by Justin Soutar
A Dangerous Cultural
Shift
Unfortunately, the United States—a Christian country and the
traditional leader of the free world—is now being gradually transformed into a
radically secular nation, partly through the increasing moral relativism and
religious indifference of its own people, and partly through the aggressive efforts
of radically secularist activists in the fields of government and politics, education,
and culture. President Barack Obama is the most obvious symbol of this
dangerous cultural shift. Prior to becoming president and throughout his years
in office, President Obama has consistently exhibited contempt for the
Christian faith and its adherents unlike any other president in American
history. During his 2008 presidential election campaign, then-Senator Barack
Obama derisively referred to Middle Americans as those “who cling to their guns
and their Bibles.” He couldn’t have summed up better his contemptuous disregard
for our First and Second Amendment rights.
Obama is the first president in U.S. history to invite members of
the radically secularist Freedom from Religion Foundation and American Atheists
to dinner at the White House. When he went to speak at Georgetown University
(a Catholic institution) in 2009, he had the “IHS” symbol behind the podium
covered with a cloth. At Christmas of 2009, President Obama considered removing
the traditional manger scenes from the White House and offered tree ornaments
depicting mass murderer Mao Zedong. When he held a memorial service for the
victims of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January of
2011, the service was held in a basketball gym instead of in a church. His
administration has effectively gutted faith from faith-based initiatives and
turned a blind eye to increasing attacks on religious liberty around the world.
Worst of all, President Obama’s healthcare reform law enacted in 2010, the
Affordable Care Act, authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to
force most businesses and charitable organizations—including nearly all
religious institutions—to provide health insurance plans that cover
contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs, even if this
violates their moral consciences or religious beliefs, under penalty of heavy
fines. In 2012, President Obama publicly declared his support for the legal
recognition of homosexual “marriage” alongside traditional marriage. On at
least five occasions, when quoting the Declaration of Independence, Obama has
said that “we are endowed with certain unalienable rights,” deliberately omitting
the phrase “by our Creator.” He has repeatedly failed to mention God in his
official Thanksgiving messages. Once he even mocked Congress for reaffirming America’s trust
in God through a Congressional resolution, arguing that it was a waste of time.
And he has done nothing whatsoever to defend and assist the persecuted
Christians of the Middle East, who are now
well on the way to extinction.
President Obama’s fanatical secularism is also clearly
manifest in his administration’s unprecedented promotion of abortion. Early in
2009, only a massive outcry from the American people prevented Congress from
passing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which Obama had promised Planned
Parenthood that he would sign; had this bill become law, it would have
demolished all state restrictions on abortion, created an unlimited “right to
abortion” supported by government entitlement, and forced all physicians to
perform abortions. Although FOCA was defeated, a substantial chunk of Obama’s
abortion agenda has found its way into ObamaCare and the unconstitutional HHS
mandate, both of which have yet to be completely overturned.
No president in history has ever exhibited such utter
contempt for the Christian religion and its followers, much less while claiming
to be a Christian himself. President Obama has clearly shown himself to be a
genuine radical secularist—an enemy of God and religion, an enemy of the
American people, and a traitor to our country.
The Battle for
America’s Future
So where are we at in America today? The answer is that
we, the people of the United States, are at war with our radically secularist enemies
for the preservation of our traditional national culture and heritage. On the
one hand, we have a small but powerful elite group of militant secularists
determined to foist their evil agenda on our country through the news and
entertainment media, educational institutions, the courts, and the federal
government. This agenda includes removing all references to God from official
government texts, from our currency, from our public schools, and from public property.
It includes government mandated, taxpayer-funded “health insurance coverage” of
abortifacients, contraception, and sterilization in violation of the moral law,
our religious liberties, and our moral conscience rights. It includes the
redefinition of marriage by the courts to place same-sex “marriage” on a legal
par with traditional marriage. And it includes the legalization of euthanasia
as a basic “human right” to lighten the growing burden of the elderly and the
terminally ill on society. Along with this radically secularist agenda being
forced on our country from the top down, there is a gradual weakening of
Christian faith and culture among the general population; a proliferation of
materialistic and hedonistic attitudes along with widespread moral relativism and
religious indifference; and growing percentages of nonreligious people and
minority faiths and sects such as Islam and the occult.
On the other hand, however, in our nation today there are
also many pockets of devout Christian individuals and families who understand
and appreciate America’s Christian heritage and who are working hard to restore,
preserve, inculcate and hand on the traditional religious and moral values that
made our country great. The Catholic Church in America and the more traditional
Christian denominations are growing. The massive pro-life movement, which now
includes a majority of the American people, is shutting down more abortion
clinics and saving more innocent lives each year through prayer and fasting, public
outreach, charitable assistance, and political activism. Public opposition to
the Obama administration’s anti-life mandate has been vigorous and sustained.
Many Americans, aghast at the radical secularists’ push to eliminate God and
Christianity from public life, are joining various Catholic and Christian
activist organizations such as Fidelis, Patriot Voices, and the Faith and
Freedom Coalition to make their voices heard. A large minority of Americans
still believe that marriage is exclusively the union of a man and a woman, and
more than thirty states have enacted voter-approved laws preserving this
traditional legal definition of marriage. And the spectacular Republican
landslide victories in the 2014 Congressional and gubernatorial elections were
a clear signal of widespread public disapproval with the direction in which
President Obama and his secular fundamentalist allies are leading this country.
Secular fundamentalism is continuing to gain ground in
America today at least in part due to bad Catholics. Take, for instance, “Catholic”
politicians such as Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi
who abuse their authority to sanction the mass murder of the innocent unborn
and legal same-sex “marriage.” But then there are also the millions of “Catholic”
voters who keep putting these radically secularist politicians in office—so-called
“Catholics” who for decades have been having abortions, using artificial
contraception and sterilization, and getting divorces at rates similar to those
of the general public. If it wasn’t for his dissident Catholic allies such as
Biden, Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius, former head of the HHS, as well as the
millions of Catholics who tolerate legalized abortion and have no problem with
birth control, President Obama’s anti-life agenda would never have gotten as
far as it has. If American Catholics faithfully practiced their Church’s
teachings in both public and private life, we would have a very different
country today—a place where militant secularism wouldn’t stand a chance.
Benedict XVI put it this way: “There can be no doubt that a more consistent
witness on the part of
America’s
Catholics to their deepest convictions would make a major contribution to the
renewal of society as a whole.”
[2]
The Challenge of
Radical Secularism
On January 19, 2012, addressing a group of Catholic bishops
from the United States during their ad
limina visit to Rome, Pope Benedict XVI made the following remarks about
the threat to American culture and society posed by radical secularism:
One of the most memorable
aspects of my Pastoral Visit to the United States was the opportunity
it afforded me to reflect on America’s
historical experience of religious freedom, and specifically the relationship
between religion and culture. At the heart of every culture, whether perceived
or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus
about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as
enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview
shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles
deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded
significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only
directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but
increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.
For her part, the Church
in the United States
is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only
proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to
human happiness and social prospering. To the extent that some current cultural
trends contain elements that would curtail the proclamation of these truths,
whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality,
or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they
represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and
to the deepest truth about our being and ultimate vocation, our relationship to
God. When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and
to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably becomes impoverished
and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist
and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.
The pontiff then issued a prophetic warning:
In the light of these considerations, it is
imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the
grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical
secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural
spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at
every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being
made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of
religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to
deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals
and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices.
Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to
mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of
conscience.
On the following day, January 20, 2012, the radical secularism of
which the pope had spoken reared its ugly head in our land. Overturning more
than two centuries of profound government respect for religious liberties and moral
conscience rights in accord with the Constitution and natural law, against the expressed
will of the people, and in a direct attack on the Judeo-Christian religious and
moral values on which our country is built, the Obama administration announced
that nearly all health insurance plans must
include abortifacients, artificial contraceptives, and sterilization
procedures, regardless of religious or moral objection to these anti-life items.
This unprecedented edict, which is still on the books as of this writing
despite a slew of court injunctions and exemptions, has nothing to do with the
public health and everything to do with the sale of anti-life drugs and
procedures for the benefit of large abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies
that back the Obama administration. In its disastrous attempt to nationalize
our healthcare system, the private interests of a few have trumped concern for
the common good, and as a result, the human rights and dignity of tens of
millions of innocent Americans have been sacrificed to the false god of money.
Corruption and radical secularism frequently go hand in hand.
The fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled both the Affordable
Care Act and the HHS mandate constitutional in June of 2012 should serve as a
painful warning that the Constitution itself, detached from the religious and
moral framework in which it was written and meant to be interpreted, is utterly
powerless to protect or guarantee our rights and freedoms. John Adams wrote:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other.”
[3] In
1781, in his
Notes on that State of
Virginia, Thomas Jefferson asked: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought
secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of
the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God?” If our leaders don’t
believe that human rights—especially the rights to life and religious liberty—come
from our Creator, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state
and the state will claim the authority to give or take them away as it sees
fit. And if they don’t believe that it is wrong to legally deprive an innocent
person of those rights, then no American’s rights will be guaranteed under the
law and the door is wide open to atheistic totalitarian rule.
Benedict XVI identified what is needed to meet the challenge
of radical secularism in America:
Here once more we see the need for
an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong
critical sense vis-Ã -vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a
reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in
public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American
society.
[4]
For too long now, we American Catholics have cowardly
permitted our radically secularist foes to dictate the rules of engagement for the
discussion of pressing religious and moral issues, and they are now exploiting
our weakness in this regard to strengthen and expand their illegitimate
occupation of the public square. We must take back what rightly belongs to us.
Specifically, we must articulate a clear defense of the natural moral law
written by God in all human hearts, revealed to Israel in the Ten Commandments
of the Decalogue, and fully revealed in Jesus Christ and His Church. We must
show how this divinely revealed moral compass guided the Founders in charting
the course of our nation, and that it is adherence to the law of God that makes
us a great nation. We must show how the Ten Commandments, together with the ancient
Roman language and law, form the basis of our modern legal system. We must
explain how former U.S.
laws against abortion, obscenity and pornography were grounded in the objective
moral law, and why our nation should enact such laws once again notwithstanding
faulty judicial decisions to the contrary. We must demonstrate the universal
and unchanging nature of this objective moral law by highlighting its
ubiquitous presence in societies and cultures throughout human history. We must
show how adherence to the moral law has enabled peoples and nations to flourish
and become great (e.g. ancient Rome,
medieval Europe, modern America)—and
how conversely, abandonment of the moral law has led to the decline and
destruction of once-great nations (e.g. ancient Carthage, modern Communist countries).
Freedom to act in accord with the natural moral law is the
most basic, the most fundamental of all human rights—even more fundamental than
freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, for religion and conscience can
both be abused to justify grave violations of the moral law. The HHS mandate and
legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” don’t just violate the religious and
conscience rights of American believers; even more fundamentally, they violate
the natural law and the right of all Americans as human beings to act in
accordance with it. By moving beyond a somewhat shallow and subjective
“religious liberties and moral conscience rights” approach to a deeper, more
profound way of reasoning based on the objective truth of the natural law
itself, our logic will resonate not only with fellow American Catholics but
also with all people of goodwill in America and beyond, thus enabling us to
recruit a broader coalition of allies and mount a more united and effective challenge
to the militant secularists within our gates. While defending our specific
religious liberties and moral conscience rights as Catholic Americans, we must
also defend the timeless freedom of all Americans and all peoples to act in
accord with “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”
Conclusion
Due to their
a priori rejection of absolute religious
and moral truth, radical secularists mistakenly view the Christian religion and
the Judeo-Christian moral system as purely human inventions rather than as divinely
revealed transcendent truths. They offer twenty-first-century America the same
temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed in the Garden of Eden at the dawn of
human history—the temptation to reject God and decide for ourselves what is
good and what is evil. Militant secularists may present themselves as champions
of secularism, freedom, tolerance, and pluralism, but history warns us that the
implementation of their ideology would crush American secularism, freedom,
tolerance, and pluralism under the boots of a dangerous tyranny. Where absolute
religious and moral truth is rejected, nothing is left but a “dictatorship of
relativism” and a ruthless Darwinian struggle for power. When man cuts himself
off from God, he loses his way and becomes a monster. None are more keenly
aware of this fact than those who have survived the terror and brutality of
radically secularist regimes.
“When God is put aside,
the world becomes an inhospitable place for man,” remarked Benedict XVI
during his visit to Cuba in 2012.
"The Russian Church, which has paid in
millions of lives for the godless Soviet experiment, can and must testify
before the adherents of militant secularism to the fact that a society torn
from its spiritual roots and faith has no future," solemnly declared Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev,
a prominent leader of the Russian Orthodox Church who grew up in the
Soviet Union, at a religious conference in London in 2014. "A
world without God, without absolute moral values rooted in divine revelation,
irrevocably turns into the realm of the rule of slavery and lawlessness."[5]
Ultimately, the religious identity of a nation is rooted in
the religious character of its individual citizens. Government institutions
alone, however well-intentioned and contrived, cannot protect and ensure that
identity. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in his second encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), “man's
freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew…Freedom
presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is
a new beginning.” As an “eclipse of God” casts its shadow over our era and
mankind finds itself lured once again by the temptation to assert its own
self-sufficiency, the United States and the world need Christians—especially
Catholics—who have the courage to let the light of Christ shine through them to
every corner of society. Clearly, the outcome of the cultural war for America’s
future will depend in large measure on the religious and moral character of its
people, the vast majority of whom still profess the Christian faith.
It is a cornerstone of modern evolutionary thought that human
societies tend to develop gradually over time from dictatorships into
democracies. But in his classic historical work The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton pointed out that the opposite
is true:
If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history
that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late
development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly
democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue
falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance
which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only
one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that
they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is
equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a
tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East...But the spirit that endures the
mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an
ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new
one.
[6]
With the ideology of radical secularism being aggressively
promoted by an elite few in government, academia, and the media and
increasingly accepted in American culture, in the early twenty-first century
the United States has begun the process of detaching itself from its Christian
roots and sliding gradually into the shadow of totalitarianism. There is hope
for the future survival of our country to the extent that we the people—individually
and as a nation—place our trust in God and remain vigilant, united in our determination
to fight this dangerous ideology until it is defeated. We must pray for the
conversion of our radically secularist politicians, professors, media pundits,
and cultural leaders. We must confront them in the public square, exposing the
errors of their pernicious worldview and working to halt their evil agenda. We
must rediscover the Founders’ vision of a secular, free, tolerant, and
pluralistic
Christian society in
which church and state coexist harmoniously. We must unstintingly defend our
inalienable human rights given to us by our Creator, especially the rights to
life and liberty and the right to act in accord with the natural moral law. We
must return to and explicitly reaffirm America’s profoundly Christian identity
and her great tradition of religious freedom. And we must re-commit to living
by the Judeo-Christian religious and moral principles that made
America great.
Only then will we once again rightly claim to be “one nation, under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Copyright © 2014, 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights
reserved.
ENDNOTES
[1] “Benedict
XVI's Address to US Bishops on 'Ad Limina' Visit,” ZENIT, January 19, 2012.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Letter to the First Brigade of the Massachusetts Militia, 1798.
[4] “Benedict
XVI's Address to US Bishops on 'Ad Limina' Visit,” ZENIT, January 19, 2012.
[5] Address at a conference
in London, Feb. 21, 2014.
[6] G. K.
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2008, pp. 58-59).
