should be. In the last decades of the 20th century, the left waged a constant insurgency - a counter-cultural movement of exceptional depth, scope, and intensity - and it finally succeeded so thoroughly that after 2000, it acquired the wherewithal to start going mainstream and conventional with its demands and goals, as its dominant ideology eventually acquired ever more teeth and muscle within the normal channels of political and socioeconomic power.

We're already in a post-Christian or even anti-Christian world. The longer we refuse to face this reality, the longer we'll lose.

I won't get into the particulars here of how I think a Trump presidency will help our cause. But for now, consider Mr. Trump a messenger more than any inkling of messiah: the message he sends is that any morality - or Christianity, specifically - that doesn't prioritize winning, if even winning only small and piecemeal in the beginning, is doomed to irrelevance and extinction.

A sea change is occurring in the world today...

It would appear that under Pope Francis, the Church is acknowledging that popular opinion in western society has become so alienated by the legalistic efforts of conservative churches and political authority to uphold traditional morality, that Christians now urgently need a whole new framework to engage a culture that is steadily becoming more and more hostile to their values and worldview.

This is really a bad time to be a rigid traditionalist with old-fashioned notions of "God, honor, and country." In a sense, the world has simply passed them by - the world they speak of preserving and reviving has, in very important ways, already ceased to exist.

In its place, we have a global market economy where everything and everyone is basically commoditized into some monetary value, where even longstanding national borders are being rendered largely irrelevant by the demands of corporate profits, and where governmental and official institutions may claim to represent the will of the people as much as they want, but in practice must resort to playing catch-up with a tiny professional/managerial elite on the payrolls of multinational conglomerates.

We all uphold this system far more than our misgivings about it allow us to recognize.

What is really happening, under the radar screen of experts, is that western Christendom's materialist heresy - ultimately borne out of the Protestant Reformation, which in turn spawned the secular tsunami of the Enlightenment - is reaching its logical 500-year conclusion. It has flourished for this past half-millennium because that's how long it has taken to spread worldwide to a degree that allowed it to both conquer the western hemisphere and also fundamentally shake up the venerable Asiatic civilizations of the eastern hemisphere.

The nihilism that an essentially materialist worldview - even one that has so successfully cloaked itself with Christian belief for so long - simply cannot be averted. Modern Christendom has become a victim of its own success: by liberating the sphere of human material activity so dramatically, it has unleashed a beast that, despite its constant efforts to restrain it, progressively and inexorably becomes less and less manageable to any degree whatsoever, to the point where it devours the master who created it.