The Church and The Tavern

and the absence of community reckoning

What are your core politics?

Where do you stand on practical matters like school choice? How do you expect others to behave in public? Should children be spanked? What is most important to you? How do you feel about moral degeneracy and what, if anything, should be done about it? How should criminals be treated? How do you want to see the community policed? What is your religion or denomination?

Most people could ramble off answers to these questions without too much forethought. Some can even adequately explain why they believe the way they do. An even smaller subset can back it up with any substance.

But what about your neighbors? What do they believe in?

There was a time when Americans had a good understanding of the political and cultural nature of their neighbors. However,

our predecessors didn’t walk over and begin interrogating the new folks in town about their worldview.

They regularly interacted with one another. They attended church together, and all the various and quirky forms of Christian fellowship. Are you likewise from a time when the Presbyterian/Methodist Cake Walk was a regular event? Do you remember the Catholic festivals with cheap keg beer and Monte Carlo in the basement?

For the other end of the social spectrum, the Tavern served as the social blender. Rumors were currency. Words were had, fists were thrown, deals were struck. The long-term meta-result was the formation of social and political alliances.

The examples are (were) seemingly endless. Bowling leagues. Regular card games. Lions Club. PAL Club. Did the adults used to block off the street on the 4th of July and have a community cookout where you could stroll from house to house? How about booster spaghetti dinners at the local high school? I bring to mind these broad examples from my memory, and pose these rhetorical questions to make the point that these activities and physical meeting spaces served as the foundation of what we felt along the way, and now know for a fact we have lost.

Take Kiwanis for example of a private secular institution.

The six permanent Objectives of Kiwanis International were approved by Kiwanis club delegates at the 1924 Convention in Denver, Colorado.

• To give primacy to the human and spiritual rather than to the material values of life.

• To encourage the daily living of the Golden Rule in all human relationships.

• To promote the adoption and the application of higher social, business, and professional standards.

• To develop, by precept and example a more intelligent, aggressive, and serviceable citizenship.

• To provide, through Kiwanis clubs, a practical means to form enduring friendships, render altruistic service, and to build better communities.

• To cooperate in creating and maintaining that sound public opinion and high idealism which make possible the increase of righteousness, justice, patriotism, and goodwill.

The absence of this social and political reckoning of one another has left us a discombobulated mess. Distrustful of one another, and completely disconnected, we’re left permanently vulnerable to subversion of everything we hold dear. We went on as if this social structure was levitated by divine providence, but it was shaped and upheld by solid men. Those men who felt and rose to a socially imposed obligation to use their status to promote, maintain, and defend the good, while pushing back against the bad whenever necessary. (This is what I imagine when Yarvin claims the caviar class are mostly great people)

The natural elites in your community met, mingled, and organized. At the block party and spaghetti dinners, they pressed flesh and influenced. The small business owners met, mingled and organized. The local union guys ALL had “their bar” and their very identity was about being organized. Those lower on the social tier threw darts and drank and fought together, then they organized.

Face-to-face, eye-to-eye, my word, your word.

We’ve all talked shit online when we may have judged differently in-person. We’ve all digitally backed out of appointments before. We’ve all ghosted someone or something. Only when we meet and agree in-person, are the commitment and obligation truly real. It takes a special kind to lie to another man’s face, especially when he’s counting on you for something important, and you’ve personally heard that importance in his voice. Where men gather, the consistent outcome is courage is elevated in unity with others, deals are struck, alliances are formed, and the winds of change blow. This is an American tradition we even learned about in gooberment schools.

So how do we go about reestablishing these social and cultural institutions? I haven’t worked out anything close to a definitive answer to this crucial question, but it’s obvious we need to begin by establishing physical spaces. “Meetups” organized online, are a valiant effort in this regard but lack that commitment element. They tend to be very loosey-goosey-cringe-Millennial affairs, not a group of serious men discussing action. There is rarely even a core group inside of these loose affiliations.

I want to leave you all with a personal challenge. Begin thinking of simple ways we can connect and form relationships. Host a monthly poker night or start a Progressive Dinner group is you’re an old fart.

SIDEBAR

Who remembers or has participated in a “progressive dinner” where you eat each course of the meal at a different group members home? This was a Christian fellowship activity my parents participated in for years and years. We knew where and how one another lived, and we broke bread together.

Perhaps you own some vacant land, and could find a good ol’ boy to push up a decent berm to shoot into. Now you have the makings of a hunt and fish club. You don’t need to start with a fully formed charter, filled with bylaws and robert’s rules gobbledygook, or any political or social purpose at all. We just need to begin to regularly be in the same place, at the same time, casually or intentionally speaking our minds to one another. History teaches us our mutual deals and alliances will form. The process will be slow, as it’s essentially from scratch, but we can do this fellas. As I’ve said for decades, if we’re to stand a chance, we all must make a lifetime effort in defense of our way of life, each in our own way. This enemy will not simply go away. We must force these ghouls back into their shadow world, together. That means replacing them in local functionary positions of government, and prominence on the chamber of commerce, etcetera. Be it Church or tavern, our hopes live or die through in-person organization. If Alinsky’s playbook being perpetrated on us by the Clinton Machine for 30 years hasn’t convinced you of its effectiveness, you must be a much younger man than me, or incredibly unaware.