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By Pastor Mark Brown
Our host apologetically tweeted something about Milo Yiannopoulos to the effect that “we know you can’t stand the guy, but…”.* I replied, “They couldn’t stand him because his fool act personified everything that they both found attractive and repellent about themselves. And it forced you to realize, at least intuitively, that you can’t separate those parts. And so they’d have to choose.” And then he asked me for a quick article expanding on that. I’m not sure it is really possible because it is more intuition, and intuition that you might not share. Of course that not sharing I would simply say is refusing to make the choice in front of you. But banishing the fool doesn’t get rid of the power of his comedy.
But this is a quick attempt anyway. And I’m cribbing a bunch from the most interesting (and courageous) scholar of the last decade, Rachel Fulton Brown. If you start reading her posts, or books, or watching the few videos of her lectures you can find the day gone faster than you imagine. This post is a good entry, and one I’m going to borrow from. Milo in his person exhibits everything that our society believes is good. Milo in many ways is exactly what we find attractive, or at least are told to find attractive.
“How else should MILO appear? Half-Greek, half-English, half-Catholic, half-Jewish, gay, white and married to a black man, MILO is more than just an existential threat to the SJW outrage machine. He is symbology incarnate, a story come to life.” Also, Milo’s well known consumerism captured so well in the picture above, reminding us of the evangelical pastoral sneakers micro-who-ha-ha.
Milo checks off all the identitarian boxes that we like to see in ourselves. See how enlightened and noble we are. See how fine a taste we have. And that taste isn’t flashy, like driving a red lambo, or installing a gold-plated toilet. It is jeans, sneakers, t-shirt, jacket and aviators. Everyman’s wardrobe. And it all looks gorgeous on a man who is himself gorgeous. But all of this notice is external, a pose, a mask, a role, a story we tell ourselves about our nobility.
All of this is married though to his internal things. Milo professes to be a Roman Catholic. He even professes to be a very bad one, which someone in a homosexual marriage would have to be. This is the necessity of repentance. He refuses to say all that he is, is good, but says it must come down. It must be made less. Milo acknowledges the role of “grooming” in homosexual culture. When drag queen story hour, books about the prost-i-tot of the week, prostituted by parents who want to give their 7 year olds puberty blocks and cut off their privates are the tops in culture, Milo says I’m the natural outcome of this. Along with this comes Milo’s embrace of Donald Trump. You can’t have exhibitionist culture without allowing the Hugh Hefner presidency. He would get his big start with “gamergate” which was simply exhibitionism and free speech mostly for incels who want their big-boob’ed anime on the PS4. You can’t have free speech for me and not for thee. Milo called us on this. The Catholic profession is the greatest sin, but the second biggest one, maybe more immediate, is Milo’s knowing admission that everything he represents, rests on a healthy society of men and women married raising children. The transgressive, like the camp, is always parasitic on the good, the straight.
And so we have to choose. If we choose the external Milo, vice must give its tribute to virtue. External Milo cannot be at the helm of society. He can only exist on the edges. If you insist on putting the transgressive in the drivers seat, the society that Milo exists in will not last long. Col. Jessup was right, “you need me on that wall.” But Milo the fool also has a word to Christians currently embracing exile porn, or maybe reveling in the Benedict Option freedom saying “not my monkey, not my circus”. Correct, it is not yours. And maybe you won’t be able to take back the culture. Maybe the cult is not strong enough. But you surely won’t do it by refusing to build the tower. You won’t do it by burying your talent. And c’mon, get real. Are you going to lose to a bunch of transgressive poseurs like Milo? Be a man. Build it.
FIN
theology like a child 