Travelogue: Budapest and Croatia

Is Christianity sexy?

Matthias Church, Budapest

Marilyn and I were in Budapest for a few days last weekend, the start of a belated honeymoon. We went to the thermal baths, visited the magnificent Matthias Church where monarchs were coronated, and attended a Serbian Orthodox service with the American writer Rod Dreher. He has a new book coming out soon, a weird and wonderful reflection on the experience of wonder.

Now we are in Hvar, an island on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. It is just as lovely as you may have heard.

It is good to get out of the Anglophone world of political hysteria for a while. Here on the periphery of the empire, life carries on largely unmolested. There is a certain pressure that is absent, you slowly realize. Daily existence doesn’t feel invested with high-stakes political drama, as it is in the US and in the Western parts of Europe. We’ve seen no walking billboards of Identity, no multinational corporations hoisting the rainbow standard over the metropolitan centers, no skulking knots of young men from former colonies who seem to be unoccupied, and perhaps too attentive to one’s walking by. There are many visitors here in the Balkans, but to judge from appearances and overheard snippets of language, they are almost entirely European tourists.

Marilyn waits for a ferry in Split, Croatia

I have never seen such a concentration of unaccompanied young women, of arresting beauty, strolling around in bikinis. It is hard to put one’s finger on what we mean when we say a place “feels safe.” It is not a matter of crime statistics, but of manners. The bodily habitus of well-socialized males in the Christian and once-Christian nations creates an ambient social trust and civility, at least in places like Hvar that are fairly affluent. I mean their discipline of the eyes, their modes of address, their calm. This evidently makes women feel free, and it is a beautiful thing.

Or as Marilyn, who is neither male nor well-socialized, keeps saying: “Dang, look at those titties!” She says this in a spirit of exuberant gratitude. Which I entirely share.

The sexiness of the West is endangered. Just now, having suggested this thesis to Marilyn as we sit looking out on the Adriatic, she interjected: “That’s because they don’t go to church!” She means the people of the European nations. Let me acknowledge that at this point, our readers may be confused. Let’s see if we can work this logic out.