Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  Son of Scopes is not quite what it seems either. The twist in the modern saga is the injection of creationism as the scientific alternative to evolution. So, let’s be plain. Creationism, which presents Genesis as literally and historically true, is not science. It is faith crudely disguised as science.

  It is not science because it violates the central scientific canon that a theory must, at least in principle, be disprovable. Creationism is not. Any evidence that might be brought—fossil, geological, astronomical—to contradict the idea that the universe is no more than 6,000 years old is simply explained away as false clues deliberately created by God at the very beginning.

  Why? To test our faith? To make fools of modern science? This is hardly even good religion. God may be mysterious, but he is certainly not malicious. And who but a malicious deity would have peppered the universe with endless phony artifacts designed to confound human reason?

  Creationism has no part in the science curriculum of any serious country. Still, I see no reason why biblical creation could not to be taught in the schools—not as science, of course, but for its mythic grandeur and moral dimensions. If we can assign the Iliad and the Odyssey, we certainly ought to be able to assign Genesis.

  But can we? There’s the rub. It is very risky to assign Genesis today. The ACLU might sue. Ever since the Supreme Court decision of 1963 barring prayer from the public schools, any attempt to import not just prayer but biblical studies, religious tenets and the like into the schools is liable to end up in court.

  That is why the Kansas school board decision on evolution is so significant. Not because Kansas is the beginning of a creationist wave—as science, creationism is too fundamentally frivolous and evolution too intellectually powerful—but because the Kansas decision is an important cultural indicator.

  It represents the reaction of people of faith to the fact that all legitimate expressions of that faith in their children’s public schooling are blocked by the new secular ethos. In a society in which it is unconstitutional to post the Ten Commandments in school, creationism is a back door to religion, brought in under the guise—the absurd yet constitutionally permitted guise—of science.

  This pedagogic sleight of hand, by the way, did not originate with religious folk. Secularists have for years been using biology instruction as a back door for inculcating their values. A sex-ed class on the proper placement of a condom is more than instruction in reproductive mechanics. It is a seminar—unacknowledged and tacit but nonetheless powerful—on permissible sexual mores.

  Religion—invaluable in America’s founding, forming and flowering—deserves a place in the schools. Indeed, it had that place for almost 200 years. A healthy country would teach its children evolution—and the Ten Commandments. The reason that Kansas is going to have precisely the opposite—the worst of both worlds—is not because Kansans are primitives but because a religious people has tried to bring the fruits of faith, the teachings and higher values of religion, into the schools and been stymied.

  The result is a kind of perverse Law of Conservation of Faith. Block all teaching of religious ideas? Okay, we’ll sneak them in through biology.

  This is nutty. It has kids looking for God in all the wrong places. For the purposes of a pluralist society, the Bible is not about fact. It is about values. If we were a bit more tolerant about allowing the teaching of biblical values as ethics, we’d find far less pressure for the teaching of biblical fables as science.

  Time, November 22, 1999

  GOD VS. CAESAR

  In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney handed down the Dred Scott decision upholding and extending slavery. Taney’s opinion was, it is generally agreed, “the worst constitutional decision of the 19th century” (the words are Robert Bork’s). Yet there is a curious and little known fact about Judge Taney. More than 30 years earlier he had freed his own slaves. Today, therefore, we would say that while he was “personally” opposed to slavery he did not want to “impose” his views on others.

  The Taney contradiction—privately opposed to but publicly tolerant of some widespread social practice—is the preferred position on abortion of pro-choice Catholic politicians today. This view does not sit well with the Catholic Church. It holds, quite plausibly, that the Taney position is as morally incoherent when applied to abortion as it was when applied to slavery.

  At the center of the debate is New York governor Mario Cuomo, who personally believes that abortion is sinful but as governor has supported no abortion restrictions, indeed has advocated state funding of abortions for poor women. For this, one New York bishop has said that Cuomo is in danger of losing his soul and going to hell. Another New York bishop barred Cuomo from any church function in his diocese (later modified as a ban on discussing abortion at any church function). Cardinal John O’Connor of New York has backed up his two bishops, continuing the argument he started with Cuomo in 1984 about whether it is possible to have it both ways, Taney-like, on abortion.

  Liberal commentary has rushed into the breach to argue not so much the merits of the issue but the propriety of the bishops’ getting involved in the first place. The claim is that these clerical admonitions constitute an assault on the separation of church and state, a denial of religious pluralism, a form of religious tyranny. These prelates, writes Arthur Schlesinger, “seem to be doing their best to verify the fears long cherished by … a succession of anti-Catholic demagogues that the Roman Catholic Church would try to overrule the American democratic process.”

  This idea of overruling is outright nonsense. The Catholic Church is in no way compelling anyone to do anything, let alone interdicting the will of the majority. If it does manage to persuade a majority of Americans that abortion is wrong and ought to be banned, how is that different from any other group persuading a democratic majority to ban, say, polygamy or drug-taking?

  As for the “threats” to Cuomo, they are entirely self-imposed. The force of the bishops’ moral appeal derives exclusively from Cuomo’s own freely offered profession that “I am a governor, I am a Democrat, but I am a Catholic first—my soul is more important to me than my body.” Unlike President Kennedy, Cuomo is more than a nominal Catholic. His profession of faith makes him subject, voluntarily, to the teachings of his church. For the church to which he voluntarily adheres to repeat to him its position on abortion, as well as the penalties the church believes are due those who violate it, is hardly an act of imposition. It is an act of religious teaching that Cuomo himself invites when he says, “I—and many others like me—are eager for enlightenment, eager to learn new and better ways to manifest respect for the deep reverence for life that is our religion and our instinct.”

  The other liberal complaint is that since the Catholic position on abortion is religiously derived, if it ultimately becomes law, that constitutes an imposition of religion. This argument is nonsense too. Under American concepts of political pluralism, it makes no difference from where a belief comes. Whether it comes from church teaching, inner conviction or some trash novel, the legitimacy of any belief rests ultimately on its content, not on its origin. It is absurd to hold that a pro-abortion position derived from, say, Paul Ehrlich’s overpopulation doomsday scenario is legitimate but an anti-abortion position derived from scripture is a violation of the First Amendment. The provenance of an opinion has nothing to do with its legitimacy as a contender for public opinion—and as candidate for becoming public law.

  Moreover, it is particularly hypocritical for liberals to profess outrage at the involvement of the Catholic Church in this political issue, when only a few decades ago much of the civil rights and antiwar movements was run out of the churches. When Martin Luther King Jr. invoked scripture in support of his vision of racial equality and when the American Catholic Bishops invoked Augustine in their pastoral letter opposing nuclear deterrence, not a liberal in the land protested that this constituted a violation of the separation of church and state.

  To his credit, Cuomo does not join the liberal
chorus in denying the prelates a right to speak as they wish on abortion. Not so for many of his backers. When it suits their political purposes they approve, they demand, that the church stand up for right. When it does not suit them, Schlesinger comes forward to warn darkly that such outspokenness risks stirring up anti-Catholic bigotry.

  On the face of it, I would say that it already has.

  The Washington Post, March 23, 1990

  BODY WORSHIP

  For a long time—from the counterculture of the 1960s until, well, yesterday—it was pretty easy to tell conservatives from liberals. Conservatives were the folks who told you how to live your personal life. Liberals were the ones who told government and everybody else to lay off and leave you to your own space.

  Conservatives went around promoting virtue and regulating vice: pornography, drugs, illegitimacy and the like. Liberals stood for self-expression and autonomy. The “right to choose” is quintessentially liberal, whether it be abortion or euthanasia or, as they say today, whatever.

  Then came tobacco. Liberals, who had developed a 39-year reputation for being soft on drugs and crime and polymorphous perversities that even Freud could not have imagined, all of a sudden became caped crusaders. When it comes to smoking, they are blue-nose prohibitionists.

  True, the anti-smoking campaign has broad support. But liberal Democrats have labored mightily to make it their cause. It began with the famous hearings chaired by the pre-eminent California liberal, Henry Waxman, at which tobacco executives were made to line up and swear that nicotine is not addictive. Its apotheosis was Al Gore’s 1996 convention speech with its lachrymose retelling of his sister’s death and his solemn pledge “until I draw my last breath” to “pour my heart and soul” into carrying on the anti-smoking fight. War on tobacco would be the liberals’ cause.

  This seems odd. Liberals have always looked down their noses at any kind of prohibition, whether it was alcohol in the ’20s or abortion today. They’re for choice, are they not? But as smokers are chased out of their offices and banished from polite society, what little prosmoking resistance there is comes from the right: from libertarians, from free-market conservatives and from traditionalists lamenting the state’s forced extirpation of a venerable and private habit.

  So what happened to liberals? My theory is this: Liberals have watched, astonished, as for decades conservatives thrived politically by showing concern for individual behavior. After years of deriding conservative “moralizing,” liberals now are playing catch-up. Hence, for example, their slavish, often comical, adoption of the language of “family values.”

  Conservatives have made a political career out of showing concern for the soul. Liberals cannot quite bring themselves to support state regulation of the soul. (Indeed, by “family values,” they mean not sexual morality but subsidized child care and a living wage.) So they have come up with their own alternative: not care for the soul but care for the body. Health is their religion, the body their temple.

  Laissez-faire? No concern about right behavior? Not us, say the liberals. We too believe in virtue. No smoking! And that’s just for starters. We are going to teach your kids safe sex, take Alar off their apples, feed them yogurt and broccoli for lunch and, for the ride home, lash them to their safety seats in cars with mandatory air bags.

  Who says we don’t care? Our motto: A healthy (multicultural) mind in a healthy body. Call it pagan if you like. We call it prudent.

  Now, if you have any doubts about the liberals’ newfound religion, take in a sex-education class at your kids’ school. The hour is not devoted to biblical/Victorian/traditional morality. Sure, the kids are taught do’s and don’ts. It’s just that the don’ts are not actions that damn your eternal soul but behaviors that doom your precious body.

  The core of the modern sexual code is disease prevention. The reason your little ones are taught the proper placement of a condom over a banana is to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases. With AIDS as a foil, sex-ed is not a form of moral education. It is a branch of hygiene.

  As are the other liberal virtues. Like the mania for health foods. It feeds a nutritional fanaticism and fastidiousness that make Islamic and Jewish dietary prohibitions look positively, well, liberal. In elite society, thinness is not just attractive but virtuous, a sign of self-denial and strength of character. Fatness is not just unaesthetic; it is a moral failing. Temptation no longer comes in the form of the devil. It comes in the form of dessert.

  This cult of the body is the perfect successor to the culture of narcissism of the Me Generation. Its genius is to take the stigma out of self-love and turn it into virtue. Its beauty is to take health and hygiene—perfectly good things, mind you—and make them a religion. In a political era demanding more public displays of piety and morality, liberals can now enthusiastically declare: We got religion too.

  The Washington Post, September 26, 1997

  CHERNENKO AND THE CASE AGAINST ATHEISM

  There have been many arguments made against atheism. The medieval philosophers divined a variety of proofs of God’s existence. Aquinas had five. But the argument from Motion or the argument from Contingency is not the kind of thing we moderns talk about anymore. So for the definitive modern case against atheism, I suggest a radically modern experience: Watch a Soviet funeral.

  I do it all the time. As Soviet state funerals have become regular events—Chernenko’s was the third revival in 28 months of Death of a Helmsman—I have become a regular viewer. They mesmerize me, in a horrible sort of way. It is not just the music, the numbing repetition of Chopin’s funeral march, but the massive, stone-cold setting. The Lenin Mausoleum, the focus of the ceremonies, is a model of socialist brutalist architecture. Cathedrals also remind us of the smallness of man, but poignantly, by comparing him to God. The Lenin Mausoleum has nothing to compare man to but its own squat vastness. The comparison is mocking.

  Then there are the speeches, a jangle of empty phrases. Chernenko was eulogized for his “links to the masses,” his “party principledness,” his achievements in the fields of “ideology and propaganda.” Was there a man behind—underneath—all this socialist realism? If so, not a word about him. The utter effacement of the person by the party reminded me of a response spokesman Vladimir Posner gave a few weeks ago to an American’s question about Chernenko’s health. “In this country,” he said, annoyed, “the private lives of the leadership … are not subject to discussion.” It was as if he had been asked to confirm Chernenko’s sexual preferences, not his existence.

  Finally, and to me most chilling, was the open casket displaying Chernenko’s (and Andropov’s and Brezhnev’s) powdered body drowning in a sea of fresh flowers. The open bier is a mere variation on a communist theme: the mummification of the great leader. In believing cultures, where there is some sense of a surviving soul, this pathetic attachment to the body is unnecessary. In fact, it is discouraged. In the great monotheistic religions, the redeemer—Moses, Jesus, Mohammed—has no earthly resting place at all. In the great materialist religions, Soviet and Chinese communism, the resting place of the redeemer, indeed his frozen body, becomes a shrine. The result is the ultimate grotesquerie: after death, a fantastic assertion of the final primacy of man, even after he has become nothing more than embalmer’s clay.

  It turns out I’m not the only one to have been chilled by the barrenness of the Soviet way of death. Shortly after his return from Brezhnev’s funeral, Vice President George Bush talked about what had struck him the most. He mentioned the austere pageantry, the goose-stepping soldiers, the music, “the body being drawn through Red Square—not, incidentally, by horses, but behind an armored personnel carrier. But what struck me most … was the fact that from start to finish there was not one mention of—God.”

  Why should that matter? you ask. After all, many of us are as tepid in our belief as the proverbial Unitarian who believes that there is, at most, one God. What is wrong with a society that believes in none? The usual answer follows th
e lines of an observation by Arthur Schlesinger (and others) that “the declining faith in the supernatural has been accompanied by the rise of the monstrous totalitarian creeds of the 20th century.” Or as Chesterton put it, “The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything.” In this century, “anything” has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao, authors of the great genocidal madnesses of our time.

  However, as the robotic orderliness of Chernenko’s funeral demonstrates, the Soviet system is now anything but mad. The “monstrous creeds” have changed. Totalitarianism was once a truly crusading faith: messianic, hopeful, mobilized and marching. Now it is dead, burnt out. Classical totalitarianism has been replaced by what philosopher Michael Walzer calls “failed totalitarianism,” the cold, empty shell of the old madness: The zeal, the energy, the purpose are gone; only bureaucracy and cynicism remain. Today the Soviet system, the greatest of all the failed totalitarianisms, no longer believes in “anything.” It now believes in nothing. A nothing on eerie display at Wednesday’s funeral.

  Chesterton’s case against atheism is that even if it is (God forbid) true, it is dangerous. Three hours of watching Chernenko placed in the Kremlin wall convinces me otherwise. The case against a public life bereft of all spirituality rests less on its danger than on its utter desolation.

  The Washington Post, March 15, 1985

  CHAPTER 11

  MEMORY AND MONUMENTS

  SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

  Uniquely among the capitals of the world, Washington’s monumental core pays homage to the word. The glory of the Jefferson Memorial is not the Founder’s statue but, carved in stone around him, his words on religious freedom, inalienable rights and sacred honor. At the Lincoln Memorial, one cannot but be moved by the eyes and grave bearing of the martyred president, but even more moving are the surrounding words: the sublime cadences of the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address, both in their entirety. (Lincoln’s gift for concision helps. Castro, of the eight-hour speeches, could not be so memorialized.)