How big foundation money is subverting Traditional Christianity

[Justin-H.S.]

*Eastern Orthodox Thread*

There is a struggle within Christianity right now between those who want to retain its traditional moral and social teachings and those who seek to modernize and conform Christianity to the liberal democratic order of the west. We saw this in Protestant churches immediately after the Reformation with some of the more radical reformers fleeing Europe to settle in America. Once here, they were preaching social gospel and egalitarianism by the mid-nineteenth century. We saw it again in the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-twentieth century, beginning with Vatican II. In both Protestant and Catholic churches, traditionalists have been drowned out by modernists. Many Protestant churches now accept female ministers, LGBT clergy, and even gay marriage and abortion in some cases. Pope Francis embodies all the modern liberalization within the Roman Catholic church. From his banning of traditional Latin Mass to leading interfaith prayers at pagan temples and advocating for socialist policies, Francis has all but completed the liberalization of the Roman Catholic Church...

How Big Foundation Money Is Subverting Traditional Christianity - Orthodox Reflections

 

[ArmyMatt]

Lord have mercy

 

[archer75]

For the record, he didn't ban the Tridentine Mass, but re-curtailed its use.

 

[gzt]

Riccardi-Swartz's work is actually pretty good.

 

[rusmeister]

Riccardi-Swartz's work is actually pretty good.

There are few things you could have said that could have more eloquently made Justin’s point for him.

“those who seek to modernize and conform Christianity to the liberal democratic order of the west. ”

“Women’s/Gender Studies” is part of that liberal democratic order that is neither liberal in the sense that a Christian ought to be liberal, nor democratic in any sense of anything ruled by the people as opposed to an elite. I hardly need look farther than that. And the saddest thing, gz, is that there IS a danger that the things people like her promote legitimately fear, yet, because they themselves reject the God-ordained order of sexuality and the family, they push people towards those opposite evil extremes. I already spoke of the dangers of hyperdoxy, which you probably agree with me on, and the elements in the Church that favor totalitarianism and Stalinism in an effort to stop the sexual anarchy promoted within those bogus fields of study called “Women’s (etc.) Studies”.

So you wind up pushing people like Justin further in one direction, because you so ardently support the other direction. And both directions lead to evil. That’s how the devil works, in general, by setting up equal and opposite evils for people to run from/to. And a person who is sincere in desiring to conform himself to the Church will face up to that. A person who really works for the devil will evade, ignore, and continue to promote the devil’s line. In either direction.

“Gender Studies” is fundamentally opposed to Orthodox teaching on the family and sexuality. A person cannot advance in that field of imaginary studies without bowing to the anarchy of the the world.

And because you promote people like her, I have to deal with Stalinists and people who want to restore the USSR and punish dissidence with that within the Church, because they are right about the anarchy she presents.

 

[archer75]

Unfortunately, I can agree with most of what rus says here.

gzt, I assume you haven't dealt with a lot of these people personally. I have. They sound ok (sometimes) in public but it's not like that behind the scenes. The best of Riccardi-Swartz's stuff you coulda got in a box of Cracker Jack fifty years ago. The rest of it, that whole worldview...they're not who they pretend to be.

 

[Andrew.H]

"Authoritarian, anti-democratic, and anti-expertise movements are surging in the United States and around the world. The credibility of scientists, journalists, educators, and civil servants erodes as trust in the institutions of civic life falls away. Religious actors and institutions play ambivalent roles, in some cases resisting and in others supporting the traffic in fabrications and falsehoods."

I died laughing at that. "My arbitrary credentials from Power Point University (that I'm a 100k in debt for) empower me with infallibility in all things" or "I'm a bureaucrat from a regulatory department, so you know I'm an expert". It's like a list of everyone I don't find credible these days, and isn't it antithetical to the practice of democracy to actively silence those you deem a threat to democracy?

 

[gzt]

Unfortunately, I can agree with most of what rus says here.

gzt, I assume you haven't dealt with a lot of these people personally. I have. They sound ok (sometimes) in public but it's not like that behind the scenes. The best of Riccardi-Swartz's stuff you coulda got in a box of Cracker Jack fifty years ago. The rest of it, that whole worldview...they're not who they pretend to be.

I can't say I know what you're referring to, but okay.

 

[rusmeister]

I can't say I know what you're referring to, but okay.

This literally means, “I don’t understand you, but agree with you”, though I think what you mean is probably “I don’t agree, and can’t and/or don’t want to try to refute what you say.” (I’m open to correction on your intended meaning.) You do act as the representative of the side that wants to introduce real change into the traditional teaching and practice of the Church. And I can see leanings among other members here reacting to what you have promoted among us in a direction that want to double down in another direction, and both directions are wrong, the one being love without truth (which winds up in the end not really being even love, but indifference), and the other being truth without love, which is as sounding brass. I will say that you are right to be opposed to truth without love.

We all go wrong in our thinking somewhere. We need to be ready to let go of attitudes which may have been dear to us, but really are outside the mind of the Church. We have to let the Church, in its Holy Tradition, Liturgy, the fathers, Scripture as expounded by the fathers correct us and our wrong thinking and attitudes that we came into the Church with, and very often find hard to let go of.

 

[Justin-H.S.]

@rusmeister
To be clear, one of my brothers at church is a PhD in Philosophy who holds pretty liberal (liberal as in left leaning) outlook and shared that article by Ricardi-Schwarz on Facebook (although I'm not on FB), and we discussed the article a couple times; once during coffee hour, and another at his house. We both came away with better understanding, and I'm a lot more centrist (in fact, I took one of those dumb tests online and my political outlook was dead-on in the middle of the graph) in my views than you described me above. We both agree that there is an element of fringe Far-right converts (just as there are fringe Far-left converts, just look at the online pit of hell: Reddit) and they usually gravitate towards ROCOR, but that number is a lot smaller than she (Schwarz) claims it to be. The Left's demand for racists is higher than the supply of racists, so they are forced to see racism everywhere in order to justify their worldview, and anyone not as fringe as themselves are seen as "racists." Likewise, just as the Orthodox population is less than 1% in population of the U.S., you can imagine that the genuine racists within that 1% to be an even smaller number. Me thinks Mrs. Schwarz is grasping at straws to find the boogeymen her worldview demands.

I professed that the Church has a tempering affect on her people (over the liturgical cycle Leninists will be less Leninist and Racists will be less racist, ideally), and that whoever joins will usually move towards the center of the cross where the Corpus Christi is whether they started from His Left hand or Right hand. Christ has a moderating effect on us, or not for some whose hearts remain as stone.

If whoever joins the Church for the wrong reasons whether those reasons are for Far Left or Right, they will eventually weed themselves out of the Church when they find that it's not exactly the way they prefer; or they will attempt to mold the Church in their own image, but find it difficult and/or impossible to do so for various reasons I won't say here. Or their hearts will soften and they will submit their preferences to the Holy Tradition.

 

[gzt]

@rusmeister
...but that number is a lot smaller than she (Schwarz) claims it to be. ... Me thinks Mrs. Schwarz is grasping at straws to find the boogeymen her worldview demands.

She wasn't making quantitative claims, was she? see for instance this discussion: Method and Consequence in the Study of U.S. Orthodoxy

 

[Andrew.H]

She wasn't making quantitative claims, was she? see for instance this discussion: Method and Consequence in the Study of U.S. Orthodoxy

Honestly, reading her online presence made my eyes glaze over a bit. It's nothing new, the same accusations and buzzwords everyone throws around. She seems to have built her career off criticizing a paradigm she doesn't share. But I'll go with the challenge the article posits and buy the book to read through.

Social sciences have garnered a bit of a reputation for ideological bias in general. I wouldn't say it's unwarranted to have a such a knee jerk reaction like that which the article refers to. I would personally have the same difficulty reacting to their work differently than I would with a Muslim polemicist; that it's done in bad faith or that those within that academic sphere would pose any genuine opposition to one of their own. Peter Boghossian did some little experiments that point some of these flaws out.

 

[rusmeister]

@rusmeister
To be clear, one of my brothers at church is a PhD in Philosophy who holds pretty liberal (liberal as in left leaning) outlook and shared that article by Ricardi-Schwarz on Facebook (although I'm not on FB), and we discussed the article a couple times; once during coffee hour, and another at his house. We both came away with better understanding, and I'm a lot more centrist (in fact, I took one of those dumb tests online and my political outlook was dead-on in the middle of the graph) in my views than you described me above. We both agree that there is an element of fringe Far-right converts (just as there are fringe Far-left converts, just look at the online pit of hell: Reddit) and they usually gravitate towards ROCOR, but that number is a lot smaller than she (Schwarz) claims it to be. The Left's demand for racists is higher than the supply of racists, so they are forced to see racism everywhere in order to justify their worldview, and anyone not as fringe as themselves are seen as "racists." Likewise, just as the Orthodox population is less than 1% in population of the U.S., you can imagine that the genuine racists within that 1% to be an even smaller number. Me thinks Mrs. Schwarz is grasping at straws to find the boogeymen her worldview demands.

I professed that the Church has a tempering affect on her people (over the liturgical cycle Leninists will be less Leninist and Racists will be less racist, ideally), and that whoever joins will usually move towards the center of the cross where the Corpus Christi is whether they started from His Left hand or Right hand. Christ has a moderating effect on us, or not for some whose hearts remain as stone.

If whoever joins the Church for the wrong reasons whether those reasons are for Far Left or Right, they will eventually weed themselves out of the Church when they find that it's not exactly the way they prefer; or they will attempt to mold the Church in their own image, but find it difficult and/or impossible to do so for various reasons I won't say here. Or their hearts will soften and they will submit their preferences to the Holy Tradition.

Hi, Justin!
I agree with you to a great extent, and wasn’t necessarily describing you at all. I will say that the people who went Stalinist in my parish were people who had gone “to the right” in terms of religious conservatism, and that THOSE people ARE reacting to the leftism promoted by Mrs. Swarz.

So I say, gzt, that you are actively encouraging people to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction, whether you mean to or not. This stuff by Swartz GUARANTEES a reaction, a push-back, and I suspect that there are some people in the Church that WANT to create that reaction, along with well-intentioned but foolish people who want nothing of the sort, but naively help throw oil on the fire. And failing to respond to what I am saying hardly implies honesty and sincerity in this.

 

[Justin-H.S.]

Race used to mean ethnos back in the day. Since the 19th century "race" was changed to mean genos by the Royal Society to justify the global British empire, and the superiority of the Anglos. By the turn of the century that torch was passed to the Anglo-American empire, and here we are now with the GAE. The Global American Empire, but that's on its way out as well. Outlived its usefulness.

We all know the Orthodox Christian race has the fullness of Truth. 2000 years and counting.

 

[gzt]

Honestly, reading her online presence made my eyes glaze over a bit. It's nothing new, the same accusations and buzzwords everyone throws around. She seems to have built her career off criticizing a paradigm she doesn't share. But I'll go with the challenge the article posits and buy the book to read through.

Social sciences have garnered a bit of a reputation for ideological bias in general. I wouldn't say it's unwarranted to have a such a knee jerk reaction like that which the article refers to. I would personally have the same difficulty reacting to their work differently than I would with a Muslim polemicist; that it's done in bad faith or that those within that academic sphere would pose any genuine opposition to one of their own. Peter Boghossian did some little experiments that point some of these flaws out.

You don't need to buy and read the entire book unless you really want to -- not even I am that interested.

Boghossian's experiments don't really show anything. And frankly my one interaction with Pluckrose left me quite unimpressed with her ability to critique anything in the social sciences -- she had trouble understanding the argument in 3.1.5 (Causal Inference The Mixtape - 3  Directed Acyclic Graphs) and suggested I was arguing women don't have free will.

 

[gzt]

If you'd like a discussion with her kept within the bounds of Orthodoxy by AFR, you can try this 50 minute discussion (with transcript): Christianity, Anthropology, and Truth with Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, PhD - Good Guys Wear Black | Ancient Faith Ministries

 

[rusmeister]

If you'd like a discussion with her kept within the bounds of Orthodoxy by AFR, you can try this 50 minute discussion (with transcript): Christianity, Anthropology, and Truth with Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, PhD - Good Guys Wear Black | Ancient Faith Ministries

Gz, I really can engage your ideas and offerings, and weigh them fairly, think about them, acknowledge the justice in them, and not merely criticize where I think them wrong.
Looking at this interview, there is plenty to agree with, especially regarding the divisions and the inability of people to listen, whether the engagement is in the flesh, or virtual, through a medium. And I totally agree on the ease and tendency to demonize others.
But there is plenty to disagree with, too. Assumptions made that are NOT granted. They talk about “just” accepting complexity, criticizing the tendency of people to try to come to a final conclusion on a question. We would certainly agree that complexity exists; the point of disagreement would come in the effective denial of final judgement on ideas, and on the tendency of the speakers to dismiss the importance of whether the complex ideas ultimately serve good more than evil, God more than the devil, or vice-versa. They tend to identify the ideas with those holding them, reducing the issue to, for example, when Fr Anthony talks about people asking “What is your attitude toward the Ecumenical Patriarch?”, etc. The speakers themselves give no indication that a person may actually be right in being indignant at an action taken by any one of the figures mentioned, while not making it a judgement of the figure before God.
Their assumption that expertise ought to generally trump the opinions and attitudes of the common people is not given. They lament anti-intellectualism, little reckoning what a pedestal they have put the intellect of the “experts” onto. They speak of the “democratization” (I won’t repeat their repeated error of spelling in that word) of media with social media as if that were a bad thing that transmits more falsehood than truth (which is quite possible), as opposed to the “legacy media” which their words assume generally transmits more truth than falsehood (not given at ALL). They speak of Luddite (attitudes) and “homophobia” (a blatantly false word that transmits one of the great lies of our time). Their own interview is so riddled with doubtful ideas and falsehood treated as true, though it is mixed with truth, as so much is in our time.

But the point is, I actually try to listen to you, and consider what you say fairly. I don’t get that you similarly try. And the sincerity of your position depends entirely on whether you make that effort or not. The speakers here talked about listening. There is a word for those who effectively say “Do as I say, not as I do”.

 

[Chesterton]

I professed that the Church has a tempering affect on her people (over the liturgical cycle Leninists will be less Leninist and Racists will be less racist, ideally), and that whoever joins will usually move towards the center of the cross where the Corpus Christi is whether they started from His Left hand or Right hand. Christ has a moderating effect on us, or not for some whose hearts remain as stone.

Yes. This very thing came up in a conversation I had with a fellow TAWer years ago. I mentioned that I had been much more conservative before joining the Church, and the Church had a moderating effect on me. She said the same thing about herself, except said that she had been much more liberal before joining the Church.

 

[rusmeister]

Regarding the article in the OP, I will say that it seems fairly obvious to me that AFR’s funding must include some that comes from something like Luce’s foundation. The influence of those folks is sufficient to quash any challenge to it. I have raised the issue of AFR before, agreeing with Marjorie Kunsch that it has been unduly influenced by those “liberal” ideas, and that AFR’s content control people have deliberately ignored and even silenced polite and honest inquiry into questionable content.

 

[Justin-H.S.]

Regarding the article in the OP, I will say that it seems fairly obvious to me that AFR’s funding must include some that comes from something like Luce’s foundation. The influence of those folks is sufficient to quash any challenge to it. I have raised the issue of AFR before, agreeing with Marjorie Kunsch that it has been unduly influenced by those “liberal” ideas, and that AFR’s content control people have deliberately ignored and even silenced polite and honest inquiry into questionable content.

I stopped going to AFR after they banned Abbot Tryphon.

Orthodox Sentinel Radio is where it’s at now.