Powerful Passage

Sometimes I despise Liberals more than Conservatives, and sometimes vise versa. I believe it is whichever side who holds the double standard, who doesn't apply a principle consistently, that really makes my blood boil. To kill in the name of God may be irrational and stupid, and for that very reason those who condemn kiling in the name of God, but then kill in the name of Freedom and Democracy, are worse. It is wrong to throw people in jail for homosexual acts (which few even on the Right advocate), but it is worse to throw people in jail for merely criticizing homosexuality (which many on the Left, especially in Europe, advocate). It is wrong for liberals to have the federal government fund sex education and teach "safe sex," but it is worse for conservatives to have the feds fund abstinence-only education. When conservatives opposed a federal role in education, their moral and intellectual superiority over liberalism was indisputable, but when they themselves advocate social engineering, they are worse than liberals because they have less excuse for embracing their position.

F.J. Sarto at Taki offers a good analysis of the situation before us. If nothing else can be said on behalf of the Christian Right, it is thanks largely to their presence and check on the Academic-Judicial Complex thatAmerica hasn't devolved into the sort of "soft totalitarianism" found in Western Europe, where clergy are jailed for their sexual views and home-schooled children are sent to psyche wards. But the Christian Right is its own worst enemy, and this is one of the most powerful passages I've read in a long time:

But with every occasion on which the Christian Right squanders its moral capital, every unjust war it supports, every foolish statement designed to provoke a war between Israel and her neighbors, every ham-handed attempt to keep Christians from taking the environment (and the survival of God’s Creation) seriously, that bulwark erodes just a little. Intelligent young people look at the movement which can sanction such irresponsibility, which touts the likes of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, and turn away in disgust. Like the Catholics of Spain who associate the Church with Franco’s secret police, they shudder and look for something else—a worldview which is not so manifestly juvenile and irrational.

They may very well turn to the secular Left. The Christian Right could vanish like the “massive” Southern resistance to desegregation, like the Temperance movement which once outlawed alcohol in 50 states, like the Black Power movement… like every other half-baked ideological crusade which faded away with the irrational emotions that had driven it, in the absence of serious thought.

And then we will be in the same boat as our cousins in Brazil, Quebec, and England. We’ll be facing real persecution by a “soft” totalitarian system that holds the family in contempt, regards Christianity as its enemy, and covets cradle-to-grave control over the thoughts, feelings and actions of its subjects.

The only hope of resisting the partisans of secular intolerance is to clean up the Christian Right (Catholic and Protestant), to purge it of jingoism, anti-intellectualism, and end-of-the world nihilism, then to break up its shotgun wedding to the hacks who run the conservative movement. The Christian Right must become less “Right” and much more Christian, reassert its intellectual and moral independence of partisan politics, and insist on applying its principles consistently. Pastors must stop endorsing torture, public Catholics must choose their pope above their president, and all of us must remember that the real war is not between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between the Church and the World. And the battlefield lies within our hearts.