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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 Secularist
Bigotry
The elightened are desperate…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 12/10/04
For
those Democrats still licking their electoral wounds, a soothing
narrative
has emerged among the liberal commentariat.
According to this tale, the Republicans triumphed because they
were able to "energize their base"-- that is, all those "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" Christians--
by appealing to their irrational intolerance and hatred of everything
in modernity that frightens them, particularly "gay rights." Only
by such exploitation of the neuroses and ignorance fostered by
religious belief and expressed by opposition to social issues
such as "gay marriage" can the Republicans trick so
many middle-class and working-class people into voting against
their true interests, all of which center on economic issues.
After all, enlightened people know that religion is just a quaint
superstition that flourishes among the unenlightened and undereducated,
a projection of neuroses and fears more efficiently treated by
modern therapeutic intervention or maybe a few courses at the
local community college. The enlightened can tolerate Christians,
as long as their beliefs remain a private lifestyle choice, one
spiritual option among many, no better than Hinduism, Scientology,
or Wicca.
But whenever Christians
actually dare to make political choices on the basis of those
beliefs, then the enlightened gatekeepers
of American secularism in the academy and in the media rise up
in righteous wrath and rush to the barricades to defend us against
the barbarian hordes of true believers who if unchecked will
transform our republic into a "theocracy" and impose
their intolerant bigotry on everybody else. And when the President
himself is one of these religious fanatics, then the prospects
for the republic and the Constitution are dark indeed--even the
usually rational New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman whined
after the election that he was depressed "because Bush's
base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend
the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting
the Constitution, not electing a president."
Apart from its sheer bigotry, which is itself based on ignorant
stereotypes and underlying beliefs warranted not by reason but
by faith (for example, the assumption that spiritual reality
does not exist), this view of religion in public life demonstrates
as well a misunderstanding and distortion of America's founding
and the important role Christianity played in the creation of
the U.S. republic. This combination of bigotry and ignorance
of history has recently surfaced in a fifth-grade class in Cupertino,
California, an affluent Bay Area suburb.
Fifth-grade teacher Steven J. Williams started all the trouble
last May when he gave his students a proclamation from President
Bush about a national prayer day. A parent complained that there
was too much religion in the classroom, particularly since Williams
had earlier discussed with his class the reference to God in
the Pledge of Allegiance, and had to have his principal stop
him from discussing Easter. The upshot of these complaints was
that Williams had to have his class handouts screened in advance
for religious content. Williams in a lawsuit claims that this
requirement led to several documents from American colonial history
being excluded from his class; the district responds that it
was Williams' use of those documents that led to his handouts
being excluded.
Whether or not Williams
was using these documents from American history as an excuse
to proselytize his students will be determined
by the lawsuit, assuming it ever even gets to trial. Making such
a determination will be difficult, for often even neutral discussions
of religious ideas are interpreted by some people as advocacy
for them. I know from my own experience in teaching the classics
of Christian literature such as Augustine, Boethius, and Dante
that any mention of Christian belief even in a scholarly context
will incite complaints about "preaching" from those
students who have been trained by public education into thinking
that the Constitution bars any mention of religious belief in
the "public square."
There's also a bad
odor of hypocrisy surrounding some of these complaints about "teaching religion," given that often
the same complainers will not mind a bit if other unscientific
or irrational beliefs and values are preached in class-much of
what is passed off as "environmentalism" in public
schools, for example, is actually a sort of nature religion based
on irrational belief and myths that have nothing to do with facts,
reason, or logic. Political ideologies like socialism, feminism,
or multiculturalism that have evolved into pseudo-religions complete
with proscriptive creeds and foundation myths are taught all
the time in the same classrooms that are supposed to be sanitized
from any mention of the religion that for 2000 years has defined
Western civilization.
What I find more interesting
is the official statement of the Cupertino school district,
which said that district administrators
are required "to uphold the First Amendment which mandates
the separation between church and state." The Anti-establishment
clause of the First Amendment, of course does no such thing.
Rather, it prohibits the federal government from establishing
a particular denomination as a part of the government; the point
of the anti-establishment clause was not to protect the government
from religion, but to protect religion from the federal government.
State governments were free to "establish" churches,
and many did so well into the 19th century.
The idea of a "wall of separation between church and state" that
so many think is written into the Bill of Rights actually resulted
from later court decisions that reflected the growing secularization
and scientism of American life, not to mention at times anti-Catholic-immigrant
prejudice. But such views had nothing to do with the intent of
the Founders, even the most irreligious of whom would have been
shocked to see our current anti-religion fundamentalism. For
these thinkers "believed mightily that of all philosophies
and religions, the Jewish and Christian religion is the best
foundation for republican institutions," as Michael Novak
puts it in On Two Wings, his study of the role of faith in the
Founding.
Anyone who has any
doubts about that role should peruse the numerous quotations
Novak assembles. The tradition of a Presidential
proclamation to thank God for his blessings was started by George
Washington, who created our November Thanksgiving Day not to
commemorate Squanto saving the Pilgrims from starvation but "to
acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will,
to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly implore his protection
and favor." In this Washington was following the model of
the Continental Congress, which issued numerous such proclamations;
that of 1782 recommended that all "testify their gratitude
of God for his goodness, by a cheerful obedience to his laws,
and by protecting, each in his station, and by his influence,
the practice of true and undefiled religion, which is the great
foundation of public prosperity and natural happiness." I
don't know what would anger the ACLU more, the reference to God
or the use of the masculine pronoun.
Even the most tepid
of believers among the Founders assumed that the health and
success of the American republic depended
on the vitality of religious belief: or as George Washington
put it in his "Farewell Address," "Of all the
dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion
and morality are indispensable supports." Famed deist Thomas
Jefferson once asked, "Can the liberties of a nation be
thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a
conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the
gift of God?" Thomas Paine, accused of atheism, wrote at
the beginning of The Age of Reason, "I believe in one God,
and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life." So
too another Enlightenment hero, Benjamin Franklin: "Here
is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That
He governs it by His providence. That he ought to be worshipped."
And of course, the
works of the many more numerous orthodox Christian Founders
could provide an endless supply of quotations
to show that teaching the Founding without taking into account
the powerful role that Christianity played is an act not just
of historical but of pedagogical malfeasance. Many of the Founding
generation believed that it was impossible to teach republican
virtue without teaching religion: "The only foundation for
a useful education in a republic," Benjamin Rush wrote, "is
to be laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and
without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object
and life of all republican governments."
If Judeo-Christian
belief is so central to the ideals that created our government
in the first place--if, as de Tocqueville wrote, "Freedom
sees religion as the companion of its struggles and triumphs,
the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its rights"----then
the current anti-Christian fundamentalism strikes at the root
of our political order. For if we are, as the secularists tell
us, mere material creatures bound to one another only by contractual
relations to be dissolved or altered at will, then what will
provide the basis for all those selfless actions and emotions
that any community depends on for its cohesion, and that keep
freedom from degenerating into mere license, the power to do
and consume whatever gratifies our selfish will and appetites?
Where will fundamental values come from, all those beliefs that
bind us into a community, and that we are willing to die and
kill for, not because they have been scientifically proven but
because we believe passionately that they are right and true
and will benefit the greatest number of people?
The secularists have failed to provide an alternative for the
religion that they have discarded. Into this vacuum has rushed
any number of pseudo-religions, from Marxism to scientism to
environmentalism, that are infinitely more irrational and mischievous
than traditional Christianity. Yet this secularism is the creed
dominating the schools, one more dogmatic, more intolerant of
dissent, and more prone to self-righteous hypocrisy----in short,
more fundamentalist than the beliefs of most Christians. For
those concerned about the dangers of religion to our political
life, then, look to these creeds, which are passed off as the
fruits of science and reason, rather than to a Christianity that
has been banished from the political culture it helped to create. tOR
copyright
2004 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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