Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  The United Methodist Church was particularly busy. At its 1995 fall meeting, the UM Board of Church and Society asked President Clinton to release fourteen Puerto Rican “political prisoners.” The “political” acts that got them into prison included a hundred bombings in five cities during the late 1970s and early 1980s, which killed five people, caused eighty injuries and produced more than $3.5 million in damage. The Boards resolution compared the terrorists to American patriots during the Revolutionary War as well as to the apostles Peter and Paul. The terrorists wanted Puerto Rican independence, which their fellow Puerto Ricans regularly reject at the polls. The UM Board nevertheless said that the terrorists had “taken up arms against the colonizer,” the United States, and regretted that their “resistance” had been “criminalized.”26

  At another fall meeting, the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries defended affirmative action against what it perceived as an increasingly racist America. One Board member said, “We live in terrifying times,” and identified radio talk shows as a “hotbed” of the thinking she feared. Another referred to the “climate of hate and violence” and said, “White, male supremacists now wear suits. They talk states rights and anti-taxes “Yet another argued that the United States and China are equivalent in their human rights problems and claimed that “domestic battering” is the “number one cause of death for women in the U.S.”27 These people live in a leftist dream world so powerful that they can repeat lies like that without shame, perhaps without even realizing that what they are saying has no relation to reality.

  Leftishness usually means hostility to the United States and that is abundantly present in the old mainline Protestant churches. This was in evidence before and during the Gulf War:

  Most oldline voices seemed to experience no doubt about the moral correctness of rejecting the use of force. Amidst ambiguities and uncertainties, the worst case was almost always assumed regarding the result of further war and the United States’ role in it. What some religious leaders affirmed as necessary about the American leadership in the crisis was heavily qualified with accusations of hypocrisy on the part of political leaders, while the worst fears of church leaders regarding American involvement in the Gulf were expressed in terms of a militaristic, imperial conspiracy. On the other hand, the best case was always assumed for multilateral diplomacy and negotiation to bring a just peace…. The more power in the hands of the Secretary General of THE U.N., and out of the hands of President Bush, the better.28

  It was not just the Gulf War that evoked such sentiments. During 1985-1988, the leadership of the Presbyterian Church (USA) was seeking support for its document “Presbyterians and Peacemaking: Are We Now Called to Resistance?” which “condemned the United States for its ‘idolatrous’ possession of nuclear weapons, and suggested that Presbyterians ‘resist’ the idolatry by acts of civil disobedience such as refusing to pay taxes.”29

  It is hardly surprising that such churches have lost substantial membership. The situation of the mainline Protestant denominations was described by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research:

  As recently as the 1950s, their memberships’ rates of growth equalled or surpassed that of the US population as a whole. But their growth slowed in the early 1960s, and by the latter part of the decade they were losing ground in overall membership. This decline has continued right to the present. By 1990, the old mainline Protestant churches had lost at least one-fifth and perhaps as much as one-third of the membership total they claimed just a quarter-century earlier. The extent and persistence of this drop-off in membership has no parallel in US religious experience. The proportion of Americans affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations is now at its twentieth-century low. And, in considering these data, it’s important to keep in mind that church membership overall has been rising over this span.30

  The mainline Protestant churches have melded too much with the secular culture so that their members see less reason to attend.31 It would be more accurate to say that these churches have melded with the far left wing of the secular culture. The decline in membership would be even more dramatic if parishioners were aware of just how extreme many of the church bureaucracies have become.

  The problem is not merely that much of the hierarchy has gone politically left. There is also the problem Tocqueville identified: the influence of the surrounding culture on the churches, in this case, the elite culture. The most striking manifestation of that is, of course, the ordination of practicing gays and lesbians as denominational ministers. That is a flat rejection of biblical principles for a secular, egalitarian, and therefore permissive, outlook. It is uncertain that the mainline churches could prevent this even if they wanted to; discipline has broken down within the church hierarchies. Thus, Episcopal Bishop John Spong of Newark, New Jersey, reportedly said that he will continue to ordain homosexuals even if his church instructs him not to do so.32 In other ways, too, the mainline Protestant churches have conformed their standards to those of the secular culture, on the theory, which has proved mistaken again and again, that to remain “relevant” and keep its members, a church must change with the times. The Roman Catholic Church has made the same mistake, but to a somewhat lesser degree.

  The obtrusive fact is that the churches that make the highest demands on their members, that focus on salvation, community, and morality, that stand against the direction of the secular culture, are the churches that have gained in membership. Evangelical denominations are examples of this. The same phenomenon is observable within denominations. The Catholic Church suffers from a shortage of priests and men seeking to become priests, but there is no shortage of vocations in the orthodox dioceses.

  If the factors just discussed were not enough cause for concern, there are yet stronger forces seeking to remake religion and to marginalize it. The strongest force seeking to destroy traditional religions is feminism. Radical feminists have very little use for religion or churches as they are, but they do not leave the churches whose doctrines and liturgies they find objectionable. They work within to change the churches so that the final product will bear little resemblance to Christianity. The feminists call for “reimagining” the Christian religion, which means rejecting all traditional doctrine. One form of reimagining is to reject the gospels because they were written by men and replace them with a history that pleases feminists. Feminists see no problem with that, according to Catholic theologian Joyce Little, because they believe that written history is merely the record of the victors, and that includes the Bible. “Everything is a form of propaganda pushing somebody’s ideology. Nothing is to be trusted at face value. This is what the feminists mean by their ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. And on this foundation of suspicion the feminists have constructed their ideological alternative to Christian faith.”33 The implications of this approach for honest investigation are obvious: anything goes. “The purpose of scholarship has become, not the discovery of truth, but the nurture of feminist consciousness,” wrote theologian William Oddie, then an Anglican, in the process of analyzing the views of a feminist theologian teaching at Notre Dame.34 Thus, biblical history is rewritten, without evidence to support the rewriting, so that it better fits the feminist view of what women must have done, what ought to have happened.

  Feminist gatherings within traditional denominations celebrate and pray to pagan goddesses. Witchcraft is undergoing an enormous revival in feminist circles as the antagonist of Christian faith. The damage done to traditional religion that is most obvious to the people in the pews is the feminist drive to make the language of the scriptures and the liturgy “inclusive.” As in all of feminisms endeavors, the charge is that the traditional—in this case the English language and the original language of the Bible—are unjust and offensive because they make women feel left out.

  The complaint is both silly and one more instance of feminists’ ability to find offense everywhere and whine about it. But in churches as in universities and the military, the opposition coll
apses at once when belligerent women claim to be offended. One of the results of the inclusive language drive has been ludicrous alterations in religious texts. “Masculine words are no longer used in reference to God; instead of the use of pronouns, the word ‘God’ is repeated over and over (‘God sent God’s Son to redeem God’s people’); the word ‘Father’ is eliminated because it is patriarchal; the names for the persons of the Holy Trinity are changed to Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.”35 There are also, of course, efforts to avoid referring to “man,” although, in English, generic references to “man” have always been understood to mean all humans.

  Paul Mankowski, a brilliant young Jesuit, points out that changing the wording to the supposedly more inclusive

  “men and women” won’t quite do, for it excludes children and hermaphrodites, who are themselves entirely human, in need of redemption, and addressees of the Word. Even “men, women, children, and those of indeterminate gender” is inadequate, because someone, sometimes, might well hear “children” and infer that it excludes infants. Notice: this proliferation is stark nonsense, but the only objection that can be tendered by the champions of inclusive language—namely, that the unmarked locution includes the various marked forms—is one that precisely invalidates their own claim. They can’t have it both ways; the dilemma is fatal.36

  The dilemma is logically fatal, but logic is not what the feminist assault on scripture and liturgy is about. What it is about is sweeping change in the Roman Catholic Church—the ordination of women as priests, and acceptance of gay and lesbian sexual practices, for example. But the motivation may go deeper than that, as one suspects upon learning that the feminists within the church engage in neo-pagan ritual magic and the worship of pagan goddesses. Donna Steichen concludes: “[The feminists’] ultimate rebellion, against God the Father and his Son, the male Savior Jesus Christ, has been disguised for public consumption as a campaign for ‘inclusive’ liturgical language. On its face, it is a child’s complaint against grammatical convention, to be addressed in an introductory course on the structure of English language. But in private, and in their own publications, feminist theologians reveal, behind that mask, naked denial of the objectively existent, transcendent Father God.”37 The inclusive language campaign serves that objective by altering what has come down to Catholic and Protestant churches so that we will accept that there is no permanent truth in religion, but only the need to respond to whatever resentments and sensitivities prevail today.

  If religion is being altered internally by the forces of feminism and left-wing ideology, it is simultaneously being marginalized in our public life by the hostility of the intellectual class. The two most significant manifestations of that hostility are the federal judiciary’s wholly unwarranted expansion of the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion and the national press’s ignoring of religion as a topic of any importance.

  The First Amendment begins quite simply: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” At the time, an establishment of religion was understood to be the preference by government of one or more religions over others. Sometimes this is referred to, inaccurately, as mandating the separation of church and state. The difficulty is that within the last several decades, the Supreme Court, at the urging of organizations such as the ACLU, has read the clause as though it commanded the separation of religion and society. It is one thing to say that government may not sponsor or support particular churches; it is quite another to say that wherever government appears, however passively, as in the ownership of parks, the symbols of religion must be banished.

  That was not the historical meaning of the First Amendment.38 The first Congress, which proposed the First Amendment for ratification by the states, also appointed chaplains for the House, Senate, and the armed forces. The early Congresses regularly petitioned the president to issue Thanksgiving Day proclamations addressed to God. The framers and ratifiers could not conceivably have anticipated that the Supreme Court, sitting in a courtroom with a painting of Moses and the Ten Commandments, would hold it an unconstitutional establishment of religion for a high school to have a copy of the Ten Commandments on a wall. Nor could they have supposed that when a public school system provided remedial education to educationally deprived children, those children from religious schools would have to leave the premises and receive the instruction in trailers.

  Lower courts have joined in, detecting the horrid “establishment of religion” in the most innocuous practices. One judge held it unconstitutional for a high school football team to pray before a game that nobody be injured. A federal court of appeals held that a Baltimore ordinance forbidding the sale of non-kosher foods as kosher violated the establishment clause. Apparently Baltimore is free to ban every form of fraud except fraud that causes an observant Jew to eat pork. Another federal court decided that a school principal was required by the First Amendment to prevent a teacher from reading the Bible silently for his own purposes during a silent reading period. The great danger was that students, who were not shown to know what the teacher was reading, might, if they found out, be influenced by his choice of reading material. He would be perfectly free, of course, to read the Communist Manifesto and even show it to his students. The speech clause of the First Amendment protects that. The list of these anti-religion decisions is almost endless.

  There can be no doubt that the systematic hostility of the courts to religion has lowered the prestige of religion in the public mind. Indeed, the message that any contact between religion and government, even a non-sectarian prayer at a school commencement, violates the document upon which our nation is formed can only send a message that religion is dangerous, perhaps sinister. Justice Potter Stewart put the matter well in a dissent:

  [A] compulsory state educational system so structures a child’s life that if religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Viewed in this light, permission of such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or at the least, as government support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.39

  The other marginalizing factor to be mentioned is the hostility or indifference of the national media to religion. Despite the fact that religion is a major feature of American life, it is the subject of only 1 percent of news stories on the four major networks and the national print press, and those are typically hostile. Journalist Fred Barnes, for example, reports a dinner with then Governor Mario Cuomo and a dozen journalists during which Cuomo said he sent his children to Catholic schools because “The public schools inculcate a disbelief in God.” Barnes wrote, “From the reaction of my colleagues, one might have thought Cuomo had advocated mandatory snake-handling as a test of faith for the state’s students.” They peppered the Governor with dozens of hostile questions. There is, Barnes says, a “peculiar bias in mainstream American journalism against traditional religions…. [W]henever religion comes in contact with politics or public policy, as it increasingly does, the news media reacts in three distinct ways, all negative. Reporters treat religion as beneath mention, as personally distasteful, or as a clear and present threat to the American way of life.”40

  It was apparently the third sentiment that led the Los Angeles Times to pull Johnny Hart’s cartoon strip “B.C.” when at Easter it depicted his caveman character writing a poem that ended “Never to mourn the Prince who was downed,/For He is not lost! It is you who are found.” A spokesman for the Times said the strips were “insensitive and exclusionary.”41 According to that standard, no one should be allowed to mention any religion in public. Hart’s problems with the censorship of religion are merely symptomatic of the press’s general hostili
ty.42 When Justice Scalia made a speech at a prayer breakfast sponsored by a religious society stating his faith and anticipating the “scorn of the sophisticated world,” he got just that from journalists who had trouble stating why it was wrong for a Justice to mention his religion in public but were sure there was something sinister about it. So weakened and out of fashion is Christianity that a travel writer can, apparently without reproof, flippantly remark of the Church’s battle with thirteenth-century heretics that “Even the enemies of the Cathars agreed that they behaved like good Christians, which is no doubt why the church resorted to such dramatic measures to exterminate them.”43 As the courts keep pushing religion out of sight, the press either ignores it or treats it as some sort of emotional affliction. It is hardly any wonder that religion slowly loses its grip on the popular mind.

  Radical egalitarianism and individualism have altered much in American life. The question of just how irresistible they are, the test case of whether any institution can maintain its integrity in the face of the deforming pressures of a modern liberal culture is, of course, the Roman Catholic Church. What is to be seen is whether the Church can maintain its doctrines and its institutional structure in the face of pressure both from without and from within.

  The Roman Catholic Church is the test case because, as Hitchcock put it, “few religions in the history of the world have placed more emphasis on doctrinal purity, liturgical correctness, and moral authenticity than has the Catholic Church…. If at almost all times in the history of the Church, a concern for orthodoxy has been paramount, the contemporary Church has an eerie feel about it precisely because of the absence of that concern.”44 If, despite a powerful and orthodox pope who has appointed many orthodox American bishops, orthodoxy is no longer a major concern in the American Church, that is surely a sign that the Church is giving way to the culture. The Church’s opposition to abortion, homosexual conduct, and the ordination of women is under attack and appears to be a minority position among the Catholic laity, perhaps even among the American bishops. If the Church gives way on any of those issues, the culture will have effectively destroyed it.