Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by William A. Donohue
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
FaithWords
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-446-55822-8
Contents
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1: Revenge of the Nihilists
CHAPTER 2: Multicultural Sabotage
CHAPTER 3: Sexual Sabotage
CHAPTER 4: Artistic Sabotage
CHAPTER 5: Sabotaged by Hollywood
CHAPTER 6: Sabotaged by Lawyers
CHAPTER 7: Democratic Sabotage
CHAPTER 8: Self-Sabotage: Catholicism
CHAPTER 9: Self-Sabotage: Protestantism
CHAPTER 10: The Perfect Cultural Storm
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For Tara
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my family and friends for supporting me at every stage of this book. Always interested in the latest update, they were a steady source of affection and inspiration.
What would I do without my agent, Loretta Barrett? She is more than an agent—the former senior editor knows every facet of her trade. She guided the book from what started out as an oversized and uncoordinated work and turned it into something much more focused. And from there she persuaded me to seize on the material that might interest readers most. Her advice, along with the initial input from Michelle Rapkin, proved to be determinative.
It took no time at all before I hit it off with Harry Helm, associate publisher at Hachette; he edited the book step by step. He is a brilliant and amiable person, and his strong interest in the book gave me the drive needed to meet deadlines and make the necessary adjustments. Any author would be fortunate to have him in his corner.
Irving Louis Horowitz, the founder of Transaction Press, must also be acknowledged. He is much more than a dear friend: his interest in publishing my first book on the ACLU, and subsequent volumes, helped craft my career. Hence, were it not for Irv, this book would never have been published.
Finally, there is the Catholic League community: the staff; the board of directors; the board of advisors; and the members. Both boards are important, but it is the staff that brings the Catholic League to life. And without the members—the best in the world—none of this would have been possible.
CHAPTER 1
Revenge of the Nihilists
A college student is threatened with expulsion because she prayed on campus for her ill professor.
Radicals bust up a Mass and spit the consecrated Host on the floor.
An artist is awarded first prize for drawing a picture of a priest performing oral sex on Jesus.
A professor predicts violence will follow a movie about the death of Jesus and cops are ordered into theaters to monitor the situation.
A civil rights organization protests a statue of Jesus found on the ocean floor.
A religious outreach adviser to a political party signs a brief trying to excise the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.
An organized group of nuns files a brief in support of abortion.
A prominent minister implores the faithful to reject Christianity.
All of these incidents, and many more, are discussed in this book. The secular assault on the Judeo-Christian ethos is not happening because of accident or whim. It is happening because disaffected men and women have deliberately set out to upend tradition. Indeed, they are hell-bent in their determination to tear down the traditional norms, values, and institutions that have undergirded American society from its founding. The cultural debris that these secular saboteurs have created will take decades to clean up, but we people of faith have no other alternative save moral decomposition.
All of us know people who are nonbelievers, and most of them are decent human beings. Many of them wish they could believe but find it difficult to do so. They may be secularists, but they are not a problem. Nor are liberals of a moderate bent. The problem group are radical secular activists out to disable America.
What bothers these men and women more than anything is the Judeo-Christian heritage that marks Western civilization. That tradition stresses virtue and places a premium on the family and the sanctity of human life. It emphasizes sobriety and moderation, shunning excess and debauchery. It understands that there is a moral hierarchy and acknowledges the existence of truth. It recognizes sin and evil, but it also believes in redemption. And it professes a strong belief in God, the Creator of the universe. All of this makes radical secularists sick.
No part of society is off-limits to these extremists. It is not just the dominant culture that is under assault—left-wing activists have sunk their secular claws into Catholicism and Protestantism as well. The goal is not reform: it is an attempt to gut core beliefs and practices. And to a disturbing extent, the secularists have succeeded in turning things upside down and inside out.
Jews are at one another’s throats as well, and indeed tensions are so bad that Columbia University professor Samuel G. Freedman says that a “civil war” has broken out between raging factions. 1 But the situation with Jews is different: there is a secular-religious divide, but it tends to run along parallel denominations and associations. As such, there is nothing analogous in the Jewish community to the kind of sabotage that Christians have experienced. Moreover, radical secularists rarely target Judaism—it is Christianity they want to sunder.
What exactly motivates them? They started as egalitarians. Now they are mostly anarchists. In other words, their passion for equality across the board—class, race, ethnic, gender—has fizzled, leaving them angry and dismayed. Whatever might be said of the Marxists, they had a blueprint for the future. Sure, before they could achieve communism, capitalism had to collapse; so it made sense to try to rally the urban working class against the bourgeoisie. But they were not levelers for the fun of it. To give them their due, the Marxists, although completely wrong, at least had a game plan, a clear but distorted vision of what the new society would look like. They were not anarchists happy to search and destroy everything in sight. No, they wanted to start de novo, building a new society on the soil of the old one.
This is not what we are faced with today. What we are faced with is nihilism. Today’s secular extremists more resemble bratty kids throwing a temper tantrum than they do revolutionaries: they want to knock the house down. Having witnessed their left-wing hopes go up in flames with the crash of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, and all the other Marxist wonderlands, they are in a state of despair. That they have absolutely nothing to offer in the way of an alternative social order not only reveals their intellectual bankruptcy, it explains their rage. This is the revenge of the nihilists.
At work is envy, not jealousy. The jealous want what others have; the envious want to deprive others of what they have. Yesterday’s revolutionary really believed he could deliver Utopia; today’s nihilist is content with upending the status quo. To put it differently, the radicals of old wanted to steer the bus along paths never envisioned. Today’s radicals want to run the bus off the road.
If the secular sabo
teurs really believed in diversity, they would evince a laissez-faire attitude and go their own way. They might even be inclined to accept their status as a subculture. That’s what diversity is all about—pluralism. But to live in a plural society implies tolerance, and that is one virtue the saboteurs sorely lack.
To accomplish their world without hierarchy, they are prepared to use every trick in the book. In this regard, they do resemble the Marxists of old: they hold to the principle that the truth is that which serves the cause. Honesty, as Lenin made plain, was for chumps. Similarly, today’s nihilists use deceit, demonization, and coercion as their weapons. “Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries,” the comrade said. “But I don’t like strawberries,” said a dissenter. “Come the revolution, everyone will like strawberries.”
In other words, radical secularists have become cultural nihilists, or what might be called secular saboteurs. Essentially, what is being described is a highly politicized segment of the population that has seen its ideals crushed and has set its sights on destruction.
Those who challenge the radical secularists have been, and continue to be, demonized in a manner that knows no ethical boundaries. Unlike thoughtful liberals who are motivated by a sincere commitment to the common good, the extremists want to subvert everything associated with our Judeo-Christian heritage. For them, what counts is winning, and if that means winning without rules, so be it. Everything is on the table. Indeed, they have perfected the politics of personal destruction. Unlike reform-minded liberals and conservatives seeking to amend the social order, secular saboteurs seek its demise.
Religion is the cultural nucleus of society, so it is not surprising that the nihilists would pay special attention to its influence. It is not easy to decide which religion—Catholicism or Protestantism—has been hit the hardest; both have had the wind knocked out of them. Those doing the damage are not seeking reasonable changes. It is one thing to gently push the envelope here and there, hoping to open the eyes of those who prefer the status quo. It is quite another to jam a pair of scissors in their eyes.
For all the talk about how multicultural our society is, the United States is still only .4 percent Hindu, .6 percent Muslim, and 1.7 percent Jewish; approximately 8 in 10 Americans are Christians. It stands to reason, then, that the radical secularists must sabotage Catholicism and Protestantism if they are to be a success. And that they have done. The most cherished beliefs and practices of Christianity are routinely trashed by those who have laid anchor in both the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches; this includes some who teach in the seminaries and divinity schools. They could move on to some other religion, but they choose to stay where the action is.
Princeton’s Robert George believes that the real clash of civilizations is less between the world’s major civilizations than it is “between those who claim the Judeo-Christian worldview and those who have abandoned that worldview in favor of the ‘isms’ of contemporary American life—feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism, lifestyle liberalism.” Lumped together, they constitute what George calls “the secular orthodoxy.” When it comes to the central issues involved in the culture war, George notes that for the most part we are dealing with “sexuality, the transmitting and taking of human life, and the place of religion.” 2
Driving the nihilists is a tortured vision of sexuality that is so unhinged from reality as to be maddening. Libertinism is too kind a word to describe what they want. And to reach their state of perpetual ecstasy, they need to take down Christianity, especially Catholicism: it is restraint that the secular purists find most objectionable. Make no mistake about it, what they desire is nothing less than full-blown genital liberation. They want it all—with whomever they want—and they want it now. To deny them is to kill them. Indeed, they’d rather be dead than utter the dreaded words “Thou Shalt Not.”
Christian holidays make secular nihilists sick. Which explains why they are relentless in their quest to censor Christmas and cast eternal doubt on the biblical account of Easter. They have no use for believing Jews as well, but they know they are too few to matter. Muslims scare them—in more ways than one—but right now they are prepared to give them a pass. No, it is Christianity that dominates, and it is therefore incumbent on them to bring it down.
Influenced by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, today’s secular saboteurs have worked hard to grab control of the cultural command centers. Their tireless efforts to use and abuse the arts and the entertainment industry are testimony to their cause. And their cause is nothing less than the public flogging of Christianity. From scatological art exhibits to perverse plays, shows, and movies, it is evident that the obscene tracks the blasphemous. Indeed, nowhere is nihilism more fashionable than among the cultural elite.
At the intellectual level, a militant atheism has surged, firing a cadre of hate-filled activists who go for the jugular. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are not content to dissect religion—they want to annihilate it. At the level of pop culture, comedians like Bill Maher are not satisfied to lambaste religion—they want to insult, demean, and disparage believers; his assaults on Catholicism are so vicious and relentless as to be pathological. Consumed with rage, these nihilists are on a mission, and they are in fact more dogmatic in their beliefs than the most fundamentalist of the faithful.
No victory would be complete without a radical reconstruction of the Constitution. The First Amendment, in particular, is under siege precisely because it affects so much of the way we live. Ideologically driven law professors, legal activists, and judges have delivered a rendering of the Constitution that would make the Framers wince. Their goal has less to do with advancing liberty, properly understood, than with tailoring the First Amendment to serve their agenda. They are aided and abetted in this process by many in the Democratic Party. They do not seek to propose anything—their objective is to impose their will on the masses.
The American experiment was never supposed to be a celebration of unbounded liberty. On the contrary, it was supposed to be a mission in service to the good society, one where justice and happiness triumphed. To do this required ordered liberty. But for cultural nihilists, ordered liberty is an oxymoron. Ironically, even the Marxists knew that to have a communist society there had to be social stability. But that’s because Marxists were in the business of societal reconstruction. Today’s radicals are more like termites than revolutionaries.
Have the moral anarchists won? No, but if they are not stopped, they will. The only force capable of defeating them is a strong coalition of religious conservatives. For this to happen—and it is already happening—religion’s conservatives will have to put aside their theological differences. Traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Jews, as well as most Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, share a core set of moral values that are antithetical to the moral wasteland of those out to destroy them. To prevail, the conservatives have to be bolder than ever, and that means they have to be prepared for assaults on their character and their religion.
Most Americans do not want to lock horns in the culture war, but it is clear that their sentiments are not with the nihilists. It is up to religious conservatives, at least the activists within this camp, to make sure that radical secularists do not succeed in their quest to sabotage our culture.
CHAPTER 2
Multicultural Sabotage
Multicultural Madness
If a benchmark of the good society is the way racial, ethnic, and religious minorities are treated, then the United States is deserving of high marks, at least in recent decades. Unfortunately, genuine concern for the welfare of minorities often becomes a highly politicized exercise. Worse, it becomes unhinged from reality. Take Native Americans.
Over the past quarter century, high school, college, and professional sports teams have jettisoned the use of Native American mascot names, all in the name of sensitivity. Led almost exclusively by white liberals, those who pioneered this
effort never bothered to learn whether their hypersensitivity was reflective of the sentiment in the Native American community. They just assumed it was. And they assumed wrong: polls show that while Indian elites may agree with white liberals, most Native Americans are not offended by Indian mascot names. 1
At face value, it sounds so nice: we should respect all cultures and heritages, embrace diversity, and practice inclusion. But the fact is that most cultures have delivered nothing but savagery and slavery and are worthy of unqualified condemnation, not respect. Moreover, diversity and inclusion are polar opposites and cannot possibly exist simultaneously: if everyone is to be included, there can be no diversity. Besides, those who typically invoke these notions have an agenda: they hate Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian ethos. The irony is that all the ideas and institutions that have made Western civilization the greatest success story in the history of the world—as measured in terms of liberty and prosperity—find their roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Ideological isms have caused some of the greatest catastrophes in history, and in the past few decades, none has been more pernicious than multiculturalism. Yet to secular saboteurs, multiculturalism is a godsend. It gives them all the justification they need to attack our Judeo-Christian roots. Here’s how they operate.
They begin by saying that our nation, and the world itself, is becoming increasingly diverse. Then they say that it behooves us to make a twenty-first-century adjustment and prepare the way for all these diverse peoples. In other words, we’d better get used to a changing world. We can begin by burying our religious traditions and practices, they instruct. This is not just an idea that secularists have—it is dogmatically enshrined in their heads. So much so that they no longer need to think: words like tolerance, diversity, and inclusion constitute a mantra. They are the holy trinity of multiculturalism.
Secular Sabotage Page 1