A Rainbow Connection Longing for Blood
Using the European Middle Ages for Murder
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
The archive of the European Middle Ages is vast, both literally and figuratively. Scholars who work primarily on other periods can tend to skate by the period, mischaracterizing it as one bereft of written and material remains, and therefore deeply unknowable. But pundits can also skate easily into the period, pillaging it cafeteria-style by making their own rainbow connection - trying to directly link something happening now to a nostalgic version of “way back then.”
Recently in The National Review, and almost certainly in response to the horrific school shooting in Nashville, Michael Brendan Dougherty attempted his own rainbow connection - linking the very fact that trans people exist to a medieval heresy called “Catharism” (direct link his piece here but unpaywalled via the Internet Archive here).
Dougherty is a supporter of the Latin Mass and other items of “trad Cath” orthodoxy. He’s long argued for a nostalgic return to the past for both Catholicism and American society, arguments that cloak, not even so well, some deeply troubling associations with antisemitism and white supremacy. But this most recent piece goes even further, something the FBI was recently worried about. It calls for violence.
Dougherty opens with a straw man, suggesting that we are just like our 12th-century predecessors in that “snobbish doctrines” have invaded a godly-ordered society. He writes:
The twelfth-century Catharist heresy… has many similarities to the transgender debate today. It aimed to destabilize the natural family and the political order that rested on it. It could view the physical body as a “prison” that hampered the spirit. Catharist dualism led to double-mindedness. The “perfect” led lives of strict chastity and vegetarianism, but others following the same doctrines could urge themselves to participate in debauches. Similarly, trans-identifying persons are tempted toward extremes in sexuality, either to infantilization, portraying themselves as pre-sexual innocents, or cold-hearted dissipation and depravity.
The trans heresy lives in a matrix of tech and biomedical business interests that thrive on the idea of humanity reconceiving itself as a thing as malleable as a social-media avatar. It fits hand and glove with a managerial elite that would prefer to govern a different kind of human subject, one without a soul or heart, one incapable of loyalties that supersede the managerial apparatus, and totally dependent on the state to vindicate its dignity.
But:
There’s so much wrong with Dougherty’s characterization, it’s almost hard to know where to begin.
Historians generally argue now that there was no such thing as “Catharism” writ large — that there was in southern France in the late 12th and 13th centuries an anti-clerical movement that in large part rejected the wealth and worldliness of the medieval Church and wanted to refocus attention on things of the spirit. These movements were organic, beginning in more rural areas, often in local parishes and far from universities and centers of political and religious power.
But scholars ALSO have shown that the extremism and debauches attached to this very much populist movement were by and large creations of a learned Inquisition that saw demons in every shadow, that was (for both theological and political/ cultural reasons) trying to purify and “order” medieval European society as a whole. Late medieval metaphors of the Christendom as a “body” predominated alongside a growing attention to the Eucharist in the Mass (as a miracle in becoming Jesus’ body), so that any deviance was an illness created by the devil to pave the way for his return foretold in the Book of Revelation. The real elites of medieval Europe, university-trained inquisitors for example, were sent to the provinces to look for anything weird and record what they found.
In other words, he’s actually literally wrong on every thing he says.
And that’s the point.
He doesn’t want history; he wants nostalgia. He wants to overwhelm the reader with a veneer of learning, even citing a “scholar” by the name of Hilaire Belloc to support his argument. But Belloc was no scholar. He was, in the words of the late Prof. Robert Martin, instead “a religious bigot, a notorious anti-Semite, a social snob, and a political turncoat; his hero in this century was Mussolini, [and] considered the League of Nations mere ‘Masonic rubbish.’”
For example, Belloc said that the only path to peace for Jews living in Europe and the Americas was to set them apart as a distinct nation and not allow them to mix or assimilate with whites. Related to Islam, Belloc said that it was a heresy and that:
Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam… [But] it is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.
In other words, Dougherty is lumping - eliding as white supremacists like Richard Spencer have done - Christendom and “Western Civilization” and then positioning any deviation from a norm as a danger that must be destroyed.
Dougherty ends his essay by saying:
The trans movement runs up against the old Christian orthodoxies… We are not contending with a mere political movement, but a destructive and fundamentally sacrilegious revision of the Western creed. And the stakes could not be higher. Heresies that triumph take from the orthodox the tools to establish themselves as the new faith: crusades and inquisitions.
Dougherty is calling for blood. Destroy them before they leverage our own institutional power, our own ability to enact violence, against us.
Dougherty is using an incorrect understanding of the past, dragging it directly into the present, in order to argue for preemptive war. Kill them before they kill us, he’s saying. There will be blood on his hands.
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