by Beck, Glenn
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THE DISLIKE BUTTON
The technological advancements we’ve made in the last couple of decades are staggering. Smartphones and the Internet and iPads and all the amazing electronics at our disposal have made our lives easier, more fun, more interesting. There is also no denying that they’ve made our lives less private.
Social networking shares our thoughts, feelings, likes, and dislikes with friends, coworkers, and complete strangers. Our phones and cars know our location. Internet search engines reveal our interests. Cameras mounted outdoors, along roads, and inside buildings capture our movements from the moment we leave the house until the moment we return. The comments we leave around the Web reveal who we are as individuals. We express ourselves with emails and texts. We can easily record video or take photographs and send them around the world. It’s wonderful. It’s exciting. It’s entertaining. It’s frightening.
It’s now easier for a hostile government to take advantage of that technology and turn it against its people than at any other time in history. In 2009, during the massive protests against the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the regime in Iran used Facebook and Twitter to prosecute the opposition. Authorities tracked down protesters by identifying them in photos and videos that had been uploaded to the Internet—exposing them to prison, torture, and even death. In Iran, family members of expats who were supporting the revolt and criticizing the regime from abroad were threatened or arrested.
Despotic Arab governments also used technology as a weapon during the Arab Spring. They pinpointed dissidents’ locations, determined their next meeting points, and identified their friends and accomplices. Here in the United States, authorities haven’t hidden the fact that they also monitor social media.
The lesson is clear: when necessary, governments will take advantage of all the technology at their disposal and use it against the enemy of the moment. If you don’t think they’d use it against you, you’re just fooling yourself. A former NSA official, holding his thumb and forefinger close together, told NSA expert James Bamford, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
BUT AT LEAST WE’RE SAFER!
Maybe you’re thinking things are a little disconcerting and we’ve bruised the Constitution a bit. But, you say, that’s the price we pay for security. Right?
Well, not really.
I hope you’re acquainted with this perfectly appropriate quote from Benjamin Franklin, or perhaps you’ve heard some variation of it. If not, then it’s my pleasure to introduce you to it: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Man, I love that guy. He had more smarts in his thumb than 80 percent of Congress has in their heads. And he’s right, too. We deserve neither, and that’s exactly what we’re getting. Neither. We’re losing our liberty and we’re not safer.
Let’s not forget that the 9/11 plot succeeded in part because the FBI, CIA, and NSA failed. There were lots of indicators that something was up; red flags were all over the place as our intelligence folks missed one opportunity after another to put the pieces together. The government let Americans down, big-time, and a lot of people died as a result.
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Franklin 2.0
The 9/11 Commission argued that trading liberty for security was a “false choice” that we shouldn’t have to make. Glad they thought enough of themselves to go ahead and trump Ben Franklin.
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So, naturally, the answer to that problem is more people and more government, right? More organizations, more agencies, more acronyms, more centralized power. A gigantic homeland security apparatus is the perfect antidote to a failed gigantic homeland security apparatus.
Obviously when you add 854,000 people to the payroll in a security capacity you’re going to get some kind of uptick in “security.” But you’re also going to get nearly a million people whose jobs now depend on their ability to keep us “safe” in this War on Terror. With that many people you also get tremendous amounts of redundancy—agencies and bureaus and individuals doing the same things that another agency, bureau, or individual is already doing. That’s a lot of folks gathering copious amounts of intelligence, writing report after report, working hard to justify their jobs.
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Fun Future Fact!
Electronics maker Hitachi has announced a new surveillance system that will be able to scan 36 million faces a second. According to Gizmodo, “finding a face in the crowd in hours and days of recordings is a simple database search.”
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It’s amazing that we employ all of those people, and have a nearly unlimited budget, yet a guy who was being monitored by our government still managed to board a plane with explosive underpants. Our million-man State Security army didn’t pick up on it. Fortunately the guy sitting next to him on the plane did.
On a Monday morning in December 2012, police in the United Kingdom arrested a dozen terror suspects in a sweep in England and Wales. At 4 P.M. that same day journalist Diane Sawyer asked James Clapper, director of national intelligence, “First of all, London. How serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here?”
Clapper, who looked like a deer caught in headlights, took a long pause and replied, “London?”
That a man in his position had absolutely no idea of major terror sweeps in London is incredible—and very telling. Everyone near a TV, radio, computer, smartphone, or newspaper knew about London! Everyone, apparently, except the guy at the helm of the national security leviathan we created.
This massive security operation sucks up tremendous amounts of information, yet can’t even come close to processing it all. Hunting terrorists was already like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Now that haystack is the size of a small city.
THE WAR ON US
You and I know how difficult it is to pry power out of the hands of the government once they’ve taken it. You and I also know that when you have a government complex that employs nearly a million individuals and has countless corporate interests, they will do what it takes to justify their existence—even to the detriment of the country they insist they want to protect.
That’s why it’s not at all insane to worry about the direction we’re headed and harbor fears of a future Orwellian nightmare state. The technology to empower it already exists. The will to disregard the Constitution already exists. The “War on Terror” that the government uses to justify its power grab continues without any end in sight. And our track record of trading liberty for “security” has not been a positive one at all.
A massive governmental and corporate security apparatus now operates in the shadows, outside of the law and at tremendous expense to the United States taxpayer. The casual surveillance of innocent American citizens was once unthinkable. Now it’s absolutely routine.
It’s become so routine, in fact, that the police state mentality trickles down to the citizens: A Minnesota girl is suing her school district after administrators pressured her to give up her Facebook password so that they could access her account. Colleges and employers have asked applicants for their passwords as well. In one instance, job applicants at the Maryland Department of Corrections were asked to log into their Facebook accounts so that the interviewer could browse their wall posts, photos, and anything else of interest. Some colleges are requiring student-athletes to “friend” coaches or compliance officers so that their online behavior can be monitored.
The America we live in today is remarkably different than the America we lived in on the morning of September 11, 2001. I worry that the children we’re now raising will grow up to think that having their emails monitored, phone calls intercepted, whereabouts tracked, bags searched, and bodies groped by “security” personnel is perfectly normal. That being detained indefinitely or assassinated without due process is somehow okay.
It’s not normal. It’s not okay.
We have to constantly remin
d ourselves of that. And we have to constantly remind ourselves of what has happened since that moment when we all looked up to see a plane fly into the World Trade Center. We’ve changed. A lot.
And that is the true legacy of Osama bin Laden: The birth of the American police state. When I say that “bin Laden won” I’m not being flippant. I’m being honest. Destruction of buildings and planes is shocking and horrific and can damage a country for years; but the destruction of our Constitution will damage us forever.
“You change society by changing the wind. Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political discussions are being made, and you will change the outcomes. . . . You will be surprised at how fast the politicians adjust to the change in the wind.”
—Jim Wallis
IT’S AN AMAZING TIME to be an American. We are standing on the edge. To one side is a course that leads us back to maximum freedom and minimum government; and on the other is a path that virtually every other country in the history of the world has walked.
The battle over which way we fall is being fought in a lot of different places. Obviously there are the voting booths, but there are also our classrooms, our television sets, and, of course, our churches.
Our churches?
Unfortunately, yes. Many of us like to pretend it’s not the case or, even if we do see it happening, that we are personally strong enough to ignore those parts of the sermon—but there is no doubt that our churches are now a battleground for political ideology.
In fact, it’s been this way for quite some time. It’s just that now those of us who understand both scripture and the Constitution are finally beginning to put our hands up to say, Hey, wait a second, those two things, both of which are sacred to us, are not mutually exclusive—in fact, it’s just the opposite: they must be read together.
Entire books have been written about the role of faith and God in America’s founding, and I don’t intend to rehash it here, but suffice it to say that America’s earliest settlers fled oppressive governments in Europe that dominated every aspect of civil society, including religion. As a result, most Americans since then have embraced a religious faith that demands personal liberty and limited government—the very principles that are reflected in our Constitution.
But there’s a big problem with that kind of faith: it leaves no room for progressivism. How can the government grow and expand its power if, every Sunday, Americans are being reminded that their faith favors exactly the opposite?
The truth is that it can’t—and so something had to change. But before we get to how the change happened, it’s important to first understand why we got to this place and who’s responsible. So, let’s start with a quick refresher on religion in America and exactly why big-government progressives were left shopping for a new home.
THE LEFT FINDS RELIGION
The percentage of Americans who attend and belong to a church has remained constant for over seventy years. But predominantly liberal mainline Protestant denominations have lost members for almost fifty years—with no end in sight for their spiral. Their membership losses range from about 20 to 50 percent, even while the U.S. population has increased by 50 percent.
Why?
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Know Your Mainline
The “seven sisters” of mainline Protestantism are the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), Episcopal Church, American Baptist Church, United Church of Christ, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these once great denominations have been rotted from the inside out by their elites’ rejection of traditional beliefs and embrace of the Social Gospel’s notion of “social justice.” And, not coincidentally, that shift leftward started right around the time the Progressive era was getting into full swing.
In 1907, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., among leading Methodists, including then U.S. vice president Charles Fairbanks, the Methodist Federation for Social Service (MFSS) arose. MFSS, led by Harry Ward (who would later gain infamy as a pro-Soviet apologist during the reign of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin), drafted a “Social Creed” focused on “equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life,” protections from occupational hazards, abolition of child labor, safeguards for women, reduced working hours, and the highest “wage that each industry can afford.” The initial version of the Creed was very modest, especially by modern-day standards.
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The Original Social Network
Walter Rauschenbusch, a liberal Baptist minister from upstate New York, helped found the “Social Gospel” movement, which asserted that Christianity was not so much about personal redemption as social reform—especially combating poverty and militarism. The Protestant Social Gospel of the early twentieth century sometimes merged with much more mainstream nineteenth-century Roman Catholic notions about “social justice.”
Original Catholic ideas about social justice affirmed their church’s core teachings about God and salvation, but in the twentieth century, liberal Protestants and Catholics often joined together under the “social justice” banner to advocate big government while minimizing traditional Christian teachings about human sin that warn against centralized power.
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In 1908, MFSS persuaded the Methodist Episcopal Church, then America’s largest Protestant church, to adopt the Creed. It was the first time a major denomination had endorsed a social creed. The Methodists enthusiastically declared: “We believe that in the teachings of the New Testament will be found the ultimate solution of all the problems of our social order. . . . When the spirit of Christ shall pervade the hearts of individuals and when his law of love to God and man shall dominate human society, then the evils which vex our civilization shall disappear.”
Full of confidence about the anticipated coming age of social justice, peace, and prosperity, the Methodists sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “America” at their convention. In 1908, Methodist bishops warned against trying to create utopia via class warfare, citing “reckless anarchists.” They celebrated America’s private philanthropy, noting that “nowhere in the world does wealth manifest its obligation to contribute to the public welfare as in the United States.” They added that education, religion, and philanthropy all benefit from the “munificence” of “rich men of America.”
Unfortunately, those warnings would soon be forgotten. Like all progressive policy, the first version is just a test balloon, something to make the public think you are reasonable, even mainstream. Only once people have decided that the policy is harmless do progressives begin to shift it toward their real agenda.
The Federal Council of Churches, encompassing thirty-two major denominations, soon endorsed an expanded version of Methodism’s Social Creed, adding support for old-age pensions and the “abatement of poverty.” As a result, nearly all of mainline Protestantism, which included most of America’s most influential churches, was now tied to the Social Gospel and its emphasis on a perverted version of social justice. Other groups, like the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), also went on to endorse the creed, giving it even more mainstream appeal.
Given their success, Social Gospel’s enthusiasts quickly became more ambitious in their goals and began to switch their focus from labor rights to assail the “profit motive,” that is to say, capitalism. A few even provocatively praised the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In the early 1920s, for example, Lewis O. Hartman, a prominent editor of a Methodist magazine, visited the Soviet Union. Upon his return to the United States he declared that Marxism was very similar to Christianity in “ideals of social justice and fair play.” Having met Leon Trotsky and reviewed Soviet troops in Red Square, he announced: “The Soviet regime . . . is essentially a struggle for human freedom, and the Communist leaders with all their mistakes are sincere, honest men working for what they conceive to be the good of h
umanity.”
In the 1920s, Social Gospel liberals solidified their control over mainline Protestantism’s seminaries and agencies. Kirby Page, a prominent Disciples of Christ minister and activist, exulted, “Among all the trades, occupations, and professions in this country, few can produce as high a percentage of Socialists as can the ministry.”
He was right. The Federal Council of Churches soon amended and expanded its Social Creed to urge “subordination for speculation and the profit motive to the creative and cooperative spirit.” And it urged “social planning and control of the credit and monetary systems and the economic processes for the common good.”
Many senior churchmen complained the New Deal did not go far enough. For example, in 1933 the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops insisted that “Christ demands a new order . . . which shall substitute the motive of service for the motive of gain.” Episcopal bishop Edward Parsons went even further: “We are living in the twilight of the gods of capitalism.”
The following year, northern Presbyterians urged “new motives besides those of money-making and self-interest” to create an “economic system more consistent with Christian ideals.” They also denounced “competition” as the “major controlling principle of our economic life” and instead urged “secure rational planning.” And, in 1935, New York Methodist clergy opined that the New Deal failed its own “high-sounding prophecies of the economic temple cleansers” and instead “blindly” upheld capitalism’s “exploitation.”