Quote of the Day

“The triumph of American independence was the result of the most extraordinary people in history, the most extraordinary culture in history, and the most extraordinary ideas in history, all creating the most extraordinary republic ever... Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it and preserved it. The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation, and America has a destiny like no other because we are a people like no other.”

–U.S. President Donald J. Trump, Address at Mount Rushmore, July 3, 2026

Reflections on America's Semiquincentennial

by Justin Soutar

This year we celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America, one of the greatest nations in the history of the world and certainly one of the greatest in modern times. Our imposing geographical size and relatively isolated position, our fertile soil and abundant mineral resources, our natural beauty and temperate climate, our vast and diverse population, our productive industry and commerce, our high employment rate and comfortable standard of living, our thriving financial sector, our large and well-trained armed forces, and our prominent influence in world affairs all contribute to our country’s greatness. However, the core of that greatness lies in 1) our appeal to universal and timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and 2) our traditional character as a religious and moral people.

The concept of natural law formed the philosophical foundation for the American colonists’ rebellion against British tyranny and their eventual momentous decision, after many years of lively discussion and intense debate, to politically separate the thirteen colonies from England. This is clear from the ringing opening text of the Declaration of Independence, which was primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson and finalized by the Second Continental Congress:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As men of faith and reason, our nation’s Founders unanimously recognized that “unalienable” human rights are gifts from God, and that the purpose of representative government is to protect these rights. In other words, they realized that human beings are given certain rights by God because of their very nature as persons created in his image, and that any government that refuses to respect these rights is not legitimate. It’s obvious that the Founders were not simply stating their subjective personal beliefs or opinions about the colonists’ problem and how it should be resolved. Justifying their course of action based on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” anchored the Declaration firmly in the objective truth of natural law. Benjamin Franklin implicitly acknowledged this natural law basis for human rights when he wisely stated: “A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

This is an important lesson for us today in the difficult battle against radical secularism, a virulent philosophy that directly attacks our traditional identity as a Judeo-Christian nation and the natural law principles of her foundation. In recent years, to cite just two of many examples, innocent healthcare providers and wedding-cake bakers have been dragged into court and threatened with huge fines for refusing to dispense abortifacient drugs or contraceptives or to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding.” The well-intentioned lawyers representing these good people usually base their defense on their client’s right to act according to his or her personal religious and moral beliefs and conscience, a right indeed protected by the Constitution. While this approach has been fairly successful, its major flaw is its failure to take advantage of the objective truth of natural law, leaving the arguments stuck on the subjective plane of “conscience rights”.

Abortifacient drugs unjustly kill innocent unborn children, violating their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is a fact and not just someone’s sincerely held belief. No woman has a “right” to kill her unborn child. Contraceptives interfere with the essential love- and life-giving aspects of marriage as designed by the Creator. And natural law defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman; the immoral practice of sodomy is not “marriage”, and no two men or women have a “right” to call it that. Defense attorneys should be arguing their pro-life and pro-marriage cases from the natural law perspective that abortion, contraception for married couples, and sodomy are objectively evil (and thus harmful to society) by their very nature, not just because their clients happen to believe that they are evil and harmful, and that no one should be forced to participate in or to support such immoral activities. In order to effectively defeat the ideology of radical secularism, we should abandon the subjective territory of “conscience rights” and reclaim the unassailable moral high ground—-the objective truth of natural law.

Intimately related to the natural law basis for human rights at the core of America’s greatness is our longstanding identity as a religious and moral people in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is evident at every turn, from the words and examples of the Founders, to the speeches and writings of our elected representatives and judges down through the decades, to the tens of thousands of churches dotting our landscape, to the prominent Catholic role in the development of our education and healthcare systems, to Congressional sessions opening with prayer, to the display of the Ten Commandments in our Supreme Court building, to our national motto, “In God We Trust.”

George Washington declared: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” John Adams remarked: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” James Madison said: “We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity… to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Having toured the young United States, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville concluded: “America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, Abraham Lincoln asserted that God’s blessings “should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.” In his famous D-Day Prayer broadcast on national radio in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt said: “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.” Ronald Reagan observed in the 1980s: “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” In 2024, Donald Trump attributed his survival of an assassination attempt to “the grace of Almighty God.” The fourth stanza of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” includes the words: “Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation… And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’” And in the Pledge of Allegiance, we declare that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Our traditional character as a Christian nation, combined with our traditional natural law basis for human rights and liberties, has allowed us to achieve many remarkable things in the past 250 years in the areas of agriculture, architecture, art, aviation, communication, culture, economics, education, energy, entertainment, finance, foreign aid, geology, health care, immigration, law, literature, medicine, meteorology, music, political philosophy, science and technology, trade, transportation, space exploration, sports, world peace, and many other fields. We should celebrate and give thanks to God for all of these accomplishments.

This is not to say that our nation, comprised of flawed human beings, has perfectly lived up to her own ideals. True American patriots wholeheartedly celebrate all that was and is good in our nation while candidly admitting her past and present failures in certain areas and realistically acknowledging her current state of deep division and crisis. We unwisely tolerated the development of a partisan political system, which is now dominated by two major parties that are diametrically opposed on nearly every issue. We unjustly forced most Native Americans onto reservations, tolerated slavery and racial segregation for decades, and bombed innocent civilians in Japan in 1945. We’ve experienced a general religious and moral decline in recent decades with the spread of alcoholism and drugs, pornography, divorce, out of wedlock pregnancies, tens of millions of abortions, sexual abuse, sodomy, transgenderism, and mass shootings, as well as petty theft, vandalism, and littering. Civics education and prayer have all but vanished from our public schools.

Misguided DEI policies have barred hundreds of thousands of qualified people from good jobs. Inflation continues to depreciate the value of our money. Our $38 trillion dollar national debt is far beyond unsustainable yet continues to rise daily. Political corruption and media bias and censorship continue to threaten the common good and obscure the truth. Power struggles and gridlock have replaced bipartisanship and collaboration in Washington as Republicans and Democrats are now bitter enemies, with Democrats attempting to destroy President Donald Trump and to manipulate election laws to their own advantage. Israeli radical Zionists are systematically eliminating Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land, and we’re doing little if anything to stop it. And Communist China has stolen our computer software intellectual property; purchased large tracts of American farmland near our military bases; planted thousands of spies in our city halls and universities; and is actively working to replace us as the world’s leading superpower.

Worst of all, the rise of toxic radical secularist (aka “woke’) ideology, openly embraced by corrupt Democratic Party elites, has taught a large percentage of ignorant Americans to hate their country; to reject our traditional Christian identity and natural law foundation; to assert various new “rights” that exist only in their deluded minds; to discriminate against innocent white men; to disrespect our immigration authorities and police officers; to tear down statues of our national heroes; to stage violent protests; and to assassinate their political enemies. This dangerous ideology has profoundly divided our nation, seriously threatening its integrity and survival.

However, there are many signs of hope that our nation will survive the present grave crisis and enjoy a brighter future. Young Americans flocked to churches after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and purchases of new Bibles are on the rise. Millions of Americans are taking the free online civics courses offered by Hillsdale College, and Imprimis now has a monthly circulation of nearly eight million copies. Many employers are making color-blind and merit-based hiring decisions. More than 25 percent of American voters are now politically independent. The number of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics continues to dwindle. And the second Trump administration and congressional Republicans have already done much to repair and strengthen our country in many of the above-mentioned fields of endeavor.

America’s first Catholic president and Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” If we who continue to love this great nation are successful in converting and defeating her radically secularist traitors and in retaining the twin core of that greatness—-our appeal to timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and our traditional character as a religious and moral people—-then she will not only survive, unite, and heal, but will also achieve even greater and more spectacular things in the next two hundred fifty years.

Long live the United States of America!

Copyright © 2026 Justin D. Soutar.

Quote of the Day

Landing of Columbus at the Island of Guanahaní, West Indies by John Vanderlyn (1846)

"The underlying motive of Columbus' historic voyage was the conversion of those who did not know Christ as the living Son of God who became the Son of Mary. His favorite prayer, said in Latin, was 'Jesu cum Maria sit nobis in via', which means 'May Jesus with Mary be with us on the way.' For Columbus this way meant both the voyage through time into eternity and the voyage in time to bring Mary's faith in her divine Son to a still unbelieving world."

--Fr. John A. Hardon, S. J., Christopher Columbus: The Catholic Discovery of America (Eternal Life, 2012), p. 15

In Defense of the Two-State Solution

by Justin Soutar

As a freelance writer who has been following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Catholic perspective for twenty years, it’s heartbreaking to watch what is now happening in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories, especially Gaza, as the dangerous radical Zionist ideology unleashes its destructive power against hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and the historic Christian community in the Holy Land continues to dwindle toward extinction. No less disturbing is the hard-heartedness of well-intentioned American conservative politicians, TV and radio commentators, magazine editors, and citizens who, blinded by their wholehearted support for Israel, cannot see the naked evil of radical Zionism or the havoc it is wreaking in the Holy Land and the surrounding Middle East.

Radical Zionism is the fundamental root cause of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without the existence and activity of this century-old ideology and movement, no such conflict would have arisen and persisted so stubbornly. The radical Zionists’ trademark crime of seizing Palestinian property outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders, evicting or killing its owners and tenants, and handing it over to illegal European Jewish settlers has instigated and fueled the conflict while provoking occasional wars between Israel and surrounding Arab nations as well as radical “Islamic” terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians by a handful of Palestinians. In this vicious circle of injustice perpetuated by Israeli and Palestinian extremists, radical Zionists bear greater responsibility, as they initiated the cycle of violence and consistently kill and displace far more innocent people than the radical “Muslims” do.

The radical Zionist ideology and movement were founded by a handful of non-religious European Jewish intellectuals who settled illegally in British-occupied Palestine in the early 1900s, often forcing native Palestinians off their ancestral lands in the process. An offshoot of the mainstream (that is, peaceful and legitimate) Zionist movement, which led to the creation of the modern nation of Israel in 1948 and has generally dominated its politics since then, radical Zionism has much in common with the better-known twentieth-century ideologies of Nazism and Communism: it is fundamentally atheistic, secularist, utopian, racist, violent, and genocidal. Its ambitious goal is to expand Israel’s territory until it includes all of the land that was part of the ancient biblical Kingdom of Israel, which stretched from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq, and to create therein an earthly paradise reserved exclusively for European Jews. The radical Zionist ideologues have used, are now using, and will continue to use any and all means necessary to achieve this goal of restoring the “Eretz Yisrael” (“Greater Israel”), including anti-Palestinian propaganda and economic warfare; the Israeli electoral process; mass forced displacement of Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews; illegal immigration and settlement of Palestinian land; bribery; intimidation; terrorism; arbitrary arrest and detention; military invasion, occupation, and annexation; and mass murder.

In their blissful ignorance of radical Zionism, American conservative commentators cite radical “Islam” as the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. From the perspective of the radical Zionists, this common misconception conveniently deflects public attention from the elephant in the room. Radical Zionism is the more dangerous of the two ideologies because its followers are more widespread, more professional, better organized and trained, better funded, more secretive, more determined, and more violent. Its adherents in Israel, the U.S. and Europe range from headline-grabbing settler-terrorists to behind-the-scenes intelligence operatives to politicians in business suits. Their visibility, activities, and locations may differ, but they are united in a single purpose: to make the dream of the Greater Israel a reality. The radical Zionist movement of the twenty-first century wields an international terrorist organization of greater reach, destruction, and effectiveness than any radical “Muslim” terrorist network, and it is operating virtually unchecked.

The success and influence of the radical Zionist settler movement has waxed and waned through the years depending on various political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and economic factors. Concomitantly, the methods used to illegally acquire Palestinian land parcels and the number of illegal settlements have fluctuated significantly over time. For much of its existence, the movement was limited to small and scattered groups of European Jewish illegal immigrants living permanently in Palestinian territory with the knowledge, if not always the approval or permission, of the Zionist council or the Israeli government. Israeli leaders unsympathetic to radical Zionism have attempted to halt illegal settlement construction altogether, which allowed the peace process to move forward. On the other hand, during those occasional periods when the radical Zionists managed to gain control of the Israeli government and military, illegal settlement construction boomed, provoking further violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

We are in such an unfortunate period now. Following the murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians by terrorists from the violent wing of Hamas in October 2023, radical Zionists cunningly played on Israeli citizens’ fears of additional attacks to seize full control of the Israeli government and armed forces. The recent pattern of official Israeli statements and actions clearly indicates the current government’s aggressive and unconditional support for the radical Zionist movement and betrays its genocidal intentions. The current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a lifelong radical Zionist who committed terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians in his youth. His regime is dramatically accelerating the process of establishing the Greater Israel through forced displacement and slaughter of the Palestinian people. The killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the expulsion of one million more from Gaza is just the tip of the iceberg. Building the Greater Israel will require the unilateral annexation of all Palestinian territory and, eventually, parts of nearby Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the obliteration of priceless Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy sites; the massacre of several million innocent Palestinian and other Arab civilians; and the forced displacement of many millions more Arabs into nearby countries and areas. In other words, genocide, a regional war, cultural destruction, and a massive refugee crisis are in the offing, to say nothing of the environmental and economic devastation the war will inevitably cause. These regional hostilities will expand into a world war if the international community intervenes decisively to stop the radical Zionists from founding the Greater Israel, just as it did eighty-plus years ago to prevent the Nazis from establishing the Third Reich.

In the violent conflict of the last two years (not a “war,” properly speaking, as wars are fought by nation-states, such as Russia and Ukraine) between “Islamic” terrorists from the radical wing of Hamas and the radical Zionist-controlled Israeli military, approximately 3,000 innocent Israelis and 65,000 innocent Palestinians have been killed. It is clear from the outrageously disproportionate nature of the casualties—more than twenty Palestinians for every Israeli—which ideology is bloodier, yet American conservative commentators do not sound the alarm about the dangers of radical Zionism, dismissing factual reports of Palestinian genocide by Israel out of hand, blaming radical “Muslim” terrorists for the Palestinian refugee crisis, and denouncing criticism of Israeli policies as “anti-Semitic”. Whenever an Israeli civilian is killed, these commentators speak and write all about it; but when a Palestinian civilian is killed by violence or starvation, they remain silent or mention it in passing, seeming not to notice or care. Are Israelis and Palestinians not both children of God? Has the Creator not equally endowed them with inalienable rights?

During the twentieth century, Turkey slaughtered its Armenians, Germany killed its Jews, and Pakistan butchered its East Bengalis, to mention just a few modern examples of ethnic cleansing. Yet in most cases, the genocidal tyrants were defeated, often at the cost of a bloody war, and the victim peoples survived to realize their dream of self-determination. In the case of the East Bengalis, the independent nation of Bangladesh came to birth on India’s east-central border. The good of natural law ultimately triumphed over the evil of ideology. Taking a lesson from history, this author predicts that the Palestinian people will survive the current genocide and return to their homeland to establish the independent nation that is rightfully theirs.

In 1948, after careful and extensive research, the recently founded United Nations Organization, led by the United States, approved the establishment of the modern nation of Israel with specific borders and with the understanding that within ten to twenty years, a modern nation of Palestine would be established alongside it. Unfortunately, due to the persistent and outsized influence of the radical Zionist ideology, modern Israel has always illegitimately claimed and occupied various portions of territory beyond its internationally recognized borderlines, and the birth of the Palestinian nation has been delayed indefinitely. Meanwhile, demographic shifts during the past eight decades have only strengthened the Palestinian position. The number of Palestinians during this time has grown rapidly, leading to a high population density in the Palestinian Territories, while the number of Israelis has increased quite modestly by comparison. So if anything, the borderlines drawn by the UN in 1948 are considerably more generous to Israel than they were almost eighty years ago.

It has been the position of the Holy See for decades, which this author shares, that the long-proposed two-state solution, with two independent nations of Israel and Palestine existing side by side within internationally recognized borders and the historic Old City of Jerusalem in a special international zone, is the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring real and lasting peace to the Middle East. There can be no peace without justice, and there will be no justice for the Palestinian people until the radical Zionist ideology and movement are defeated. Let us pray daily for the conversion of the radical Zionists and of those well-intentioned commentators whose ignorance and silence allow the evil of radical Zionism to grow more powerful with each passing day.

Copyright © 2025 Justin D. Soutar.

Quote of the Day

"History is not history unless it's the truth."

--Abraham Lincoln

Reflection for the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord

"Augustus' instruction regarding the registration, for tax purposes, of all the citizens of the ecumene leads Joseph, together with Mary, his betrothed, to Bethlehem, the city of David, and thus it helps to bring to fulfillment the promise of the prophet Micah that the shepherd of Israel would be born in that city. The Emperor unwittingly contributes to the realization of the prophecy: the history of the Roman Empire is interwoven with the history of the salvation that God established with Israel. The history of God's election, hitherto confined to Israel, enters the wider world, it enters world history. God, who is the God of Israel and of all peoples, shows himself to be the true guiding force behind all history."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Part Three: The Infancy Narratives (Image, 2012), pp. 64-65

Quote of the Day

"As is our custom, Vespers were said in the late afternoon, and a special thanksgiving was offered to God for giving us renewed hope through the many signs of land he has provided. I now believe that the light I saw earlier was a sign from God and that it was truly the first positive indication of land."

--Christopher Columbus, Diary, October 11, 1492

Quote of the Day

"The historical truth is that [Father Junipero] Serra repeatedly pressed the Spanish authorities for better treatment of the Native American communities. Serra was not simply a man of his times. In working with Native Americans, he was a man ahead of his times who made great sacrifices to defend and serve the indigenous population and work against an oppression that extends far beyond the mission era. And if that is not enough to legitimate a public statue in the state that he did so much to create, then virtually every historical figure from our nation’s past will have to be removed for their failings measured in the light of today’s standards.”

--California Catholic Conference of Bishops, June 22, 2020

ElectionWatch 2018: What Will Happen?

Continuing with a tradition begun in 2010 and continued in 2014, it's time (past time, really) for an ElectionWatch series of blog posts and articles offering insight and commentary on the 2018 U.S. congressional, senatorial, gubernatorial and state legislative elections. Although leap-year presidential elections are the "big shows" that generate increasingly huge amounts of political fundraising, campaigning, media attention and voter activity, I personally find the off-year elections a bit more interesting.

While millions of Republican, Democratic and independent voters regard presidential elections as the most consequential for our nation, the fact is that midterm elections are often just as influential, if not even more so, on the direction of our country. This is because our president, while head of the executive branch of government and director of national policy, is only one man, whereas the fifty state governors, ninety-nine state legislatures, one hundred senators, and 435 members of Congress do the lion's share of actual governing, thereby exerting tremendous influence on state and national policy by virtue of their offices and authority. Depending on the issue positions, agenda, and political affiliation of these lawmakers and executives, this influence is used either in support of or in opposition to the president's national policy goals. During the notoriously immoral and corrupt administration of President Barack Obama, for example, Republicans who took control of state legislatures, governorships, Congress, and the Senate provided an important check on the president's abuses of power by refusing to implement ObamaCare, suing the federal government over the unconstitutional HHS mandate, restricting abortion, protecting religious liberty, and enforcing immigration laws.

Yes, senators, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators are elected in presidential election years as well. However, the midterm elections provide a valuable barometer of national opinion across a wide range of issues, typically indicating voter support or lack thereof for the incumbent president and his agenda. In the historic 2002 midterms, Republicans expanded their majorities in both the House and the Senate due to voter approval of President George W. Bush's pro-life, economic and national security measures. As support for Bush's foreign policy waned, Democrats managed to narrowly take over Congress and pick up some state governorships in the 2006 election. The stunning Republican landslide victories of 2010 and 2014 were driven by massive public dissatisfaction with Barack Obama's abortion, healthcare, economic and tax policies.

What will happen in 2018? Will Republicans keep and strengthen their majorities in the House and the Senate as in 2002? Will Democrats seize control as in 2006? Or will something entirely different happen? To answer these questions in a meaningful way, we must attempt to combine historical perspective with an objective evaluation of the current complex situation in the United States.

We live in a country that is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War. Party lines have become fault lines segregating people with radically different values, issue positions, interests and income levels from each other. Republicans have become the party of traditional Judeo-Christian values and support for President Donald Trump, and Democrats have become the party of radical secularism and outright hatred of President Trump. Yet many Americans feel that neither party truly represents their interests. Civil discourse, the art of expressing one's opinions and convictions in a compelling yet respectful manner; and bipartisanship, the art of working together for the common good based on common values, have all but vanished from Washington, replaced by vulgar personal attacks and legislative deadlock. Meanwhile, many Americans, myself included, applaud President Trump's performance on certain issues such as abortion, religious liberty, the HHS mandate, court appointments, taxes, the economy, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy while taking issue with his decisions on renewable energy, environmental protection, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy.

Although it has certain unique aspects pertaining to our own time, our current national crisis is far from unprecedented, and history teaches that such profound wounds of division will be reflected in the election results. That said, it's tricky to predict what will happen on Tuesday night. On the one hand, Democrats are spending a ton of money to try to take over Congress, with the secular media and certain national opinion polls biased in their favor. But on the other hand, the economy is doing pretty well, which helps the Republicans. The latest polling averages from Real Clear Politics show Democrats winning a narrow seven-seat majority in the House of Representatives and Republicans holding on to the Senate, but as we saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016, the polls can be inaccurate. To offer my best guess at this point, I don't think we'll see a repeat of 2002 or 2006. I think something entirely different will happen: Republicans will maintain majority control of both the House and the Senate, albeit by extremely narrow margins.

Regardless of what happens, much is at stake in this election. The Democrats have vowed to impeach President Trump and force their own radically secularist agenda on our nation, and they will certainly attempt to do this if they achieve even a one-seat majority in the House. We need to pray earnestly for our country's conversion and healing, vote our values and leave the results in God's hands.

A Little History You Probably Didn't Know

"Contrary to a widespread misconception, the 56 signers did not sign as a group and did not do so on July 4, 1776. The official event occurred on August 2, 1776, when 50 men probably took part. Later that year, five more apparently signed separately and one added his name in a subsequent year. Not until January 18, 1777, in the wake of Washington's victories at Trenton and Princeton, did Congress, which had sought to protect the signers from British retaliation for as long as possible, authorize printing of the Declaration with all their names listed. At this time, Thomas McKean had not yet penned his name.

"The most impressive signature is that of John Hancock, President of Congress, centered over the others. According to tradition, Hancock wrote boldly and defiantly so that King George III would not need spectacles to identify him as a 'traitor' and double the reward for his head. The other Delegates signed in six columns, which ran from right to left. They utilized the standard congressional voting order, by colony generally from north to south: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

"Those who signed on August 2 undoubtedly did not realize that others would follow them and thus allowed no room to accommodate the signatures of the later six men. Two of them, George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee, found ample room above their fellow Virginians. One, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, crowded his name into the space between the Massachusetts and Rhode Island groups. Two of the others--Thomas McKean and Oliver Wolcott--signed at the bottom of columns following their State delegations. Only Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire needed to add his name separately from his colleagues--at the bottom of the first column on the right at the end of the Connecticut group."

--from the book Men of Freedom: Profiles of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (Pathmaker Books, 1975), pp. 23-24 (Note: In addition to biographical sketches of all fifty-six of the signers, this wonderful old book includes the historical background of the Declaration of Independence and tells what happened to the original document of the Declaration in the two hundred years following its publication. Unfortunately, this treasure has been out of print for many years and is now very difficult, if not impossible, to find.)

Signs of Hope: A Transcendent Perspective

A blessed and happy New Year to all of my readers, Catholic and otherwise! As we leave the Year of Our Lord 2015 behind and embark on A.D. 2016, it's a good time to step back a bit from the daily frenzy and turmoil of national news and world events as brought to us 24/7 by the radically secularist mainstream media machine and put these temporary passing things within a broader historical context, as well as to view them from the transcendent perspective of God and eternity.

While it's undeniably true that we live in an era of great turmoil and confusion, injustice and deception, materialism and hedonism, violence and conflict, destruction and upheaval in which many bad things are happening that seem to portend a dark future for our planet and its inhabitants, we must keep in mind that there are also many good things happening that represent signs of hope for a brighter future--seemingly insignificant things that are often hidden and go unnoticed by the proud and the great, the rich and the powerful of our time, things that are either minimized or entirely overlooked by the worldly mainstream media, just as the birth of Jesus Christ to a humble Jewish girl in a Bethlehem cave-stable more than two thousand years ago escaped the attention of the elite rulers of ancient Rome. In the six thousand years of recorded human history to date, we have been through many dark periods when hope for the future seemed faint, yet with the help of God, our loving Creator and merciful Redeemer, we survived those dark periods and emerged from them into the light of justice and peace, development and achievement.

Indeed, it is very often when things are darkest that the seeds of a brilliant future are quietly being sowed and their growth carefully nurtured, just as the Benedictine monks of the Dark Ages in their scattered monasteries sowed the seeds of learning and culture that triumphantly burst into full flower during the Middle Ages. No matter what dreadful and evil things may happen on this earth due to the sin and wickedness of fallen humanity, Almighty God is still the sovereign Lord of the world and its history, and nothing bad happens unless He allows it to happen as a mysterious part of the unfolding of His plan for the universe. In His masterful divine wisdom, which is far above our limited human thinking and reasoning, He knows how to bring good even out of evil, and His Spirit is constantly working in the hearts of countless men and women of good will to inspire a remarkable diversity of good works and initiatives, all of which contribute harmoniously to the renewal of this planet of ours, the jewel and masterpiece of His planetary creation. If you want proof that this is happening all over the world right now, just step outside the box artificially created by the mainstream media and start looking around carefully for yourself. You'll discover signs of hope everywhere, even in the most unlikely of places.

We also know that, whenever the end of this passing world comes, Jesus Christ our Lord will return to earth as the glorious Just Judge of all humanity to raise the bodies of the dead and pronounce final judgment on all of human history. Those who have died or met Christ in friendship with God will be rewarded with eternal life in the unimaginably magnificent City of God in Heaven, while evildoers who died or met Christ without repenting will be punished with eternal death in the unimaginably horrific dungeon of the damned in Hell. Every single human being who ever lived will ultimately find a permanent and irrevocable home in one of those two places based on the choices freely made in his or her life and the state of his or her soul at the moment of death or the moment of Christ's return. Thus it behooves us to spend our short earthly lives well, preparing as best we can for admission to Heaven in the next life by doing God's Will and striving to grow in union with Him here and now.

It would be well for us to keep these truths in mind as we continue to be bombarded by the deafening clamor of the incessant drumbeat of bad news churned out by the radically secularist mainstream media outlets. It's not a matter of burying our heads in the sand like ostriches and pretending that nothing bad is happening, or of attempting to insulate ourselves completely from the suffering and misery of our innocent brothers and sisters in the human family. Rather, it's a matter of viewing things from the correct perspective, the perspective of the Almighty and Eternal God who holds the universe in His hands and providentially guides the course of world history, the One in whom we can safely place our full trust, our Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier with whom we are meant to share perfect happiness for all eternity in the world to come.

The Tyranny of Radical Secularism (Part 2 of 3)

by Justin Soutar

A major propaganda weapon in the militant secularists’ assault on America’s Christian identity and on religious liberty is their re-interpretation of the concept of the “separation of church and state” implicitly enshrined in the First Amendment. Our nation’s founders intended the distinction between religious and civil authority to allow each governing entity to fulfill its proper public role. Radical secularists reinterpret this common-sense distinction as a radical divorce between the religious and civil spheres. In their view, every trace of religion must be scrubbed from American public life: no references to God should be made by government leaders; no symbols of the Christian religion should be displayed on public property. This malicious anti-God and anti-Christian animus would have struck the Founders as not only quite alien but extremely dangerous to the well-being of our nation. Here is what General George Washington wrote to the governors of the original thirteen states in a letter announcing the disbanding of the Continental Army on June 8, 1783 (note that this was an official U.S. military document):

I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the State over which you preside, in His holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field; and, finally, that he would be most graciously pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.

 And James Madison said the following in an address to the Virginia General Assembly in 1778: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

 

The Founders’ Vision for America

Many of us today take it for granted that the United States is a natural product of Christian European civilization. However, we shouldn’t forget that at a time when most European Catholic and Protestant nations were governed by absolute or constitutional monarchies in which Church and state authority were closely linked and intertwined, the concept of a secular republic built on Christian religious and moral values was quite novel. As men of the Renaissance period, our nation’s devout Christian Founders did not eschew experimentation, but their experimentation flowed from the religious and moral principles they held dear. What they gave the world was something altogether unique and unprecedented—a secular Christian republic. What they created has come to be known as the “American experiment.” The Christian religion and Judeo-Christian moral code formed the foundations of this experiment and have contributed enormously to its remarkable success. Without those religious and moral foundations, the experiment would have failed long ago and our nation would never have achieved greatness.

The Founders’ vision for America was simple, intuitive, holistic, and brilliant. Today it appears utterly sane and reasonable when contrasted with the dangerous alternative vision that radically secularist ideologues are working so hard to put into practice. The Founders believed that God created all human persons equal in dignity and endowed them with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They believed that the role of civil government is to protect these unalienable human rights. They believed that such government comes from God and derives its legitimate authority from the consent of the governed. They were also profoundly aware of the fact that human nature has been corrupted by original sin, so they designed a three-branch system of government with checks and balances to minimize corruption and abuse of power. They believed that freedom is sacred because it is a gift from God our Creator, and that the truth is what makes people free. They understood freedom as the right to act in accord with the natural moral law and to practice one’s religious beliefs without government interference. They knew that religion and morality are powerful safeguards of human liberty, and considered both essential to the survival and well-being of America. Most importantly, the Founders agreed that without God’s guidance, protection, and assistance, the American experiment would be a failure.

The great majority of the Founders were Protestants who hailed from eighteenth-century England, where theocratic monarchs forced the state religion of Anglicanism on their subjects and outlawed the public practice of Catholicism and Protestantism. As a result of this experience, the Founders decided that the United States would not have an official religion. They understood that religious freedom is a two-sided coin consisting of these basic elements, one negative and the other positive: 1) freedom from religious compulsion (negative), and 2) freedom to practice one’s own religion (positive). To guarantee religious freedom in the new nation, our founders wisely integrated these two essential elements into the First Amendment to the Constitution: 1) they forbade Congress from passing any law that would institute an official American religion, and 2) they forbade Congress from passing any law that would prohibit the free exercise of religion. Thus the First Amendment authors intended to safeguard our republic from the opposite extremes of totalitarian theocracy and religious repression.

The careful distinction between religious and civil authority in the First Amendment (commonly known today as the separation of church and state) was intended to allow each governing entity to fulfill its proper public role unimpeded by the other. The First Amendment may be considered a blueprint for the secular Christian nation that the United States was founded and intended to be.

 

Secularism v. Radical Secularism

What are some characteristics of a secular nation, properly understood as such? First and most importantly, a secular nation is a religious nation, a nation “under God.” It recognizes that human rights and state authority both come from God and that the state is the guardian of these rights. This proper understanding of the source of human rights and the role of the state makes a secular nation a place of freedom and justice. It is a nation that values religion and morality as “indispensable supports” of its political prosperity (George Washington). It is a nation where church and state coexist harmoniously, each respecting the legitimate authority of the other. It is a place where each citizen is free to practice the religion of his or her choice, or to not practice any religion if that is his or her choice. It is a place where the contributions of religious believers to public life are recognized, welcomed and encouraged, even by those who are not religious themselves. It is a nation where traditional family values are highly esteemed and diligently safeguarded by those in authority. It is a place where government leaders are public servants, chosen by the people and responsible to them, subject to the same laws, who strive to promote the common good of all citizens. All these characteristics of a secular nation have allowed the United States of America to flourish and become the world’s greatest nation.

On the other hand, a “radically secularist” nation is a nightmarish place where atheism has become the official state “religion” and where all genuine religions are suppressed by law. This kind of nation is a nation without God. It recognizes no authority above that of the government. It is a place where human rights are believed to come from the government and may thus be given or taken away as the state sees fit. This false subjectivist understanding of human rights and government power renders it a place of bondage and injustice. It is a nation that rejects religious faith and absolute moral standards as obstacles to its freedom and progress. It is a nation where the church is completely subordinated to the state, and where public practice of religion is either severely curtailed or absolutely forbidden. It is a place where religious believers must leave their faith behind if they are to make any substantive contributions to public life. It is a nation where traditional family values are openly scorned and deliberately attacked by those in authority. It is a place where government leaders are self-appointed elitist dictators, not responsible to the people and not subject to any laws, who use their power to advance their own private interests. Such a godless, radically secularist nation is a nation in despair—a living hell. Within a relatively short time, it self-destructs and usually leaves behind an infamous legacy of violence, war, and mass murder. Historic examples include France under the Jacobins, late 1920s Mexico, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China. Contemporary examples would include Communist China and North Korea.

Many countries of the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, the nations of Western Europe, and Communist China and North Korea, are currently at various intermediate stages on the road to the radically secularist inferno. Abortion on demand is legal in all these countries; in China, parents are forced by law to abort every child after their first. Euthanasia is gradually becoming acceptable and legal everywhere. More than a dozen nations on four continents have already passed laws making same-sex “marriage” the legal equivalent of traditional marriage. In Western Europe, radical secularism has gained significant ground. While freedom of religion still largely exists and the people still elect their government leaders, hostility to religion now permeates Western European culture. A few years ago, a law was passed in Ireland attempting to force priests to violate the seal of confession by reporting sins of sexual abuse heard in confession to the government; a similar attempt was made with a priest in Louisiana last year. The Catholic Church in China is officially suppressed by the government, which recognizes only its own National Catholic Patriotic Association. And North Korea resembles one large prison camp ruled by a military dictatorship.

 

Lessons from History

As hinted above, the takeover of a country by the forces of militant secularism is usually not a “bolt from the blue,” a sudden and swift affair imposed on unwilling and unsuspecting masses by an elite coup with whom they have nothing in common. On the contrary, it is typically a gradual process occurring over several decades or generations that involves a progressive and widespread decline of religious faith among the general population, eventually leaving a yawning vacuum to be filled by the pseudo-religion of radical secularism. This is exactly what took place in Orthodox Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s: a steady loss of religious faith among the bourgeois paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In early twentieth-century Mexico, unscrupulous Catholic landlords had amassed great wealth through unjust exploitation of their tenant farmers and neglected to share their resources with the less fortunate. Plutarco Elias Calles, the radically secularist dictator who took control of Mexico in the 1920s, had grown up in abject poverty that left him extremely bitter and convinced that organized religion was the enemy of the Mexican people. The French Revolution offers another example of this general rule: in late eighteenth-century France, corruption within the Catholic monarchy generated popular resentment, which the Jacobins unhesitatingly exploited to push their fanatically secularist agenda. (Poland is a somewhat different case, as it did not experience a homegrown revolution but was occupied by militantly secularist foreign invaders, while its own people remained devoutly religious under Communist rule.)

Given the critical situation in which America finds itself today, with the benefit of hindsight we may wonder whether the Founders made the right decision in not establishing Christianity as the official religion of the United States. It is certainly legitimate to raise this question and discuss and debate the answer as they pertain to both national religious identity and religious freedom. On one hand, making Christianity the official religion of the United States would have removed any ambiguity about our identity as a Christian nation, making it much more difficult for today’s radical secularists to successfully mount a vicious attack on that identity. On the other hand, however, we need to keep in mind that even countries with official religions are not immune to the forces of militant secularism. France, Mexico, Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Poland—all either officially Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant nations—were shaken by convulsive revolutions in 1789, 1917, 1917, 1922, 1933, 1936, and 1939, respectively, that enthroned more or less short-lived totalitarian atheistic and socialist regimes (the Jacobins, the Federales, Communists, Fascists, Nazis).  

How did this happen? How did nations that had been Christian and free for centuries succumb to the tyranny of radical secularism? The answer is that, for a significant period of time prior to each revolution, the Christian people within those nations had been growing weak in their faith; as a result, injustices had crept into society and become entrenched, providing a fertile breeding ground for destructive revolutionary ideologies. When a country loses its faith, it then loses its freedom as well, with terrible social consequences. The rise of a godless dictator such as Hitler or Stalin is rarely an accident or anomaly, but rather an ordinary consequence of a religious vacuum and its attendant social turmoil, a predictable response to the need to fill that vacuum and impose order.

A lack of charity and justice properly grounded in the truth, especially from those who call themselves followers of Christ, lies at the root of all social problems. A serious and prolonged crisis of faith inevitably leads to crisis in society. Conversely, the solution to social problems is personal conversion to Christ. This is part of the reason why Pope Benedict XVI, during his papacy, declared a Year of Faith—to address the “profound crisis of faith” afflicting the contemporary global society by summoning all Christians “to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Savior of the World.” If bad Christians give religion a bad name, good Christians make religion look attractive and contribute to the building up of human society. As a Muslim sultan once famously remarked to Saint Francis of Assisi, “If all Christians were like you, I would become a Christian.”

Radically secularist despots such as Lenin, Calles, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin who carried out their evil ideology to the letter inflicted untold human suffering and misery and are universally condemned as traitors to mankind (except by those freethinkers in their soap bubbles who think they were just doing what was “right for them”). By contrast, great Christian figures such as Saint Francis, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Father Benedict Groeschel, Saint John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis who live the Gospel authentically accomplish outstanding achievements for human society and are universally admired, loved, honored, and respected (except by radical secularists). The latter offer marvelous examples of how to authentically live one’s Christian faith in the modern world, while the former serve as ominous reminders of where the radically secularist path ultimately leads.

History also assures us that the stronger the religious and moral character of a people, the more likely their nation is to survive through and triumph over a radically secularist interlude. Poland is perhaps the best example of this: following fifty years of Communist rule there, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left behind a nation still 90 percent devout Catholic.

 

(To be continued)

Tribute to an American Catholic Hero

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the most famous photograph in U.S. military history and one of the greatest photographs of all time. As is generally known, it was taken by Joseph Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer, on February 23, 1945, during the Battle of Iwo Jima, a key turning point in World War II. The photo, which immediately drew widespread admiration and acclaim and won Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize, depicts six Marine soldiers erecting a large American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in the western Pacific. I have been familiar with this stirring image since childhood, but only recently have I come to grasp its full significance thanks to James Bradley's epic masterpiece Flags of Our Fathers.

Based on extensive interviews with dozens of war veterans and surviving relatives of the flag-raisers, this accurate and brilliantly written chronicle published by Bantam in 2000 (which was also made into a movie of the same name) places the famous photo in its proper context by telling the true stories of the young men who raised the flag and providing the essential background details that led up to that dramatic moment. And James Bradley is an amazingly gifted storyteller. Reading this engrossing book--which almost didn't get written, because the author's heroic father himself narrowly escaped death in battle and refused to discuss his wartime experiences with his family--has given me a whole new understanding of, and appreciation for, this unique photograph, which almost didn't get taken because someone else had already photographed the first flag-raising on the Suribachi summit two hours earlier and the press photographers, including Rosenthal, didn't know there was going to be a second flag-raising and had to scramble to document it.

I might never have read Flags of Our Fathers had I not stumbled across it on a bookshelf during a casual browse at my local Goodwill thrift store last summer. When I discovered it and saw what it was—a classic hardcover in good shape, with the instantly recognizable photo of the Stars and Stripes being raised gracing the elegant white, blue and gold dust jacket—I felt lucky. I had found a lost jewel, a discarded treasure. Fourteen years ago when it first came out, Flags of Our Fathers was a New York Times bestseller, and now here it was on a Goodwill bookshelf, unwanted and rejected, available for just two dollars. I wondered why someone had decided to get rid of it. Perhaps, for some reason or other, the previous owner no longer recognized its value. Maybe he (or she) no longer appreciated the heroic sacrifices of our men in uniform several generations ago on a distant island in the Western Pacific. Maybe the previous owner had lost interest in U.S. military history. Or perhaps he or she had died and left the book behind for someone else to treasure and enjoy. In any case, once I opened Flags of Our Fathers and began reading, it was hard to put down and stop thinking about. As a result of this serendipitous discovery and what I have learned from reading this remarkable book, I find myself in total agreement with G. K. Chesterton that "Everything has been saved from a wreck." (PLEASE NOTE: As can be expected with any frank discussion of U.S. military history, Flags of Our Fathers does contain graphic descriptions of war violence along with some language and anecdotes that are less than edifying. However, the latter amount to minor detractions from an otherwise magnificent work that I heartily recommend to adult readers.)

With its candidly detailed biographies of the six flag-raisers, its nostalgically vivid portrait of early to mid-twentieth-century America, and its gripping minute-by-minute account of the nearly impossible invasion and conquest of the most heavily fortified island in military history, Flags of Our Fathers is certainly a fitting tribute to the self-sacrificing heroism of our nation's Marines in World War II and to the religious and moral values that made America great. But in addition to that, it offers a compelling and beautiful witness to the power of our Catholic faith and its essential role in American life. The book reveals that the author's beloved father, John Henry Bradley (1923-1994)--the one flag-raiser whose profile is clearly visible in the center of the photograph and the only one who lived to see his grandchildren--was a lifelong, devout practicing Catholic whose entire military and civilian life was dedicated to the humble service of others. I was particularly edified to read of his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which included praying the Rosary daily and calling on her assistance in times of need. 

As a husband, father of eight children, and funeral home director in his postwar years, John Bradley enjoyed an excellent reputation as a quiet and respectable family man both in and beyond his small Catholic hometown of Antigo, Wisconsin. He had never intended to join the Marines or end up in combat on a distant overseas island. As a young man during World War II, he initially trained and served as a Navy medic here in the States but was then unexpectedly transferred into Easy Company, the ironically named Marine contingent that sailed across the Pacific to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima under heavy Japanese fire in February 1945. American forces suffered more casualties in the one-month invasion and conquest of that tiny island than in any other battle of the entire War. During that fierce and grueling struggle, Navy corpsman John Bradley risked his life over and over again to tend wounded Marines. He was awarded a Navy Cross for his valor. In his humility--and also because of the tragic horrors he witnessed during the battle--he kept that prestigious award hidden in a box in his closet for the remainder of his life, turned down all interview requests from journalists, and never discussed his famous role in the flag-raising on Iwo Jima with his family members or anyone else in town. He adamantly refused to allow his subsequent civilian life to be defined by what he sincerely considered his undeserved status as a military celebrity.

Regardless of the accolades showered upon him by the U.S. government, media, and public throughout the forty-nine years of his life as a war veteran, John Bradley never thought of himself as a hero for helping five Marines to raise a large American flag on a makeshift pole on an island mountaintop in the Western Pacific. He had simply done it because it was his duty to pitch in and give his buddies a hand, unaware that this simple action would be immortalized in a chance photograph and that he would be at the center of that photograph. He felt that he did not deserve such fame because so many of his Marine buddies, who had served just as valiantly and faithfully as he on Iwo Jima, had made the ultimate sacrifice without ever receiving comparable recognition since their deaths on the island went largely unreported by the media in the weeks following the flag-raising. When his family pressed him to discuss the matter of the flag-raising, the most he ever said about it was that the real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn’t come back.

Yet it is precisely his profound humility and his constant deflection of attention away from himself that clearly identifies John Henry Bradley as a genuine American hero. Even if we agree with him in admitting that his celebrity status as a flag-raiser may have been somewhat exaggerated during his lifetime, his true heroism lay in his quiet, untiring, selfless, everyday dedication to the service of his country and his fellow men and women. Furthermore, we must acknowledge that, as a faithful Catholic throughout his life, John Bradley was--and is--a true hero of the Catholic Church and a role model for lay Catholics around the world. But despite his impeccable credentials as a candidate for sainthood, his life of heroic virtue has yet to receive any official acknowledgement from the Church. It is my sincere hope that this beautiful example of everyday holiness will not remain hidden under a bushel basket, or simply be ignored and forgotten like that magnificent book on a Goodwill shelf. With a number of John Bradley’s relatives and friends still alive today, I strongly believe that his cause for canonization should be introduced without further delay. And I hope and pray that his talented son James Bradley, who has been away from the Church for many years, will one day rediscover the priceless gift of the Catholic faith given to him by his saintly father.

Article Heritage Series #4: Islam v. Radical Secularism: Which Is the Greater Enemy?

My apologies to all the readers! I'm long overdue to give you another installment of my "Article Heritage" series, which was originally intended to be a quarterly affair. I can't believe nine months have gone by since I posted my third installment last April. But then again, I was rather focused on the "ElectionWatch 2014" series from May onward, as well as writing and publishing other articles and music, and I was also spending some time revising my book on Mother Teresa (which still is yet to be published). You get the idea: I've been a pretty busy guy.

So now that I've caught up on things a bit, it's time to take a look at another article from my early days as a writer. This one, entitled "Islam v. Radical Secularism: Which Is the Greater Enemy?", goes back almost to the very beginning, having been originally composed in late 2005 while I was engrossed in research for my book America's Back-Door Enemy. It was published on a now-defunct website called Traditional Catholic Reflections & Reports in January 2007, and it also appeared in the November 2007 issue of the Ethical Spectacle (it's still there at http://www.spectacle.org/1107/justin.html ). This essay was very controversial at the time of its writing and publication, (and still would be today in certain quarters,) but its topic and thesis are still quite pertinent and true. In this piece, I used history, logic, and Catholic moral teaching to build a convincing case that the radical secularism within our own culture poses a much greater threat to American national security than does foreign "Islamic" extremism. My thinking on this subject is still very much the same, and I shudder to think what would happen if our country were to return to that Orwellian kind of foreign policy which plays on people's fears of terrorism to justify all sorts of wrongdoing and which--as I clearly demonstrate in my above-mentioned book--is driven by corporate greed and lust for power.

So here it is:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Islam v. Radical Secularism:

Which Is the Greater Enemy?

 

By Justin Soutar

December 2, 2005 (Revised November 9, 2006; January 2, 2007; and July 23, 2007)

 

 

            Ever since the dreadful terrorist attacks of 9/11, neoconservatives have made dire predictions about the looming threat of Islam. At all levels of American public life from government officials to university professors to respected magazine editors to radio talk show hosts, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, we hear the same ominous warnings. The underlying fear is that, if the Muslim world continues growing in numbers and religious fervor, it will eventually be poised to annihilate our Judeo-Christian Western civilization. Those who subscribe to this analysis point triumphantly to repeated violent reactions by fanatics to real and perceived insults against the Islamic faith, as well as to the long-running terrorist conflagrations in Israel and Iraq, as proof of what they have warned us about for five years—that Islam is the greatest enemy of the US and the West.

            But this view contains two serious flaws. First, it muddies the water with fallacious generalizations that cover up and distort reality. Second, it leaves too many important facts crying out for explanation, the most remarkable of which is the near-universal, deeply rooted Muslim hatred for the evil of Western radical secularism.

 

Muslims: Image v. Reality

            Why do Muslims hate the West? According to conservatives and neoconservatives, they hate the fundamental ideas of Christianity, democracy, and freedom that America represents. Their impression seems to be that Muslims in general are becoming utterly depraved, evil, almost subhuman creatures, bent on annihilating the Christian West because it is so full of goodness. Upon forthright examination of the evidence, however, this opinion is shown to be a fallacy.

            First of all, contrary to what the US news media leads Americans to think, the Muslim people have not committed en masse to terrorism. It is fairly well-known that ninety percent of all Muslims worldwide belong to the Sunni branch of Islam, which emphasizes individual interpretation of the Koran and from which the majority of terrorists have emerged. Al-Qaeda is estimated to include 50,000 devoted members; all “Muslim” terrorist networks combined amount to some one hundred thousand persons; and several million “lone wolves” who are willing to use violence without the help of a terrorist organization exist in Asia, Europe and Africa. In addition, those “Muslim” individuals who deliberately assist terrorists in performing their acts could constitute a worldwide number as high as ten million. But all these numbers still add up to barely one percent of all self-proclaimed Muslims worldwide. So even though most Muslims are Sunnis and thus vulnerable to extremism, only a mere handful can be called terrorists. The vast masses of those who call themselves Mohammed’s followers, together with most imams and other religious leaders, are upright, peaceful people who condemn atrocities against innocent civilians. Yet they have been demonized “evildoers” as though the majority were terrorists! As Muslims grow in numbers and gradually anchor their presence in all the Western countries, neoconservative commentators are quick to sound the alarm that “Islam” is a greater threat than Adolf Hitler. However, given that terrorists remain a small, deviant, heretical “Islamic” movement, “Islam” itself should not be considered the main problem.

            But perhaps a growing, resurgent, radical branch of Islam teaches hatred of Christianity and the West? In the context of the current wave of Muslim terrorism, neoconservatives remind us of the Muslim threat to Europe which the Crusaders had to drive back in the first part of the second millennium. But neoconservatives fail to point out the sharp differences between the Crusader Era and today’s situation. To begin with, the earlier centuries of Islam, when the great dynastic empires stretched across the Middle East, were the time of conquering the world for Islam. Catholics from Palestine to Europe refused to commit apostasy, making it necessary for them to take up arms to defend their religious freedom and civilization. Generally, the Turks were undeniably aggressive and could not be negotiated with. But Islam today does not have an empire. And the few terrorists, by their very nature, are eager to negotiate because terrorism is a weapon of negotiation used to wring demands out of an inflexible government. It is the systematic failure to achieve the right to a redress of grievances that drives “Muslim” terrorism, especially in Iraq.

            A second difference between that time and today is that the Turks were military warriors in the vast armies of the Seljuk Empire, whereas a tiny fraction of modern Muslims are bands of civilian terrorists. Neoconservatives totally ignore the difference in terms of both numerical representation and status. First, the Muslim armies officially represented the colonialist ambitions of an empire—which is by definition a colonizer—in contrast to terrorists, whose acts of murder are condemned by 90 percent of Muslims. Secondly, these were real wars between nations. The European Catholic nations declared wars of liberation to protect the Holy Land. A Muslim empire declared war on European states. But Muslim terrorists are engaged in a broad international campaign to force America, Israel, and their allies to change their unjust, decades-long Middle Eastern policy.

 

Terrorism and Extremism

            It needs to be emphasized that terrorists are civilians and criminals under international law. Since they do not belong to the armed forces of any nation, terrorists lack the power to declare war. In that respect, terrorism is simply a crime like any other--and the US should deal with it in accordance with international norms, as Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have repeatedly insisted. The attacks of 9/11 were a crime against humanity, not an act of war. When Osama bin Laden rallies millions of Muslims to a “jihad” (“struggle”) against the West, he uses the term literally—as well as spiritually, to indicate a rejection of the evils of immorality, murder, unrestricted capitalism, and imperialism into which the United States, Israel, and Iraq have sunk.

It is a common historical and factual error to compare the formidable Islamic aggression of one thousand years ago with the modern rise in terrorist incidents. Such comparisons only confuse the issue in the minds of many Americans. However, one tenuous argument remains for neoconservatives worried that “Islam” is the enemy: that unbeknownst to most Muslims, traditional Islamic doctrine actually teaches violence against Jews and Christians, and that we are witnessing a frightening “resurgence” of this doctrine. But no religion teaches violence. In all the three great monotheistic religions, a comprehensive body of teaching is set forth like a stained-glass window, and each individual doctrine or passage of scripture must be interpreted within the context of the whole picture. Extremists take a single passage or teaching out of context and give it undue importance to suit their own purposes; they do not submit to the whole body of teaching and thus cannot properly be called members of that religion.

There does exist a great deal of disunity, disagreement, and conflict within Islam. “Islamic” extremists themselves are torn by dissention, of which a major example would be how Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri thinks bin Laden has too much concern for the lives of noncombatants. But as Pope Benedict XVI reasoned in his famous address at the University of Regensburg in Germany last September, irrational acts such as the murder of innocent civilians are incompatible with the nature of God and thus with religion.

Once upon a time, Saint Francis of Assisi met a Muslim sultan who was invading Italy After the saint spoke kindly with him, the sultan said, “If all Christians were like you, I would become a Christian.” This is the attitude of Muslims toward Christianity. They do not hate our religion—they only hate the bad actions and unjust policies of certain people who call themselves Christian. In the same way, “Islamic” terrorists do not hate the West, only the grave injustice and evils it has committed against them.

 

A Clash of Values and Rights

Additional facts contradicting the “evil Muslim” notion and begging for explanation come (quite ironically) from the very people responsible for crimes of terrorism. Far from dedicating their whole lives to evil, “Islamic” terrorists demonstrate certain upright qualities. They adhere passionately to a set of moral guidelines based on the Ten Commandments. While we all know that Muslim terrorists appear deeply committed to worship of God, this is not a pretense; their misguided religious sincerity is evident. This truthfulness carries over into their explanations for their attacks—as is well known, they often state that such and such an attack is in retaliation for a crime committed against their people. Moreover, the rest of the world quickly realizes who the culprit might be because terrorist organizations boldly claim responsibility for their attacks.

Most of the dozens of terrorist groups currently operating in Iraq maintain that their frequent strikes against police, Shiite Muslims, Kurds, and Western soldiers are in retaliation for American mistreatment of Iraq as well as for Shiite and Kurdish cooperation with the US vis-à-vis Sunni Muslims—accusations which unfortunately contain more than a grain of truth. Contrary to the myth of a “gradual transition of power”, US forces are running Iraq, allowing profit-crazed Western mega-corporations to freely exploit the nation and plunder Iraq’s vast underground sea of oil.

            Furthermore, a wealth of psychological profiles compiled on numerous “Islamic” terrorists reveals that they share a deep and abiding love for their families. The principle of honor and respect for their parents is never questioned. Finally, the most apparent virtue manifested by Muslim terrorists is their moral cleanliness—they are scrupulous in avoiding occasions of sin, and they rightly reproach America as immoral and hypocritical because of our bad magazines, books and music which have saturated the Middle Eastern culture. Not only is the radical secularism of our Western culture alien to the Middle East; it is loathed precisely because of the religious and moral values that Muslims and terrorists alike hold dear.

Instead of merely using religion as a cover for malicious evil, “Islamic” terrorism springs from deep convictions and is not ill-intentioned. So notwithstanding their undeniable crimes against civilian lives, terrorists do have consciences and moral values--they are not animals or demons as neoconservatives often seem to imagine.

            But now we discover yet another problem crying out for explanation. If the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and disapprove of terrorist attacks, then why did millions of people across Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria fill the city streets waving signs, pictures and banners of Osama bin Laden after 9/11? Because an important distinction exists between sympathizing with terrorists and praising or approving the murder of innocent people. When discussing sin, well-known preacher Father John Corapi has continually emphasized this approach of loving and sympathizing with the sinner while condemning the sinful act. We categorically condemn the objective sin of murder, which can never be justified. But at the same time, we should sympathize with the injustice, frustration, and despair of so many terrorists that drives them to take such drastic measures. In addition, we refrain from condemning those perpetrators to hell ahead of God’s official judgment because we are incapable of discerning whether their souls are subjectively in mortal sin or not. In order to combat the neoconservatives’ tendency toward a pernicious “denial of the very humanity of ‘the other’”, as Pope John Paul II warned against, American Catholics should be keeping this crucial principle in mind. We must avoid the temptation to hate terrorism and its perpetrators alike.

            So the reason large numbers of Muslims peacefully demonstrated for Osama bin Laden was to express their anti-Americanism and support for his message to attack US troops on duty in the Middle East—conduct which is morally and legally justified. [Note to current readers: I do NOT approve of the killing of American troops stationed overseas. I was simply making a distinction between killing innocent people, which is never justified, and killing a military aggressor, which is. Our foreign policy must respect the sovereignty of other countries in accordance with international law. Therefore, I believe that most, if not all, US troops currently stationed in the Middle East and on other foreign lands overseas should be withdrawn to US soil and employed in the more useful task of guarding our coastlines and borders.] According to Muslim natives of the Middle East, bin Laden enjoys the status of a father figure among them. His tremendous backing can only be explained by the negative effects of American foreign policy in the region. This recurring phenomenon of overwhelming popular allegiance to anti-American leaders from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 to bin Laden in the 2000s is where the neoconservative logic breaks down. Should fifty million anti-American Iranians, or the hundreds of millions who quietly profess bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, be called terrorists or freedom fighters?

 

American Foreign Policy

Anti-Americanism is so popular, especially among Muslims in the Middle East, because the United States has mistreated them—and helped Israel to do the same. Hundreds of thousands of radically secular Zionists crowded into Palestine, subjected nearly one million Palestinians to exile and murder, and imposed on the Holy Land a Western-style state which has stripped Palestinians of their inalienable rights. During the Cold War, the US devoted substantial military and economic aid to Israel and its Arab allies to protect its Middle Eastern oil businesses. These petroleum companies earned US entrepreneurs and Middle Eastern rulers fantastic sums of money but largely failed to raise living standards for the average Arab. With the end of the Cold War and subsequent globalization of capital, labor and technology, this gap between East and West has only grown worse. The US and Israel, which account for less than one-tenth of earth’s population, now possess and control more than half of worldwide wealth through their transnational firms and military establishments. Anti-Americanism—and the terrorism springing from it—is a response to real grievances against the US, which has unjustly exploited the Middle East’s wealth and political systems.

            Iran under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi some decades ago provides a classic example of this laissez-faire capitalist policy. The Shah was a cruel, intensely unpopular, multi-millionaire dictator whose radical secularist program legalized divorce, tortured opponents of his regime, forced Muslim children to attend nonreligious state-run schools, and caused millions of peasants to lose their farms through heavy taxes. Since the shah was America’s pawn, we did not overthrow him as he deserved; but the Iranian people rose up together and defeated him without our help—indeed, despite our best efforts to secure him in power.

            But the economic dimension of American and Israeli foreign policy alone does not explain Muslim resentment, nor does it explain the Muslim world’s hearty detestation for the entire West. Most neoconservatives (a notable exception being Dinesh D’Souza) have equally ignored the cultural dimension. They forget that, in the minds of pious foreign Muslims, radical secularism has replaced Christianity as the defining Western cultural trait. Throughout the United States, Europe, and Western-oriented countries of the Middle East, the evils of abortion, contraception, euthanasia, greed, unlimited gambling, drunkenness, nightclubs, dirty magazines, offensive clothing fashions, bad movies, and satanic music proliferate.

Even worse is the fact that the cultural and economic dimensions are intertwined, with one reinforcing the other: Western big businesses accumulate billions of dollars by deliberately exploiting human weaknesses through the spread of cultural filth.

The flood of wickedness that the US, Israel and Europe have dumped on our Middle Eastern allies has kindled the extremely flammable fires of Islamic righteous indignation. Moreover, the negative effects of the Western cultural dark side do not remain confined inside the borders of these Western and Westernized countries. Its poison has spilled across national lines and wreaked a great deal more damage than most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, will ever fully understand or appreciate.

 

Examination of Conscience

            The West needs to wake up and learn a lesson before it is too late. In contemporary American foreign policy, military adventurism, cultural imperialism, unfettered capitalism and immorality go together. In the Western world as a whole, society is coming apart at the seams as radical individualism becomes the chief god. The evil of radical secularism, foisted on the Middle East through Israel and its allies and vigorously promoted in Europe, has provoked a tremendous surge of anti-Western sentiment and hatred. The evil and emptiness of modern Western culture has caused the younger Arab generation to turn to God and their familiar religion for comfort and strength, just as we did after 9/11, bringing about a massive Muslim religious revival. Finally, the combination of two false “freedoms”—unfettered capitalism and immorality—has incited, fueled and sustained the recurrent waves of “Muslim” terrorism which the West is now suffering.

            Catholics and neoconservatives should refrain from denouncing “Islam” and especially Muslims collectively as evil and the most serious enemy of America simply because a small percentage of Muslims approve of criminal terrorism. The internal enemy lurking within our culture and within our foreign policy—the enemy of radical secularism—poses a greater threat to our national survival than the external foe of international “Islamic” terrorists. The notion of a monolithic Islam is derived from anxiety and fear, not rational thinking and facts. If we would only take to heart the cry of the great Pope John Paul II, “Be not afraid”, we could evaluate our situation so much better.

Arthur Goldschmidt, a prominent Jewish Middle East historian, wisely reflected: “Someday, perhaps, practicing Muslims, Christians, and Jews will settle their differences—even the Arab-Israeli conflict—in order to wage war on their common enemies: secularism, hedonism, positivism and the various ideologies that have arisen in modern times.” The motto “United we stand, divided we fall” is more true now than ever before. United and standing together, the Western and Muslim worlds must wage war on radical secularism—or both will fall.   

 

Copyright © 2006, 2007 by Justin Soutar. All rights reserved.