Casey Chalk, formerly a regular contributor to Called to Communion, is increasingly at home writing for The American Conservative. His latest is a case for deporting John Oliver. Chalk tries to distinguish good from bad criticism of the U.S. by ferners internationals:

The reason Hitchens, Scruton, and others like them are effective is because they are indefatigably modest, restrained, and courteous. If they did nothing but scold, they would quickly become tiresome. And when they do criticize, they do so with charity and respect for a country not their own. I was under the impression these were traits that Brits prided themselves as possessing. Not so for Mr. Oliver. His program is filled with caustic insults directed at a panoply of American individuals and institutions. His coverage of the 2016 presidential election was particularly scornful of the American political process. The content is also typically boorish—of all the episodes seen, narry one misses an opportunity to make a joke about sex with animals. Are such things suddenly funny if offered with an English accent?

Since arguments that Roman Catholics did not make for the best citizens or residents of the U.S., I was surprised to see Chalk list Oliver’s anti-Catholicism as a reason for sending him home:

His vitriol against the Catholic Church—still the largest religious institution in the United States—is especially antagonistic: Oliver has suggested that Pope Francis’s opposition to gay marriage demonstrates that the pontiff has “lost touch with reality.” He’s labeled the Church a “vast criminal enterprise,” and sarcastically accused it of “victories for humanity” like the Crusades, forced adoptions, and an “international pedophile exchange program.”

Once the objects of discrimination, Roman Catholics might want to avoid returning the favor.

But the coup de grace was Chalk’s appeal to Patrick Deneen, whose book, Why Liberalism Failed, has become the equivalent to Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? for traditionalist conservatives. Instead of conceding as Deneen does that thanks to liberalism, western societies have no core identity, Chalk rejects Oliver as someone who undermines American traditions (in ways similar to Protestant anti-Catholicism):

The America of Oliver and his audience is not one of interdependent communities and time-proven customs, but of “increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” This is perhaps no surprise, given that Oliver broadcasts from New York City, the epicenter of technocratic snobbery and what Charles Murray calls “superzips,” or zip codes with tremendous concentrations of people with high educational attainment and income.

As Deneen observes, “much of what today passes for culture—with or without the adjective ‘popular’—consists of mocking sarcasm and irony.” This is certainly the case with Oliver, who snidely labels many Americans bigoted and backward and pursues a policy of damnatio memoriae that condemns any American tradition that fails to correlate with his anemic, progressivist vision for our nation’s future. Yet as much as Oliver has shone his spotlight on many targets worthy of reproach (e.g. Infowars, unverified scientific studies, multi-level marketing), his larger, self-referential project undermines core elements of American identity, ones we should be most wary of losing in this time of socio-cultural distemper.

To recap:

Chalk thinks that outsiders should be careful in their criticisms of the U.S. unless they go too far and show disloyalty. Protestants accused Roman Catholics of disloyalty by virtue of their obedience to a foreign prince.

Chalk appeals to Deneen to defend American customs and identity. Deneen thinks such coherence and stability is a sham after Hobbes and Locke.

Maybe it’s time for Mr. Chalk to write for Bryan and the Jasons again.