There is no more delusive passion than hope; and it seems to be the happy privilege of youth to cull all the pleasures that can be gathered from its indulgence. It is when we are most worthy of confidence ourselves, that we are least apt to distrust others; and what we think ought to be, we are prone to think will be.
–James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy
There has been a lot written about secularism in the light of the terror attacks against the French Magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish deli in Paris. French secularism with its roots in the French Revolution is quite different than American secularism. William McGurn puts it this way:
The question is whether French secularism is up to the challenge of defending itself.
At the heart of laïcité are two principles: first, that religion and the questions it raises have no role in French public life, and, second, that no one faith will be favored over others.
In theory, this latter ought to make France more attractive for a minority religion. In practice, this has not happened, in good part because many in France’s Muslim community don’t wish to be assimilated.
The received wisdom is that France — and Europe — must respond to the threat of radical Islam by rededicating themselves to their highly secularized selves. What no one asks is whether it might in fact be the way the French and the Europeans define a secular state that accounts for some of their weakness.
He says concisely and accurately:
Can you beat something with nothing?
Maybe, but it’s very difficult. In France, public life is completely devoid of any reference to a higher power; the public square is wiped clean of religion. Some radical secularists in America have tried to say America’s Founders intended such a secular state, but they would be mistaken. In fact our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, has five references to God itself! Our very liberty is grounded beyond the state, in the “laws of nature and nature’s God.”
We tend to forget that the liberties and prosperity bequeathed to us in Western civilization did not come from nowhere. In America, Christianity and the Enlightenment fused to make the most stable experiment in republican government in the history of man. It was not one to the exclusion of the other; any other reading of history is either dishonest or blind. That’s why when Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he marveled that religion, i.e. Christianity, far from being a destabilizing force as the French believe it was, in fact was a glue that held society together. McGurn has a fantastic quote about the importance of the Judeo-Christian foundation of the West:
[A]s Britain’s Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has put it, an understanding that “you cannot expect the foundations of Western civilization to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact.”
As Europe increasingly moves away from its Christian roots, this will certainly be put to the test.
As I’ve read about this discussion, I’ve thought of a tremendous book that is required reading if one is to have a healthy, and accurate understanding of secularism properly understood: The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker.
A recent piece by Terry Mattingly, who writes a syndicated “On Religion” column, had this provocative title that most people would agree with; Christian movies can be awfully cheesy. It dovetails well with my previous piece about the movie Unbroken, and how that was not the movie I or many Christians would have made. Mattingly points out that Louis Zamperini’s struggle after he returned from the war and subsequent conversion is every bit the dramatic story his wartime service was, but Angelie Jolie wanted to tell a “universal story” of faith and forgiveness that could be understood by all. What exactly about the gospel is difficult for people to understand?
But as I asked previously, where are the Christian directors with the chops to get such a job? Mattingly confirms what pretty much anyone knows to be the case. Here is an excerpt from his column:
In our “Crossroads” [a radio program] conversation, Wilken asked a totally logical question: Could anyone have made a movie that was faithful to the whole story? That would, of course, have meant including the Graham crusade and – in a scene that simply screams cinema – Zamperini’s stunning trip to a Japanese prison to share his Christian testimony and to forgive his prison guards in face-to-face meetings.
I asked him to name a Christian director, today, who could have handled that story. Let’s just say that the list is very, very, very short.
Christians complain that Hollywood often doesn’t treat them fairly or accurately, but it is hard to expect otherwise when the entertainment industry is filled with pagans and heathens (are those politically incorrect terms?) who don’t know the first thing about historic, orthodox Christian faith. If Christians want this to change, and we should, then we need to encourage our young people with a love of stories and film to make careers alongside all those pagans and heathens in Hollywood. Until then tone deaf will often be the best we can get.
Michael Baron, one of the more insightful American cultural commentators, published a piece recently on family fragmentation. Here are the facts:
About 40 percent of babies born in America these days are born outside of marriage. That’s true of about 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites, more than 50 percent of Hispanics and more than 70 percent of blacks.
Sociologically we know that children in broken families do worse psychologically, emotionally and economically than children from intact families where the mother and father are married. This affects children of all classes, but those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum seem to fare worst, as Charles Murray showed in his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. This is not a race thing; fragmented families affect any and all races. But as we see in inner city black America, family breakdown is literally a matter of life and death.
Barone looks at a study that interviewed 40 experts on the family across the ideological spectrum, and all agreed this is a tremendous problem for America’s future. Like all “experts” they attempt to find answers to such problems, but in this case none were confident there really are any answers. The reason is simple: it’s a cultural problem which cannot be fixed by government or any other programs.
Why is the American family fragmenting? It’s pretty clear that when the dominant culture doesn’t value the family as traditionally understood, then those families will tend not to fare well. The denigration of the family goes back a long way among Western cultural and intellectual elites, mainly because the traditional family was associated with religion, specifically Christianity and Judaism. The limitations of such a family never sat well for those who wanted to be a law unto themselves.
The perception of the traditional family as patriarchal and oppressive was pretty much limited to intellectuals and artists types for much of the 19th and 20th Centuries, but the damn burst in the 1960s with the sexual revolution, no fault divorce, and the acceptance by many or most Americans of the family as just another lifestyle “choice.” Popular culture did a quick pivot within a handful of years from a promoter of traditional values to a denigrator of them, along of course with promoting their opposite. In the 21st Century while disparaging the traditional family is no longer common, the idea that it is just one among many family arrangements, and that all are just as valid and good as the other is widespread. Thus the popularity of the hit TV series Modern Family. And with the drive to redefine marriage where gender is irrelevant to what marriage means, the idea that there can be an ideal family structure is culturally kaput.
So when these experts are not confident that there are any answers to family breakdown, they are right because the problem is cultural. The problem is that most people don’t see this as a problem! In fact, I would wager that most secular/liberal types, the ones that dominate popular culture, media and education, are convinced that family as just another lifestyle choice is a positive moral good! Why limit people’s freedom and choices? But when those same secular/liberal types think that certain choices harm people, they are all for limiting those choices and stigmatizing any who make them. One very simple example is smoking, from ubiquitous cultural acceptance 50 years ago, to unmitigated evil today. Alas liberal hypocrisy is a cliché.
As long as the professions of cultural influence I mentioned are dominated by people whose values are inimical to traditional, religiously infused values, the family doesn’t have a chance. Sadly many more people will have to suffer as a consequence.
On July 13, 1787, the United States Congress passed a law called the Northwest Ordinance, one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the early republic. The law created the Northwest Territory, which includes the current states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and some of Minnesota. It was groundbreaking for several reasons, not the least of which was that it set up a policy for new states to be admitted to the union, and it outlawed slavery whenever those states came to be.
But for the purposes of this post it is Article 3 that to us might appear radical, but to the Founding generation was simply common sense:
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
Keeping aside separation of church and state as currently understood, I thought of this when I read a piece about atheists demanding that a university chancellor apologize for saying that religion is essential if a democracy is to thrive. The gist of the chancellor’s argument was that:
Democracy works in America not because of government enforcement or because people believe they’re accountable to society, but because they know they’re “accountable to God.”
This offended some atheists, one who claimed that religion isn’t necessary to “keep people from being criminals.” This gentleman called for an apology to all those who were “disparaged” by such comments.
Now we all know perfectly fine atheists, many of whom are likely more upstanding than some of the religious people we know. Nobody of any credibility would argue that atheists cannot be upstanding, moral citizens, and I’m sure the chancellor would agree with that. But the discussion wasn’t about isolated individuals, but society. The Founders of America regardless of their own religious convictions, strongly believed that virtue was a necessary foundation for liberty, and that a self-governing people could only prosper where religion was taken seriously.
If we paraphrase the beginning of Article 3, it says that religion and morality are necessary for good government, the former provides the foundation for the latter. Why would they say such a thing? Mainly because they knew human nature, and they knew that a godless universe would never give human beings broadly considered a good enough rationale to be moral, and without a moral or virtuous citizenry you cannot have good government.
The atheists’ offense at such assertions is difficult to take seriously because a society full of atheists has never existed nor can it; even officially atheists societies such as the old Soviet Union, or China and others could never stamp out religion completely. And the leaders of those societies used atheism to provide the amoral framework for their totalitarianism; if the state is not accountable to any higher moral authority, then it can do anything it wants. Another problem with such offense is that a society full of atheists even if it could exist would have a moral framework that is to one degree or another based on the Judeo-Christian religions.
Atheists have argued for centuries that human beings can build a morality without God, but if the atheist is logically consistent he cannot get morals from matter alone; he gets them from the residue of religion. But as Nietzsche understood, as does Woody Allen in our day, you cannot get meaning from a universe that is ultimately, objectively meaningless. So the Chancellor need not apologize, even if how he said what he said was inartful. Atheists should not feel disparaged or offended by such comments because they are simply the logical conclusion of their worldview.
A great take on what the movie didn’t cover:
In Unbroken (released this Christmas), Jolie got all the big cinematic elements in: Louie’s wayward youth, his Olympic glory, his harrowing 47-day ordeal at sea during World War II, his bitter imprisonment in Japanese POW camps and, most critically, his battle of wills with the sadistic guard known as “The Bird.”
And yet the movie stopped just when Louie’s life was getting interesting.
Recent Comments