Our Sinking Institutions.

Has the Atlantic Monthly hit bottom, or is there still a way to go?

A peculiar thing about the radical left: the more of our institutions they subsume, the angrier they get, and the angrier they get, the more incoherent and irrational they become. A case in point is a piece that just appeared in the dreary pages of the once respected and august Atlantic Monthly, bearing the provactive headline: How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary. In case that isn’t enough to grab the reader’s attention, a subheading then asks (rhetorically, you might suppose, but guess again): Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?

The author is one Daniel Panneton, who, the Atlantic’s blurb states, is a “writer based in Toronto, Canada,” no other credentials given. His essay certainly starts off with a bang (if you’ll pardon the expression).

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Gee whiz! That’s quite a mouthful, but hold on. Mr Panneton is only getting started.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants.Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

Wow and gee whiz! Wouldn’t you, just for curiosity’s sake, like to catch a glimpse of a few of those images “saturating” social media pages? Sadly, you cannot. Mr Panneton chooses not to provide a single link, reference, or name that might assist ghouls like Bickerstaff to feast theirs eyes upon the gruesome images. Strange, that, but perhaps he does so out of concern for the faint of heart or the fairer sex. And speaking of the fairer sex, note this oddly worded claim.

Many radical-traditional Catholic men maintain the hard-line position that other forms of Christianity are heretical, and hold that Catholics alone adhere to the one true Church.

Really, Mr Panneton, only the men? Speaking as a so-called “radical-traditionalist” (a pejorative, by the way, used only by such progressive Catholic organs as Commonweal or National Catholic Reporter), Bickerstaff knows plenty of women who maintain that “hard-line” position. Perhaps you regard them as being of the weaker sex and don’t consider them a threat?

On and on this silly rant goes, jam-packed with accusations with little documentation to support them, only links to pieces in a litany of leftist publications expressing the exact same opinions as Mr Panneton’s, but dating before his regurgitating them in the Atlantic.

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How sad the Atlantic Monthly, a 165 year-old American journal that’s so much a part of this country’s history, whose contributors in the past included, picking a few at random, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, has sunken to the point where it publishes such insubstantial fluff submitted by lightweights like Daniel Panneton.