Happy and religious: the picture is clear

Photo: Airam Dato-on

Is this a matter of cause and effect? See the following two headlines appearing adjacent to each other on news sites:

Gallup poll: More than half of Americans rarely go to church 

Less Than Half of Americans "Very Satisfied" With Own Lives

Religion News Services reports the findings this way, with the Nones ‒ those mainly young people who have no religious affiliation ‒ the standouts:

More than half of Americans (56 per cent) say they seldom or never attend religious services, according to new data from Gallup. Less than a third (30 per cent) say they attend on a weekly or almost weekly basis.

Gallup found that almost all of the so-called Nones (95 per cent) say they seldom or never attend services. More than half of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Orthodox Christians say they rarely attend as well.

Overall, the percentage of Americans who never attend services has more than doubled since the early 1990s.

Weighing on this question is this:

The difference between how older and younger people in the U.S. rate their lives, according to the 2024 Gallup World Happiness Report. Americans over 60 rated their lives at an average “life evaluation” of 7.2 on a scale of one to 10, the 10th-highest globally, while the average evaluation for those under 30 stood at only 6.4. Low youth sentiment dragged down the U.S.’s overall happiness ranking, pulling it out of the top 20 “happiest” countries for the first time. ‒ Semafor

The RNS article continues:

Gallup Senior Editor Jeffrey Jones said the decline in attendance is driven mostly by generational shifts. Not only are younger Americans less likely to identify with any religion, they are also less likely to have been raised with a religion.

“If you were raised in a religion and you have fallen away, you can come back to it,” he said. “Younger people, a lot of times, weren’t brought up in any religion. So they don’t have anything to come back [to].” 

Gallup’s findings echo the data from other major organizations, such as Pew Research Center, that track religion and other cultural trends and have found both religious identity and participation are declining.

A recent Pew study found that most Americans believe religion’s influence is waning. Half think that is a bad thing. The other half think the decline is good or don’t care.

If they believe the decline in religious practice doesn't matter, they should take note of the findings of the second article, which Gallup presents in this form:

 STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• 47% “very” satisfied with their personal lives; one point shy of record low
• 78% very or somewhat satisfied; down five points since last year
• Satisfaction highest among upper-income, married, religious adults

The factors relating to the highest satisfaction warrant a mention. Those with higher education, and therefore with a higher income, are the people who make a commitment in marriage, and they are also alert to the value of religious participation.

According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center:

💢  American Christians are more likely to have college degrees than the general population. 

💢 Highly educated Christians in the United States are more likely to attend church than those with lower education levels. 

💢 On a scale measuring levels of religious commitment, over 70% of Christians in the United States who are educated demonstrate high levels of religiosity.

From a more recent Pew study, these comments:

💢 “Nones” tend to vote less often, do less volunteer work in their communities and follow public affairs at lower rates than religiously affiliated people do.

💢[P]eople who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” tend to have lower levels of educational attainment than religiously affiliated U.S. adults.

💢 By a variety of measures, religious “nones” are less civically engaged and socially connected than people who identify with a religion. On average, they are less likely to vote, less likely to have volunteered lately, less satisfied with their local communities and less satisfied with their social lives.

💢 When asked how they decide between right and wrong, 83% of “nones” say the desire to avoid hurting other people is a key factor. And 82% of “nones” say logic and reason are extremely or very important when they decide between right and wrong.

This chart from Gallup of its latest findings shows how personal lives are shaped for the good by a willingness to marry and to put one's life in the hands of a divine being, the pre-eminent markers of a person who puts the other, the community before self.

With the World Happiness Report we get confirmation that those who most ignore the religious or transcendental dimension—speaking of the young—fail to gain from the solid foundation it provides to build personal meaning and a sense of direction in life. 

Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre and another editor of the World Happiness Report, said the research should ring an alarm for policy-makers.

"We documented disconcerting drops especially in North America and Western Europe," he said.

"To think that, in some parts of the world, children are already experiencing the equivalent of a mid-life crisis demands immediate policy action."

Policies that promote respect for religion and the parental involvement in care of children are what is needed. As to the first element, such policies are unlikely when the unhinged ideology of self-invention has infiltrated so many key social institutions. 

Secondly, the policies needed urgently are like that instituted in Florida and other states where parents are required to take a more involved role in their children's use of social media. On that, see these news reports: here and here; and this interview with Jonathan Haidt, the foremost researcher into why the West's young people are so depressed and confused.

Grace builds on nature, and that's where we have to start, that is, in ensuring the basic virtues of a life in which parents look after their children, and young people show a willingness to take part in caring for the welfare of the whole of society, with less focus on themselves. In that way, the goodness of God reveals itself.

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.

Gender theory's Butler fails new-book test

Andrew Sullivan reports in his weekly blog* that he finds something to celebrate in Judith Butler's new book Who's Afraid of Gender? 

Sullivan is known for his influential work as a journalist and writer, particularly on British and American political and ⁣social ⁣issues. He has long had an online voice, often viewing issues with a countercultural perspective. 

Butler is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced much of the Critical Theory ideology that now holds sway in academia and, as a consequence, in the upper echelons of Western society. Her domain is political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. She is distinguished professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a founding director of the Critical Theory Program there. 

Both Sullivan and Butler have had same-sex spouses.

Sullivan's celebratory note arises from the nature of the discourse manifest in Bulter's book and other sources that he discusses. He puts it this way:

It’s telling, it seems to me, that we’ve begun to see a shift in the tactics of critical queer and gender theorists. They are beginning to make actual arguments in the public square, instead of relying on the media, the government, and the courts to impose their ideas by fiat. 

The arguments presented, however, are intellectually pathethic, Sullivan seems to say: 

Reading [Butler] again after a few years, it becomes clearer and clearer why she is so hard to engage. This is a work so embedded in neo-Marxism it’s impossible to grasp it without accepting its collectivist and revolutionary premises. For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:

Nature is not the ground upon which construction of gender happens. Both the material and social dimensions of the body are constructed through an array of practices, discourses, and technologies.

The material dimensions of the body are just ideas: “Anatomy alone does not determine what sex a person is.” You might think, for example, that when a baby is born with a vagina, we are observing her sex. But for Butler,

sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; sex assignment, understood as an iterative process, relays a set of desires, if not fantasies, about how one is to live one’s body in the world. And such fantasies, coming from elsewhere, make us less self-knowing than we sometimes claim.

Later on, Butler warmly approves of this quote from Catharine MacKinnon:

Women and men are made into the sexes as we know them by the social requirements of heterosexuality.

This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.” I kid you not:

The hetero-normative framework for thinking of gender as binary was imposed by colonial powers on the Global South, to track the legacies of slavery and colonialism engaged in brutal surgical and sexological practices of determining and “correcting” sex in light of ideals of whiteness … Gender norms were created through surgical racism. Black bodies were the experimental field from which white gender norms were crafted. Dimorphism serves the reproduction of the normative white family in the United States.

The golden rule of the woke applies: everything is a product of white supremacy! But of all the things you could call “socially constructed,” the sex binary is the least plausible. It existed in our species before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary. It existed before humans even evolved into the separate and mostly distinct genetic clusters we now call race. How’s that for pre-cultural! It is in countless species that have no access to an array of “practices, discourses, and technologies.” It structures our entire existence. Not a single cell in the body is unaffected by our sex. Our entire reproductive strategy as a mammal is rooted in it. If you can turn even this into a human invention — malleable and indeterminate and a “spectrum” — there is nothing real outside us at all.

This is the anarchy and nihilism intrinsic to critical theory in all its toxic forms. It deconstructs everything and constructs nothing. It is a negation of humanity’s signature mixture of the earthly and the divine, the instinctual and the intellectual. In this grim, neo-Marxist dystopia, the individual is merely a site where various social and collective powers impose their will.

Science therefore has no autonomy beyond politics; art becomes a mere expression of power dynamics; there are no stable truths — which is how critical theory has destroyed the humanities, replacing them with nihilist word-games. So the penis is female. Yeah, you heard that right, bigot. And the proof that it is female is that some people with penises say it is. And that’s it. No other form of evidence is allowed. Orwell presciently described this grotesquery:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

But this party command is the central message of Butler’s work, 40 years after 1984. Here she is on why a dude with a beard, a rock-hard cock, and a luxuriantly hairy back is actually a woman:

[Gender-critical] feminists would claim that being a woman is not a feeling, but a reality. For trans women and men, though, being a woman or a man is also a reality, the lived reality of their bodies. The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many people can participate in the reality it describes, nor does it limit in advance the forms that that reality can take. In fact, feminism has always insisted that what a woman is is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.

But if the open-ended question of what a woman is includes being its opposite, a man, then both categories, male and female, effectively evaporate into thin air. It is like saying that white must include black if it is to be white. That is why Butler and the TQ+ movement are trapped by their logic into being homophobic: they have to deny that gay men can exist at all, because men cannot exist at all, unless they include women in the definition of man.

Sullivan is scathing over what he shows is Butler's non-engagement with the central issues of support for those contending with gender confusion, whether identifying as gay in some form because it's fashionable, or young people being caught up in the trans groundswell. He writes:

On the most blazing practical issues of our current gender debate, Butler has little to say. Can children really give informed consent to irreversible re-ordering of their entire endocrine system before they’ve gone through puberty or even had an orgasm? She offers this non-answer:

Of course, there are serious discussions to be had about what kind of health care is wise for young people, and at what age. But to have that debate, we have to be within the sphere of legality. If the very consideration of gender-affirming care is prohibited, then no one can decide which form is best for a specific child at a certain age. We need to keep those debates open to make sure that health care serves the well-being and flourishing of the child.

This is an evasion worthy of the most craven politician, not an argument by an honest intellectual. What about the fact that 60 - 90 percent of kids grow out of gender dysphoria, as JK Rowling has noted? Another non-answer from Butler: “She does not tell us whether those referenced are tomboys, sissies, genderqueer people, cross-dressers, trans people, or something altogether different.” This is pedantic whataboutism. Almost all of them are gay, as Butler surely knows.

As to other issues: 

Is it fair to have trans women who went through puberty as men compete against women in athletics? Butler cites a single outlier study using unreliable markers claiming that among top athletes, there is considerable overlap in testosterone levels between men and women. But of course, there is no such overlap in any other study — and there are countless of them. The highest testosterone levels among women are far below the lowest for men. They differ so much in degree they differ in kind.

Is the insistence by doctors that if you don’t trans your child he will kill himself, ethically defensible, as Rowling has asked? Butler responds: “She acts as if the claim is unfair or untrue, but what if it is true?” Memo to Butler: it isn’t true 99.7 percent of the time, making the “do you want a dead boy or live girl?” blackmail all the more ethically despicable. This easily found fact is something that Butler didn’t even feel the need to research. 

What they want is an abolition of biological sex

Despite all this, Sullivan is optimistic about a truly human outcome after Critical Theory in all its mutations and displays of hubris is dismantled from the leading heights of Western culture. Sullivan says:

The truth is: we have come a long way in understanding and respecting the unique human experience of being transgender. In the US, trans people are protected by the gold standard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They are everywhere in our popular culture. An entire generation has even been told that being trans is the most glamorous thing you could possibly be. But none of this is sufficient for the transqueers.

What they want is an abolition of biological sex for everyone; the end of men and of women as separate categories; the sex reassignment of children on demand; the destruction of the nuclear family; an end to the Hippocratic Oath; the abolition of homosexuality; the presence of male bodies in women’s showers, prisons and shelter; the creation of fantastical post-everything genders and pronouns; and the criminalization of anyone who would ever question this cultural revolution.

They are not winning, but it is not for lack of trying. The pseudoscience behind child transition is beginning to be exposed and puberty blockers are now banned in the UK outside clinical trials. A new lawsuit is being filed against the National Collegiate Athletic Association for destroying women’s sports. Public opinion has responded to the transqueer ideology by moving in the opposite direction, and now gay people are being caught in the queer crossfire.

Newspapers like the New York Times have refused to be intimidated into suppressing coverage of the debate. Detransitioners are increasingly public about the medical abuse they were subjected to and still suffer from. Leaked files from WPATH have proven that doctors know full well their patients can’t give informed consent and still trans them. Comedians have poked fun at the entire mountain of incoherence and emotional cray-cray of the transqueer. And even gay men and lesbians are beginning to cotton on to the homophobia implicit in all of it. 

An end to the cultural colonialism that washes from Western academia over most of the world is needed urgently. Also needed are people who are willing to show strength of character in joining the mounting numbers exposing the harm done to the vulnerable in society, harm caused by the fallacies inherent in the neo-Marxist ideology of self-invention.

* The Weekly Dish blog is largely behind a paywall.

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.

IVF: An industry built on death

Photo by Nadezhda Moryak

All is not smooth-sailing at present for those involved in receiving or delivering IVF treatment. The Alabama Supreme Court's ruling that the fertilised egg, the embryo, is a human being highlighted the contradiction at the heart of this process of dealing with infertility. 

On the one hand the providers, a lucrative branch of the healthcare industry, offer a child on the receipt of an egg and sperm and the production of an embryo, while, on the other, they typically discard as medical waste the embryos not required.

The starkness of the ethical offence on this point, without regarding other violations spurred by the commerical nature of the business (see here, here and here), is dramatic. The same entity, the embryo, is both a child and merely mattter to be discarded, whether with the parents' consent or not.

That's why moral clarity, when it is offered, is valuable. The American Catholic bishops issued a statement that lays out the key ethical and moral issues of the IVF procedure. Within that context, what is possible and legal is not necessarily moral or ethically justifiable.

The Catholic Church, whose teachings lay the foundations for the concept of the basic human rights, defends the stance that each person’s life is a unique gift and has immeasurable value from the moment of conception. It is for that precise reason that the people of good will should not condone procedures such as in vitro fertilization that result in a loss of life at a massive scale.

The bishops' statement is worthy of examination:

The national conversation in the news about laws related to in vitro fertilization and other technologies creates an opportunity and a necessity to speak about protecting the gift of life itself. Each of our lives has immeasurable value from the moment of conception. In this way, we know that the deeply-rooted desire to bring about new life by having children is good. As priests and bishops, we grieve with and accompany in hope and love the increasing number of families suffering with an experience of infertility. We also encourage restorative, often-overlooked, treatments that can help to address the root causes of infertility.

It is precisely because each person’s life is a unique gift that we cannot condone procedures that violate the right to life or the integrity of the family. Certain practices like IVF do both, and they are often not effective even for their own purposes.

Children have a right to be born to their married mother and father, through a personal act of self-giving love. IVF, however well-intended, breaches this bond and these rights and, instead, treats human beings like products or property. This is all the more true in situations involving anonymous donors or surrogacy. This of course does not mean that our brothers and sisters who were conceived by IVF are somehow ‘less than’ anyone else. Every person has immeasurable value regardless of how he or she was conceived – and that applies, absolutely, to all children created through IVF, the majority of whom have not been and may never be born.

The fact is that, in the IVF industry, many embryos are never transferred to a mother’s womb, but are destroyed or indefinitely frozen, and, of those who are transferred, only a fraction survive to be eventually born. All told, there are millions of human beings who have been killed or potentially permanently frozen by this industry. This cannot be the answer to the very real cross of fertility challenges. In efforts to bring about new life, we cannot turn our face from the many more lives that are cut short and extinguished in the process.

The IVF industry in its extended form operates procedures that are regarded as unethical but which are touted by some who have, not so much a scientific interest, but a commercial enthusiasm for destroying ethical boundaries. These enthusiasts aim "to fabricate and impose new rights to human cloning, gene editing, making human-animal chimeras, reproducing children of a parent who is long deceased, engaging in the buying and selling of human embryos, commercial gestational surrogacy, and more." 

The bishops emphasise their main concern for the human being with these words: 

Among those to whom we and our parishes minister, we know well the deep yearning and even suffering of families struggling with infertility. We seek to ameliorate that personal suffering. Yet we cannot condone a practice and an industry that is built on millions of children who are created to be destroyed or abandoned. 

💢 For more on infertility, including ethical restorative reproductive medicine and research, see    here 

💢 For more on the dark side of the IVF industry, see here, here, and here 

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.

No Natural Law? Danger alert for society!

...one of the most disturbing and, frankly, dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation...

Those who lose touch with their Christian roots often display ignorance of what has made Western civilisation so magnificent. The latest gaffe was performed in a panel discussion on MSNBC which featured Heidi Przybyla, a Politico journalist. She showed some acquaintance with the concept of Natural Law, but could not identify it as the anchor of her own American heritage. Here, from the Declaration of Independence:  

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

A retort to the Przybyla barbarism came courtesy of Robert Barron, Catholic bishop of Winona–Rochester, Minnesota. Bishop Barron says on an video on X: 

On a clip that came out last night Heidi Prsybyla from Politico was on MSNBC. It was one of the most disturbing and, frankly, dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation.

She's going after what she calls Christian nationalism but what she said was there are these Christian nationalists out there who are claiming that our rights don't come from any human authority, they come from God, and she specified that they're claiming, these weirdos, that [human rights are] coming not from the Supreme Court or from Congress.

Well, first of all, it was Thomas Jefferson who made that claim “we hold these truths to be self-evident that we're endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights”. 

May I say, everybody, it is exceptionally dangerous when we forget the principle that our rights come from God and not from a government because the basic problem is if they come from the government or Congress or the Supreme Court, they can be taken away by those same people. This is opening the door to totalitarianism.

This is not some kind of religious nationalism or sectarianism; it's one of the sanest principles of our democratic governance, that our rights come from God.

Yes, government exists to secure these rights, the Declaration says, not to produce them. It is exceptionally dangerous to go down this road because we lose our groundedness in something transcendent and become, therefore, by that very move, victims of a potentially totalitarian state that can take away the same rights that they gave us in the first place.

So can I just say that in their enthusiasm I suppose to go against so-called Christian nationalism they're actually going against the foundations of our democracy. And it's further evidence of this extreme hostility of the left now toward religion.

No, no, precisely as an American I want to hold that my rights come not from something as vacillating and unreliable as Congress or the Supreme Court. They come from God. 

Outside the Bible, the concept of Natural Law has its origins in ancient Greece (Aristotle) and Rome (Cicero) and provided the Apostle Paul with the platform to teach his non-Jew audiences that God speaks to all human beings through the law of conscience; the authentic virtues and the interior resistances of the Gentiles to what is evil bear witness to this fact ‒ "that the requirements of the Law are inscribed in their hearts; and their own conscience will also bear witness for them, since their conflicting thoughts will accuse or even defend them" (Romans 2:12). 

The only proven reliable human system

Zach Costello, a YouTube host, comments:

The left has been infested with this atheistic secular moral philosophy that claims values and rights are man-made. What Przybyla is saying is in fact exactly what the left believes. 

Christians believe in an objective moral law that we are subject to and cannot change.  It’s like gravity. If you abide by and align yourself properly with the law of gravity you will live and thrive. If you ignore, or misalign yourself with the law of gravity you will get hurt or die. All human beings are subject to the law of gravity and all human beings are subject to the moral law. 

Many have died for this truth that our rights come from God because men cannot be trusted with the rights of other men. If you don’t think this is true, you know nothing about history... and that is extremely dangerous. The only proven reliable human system is one that is properly subject to God. We must remain one nation under God for a reason, otherwise we will be a nation gone under, [succumbing to] relativist chaos.

That chaos is already apparent in Western nations as traditional norms are abandoned under the influence of the leadership class, which is largely captured by the fashionable ideology of self-will and self-invention, itself the child of warped parentage, namely marxism and the sexual revolution.

Solzhenitsyn with some plain speaking

In that connection, graduates at Harvard's commencement in 1978 were enriched with insight on post-Christian society from the "outsider" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. . . . 

Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. . . . 

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?. . . 

[The mistaken logic of today’s Western thinking comes from a view that] was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. 

It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists. . . . This new [autonomous materialistic] way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. . . . 

Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity? 

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. . . . This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.

One last thought:

Can anyone doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s appraisal of the future of culture without religion and moral norms is coming to an unmitigated fruition? If we are to escape the clutches of what he rightfully acknowledges as the “forces of evil”, we will have to “ascend upward”, which means rediscovering the religious and moral components of human nature, and bringing them to the forefront of our culture and society.

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.

Tet needs protecting under new colonialism

Traditional games come to town at Tet in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Phuong Quyen/ Tuoi Tre

Tet, Vietnam's Lunar New Year festival, comes under scrutiny every year as its impact on business is assessed and Vietnamese compare notes on their experience of the latest event. This time of recreation and family re-connection has its detractors, but firm defenders, too, as we will see below.

As with Easter, the festival occurs in accord with the lunar calendar, so its dates change each year and so do the arrangement of the public holidays, of which five are codified, though an adjacent weekend can extend the time off work and school. Business operators and experts in the field have raised calls for a fixed-date holiday structure.

Other factors lead Vietnamese to turn their backs on Tet traditions. Businesses entice workers with up to double normal pay rates to stay on the job and keep production flowing. Those with the means often make the most of the opportunity to travel, not to their hometown, but abroad. Young people with few resources sometimes see it as a waste of money to travel home, with fares rising hugely, and because they feel they must comply with the customary gift-giving. Also, they cringe at the practice of family investigating their urban lifestyle, romantic activities, and especially, their economic condition. Vietnamese can be very direct in asking how much a person earns, along with their age.  

Though Tet remains solidly entrenched within Vietnamese society, modern ways of thinking, in particular the individualism and consumerism Western cultural colonialism imposes, are weakening its unifying force and its ability to uplift the people through focusing on what is noble, lovely and admirable relating to the past and present.

Fortunately, Tet has defenders who uphold this precious legacy of their ancestors. Trinh Nguyen is one defender, though she admits to having once been among the "boycott Tet" brigade of young Vietnamese. Now, with doctoral study and work experience overseas, she has very strong views on Tet's value. She writes:

I now see Tet as a special gift inherited from our ancestors. Just as we give children lucky money during Tet, our ancestors worked hard to preserve the tradition of saving a few days a year from work so their descendants will not be swooped away in the frantic typhoon of economic growth.

Let each person use this lucky gift the way he or she chooses. Let Tet be a period when the extroverts have a fantastic time partying and gathering, the introverts have their peaceful moments with their warm tea and Tet candies, the elders cheerfully wait for visits from their children, the young have time to finish their books, and the children learn to appreciate a red Tet envelope containing a sincere New Year wish rather than a high-value note.

The question is not whether to keep or to abandon Tet but rather how to celebrate it. By focusing on the value that Tet brings, Tet is no longer a burden. It is a time of harmony and synchrony between old and young, yin and yang.   

North America fades by comparison

Nguyen compares the Vietnamese approach to life with the experiences of Canadians and Americans:

During the two weeks prior to Tet, people's minds are already busy shopping and cooking. The common work email reply is: "Out of the office." Your co-workers are excited about their extended annual leave. Some projects seem to halt forever; the delivery schedule is uncertain, and many plans suddenly need to wait until after Tet. The whole system pauses to prepare for Tet. I advocated, therefore, abandoning this time- and energy-consuming holiday. I believed that by only celebrating the calendar New Year, Vietnam would be more advanced and more productive.

[However,] after more than 10 years working and studying in both Vietnam and Canada (I now live in Vancouver, Canada, where most people only have one or two days off for their New Year), I realized how much I miss the anticipation of the public announcement of the duration of the Tet holiday for that year. And I wonder, what are we all working for?

The exciting projects are endless. Success and ambition go hand-in-hand. Some people work to bring prosperity to their families; yet, "prosperity" has no limits. Some people work for their passion, and sometimes the passion swirls them away from their family before they realize it. The United States is a good example of this work-centric view.

The United States is particularly sparing with days off. It is the only developed country that offers no paid maternity or paternity leave to expecting parents. Parental leave is at the mercy of the employer. Most mothers, consequently, rush back to work as soon as they finish delivering their baby. A nine-year ethnography study of American bankers by Dr. Alexandra Michel in 2011 showed that the more successful these executives are, the more they work. One study participant shared that he must not miss a meeting even though his serious back pain forced him to lie on the conference table. The idea that hundreds of millions of people in Vietnam and other countries are willing to stop working for one week would be inconceivable to these executives.

Tet is intense, and Vietnamese take this time seriously, but, as Nguyen says, the burdens of Tet participation have to be seen from the perspective of service to society. She also advocates focusing on what is essential to the annual event, and dispense with what is not. "It is a time of harmony..." and within that, it can be a time of creativity in seeking to achieve the ancient goals. 

Ω See also: Tet 2024: Lunar New Year in Vietnam (photos)

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.

Tet 2024: Lunar New Year in Vietnam

Nearing the end of Tet, the Lunar New Year 2024 in Vietnam, it's time to curate some snaps that highlight the rich significance of this festive occasion.

The Government declared that there would be five days of public holidays, ending February 14, which meant a seven-day break from the routine, counting the weekend. Going back to one's hometown is an essential part of marking this time, which involves millions travelling away from factories, shops and offices in the main centres to re-connect with family. Vietnam's population is still predominantly rural based, at 61.23 % of the total population in 2022, according to the World Bank.

Householders turn to flowers to decorate and express the joie de vivre at the heart of this festival. The chrysanthemum plays the leading role here because it is synonymous with the worship of  the dead (for Buddhists), or honouring the departed (Christians). Markets spring up at points of easy access. Farming people grow trees and flowers as a supplementary income. Water melons capture the character of the festival with its generous shape and delightful fruit.

The boats draw up and unload their colourful produce

The few days before Tet's January 1 are hectic for buyers and sellers   

Householders enter into the spirit of the festival's customs

Neighbourhoods join in, with flags and hammer-and-sickle banners from the Ward Committee

Businesses and public offices provide for photo opportunities

Couples and families come out for photos in their traditional finery 

Tradition that is expressed with a touch of innovation is the challenge this festival sets

A sense of history, the importance of gift-giving, re-establishing personal connections as families and friends undertake a working life often far from home ‒ all of these socially important attributes are at the foundation of the Tet festival. Long may Vietnam value it!

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published. 

Mother rejoices at not aborting her terminally ill child

When the choice is - abort a child or not. Photo by Leonardo Gonzalez

Sometimes personal stories contain an unexpected power. One such is told by Laura, a mother who writes about why she carried her seriously-ill third daughter to full term. The outcome of not aborting her is that she and her family have "infinite gratitude for the gift that Caterina has been and is for us". 

Here is Laura's story:

At the end of last March, my husband and I found out that we were expecting our third child. We were not ready for such news, but I remember our happiness that day and my husband's beautiful smile. A few weeks later, we told our two daughters about the arrival of the little sister they had been longing for: we were really happy and I remember the gratitude I felt during those days thinking that I really had everything I wanted from life.

In May the unexpected happened. On the feast of St. Rita, the patron saint of "impossible causes", our life suddenly changed: during an ultrasound scan, potential problems began to appear in our baby, which a few days later were confirmed by a diagnosis that gave us no hope of survival, due to a serious chromosomal disease. I spent the first few months questioning everything, primarily my faith, which collapsed. Why did Jesus decide to give me such great pain overnight? How can one carry a pregnancy knowing that their daughter could die any day? How do you tell your other daughters that their much-desired sister was soon destined for heaven?

I was overwhelmed with grief and anger, I went through dark days. I never denied the encounter with Jesus that I had made years before, but it simply no longer seemed real, current to me in those days. Why had he abandoned me overnight? I always had many friends around, but I remember the loneliness of those days. Nothing and no one could take that pain away from me. I did not feel able to carry on with a pregnancy in which our child, given the diagnosis, would have died anyway. Everything seemed out of my reach and I felt totally incapable of standing up to what was asked of me. To stay on my feet I tried to cling to my family and do nice things, but nothing sustained me.

Until a meeting with a gynaecologist changed everything. During the first ultrasound with her, I realised that she loved my daughter more than I did, and above all she looked at her as a child and not because of her illness. I was so struck by this doctor's gaze on me and my husband, as well as on our little girl, that from that day on, I began to see a possible way forward: within such a companionship, it was possible to carry a pregnancy. From that day on, I slowly began to give in to His presence, starting with the meeting with this gynaecologist who helped us not to look at our daughter through the eyes of the world.

They were intense months, in which darkness, sadness and pain did not lack, but in which we received much more than we asked for. They were months of encounters, of new friendships, of beauty, a succession of "yeses" by letting what happened happen, and every day we thanked the good Lord that our little girl was still with us. We learnt to live one day at a time, certain that within each moment there was and is everything we need, certain that when we let Jesus in, grace happens.

I never felt "capable" of carrying this pregnancy, but [...] I know Who made it possible. I was then struck by our daughters, who for months asked simply and insistently for the miracle of their sister's healing, certain that Jesus is good and would listen to them. The certainty with which they prayed was beautiful to look at every day.

During the last period of pregnancy, important medical decisions were made, but every time we were discussing them with our gynaecologist, I went home with a grateful heart. We always chose together with her what seemed truest to us, looking at the great good that by now Caterina (this is the name we gave our little girl) was for all of us, within a communion that only a friendship in Jesus and of Jesus makes possible. I remember each ultrasound scan as the most desired moment, both because we could see our baby girl – knowing that, given the situation, there might not be another one – and because it was evident to me how within such a companionship and gaze even my pregnancy, which on the surface was only pain, was a gift and a preference that God had wanted for us.

The closer the day of delivery approached, the more at peace I was, certain that whatever happened was the best thing for us and for Caterina. We were accompanying her to the fulfilment of her destiny, something that we are also doing with our other two daughters; Caterina's fate was simply already written.

The constant embrace of our friends and all the doctors I met in the hospital really made me experience a joy that is difficult to describe because it is humanly impossible except within the work of Another. Our prayers and those of our friends never failed us (they prayed for us from Argentina to Singapore) and I often wished to pray alone, no longer asking for explanations, but asking for Him to show Himself in every moment. I realised that what saved me, and still saves me today, is to ask: "Where are You now?".

Caterina taught us to look at our daughters in a new way, truer and more certain of the good destiny that is there for them and for our family. Our daughter was born in Heaven on exactly the day she should have been born here on Earth. On that day the unthinkable happened again: we experienced great love and experienced unimaginable beauty, even within the pain of our child's death.

I remember that shortly before the birth, we went with the gynaecologist to pray in the little chapel of the hospital. That day there was nothing truer than standing before the Cross, before the One who thought of us and wanted us together, making Caterina's miracle possible. That day, as well as the day of the funeral, showed us again that within a companionship one can say "yes" to God with peace and joy in their heart from another world, in this world. The real drama today is not not having Caterina with us, the real drama is not saying "yes" to Christ in every moment.

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.