Signs of Contradiction

On Trad Wives, Keyboard Warriors, and Saving the World While Losing Your Soul

I know a man who once loved the Church. I don’t know how much he loved Jesus. But I know he loved the Church. He was excited to be Catholic. In the world, he saw chaos, but in the Church he saw order, a safe harbor from the madness outside. He was consoled by the clarity of Catholic doctrine and the consistency of Catholic teaching. He felt pride in the Church’s history and found beauty in her liturgy. So, he dedicated his life to defending her.

And he was always defending her—when he was at work, when he was at rest, when he was online, when he was in prayer. He defended her against those who wanted to water down her doctrines, and he defended her against those who wanted to water down her liturgy. He defended her against those who questioned her teachings, and he defended her against those who ignored her teachings. He defended her against those who hated the Church, and He even defended her against those who loved the Church, but who lived their lives somewhat differently than he did.

There was, you see, much defending to do. It kept him very busy. It filled his time and his head and his heart. Until, one day, after decades of defending the Church, he just stopped. Someone in the Church—many someones actually—let him down in a terrible way, and in the wake of that let down, his faith crumbled. It crumbled instantly.

Maybe, once, his faith had been strong. But by the time it crumbled, the substance of it was gone. He knew what was wrong with people in the world and people in the Church. He knew what he was against. But he no longer knew what he was for. The business of defending the Faith had consumed his faith; it had hollowed it out, removing all the beauty and belief, and filling the vacuum with the hot air of righteous anger. So, when the terrible thing happened, that was it for him. He walked away from the Church and has yet to return.

Another story. This one about a woman—a smart woman, a hip woman, a woman who once had a sharp eye for truth, a keen nose for BS, and a heart full of compassion. She grew up in the Church and loved the Church too. But she was quick to see the hypocrisy of some of her community’s more pious members and knew she didn’t want to be like them. So, she said as much, at first with the hopes of holding those people to account and calling them to do better. But as she called the Catholics around her to do better, she also judged them, witheringly and wittily so. She got attention for that. People applauded her for it. And she liked that.

Years passed, and with each trip round the sun, this woman found more of her fellow Catholics to cast her withering, witty judgement upon. The pro-life ones. The Republican ones. The Latin Mass-going ones. The Rosary-praying ones. The pope-loving ones. The ones with big families and big vans. The ones who weren’t deconstructing. The ones who weren’t scoffing and ironic and sufficiently woke in just the right ways on just the right issues.

No one, she came to think, was as smart as she was. No one, she insisted, saw as deeply as she did. So she stood further and further apart from her fellow church goers, growing angrier and more disdainful of them, until she could barely bring herself to be a church goer at all. She abandoned old friends and made new ones—angry, disdainful ones like herself. And that’s where she still is today, standing apart, judging and scoffing; continually deconstructing, but never reconstructing anything worth giving her heart to; happiest when she has something to be against, but finding little joy in what she claims to be for.

These are real people. You may think you know them. And you might. But the people you think I am writing about are probably not the ones about whom I am actually writing. Because there are so many people like this. After twenty-two years of writing for and about the Church, I know an easy dozen people to whom almost every word could apply— people who have lost their faith in Christ, either while defending the Faith or holding the faithful to account. I know plenty more about whom these words could someday apply. For all I know, they could someday apply to me. They could someday apply to all of us. Because it’s not hard to become like them these days. Unfortunately, it’s quite easy.

It's easy because there is so very much wrong with the world. There are so many truths, institutions, and things of value that need defending. There also are so many ideas, habits, trends, and movements that need critiquing. We are a people unmoored, at sea, confused in our minds and confused in our bodies. Our leaders lack virtue, our shepherds lack conviction, and our opinion leaders are fanning the flames of outrage at it all, because anger sells. If you want clicks, likes, shares, and ad revenue on YouTube, temperance and charity are not the way to go. You need to critique and critique hard. Or defend and defend hard. Whatever you do, you do it hard. You take no prisoners. You dehumanize, and you demonize. That’s how you pay the mortgage.

And so here we all are, in the two thousandth and twenty-fourth year of Our Lord, swimming in a sea of angry, sweeping criticism about everyone and everything: politics, liturgy, family, work, women, women who work, men who stay home, feminism, natural family planning, theology of the body, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, drinking wine, eating meat, using Substack, and (especially this past week) watching The Chosen, over which Catholics on Facebook are currently fighting to the death.

It is exhausting. And it’s also dangerous.

Contra Mundum

About a month ago, someone asked me what I think is most concerning about the Trad Wife phenomenon on social media, (this is a tangent with a purpose, I promise). For those of you whose social media feeds look different than mine, Trad Wife is not an insult. It’s what a growing number of young, traditional, faith-minded women (some Catholic, some Evangelical) proudly call themselves. No group is a monolith, but for the most part, these young women make videos of themselves wearing beautiful dresses and tending to their homes and children. They embrace traditional gender roles, with the husband as provider and the wife as homemaker, and to varying degrees reject many of feminism’s achievements, from women’s right to vote to the good of higher education for women.

Anyhow, my answer to that question was that I certainly don’t find it concerning for women to stay home, not pursue a career, and instead give their time and hearts to homemaking, childrearing, or homeschooling. I think that is good, beautiful, important, and what many of my closest friends do. (It is primarily how I spend my days, too). But none of my closest friends call themselves Trad Wives. They call themselves homemakers, stay-at-home moms, or something like that. They also don’t talk much or at all about submitting to their husbands, the patriarchy, or the marital debt (we generally have more interesting things to talk about). But the constant chatter among self-proclaimed Trad Wives on those topics also isn’t what concerns me most. I mean, it concerns me. I hope they have husbands who respect their wives as persons and won’t ever dominate or abuse them. But it’s still not the primary pain point for me.