• One in four children born to white women are out of wedlock. In 1960, it was 2 percent.71 Three in four unmarried white women have had affairs by age nineteen. In 1900, the figure was 6 percent.72 Teenage suicides are triple what they were in the early 1960s.73 The test scores of high school students are now among the lowest of the industrialized nations.
• Abortions in the United States now run at 1.2-1.4 million per year, the highest rate in the West, with 40 million performed since Roe v. Wade. Births to married women in the United States, 4 million in 1960, fell to 2.7 million in 1996.74
• The U.S. divorce rate is up 350 percent since 1962, and one-third of all American children now live in single-parent homes.75
• Nearly 2 million Americans are in jails or prison, 4.5 million on probation or parole. In 1980, the prison and jail population was 500,000.76
• There are six million narcotics addicts in the United States.77
• In the African-American community, 69 percent of all births are out of wedlock, two-thirds of the children live in single-parent homes, and 28.5 percent of the boys can expect to serve a jail or prison sentence.78 In major cities four in ten black males aged sixteen to thirty-five are in jail or prison, or are on probation or parole. Drugs are pandemic. Children do not learn in schools. Conscientious kids are intimidated and beaten up. Girls are molested and assaulted by gang members high on dope and rap.
These are the statistics of a decadent society and dying civilization, the first fruits of the cultural revolution that is de-Christianizing America. Reading these statistics, one is reminded of Whittaker Chambers in Witness: “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that have become indifferent to God, and died.”79 Again, Jim Nelson Black:
No matter how far back you look, you will find that religion was always foundational to the great societies. Whether in India, China, Palestine, Greece, Carthage, Africa, or the civilizations of South and Central America, the story is always the same: Civilization arises from religion, and when the traditional religious beliefs of a nation are eroded, the nation dies.80
Europe has begun to resemble the United States. Between 1960 and 2000, out-of-wedlock births soared in Canada from 4 percent to 31 percent, in the U.K from 5 percent to 38 percent, in France from 6 percent to 36 percent.
As a guide to people’s moral lives in Britain, Chistianity has been “vanquished,” Card. Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the archbishop of Westminster, told a gathering of priests in September 2001. People now seek happiness in alcohol, drugs, pornography, and recreational sex, said the cardinal in echo of the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, who had observed, a year earlier, “A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life. Our concentration on the here and now renders a thought of eternity irrelevant.”81
But what is one man’s septic tank is another’s hot tub. To a devout Marxist, Castro’s Cuba is paradise compared to the Cuba of the 1950s and a more just and decent society than what the exiles have created in Miami. To our cultural elite, divorces, abortions, and the junking of obsolete Christian concepts like sacramental marriage may be seen as milestones of freedom.
But how do we create a moral nation and good society if we no longer even agree on what is moral and good?
WHEN BOY SCOUTS BECAME BIGOTS
“Culture is religion externalized and made explicit,” said theologian Henry Van Til. Echoing historian Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk wrote that all culture is rooted in the “cult,” i.e., in religion. “This is no mere wordplay,” argues Bruce Frohnen, senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
Culture and cult share a common root in the Latin colere, which means to cultivate, as in cultivating one’s garden or one’s character … . Dawson’s point was that a people grow together from its common worship. As a people develop common liturgical habits—he they a formal liturgy or the simple singing of hymns—they also develop social habits concerning things like cuisine, art, and daily ritual. These common habits bind them together as a people into a common culture. They also tie, forever, the culture of people with its common religion.82
The goal of the secularists is to cut the ties between our culture and “common religion.” If that happens, the culture dies. Again, Dr. Kirk:
All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief. But neither can religion subsist if severed from a healthy culture; no cultured person should remain indifferent to erosion of apprehension of the transcendent.83
That this culture war is thus a religious war may be seen in the latest skirmish—the Battle of the Boy Scouts. By the 1911 Scout handbook, “No boy can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God.”84 “On my honor I will do my duty to God and my country,” reads the Boy Scout Promise.85 “Homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirements in the Scout Oath that a Scout be ‘morally straight,’” reads the Scouts’s officials positions.86
Since its founding, the Boy Scouts of America has held faithfully to these principles. But while the Scouts have remained true to their beliefs, fashionable opinion has done a somersault. What was morally upright in 1980 is intolerable bigotry in 2001. To the New York Times, the Boy Scouts of today are “something akin to a hate group.”87And either the Scouts will conform to the altered moral code of the cultural revolution, or they will be ostracized, defunded, and destroyed.
The revolution simply cannot coexist with a Boy Scout organization that is huge, respected, and beloved, but shapes the souls of boys in ways it finds abhorrent. Thus a nonnegotiable demand is on the table: the Boy Scouts may retain their respected position in society only if they cut out certain core beliefs and substitute the opposite beliefs. Specifically, atheists and homosexuals must be allowed to become Scouts and Scoutmasters.
“Make him an offer he can’t refuse,” said Don Corleone. The revolution is making the Boy Scouts an offer it can’t refuse: yield, change your beliefs, or we destroy you.
Given what has happened to the Catholic Church, where a screening process failed to weed out potential pedophile priests, resulting in tragedies for altar boys and the worst scandal in the history of the Catholic Church in America, the policy of not permitting homosexuals to take Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts camping would seem simple common sense. But ideology has crippled common sense. The ACLU today defends both the right of homosexuals to lead Scout troops and the right of the North American Man-Boy Love Association to publish manuals on how to pick up kids and evade the cops—i.e., a how-to manual to help pedophiles get away with statutory rape. The plaintiffs in the case against NAMBLA are the parents of a ten-year-old boy who was raped and murdered by a NAMBLA member.88
WHERE DOES THE Battle of the Boy Scouts stand?
Dismissing the Scouts’s claim that they are a private organization and thus exempt from state antidiscrimination laws, New Jersey’s Supreme Court ordered the Scouts to admit homosexuals in the name of a higher goal: “eradicating the ‘cancer of discrimination.’”89 Thus, the court equated the Scout creed and Christian doctrine that homosexuality is “not morally straight” with a “cancer” on American society.
In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court spared the Scouts from having to decide whether to be true to their God-centered beliefs or to be broken by state power. But the Scouts’s courage cost them one million dollars in funding. In New York, California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, school boards have cut ties and denied the Scouts access to school facilities. Local governments in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale have denounced them. Thirty-two United Way chapters have severed connections. Levi Strauss, Wells Fargo, and Textron have ended support. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations sent a memo to its affiliates urging a cutting of ties. Film director Steven Spielberg resigned from the BSA advisory board with a statement reading: “The last few years in scouting have deeply sa
ddened me to see the Boy Scouts of America actively and publicly participating in discrimination. It’s a real shame.”90 When Eagle Scouts participated in opening ceremonies at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, delegates booed them. Wrote reporter Valerie Richardson:
Under normal circumstances, jeering at children is the sort of behavior that might get a delegate sanctioned, if not booted from the convention altogether. But anyone who expected the Democratic leadership to scold the Boy Scouts of America bashers is attending the wrong convention.
Support for homosexual rights has become an integral part of the Democratic orthodoxy, as unassailable as the party’s pro-choice or civil rights planks.91
In April 2001, the cultural revolution rolled out its siege gun, CBS’s Sixty Minutes, and, in what columnist Nat Hentoff called an “attack” and “prejudicial reporting,” blasted the Scouts for bigotry.92 Hentoff, for the defense, quoted Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: “The right of association is as inalienable as individual liberty.” 93
But such rights are early casualties in a cultural war in which there will be no truce. Traditionalists can run, but they can’t hide. With our public schools and public square de-Christianized, our private schools and private institutions are next. Through the hook of public money, all will be made godless, all forced to conform to the catechism of a revolution that declares infallibly, “All lifestyles are equal.” Who says otherwise—let him he anathema. What, then, is the future of the West? Again, Eliot:
If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must first wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren; and if we did not one of us would be happy in it.94
NINE
INTIMIDATED MAJORITY
Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.1
—Mary Berry, Chairman
U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Why did Christians permit their God and faith to be driven out of the temples of their civilization? Why was their resistance so feeble? Napoleon said that God is on the side of the big battalions. But in America the Christians were the big battalions, and they were supposed to be on God’s side. Yet they were beaten—horse, foot, and dragoons. In his book long March, Roger Kimball, an editor at New Criterion, attributes the rout on the cultural front to a failed conservative movement.
The long march of America’s cultural revolution has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The startling and depressing fact is that supposed conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our culture. On the contrary, in the so-called “culture wars,” conservatives have been conspicuous losers.2
Despite the hollow boasts of some conservatives that “we won” the culture war, candor compels one to concede Kimball is right. But why are traditionalists in retreat? Christians and conservatives did not lack for pulpits or microphones, from talk radio to cable TV, from the Internet to the magazines. After 1968, Republicans won more battles than they lost and did not lack political power. Polls showed the country was on their side of the barricades in the culture wars: Americans opposed women in combat, abortion on demand, and racial preferences. They favored prayer in the public schools and posting the Ten Commandments. They wanted immigration reduced and English made America’s language. Yet, on the moral, social, and cultural fronts, Republicans, conservatives, and Christians have been in almost continuous retreat and are today, by and large, an intimidated lot.
The White House refused to step in while John Ashcroft was beaten bloody by Teddy Kennedy and the Democrats of the Judiciary Committee. Neither Mr. Bush nor his running mate attended the 2000 convention of the Christian Coalition. Mr. Bush sent a tape. But he did make time in his campaign schedule to meet with the gay Republicans from the Log Cabin Club. When the Confederate battle flag became a blazing controversy, Governor Bush said it was for South Carolinians to decide. But, as soon as the primary was over, he ordered memorial plaques to Confederate war dead taken down from the Texas Supreme Court.
Not one speaker at the Republican convention in Philadelphia was allowed to defend the party’s position on the defining moral issue of life. Yet Colin Powell was given prime time to lecture the party on its supposed hypocrisy in opposing affirmative action, and the chastened Republicans dutifully smiled through their public caning. On the social and moral issues that once defined Reaganism, the party has fled the field.
“It’s a different Republican party” was the convention spin. Yes, it is, with pandering the fashion in Philadelphia. Malevolent wit Bill Maher mocked that “the last time the Republicans had this many blacks up on the stage, they were selling them.”3 When Mr. Bush sought to “reach out” to the NAACP by addressing its convention, the NAACP reciprocated with an attack ad featuring the daughter of James Byrd, implying that Mr. Bush’s opposition to a hate crimes law meant he did not care about her father’s lynching. Whenever critics demand that Republicans reach out to those who have again and again bitten their hand, the party obediently reaches out, and is bitten again—to the undying amusement of its tormentors. National Review summarized the success of the politics of appeasement.
Bush tried, more than any previous Republicans candidate had, not to offend liberal sensitivities on race. He embraced immigration, supported bilingual education, obscured his position on race preferences, appeared before the NAACP, split the difference on hate crimes, and had Colin Powell guilt-trip the Republican convention. His reward: 35 percent of the Hispanic vote and a smaller share of the black vote than Bob Dole got in 1996.4
Conservatives have lost the moral certitude they had when they were young and theirs was a fighting faith. Now, they seem desperately anxious to reassure the public that they are really not bigots, but every bit as warmhearted and well-intentioned as their accusers. After Mr. Bush chose his cabinet, NAACP chair Julian Bond said he had “selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetite of the extreme right wing and chose[n] Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”5
House Majority Leader Richard Armey wrote NAACP president Kwasi Mfume that such language was “racial McCarthyism” and “reverse race-baiting.”6 “Deliberate or not,” said Armey, “if left unchallenged, this practice will continue to divide our nation.”7 Armey asked for a meeting, but Bond dismissed his letter as “a typical complaint of those who oppose justice and fairness.”8
The episode is instructive. One of the highest-ranking Republicans in the nation had requested a meeting with an NAACP whose leaders had smeared his party and vilified the president-elect, and Bond had treated him with contempt. A morally self-confident Republican party would have lacerated Bond, demanded that the IRS look into the NAACP to ensure it was not violating its tax exemption by engaging in partisan attacks, cut off discretionary federal funds to the NAACP until Bond was fired, written the major donor corporations of the NAACP to ask if they support demagogic attacks on the president, and amended the tax laws to punish foundations like Ford, which finance, with tax-free dollars, the trashing of the president and the Republican party. How should conservatives deal with the NAACP? The same way liberal Democrats deal with the Religious Right.
Instead, Mr. Armey asked for dialogue. Fighting back in the culture war has become incompatible with the new Republican image. Since Ronald Reagan departed, the media have whispered in Republican ears, “Moral and social issues are losers. Drop them, or go down to defeat.” Republicans have gotten the message a
nd become conscientious objectors in the culture war.
AMERICA, TOO, SEEMS to have lost her moral certitude. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower sent illegal aliens packing in Operation Wetback and apologized to no one for defending U.S. borders and ordering intruders to go home. Republicans today will not even demand that we seal a border that 1.5 million aliens attempt to breach every year. No one wants to be called a nativist. When the conservative weekly Human Events interviewed seventeen members of the House and Senate, asking if they supported the deportation of illegal aliens who broke our laws and broke into the country, only two flatly said yes.9 Because Hispanic Americans might retaliate against members of Congress who demand that our immigration laws be enforced, Congress will not insist that the president enforce them. Such cowardice could cost us our country. There has been a terrible attrition of will to do what is necessary to preserve the unique nation that America once was.
At that Portland State commencement where Mr. Clinton said that in fifty years there would be “no majority race left in America,” students broke out in spontaneous applause.10 Surely, it is a rarity in history that a people would cheer news that they and their children would soon be dispossessed of their inheritance as the majority in the nation their ancestors built.
The Death of the West Page 21