Secular Sabotage

by William A. Donohue

  Several months before the film opened on December 7, 2007, it was evident that the movie version was being toned down so as not to anger Christians. The concern of the Catholic League was that unsuspecting parents might take their children to see The Golden Compass and then buy the trilogy for them, perhaps as a Christmas gift. The movie, we argued, was “bait for the book.” In a nation that is overwhelmingly Christian, it was not likely that most parents would intentionally choose to introduce their kids to the wonders of atheism and the horrors of Christianity, especially at Christmas. Which is why the Catholic League published a booklet unmasking Pullman’s agenda.

  The duplicity of those associated with the movie easily rivaled Dan Brown’s. Pullman, for example, when put on the defensive about his real goal, said “my main quarrel has always been with the literalist, fundamentalist nature of absolute power, whether it’s manifested in the religious police state of Saudi Arabia or the atheist police state of Soviet Russia.” 61 This is simply dishonest. Pullman did not choose the politburo as the evil empire—he deliberately chose the magisterium, the official teaching body of the Catholic Church. That is why his books are sprinkled with such Catholic terms as “pope” and “cardinal.” It was not just any ideology or institution that Pullman was smearing, it was Catholicism.

  Pullman’s hostility is easily documented. Here are a few of his more famous chestnuts: “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief”; “Give them [the Catholic Church] half a chance and they would be burning the heretics”; “I am all for the death of God”; “My books are about killing God”; and so on. 62

  One astute critic of Pullman’s books, Mark Hadley, spoke with candor when he said that the author “may prove to be to children’s literature what Richard Dawkins is to science. Both of their writings express a negative opinion of Christianity and its institutions that falls little short of hatred.” Another Brit, Peter Hitchens, brother and ideological nemesis of Christopher Hitchens, went further: “The atheists have driven God out of the classroom and off the TV and the radio, and done a pretty good job of expelling him from the churches as well. But one stubborn pocket of Christianity survives, in the Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis.” Hitchens is right about this. “I loathe the Narnia books,” Pullman has said. “I hate them with a deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away,” he adds. In fact, Pullman considers the Narnia series “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.” 63

  But nothing could be more poisonous than trying to seduce youth into believing the worst about Christianity. At least Christopher Hitchens is honest—he loathes all religions equally and he does so unabashedly. By contrast, there is something unethical about trying to sneak atheism in the back door, as Pullman has done.

  It was the deceitful stealth campaign associated with the movie that impelled the Catholic League to call for a boycott of the movie. The producers, New Line Cinema and Scholastic Entertainment (an arm of the mega-publisher of elementary and secondary school materials, Scholastic), tried to lowball the anti-Christian themes of Pullman’s work, hoping to make a quick buck off the uninformed. But few were fooled in the end. Just before the film opened, Hanna Rosin wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that Pullman’s books were “antireligious” and “subversive.” 64

  The Golden Compass was supposed to be the new Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia. But it made a mere $25.8 million its opening weekend and an even paltrier $9 million the following weekend. Contrast this with three other holiday movies in 2007: Enchanted made $34 million its first weekend; I Am Legend pulled in $77.2 million; and Alvin and the Chipmunks raked in $45 million. In other words, the boycott worked. 65 Even Pullman conceded that the campaign against The Golden Compass was a success: “I’ve no doubt to say it did influence a number of people not to go to see it.” Indeed, Pullman admitted that the scheduled film release of The Subtle Knife, the second work of his trilogy, was not going to happen in 2009. 66

  One of the most embarrassing aspects of this controversy was the laudatory review the movie received from the Office for Film and Broadcasting of the bishops’ conference, the USCCB. Written by the office’s director, Harry Forbes, and an associate, the review completely sidestepped the anti-Catholic nature of the movie and the book upon which it was based. Forbes actually said that Pullman’s use of the term “magisterium” was “a bit unfortunate,” thus evincing a stunning cluelessness. There was nothing “unfortunate” about it—Pullman chose that term because he wanted to slam the Church. In any event, when American bishops were being inundated with complaints, Forbes had to pull his piece from the USCCB’s Web site. 67

  Angels & Demons

  Dan Brown and Ron Howard are quite a tag team. After exploiting Catholicism in The Da Vinci Code, they were back in 2009 with Angels & Demons. It proved to be more demonic than angelic.

  Brown’s defenders went back to their talking points, saying he was a novelist and no one should take what he says seriously. But Brown’s stock in trade is to mix fact with fiction, and Howard has certainly proven to be a great student of the master. They take real-life characters, such as Copernicus and Galileo; and real-life organizations, such as the Illuminati; and real-life issues, such as science and religion, and blow them to smithereens.

  Dan Brown is a master of disinformation. In other words, he knows what the historical record says, and yet he misrepresents it. Worse, he seems to do so with malice: his distortion of the truth smears the Catholic Church. His readers are left to believe that the Catholic Church sees science as the enemy, an accusation that is as baseless as it is scurrilous.

  Brown begins with a “Fact” page that mentions CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He distorts the truth so badly about this organization that it was forced to put several pages on its Web site setting the record straight. More important, Brown says on the very next page that “The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual.” And what are the Illuminati up to? In the novel it says that “the Illuminati were hunted ruthlessly by the Catholic Church.” In the movie, Tom Hanks, who plays the protaganist, Harvard professor Robert Langdon, says that “The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever. They’ve come for their revenge.” 68

  All of this is nonsense. Not a single member of the Illuminati was ever hunted, much less killed, by the Catholic Church. Exactly who the Illuminati were shows how bogus Brown’s claims are.

  In the novel, Brown says the Illuminati were founded in the 1500s; the movie says the same. The book also says that “Word of Galileo’s brotherhood started to spread in the 1630s, and scientists from around the world made secret pilgrimages to Rome hoping to join the Illuminati.” The film’s director, Ron Howard, concurs: “The Illuminati were formed in the 1600s. They were artists and scientists like Galileo and Bernini, whose progressive ideas threatened the Vatican.”

  Brown, on his Web site, hammers this point home: “It is a historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600s. The early Illuminati—those of Galileo’s day—were expelled from Rome by the Vatican and hunted mercilessly” (my italics).

  This kind of libel is easy to disprove. The Illuminati were founded by a law professor, Adam Weishaupt, in Bavaria on May 1, 1776. This isn’t a matter of dispute. So dragging Galileo into this fable is totally irresponsible—he died in 1642, almost a century and a half before the Illuminati were founded. Brown must know all this because on his own Web site there is a section on the Illuminati that correctly identifies the group’s founding in 1776.

  Brown says that the goal of the Illuminati is to create “A New World Order based on scientific enlightenment.” This puts him in some choice company. No one in the twentieth century promoted this Illuminati “New World Order” thesis more than Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. In recent years, it has become a favorite notion of people such as Protestant leader Tim LaHaye.


  Conspiratorialists believe that the Illuminati were behind everything from the French Revolution to 9/11; they assassinated as many as a half-dozen American presidents, as well as Princess Diana; they somehow managed to give us both AIDS and Hurricane Katrina; and now Brown says they tried to blow up the Vatican. Not bad for an organization that collapsed in 1787.

  Just as preposterous, but much more pernicious, is Brown’s portrayal of the Catholic Church as antiscience. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just who does he think was responsible for keeping the universities afloat in Europe in the Middle Ages?

  “For the last fifty years,” says professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “virtually all historians of science… have concluded that the Scientific Revolution was indebted to the Church.” J. L. Heilborn of the University of California at Berkeley writes that “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other institutions.” 69 The scientific achievements of the Jesuits alone reached every corner of the earth.

  What was it about Catholicism that made it so science-friendly, and why did science take root in Europe and not someplace else? Baylor sociologist Rodney Stark knows why: “Because Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being, and the universe as his personal creation. The natural world was thus understood to have a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting (indeed, inviting) human comprehension.” 70

  But Brown will have none of it. In his mind, the Catholic Church is fearful of science and has always tried to repress it. It would be interesting to know how he would explain the fact that the first leader of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences was none other than his favorite “martyr,” Galileo Galilei.

  What got Galileo into trouble was less his ideas than his arrogance: he made claims that he could not scientifically sustain. Copernicus, also a Catholic, never got in trouble for hypothesizing that the earth revolved around the sun. And neither did scientists like Father Roger Boscovich: he continued to explore Copernican ideas at the same time Galileo was sentenced to house arrest (the Church erred in its punitive approach, but it needs to be stressed that Galileo was never tortured or imprisoned, as many contend). The difference is that Galileo, who was initially showered with awards by two popes, refused to state his theories as mathematical propositions; even the scientists of his day knew he didn’t have the kind of evidence he purported to have.

  “It’s certainly not anti-Catholic.” That’s how Brown characterizes his book. So was the Vatican wrong to bar the film crew from shooting on its grounds? The Vatican took that step because it properly regarded Brown’s other movie, The Da Vinci Code, to be a patently unfair presentation of Catholicism.

  Recall that before The Da Vinci Code was released, coproducer John Calley admitted to the New York Times that the movie was “conservatively anti-Catholic.” How telling it was, then, that the New York Times reported that coproducer Brian Grazer said he wanted the movie version of Angels & Demons “to be less reverential than ‘The Da Vinci Code.’” That about seals it. The final nail in the coffin was unwittingly offered by the movie crew of Angels & Demons.

  Father Bernard O’Connor is a Canadian priest and an official with the Vatican’s Congregation for Eastern Churches. In 2008 he was in Rome while director Ron Howard was shooting the movie. O’Connor had two encounters with the film crew, informal discussions with about 20 of them. He was dressed casually so no one knew he was a priest. They spoke openly, thinking he was just “an amiable tourist.” He wrote an article about his experiences for the monthly magazine Inside the Vatican.

  One self-described “production official” opined, “The wretched Church is against us yet again and is making problems.” Then, speaking of his friend Dan Brown, he offered, “Like most of us, he often says that he would do anything to demolish that detestable institution, the Catholic Church. And we will triumph. You will see.” When Father O’Connor asked him to clarify his remarks, the production official said, “Within a generation there will be no more Catholic Church, at least not in Western Europe. And really the media deserves to take much of the credit for its demise.”

  This should put to rest all reservations about the real intent of at least some in the media—their goal is to weaken, if not totally disable, the Catholic Church. They do not point their guns at Islam or Judaism. It’s the Catholic Church they want to sunder. It also makes nonsensical any attempt by apologists for Brown and Howard not to dub them secular saboteurs of the first order.

  “The public is finally getting our message,” boasted the movie official. The message was clearly defined: “The Catholic Church must be weakened and eventually it must disappear from the earth. It is humanity’s chief enemy. This has always been the case.” He credited “radio, television, Hollywood, the music and video industries, along with just about every newspaper which exists, all saying the same thing.” He also cited the role that colleges and universities have played in undermining Catholicism.

  After Father O’Connor’s article was published, I contacted him about a few issues. I wanted to know how he approached the crew, who they were, and how he could verify his comments.

  “I wanted frankness from a variety of people,” he told me. “Technicians, film crew, extras, anyone who came by the coffee bars(s) adjacent to Via della Conciliazione.” He said he “sort of ‘hung out’ there” for a couple of afternoons. All but one of those to whom he spoke were male, and “the ages varied between early thirties and late fifties.” He said the comments he heard were “almost entirely negative.” As soon as he got back to his apartment, he started jotting down what he heard. 71

  Hollywood would never make a movie about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it wouldn’t matter a whit if it was made on the grounds that it was nothing but fiction. What would matter is that a film version of this slanderous anti-Jewish tract might promote intolerance.

  The secular sabotage of American society that Hollywood has contributed to is motivated by a deep-seated hostility to the nation’s Judeo-Christian ethos. Those who think it can all be explained by profit are mistaken. Surely there is a market for movies that bash blacks, Jews, and gays, but don’t look for Hollywood to start churning them out. The protests would be far too loud. Money matters, but often it is ideology, not cash, that proves controlling in the end.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sabotaged by Lawyers

  Perverting the First Amendment

  The secular assault on Christianity carried out by activist groups and sympathetic judges represents nothing short of a bastardization of the intent of the Framers: just as the secular left likes to play fast and loose with Scripture, they also like to play fast and loose with the Constitution. Fidelity to the original text means nothing to ideologues bent on winning at all costs. Their goal is a wholesale reordering of the First Amendment, the purpose of which is to weaken the public role that Christianity has historically played.

  How did we arrive at the point where it is taken for granted—mistakenly so—that the First Amendment can be invoked to stop a schoolchild from singing “Silent Night” at a “holiday” concert? Similarly, how did we get to the point where a Bible study and prayer meeting for New York City residents who lost loved ones on 9/11 was banned because the rented room was in a public housing development? Examples like these—and there is an endless list of them—convinced David Limbaugh to conclude that we have reached “new heights of absurdity.” 1

  Absurd though these examples are, their roots lie in bigotry and the agenda of the secular saboteurs. Philip Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State is already a classic in constitutional jurisprudence, and it is his conclusion that “the separation of church and state became popular mostly as an anti-Catholic and more broadly antiecclesiastical conception of religious liberty.” 2 But according to the gospel of th
e secularists, it was Thomas Jefferson who gave us this concept. They cite, among other things, Jefferson’s refusal to honor the tradition of Washington and Adams of issuing a proclamation for days of “fasting and thanksgiving.”

  In 1808, Jefferson wrote a letter to a Presbyterian minister and Princeton professor explaining why he resisted this tradition. He maintained that when he served in state offices—as a Virginia legislator and as governor—he supported state laws allowing for public fasts and thanksgiving. But as president of the United States, he did not think it appropriate to use the powers of the federal government in this manner. In other words, he was expressing his republican convictions.

  Secularists who say that Jefferson was somehow hostile, or even indifferent, to religion’s role in society are pitching pure propaganda. Literally two days after he penned his “separation of church and state” metaphor (contained in a letter to Danbury Baptists in 1802), he attended church services in a government building, the Capitol, for the first time as president. This was no accident: he was intentionally making a public statement rebutting the accusation that he was some sort of heretic. And if Jefferson were the secularist that today’s saboteurs try to make him out to be, then how do they explain the fact that he provided federal funds for the building of a Catholic church for the Kaskaskias Indians? 3 Today, Catholics who send their kids to parochial schools can’t get money for maps, never mind funds to build a church.

  Hamburger’s contention about the anti-Catholic roots of church-state separation is verified by examining how Jefferson’s metaphor became law. It wasn’t until after World War II, in the 1947 Everson v. Indiana decision, that this concept took hold. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, declared that what had been understood from the time of the Founders was wrong: it was wrong to dispense federal funds even when there was no government favoritism, not simply in cases of preferential treatment. It was Black who said there was an impregnable “wall” between church and state, one that even barred government from supporting all religions equally. So where’s the anti-Catholic bias? It’s not in the wording—it’s in Black’s motivation.