by Os Guinness
A third side effect of pluralization is also to our advantage. Pluralization reduces the necessity of choosing at all.14 In other words, the extension of choice leads to the evasion of choice.
The Christian faith always work best with an either/or option, or when contrast is the mother of clarity. Let them put the choice starkly, and even the air will be charged with the responsibility of decision. The choice matters. The choice must be made. The choice cannot be ducked. When told they must choose, most people respond by choosing.
But having too many choices leads either to vertigo or a yawn. Back in 1885, Pope Leo XII barked out the warning, “The equal toleration of all religions … is the same thing as atheism.”15 Dead right, of course, but a trifle indelicate in the modern ecumenical climate, and we can expect such archaic sentiments to be ignored. Far more likely is the continuing trend toward a multiplication of choices in which would-be competitors cancel each other out, leading toward the neutralization of values in particular and to intellectual chaos in general.
The net effect of pluralization is that it acts on faith like a non-stick coating. Christians and convictions were once inseparable. Pluralization, though, coats faith with spiritual Teflon, sealing Christian truth with a slippery surface to which commitment will not adhere. The result is a general increase in shallowness, transience and heresy. Picking, choosing and selectiveness are the order of the day. Asked about her beliefs, Marilyn Monroe replied, “I just believe in everything—a little bit.”16
Many Christians are only slightly different. Doctrinal dilettantism and self-service spirituality are all part of the trend toward effete gourmet godliness. We are home and dry, however, when this “cafeteria spirituality” becomes so prevalent that faith loses its authority and shrivels into a preference.
Traditionally, as one of the enemy scholars put it, faith had “binding address.” Faith led to obedience, belief to behavior, and “the talk” to “the walk,” as they put it quaintly. All that is yesterday. Belief has been severed from behavior. Commanding truths have softened to inviting choices. In the world of the smorgasbord and supermarket, people pass down the line and choose “the church of their choice” and “the principles of their preference.” It is all a matter of cafeteria convictions. “So you don’t like coleslaw? Choose iceberg lettuce. And you find hell uncomfortable to believe? I prefer love, myself.”
Need I say it? We have nothing to fear from such faith. A consumer-driven faith of preferences and choices will go nowhere and achieve nothing. They are nothing more than T.E. Lawrence’s “dreamers of the night.” Whereas people of real faith are “dreamers of the day,” dangerous to us because they pursue their dreams with open eyes and bring them to fulfillment, “dreamers of the night” are fated always to wake and find their dreams were vanity.
Go for the Big Prizes
Exploiting pluralization is another of those assignments in which you will need to keep a close check on your agents. They will be all too inclined to let subtle subversion degenerate into dirty tricks. That is because pluralization works itself out so outrageously in the more extreme cases, and these are easier (and more entertaining) to imitate.
Instruct your agents that they have pushed pluralization far enough at the level of things. Our goal now is to encourage pluralization at higher levels, so that it produces side effects in relation to places, tasks, values, relationships, societies, and finally beliefs. If they devote too much energy dabbling around at the lower levels, they will miss what is important at the higher ones.
The Director, as you know, deplores the lack of economy in overkill. He has stipulated that pluralization should not be rushed. There are built-in human and social forces to reverse it if it becomes too extreme. Touch off these extremes and you chance setting in motion a counter-trend, a sort of retro-rocket that could waste much of our work.
It is well known, for instance, that it was excessive junk food that led to the health-food craze, just as fast food led to the “slow food” movement. If pluralization rebounds similarly, there would be a powerful compensating trend in religion toward moral authority and social unity. Were this to happen, we would change course and steer even that toward our ends. But it would be a pity not to ride the wave of pluralization right onto the beach.
Once you have grasped the distinctive workings of pluralization, stand back and see how secularization, privatization and pluralization all work together. When secularization and privatization have finished their task, every religion in the modern world has lost its power. When pluralization has done, each has also lost its uniqueness. Secularization is the body blow, the relentless stamina-sapping punch that leaves the Church still on its feet but finished. Privatization and pluralization are a two-punch combination that are guaranteed to knock it out for the count.
P.S. I gather that before you leave England finally, the Director is sending you down to interview the Old Fool, as he contemptuously calls him. There is much more than dismissive ridicule in that title. It is a recognition that he and people like him are among the most dangerous of Christian exceptions. Their entire stories are a living reversal of our Operation. They have virtually backed into faith through a long process of disillusionment with the very fantasies by which most Christians are enthralled. To make matters worse, the Old Fool brings to his faith a comic vision of the frailty and absurdity of life. He thinks this allows him to peep impudently around the corners of the world’s mesmerizing triumphs and pronounce them laughable and less than final.
The Director is sending you, however, for an important reason. The role of the media will be central in your work in Los Angeles, and there are few people alive who understand it as well as the Old Fool. Fortunately, he is misunderstood and ignored by his own people, but you need only listen to him carefully, especially to his views on the fantasy-creating power of the media, to see how your strategy should proceed.
In this case, know your enemy and know what your enemy knows and you will know the best and worst of the Church in an afternoon. The insights their own side will not use, we will—against them.
MEMORANDUM 6
Creating Counterfeit Religion
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
There used to be an old Cold War joke among military strategists that any conflict between China and the Soviet Union would go like this: The Soviets would take a hundred thousand prisoners on the first day, half a million on the second, and a million and a half on the third, only to surrender on the fourth day—overwhelmed by the number of their captives.
Our main approach to following up the pressures of modernization works much like that: Where religion still flourishes, we go with the flow and create such high-quality counterfeits of religion that real faith is de-valued to the point of uselessness.
Needless to say, this approach is quite unnecessary in Western Europe and wherever secularization has assisted religion in its grand disappearing act—such as the university world in America. In places like that, secularity reigns supreme, the Church’s spiritual and social influence have been sapped, and all we need to do is sprinkle on top a little extra confusion and controversy so that the disappearance of religion is welcomed and taken for granted. The best garnishing to the pie is to add confusion and controversy to such terms as “secularization,” “secularism” and “secularity,” so that even educated people become hopelessly entangled and never actually confront real faith directly. There has to be a strong dose of theory in that approach, but the goal and the gains are practical.
When religion still flourishes, however, our creation of counterfeit religions is practical from the start. The tactic works like this: In times of comparative strength, the Church makes many converts. It is then up to us to see that these converts turn out to be as embarrassingly awkward and unmanageable for the Church as a horde of Chinese captives would have been for the Soviets. This we
do by multiplying counterfeits and compromising the integrity of the new converts from the outset. “The more the messier,” you might say.
What do I mean by counterfeit religion? Perhaps not what many people think. Propaganda and disinformation have always encouraged Christians to limit the term to non-Christian religions, and especially to groups they despise, such as “cults,” so that they do not see the counterfeits they themselves are creating and circulating. Obviously I am not limiting the term in that way. We could not care less about the other religions. Our sole goal is counterfeiting the Christian faith itself, and my main focus is not on counterfeit individual faith but on counterfeit Christian faith on a collective or social level.
Fortunately for us, clear, confident Christian attitudes toward other religions are out of fashion in today’s world, and held to be “arrogant,” “intolerant,” and “politically incorrect.” (This is why we have been able to shut down so many of our counter-apologetic divisions.) Surprisingly, alertness to counterfeit faith at an individual level has diminished at the same time. But luckily for us, what is really extraordinary is that few Christians today are alert to our counterfeiting of faith on a collective level.
As with our age-old counterfeits of individual faith—in attitudes such as pharisaism, legalism, hypocrisy, and cheap grace—our counterfeiting of collective faith pivots on the inescapable struggle between faith and religion, or as they put it, between the “new nature” and the old nature,” between “the power of God” and the pull of “fallen natures” gravity. Our focus, in other words, is the point where the spiritual force of “conversion” to the Adversary’s ways meets the natural forces of “reversion” to ours. We simply have to ensure that in each case the former is neutered and the latter wins. That is, that the Church conforms to the spirit and shape of today’s world rather than being transformed and transforming, that Christians revert to their old ways rather than being converted to new ones.
I described in my first memo the mounting levels of worldliness involved in our overall subversion (the movement from “culture-blind” to “culture-bound” to “culture-burnt”). The trick is to keep the counterfeit so close to the real thing as the Church passes through these levels that only a trained eye could tell the difference.
Among the great advantages you have in working in the United States is the marked absence of trained eyes and the plentiful supply of empty-minded religion. In short, there will be few to detect what we are doing. American popular religion has parted company with serious thinking for so long that many believers could spot only the crudest and most careless of counterfeits. Indeed, in the climate of the present culture wars and the strident onslaught of the new atheists, even the crudest counterfeits are now defended stoutly as if the faith depended on defending all faiths. Indeed, serious discernment in American popular religion must be the most valuable commodity on earth. It is certainly the scarcest.
Be that as it may, the awkward thing about American religion is that, while vitally changed through pressures such as the private-zoo factor, it still has a disturbing degree of spiritual and social vigor—at least among the middle classes. What is left of European religion, by contrast, is hardly worth counterfeiting. We are therefore following up our initial gains in America by twisting the relative strength of faith through counterfeit religions, in order to capitalize on the weaknesses we have already exposed there. Let me highlight some of our principal counterfeiting campaigns.
Civil Religion
Civil religion is counterfeit in the sense that it is religion shaped by the priorities and demands of the political order, so that loyalty to Caesar once again overrides loyalty to the Adversary.
It goes without saying that we did not need to use civil religion in our European armory because we exploited the excesses of state churches to the full. After a long, 1,500-year run since Constantine, state churches are almost completely out of fashion in Europe, and the reason is obvious: religion that sold its soul to gain state support was sooner or later bound to be corrupted by the devil’s bargain. The clearest example was the pre-revolutionary Catholic Church in France, and the cry of the Jacobin radicals (borrowed from Diderot) said it all: “Strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest!”
When the Bastille fell in 1789, the French Church and the French state were both corrupt and both oppressive, and the revolution blew off both at once. From then on and even today in France, the mindset holds that if you are in favor of religion, you must be reactionary; and if you are in favor of freedom, you must be secularist. This equation was set in concrete by the condition of the Church at the time of the Revolution, and as you can see from recent events in France, the mindset of laicite is still decisively in our favor. What could be a better partner to our overall work of secularization?
The American situation is very different, so we have worked it differently. Americans rejected the state Church solution almost from the start. Having left Europe to escape religious oppression, and arriving to find a diversity of energetic faith communities, they took both religion and religious liberty seriously and saw both as positive. Their solution was to separate Church and state institutionally but not to separate religion and public life. The result was Jefferson’s celebrated “wall of separation.”
Almost all American Christians, including Roman Catholics, supported and welcomed this separation (Jefferson actually used this phrase in writing sympathetically to a Baptist), and therein lay the seed of their present problems.1 Even for Jefferson, the “wall of separation” was originally both porous and wavy—rather like his famous serpentine walls at Monticello. In other words, the relationship of the churches and the states—for in America they were always plural—was far from a strict separation and it was all a matter of nuance and trust.
Nuance and trust are rarely enduring qualities, and certainly not in this case. All we had to do was to harden the partial and institutional separation into a strict and total separation and give it the force of a legal doctrine. The two Religious Liberty clauses of the First Amendment would then work against each other, and the First Amendment itself would work against religion rather than for it. This we finally achieved in the Everson case in 1947, and deliciously, one of the main architects of the doctrine of strict separation was a Southern Baptist Justice on the Supreme Court.
Ah, the ease of seducing Christians once you know their mixed motives. Not only was the worthy justice a Southern Baptist, he was also a Ku Klux Klansman, and his intention was to protect his fellow-Baptists from the rising threat of Roman Catholicism. Little did he know that he was working with secularists to hurt Christians of all stripes. For as anyone can see half a century later, strict separation turns religious liberty from liberty for religion into liberty from religion. Irony upon irony, Christians originally intended to use the separation of Church and state to safeguard pluralism, but a tiny twist of the screw and their well-intentioned efforts have ended up establishing secularization by law. The Christian faith in America has had a slightly boxed-in character ever since, and the achievement was both voluntary and in place before many of them realized.
That is only the start of our triumph. Much of what is left of American faith in public life we have turned into our first great counterfeit: civil religion. What is civil religion? In its American form, civil religion is that somewhat vague but deeply treasured set of semi-religious, semi-political beliefs and values that are basic to America’s understanding of itself.2 You can witness civil religion at its most elegant in the speeches of any presidential inauguration, at its more homespun on any Fourth of July, or at many a point when Americans are sounding off on how they are “proud to be American.”
Like nationalism, civil religion goes beyond a patriotism that the Adversary sees as legitimate. And do not fall for the folly of mistaking the apparent vagueness of civil religion for weakness. The American Creed is quite different from the Apostle’s Creed. The latter is basically theological, the former political. The
latter is a matter of sacred covenant, the former of social contract. The latter is highly distinct, the former deliberately vague. But the American Creed is just as deeply held as the Apostle’s Creed, and even more so when the two are confused. As you can easily test for yourself, the charge “un-American” is far more likely to provoke an outcry in American hearts than the charge “heretical.”
How have we succeeded in fusing the two creeds? The issue underlying civil religion is a straightforward one that is inescapable in constitutional democracies: What is the source of a nation’s unity and legitimacy? For most of Western history, the accepted answer was to adopt a religion to provide the official undergirding of the national and social order, and so to ensure its unity and vitality. Each country therefore had its own established religion and its official state Church that was the spiritual and moral basis of its political order.
When Americans swept away the last vestiges of state churches, there was a reason why they did not anticipate the problems of moral justification that would arise in public life later: Christian assumptions and virtues—along with certain Enlightenment values—were taken for granted as foundational to the consensus that held the nation together. The specific beliefs of Christian denominations may have been left un-mentioned, and none of the assumptions were ever given the binding force of an established religion as they had been in Europe, but the necessity and value of general Christian virtues were taken for granted, even by non-Christians.
Two hundred years later, the folly of relying on this unspoken consensus is plain. Enlightenment notions have been swept away under the onslaught of postmodernism, and the Christian consensus has been eroded beyond recognition by the increase in pluralism, the surge of strident secularism, and the general coarsening of a post-Christian culture impatient with virtue and restraint of any kind.