Red Meat
I’m not a paleoconservative, nor do I play one on the web. I read some paleoconservative organs, though, even paleoconservative organs that imagine that they are libertarian. There’s no way that 21st century libertarians can unreservedly ally themselves with the paleos, but then, libertarians can’t unreservedly ally themselves with neoconservatives, so-called civil libertarians, the business roundtable, leftist drug war opponents, or those gun- and abortion-rights supporters for whom their single issue is the single “choice” they trust their fellow citizens to make.
The flagship paleo journal is Chronicles. I found the Christmas issue, “And the Word Was Made Flesh,” especially valuable. Chronicles represents not just the Christian Right but the Catholic Right, and I came away from the current issue understanding Catholicism, and the more “Catholic” protestant sects, maybe for the first time. I was reared in that protestant denomination known to anatomists of faith as “the closest church,” and have not been a believing Christian since high school, so my catechism was haphazard.
More than one article stresses the significance of the physicality of the Incarnation. (Note: In the scramble to ready Unqualified Headquarters for its Christmas dinner guests, my copy of the current Chronicles has gone missing. Nor does Chronicles make its current issue contents available on the web. So I have no links or lengthy quotes.) Contrasting the presentations of Jesus in the Gospels and the Koran, in which Jesus is a paragon of asceticism, the author avers that “No sane host would invite the Muslim Jesus to the wedding feast at Cana.” Elsewhere, an author argues that the Gospel story itself rebukes the Puritan impulse – by taking on human flesh and allowing Himself to be “born under the Law to redeem those born under the Law,” God’s message to humanity was that the physical world matters, and that salvation must be worked out in the physical world. “Incarnation” includes the root carn- – “flesh” – but we see the word even more clearly in later romance languages: meat. God became meat as we are meat.
What I finally understood after reading the magazine was the logic of Catholicism. In the Protestant tradition, the Catholic belief that the Sacraments are necessary to salvation is unfathomable. Protestants believe in the unmediated experience of God. But if you read the meaning of the Gospel as God’s affirmation of the physical world and physical works as the theater of salvation, then it’s plausible that it is necessary to Do Certain Things in certain ways – the world is for believers to do those things. And the Catholic insistence on the necessity of mediating institutions makes sense too. Perhaps Protestants see the Divine Christ among us as a sign of the direct experience of God and Catholics see the Human and Divine Christ as the Glory of God Shuttered, betokening the need for a Human-staffed, Divinely-guided Church to interced with Christ as Christ interceded with God.
Years ago, I worked with a gay former priest, former because of John Paul II’s edicts against gay clergy. He was one of the most interesting men I ever met (my coworker, not the Pope), and we talked frequently about religion. A spectator sport to me, it meant much more to him. He remained committed to the Catholic Church that refused his services, because, he said, the Catholic tradition best met the needs of intellectual rigor and Christian belief. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he meant that. Now, thanks to a magazine that abhors gay clergy every bit as much as the Pope, I think I almost might. As a bonus, it gives me another angle to consider the Catholic SF novelist Gene Wolfe, especially his classic, The Book of the New Sun.
Oddly, almost every Chronicles reader I know is a gay poet. They’ve all been Chronicles contributors at some point, too. (Unqualified Offerings published a handful of poems in the magazine many years ago, but never mastered the gay trick of being sexually attracted to men.)
