Slouching Towards Gomorrah (48 page)

Much of the outlook of American churches today can be capsulated in the phrase “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which James Fitzjames Stephen over a century ago called the Religion of Humanity: “It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human race collectively has before it splendid destinies of various kinds, and that the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love.”
⁴⁶
He added, “I do not believe it.” Neither does anyone with eyes to see and even a trace of common sense. The Religion of Humanity is not Christianity or Judaism but tends to oust those religions or soften them to irrelevance.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance. Freud, Marx, and Darwin, according to the conventional account, routed the believers. Freud and Marx are no longer taken as irrefutable by intellectuals, and now it appears to be Darwin’s turn to undergo a devaluation.

The fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory. Though there is ample evidence of evolution and adaptation to environment within species, there is not evidence of the gradual change that is supposed to slowly change one species into another. A compelling argument for why such evidence is missing is provided by the microbiologist Michael Behe. He has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it.
⁴⁷
Scientists at the time of Darwin had no conception of the enormous complexity of bodies and their organs. Behe points out that for evolution to be the explanation of features such as the coagulation of blood and the human eye, too many unrelated mutations would have to occur simultaneously. This may be read as the modern, scientific version of the argument from design to the existence of a designer.

The argument from design is now bolstered by the findings of physics concerning the Big Bang. We now know that there were a great many “coincidences” at the outset of the universe that were
essential if life was to exist. Surveying this developing literature, Patrick Glynn lists values such as Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant, the relative masses of subatomic particles, the precise rate of expansion of the universe in the tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the precise strength of the nuclear weak force, the nuclear strong force, and electromagnetism. “[Scientists now understand that minuscule alterations (often as little as one part per million) in those values and relationships, or in scores of others, would have caused catastrophic derailments in the series of events following the universes beginning…. [E]ven the slightest tinkering with a single one of these values, most scientists now agree, would have foreclosed the possibility of life.”
⁴⁸

Religion will no longer have to fight scientific atheism with unsupported faith. The presumption has shifted, and naturalistic atheism and secular humanism are on the defensive. Evidence of a designer is not, of course, evidence of the God of Christianity and Judaism. But the evidence, by undermining the scientific support for atheism, makes belief in that God much easier. And that belief is probably essential to a civilized future.

The nature of a world without such religion, as Paul Johnson argued, is likely to be very unpleasant:

15

W
here modern liberalism’s radical versions of liberty and equality hold sway, there can be no fraternity. From the French Revolution to the Sixties rebellions, radicals who worship liberty and equality also invariably yearn for fraternity, community, brotherhood. They will never achieve it, because the dynamic of radicalism in general and modern liberalism in particular is to shatter society. Talk of fraternity refers only to the rebels; everybody else is despised and to be coerced.

A bourgeois or non-radical society, one that is not politicized in all its departments, can achieve a degree of unity through a common culture. America once had such a culture. Periods of heavy immigration of a wide variety of races and ethnic groups produced evolution in that culture without destroying its essential nature. Assimilating large numbers of persons from very different cultures is difficult but doable, as our experience proves. What may make the task impossible is that the powerful agents of modern liberalism—primarily the universities, high schools, primary schools—are working not only to fracture our culture but to suppress its historic sources of strength. This fracturing does not result from immigration but from ideology. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the cultural unity that is being deliberately destroyed.

From the beginning of our nation, men regarded it as important that America had a single culture. In Federalist No. 2, Publius (John Jay) wrote:

Publius described a land populated by people descended from Englishmen, speaking English, professing Protestantism, attached to principles of self-government, and so, not surprisingly, very similar in their manners and customs. In fact, it would be untrue to say that the culture at America’s foundation was European or, as we now say, Eurocentric. It was nowhere near as inclusive as that. It was Protestant English. There were other nationalities, of course, but by far the dominant culture was as Publius stated it. He might have added that our prospects for nationhood under a common culture were enhanced by Americans’ common political experiences of living as colonies of England, of the Revolutionary War, and of living together, albeit rather loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation.

Change came with the initial heavy waves of immigration of other Europeans with different ancestors, different languages, and different religions. Germans came in massive numbers, then Irish, Italians, Slavs, and European and Eastern European Jews, among others. The culture was enriched but did not alter fundamentally. It gradually changed from Anglocentric to Eurocentric, with a new and distinctively American accent. Those who came later were certainly not primarily English Protestants, but they assimilated because they wanted to become Americans and believed that meant adopting the language and many of the attitudes they found here. There were resentments between groups, of course, ethnic
politics, social and religious discrimination, and sizeable pockets of bigotry. But there was certainly no concerted rejection of the dominant culture.

The United States now faces the question of how far a culture can stretch to accommodate more and more ethnic groups and religions and still remain recognizable as a culture rather than an agglomeration of cultures. Which leads to the further question: Can a national identity, something resembling a national community, be maintained when cultural unity is destroyed? We are, after all, no longer one united people, descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, and very similar in our manners and customs. We are no longer a people joined by common political experiences and memories. And with every year that passes, we are less like that.

So far as I know, no multiethnic society has ever been peaceful except when constrained by external force. Ethnicity appears to be so powerful that it can overcome rationality. Canada, for example, one of the five richest countries in the world, is torn and may well be destroyed by what, to the outsider, look like utterly senseless ethnic animosities. Since the United States has more ethnic groups than any other nation, it will pass as a miracle if we maintain a high degree of unity and peace.

Had we been at the Founding a people as diverse and culturally disunited as we are today, there would have been no Founding. A Constitution and Bill of Rights would not have been proposed, and, if proposed, would have provoked political warfare that would have torn the country too deeply for any hope of unity. It was only the momentum of the original cultural unity that carried us forward with a single dominant culture for so long.

It was still possible to think of the United States as more or less culturally unified into the 1950s. But now we are reversing direction and becoming a chaos of cultures that cannot, or more accurately will not, be unified. What we are discussing are cultural disintegrations in addition to those caused by a number of other groups with feverishly adversarial stances. Radical feminists, race demagogues, homosexual activists, animal rights fanatics, and yet others, play major roles in fracturing the culture. But the phenomenon known as multiculturalism adds a new and powerful
dissolvent. It addresses not a single group, as does feminism, for example, but all groups—other than white, heterosexual males. Each is urged to become or remain a separate tribe.

Some of this was to be expected. No immigrant racial or ethnic group assimilated immediately; typically, newly arrived groups bunched together for a generation or two. Though they assimilated more rapidly than most, German immigrants clustered in Milwaukee and on farms in eastern Pennsylvania. Irish and Italians stayed together in their own urban neighborhoods, as did Jews in areas like the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Chinatowns grew up in a number of American cities. The children and grandchildren of these groups moved out, intermarried, and, though preserving aspects of their original culture, by and large melded into the larger culture.

The arrival of groups of non-European backgrounds would make the task of assimilation much harder in any event, but what bids fair to make it impossible is the recent phenomenon of groups who do not wish to assimilate but to live in America as indigestible lumps in our society. While most immigrants still wish to become Americans, some of them do not learn English and do not apply for American citizenship when they become eligible. These groups are told by ethnic activists and academic leftists that they should not move into the older American culture but should remain separate, preserving their distinctive cultures, no matter how ill-suited to success in this society those cultures are. Hispanics, who will outnumber blacks in the United States by the end of the century, often do not regard this country as their own. During the heated demonstrations against California’s law denying various social services to illegal immigrants, a number of the demonstrators waved Mexican flags, apparently, regardless of citizenship, regarding themselves as Mexicans who were here for economic benefits only.

Muslim immigration adds a group whose religion and culture causes some of them to reject much of what we regard as essential features of American culture and government. This “ominous development,” as the British political philospher John Gray calls it, is well under way in Britain, “where a minority of fundamentalist Muslims that is estranged from whatever remains of a common culture, and which rejects the tacit norms of toleration that allow a
civil society to reproduce itself peacefully, has effectively curbed freedom of expression about Islam in Britain today.”
¹
Some conservative Muslims in the United States fight assimilation, while the fundamentalists speak of living here “in the depths of corruption and ruin and moral deprivation. “They assert that “Islamic civilization is based upon principles fundamentally opposed to those of Western civilization.”
²
This is, of course, not true of all Muslim immigrants or even most of them, but that it is true of some may well pose a problem. The British experience may not be a guide, since the British, unlike the Americans, have no tradition of welcoming newcomers. It is important, nevertheless, that we do all we can to counter the separationist tendencies of some Muslims, even if there is some truth in their statement that we live in a state of moral deprivation.