I finished reading Dabney on Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education, Feminism, and Government edited by Zachary M. Garris, which contain four essays of Southern Presbyterian pastor and Chief of Staff to Stonewall Jackson Robert Lewis Dabney’s, including the essay Women’s Rights Women which contains his famous prediction from 1897 I repeatedly reference (reposted below) about how the franchise will be extended to infinity and so-called “conservatives”, pathetic weaklings that they are, will do nothing. The book is here: amazon.com/Dabney-Fire-…

I thought carefully about whether I wanted to do a post on Dabney (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R… ), and I have another book about him to read so the answer isn’t quite no, but I’m leaving my basic comments in the form of this Note here.

With discernment and wisdom Dabney correctly predicted a number of other important things. He argued that public education - which was gradually being forced onto the states - would first become secular and then turn hostile to religion, and he correctly identifies that treating women equally to men with women’s suffrage (as opposed to morally equal with their own separate domains) would ultimately result in the de-sacralization of marriage, the rise of divorce, and the ruination of children. He had great insight understanding these trends and they happened as he predicted, which makes him stand head and shoulders over most of his era.

The problem that I have with Dabney is that he argues deontologically: he first expressed faith as a Protestant and then he tried to make sense of the world on that basis. On the other hand, I approach things from a consequentialist perspective, and to a lesser extent from a virtue ethics perspective — it’s hard for me to delve deeply into arguments with those arguing from a deontological perspective. So, for example, Dabney views the natural order of the world as a Christian order and the modern world has fallen and continues to fall away from that order; on the other hand, I see that falling away at least in part as the egalitarian ratchet effect, where a society’s core values double down on themselves over time unless they are transvalued, society collapses or is conquered from without, because that’s what I see in history. Because Christian society’s core values are rooted in egalitarianism, egalitarianism will always intensify unless one of those other conditions are met, which I discussed here: neofeudalreview.substac…

Dabney would have rejected that argument out of hand because it would have gone against his faith. And because of that I found his argument style frustrating, even though I found him to be a moral, upstanding and intelligent man. It isn’t possible to return to an earlier age or an earlier era of development; it’s like saying let’s return to 1950s America because that’s when the average American had the highest status throughout the world. We aren’t going to back to that - whatever comes next will be something new and different. And perhaps that new and different thing will be an inner Christianity, the Christianity of the gnostics that Carl Jung and other modern gnostics have predicted to occur as we enter the Age of Aquarius. That’s the Christianity that appeals to me. We’ll see.