Next, he was sent to Ramadi—the deadliest city in Iraq— and would later be sent to Helmand Province— the deadliest province in Afghanistan.

My most badass guest on the show, and the most badass man I’ve ever spoken to. Hope you enjoy.

I’m writing on September 30th, 2026. Right now, U.S. forces are withdrawing from Iraq, again. The Iraq War began in 2003; we left in 2011, then re-entered in 2014 to put down ISIS. Supposedly, this will be the end.

In the run-up to our departure, I’ve been interviewing historians and veterans about Iraq. Every time I look into the war, I’m struck by how incoherent it was. America’s leadership had wildly different ideas about our aims, strategy, and tactics. Most histories of the war treat these disputes as a sideshow and focus on battles, diplomacy, etc. But the jungle of ideas is thick enough to merit its own book. I could never write it, but someone with more time, brainpower, and funding should. An Intellectual History of the Iraq War would zoom out from military matters and focus on our leaders’ thinking, then zoom back onto the battlefield to trace the way our leaders’ ideas helped or harmed combat operations.

A lot of the U.S. government’s internal bickering was recorded. Bush, Rumsfeld, Petraeus, etc. made plenty of on-the-record statements that reveal their thinking. For example, Dick Cheney favored going to war because he wanted to oust Saddam in 1990, and he saw this as a second chance. Condoleezza Rice thought that Saddam’s flouting of the UN was so egregious that a war was needed to defend the credibility of the “international community.” Some have theorized that Paul Wolfowitz, the war’s chief architect, saw the invasion as a means of deterring threats before they arose. The United States would make an example of Iraq: if any countries considered crossing us, they would remember what we did to Saddam, and think again. Imagine a schoolyard bully who beats up a kid to intimidate his classmates— that was how Wolfowitz saw the Iraq War. His ambitions were sweeping. Not only would this display of American power cow would-be antagonists, it would breed lasting, global peace. A chaotic, violent world would be transformed into America’s tranquil playground.

If only.

Tracing how these disagreements filtered down to the battlefield— as tactics and strategies were misunderstood, half-implemented, or hobbled by compromise— would be an important contribution. An intellectual history of the war could also examine our leaders’ more subtle, shared assumptions. For instance, the war’s planners all seemed to conflate “democracy” with “freedom.” In the West, republicanism and liberalism grew up together, so our leaders assumed that one followed the other. But it’s not true. Democracy and liberty have no innate connection. A king’s subjects could be free, while a fascist could win at the polls. After Iraq’s elections, our government assumed liberty, rule-of-law, and peace would unfold, but Iraqis voted in sectaries who harassed, tortured, and murdered their countrymen. Both the initial mistake, and our leaders’ disillusionment with democracy, deserve a place in this book.

The intellectual currents on the Iraqi side also matter. Shi’ites vs. Sunnis would be the easy part, but the differences between Shi’ites like Muqtada al-Sadr, who ran the Jaysh al-Mahdi terrorist militia, and Ayatollah al-Sistani, a fair-weather cooperator with the U.S., would be more revealing. Ditto with the differences between the first and second leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq— the first, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saw himself as protector of Iraq’s Sunnis; his successors saw Iraq as a theatre for jihad against the Great Satan. Did those differences change how Al-Qaeda in Iraq operated?

This might be a stretch, but a historian could also incorporate America’s domestic intellectual scene into the book. In 2000, George W. Bush campaigned on keeping American troops home, casting the Democrats as trigger-happy, globalist do-gooders. By 2003, the Right had become pro-war, the Left, anti-war. This lasted into the next presidency. Obama stayed out of Syria and kept his intervention in Libya limited, probably because of the Iraq fiasco.

In a small way, I’m part of this story as well. I became interested in the Iraq War as a kid, and in 7th or 8th grade, I decided I was against the war. That was the first time I broke from my parents’ political views. Like most political pre-teens, my opinion was under-informed and over-strong, but it was my first attempt to think for myself. Soon, Americans drifted over to my side of the question, and broadly became less interventionist, partially because of another domestic shift: we began to assume that wars last forever. In 2003, many generals, congressmen, pundits, and statesmen seemed to think that Iraq could be wrapped up in 2-3 years. Today, that sounds absurd, but that was the assumption. Now when Americans think of war, we expect a long haul.

There’s more. Hundreds of pages more. All that’s needed is someone to write it.

In the beginning of 1933, Germany’s President Paul von Hindenburg was no admirer of Adolf Hitler. Hindenburg was a military man and a purebred Prussian, so when he nicknamed Hitler “The Bohemian Corporal,” he meant it as a double-derision. Hindenburg considered the Nazi leader a demagogue, an ideologue, an incompetent, and a prick— he once remarked that Hitler was, at best, qualified to head the postal ministry.

Days after making that comment, Hindenburg installed Hitler as chancellor of Germany and began helping him establish a dictatorship.

The turnaround was so abrupt that it calls for explanation. Henry Ashby Turner famously detailed Hitler’s monthlong ascent from loser to leader. Turner argued that Hindenburg, Franz von Papen, and other government insiders lifted up Hitler because they were petty men, bent on denying power to their rivals— so much so that they empowered a man they didn’t understand. By this telling, one of history’s greatest catastrophes can be traced to a drama small enough to fit inside a middle school homeroom.

It’s true that Hitler’s appointment owed a lot to the childish vindictiveness of Weimar’s leaders. There’s more to the story though. Hindenburg and Papen were shallow, small men, but they were men with ideas. Both saw parliament as ineffectual and crooked, and political parties as divisive, self-promoting, and mercenary. Hitler shared their contempt. Common enemies forge friendships, and anti-parliamentarianism drove Hindenburg and Papen to embrace, then elevate, the Bohemian Corporal and hand over Germany to Nazism.

Hindenburg and Papen weren’t original thinkers though. Their anti-parliamentary ideas sprouted from the soil of Germany’s political culture, which had a deep disdain for democracy. Historians have long debated whether Germany was on a Sonderweg: a special path that led the country toward Nazism. I don’t know whether the German people, as a whole, walked that path, but Hindenburg and Papen did. These two men were products of German culture, and their decision to empower Hitler can’t be understood apart from the culture that formed them.

Anti-Parliamentarianism in Wilhelmine Germany

Kaiser Wilhelm led Germany from 1890-1918, and he and his supporters hatched multiple schemes to implement a Staatsstreich (i.e. coup) that would cripple parliament. The prospect of parliament becoming more powerful, as it would in the Weimar era, horrified the leadership class. After a private conversation with German ambassador Paul von Hatzfeld, the English diplomat Arthur Balfour wrote that the specter of parliamentary government “haunts the German mind.” Germany’s nobility too had little patience for parliament, and they used their wealth and power to deflate the democratic fervors of the masses.

Germans valued unity and hated division. Collaboration, cohesion, and community were more important than individualism; everyone trumped every one. Partisanship disgusted them, and commentators derided political parties for sowing discord amongst the Volk. Germans also observed partisanship in other countries, and they didn’t like what they saw. The journalist Hans Plehn argued that the British House of Commons advanced the interests of parties over the good of the country, and the historian Hans Delbrück disparaged the parties of France and Britain as “self-perpetuating oligarchies” driven by greed and lust for power. In Bernhard von Bülow’s Imperial Germany, he included a scathing chapter titled “Dangers of Political Parties,” in which he claimed that “the true interests of the nation have never been found in the course of one particular party.” These critiques share an underlying theme: parties pursue their interests to the detriment of the country.

The great Margaret Lavinia Anderson didn’t weigh this kind of vitriol heavily. In her view, Wilhelmine German culture was mostly supportive of representative government. Anti-democratic polemics were exceptions, not proof of anything. But Anderson’s case is based on the democratic commitments of the German populace. The regular joes, the commoners, the rabble. They favored democracy; Germany’s leadership class did not. Hindenburg and Papen shared something in common: “von.” They were of aristocratic heritage, and they took their cues from Germany’s anti-parliamentary ruling class.

Weimar: Parliament’s New Nadir

After the guns of World War I fell quiet, a new government— the Weimar Republic— was founded, under a constitution more democratic than any country in Europe (or North America) could claim.

“More democratic” is not a compliment. Weimar’s constitution rendered the government hapless and doomed the Republic, which conservative Germans predicted from the start. In 1918, Thomas Mann wrote, “I want the monarchy, I want a passionately independent government… I don’t want this parliament and party business that will sour the whole life of the nation with its politics…” Two years later, the journalist Walter Schotte echoed that complaint: the constitution had saddled Germany with “nothing but a sorry party government.” Conservative German journalists curated stories that showcased democracy’s failings (and lavished praise on counter-examples, like Mussolini’s Italy). Throughout the 1920’s, as the Republic’s ineptitude became more obvious, the press became louder and more scathing in their denunciations of parliament as an antfarm of corruption, helpless to alleviate Germany’s political and economic woes.

Who could deliver Germany from this morass? Hindenburg, according to many. The magazine Simplicissimus ran a cartoon of Hindenburg towering over bickering partisans, with the caption, “If one stands above the parties, one is alone.” In 1929, Carl Schmitt opined that most Germans believed that the state was enslaved by interest groups, but they still trusted Hindenburg. This popular conception of Hindenburg may have flattered him into becoming a more determined opponent of parliament and partisanship. It was a role he would play well.

The Thought of Hindenburg and Papen

It’s always difficult to trace an individual’s intellectual journey. There’s no way to prove, beyond doubt, that Hindenburg or Papen inherited their views from Germany’s political culture. People stumble onto ideas through their own reasoning, by reading foreigners’ books and articles, or by other means. But in the case of Hindenburg, this seems unlikely. Historians are unanimous: he was a dolt. Turner wrote that Hindenburg had “no intellectual interests outside of military affairs” and held “simplistic views” on most topics. Andreas Dorpalen was less critical, yet he too portrayed Hindenburg as a halfwit. Almost certainly, Hindenburg acquired his ideas passively, by absorbing German culture’s prejudices and preconceptions— including its distaste for democracy.

Hindenburg’s first presidential address demonized parliament, which, he charged, had too often “indulged in petty quarrels that harmed the nation’s interests.” Initially Hindenburg surprised skeptics by deferring to republican procedures, but this was a ruse. From the outset, he sought to strengthen the presidency at the legislature’s expense— he just needed to bide time before sidelining parliament. In 1930, Hindenburg began allowing his (personally-appointed) chancellors to pass new laws through the president’s emergency powers. Afterwards, almost every new law was enacted by presidential fiat.

Parliament had been castrated. One could argue that with Hindenburg’s arrogation of power, Weimar’s republican experiment had come to an end. Yet it was still conceivable, if not probable, that German democracy could have been rehabilitated. Weimar’s fate was only sealed once the Nazis took power. To understand how that came about, we must turn to the other man most responsible for Hitler’s installation: Franz von Papen.

Papen was deeply influenced by the Catholic conservatives: German Catholics who opposed the Weimar Republic. Admittedly, most Catholic conservatives began denouncing democracy after the First World War, but the critiques they made—that parliament was corrupt, divisive, ineffectual, and hyper-partisan-- were rooted in Wilhelmine political culture. So while Catholic conservatives were late converts to the anti-parliamentary faith, their adopted creed had Wilhelmine roots. Papen would prove a devout disciple. When he revoked his membership in the Centre Party, he claimed that he wanted to act “not as a party man, but as a German.” These were not empty words. During Papen’s tenure as chancellor, he ruled by decree, devised two (!) plans to indefinitely dissolve parliament, and selected cabinet who were almost entirely without partisan affiliation and opposed the existence of political parties.

When Hitler sat down with Papen in early January, 1933, the two men agreed that a top-heavy, unimpeded chancellorship (i.e. a dictator) was needed to rescue Germany. This shared vision was the starting point of their alliance. Papen lobbied for Hitler’s appointment, and he courted Hindenburg’s advisors—including his son, Oskar von Hindenburg—to do the same. Papen’s efforts succeeded: he convinced Hindenburg to install the Nazi leader. Notably, before taking the chancellorship, Hitler demanded that parliament be dissolved and new elections be called. His hope was that a new, more pliable legislature would pass an enabling act, which would turn parliament from a nuisance into a nothing. Papen raised no objections to this scheme. Some historians have argued that Hindenburg still had reservations about the Bohemian Corporal, but he, too, did not object.

Hindenburg had alternatives. There were other able, popular politicians in Germany. No evidence exists that, toward the end of January 1933, Hindenburg contemplated appointing any of them. He needed a man who shared his disdain for parliament, and that excluded many politicians from consideration. Hitler did not number among the excluded.

Hindenburg’s Role in Hitler’s Consolidation of Power

Historians have overlooked Hindenburg’s ideas because many have examined Hitler’s installation in hyper-focus. This is understandable; one of the most calamitous events in history deserves a close look. But a magnifying glass can obscure. To understand Hitler’s appointment, we must examine it within the context of what came afterwards, when Hindenburg’s anti-parliamentary views were on full display.

On February 4th, Hindenburg granted the police wide powers to break up political meetings and shutter media outlets. The primary victims were the Communist and Social Democratic parties, Hindenburg’s old enemies. On February 28th, Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which gave Hitler more authority, curtailed civil rights, and permitted the federal government to swallow state governments. In March, Hindenburg exhorted parliament to pass an enabling act, saying, “selfishness and party quarrels” should not undermine Germany’s “national self-realization.” Hindenburg’s request was granted: parliament passed the enabling act. From then on, Hitler governed by decree. Sometimes the Führer sought (and received) Hindenburg’s rubber stamp. Other times he bypassed Hindenburg entirely, with no repercussions.

By 1934, the Nazis’ popularity was sagging, badly. Fascist dictatorship wasn’t the spa day that many Germans had predicted. Hindenburg, though, was still popular with the public and the army. He had both the formal power and the political heft to unseat Hitler, or at least to impede his excesses. He chose not to. Hindenburg stood behind the Führer, and continued appearing with him in public and in Nazi propaganda films and posters.

Sympathetic historians have argued that Hindenburg held reservations about the regime, but assented because he was elderly and lethargic. That’s bullshit. Recent research has shown that Hindenburg remained sharp in old age, and that he was satisfied with the Third Reich. In a telegram he sent to Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives, a purge of the state’s purported enemies, Hindenburg praised the Führer’s “decisive intervention” which “saved the German people from great danger.” Nice praise for a murderous rampage. Hindenburg was pleased with the Nazi regime. And why wouldn’t he be? He got what he wanted: a united Germany unburdened by partisan, parliamentary politicking. Hindenburg’s ideas had triumphed.

It sounds delusional, even repugnant, to suggest that the weeks and months after September 11th were “the good old days.” For the most part, they weren’t. Three-thousand men and women had been killed. A nation that prides itself on productivity was paralyzed. Day-to-day activities— baseball games, vacations, concerts, and movie premieres— were put on hold. A new, haunted way of life was unfolding, featuring airport security screenings, anthrax mailings, a terror-driven news cycle, and government speculations about suitcase bombs, cyberattacks, and infrastructure sabotage. For months after 9/11, people flinched whenever they saw a plane overhead. Soldiers were sent off to a war, then a second war, and many wouldn’t return.

I remember the morning it began. I was in third grade, and every 5-10 minutes, the voice of Sister Sharon came through the loudspeaker, asking for this-or-that student to report to the office to be sent home early. The callouts were confusing, maybe a little unsettling. I didn’t know what was going on, and I had no dream that I would be “lucky” enough to leave school. My mother was stricter than my classmates’ parents, I thought, so there was no way I would be sent home. And then I was. I grabbed my backpack, went to the principal’s office, and from there, my mother drove me and my sisters to a spot in New Jersey where we could see New York across the river.

“We were attacked,” she said, tears clogging up her voice, as we watched two stalks of smoke rise up from the city.

No, those weren’t good days. I don’t want them back. But in the ensuing twenty-five years, we’ve lost something that was palpable on the morning when those towers fell.

“We were attacked,” my mother had said. We. Back then, “we” felt substantial. “Our country” wasn’t a splotch on a map; it was a people. Or at least, it seemed that way. Maybe America’s solidarity was illusory, or maybe it just felt real to an eight year old. But I don’t think it was.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, church services lit up the country. Democrat and Republican, black and white, city and country, rich and poor, everyone seemed to agree that this was a time for mourning and prayer. Braves fans cheered on the Mets, their divisional rivals. By common, undirected agreement, TV shows that featured the twin towers disappeared off the air. Strangers donated millions of dollars to 9/11 widows. New Yorkers dropped off several weeks’ worth of home-cooked meals to fire and police stations. Midwesterners and Southerners traveled to the city to assist recovery efforts. Then-President Bush held a 90% approval rating, the highest ever recorded for a sitting president.

To me, that political harmony is the surest sign that our country has changed. Nowadays, try to imagine any president— Democrat or Republican— pulling over 60%. I don’t think that it would, or could, happen. If a comparable attack happened today, partisans would probably blame whichever administration supposedly allowed it to happen, or whichever opposition party blocked reforms that, supposedly, would have prevented it.

In the wake of 9/11, neither left nor right attacked their opponents. They had opportunities. There were fingers worth pointing, or at least, questions worth asking. After Bin Laden bombed our African embassies, the Clinton administration pursued him half-heartedly. Throughout the 90’s, reformers had called for changes to intelligence-sharing and counterterrorism procedures. And of course, the attack had happened on President Bush’s watch. But none of that seemed important. Partisan fingers stayed in holster, and we locked arms instead.

Not only was the United States united, but back then, people really believed that America was a great country. In grade school, I was taught that ours was the greatest country in the world, and throughout my teenage years, I kept believing it. Maybe I still believe it. I can’t think of a country I could confidently call better, nor can I think of anywhere else I’d like to live. But now, “America is the greatest country in the world” sounds different to my ears. If this country is the best, it’s best by default. Everywhere else is crumbling too, and perhaps we haven’t crumbled as badly, or maybe I just prefer our problems over those of other countries. That’s not how I, or the rest of the country, used to feel. In the years after 9/11, America seemed to stand at the peak of a mountain. Now, we’re more like the high point of a valley, or the top layer of a dunghill. We may be greater, but we aren’t great. We may be better, but we’re not good.

It’s trite to list all the reasons that we have lost our national unity and pride. The lies our leaders told and keep telling. The distrust that the media, universities, and anyone who self-presents as “an expert” have earned for themselves. The internet. The smartphone. The algorithm’s propensity to appeal to the worst in us. The bipartisan clown-show. DEInsanity. Trump. The proliferation of “isms.” Constant, inane, contrived controversies. The erosion in regular people of industriousness, religiosity, boldness, idealism, and most other qualities that made our nation exceptional.

That’s an incomplete list, but it’s enough to justify our national disillusionment. And when I look at that list, I think: are we right to feel disillusioned? Should we be down on America? It’s hard to be proud of a country that pushes gender ideology on children, starts meaningless wars, elects leaders who party with pedophiles, and produces cultural achievements like Fifty Shades of Grey and “The Tide Pod Challenge.” Maybe diminished love for our country is the right response to what our country has become.

That judgment might be too gloomy. All nations are a mix of good and bad. America’s past makes that clear. Our forefathers created a government founded on rule of law, a written constitution, and republican elections; they offered freedom of religion to believers who would’ve been persecuted elsewhere; they provided economic opportunities for millions who would’ve been paupers in their homelands. Those achievements existed alongside slavery and other evils. Leftists err by magnifying our history’s failures and blotting our accomplishments from view. The twin mistake would be to get too pessimistic about our current moment. No journalist will report on all the people who perform small acts of kindness, or who volunteer for their church, or who adopt a child. It’s easy to hone in on America’s failures and overlook the good things that still happen every day in America.

But there’s a limit to “see-the-whole-picture” optimism. A citizen of Stalinist Russia, shouldn’t find reasons to celebrate his country; the balance of good-to-bad has tipped too far.

Has America crossed to that side of the see-saw? Honestly? I’m not sure.

Similarly, I bemoaned the lost unity in America, but maybe we ought to be divided. I do not, and should not, feel unified with a Lindsey-Clancy-defending feminist, or with anyone who identifies as “red-pilled” or “woke,” or with the drug-dealers posted outside the middle school where I work. Those are extreme examples, but when I look past the extremes, I’m not encouraged. More and more, I’m convinced that “The Average American” and “The Ugly American” are the same person. National solidarity is like any virtue: taken too far, it becomes a vice. If camaraderie with my fellow Americans means embracing the moral, spiritual, personal, or intellectual mediocrity that I see every day— count me out.

In 2001, the United States was no paradise. I’m not rosy-eyed about the past; lowlifes were not in short supply when I was young. But whatever our shortcomings, America was good enough to justify the emotions that we poured out when we saw the towers fall. Now? I don’t know that we’re capable of feeling that level of patriotism or national solidarity, and I don’t know that we should.

Professor Reynolds was my teacher in college, and one of the finest, most brilliant men I know. Enjoy.

Studying history is wonderful, literally. It’s filled with wonder— wondering what it was like to live in a different time and place, to use different tools and technologies, to have different values, assumptions, and dreams, along with different concerns and fears.

Most of the time, students don’t realize that. Every kid who’s ever hated history class has had the same complaint: “All we do is memorize names and dates.” Sometimes, they have a point. Check out this question that a former co-worker put on one of her tests:

“How many countries does the Danube River run through?

a. 11
b. 12
c. 13
d. 14”

The correct answer is, “Who cares?” It’s good to know that the Danube runs through a lot of countries, but why would anyone need to specify the number?

More than any other class, history is in danger of becoming a memorize-and-regurgitate game. Kids need basic historical knowledge before they can ask interesting questions, have worthwhile debates, or interpret controversies— you can’t argue over the cause of the American Revolution if you’ve never heard of George III— so some memorization is necessary. The trouble comes when memorization becomes the end, instead of the low-rung of a ladder that leads to higher thinking. Cramming information into kids makes learning subjugating and distasteful, when it should be liberating and fun. Plus, in a few weeks, (or days, or hours), kids will forget what they memorized.

Most people realize this, but some good teachers slouch into the memorization trap anyway. Teachers get tired, and it’s easier to create (and grade) tests that are memorization-heavy. Teachers also get frustrated, either with student apathy, or with their students’ rickety, callow attempts at critical thinking. Finally, teachers get wrapped up in lesson planning, parent emails, extracurriculars, duties, administrative evaluations, bullshit, etc. and lose focus on what they’re there to do: inspire curiosity in kids.

But none of that is an excuse. Memorization must be resisted. Here are a few ideas on how to do it:

Fictional stories. Have students write a story, from the first person perspective, about a major event. For instance, they could imagine themselves:

—in Belfast in the 60’s, caught on either side of The Troubles.

—on a boat that landed in the New World, getting ready to encounter new people, animals, plants, and natural wonders.

—as an American soldier, crawling through Vietcong tunnels, not knowing where they were going, who or what they would find, what booby traps had been set for them, or whether they would make it out.

Writing themselves into historical events will ignite kids’ imagination, especially once they learn that real stories from North Ireland, the exploration of America, and the Vietnam War are more interesting than anything they conjured up.

Counterfactual history. This means imagining what the world would be like if a major historical event went differently. The classic example— What if the Axis won World War II? —is great, but overused. There are plenty of other options. What if the Soviet Union won the Cold War? What if the printing press had never been invented? What if slavery was never abolished?

Thinking through questions like that can help students see how contingent their lives are. If an event, hundreds of years ago, unfolded differently, their world might be unrecognizable.

Problem essays. The credit for this idea goes to my greatest teacher, the eccentric polymath Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Students write a short essay where they identify a historical problem. Why did the Renaissance happen? Why did Europe surpass China in global power? Why did the Dutch Empire decline so quickly?

Students aren’t supposed to make an argument or answer the question. That’s not the point. They should find a problem that vexes, provokes, and even frustrates them, and ponder it. The assignment should help them to see that history is not a dead list of facts-to-be-learned, but a discipline brimming with mysteries.

Ah, the Crimean War. That curious conflict that pitted Protestant Britain, Muslim Turkey, and Catholic France against Orthodox Russia. And it started because of a roof.

For years, Catholic and Orthodox priests had been squabbling over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: the site of Christ’s supposed, but probable, burial. In 1846, Easter landed on the same day for both Orthodox and Catholics, and priests started punching each other. The fistfight scaled up into a riot, and roughly forty people were killed. That bloodletting wasn’t enough to drain tensions over the Church, which persisted, and escalated into a crisis.

Ottoman law held that whoever had the rights to fix a roof owned the property. The Church’s roof was in dire need of repair— birds were able to fly through holes and interrupt liturgies. French diplomats leaned on the Ottoman government to award roof-rights to the Catholics, and the Sultan’s government was about to buckle, when the Czar intervened. Russians fancied themselves the guardians of Orthodox Christians, and they were not going to let Catholics wrest away Christ’s burial place. Diplomatic bungling and chest-puffing followed, and Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. France sided with the Turks, as did Britain.

And yes, while the roof dispute triggered the conflict, structural/geopolitical tectonics were the real cause. Britain wanted to contain Russians’ expansionism. The French worried that their North African possessions would rebel if the Ottoman Empire fell. Both countries were concerned about the Czar’s ambitions in the Balkans. Russia and Turkey had priorities of their own, as did the Austrians, who aided Britain and France, and Piedmont-Sardinia, who eventually jumped in as well.

Unfortunately, but understandably, the war is barely remembered today. Napoleon rang in the nineteenth century, and World War I delivered the coda. Crimea is an awkward peep in an otherwise quiet interlude. But the war deserves more notice. Roughly half a million people died; military nursing, journalism, technology, and tactics changed; Russia surrendered suddenly, without an obvious reason. What more could an historian want?

Right now I’m finishing a master’s degree, and I chose Crimea as a dissertation topic. Books on the war typically focus on diplomacy, warfare, and politicking. The religious element gets a chapter, a section, a footnote, or a subordinate clause. Given the assortment of alliances, I sensed an untold story about the role of faith in the conflict. If it was up to me, I would examine the religious populations of all the countries involved, but in an act of cruelty, my program’s directors capped students at 50 pages. With that limit, I have to narrow in on one of these countries. Since I’m studying in the UK and English is my mother tongue, I chose Old Blimey.

To my knowledge, only one historian has examined the way religious folks made sense of this mess: Petros Spanou. The first few chapters of his PhD thesis examine how Britain’s ministers and religious press mobilized support for (or resistance against) the conflict. Among other things, Spanou showed which Bible passages preachers leaned on, what arguments they employed, and how hawks responded to Christian pacifist arguments. Hyper-nerds who would like to read it can download a copy here.

My forebear’s biggest mistake has to do with British attitudes toward France and Catholicism. English, Scotch, and Irish Protestants have a long history of Catholic-bashing. On any given Sunday, the congregation could expect to hear their pastor denounce Romish tyranny, Marian idolatry, and Jesuitical deception. When Spanou wrote about how preachers treated Britain’s alliance with France, he claimed that preachers dodged the question. Justifying an alliance with those papist frogs was awkward, so ministers ignored the tension and focused on denouncing Russian malevolence.

His argument isn’t incorrect, but it might as well be. Victorian ministers combined their saber-rattling with familiar slights against Catholicism, but they redirected those charges at Russian Orthodoxy. According to these preachers, the Czar was as autocratic as the pope, and “his” Church aped Popery’s worst errors— transubstantiation, saint-veneration, purgatory, etc. Russia was the new Rome, and in the words of Reverend T.G. Horton, the Czar was “as decided a Pope and anti-Christ as his Holiness in Rome.” Preachers repackaged anti-Catholic tropes to rally their congregations against a new enemy.

Moreover, Victorians believed that Popery was dying. The 1848 Revolutionaries had chased the Vicar of Christ out of the Vatican, and France, once “The Eldest Daughter of the Church,” had secularized. Just a generation or two ago, Frenchmen had lopped off the heads of nuns and hosted nudist-dancers in Notre Dame Cathedral. The British were confident that the Church of Rome was nearing her end. She posed no challenge to “true Christianity;” her younger sister in Russia did.

Orthodox-bashing was new, but asserting that Catholicism was near-collapse wasn’t. Well before Crimea, preachers were arguing that, any day now, Rome’s Church would fall to pieces. Many Anglican clergy had taken a calm view of the “Papal Aggression,” when Pope Pius IX had essentially claimed England as his spiritual territory. This was nothing to worry about, most ministers claimed. The Pope’s action was obnoxious, antagonistic, and putrid, but not a threat. It was the flailing of a patient in terminal decline, the loud boasting of a weak man. It should be met with equanimity.

Contra Spanou, Victorian clerics didn’t duck the question of France’s Catholicism. They didn’t justify Britain’s alliance because they didn’t need to. Cooperating with France posed no problems for Protestants; they saw France as a secular power, with only a thin attachment to that fading bastardess in Rome. It was the Czar’s faith that was vibrant, expansionist, and in need of a check from “true Christians.”

The French question, along with some other observations about British preaching, will constitute the first chunk of my thesis. Part two will be more ambitious.

The other day I wrote that the historian’s task is: “approaching familiar sources with innovative questions. Primary sources don’t reveal anything by themselves. Working with them is always push-pull. The historian asks questions, the sources answer (and a non-answer is an answer). The sources don’t change, but the questions can, and new insights can be revealed when historians ask imaginative questions of diaries, letters, paintings, poems, artifacts, and scribblings that we’ve had for years.”

In this case, what does it mean to look at old sermons with new questions?

The broad, supra question that Spanou asked is: “How can we use sermons to better understand the Crimean War?”

Flip that around.

“What can the Crimean War reveal about Victorian sermons?”

What do these war sermons unveil about British Christianity at the mid-point of the nineteenth century? What can they tell us about religion and patriotism? Biblical exegesis? Fundraising? Rhetoric? Belief in providence? Authority? Ecumenism? Were ministers convinced of their own arguments, or were they deploying them cynically? Were they consistent, preaching the same ways when they encountered analogous issues? Was there any concern about proclaiming politics from the pulpit?

Questions worth answering, all of them.

I have another question, and it might be huge, or it might be sheer wind. Recently I read Mark Knoll’s stupendous The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Knoll pointed out that wars usually generate religious insights, as theologians re-examine old doctrines in light of the sufferings they witness. In America’s Civil War, that didn’t happen. After the guns quieted, neither Northern nor Southern theologians embarked on a substantial religious re-think. People retrenched into familiar camps and proclaimed the same theology after the war that they had proclaimed before and during it.

The Crimean War took place at roughly the same time (1853-1856, less than a decade before the Civil War), and American culture is a cleave-off of British culture. Should we expect a similar lack of creativity in the wake of Crimea…? Maybe, maybe not. But four years after the Czar’s surrender, Anglican theologians released Essays and Reviews, a groundbreaking work of liberal, Protestant theology. This was followed by a stream of other such publications, and a quickened movement of the Church of England towards liberalism.

Wealthy Anglicans had been shuffling away from traditional Christianity for a long time. Before Crimea broke out, John Stuart Mill noted, and John Henry Newman decried the gentry’s diminishing faith.

I’m wondering: Did the Crimean War— which held the attention of the religious press, and led Her Majesty’s Government to call for multiple, nationwide Fast Days— delay the Anglican drift away from tradition?

Did theologians bite their tongues, knowing the dangers of religious controversy in a time of war? Alternatively, did they realize how much less receptive the public would be? Were theologians themselves caught up in the cause, and distracted from their musings? Crimea never came anywhere near England’s shores, but war correspondents and photographs brought regular, reliable news of battlefront carnage home. It could be that the war’s effect was strong enough to shore up the joists under the Church of England— for a time.

Stay tuned. I’ll let you know what I find.

Students and teachers typically group “math and science” opposite “English and history.” In one corner, you find numbers, formal logic, and clear answers; in the other: words, arguments, and inductive reasoning. Students are typically wired for one skillset or the other, so kids who pull A’s in humanities classes often need algebra tutors, and vice versa. Since people tend to hate things that they’re bad at, both groups of students usually resent being shoehorned into classes that don’t meet their strengths. Future engineers hate English, while tomorrow’s poets dread math.

That’s the conventional wisdom, and it’s true but not complete. The above paragraph explains people’s preferences in school, not in life. It accounts for differences in grades, not leisure. As an adult, I do math when I have to, while the bulk of my free time is spent reading novels and histories, writing short stories, or podcasting about the past.

Why do I dork out that way? Not because “I’m good at” English and history. I’m not even sure I am good at them. I’m driven by love. That’s it. History, literature, I love you both. Reading, writing, watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, whatever— I can’t get enough. It’s not laborious or forced; I can barely help myself. History and English draw me, like a dog to a game of fetch. Every day, the dog chases the ball until he’s panting, exhausted, and ready for a nap. A few hours later, he’s at it again. That’s me. Day in and out, purely for pleasure, I come back to history and literature. And I know plenty of people who can relate.

So why do English and history go together, inside the classroom and out? Here’s my guess. They both engage the imagination. The people who love literature and history are the people who love to dream, create, and escape themselves. Who, even if they like their jobs, aren’t satisfied with a 9-5. Who look around at their friends, their neighborhoods, their families— and love them, wouldn’t trade them for anything— but want a little more. The people who’ve wanted to fly since they learned to walk.

Imagination’s connection to literature is obvious, but some readers may not get how it meshes with history. As with many problems, I blame our education system. Instead of helping kids daydream about past lives, teachers make students memorize presidents and paintings. Instead of studying adventurers and heroes, villains and cataclysms, students are force fed vocabulary terms. By approaching history that way, teachers wring the fun out of their discipline, and obscure its imaginative nature— which is exactly what keeps adult history-lovers hooked.

When I read history, I’m asking myself, “What was this like?” To be in the crowds when Robespierre was guillotined? To enter a Roman temple to Minerva? To be inside the walls when Mongol hordes surrounded my city? To pilot an airplane in the Italo-Turkish War, and with my left hand on the steering wheel, use my right to uncork and throw a bomb? Most of the time, I’m not articulating those questions. They occur to me subconsciously. Without realizing what I’m doing, I place myself behind the eyes of someone— either a big player or a regular joe— in the time and place I’m reading about, and I imagine my way into his (or her) assumptions, curiosities, doubts, expectations, desires, and fears.

Writing history is impossible unless you read history, especially primary sources, and to understand those, you need to ask the same question: “What was this like?” You won’t understand Queen Victoria’s diaries unless you can imagine the burden that comes with the royal tiara. Nor will you understand the Irish diaspora unless you can feel an empty stomach, Gandhi’s Salt March without envisioning life in the Raj, or the Fall of Constantinople from outside its gates. To write about past-lives, we need to make sense of them, and that requires us to step out of our world and into theirs.

There’s another connection between writing history and imagination. Most historians— and all good ones— try to say something original, even about well-worn topics. The most straightforward way to write new history is to find new sources. That happens, and occasionally it can be huge. More often, new sources reinforce what people already knew. No one will care if you uncover a letter confirming that Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer, or that Hitler was an anti-Semite. You might discover a surprise about a nobody, but again, who cares? No matter how navel-gazing our universities get, discovering a speech by Zachary Taylor’s Postmaster will excite no one. Fresh, provocative sources are like winning lottery tickets. If you come across one, congrats, but in historical scholarship as in life, old-fashioned work is a better bet than scratch-offs.

In this case, old-fashioned work means approaching familiar sources with innovative questions. Primary sources don’t reveal anything by themselves. Working with them is always push-pull. The historian asks questions, the sources answer (and a non-answer is an answer). The sources don’t change, but the questions can, and new insights can be revealed when historians ask imaginative questions of diaries, letters, paintings, poems, artifacts, and scribblings that we’ve had for years.

Being able to do that is the key to being a great historian. And while I would never, and will never, claim to be anything like a great historian, that task— asking creative questions of history— is the goal of this Substack. Most of the time, I only plan to pose questions. Once in a while, if I’m feeling punchy, I may hazard a guess about the answer. But what I really want to do on here is invite my readers to wonder, to speculate, and to re-frame things themselves.

“…history is the great meta-narrative. Everything has a history. And even those disciplines, even those pursuits which don’t think of themselves as being connected to history… nevertheless, they have one. And history is a way of shaping, understanding, clarifying – sometimes condemning, at other times exalting – what has happened in events and with people that are no longer here to talk about them directly to us.

There are many people who are very dubious about this exercise that we call history. Some people in a very practical sense simply say, Well, it’s very boring. It’s all dates and names and places. Well, dates and names and places are important just like the scaffolding of a great cathedral is important when you’re constructing it. Not pretty to look at, but you’re never going to get the cathedral without the scaffolding.

But in a larger sense, we deal with history because many people resent history today. And this is particularly true in times of despotism, times of authoritarianism, times of tyranny. What else do tyrants love to destroy except a people’s history? Because when they can do that, there’s nothing for people to appeal to from whatever atrocities are being committed in the present. Nothing to compare what the present looks like to something in the past. So, of course we talk a great deal about wanting to think about and face toward the future. But in fact, many of the people who talk in that way really aren’t interested in the future at all, don’t even really have a clear idea of the future. What they really want to do is shape the past. And unless we are aware of the forces both positive and negative that wish to gain control of history, then we become vulnerable in the most childish and in the most vulnerable way.”

Full article here:

The Golden Thread

The Golden Thread Leads Us to the Light

Several months ago, Allen C. Guelzo was interviewed by Albert Mohler on the latter’s Thinking in Public podcast. The episode dropped on Aug. 5, 2026. This was Guelzo’s third appearance on Mohler’s program, the others devoted to his work on Robert E. Lee (2022…

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3 months ago · 6 likes · The Golden Thread

If history departments were to hold a popularity contest, among the general public, military historians would dominate. Historical documentaries are usually about, or touch on, war. Ditto for biopics and historical dramas. When I was a kid, my friends played Call of Duty, Age of Empires, and Assassin’s Creed. Hard to imagine East End Dock Strikes: The Video Game having a market. Historical fiction is more mixed, because most buyers are women, but if you wander into a bookstore’s history section, accounts of battles and wars weigh down the shelves. Historians of other stripes sometimes malign military history, for reasons that are usually either elitist, or a veil for their jealousy. But their critiques are common enough that, recently, History Today Magazine asked: “Do We Have Too Much Military History?”

Here was my favorite response:

We need more. Military history matters. Partly because we’re citizens and need to understand the wars fought in our name. But also because few areas of history attract more public interest and none generates so much guff. If we don’t understand the wars of the past, we have no chance of preventing fools and knaves from distorting our yesterday to serve their today. How often have we heard dodgy analogies with the Munich Crisis used to justify interventions abroad, for instance, or the myths of 1940 trotted out to support British isolationism? Without rigorous scholarship, sound evidence and considered argument, we have no answer.

We need more because we need more good history. History is not a zero-sum game, where one more good essay on religion and the American soldier means one fewer on medieval Baltic pottery. Historians are like musicians: they have different talents and they work in different styles. The more good stuff they produce, the richer our world. If history is done well, it doesn’t matter whether it’s about the economics of shipbuilding 1450-85, or Stalingrad.

We need more because military history is hard. Few other areas require so diverse a skill set. Far from being merely ‘paintballing on paper’, the best now encompasses the whole human experience of war. Read Alexander Watson’s recent The Fortress, for example. He interweaves political, social, cultural and emotional history; indeed, approaches from every strand of our discipline. He has carried out comparative study in multiple languages, working from tricky sources in hard-to-reach archives. And all the while he maintains a grip on the brutal and depressing realities that war involves and that give the subject coherence.

And we need more and better career paths to bring through new voices and build a generation of military historians for tomorrow. What is true for history in general is especially true for military history: it is notoriously hard to win public funding for research; harder to get published in the most prestigious journals; and hardest of all to find jobs. Why? We could speculate. But this needs to change, or in ten years there will be no students learning, no original scholarship being published and no way back for the history of war.

-Professor Jonathan Boff, whom I may be able to take a class with next semester, fingers crossed. Whole article here.

That sunburned casanova is your author, Brian Stahl, standing next to a 100x-larger replica of a Minié ball. (Pronounced Min—ee—ay). The conical bullet with three ridges near the bottom, combined with the engineering magic in the rifle’s barrel, made soldiers’ guns much more accurate. Much deadlier, too. Previously, muskets fired spherical balls, which fired wildly off-mark. Musketeers stood shoulder-to-shoulder because, if they all fired simultaneously, one of them may have scored a hit. More often, they all missed. There were no Chris Kyles back then. The steadiest hand and eye didn’t make a difference, because the guns were so poor.

With the Minié ball came new possibilities. Units no longer needed to bundle together. Snipers could pick off targets from afar. Small groups of soldiers could be effective, so clandestine operations took a new hue. Armies engaged each other further out, which rendered the bayonet and the sword defunct.

All these ideas would occur to military leaders— eventually. But tactics always lag behind technology. The American Civil War was so bloody, in part, because the military brass hadn’t adjusted to the Minié ball. Soldiers were ordered to keep bunching together, as they had always done, even though the enemy’s bullets were picking them apart. A lot of young men would’ve been spared had the higher-ups acclimated to the new technology.

When I first learned about this, part of me wanted to scoff at the incompetence of the Civil War’s commanders. Another part of me recognized that instinct, and suppressed it, knowing that it’s too easy to play Monday-morning quarterback, that clear vision comes after a storm, that posterity too easily condescends, etc.

That was a good instinct, but I was wrong. Civil War commanders should have done better. Or, at least, one of them should have.

Enter General George B. McClellan, Union General-in-Chief for the bulk of 1862. Today, he is mostly remembered as a candy-ass. McClellan chronically overestimated the size of his enemy’s forces, so he shirked risks, delayed or omitted attacks, and failed to press advantages. Some historians have argued that this wasn’t innocent incompetence. McClellan was sympathetic to slave-holders, and in the 1864 presidential election, he ran against Lincoln on the promise of negotiating an end to the war. Some believe that McClellan treaded tenderly because he wanted to undercut the war effort.

That’s nonsense. From McClellan’s diaries and letters, there’s no evidence that he was sabotaging the Union. He wasn’t perfidious, just cowardly.

That doesn’t redeem his memory. “Not a traitor” is no badge of honor. Had he been bolder, he could’ve ended the war years earlier, and spared his country a lot of bloodletting. Of the 750,000 men who died in the war, how many would have survived, had McClellan been braver? How many women and children wouldn’t have suffered starvation and deprivation? How much better adjusted might our country be today, had the war not inflicted such lasting, psychological wounds?

McClellan’s reputation isn’t bad enough though. He had been an American observer in the Crimean War— that strange conflict that saw Protestant England, Catholic France, and Muslim Turkey team up against Orthodox Russia. Crimea is a peninsula that’s beautiful and coastal, has been conquered scores of times, and is peopled by an eclectic assortment of ethnicities. It’s seen genocides and deportations, sheltered dead languages and refugee peoples, and it was the birthplace of modern warfare. The Crimean War occupies the chronological mid-point between the French Revolution and World War I. Not as brutal or consequential as either, Crimea sits as the forgotten middle child of the long nineteenth century.

That’s a shame. Crimea saw the Minié ball’s wartime premiere, leveling Russian troops and leading the Allies to victory-after-victory. Some British commanders recognized the new tactical possibilities that these bullets presented. Sir Colin Campbell, the feisty Scotsman commanding the 93rd Highlanders Regiment at the Battle of Balaclava, ordered his men to line up two-deep, meaning one behind the other, instead of the standard, four-deep formation. Campbell recognized that his guns’ new accuracy made tight-clusters of men unnecessary.

Before the battle, Campbell shouted, “There is no retreat from here, men! You must die where you stand!” Supposedly, his aide replied, “Aye, Sir Colin. If needs be, we’ll do that.” Campbell was a commander, not a prophet. His men survived; the Russians fled.

The British pieced together a tactic that McClellan wasn’t smart enough to ape, to his country’s misfortune. But soon enough, American forces, and armies all over the world, would learn their lesson. Military tactics changed, permanently, thanks to the innovation at Crimea.

That was one among many novelties. Battlefield-nursing, railways, telegraphs, war correspondents, photography, steamships, and heavy artillery shells were all unveiled on Crimea’s battlefields. Granted, some of those innovations had been soft-launched on imperial ventures, but Crimea saw their debut in ‘near-peer,’ European conflict.

Fast forward 1.5 centuries. Today, Crimea is the focal point of Ukraine’s campaign against Russia. Every day, Ukrainian air or sea drones sink oil ships headed to Crimea. Supply trucks are vaporized from above, by an operator hundreds of miles away. Crimea’s residents are suffering power outages and water shortages. The local economy is in paroxysm. It would be too much to call Crimea an overgrown beach-town, but the economy depends on summer tourism. It’s a fair bet that the economy won’t rebound until, at earliest, next summer— if, by then, the war is over.

Again, new technology makes its debut in Crimea.

And again, the United States lags behind, as we struggle to fight a war against an enemy, Iran, the old-fashioned way.

Well, not quite the old-fashioned way. We haven’t sent in ground troops, Deo Gratias. But the symmetry is weird, isn’t it? Especially given that future wars between powers— great and small— will probably look a lot like the Ukrainian strategy against Crimea: unmanned drones choking economies.

Both times, military revolutions got started on that captivating, sepulchral peninsula. History rhymes. I’m guessing we’re in for a long poem.

History being an unending double dialogue— a dialogue between the scholar and his sources, and a dialogue between scholars— and historians being men of passion, it follows that to the innocent eye of the bystander historical debate looks like the battles of theologians: as though the disputants were defending rival certainties when in reality they are advancing various hypothetical interpretations from whose collisions better knowledge and clearer understanding may (and usually do) emerge. These idiosyncrasies of the profession, which, I regret to say, sometimes deceive even its members, have disguised the basic truth about historical study which derives directly from the nature of its materials, the methods used to work on them, and the ultimate open-ended uncertainty that is our fate. Because there are no certainties there can be no authorities: history is free. There is, indeed, only one authority whose word is law, and that is the historical evidence: but it is an ambiguous authority whose word sounds differently in different ears, whose law disconcertingly changes shape as various obedient subjects endeavour to abide by it. I do not wish to be misunderstood: I do not subscribe to the frivolous, even nihilist, notion of relativism which thinks that historical understanding is only what happens in the observer’s mind and varies casually from historian to historian. I think that there is a historical reality which we can come closer and closer to grasping; and I think that the willingness of historians to agree on so much, as well as the special unwillingness of the relativists to have their own interpretations doubted, support my belief…

In history there are no authorities: history is a free study in which no man can claim rule, or credence for his mere ipse dixit, and which the only true sin is to deny a hearing to views with which ones happens to disagree. This truth, too, eliminates those forms of history which suppose that to cite Scripture or Zarathustra or Engels on a disputed point of historical truth is to settle the issue.

—Sir Geoffrey Elton.

“The only danger to history today is that historians are sometimes too modest and try to find excuses for their task. It is safer as well as sounder to be confident. Men write history for the same reason that they write poetry, study the properties of numbers, or play football—for the joy of creation; men read history for the same reason that they listen to music or watch cricket—for the joy of appreciation. Once abandon that firm ground, once plead that history has a "message" or that history has a "social responsibility" (to produce good Marxists or good Imperialists or good citizens) and there is no logical escape from the censor and the Index, the O.G.P.U. and the Gestapo.”

—A.J.P Taylor, whose books I don’t like, but who knocked home a banger of a quote here.

Graham Greene wrote at least four Catholic Novels, but he rejected the label “Catholic Novelist.” He was a novelist, and he was a Catholic. To his mind, those identities were separate.

If he was trying to prove that, to himself or his public, he failed. Today, people read Greene’s Catholic novels—The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and my favorite, The Heart of the Matter— and Vietnam War buffs read The Quiet American, but that’s it. I don’t know anyone interested in his other novels, or his short stories, screenplays, essays, etc. In the literary canon, he will, and should, go down as a Catholic Novelist.

But Greene was pointing to a real distinction. An author can be a practicing Catholic and a novelist, without being a Catholic Novelist. Hemingway was. Balzac, too. Sometimes a and b are true, while a + b is false. An author can also be a Catholic Novelist without being Catholic. Willa Cather was a Protestant, but her novels are soaked in Holy Water. Ditto for C.S. Lewis, David Lodge, and Sally Rooney.

What is a Catholic Novelist? Easy. Someone who writes Catholic Novels. The question is: “What is a Catholic Novel?”

Some deny that the genre exists. Muriel Spark argued that a novel couldn’t be Catholic, unless it was a propaganda piece. But that’s nonsense. Spark, an example of a Catholic and a novelist who wasn’t a Catholic Novelist, imbibed the most degrading stereotypes about her faith: that it’s hidebound, anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and stupefying. For creatives, Catholicism functions the way that a school gym does for students. Walls and a ceiling make some games unplayable. But there are other games that they can play, which they couldn’t pull off in a wide-open field. The limitations allow for different types of fun. Catholic Novels are similar: the boundaries of faith are both restricting and empowering.

So what is a Catholic Novel? A complete answer would be dissertation-length, so here’s my short definition: A novel that cannot be understood without a knowledge of Catholicism, and that can only be fully appreciated by adherents to the faith.

The word “fully” is doing a lot in that sentence, although probably not enough to avoid pissing someone off. I can hear the indignation already. “Where do you get off saying that only Catholics fully appreciate The Lord of the Rings?” Sorry, but it’s true. It’s not unique to Catholic lit either. The Orthodox get more out of icons than us Westerners, as do Muslims with the Blue Mosque. Appreciation is still possible for outsiders. I can, and have, buzzed on icons. Great art is multilayered enough to appeal to non-believers, but there’s a layer that only a believer can understand.

Non-Catholics who read Diary of a Country Priest or Kristin Lavsrandatter can love the characters, plot, style, tone, humor, imaginative vigor, and commentary on the human condition. But part of the novel’s substance is spiritual. It emerged out of the novelist’s spirituality— and it’s not a hazy, ill-defined spirituality, but one formed by the Tradition of the Church. Non-Catholic readers may admire, and may be able to wade into, spiritual aspects of the novel. But not all the way. They can wade in; they can’t swim. So they are excluded from a dimension of the work. A part of them that could be moved is inert. However profound their appreciation for a novel, it will be incomplete.

A lot of people won’t agree with that. Even more will disagree with my definition of Catholic Novel. I’d love to hear the pushback, but in the end, a tight definition of Catholic Novel is unnecessary, because if you and I were to draw up a list of Catholic Novels, we would include the same titles. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, while speaking of the Catholic Novel’s 180° opposite, said that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it. That dictum applies here too. You don’t need a precise definition to know that Brideshead Revisited, The Man Who Was Thursday, and Callista make the cut; Sabbath’s Theatre and Ulysses don’t.

In that light, it becomes easy to see who counts as a Catholic Novelist, and to compile a list of them. Which is what I was doing the other day. I added two more qualifiers though: “Great” and “American.”

If you feel inclined, take a second to bang out your own list of Great American Catholic Novelists. It might make the rest of this article more interesting.

My first pick was Flannery O’Connor. I’m guessing that anyone reading this did the same. Walker Percy came next. As far as I can tell, the Temple of High Brow considers these two to be the high points of US Catholic literature. After that, I brainstormed Walter Miller (A Canticle for Leibowitz) and John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces), although I think those two reflect my tastes more than canonical ranking.

Here’s what’s strange about this list: Everyone I named is from the South. When I started digging around to find writers who broke that mold, I couldn’t. Elmore Leonard was (apparently) Catholic and (apparently) wrote Catholic Novels. He lived in Detroit, but grew up in Louisiana. The other names that Google churned up were lapsed Catholics (Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison), obscure and forgettable (J.F. Powers, Myles Connolly), or contemporary, with an undetermined place in the literary canon (Phil Klay and Ron Hansen).

What gives? The Northeast is America’s literary and Catholic capital, and there are way more Catholics in the Midwest than in the South. So why have the enduring Catholic Novelists— all of them, so far— come from Dixie?

Here’s my guess. Successful novelists are typically outcasts. Harold Bloom’s list of canonical authors is a smorgasbord of drunks, misers, criminals, junkies, creeps, recluses, philanderers, fascists, communists, wife-beaters, chronic masturbators, and suicides. That overlap isn’t accidental. Novel-writing is the kind of activity that attracts maladjusted people (and aggravates their issues). When novelists describe their writing process, it’s usually along the lines of: stare at a keyboard for days on end, trying to perfect a sentence, only to later trash the whole paragraph, or the whole page, or the whole chapter. When they finish the novel, after years of labor, the novelist is filled with loathing for its flaws. A lot of writers say that they don’t like writing. Some hate it. But they can’t stop. Every few hours, the keyboard summons them, and they report for duty.

Normies don’t get into this, and if they do, they either quit, or cast aside literary pretensions and pump out supermarket lit. The people who stick with the craft— who try to achieve a novel, or a couple pages, worthy of Dickens, Tolstoy, or Melville— are the weirdos. The ones who feel they have to write. The ones for whom fiction is the only escape, the only thing that makes sense, the only place they can find shelter.

That’s why so many successful novelists are human failures. It’s also why a disproportionate number are homosexual or Jewish. They’re outcasts, who aren’t understood by, and don’t understand, the people around them.

For the same reason, Great American Catholic Novelists come from the South.

In America, Protestants have always outnumbered Catholics. That’s true in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast, but the South is where the sectarian balance is most lopsided. It’s also home to the sharpest anti-Catholicism. Not all Southerners fell that way, of course, but there’s a higher concentration of anti-popery there than anywhere else.

The KKK hates my co-religionists almost as much as blacks. Among regular folks, aversion to Catholics is stronger below Mason-Dixie than anywhere else. Some Southerners hold outdated stereotypes; others are outright bigots. But whether anti-Catholicism is hard or soft, it’s real, and a lot of Catholics feel it. That’s true today; it was much more true in the mid-twentieth century, when O’Connor, Percy, et al. were doing their best work. Even for Catholics who live among their brethren, there’s an awareness that their faith and their culture are at odds. A deep sense of friction develops. That friction drives some to fiction.