Slouching Towards Gomorrah (47 page)

Feminist gatherings within traditional denominations celebrate and pray to pagan goddesses. Witchcraft is undergoing an enormous revival in feminist circles as the antagonist of Christian faith. The damage done to traditional religion that is most obvious to the people in the pews is the feminist drive to make the language of the scriptures and the liturgy “inclusive.” As in all of feminisms endeavors, the charge is that the traditional—in this case the English language and the original language of the Bible—are unjust and offensive because they make women feel left out.

The complaint is both silly and one more instance of feminists’
ability to find offense everywhere and whine about it. But in churches as in universities and the military, the opposition collapses at once when belligerent women claim to be offended. One of the results of the inclusive language drive has been ludicrous alterations in religious texts. “Masculine words are no longer used in reference to God; instead of the use of pronouns, the word ‘God’ is repeated over and over (‘God sent God’s Son to redeem God’s people’); the word ‘Father’ is eliminated because it is patriarchal; the names for the persons of the Holy Trinity are changed to Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.”
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There are also, of course, efforts to avoid referring to “man,” although, in English, generic references to “man” have always been understood to mean all humans.

Paul Mankowski, a brilliant young Jesuit, points out that changing the wording to the supposedly more inclusive

The dilemma is logically fatal, but logic is not what the feminist assault on scripture and liturgy is about. What it is about is sweeping change in the Roman Catholic Church—the ordination of women as priests, and acceptance of gay and lesbian sexual practices, for example. But the motivation may go deeper than that, as one suspects upon learning that the feminists within the church engage in neo-pagan ritual magic and the worship of pagan goddesses. Donna Steichen concludes: “[The feminists’] ultimate rebellion, against God the Father and his Son, the male Savior Jesus Christ, has been disguised for public consumption as a campaign for ‘inclusive’ liturgical language. On its face, it is a
child’s complaint against grammatical convention, to be addressed in an introductory course on the structure of English language. But in private, and in their own publications, feminist theologians reveal, behind that mask, naked denial of the objectively existent, transcendent Father God.”
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The inclusive language campaign serves that objective by altering what has come down to Catholic and Protestant churches so that we will accept that there is no permanent truth in religion, but only the need to respond to whatever resentments and sensitivities prevail today.

If religion is being altered internally by the forces of feminism and left-wing ideology, it is simultaneously being marginalized in our public life by the hostility of the intellectual class. The two most significant manifestations of that hostility are the federal judiciary’s wholly unwarranted expansion of the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion and the national press’s ignoring of religion as a topic of any importance.

The First Amendment begins quite simply: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” At the time, an establishment of religion was understood to be the preference by government of one or more religions over others. Sometimes this is referred to, inaccurately, as mandating the separation of church and state. The difficulty is that within the last several decades, the Supreme Court, at the urging of organizations such as the ACLU, has read the clause as though it commanded the separation of religion and society. It is one thing to say that government may not sponsor or support particular churches; it is quite another to say that wherever government appears, however passively, as in the ownership of parks, the symbols of religion must be banished.

That was not the historical meaning of the First Amendment.
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The first Congress, which proposed the First Amendment for ratification by the states, also appointed chaplains for the House, Senate, and the armed forces. The early Congresses regularly petitioned the president to issue Thanksgiving Day proclamations addressed to God. The framers and ratifiers could not conceivably have anticipated that the Supreme Court, sitting in a courtroom with a painting of Moses and the Ten Commandments, would hold it an unconstitutional establishment of religion for a high school to have a copy of the Ten Commandments on a wall. Nor
could they have supposed that when a public school system provided remedial education to educationally deprived children, those children from religious schools would have to leave the premises and receive the instruction in trailers.

Lower courts have joined in, detecting the horrid “establishment of religion” in the most innocuous practices. One judge held it unconstitutional for a high school football team to pray before a game that nobody be injured. A federal court of appeals held that a Baltimore ordinance forbidding the sale of non-kosher foods as kosher violated the establishment clause. Apparently Baltimore is free to ban every form of fraud except fraud that causes an observant Jew to eat pork. Another federal court decided that a school principal was required by the First Amendment to prevent a teacher from reading the Bible silently for his own purposes during a silent reading period. The great danger was that students, who were not shown to know what the teacher was reading, might, if they found out, be influenced by his choice of reading material. He would be perfectly free, of course, to read the Communist Manifesto and even show it to his students. The speech clause of the First Amendment protects that. The list of these anti-religion decisions is almost endless.

There can be no doubt that the systematic hostility of the courts to religion has lowered the prestige of religion in the public mind. Indeed, the message that any contact between religion and government, even a non-sectarian prayer at a school commencement, violates the document upon which our nation is formed can only send a message that religion is dangerous, perhaps sinister. Justice Potter Stewart put the matter well in a dissent:

The other marginalizing factor to be mentioned is the hostility or indifference of the national media to religion. Despite the fact that religion is a major feature of American life, it is the subject of only 1 percent of news stories on the four major networks and the national print press, and those are typically hostile. Journalist Fred Barnes, for example, reports a dinner with then Governor Mario Cuomo and a dozen journalists during which Cuomo said he sent his children to Catholic schools because “The public schools inculcate a disbelief in God.” Barnes wrote, “From the reaction of my colleagues, one might have thought Cuomo had advocated mandatory snake-handling as a test of faith for the state’s students.” They peppered the Governor with dozens of hostile questions. There is, Barnes says, a “peculiar bias in mainstream American journalism against traditional religions…. [W]henever religion comes in contact with politics or public policy, as it increasingly does, the news media reacts in three distinct ways, all negative. Reporters treat religion as beneath mention, as personally distasteful, or as a clear and present threat to the American way of life.”
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It was apparently the third sentiment that led the
Los Angeles Times
to pull Johnny Hart’s cartoon strip “B.C.” when at Easter it depicted his caveman character writing a poem that ended “Never to mourn the Prince who was downed,/For He is not lost! It is you who are found.” A spokesman for the
Times
said the strips were “insensitive and exclusionary.”
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According to that standard, no one should be allowed to mention any religion in public. Hart’s problems with the censorship of religion are merely symptomatic of the press’s general hostility.
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When Justice Scalia made a speech at a prayer breakfast sponsored by a religious society stating his faith and anticipating the “scorn of the sophisticated world,” he got just that from journalists who had trouble stating why it was wrong for a Justice to mention his religion in public but were sure there was something sinister about it. So weakened and out of fashion is Christianity that a travel writer can, apparently without reproof, flippantly remark of the Church’s battle with thirteenth-century heretics that “Even the enemies of the Cathars agreed that they behaved like good Christians, which is no doubt why the church resorted to such dramatic measures to exterminate them.”
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As the courts keep pushing religion out of sight, the press either ignores it or treats it as some sort of emotional
affliction. It is hardly any wonder that religion slowly loses its grip on the popular mind.

Radical egalitarianism and individualism have altered much in American life. The question of just how irresistible they are, the test case of whether any institution can maintain its integrity in the face of the deforming pressures of a modern liberal culture is, of course, the Roman Catholic Church. What is to be seen is whether the Church can maintain its doctrines and its institutional structure in the face of pressure both from without and from within.

The Roman Catholic Church is the test case because, as Hitchcock put it, “few religions in the history of the world have placed more emphasis on doctrinal purity, liturgical correctness, and moral authenticity than has the Catholic Church…. If at almost all times in the history of the Church, a concern for orthodoxy has been paramount, the contemporary Church has an eerie feel about it precisely because of the absence of that concern.”
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If, despite a powerful and orthodox pope who has appointed many orthodox American bishops, orthodoxy is no longer a major concern in the American Church, that is surely a sign that the Church is giving way to the culture. The Church’s opposition to abortion, homosexual conduct, and the ordination of women is under attack and appears to be a minority position among the Catholic laity, perhaps even among the American bishops. If the Church gives way on any of those issues, the culture will have effectively destroyed it.

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.
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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.