Grumpy old men and David Brooks

I've long had a question about this sanctification business. A friend of mine used to say he wasn't sure there was such a thing because just about every old man he'd known got more cantankerous through the years, not less. If sanctification was meant to be something akin to "the gradual, gracious work of the Spirit in us bring us to conformity to Christ," then how is it, he used to say, smirking, that most old guys got more grouchy with the years?

He was being facetious, but there was some truth in what he was seeing and saying: old farts grew owly more often than not. I can feel it in me.

My old friend's perception, it seems, was skewed because statistics show each generation of Americans tend to grow more "progressive" through time. That is certain among my people, who, a generation ago, would not have walked into Wal-Mart on a Sabbath afternoon, as I did last Sunday, only to run into several church members, none of whom, it seemed, bore a nickel's worth of guilt for said transgression.

David Brooks, in yesterday's New York Times, says Republicans--especially Trumpites--tend to forget that, and tend to look away from what's happening all around us as we speak: a younger generation, Generation Z, simply doesn't gauge the social issues separating us in the ways their parents do, even though they get along with their parents, often royally. On gay marriage, they see no reason why it's wrong. On immigration, they believe that a racial and ethnic mix doesn't divide but enhances our lives. On gun control, they don't begin to get Wayne LaPierre. About climate change, they couldn't be more sure.

Brooks, a conservative by nature and personal history but a classic no-Trumper, says the present Republican Party, Trump's party, is woefully and willfully blind to what is happening all around us. The world is changing, most visibly in racial character. White folks will soon become a minority that nothing, save genocide, is going to change. A program of racial exclusiveness, as Trump seems bent on using, is doomed, Brooks says. "These days the Republican Party looks like a direct reaction against this ethos — against immigration, against diversity, against pluralism," he says. "Moreover, conservative thought seems to be getting less relevant to the America that is coming into being."

Hard as it might be for old farts to get less grouchy, he says we all need to face the fact that the world beneath our feet and all around us is clearly and demonstrably changing. "A better multiculturalism would be optimistic," he says; "we need to believe that we can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed." That's not Trump, and it's not, at present, Republican.

Besides, what Brooks suggests strikes me as better definition of what the catechism claimed "the process of sanctification" was meant to be.