- The arrogance of Christian Nationalism;
- How some of science fiction has become absorbed into even literary culture.
From a few days ago.
NY Times, David French, 20 Aug 2026: JD Vance Has a Mind-Bending Vision for America
JD Vance doesn’t think our nation is Christian enough to be truly free. Your faithlessness has broken the social compact, and now it is time for the government to seize greater control.
More and more, the evidence suggests to me that religious faith rots the brain. French goes on:
If I had to distill many of our most important economic and cultural controversies to a single question, it would be, “Who decides?” Who are the people who make the most important decisions that affect your life?
My default answer — and the default answer for my branch of American conservatism — has long been quite simple. You decide. You are the person best equipped to understand your own life, your own family, your own career and your own business.
This sounds nice until you consider the foundations of any kind of society. Do people have obligations toward one another, or not? (Also, here French sounds like Penn Jillette’s defense of libertarianism.)
Many people think not. They know best, for themselves and their families. But what kind of society would that result in? Again, here is the divide: those who prefer individual freedom and complete freedom of choice (including, e.g., the freedom not to vaccinate and thereby spread diseases to others), without having any responsibility to the others that are holding society together; and those who have built modern societies with their big cities and their necessary levels of cooperation.
French goes on, at some length, along the same themes. He concludes:
Into this vacuum steps Vance, with a message that is almost perfectly calculated to appeal to angry Christian ears: They did this to you. They replaced the faith of our fathers with an empty faith in economics and a destructive worship of the individual. They hollowed out our churches. They shuttered our factories.
And now they must be obliterated. They must be silenced. Or, to use Vance’s words, “Go after the companies that are destroying this country and reward the companies that are building it.” And who decides which companies are in which category? Well, Vance and his allies, of course.
But that’s nonsense. The role of the government isn’t to withhold liberty from its enemies but to protect the freedom of all its citizens — not because we’re inherently good or wise but because we know the government is not.
There are the usual paradoxes here. Vance and his like excoriate the left-wing notion of the individual — but what would the opposite be, communism? No; what they want is religious conformance. The “faith of our fathers.” But that faith is not only contrary to American ideals, it is not sufficient to organize the enormous, complex, world, that humanity has built. They don’t realize this.
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One more, on the general theme of science fiction.
NY Times Book Review, Lauren LeBlanc, today: A Second Chance After Her Son’s Death: A Portal to Another Universe, subtitled “In ‘Under Story,’ a grieving woman makes a discovery that could help her recover what she thought she had lost forever.”
The desire to transcend grief is itself a romance. Chloe Benjamin seizes on this wild yearning in her new novel, “Under Story.” In this expansive speculative saga, an estranged couple uncover more than they bargained for when they defy conventional physics and travel through time in a desperate attempt to reconcile the past.
And so on. For at least a decade, or maybe since Audrey Niffenegger’s THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE published in 2003, there is a growing trend of ‘literary’ novels that use traditionally science fictional themes, that are *not* — horrors! — described as science fiction.
Traditional themes like time travel and now even alternate universes are depicted in literary novels without batting an eyelash.
The irony is — as I discussed in my essay published last year — these writers have no understanding of how to think about these themes, no background in how science fiction has drilled into these themes over the decades, considered many angles, and drawn some conclusions. And so they commit rookie mistakes. About which they likely don’t care; to them, they’re not the point. As I discussed in my essay.
And so my conclusion is… : the very idea of science fiction is changing. Or, the very idea of considering fantastic premises is changing. They’ve been changing over the past century. It takes some experience and perspectives to see this. I’m a bit slow, but this is something I’ve recently perceived.
Everything changes. Even the literature of change.
