Lunch With the BD #2 - Bethel McGrew
You can read and subscribe to Bethel McGrew’s Substack here. The last “Lunch With the BD” was with Ed West.
We live in an atheistic age — an age in which God has been drained from public life. Still, even as an agnostic it is hard not to hear the whisper of the divine as I sit down for brunch with Bethel McGrew in a diner on the peaceful outskirts of a small Michigan town. The leaves are rich with reds and golds. The air is crisp. Fat is sizzling in the frying pan.
Bethel orders sausage and egg hash and I choose scrambled eggs with a short stack of pancakes.
Bethel, who has also written under the name Esther O’Reilly, is a one-woman counterinsurgency battling the secularisation of modern life. On her Substack, and in essays for First Things, National Review and others, she makes the impassioned case that the world “needs Jesus”.
But this is not just an emotional appeal. There is intellectual heritage here. Bethel’s parents are the renowned philosophers Timothy and Lydia McGrew. What was it like growing up with two philosophers? “It was wonderful, and very odd!”
Dinner-table conversations were unusual, to say the least. My parents made some of their seminal research breakthroughs when I was still young enough not to understand them, but just old enough to be very frustrated about this. Truth be told, I still need to give myself mini-review sessions each time I come back to revisit various technical problems they’ve worked on.
Having philosophers for parents—and not just any philosophers, but good philosophers, who worked on serious problems—gave me a leg up in all sorts of ways. Like a sailor's daughter who learned to swim right away, I learned to think right away. From a very young age, I learned to recognize bad arguments and bullshit. I also, much to some people’s understandable annoyance, learned to recognize the kind of mental blocks and bad habits that even very smart people can persist in, even on the scale of an entire academic sub-discipline. That was a function of the fact that my folks had a lot of range as scholars (as in, my mom has entered three separate scholarly disciplines, none of which was her undergraduate focus). They did have particular specialties, but they were also exceptionally good at thinking outside the box and interrogating all kinds of specialists in all kinds of fields with fresh ideas. And still are! I don’t know why I’m referring to them in past tense!
Our breakfasts arrive. My “short stack” of pancakes is enormous. There must be six giant slabs of cake in front of me. It’s good food, though — especially with a drop of maple syrup.
When I first encountered Bethel, she was writing under her “O’Reilly” pseudonym. What inspired that decision, and what changed? “It’s a bit of a story,” she says:
I was ridiculously young when I first started writing, still in high school. At the time, my parents and I vaguely assumed that my future lay somewhere in academia. We weren’t sure quite where, but regardless, I was strictly advised to protect my youthful little Wordpress rants on politics, social issues, etc., from ever being linked back to me. But I still wrote, simply because I’ve always written, and I needed an outlet to talk about stuff I liked and cared about. My mother was a bit of a political pundit, when she wasn’t being a philosopher, and I was very much inspired by her example, as well as other provocative figures in the Bush-to-Obama-era landscape. I was pretty adorable in this phase, if you want to know the truth.
Fast-forward to my first year of grad school. I began to place bits of freelance writing here and there, pleased to discover that there was a little money in that game. But I still had no lofty aspirations. Placing work in major magazines seemed like a distant goal. But all of that began changing about two years later in 2018, when I broke into The Discourse as a sort of go-to “Christian voice” on the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. By now, I was smack in the middle of an intensive mathematics program, still assuming I had to protect my future earning power. So I resolved to keep doing all my public social critic-y things with a pseudonym. This became progressively more labored as I accumulated bylines and Twitter followers. Though I did agree to “voice-dox” myself when I was invited to do a couple radio appearances with figures like James Lindsay and Douglas Murray. That alone was enough to tip off a few people in the Venn diagram overlap of my followers and my parents’ followers, because my mother and I share quite a distinctive voice!
Fast-forward again to my last year of grad school, which happened to be Plague Year—such a horrible year for everyone everywhere that I don’t want to exaggerate its badness for myself, but still, it wasn’t great. I finished my academic marathon, only to realize that I didn’t actually have the chops or the will to pursue a research career in my degree field. This was awkward, to say the least. Meanwhile, happily but confusingly, writing had turned out to be a much more important part of my life and work than I’d ever predicted.
So by now, I was really thinking seriously about what sort of public figure I wanted to be. Did I want to be forever the anonymous gadfly? Or did I want to be a full public person, with a name and a voice and a face (and a doctorate now, which I could at least wave around a little even if I didn’t use it)? I was a bit haunted by something a mentor said to me about a friend of his who published pseudonymously while making himself the old “when I get tenure” promise. But by the time he got tenure, his two selves had, as my friend vividly put it, “fallen so far out of gravitational attraction to each other” that he never kept that promise.
And so I suppose I just decided that whatever that meant, it wasn't going to happen to me. I also saw a potential future in Christian institutions where I could find friends who would actually appreciate my work. So between one thing and another, cat's out of the bag now, and I have no clue what this will mean going forward. But I guess we'll see!
I smile. I had much the same dilemma when I started to use my real name — with the small difference that I had no prospects.
Christian apologists have an uphill task attracting converts in a culture where the truth claims of religion strike most people as absurd if they are not reduced to vague gestures towards the unknowable. That’s one thing that I respect about Bethel — her defiant confidence in her own case. What does she think is the best argument for the truth of Christianity?
There are a number of (IMO) knock-down arguments for bare theism, which some Christian apologists view as a necessary prerequisite for Christian case-making (a view I don't share). But if you're going to ask me what's the best argument for Christianity, specifically, as opposed to Deism, Judaism, etc., then I would have to say it's the substantial reliability of the documents claiming to give an account of Jesus' earthly doings—and, by extension, of Acts, as a gospel writer's account of the apostles' first public eyewitness claims. The cumulative internal and external case for this reliability is formidable and ultimately unanswerable, in my judgment. What that leaves us with is a classic trilemma: Either the apostles were lying, or they were insane, or they were telling the truth. The one thing they couldn't have been is honestly mistaken. Regrettably, New Testament scholarship has cumulatively reified many bad habits of reading and interpretation, bad habits that Christian apologists haven't always countered with an appropriately robust vigor. I may be biased, but I favor my own folks’ apologetic project, which is in part a ressourcement project drawing on forgotten Christian Enlightenment thinkers. And, incidentally, Mum’s several critically-acclaimed books on the subject are pretty okay too. Meanwhile if anyone wants a free taste of how we think about these things, here’s a little piece I wrote for the Spectator on the gospel of John, which has an undeserved reputation as the redheaded stepchild of the four gospels.
I nod. Somehow, the more pancakes I eat the taller my stack appears to grow. Every time I look at it my neck cranes further upwards. It has reached proportions of a leaning tower of pancakes. An old, well-built man with a long grey moustache looks over at me and smiles.
A lot of discourse about religion nowadays concerns “cultural” Christianity — attempts to mine religion for moral, cultural and political insights relevant to secular times. Here, a leading figure has been Jordan Peterson. As someone who wrote a lot about the keen-eyed Canadian moralist, what does Bethel think of his career trajectory?
It's been quite a trip! And of course it's deeply linked with my own writer's journey. I think we're not going to see a figure like Peterson come around again. He became a phenomenon because he was sui generis. Yes, many of his individual ideas were derivative, but nobody had tried to quilt them together the way he did, with a comparable degree of magnetism and empathy. I think people tended to bin him as self-help and move on, when there was really a lot more going on. With New Atheism sagging, he was a perfectly timed shock to the system of religious discourse, capturing the geist of a whole generation that was bored by Christian-atheist debates but still vaguely felt like this stuff was important. And what was sort of lovely and endearing about it was that he'd already been teaching all this stuff in total obscurity for decades. The man just needed to meet the moment.
Sadly, it also seems clear that meeting the moment took an extraordinary toll on the man, and once he was famous this played out in very public ways. Many of us who follow him have been concerned about the consequences downstream of turning Jordan Peterson into a brand, not to be crude. It's probably safe to say that mistakes were made. At the same time, I'm really not interested in ponderous armchair-quarterbacking from people who are offended by the fact that Peterson sometimes gets angry and shouts about things, simply because they've never been passionate enough to be angry and shout about anything. Many of the voices fussing at him have an obvious political ax of their own to grind. All that said, I did think his reinvention with Daily Wire got off to a clunky start and didn't play to his strengths, at least at first. But I think he's still doing interesting work with his podcast and now with the Exodus project, where he seems to have wisely surrounded himself with other interesting substantive people. I think finding good collaborators will be key going forward, so that he can build community while still retaining his distinctive voice.
How much can secular and religious thinkers co-exist on what we broadly call “the right”?
A great question that I’ve mulled over quite a bit. So I think to begin with, we aren’t all operating with the same definition of what it means to be “on the right,” here. To me, a number of secular people who are described that way (positively or negatively) are really just your classic old liberals who got mugged by reality. But because the Overton window has shifted so much in various areas, we now have an over-inflation of terms like “conservative” or “right-wing.” I’m one of those old-fashioned American conservative types who still believes the rubber really meets the road in the realm of "social issues" like abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage. That means I think there’s a ceiling on the potential for religious and secular co-belligerence against, say, the radical LGBT+ lobby, because from a consistently conservative religious POV, or even just a consistent conservative POV, the rot of LGBT+ activism has been there from the beginning. So it seems inevitable that there will always be an inherent tension there, even though it’s possible to make some common cause with gay men and lesbians who genuinely want to protect the vulnerable from some of the most damaging excesses of the movement. Sohrab Ahmari and Douglas Murray might be able to have a nice panel discussion at NatCon, but one can only have so many polite panel discussions. (All due respect to them both.)
Shifting to the more in-house Christian side of all this, there is an internal fracturing that I see sadly pushing Christians apart from each other and perhaps sparking some attempts to seek cultural co-belligerence with secular people. Just speaking for myself, I find it very difficult to get comfortable with people who might agree with me on, say, abortion, but have proven aggressively wrong-headed when it comes to identity politics, the pandemic, etc. Even if we share a religion, it feels like we can't get along in the way that people need to in order to build social cohesion. There's a lot of hand-wringing about this from Christians who think it's a sin not to be unified or whatever, but I don't know. I think it's just human. Of course, everything would be much simpler if everyone just agreed with me!
The pancakes are beginning to overwhelm me now. All I see is pancake, stretching up towards the ceiling. I desperately pour on syrup from the jug — which has somehow become a pitcher. The old man with the grey moustache is openly chuckling at me.
As Bethel suggests, there is also rhetorical conflict among Christians regarding how to approach modern cultural and political challenges. What is “winsomeness”, which I have heard so much about, and what is wrong with it?
Ha! I see that you're up on your internecine evangelical Protestant squabbles! So, to frame this question for those who are lost, there's an ongoing dustup over, essentially, how conservative Christians should speak in public. Should they bend over backwards to seem nice and likable, or should they just say to hell with it and say what they think, since their ideas are going to be intrinsically unpopular with the wider culture anyway? A good example of "winsomeness" gone embarrassingly wrong would be this incident a couple months back where an Australian pastor got skewered on live TV for "hateful" old sermons where he'd said things like "The death toll of abortion is comparable to the Holocaust" and "Homosexual acts are sinful." Instead of sticking by these controversial but perfectly legitimate ideas, he beat a retreat and kept repeating the phrase "life and love" over and over. It was, as the kids say, very cringe.
Mind you, I don't think there's anything wrong with speaking winsomely in the basic sense of being naturally likable, being thoughtful, not being a jerk, etc. I try to practice all those things myself. The trouble arises when the idea becomes synonymous with passive, shallow virtue-signaling, which I think poor Pastor Mason fell into in his strenuously fruitless efforts to be liked. For a model of how this sort of thing should be done instead, I thought Fr. Sean Sheehy in Ireland did a fantastic job graciously sticking to his guns even after his own bishop told him he couldn't preach basic Catholic moral teaching. (Which tells you something about the absolute state of the Catholic Church, but that's a whole other story.) It's important for Christians not to give the impression that they're somehow embarrassed by their most uncomfortable ideas about human nature and behavior. It's also important that they be willing to defend those ideas as things woven into the fabric of reality, not just quaint little religious notions floating in the ether. Naturally, this is going to offend people who think the fabric of reality looks different. But c'est la vie!
My Tower of Battered Babel has defeated me. I feel full of pancake — in a literal rather than colloquial sense. I am concerned that if I sneeze pancake will shoot out of my nose. But I have one more question for Bethel. She is a writer on more than religion — with her eye also turning to music, literature and politics. Indeed, she is a writer in the truest sense — the sense in which her use of language has value that transcends the themes of her work. What are her ambitions going forward?
A great question whose answer I feel like I’m still discovering in a way. There were some things I didn’t know I aspired to achieve as a writer until I began achieving them, if that makes any sense at all. Some people have asked whether I have a book in me, but I’m not sure I do. I think by now I’ve pretty much mastered the short essay, but writing a book requires you to have one singular unifying Idea, across 250-300 pages. I haven’t found mine yet, I guess! Although I am nursing along a historical project which I’ve taken on as a labor of love, publishing some extraordinary World War I letters by a Scottish chaplain which really deserve to see light of day. Of course the bulk of that project will not be my words, but it’s been a lot of work to plan even the biographical intro I intend to write for it. Once that’s finally out, I’ll be very proud of it, because military history has been a lifelong passion of mine, and this will be a work of real historical retrieval. It also feels like it has TV miniseries potential, but that's only a pipe dream for now!
I think I have a bit of a knack for poetry, so I expect one of these days I’ll pull a chapbook together. That feels like a doable goal. I also have some aspirations in the realm of fiction, though I would need to become a vastly more disciplined person to realize most of them. Fiction is just so bloody hard. So far I have a couple unpublished short stories, one dubiously marketable play, and pages of half-baked notes for about five abandoned novels, so I’m well on my way, clearly. But I’d really like to see a novel through one day, just to have done it, whether or not it goes anywhere. Once I was describing an idea I had for a war novel to a very successful war fiction writer, demurring that it was about World War II and I wasn’t sure there was a market for that. He said “Oh don’t worry about that, just write what moves you.” Words to live by!
Bethel must go to work and I must go to digest. Stumbling out into the streets, I keel over onto the pavement — my internal organs struggling to contain several tons of flour, egg, milk and maple syrup. Suddenly, a hand appears and pulls me up. It is the old man.
“Y’alright?”
There is a twinkle in his eye.
“Yeah,” I say, wheezing, “It’s just this goddamn pancake.”
“Hey,” he snaps, “Language!”
He wags his finger, smiles again and walks neatly away. I watch him go, wondering who I have just encountered.
“That wasn’t very winsome of you!”