Quote of the Day

"If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason. And because it is Reason, it also created freedom; and because freedom can be abused, there also exist forces harmful to creation. Hence a thick black line, so to speak, has been drawn across the structure of the universe and across the nature of man. But despite this contradiction, creation itself remains good, life remains good, because at the beginning is good Reason, God’s creative love. Hence the world can be saved. Hence we can and must place ourselves on the side of reason, freedom and love – on the side of God who loves us so much that he suffered for us, that from his death there might emerge a new, definitive and healed life."

--Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, April 23, 2011

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)

The Tyranny of Radical Secularism (Part 1 of 3)

by Justin Soutar

(NOTE: This lengthy article originally appeared as a three-part series on the website Intellectual Conservative

May 11, 2015 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-tyranny-of-radical-secularism-part-1-of-3/

May 19, 2015 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-tyranny-of-radical-secularism-part-2-of-3/

and May 26, 2015 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-tyranny-of-radical-secularism-part-3-of-3/ .

Here is the first installment of that same three-part series.)

 

More than two hundred years ago, the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation and as a haven of religious liberty by men whose ancestors had fled religious persecution in Europe. Today, both our identity as a Christian nation and our freedom of religion are under unprecedented attack by an elite and vicious group of militant secularists in government, academia and the media who are determined to expunge God and Christianity from every corner of American public life. Their goal is to replace the Christian religion and the Judeo-Christian moral code based on the Ten Commandments with religious syncretism and moral relativism as the new foundations of American society. The radical secularists’ wicked campaign to de-Christianize America is carried out in the name of “secularism,” “freedom,” “tolerance,” and “pluralism,” with their battle cry being “separation of Church and state,” but they have misappropriated these terms and hijacked them, twisting and distorting their true meaning in order to advance their sinister anti-religious agenda.

 

The War of the Words

Let’s take the first misused term, “secularism,” first. Radical secularists have so thoroughly distorted the terms “secularism” and “secular” that they have become the equivalent of the term “non-religious.” But that is not the original meaning of the words or what our nation’s devout Christian Founders understood them to mean. They used the term “secular” simply to distinguish civil society or the state from religious bodies or the Church. Something that is distinct from something else is not necessarily the enemy of that other thing. Yet that is what we have been trained to think in the modern age. Religion and society, faith and reason, faith and science, love and truth, public and private life, the spiritual and material worlds, are now commonly regarded as polar opposites, as inherently contradictory and opposing realms that must be hermetically sealed off from each other. For its own good, each must supposedly occupy its own tightly defined sphere of influence and not be allowed to interfere in any way with the operation of the other.

This great divorce between distinct realms that are in fact mutually compatible, complementary, and interdependent is a bitter fruit of the relativistic and materialistic philosophies that increasingly dominate our post-modern society and that provide a basis for the destructive totalitarian ideology of radical secularism. Relativism, of course, is the irrational idea that there is no such thing as absolute religious, moral or spiritual truth, whether accessible to human reason alone or divinely revealed. Rather than being gifts of God and paths to absolute truth that tend to unite mankind, faith, morality, spirituality, and reason are viewed as purely human attempts to impose order on a chaotic and meaningless cosmos. In this great sea of relativistic truth, it’s up to each individual to decide for himself or herself, in a hermetically sealed vacuum, what to believe (if anything) and what is morally right and wrong. The only absolute truth that can be known for certain by all humanity is what can be discovered about the material world through scientific research. And there we have just defined materialism—the even more irrational idea that nothing exists beyond what we can see and hear and measure and quantify. Relativism pushes God out of the picture, while materialism denies his existence a priori.

These two unreasonable atheistic philosophies, which contradict human experience and common sense, form the backbone of the radically secularist ideology that is now infecting our nation. This totalitarian ideology carries within itself the potential to destroy American society in the following three stages: First, by making the world seem unintelligible and meaningless and preventing us from living the fully integrated, harmoniously complete lives that our Creator intends us to live; second, by isolating individual human beings within themselves, cutting them off from each other and from their Creator; and third, by destroying the religious and moral foundations on which our nation is built.

Next comes the much-misunderstood and much-abused term “freedom.” In their self-constructed parallel universe closed off from God and devoid of absolute moral truth, militant secularists understand freedom as the unlimited right of each individual person to do whatever he or she wants to do. In their view, no external religious precepts, moral laws, spiritual guidelines, legal restrictions, cultural traditions, or any other kind of constraints may be imposed on human behavior because these would automatically infringe on human freedom. Having kicked God out of the picture, each individual person becomes a fully autonomous, all-sufficient god, freely deciding on his or her own absolute and final authority what is good and what is evil. Radical secularists denounce Christianity, with its absolute religious doctrines and moral teachings, as the great enemy of human freedom, claiming that the Christian religion and Judeo-Christian moral code must be jettisoned if America is to enjoy real “freedom.”

This warped, erroneous, and dangerous view of human freedom is radically different from the traditional Christian and Western concept of ordered liberty that shaped the worldview of our nation’s Founders. They saw human freedom as a gift from God and understood it as the ability to act in accord with the natural moral law. They understood that each of us bears a moral responsibility to God and to each other for how we use our freedom. And they knew that religion and morality are what make a nation truly free. Grounded in the false philosophies of relativism and materialism, the radically secularist concept of freedom is irrational because, instead of liberating human beings, it enslaves them within themselves. Moreover, their theory cannot be put wholly into practice: even extreme secularists are forced to abide by certain laws and requirements imposed by our government for their own good and the good of the whole society. Any attempt to fully implement their distorted anarchic notion of freedom in the real world would result in total chaos, from which a totalitarian dictatorship would swiftly rise up to restore order. Thus, instead of leading to the Promised Land of genuine freedom as its adherents claim, the radically secularist ideology leads inescapably to the utter destruction of human freedom.

The third term being misused by secularist fanatics—this one with almost laughable irony—is “tolerance.” Tolerance by definition is a positive thing: according to the World English Dictionary, it is “the acceptance of the differing views of other people, for example, in religious or political matters, and fairness toward the people who hold these different views.” Acceptance and fairness are the two key elements of tolerance; both of them flow from basic Christian principles of justice and charity, and both are grounded in the innate dignity and inalienable rights of the human person which Christianity upholds. Therefore, without Christianity, there would be no such thing as tolerance, properly understood.

Unfortunately, as with “secularism” and “freedom,” radical secularists have twisted the concept of tolerance completely out of shape, transforming it into a negative thing that actually justifies their bullying tactics. Their warped view of tolerance is based on the dangerous idea that Christianity must not be allowed to play its traditional role as the dominant force shaping modern American politics, culture, and society. Secularist zealots see the Christian religion as the great enemy of tolerance (and thus of human society in general), and therefore they exhibit a profoundly nasty and increasingly blatant intolerance toward it and its followers. Here again, the radically secularist bigots have things precisely backwards. It is thanks to the Christian religion that they have the right to speak their minds in public—a right they constantly abuse to heap vitriol on Christianity and poison the thinking of the general public. Radical secularism is the most intolerant and tyrannical ideology the world has ever seen. Its cruel and doctrinaire adherents are bound and determined to impose their false and distorted worldview on the rest of us. They unrelentingly demand lock-step conformity to their destructive ways of thinking and acting. And yet, despite all this, we’re supposed to believe that their pernicious quest to eliminate all religious—and especially Christian—symbols and references from American public life is driven by “tolerance” for other viewpoints. What these devious fundamentalists really mean by that word is tolerance of every religion except Christianity.

This brings us to the fourth term stolen and hijacked by the militant secularists, “pluralism.” They use this term (which is synonymous with their own favored term, “multiculturalism”) to mean that the fundamental Christian and European elements of American culture must surrender their privileged status and take their place as equals alongside Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Animist, New Age, Asian, African, Latin American, Oceanic, and any and all other minority cultural elements. In their view, a truly “pluralistic” society is a homogenized blend of all religions and cultures within it. Radical secularists insist that all religions and cultures should equally contribute to influencing our national life. The twin errors of moral relativism and religious syncretism lie at the bottom of this multicultural directive. Moral relativism is the idea that moral absolutes do not exist and that no single moral system should guide American conduct. Religious syncretism is the idea that all religions are of equal value and that no single religion should be the dominant influence on American culture and public life. As a pluralistic society and as a nation of immigrants, we should indeed welcome the opportunity for cultural enrichment presented by the variety of peoples, religions, and cultures that make up the kaleidoscope of modern American life. However, this does not mean that we must submerge or abandon our fundamental identity as a Christian and Western nation. In fact, it is that very identity that allows our nation to be pluralistic in the first place: The values of freedom, tolerance and respect for human rights that we so highly prize in American culture flow from the Christian religion and the Judeo-Christian moral system. Thus Americans who hail from different religious and cultural backgrounds should (as most do) respect our traditional cultural identity as a Christian and Western nation.

Radical secularists, however, deny and dismiss the obvious fact that European Christianity is the basis of our cultural diversity. They believe (in their hermetically sealed soap bubbles) that freedom, tolerance and respect for human rights can just as easily exist and flourish in a multicultural soup devoid of Christian and European underpinnings. Thus they are hard at work transforming our Christian and Western country into a “multicultural” country. The radically secularist multiculturalists profess firm faith (on what basis?) in the absolute equality of all human cultures, and the gospel of multiculturalism has been faithfully proclaimed to all Americans by President Obama in these words: “We are no longer just a Christian nation. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation and a nation of nonbelievers.” The absurdity of such a statement is readily apparent. Regardless of the religious and cultural variety that may exist within it, each nation has and evinces a predominant religious and cultural identity. Take away that predominant identity, and the nation as we know it would cease to exist. If Israel was not a Jewish country, what kind of country would it be? If India was not a Hindu country, what kind of country would it be? Along with their substantial Jewish and Hindu majorities, both countries feature an amazing variety of different cultures, religious traditions and ethnic groups. Yet we call Israel a Jewish nation despite the fact that only about 75 percent of Israelis are Jewish, and we call India a Hindu nation despite the fact that only about 80 percent of Indians are Hindu.

No one dares to suggest that Israel should submerge its Jewish identity into a Jewish-Muslim-Christian soup or that India should abandon its Hindu identity and become a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Buddhist-Christian-Jain nation. Yet when it comes to the United States, we are told by our radically secularist brethren that our country must now assume a “multicultural” identity, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans—upwards of 70 percent—still identify themselves as Christian. By the numbers alone, America is nearly as much a Christian nation as Israel is Jewish and India is Hindu. To eliminate that Christian identity would inevitably result in the loss of our national culture.  

Finally, we come to that well-known phrase “separation of Church and state,” which has become the chief weapon of the radically secularist crusaders in their all-out war on America’s Christian roots. By establishing a secular republic, the founders never intended that religious and civil institutions should be completely walled off from each other, occupying separate and non-overlapping spheres of influence. They simply intended that our national government—which would deal primarily with political, economic, and military matters—would not be run or controlled by any particular religious institution. They never intended that our government be indifferent to religion, much less nonreligious or even hostile toward religion. One searches the writings of the founders in vain for any reference to the idea of an absolute “separation of Church and state.” In fact, only a single isolated mention of this phrase was made in a letter of Thomas Jefferson.

On the contrary, as educated men and as Christians, the founders knew well that religious and civil authority both come from God and fulfill complementary roles in human society. People are by nature religious, and civil government is needed to maintain an orderly society. Since both religion and civil society are human needs, some mutual overlap between the two spheres is natural, normal, inevitable, and indeed essential to the proper functioning of both. The state must fully respect the rights of the church, and the church must be subject to the laws of the state in civil matters. By wisely establishing an unofficially Christian nation with a constitutional republican form of government, the Founders intended to preserve America’s Christian identity while avoiding the abuses that a state religion could bring. According to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI: “The legitimate separation of Church and State cannot be taken to mean that the Church must be silent on certain issues, nor that the State may choose not to engage, or be engaged by, the voices of committed believers in determining the values which will shape the future of the nation…. Respect for the just autonomy of the secular sphere must also take into consideration the truth that there is no realm of worldly affairs which can be withdrawn from the Creator and his dominion.” [1]

A Christian Nation

Our identity as a Christian nation is rooted in the devout Christian faith of the people who settled and founded this country. From the first English Puritan Pilgrims who disembarked at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock in the early 1600s to the later English, German, and Irish Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic settlers of the 1700s, nearly all of the American colonists were dedicated Christians who attended church regularly and practiced their faith publicly. The main reason why most of them came to these shores was to live in a land where they could worship God freely and practice their Christian faith openly without fear of government interference. They freely, explicitly and unapologetically expressed their Christian faith in the official governing documents that they wrote and collectively adopted.

Our nation’s recorded Christian heritage begins with the first words of the first document signed by an early band of American colonists: The Mayflower Compact of 1620 began with the words, “In the Name of God, Amen,” and stated that the purpose of the voyage was to found a colony “for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith.” Our nation’s official founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; that “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitle them to establish their own free and independent nation; that the representatives of the thirteen states appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world” for the rectitude of their actions; and that they pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred Honor “in support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we call ourselves “one nation under God.” Our official national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as well as our other great patriotic hymns “America the Beautiful,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” are eloquent and fervent prayers to God rooted in biblical Christianity that acknowledge His sovereignty over our nation. Our official national motto, engraved on our currency since the mid-1800s, is “In God We Trust.” The oath of office, which is taken on a Bible, includes the prayer, “So help me God.” Each session of the Supreme Court is opened with the prayer, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” A public prayer is offered at each presidential inauguration. Every single U.S. president has professed the Christian faith and invoked God’s blessing on our nation in his public addresses. Prayer, Bible reading, and displays of the Ten Commandments were common in public schools until the 1960s (and still would be today were it not for some misguided court rulings driven by the radically secularist ideology). And thousands of town hall meetings across the country each year still regularly begin with a prayer. Never mind the unfounded claims of extreme secularist naysayers: the Christian religion is truly woven deeply into the fabric of our nation.  

(To be continued)

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. 

Quote of the Day

The world is now seen as something rational: It emerges from eternal reason, and this creative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world. Faith in the one God is the only thing that truly liberates the world and makes it "rational." When faith is absent, the world only appears to be more rational. In reality the indeterminable powers of chance now claim their due; "chaos theory" takes its place alongside insight into the rational structure of the universe, confronting man with obscurities that he cannot resolve and that set limits to the world's rationality. To "exorcise" the world--to establish it in the light of the ratio (reason) that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it--that is a permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Part One: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 174