Crunchy Cons Fight Back! Maggie Responds

[A sampling of excerpts from responses from the Crunchy Con blog over at National Review online, including the last one (which was chronologically first,) from Rod himself. I'd respond in depth tonight, but I just spent 10 hours in the car. I'm tired.

Let me say briefly: Rod, I wasn't writing a book review. I was conversing in public. Which means I wasn't trying to capture your book. I was trying to articulate my response to your book. So you got the part that interested me.

And I wasn't criticizing you for worshipping at a Lebanese Maronite Church. I think that's cool. I was pointing out the internal contradictions of your project: You are constructing yourself as a traditionalist. This is a very American project of a classically Liberal sort. I'm all for it. Maggie

P.S. The question whose importance I questioned was: Can you be Crunchy and Conservative too? You sometimes say you are only asking for a place at the table, and sometimes suggest that you are laying the basis for a whole new movement of an undefined nonpolitical sort. But I would say you more often revert to the first question, and I think the answer is sure, yes. Now are you satisfied?]


From Angelo Matera

"I was disappointed in Maggie’s review, and I don’t know why she couldn’t see the substance in Rod’s book. I imagine she really does consider our culture a given, and the issues of abortion and sex and marriage too important to risk messing with the conservative coalition."

Jason, a military man, writes:

"I think most on the Crunchy Con blog have overlooked Maggie Gallagher's most important (for me) point: the American tradition defies being rooted to one place. As someone who's been in the military all his adult life, this is truer for me than most. The great (maybe mythical) American tradition says that our ancestors left England (or other parts of Europe) to escape being trapped into the same place, occupation, and social class as their fathers. To be American means that I am judged on what I do, not on what my father did. . ."


Caleb Stegall:

Rod wrote:

'Is what really a very important question? God? Family? Architecture? Liturgy? Birkenstocks? Organic chickens (which I understand to mean "the kind of food we eat")? No, Maggie, footwear is not an important question, and people who actually read my book know that I don't make an issue of it, except as an example of how I let a silly cultural prejudice against a brand of shoes keep me from trying out a product that has given me good service. So okay, footwear is not important. But all the rest of it, yeah, it's important.'

"He is right, and this is really at the heart of the disagreement. Does anything matter? Really matter? I asked yesterday the Augustinian ethical question: What do we love? Lying behind that question may be the question: Is there anything out there worth loving? Too many conservatives simply give in to the tide of cultural nihilism as Gallagher does at the end of her review."


Rod's original post:

"This is really unfair, and I can't believe that Maggie, a fair-minded and careful writer, closely read what I wrote. Maggie writes as if we were trying on an exotic version of Catholicism for purely aesthetic reasons, but in fact we wanted a mass, and spiritual leadership, that was more traditional, because the tradition connected us to something real . . ."
posted by maggie at 11:46 PM | link

1 Comments:

At 3/16/2006 9:37 AM,  Anonymous said...

Maggie,

Some interesting ideas, yours, about Rod Dreher's new book.

You lost me, however, when you led the sixth paragraph of your column with the words, "There is something movingly pathetic..."

As a Roman Catholic, born and bred, I found myself consulting the Good Book, looking for examples of God, Jesus Christ, and/or the Apostles employing the words "...movingly pathetic" to describe a sinner, leper, or something with whom they disagreed. Heaven knows, the world was far from perfect in those days and remains in something of a muddled state in our lives.

Despite exhaustive research and the use of a few Internet search engines that offer Biblical text, I failed to discover any example of the words "...movingly pathetic" in the Bible. I tried the King James version. I perused both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Nope, just couldn't find "...movingly pathetic."

Perhaps you can offer your reference to scripture. Hey, I'm far from perfect.

Somehow, I just don't think the term "...movingly pathetic," or, far more importantly, the attitude of arrogance, dismissiveness, and scorn that it carries figures to appear anywhere in the text of any religious document. Could be wrong, though.

Your effort, in this case, seemed so biting, so trite, so devoid of anything other than scorn that I found myself dismayed and more than a bit concerned about the viciousness of your reaction toward Mr. Dreher and the Crunchy Conservative idea. Nah, I'm not a Crunchy Con. Birkenstock just isn't my kind of place, and Whole Foods hasn't set up shop in my neighborhood. So, I suggest that you not waste any time with the tired, boring counter-argument that I am, in the words of Jonah Goldberg, one of Mr. Dreher's Kool-Aid consuming brood.

Such compassion from Mr. Goldberg. Kind of reminded me of your article on Mr. Dreher's book. You did read, in this instance, like another of Lucianne's loyalists. Course that's to be expected. Lucianne did train you. And who, I ask you, is nastier than Lucianne?

Well, perhaps Ramesh Ponnuru? http://corner.nationalreview.com/06_03_12_corner-archive.asp#092556

Maybe Mark Levin?
http://levin.nationalreview.com/archives/092538.asp

What's next? Your column questioning the motivations of Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an Orrin Hatch kind-of-a-gal?

Still, though, Lucianne remains supreme. When it comes to nasty.

Ira Schwartz

http://crunchycon.nationalreview.com/archives/092463.asp

Re: Maggie Gallagher
[Rod Dreher 03/15 01:09 PM]

Maggie Gallagher writes:

There is something movingly pathetic in watching the Drehers drive through different religious identities, for example, searching for one that "fits." Worshipping at a Lebanese Maronite (Catholic) Church, for example, because they like the taste of ancient tradition, even if they are neither Lebanese nor Maronite. Tradition itself becomes a kind of consumption item, to be produced and consumed by crunchy cons.

This is really unfair, and I can't believe that Maggie, a fair-minded and careful writer, closely read what I wrote. Maggie writes as if we were trying on an exotic version of Catholicism for purely aesthetic reasons, but in fact we wanted a mass, and spiritual leadership, that was more traditional, because the tradition connected us to something real. The Roman rite parishes we had to choose from all, to one degree or another, threw away tradition. Are we to be blamed for trying to find, within the broader Catholic tradition, some way out of the dryness and alienation of Catholic parish life? This is what I actually wrote in the book about why we found refuge with the Maronites:

It was an Eastern-rite parish, where the aesthetically rich, awe-filled fifth-century liturgy was celebrated partly in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and the priests wer edecidedly uninterested in trendiness. We couldn't take the smarmy, white-bread, middle-class American masses at the Roman-rite parishes around us, where the liturgies were washed out and banal, and the moral and theological grandeur of the historical Christian faith was discarded in favor of a piety that demanded no more of you than that you feel good about yourself. This was a form of Catholic Christianity that demanded more from us, and because of that, it was more rewarding. And it seemed so much more solid than Our Lady of What's Happening Now around the corner, where the priests embarrassed themselves trying to be hip and relevant.

The key thing is, we didn't become members of Our Lady of Lebanon parish because it sounded like a neat experiment in religious tourism.

We did so because we are conservative Catholics, and we were hungry for worship in a parish where we could find the real, deal, be it in English, Latin or Aramaic.

 

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