We’ve followed the supremely dumb sports programs at Notre Dame on this blog forever (first post is about the cathedral; scroll down); but who knew the campus altogether – from its infected president on down – was so fucking stupid?
Several people in fact wore masks at the Rose Garden event (check out a photo). Notre Dame’s leadership seems keen to model a herd – lemming? – mentality for its students.
… up in flames.
Nearly a thousand years of history going up in flames.
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… Like a prodigious skeleton of fire
Leaving an immense void — twisted iron, indented
clock wheels, broken muted bells.
Foolish imposter doors which did not open
Hang in high galleries. Perforated the great
roses — intense blues, purples,
Reds so warm and vigorous which burnished
The rays of the midday sun. The gargoyles drip
heavy tears. I hear the bells falling.
Wind is raging among the naves and corpses.
— Daisy Aldan, The Destruction of Cathedrals.
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From the Notre Dame School of Polyphony (1160-1250).
Dear Lord forgive us our buyout and our fraud
And all else we do unworthy of our God;
Show mercy, in thy holy name!
For nothing matters more than football games.
Like Catholic, football-obsessed Boston College, Notre Dame of all places is beginning to show signs of spiritual strain. More and more fans confess that the school’s squalid football program – which slimes along its merry way accompanied by a tireless chorus of We’re godly from the school – is so squalid, so hypocritical, that they just can’t do it anymore. Notre Dame is a choir boy gone rancid, and while most of the congregants have decided through an effort of will to grip their hymnals ever tighter and ignore the stinky lad, some have become overwhelmed by the smell. They may still buy tickets to the games, but they’re “finding it hard to care very much.” They’re finding it hard to forget six player arrests in one night, and blahblahblah you know the picture. You know it from forthrightly filthy programs like University of Miami, and you know it from equally but not at all forthrightly filthy Notre Dame.
Notre Dame is Blanche DuBois flouncing around a dump, twirping about her moral purity and her clean bright Southern manse. You just want to look away.
Forget the six ND football players arrested in a span of a few hours last weekend for various violent offenses; cast your mind back to Notre Dame having recently paid football coach Charlie Weis a $19 million buyout.
Weis, currently doing nothing in a gated community in Florida while his wife buys horses, chats with an interviewer about his son’s effort to attend ND:
Charlie Jr. was on track to enroll at Notre Dame. Weis says [ND’s president] himself had promised that he would be accepted, as long as his grades and test scores qualified, which they did. But after Weis was fired, Notre Dame sent a letter deferring Charlie Jr.’s acceptance. Not long after that, Weis says, he got a call from someone in Notre Dame’s development office making him an offer: If he’d donate some of the money Notre Dame owed him back to the school — “seven figures,” Weis says — Charlie Jr. could get in.
Weis said no. Charlie Jr. ended up enrolling at Florida when Weis was offensive coordinator there for a year. Then he followed his father to Kansas. [To make matters worse for Weis, he also collected many millions in buyout money from Kansas. Now he’s a huge multimillionaire with nothing to do!]
Later, Weis says, a fundraiser for the school told him that Notre Dame used the [buyout] contract in pitches to donors, saying they needed to give more because the school still owed Weis so much.
Notre Dame: Classy.
Of course, this is what big-time football brings to the university, house of reason. It brings the adorable primitivism of humanity’s infancy. Like fraternities, to which it is symbiotically attached, it brings “shirtless kids covered in paint, shivering in the November weather as they cheer their team on,” as one pundit excitedly puts it. The same writer goes on to say:
If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe. You must make them fall in love with their school, and believe that they and all the other alums are united in a family. Your temple of reason cannot rise to the heavens unless it is grounded in irrational love.
Tribalism: The core of any great university. I think that’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Students come to us already members of high school cliques and neighborhood gangs; our purpose is to strengthen those cultic tendencies.
But it’s not just tribal, magical thinking we’re after. Let’s say it straight out – it’s ultimately stupidity we want to convey:
[T]wo schools [Kansas and Notre Dame] [are] now paying Weis nearly $23 million not to coach.
And if UD were a Catholic (she’s Jewish) she’d be less than thrilled that Our Lady’s been dragged through the mud again and again by the drunks and academic frauds that play under her name.
Of course big-time university football besmirches all schools (one exception might be Brigham Young), but while the lowest of the low, like the University of Miami and Auburn, tend to be refreshingly honest about their total mindless commitment to sports, other schools, like the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Notre Dame, are constantly flouncing around telling everyone about their integrity. Both amply deserve what’s happening, and they certainly won’t learn from it. Both have invested far too much money in one of the dirtiest rackets going.
… just keeps it coming! Good on you! Especially for a religious school.
Courtesy of Professor Angst.
“I honestly don’t think it was any worse than any of my other classes. I’m sure they were browsing Facebook during class, but they did that before with laptops and smartphones. There are a lot of professors who would disagree with me on this,” [Angst] added, “but I believe we’re in a multi-tasking world and we need to figure out how to listen and do these things at the same time.”
Can’t argue with that sort of success.
Yeshiva University a few years ago ran a lot of slick ads in the New York Times intended to attract a more cosmopolitan applicant pool. Notre Dame has long presented itself as a respectable liberal arts university. But something always happens to put parochial schools back in their places, and no one who watches these schools with any care should be surprised when they show their true colors.
As in: You really shouldn’t be surprised at evidence that important Notre Dame groups are trying to get rid of a professor who supports reproductive freedom. And that its administration has been outright hostile to the professor. Why do you think illiberalist Patrick Deneen left Georgetown for Notre Dame? He rightly identified the place as really, really Catholic.
“Alabama always ranks at the bottom” of every state-based quality of life list, notes a local opinion writer; and if you want to know how they do it, look no further than Auburn University’s Neville Arena, purpose-built for basketball, but – er – converted the other night, by the school’s multimillionaire sports coaches (football and basketball), into a massive Christian revival/pep rally/public baptism. We Ask You Lord/In Jesus’ Name/Make Us Win/ Tomorrow’s Game…
Some have dared point out that Auburn is a public university, and here in the States, uh….
But the Guv herself just shot that right down as in like how dare sicko atheists dare tell us what to do down here …
And meanwhile all the smart people on campus (Jews, Hindus, Muslims) take one look at this sponsored, schoolwide thang and say Wow this is even freakier than Notre Dame… I’m getting the hell out of here…
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And that’s how you do it. That’s how you keep your school – and your state – stupid. In the name of the Father, the Run, and the Goaly Posts, Amen.
What is arguably the book’s most important claim — that liberalism is beset by an insuperable tension between a conservative mass public and an insular liberal elite — is never established with a single empirical study or even a simple piece of polling data…
In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.
Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”
Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions.
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While reading the book, Beauchamp emailed Deneen asking what he thought of some of Beauchamp’s reactions to his arguments. Deneen completely refused to engage:
“I’m quite certain you’re unlikely to deviate from any conclusions you’ve already settled upon, regardless of what I might try to convey in response to any questions.”
Beauchamp sees in this refusal Deneen’s revolutionary commitment to “conflict” rather than conversation with the liberal enemy. UD sees it as far more insidious, the sort of snobby/nihilistic reaction you get from a person who left a position at Georgetown University because it’s not truly Catholic and “insulated” himself (to use a word Deneen constantly uses to characterize out of touch liberal elites) at the University of Notre Dame, and who – should God grant him long life – will eventually leave Notre Dame for Ave Maria University, and then Ave Maria for a pontifical campus in Rome within walking distance of the Vatican. It don’t get no more cluelessly elite than an intellectual shut-in uniquely possessed of the truth.
Harvard’s new chaplain di tutti chaplains, elected unanimously, is an atheist. This gesture acknowledges the super-rapid rise, in America, of the category Nones — non-church-goers, many of whom retain spiritual leanings. Some Nones are atheists, or close to it; others look like mild versions of deists. All seem to have abandoned organized religion, though all seem subject to the same existential anxiety and ontological questioning typically shared by traditional followers of God. We’re talking about a quarter of the US population – on a par with evangelicals, and with Catholics – and a segment that’s growing really, really fast.
Why is this happening? In reading about it, UD has encountered many theories, starting with the general point that increasing secularization is baked into most modern, successful countries. Even so, the US has until quite recently exhibited strikingly higher rates of belief in God and of church attendance than places like Norway, France, and England. What has changed?
Nonreligiosity is on the rise far beyond the confines of Harvard; it is the fastest growing religious preference in the country, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 20 percent of the country identifies as atheist, agnostic or nonreligious — called the “nones” — including four in 10 millennials.
The reasons that more young Americans are disaffiliating in the world’s most religious developed country are varied. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith attributes the trend partly to the growing alliance between the Republican Party and the Christian right, a decline of trust in institutions, growing skepticism of religion in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a shift away from traditional family structures that centered on churchgoing.
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The trend, [Robert] Putnam says, is borne out of rebellion of sorts.
“It begins to jump at around 1990,” he says. “These were the kids who were coming of age in the America of the culture wars, in the America in which religion publicly became associated with a particular brand of politics, and so I think the single most important reason for the rise of the nones is that combination of the younger people moving to the left on social issues and the most visible religious leaders moving to the right on that same issue.”
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Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has sought to win support by adopting conservative Christian positions on same sex marriage, abortion, and other cultural issues. But this appeal to religious voters has had the corollary effect of pushing other voters, especially young liberal ones, away from religion. The uncritical embrace of President Donald Trump by conservative evangelical leaders has accelerated this trend. And the Roman Catholic Church has lost adherents because of its own crises. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that an overwhelming majority US adults were aware of recent reports of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and most of them believed that the abuses were “ongoing problems that are still happening.” Accordingly, many US Catholics said that they have scaled back attendance at mass in response to these reports.
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Note what’s not cited: The intellectual stardom of the New Atheists. You might expect this to appear as a reason, but UD didn’t expect it to. It’s rare to reject organized religion merely because of arguments people make against it. Lots of people have pointed out that Dawkins and Hitchens recycle the same anti-religion arguments people have made for centuries. It seems more likely, as the above comments suggest, that you leave organized religion because of the actual beliefs and behaviors it seems to generate in your time, in the world around you. Ol’ UD, for instance, thinks this photograph alone probably accounts for two million or so newbie Nones.
For a closer look at some of those beliefs and behaviors, read rural Texan writer Natalie Jackson:
“When my classmates were hospitalized with COVID-19, there were repeated calls for prayers and proclamations that God would provide healing. When they died, those prayer requests became comments that ‘God called [them] home.’
The belief that God controls everything that happens in the world is a core tenet of evangelicalism — 84 percent of white evangelicals agreed with this statement in PRRI polling from 2011, while far fewer nonwhite, non-evangelical Christians shared this belief. The same poll also showed that white evangelicals were more likely than any other Christian group to believe that God would punish nations for the sins of some of its citizens and that natural disasters were a sign from God. What’s more, other research from the Journal of Psychology and Theology has found that some evangelical Christians rationalize illnesses like cancer as God’s will.
This is why I remember friends and acquaintances in Leon County when I think about how religious beliefs influence one’s attitude toward COVID-19 and vaccination. PRRI’s March survey found that 28 percent of white evangelical Republicans agreed that ‘God always rewards those who have faith with good health and will protect them from being infected with COVID-19,’ compared with 23 percent of Republicans who were not white evangelicals. And that belief correlates more closely with vaccination views among white evangelical Republicans — 44 percent of those who said God would protect them from the virus also said they would refuse to get vaccinated. That number drops to 32 percent among Republicans who are not white evangelicals.
Complicating matters further, the pandemic also fits neatly into ‘end times’ thinking — the belief that the end of the world and God’s ultimate judgment is coming soon. In fact, nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Republicans (64 percent) from our March survey agreed that the chaos in the country today meant the end times’ were near. Faced, then, with the belief that death and the end of the world are a fulfillment of God’s will, it becomes difficult to convince these believers that vaccines are necessary. Sixty-nine percent of white evangelical Republicans who said they refused to get vaccinated agreed that the end times were near.
Moreover, given how many white evangelicals identify as Republican or lean Republican — about 4 in 5 per our June survey — disentangling evangelicals’ religious and political beliefs is nearly impossible. Consider how many white evangelical leaders like former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. downplayed the severity of the pandemic in line with Trump. Falwell was hardly the only evangelical leader to do this either. If anything, the pattern of white evangelical resistance to vaccination has reached the point where some white evangelical leaders who might otherwise urge vaccination hesitate to do so because of the political climate.”
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And Falwell Jr’s a twofer: Told people fuck-all about what pandemic; and turned out to be a flaming moral degenerate.
Hitch used to say that until people stop being afraid of death, religion will always be a winner. Point taken. But it’s just as true that as long as religions spawn large numbers of dumb and dumber fanatics (dangerous fanatics is for another post), secularity’s got a fighting chance. Ask Adelle Goldenberg.
Adelle Goldenberg, 22, grew up in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, where she recalls being told that she could not attend college. In preschool, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, her answer was simple: a bride. It was the only thing she could envision for a girl like herself. When she turned 19, she applied to Harvard in secret and fled the community.
Once at Harvard, she was wary of assuming any religious label, but she still yearned to find people wrestling with issues deeper than academic achievement. She started attending meetings of the humanist group and discovered in Mr. Epstein a form of mentorship that felt almost like having a secular rabbi, she said.
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One more thing, if I may: Read Jackson again, and add to her characterization of rural evangelical Texans the fact that every one of their houses is dripping with guns. It’s hard for UD to avoid the conclusion that these people are death-lovers — passive nihilists who can’t wait for it all to be over in any one of the many ways their… arsenals (see notorious rates of suicide vs. homicide with household guns) of faith provide. And then eternal bliss.
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UPDATE: You have to admire the fervency of the evangelicals.
An evangelical pastor and senior VP for a non-profit called National Religious Broadcasters was fired on Friday for promoting COVID vaccines on MSNBC’s Morning Joe… National Religious Broadcasters, a 1,100-member organization of Christian communicators, told [Daniel] Darling his statements violated their policy of remaining neutral about COVID vaccines, Religion News Service reports. He was told he could sign a statement admitting he had been insubordinate, and admit that his pro-vaccine statements were wrong, or be fired. He chose the latter.
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Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several [evangelical] colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines.
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We’ve reached snake-handler levels of stupidity here.
Probably forever. And get a load of all the headlines, many of them featuring his Notre Dame connection. Which you can instantly confirm by clicking on his... Hero Page. UD remains baffled as to why football factories don’t employ someone (respectable universities do) to take down the pages of the disgraced.