Slouching Towards Gomorrah (46 page)
Read Slouching Towards Gomorrah Online
Authors: Robert H. Bork
It was tempting for men who wanted freedom from religious prohibitions to accept the idea that science was steadily disproving religion’s claims. The three most influential thinkers of the modern era, men who advanced their theories as science, either were bitterly hostile to religion or espoused theories that could be read to undercut faith. Sigmund Freud assailed religion “in all its forms as an illusion and therefore recast it as a form of neurosis.”
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Karl Marx viewed religion as superstition that opposed the progress of the working class. Charles Darwin offered the theory of evolution that was taken by many to disprove the theory of a Creator. Many people were particularly attracted to what they took to be the message of the new science of psychology: sex is the driving force of life and inhibitions are not only passe but dangerous.
The lures of hedonism aside, the intellectual prestige of science was high because of its increasing ability to predict and explain much that had previously been mysterious, and also continually to improve the material conditions of life. Science is assumed to be hostile to supernatural theories. Most people would say that religious belief requires an act of faith while a belief that science can compass all reality does not. A belief that science will ultimately explain everything, however, also requires a leap of faith. Faith in
science requires the unproven assumption that all reality is material, that there is nothing beyond or outside the material universe.
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Perhaps that is right, though it seems counterintuitive, but it cannot be proven and therefore rests on an untested and untestable assumption. That being the case, there is no logical reason why science should be hostile to or displace religion. There are, in fact, arguments that materialism as a philosophy is now dead,
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but I need go no further than to assert that the belief that science has demonstrated the falsity or improbability of religious beliefs is itself false.
Refuting the supposed opposition between religion and science, however, will have no noticeable effect in reinvigorating religion. We have gotten used to its effective absence. Many people go through life with no particular beliefs, and appear untroubled by it. Others have substituted some political movement as their religion—environmentalism, animal rights, feminism, incremental socialism. The churches themselves have turned left. This has been blamed on the Sixties: “The New Left also affected religious life in the West. The Protestant mainline churches turned to the left; the World Council of Churches identified itself with the Third World as against the West…. Liberation theology affected young Catholic priests and nuns who became soldiers in the antiwar, anticapitalist, and anti-American empire movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. While they condemned ‘cutthroat capitalism,’ they seldom criticized ‘cutthroat socialism.’”
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All quite true; the Sixties jump-started the leftist politicization of the churches, but the process was under way before that.
Clergy and church bureaucrats are members of the intellectual class and look to that class for approval, an approval they cannot win through their merits as religionists, but only through their political attitudes and political usefulness. Too often it is clear that the president of Notre Dame would much prefer the approval of the presidents of Harvard and Yale to that of the pope. On domestic issues other than abortion, the Catholic bishops often look like the Democratic Party in robes. They claim to be for welfare reform, for example, but they oppose the Republican bill for the same reasons the Democrats do. On issue after issue, they line up with the Democrats and against the Republicans.
The mainline Protestant churches are further to the left. The
National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NCC), which represents most mainline Protestant denominations, has consistently taken liberal left positions on domestic issues and has been strongly critical of the foreign policy of the United States while much more favorable to the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes. The NCC
has taken the ideas of the liberal-left, clothed them in theological garments, and accorded them the status of quasi-dogma. Political “liberation” seems more important than spiritual salvation; sin, now only rarely personal, is often identified with “unjust structures”—capitalism or anything “reactionary”; an earthly kingdom of “justice for the oppressed” displaces or even claims to be the Kingdom of God; and corporations, the military, and the United States are labeled “demonic powers.” Revolutionary movements, on the other hand, are “new thrusts for human dignity and freedom”; revolutionary leaders, the new messiah figures, are “co-workers with God.”
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The World Council of Churches is, if anything, worse. During the Cold War, the WCC regularly took positions that were pro-communist and anti-United States. The Sixth Assembly of the WCC met in Vancouver in 1983 and adopted resolutions on the war in Afghanistan and the conflicts in Central America, especially the fighting in Nicaragua where the Sandinista regime was instituting a violent communist dictatorship. As Ernest W. Lefever, a political commentator, noted, the WCC’s position on Afghanistan carefully did not blame the Soviet Union for invading, but did call for “‘an end to the supply of arms to the opposition groups from the outside,’ meaning that military supplies to the freedom fighters, primarily from the United States, should cease.” The Russian Orthodox Church, a member of the Council and a tool of the Soviet government, called this “balanced and realistic.” Lefever wrote that the “Central American resolution repeatedly portrayed the United States as the only external aggressive, militaristic, and repressive force in the region”; “Respected scholars on Central American affairs could discern no difference in the WCC resolution and the views espoused by Moscow and Havana.” Capitalism was defined as a system of “economic domination and unjust social structures” that
suppresses the “socio-economic rights of people, such as the basic needs of families, communities, and the rights of workers.”
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The members of the American denominations represented by the NCC and the WCC are far more conservative than the controlling bureaucracies of those organizations. But many of the member church bureaucracies are themselves to the left of the parishioners. There was something of an uproar when a Presbyterian official and other NCC leaders visited the White House, “laid hands” on President Clinton, and prayed for him to be “strong for the task” of resisting the Republican Congress.
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A unit of the Episcopal Church, Women in Mission and Ministry, co-sponsored a National Feminist Exposition, characterized by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Washington think tank, as a “left-wing, partisan political extravaganza” showcasing a “pantheon of radical feminist leaders. “The major agenda item was to “galvanize opposition to the Republican Congress during the 1996 elections.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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The mainline Protestant churches have melded too much with the secular culture so that their members see less reason to attend.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.