One of the more potent (and predictable) side effects of forcibly removing religion from public life, public conversation, and yes, public schools, is that society gradually loses touch with the religious dimensions of life.
We forget how to talk about faith... we misinterpret other people’s religious actions and conversation... we underestimate faith’s powerful influence in the lives of those who still take their deepest beliefs seriously.
And, of course, what we cannot understand, we usually begin to fear.
And the things which unsettle us... often begin to make us angry.
Perhaps that explains the increasingly open and unrelenting fury of the Left toward Christians, as rant after rant erupts in a variety of venues:
The savage soundbites on NBC’s new ‘Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip,” in which Aaron Sorkin’s characters liken Christians to the Ku Klux Klan and deride them as both wild-eyed doomsday-ers and ignorant bigots from inconsequential corners of the American landscape.
The recent virulent Rosie O’Donnell outburst, as she explained to the audience of ‘The View’ why Christians are even more dangerous than Muslim terrorists.
The increasingly aggressive efforts of university administrations to drive Christian student groups from campus, usually on the premise that Christians are “intolerant” of homosexual behavior and that religious activities are inherently divisive.
The escalating effort to remove crosses erected on government property to memorialize the sacrifices of fallen servicemen and police officers – lest some atheist passer-by take offense.
The inscrutable decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled that Christians can’t meet in a private room at a public library because they might start studying the Bible or singing hymns... and religion isn’t considered free speech, on public property.
But if it’s one thing for the Left to demand that Christians check their faith at the door, it’s another to ask us to check our minds. The defiant refusal of so many leaders in our courts, our schools, and our media to acknowledge the reality of religious faith is translating not only into aggressive attacks, but into almost laughably bad logic.
Consider:
Madonna, who justifies the climactic moment of her current “Confessions” tour, in which she hangs from a gigantic cross with a “crown of thorns” on her head, by assuring us that, "if Jesus were alive today he would be doing the same thing." (Maybe she should have let Papa preach. Whatever else you want to believe about Jesus, He obviously understood the difference between sacrificing oneself to save mankind and degrading oneself to sell tickets.)
Sorkin’s comparison of Christians to Ku Klux Klan members. How does he reconcile the inherent “bigotry” of anyone who follows Jesus with the outspoken Christian faith that drove Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights pioneers – white and black – of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference?
The endless accusations of “intolerance” lodged against Christians. Mocked, censored, and persecuted, we pray, change the channel, write letters, stage boycotts, complain on Conservative radio, file lawsuits, vote. In other words, we utilize the full resources of a democratic society... while our opponents force-feed their political agenda with aggressive censorship and fiats invoked by judges more obsessed with their own leftist liturgy than the letter of the law.
O’Donnell’s outburst. How long does she think an outspoken woman who publicly embraces lesbian behavior would last under the tolerance of Al Qaeda, whose idea of religious conversion is “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse?”
The American secularist media. They dutifully shake their heads over the rising number of sex crimes and teen pregnancies – while promoting increasingly pornographic images on everything from daytime television to cable news programs. They warn of increasingly violent crime rates all over the country, between commercials for ever-more sadistic “entertainment” programs.
Somehow, the people at the wheel of our careening culture are convinced that – if we can only remove every spiritual incentive for upright, moral, selfless behavior – if we can just convince everyone that God doesn’t exist – people will suddenly decide to be good.
No, not just good. Better than they’ve ever been before.
Legendary novelist Fedor Dostoevsky knew better.
“If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality,” he wrote, “not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.” For, “if God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Everything. Liberty – political, social, sexual – runs amuck, without reason, without discipline, without limits. Justice is impossible, and unnecessary. Ignorance truly becomes bliss. Nothing has to make sense any more, because... nothing matters.
In their blind determination to eradicate God from our community, from our culture, even from our government, the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State and all their Leftist kindred aren’t really accomplishing the demotion of the Divine – Who is, by definition, un-demote-able.
They are bent, rather, on destroying themselves.
The only question that remains, as they head for their mad fall, is whether they take our nation, and our children, with them. |