Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  The other reason the Church arouses hostility is that its structure is hierarchical and authoritative, in addition to the fact that its priesthood is male. It has clear lines of authority on matters of faith and morals, culminating in the authority of the pope. These are matters that create no small outrage in the egalitarians of our time, and one sees even within the Church demands that it be democratized, that it accept beliefs and behavior it has always condemned, and that it accept radical alterations of its ancient structure. Columnists pronounce the Church out of touch with the people in the pews and find that reason for the church to change.

  That is not reason for the Church to change. The Protestant mainline denominations are out of touch with the people in the pews because the churches’ leadership changed, moving well to the left of their membership. That is a different situation than a church that is trying to remain unchanged while the culture changes its members.

  If a church changes doctrine and structure to follow its members’ views, it is difficult to see the value of that church and its religion. Religions must claim to be true and, in their essentials, to uphold principles that are universal and eternal. No church that panders to the Zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.

  It is not helpful that the ideas of salvation and damnation, of sin and virtue, which once played major roles in Christian belief, are now almost never heard of in the mainline churches. The sermons and homilies are now almost exclusively about love, kindness, and eternal life. That may be regarded, particularly by the sentimental, as an improvement in humaneness, indeed in civility, but it also means an alteration in the teaching of Christianity that makes the religion less powerful as a moral force. The carrot alone has never been a wholly adequate incentive to desired behavior.

  The current resurgence of religion is taking place both within and without the traditional churches. The evangelical movement within these churches is strong and growing and may ultimately reinvigorate them. A religious revival outside any traditional church may be seen in the phenomenon of the men’s movement Promise Keepers. The idea of University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, the movement started in 1990 with a meeting of 72 men. By 1995, more than 720,000 men had packed thirteen sites around the country to hear the Keepers’ growing list of top speakers, to pray, and to enjoy fellowship. Promise Keepers has a staff of 300 and a budget of more than $60 million.45 At the highly emotional meetings, the men vow to be faithful in marriage, to be good family men, and to seek denominational and racial unity. They work with their local churches. Some anxiety has been expressed that Keepers is a theological and doctrinal hodgepodge, but that is not terribly relevant to the question of whether the movement can help restore the moral tone of society. Perhaps Keepers’ highly emotional commitment can do more to alter personal behavior and elevate cultural standards than the traditional churches have been capable of doing, or willing to try to do, in recent years. At a different level, Pope John Paul during his eighteen-year pontificate has been laying the intellectual foundations for a revitalization of the Church and Catholic life. Whether his vision will influence the entire Church remains to be seen.

  Much of the outlook of American churches today can be capsulated in the phrase “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which James Fitzjames Stephen over a century ago called the Religion of Humanity: “It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human race collectively has before it splendid destinies of various kinds, and that the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love.”46 He added, “I do not believe it.” Neither does anyone with eyes to see and even a trace of common sense. The Religion of Humanity is not Christianity or Judaism but tends to oust those religions or soften them to irrelevance.

  The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance. Freud, Marx, and Darwin, according to the conventional account, routed the believers. Freud and Marx are no longer taken as irrefutable by intellectuals, and now it appears to be Darwin’s turn to undergo a devaluation.

  The fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory. Though there is ample evidence of evolution and adaptation to environment within species, there is not evidence of the gradual change that is supposed to slowly change one species into another. A compelling argument for why such evidence is missing is provided by the microbiologist Michael Behe. He has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it.47 Scientists at the time of Darwin had no conception of the enormous complexity of bodies and their organs. Behe points out that for evolution to be the explanation of features such as the coagulation of blood and the human eye, too many unrelated mutations would have to occur simultaneously. This may be read as the modern, scientific version of the argument from design to the existence of a designer.

  The argument from design is now bolstered by the findings of physics concerning the Big Bang. We now know that there were a great many “coincidences” at the outset of the universe that were essential if life was to exist. Surveying this developing literature, Patrick Glynn lists values such as Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant, the relative masses of subatomic particles, the precise rate of expansion of the universe in the tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the precise strength of the nuclear weak force, the nuclear strong force, and electromagnetism. “[Scientists now understand that minuscule alterations (often as little as one part per million) in those values and relationships, or in scores of others, would have caused catastrophic derailments in the series of events following the universes beginning…. [E]ven the slightest tinkering with a single one of these values, most scientists now agree, would have foreclosed the possibility of life.”48

  Religion will no longer have to fight scientific atheism with unsupported faith. The presumption has shifted, and naturalistic atheism and secular humanism are on the defensive. Evidence of a designer is not, of course, evidence of the God of Christianity and Judaism. But the evidence, by undermining the scientific support for atheism, makes belief in that God much easier. And that belief is probably essential to a civilized future.

  The nature of a world without such religion, as Paul Johnson argued, is likely to be very unpleasant:

  Certainly, mankind without Christianity conjures up a dismal prospect. The record of mankind with Christianity is daunting enough.… The dynamism it has unleashed has brought massacre and torture, intolerance and destructive pride on a huge scale, for there is a cruel and pitiless nature in man which is sometimes impervious to Christian restraints and encouragements. But without these restraints, bereft of these encouragements, how much more horrific the history of these last 2,000 years must have been! … In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world, and it is not encouraging.49

  15

  The Wistful Hope for Fraternity

  Where modern liberalism’s radical versions of liberty and equality hold sway, there can be no fraternity. From the French Revolution to the Sixties rebellions, radicals who worship liberty and equality also invariably yearn for fraternity, community, brotherhood. They will never achieve it, because the dynamic of radicalism in general and modern liberalism in particular is to shatter society. Talk of fraternity refers only to the rebels; everybody else is despised and to be coerced.

  A bourgeois or non-radical society, one that is not politicized in all its departments, can achieve a degree of unity through a common culture. America once had such a culture. Periods of heavy immigration of a wide variety of races and ethnic groups produced evolution in that culture without destroying its essential
nature. Assimilating large numbers of persons from very different cultures is difficult but doable, as our experience proves. What may make the task impossible is that the powerful agents of modern liberalism—primarily the universities, high schools, primary schools—are working not only to fracture our culture but to suppress its historic sources of strength. This fracturing does not result from immigration but from ideology. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the cultural unity that is being deliberately destroyed.

  From the beginning of our nation, men regarded it as important that America had a single culture. In Federalist No. 2, Publius (John Jay) wrote:

  Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs….

  This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.

  Publius described a land populated by people descended from Englishmen, speaking English, professing Protestantism, attached to principles of self-government, and so, not surprisingly, very similar in their manners and customs. In fact, it would be untrue to say that the culture at America’s foundation was European or, as we now say, Eurocentric. It was nowhere near as inclusive as that. It was Protestant English. There were other nationalities, of course, but by far the dominant culture was as Publius stated it. He might have added that our prospects for nationhood under a common culture were enhanced by Americans’ common political experiences of living as colonies of England, of the Revolutionary War, and of living together, albeit rather loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation.

  Change came with the initial heavy waves of immigration of other Europeans with different ancestors, different languages, and different religions. Germans came in massive numbers, then Irish, Italians, Slavs, and European and Eastern European Jews, among others. The culture was enriched but did not alter fundamentally. It gradually changed from Anglocentric to Eurocentric, with a new and distinctively American accent. Those who came later were certainly not primarily English Protestants, but they assimilated because they wanted to become Americans and believed that meant adopting the language and many of the attitudes they found here. There were resentments between groups, of course, ethnic politics, social and religious discrimination, and sizeable pockets of bigotry. But there was certainly no concerted rejection of the dominant culture.

  The United States now faces the question of how far a culture can stretch to accommodate more and more ethnic groups and religions and still remain recognizable as a culture rather than an agglomeration of cultures. Which leads to the further question: Can a national identity, something resembling a national community, be maintained when cultural unity is destroyed? We are, after all, no longer one united people, descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, and very similar in our manners and customs. We are no longer a people joined by common political experiences and memories. And with every year that passes, we are less like that.

  So far as I know, no multiethnic society has ever been peaceful except when constrained by external force. Ethnicity appears to be so powerful that it can overcome rationality. Canada, for example, one of the five richest countries in the world, is torn and may well be destroyed by what, to the outsider, look like utterly senseless ethnic animosities. Since the United States has more ethnic groups than any other nation, it will pass as a miracle if we maintain a high degree of unity and peace.

  Had we been at the Founding a people as diverse and culturally disunited as we are today, there would have been no Founding. A Constitution and Bill of Rights would not have been proposed, and, if proposed, would have provoked political warfare that would have torn the country too deeply for any hope of unity. It was only the momentum of the original cultural unity that carried us forward with a single dominant culture for so long.

  It was still possible to think of the United States as more or less culturally unified into the 1950s. But now we are reversing direction and becoming a chaos of cultures that cannot, or more accurately will not, be unified. What we are discussing are cultural disintegrations in addition to those caused by a number of other groups with feverishly adversarial stances. Radical feminists, race demagogues, homosexual activists, animal rights fanatics, and yet others, play major roles in fracturing the culture. But the phenomenon known as multiculturalism adds a new and powerful dissolvent. It addresses not a single group, as does feminism, for example, but all groups—other than white, heterosexual males. Each is urged to become or remain a separate tribe.

  Some of this was to be expected. No immigrant racial or ethnic group assimilated immediately; typically, newly arrived groups bunched together for a generation or two. Though they assimilated more rapidly than most, German immigrants clustered in Milwaukee and on farms in eastern Pennsylvania. Irish and Italians stayed together in their own urban neighborhoods, as did Jews in areas like the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Chinatowns grew up in a number of American cities. The children and grandchildren of these groups moved out, intermarried, and, though preserving aspects of their original culture, by and large melded into the larger culture.

  The arrival of groups of non-European backgrounds would make the task of assimilation much harder in any event, but what bids fair to make it impossible is the recent phenomenon of groups who do not wish to assimilate but to live in America as indigestible lumps in our society. While most immigrants still wish to become Americans, some of them do not learn English and do not apply for American citizenship when they become eligible. These groups are told by ethnic activists and academic leftists that they should not move into the older American culture but should remain separate, preserving their distinctive cultures, no matter how ill-suited to success in this society those cultures are. Hispanics, who will outnumber blacks in the United States by the end of the century, often do not regard this country as their own. During the heated demonstrations against California’s law denying various social services to illegal immigrants, a number of the demonstrators waved Mexican flags, apparently, regardless of citizenship, regarding themselves as Mexicans who were here for economic benefits only.

  Muslim immigration adds a group whose religion and culture causes some of them to reject much of what we regard as essential features of American culture and government. This “ominous development,” as the British political philospher John Gray calls it, is well under way in Britain, “where a minority of fundamentalist Muslims that is estranged from whatever remains of a common culture, and which rejects the tacit norms of toleration that allow a civil society to reproduce itself peacefully, has effectively curbed freedom of expression about Islam in Britain today.”1 Some conservative Muslims in the United States fight assimilation, while the fundamentalists speak of living here “in the depths of corruption and ruin and moral deprivation. “They assert that “Islamic civilization is based upon principles fundamentally opposed to those of Western civilization.”2 This is, of course, not true of all Muslim immigrants or even most of them, but that it is true of some may well pose a problem. The British experience may not be a guide, since the British, unlike the Americans, have no tradition of welcoming newcomers. It is important, nevertheless, that we do all we can to counter the separationist tendencies of some Muslims, even if there is some truth in their statement that we live in a state of moral deprivation.

  Americans of Asian extraction had seemed to be immune to this rejectionist impulse. They had, after all, produced startling rates of achievement in academic endeavors, science, and business. Yet, perhaps feeling that ethnic grievance is necessary to ones self-respect, Asi
an-American university students are beginning to act like an ethnic pressure group, demanding the paraphernalia—separate dormitories, courses, etc.—of campus tribalism.

  Ethnic separatism and hostility to other ethnic groups may be inbred in mankind, requiring no explanation peculiar to any particular society. Thus, it is possible to question historian Arthur Schlesinger’s proposition that “The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.”3 If the cult of ethnicity is a universal phenomenon—running from Bosnia to Sri Lanka to Liberia to Indonesia, and a dozen or so other places—surely the cause is more general than decreasing confidence in the American future. It seems far more likely that the causal arrow runs the other way: decreasing confidence in the American future is a symptom of the rising cult of ethnicity.

  The natural centrifugal tendencies of ethnicity were once counteracted by a public school system that stressed indoctrinating immigrants to be Americans. The schools were agents of cultural unification. They taught patriotism and standards derived from European cultures. Part of our national lore, and glory, is the fact that youngsters speaking not a word of English were placed in public schools where only English was used and very shortly were proficient in the language. That was crucial to the formation of an American identity. Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture. Our egalitarians view every culture (other than European) as equal. They resent and resist attempts to Americanize immigrants, and the crucial battleground is language.