“Sweet tolerance and gentle affirmation are the hallmarks of today’s mainliners,” Murchison muses. The Episcopal elite, “especially the baby-boom bishops, priests and theologians who run the national show—don’t merely move the theological goalposts; they depict goalposts as unmodern, what with their rigor and fixity. Just kick, they admonish—it’s fine with the Lord.”63
The revised teachings of the Episcopal Church on what were once biblical truths and settled matters of morality call into question its credibility and that of the other mainstream churches. For if these Christian churches have been teaching falsely in condemning abortion and homosexuality as justifying damnation for five centuries, why should anyone believe the new catechism? If they were wrong for five hundred years, why are they right now?
What is happening to the Episcopal Church has been happening to the Protestant world since the Reformation. Having rebelled against Rome over papal authority, how do Protestant churches deny dissident factions the right to rebel and break away from them? If Rome has no authority to command obedience or teach infallibly, whence comes theirs?
Protestantism, some historians argue, must inexorably lead to where it is arriving at—a place where each faction, indeed, each individual, decides what is moral law and biblical truth: the privatization of morality. But if the atomization of Protestantism is the future, that must lead to the atomization of America. For America was born a Protestant nation.
The Christian crack-up proceeds. In 2009, conservatives split from the 4.7 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America after that church voted to “ordain partnered gay clergy.”64 And if the consecration of the gay bishop in New Hampshire proved traumatic for the Episcopal Church, no less did it do so for the bishop himself. At sixty-three, Bishop Robinson announced his resignation, to take effect in 2013, telling his annual diocesan convention, “Death threats, and the now worldwide controversy surrounding your election of me as bishop, have been a constant strain, not just on me, but on my beloved husband Mark,” and on Episcopalians across the state.65
IS RELIGION NECESSARY?
The end of Christianity has long been sought by men both famous and infamous. Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses.” Winston Churchill, after reading Winwood Reade’s exuberantly anti-Christian Martyrdom of Man in Bangalore as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern, wrote his mother:
One of these days the cold bright light of science & reason will shine through the cathedral windows & we shall go out into the fields to seek God for ourselves. The great laws of Nature will be understood—our destiny and our past will be clear. We shall then be able to dispense with the religious toys that have agreeably fostered the development of mankind.66
Less respectful of these “religious toys” was Friedrich Nietzsche: “I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that has ever existed.”67 His admirer Adolf Hitler agreed, “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.”68 As Eugene G. Windchy relates, in The End of Darwinism:
[Hitler] thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arab advance into France. Had the Christians lost, [Hitler] reasoned, the Germanic peoples would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire.69
In Inside the Third Reich, the memoir of his years as Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer wrote that Hitler would often say:
You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?70
Yet even those who loathe Christianity often admit that mankind cannot do without religion. Though he detested the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount, Hitler conceded in Mein Kampf what writer-historians Hilaire Belloc and Christopher Dawson would contend: religion is indispensable to society:
This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of religious belief. The great masses of a nation are not composed of philosophers. For the masses of the people, especially faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on life. The various substitutes that have been offered have not shown any results that might warrant us in thinking that they might usefully replace the existing denominations.71
As for his Nazi elite, with its Darwinian pagan ideology, Hitler added: “There may be a few hundreds of thousands of superior men who can live wisely and intelligently without depending on the general standards which prevail in everyday life, but the millions of others cannot do so.”72
Stalin, who had sought to eradicate Christianity, recognized its hold on the Russian people. In the Great Patriotic War, he opened cathedrals and churches, released bishops and clergy from prison, and called on her sons to fight, not for party or politburo, but for “Mother Russia.” Stalin understood that the Russian masses were not Marxists, but God-and-country Christians.
By 1938, as he concluded that Europe was losing its faith to skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism, Belloc wrote that the West had embarked on a voyage certain to end on the reef of civilizational ruin.
[T]he skeptical attitude upon transcendental things cannot, for masses of men, endure. It has been the despair of many that this should be so. They deplore the despicable weakness of mankind which compels the acceptance of some philosophy or some religion in order to carry on at all. But we have here a matter of positive and universal experience.73
Every nation, every culture has to be inspired by a body of morals. Behind that body of morals must be a doctrine we call religion. Throughout history, Belloc was saying, the death of a religion meant the death of the culture and the civilization to which it gave birth. Once Christianity had triumphed in the Roman Empire, the pagan gods were dethroned, the empire passed into history, and Christendom was born and began its ascendancy.
“Human society cannot carry on without some creed, because a code and a character are the product of a creed,” Belloc wrote. Individuals may carry on with “a minimum of certitude or habit about transcendental things,” but “an organic human mass cannot so carry on.”74 Belloc echoes the belief of Washington and John Adams that religion and morality were interdependent and indispensable to the survival of a free society and a virtuous republic.
SOCIAL DECOMPOSITION
If God is dead, said Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, is not everything permitted? So it seems today. For what are the social consequences of what former Newsweek editor Meacham calls “The End of Christian America.”75 Since 1960,
• The U.S. illegitimacy rate has rocketed from 5 percent of all births to 41 percent.76
• Among African Americans the share of births out of wedlock is 71 percent, up from 23 percent in 1960.77
• The percentage of households that were married-couple families with children under eighteen had plummeted by 2006 to just 21.6 percent.78
• Since Roe v. Wade fifty million abortions have been performed.
• Between 1960 and 1990, the teenage suicide rate tripled. Though the number then fell, as of 2006 suicide was the third leading cause of death of young adults and adolescents aged fifteen to twenty-four, just behind homicides.79
• Cheating in sports, scholastics, business, and marriage is pandemic.
• Between 1960 and 1992, violent crime—murder, rape, assault—soared 550 percent.80 The subsequent decline is due to the passing of the baby boomers out of the high-crime ages (sixteen to thirty-six), the birth dearth, and a 700 percent increase in the prison population, which today stands at 2.3 million Americans, with 5 million more on probation or parole.81
“Traditional America is dying,” writes Jeffrey Kuhner, of the Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal, who attributes its passing to “individualistic hedonism,” the Pl
ayboy philosophy, and the “MTV morality” dominant in Hollywood and society.82
* * *
Rather than ushering in a new utopia, the abandonment of traditional morality has unleashed a sea of misery. Our culture has become coarsened, cheapening the value and dignity of human life. Legalized abortion has led to the murder of nearly fifty million unborn babies. Sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS, have resulted in the death of millions. Divorce has skyrocketed. The family has broken down. Pornography is ubiquitous, especially on the Internet. Out-of-wedlock births and teenage illegitimacy rates have soared. Drugs and gang violence plague our inner cities—and are spreading into our suburbs.83
Grim reading, but is it not all palpably true?
Cultural degeneration and social decomposition travel together. So T. S. Eliot predicted eighty years ago: “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse.”84
In his 1987 address at West Point, “The Meaning of Freedom,” writer Tom Wolfe described the four phases of freedom America has known. First was freedom from foreign tyranny won in the Revolution. Second was freedom from the aristocratic British system of privilege and class. Third was freedom to pursue one’s dreams and better one’s station in life realized after the Civil War. We entered the fourth phase in the late twentieth century. It is “freedom from religion,” said Wolfe—that is, freedom from the moral and ethical constraints of religion and the manners, customs, and conduct religion prescribes. Social decomposition is what this fourth phase of freedom has produced. “I believe there is something Nietzschean,” said Wolfe, “about a country that has taken freedom to the point of getting rid of the constraints of the most ordinary rules.”85
Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw freedom from religion and the moral constraints it imposes as “destructive and irresponsible,” a corruption of the idea that the Founding Fathers had believed in and fought for:
All individual human rights are granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.… Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.86
Indeed, in that time of the Founding Fathers, Yale President Timothy Dwight wrote, “Without religion we may possibly retain the freedom of savages, bears and wolves, but not the freedom of New England.”87
Can a nation survive freedom from religion? We are about to find out.
Chronicles editor Tom Piatak writes of a similar disintegration in a once-conservative Britain where 7 percent of the population attends church on Sunday. In his “Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,” Jonathan Swift, the eighteenth-century satirist and Anglican minister, predicted that social disintegration would follow the death of Christian belief. He wrote of how a villager, hearing an argument against the Trinity, “most logically concluded” that “if it be as you say, I may safely whore and drink on, and defy the parson.”88
“The moral collapse of post-Christian Britain is evident from statistics as well as anecdotes,” writes Piatak. “The illegitimacy rate among white Britons is 46 percent, double the rate among American whites, and the crime rate is 40 percent higher in Britain.” The United Nations Children’s Fund calls Britain “the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child.”90
British children have the earliest and highest consumption of cocaine of any young people in Europe; they are ten times more likely to sniff solvents than are Greek children; and they are six to seven times more likely to smoke pot than are Swedish children. Almost a third of British young aged 11, 13, and 15 say they have been drunk at least twice.91
Theodore Dalrymple, author of Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics of Culture and Decline, writes that, “absent a transcendent purpose, material affluence … may lead to boredom, perversity and self-destruction.”92 In Britain, Dalrymple adds:
The privatization of morality is so complete that no code of conduct is generally accepted, save that you should do what you can get away with: sufficient unto the day is the pleasure thereof. Nowhere in the civilized world has civilization gone so fast and so far into reverse, as in Britain.93
Dalrymple sees Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, about a future dystopia in Britain, as “socially prophetic.”94 British poet, essayist, and playwright T. S. Eliot had a similar vision earlier in the twentieth century. Asked by poet Stephen Spender what he saw ahead for our civilization, Eliot replied, “Internecine warfare … people killing one another in the streets.”95
One recalls the observation of Edmund Burke, eighteenth-century British philosopher and statesman:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.… Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.96
In his 1933 book Enquiries into Religion and Culture, Christopher Dawson emphasized that religion is the tap root of culture and the source of ethics. If that root is cut, society will disintegrate and the culture will die, no matter how prosperous the people.
The central conviction which has dominated my mind ever since I began to write is the conviction that the society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally. Consequently, the problem of social survival is not only a political or economic problem; it is above all things religious, since it is in religion that the ultimate spiritual roots both of society and the individual are to be found.97
If Dawson is correct, the drive to de-Christianize America, to purge Christianity from the public square, from public schools, and from public life, will prove culturally and socially suicidal for the nation.
Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century Italian painter, architect, and historian who studied the works of the Roman High Renaissance, believed that society was organic and biological, that once it passed its prime, decay and death were inevitable: “[o]nce human affairs start to deteriorate, improvement is impossible until the nadir has been reached.”98 As one looks back to what the West produced over the centuries, and what the West produces today, in painting, sculpture, music, literature, film, and governance, do we not appear to be a civilization closer to its nadir than its height of perfection?
In a New York Times review of a biography of Nietzsche, American scholar and author Francis Fukuyama writes that the most serious issue raised in any study of Nietzsche “concerns the nature of his politico-cultural program, the ‘transvaluation of all values’ that was to take place in the wake of the death of Christianity.”99
Acknowledgement of the death of God is a bomb that blows up many things, not just oppressive traditionalism, but also values like compassion and the equality of human dignity on which support for a tolerant liberal political order is based. This then is the Nietzschean dead end from which Western philosophy has still not emerged.100
The death of God has blown up our decent and civil society.
GRAMSCI’S TRIUMPH
Today’s social decomposition is the first consequence of the collapse of Christianity and the moral order it sustained. This is the triumph of Antonio Gramsci and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Where the violent victories of Lenin and Mao were eventually reversed, Gramsci, an Italian communist theoretician who died in the 1930s after years in a fascist prison, proved to be the more perceptive Marxist.
On a visit to the Russia of Lenin and Stalin, Gramsci saw that, while the Bolsheviks had succeeded in seizing total power, they had not won over the people. The people obeyed, but hated their rulers an
d loathed the system. Their love and loyalty went not to the party or the state, but to family, faith, and Mother Russia.
Gramsci concluded that Christianity had immunized the West against Communism. The Russian people had lived for a thousand years with the Christian faith and cultural traditions that caused them instinctively to recoil from Marxism as immoral and unpatriotic and to reject the new Communist order as illegitimate, godless, and evil. Until Christianity was seared out of the soul of Western man, Gramsci concluded, Communism could never take root.
Therefore, Marxists must conduct a “long march through the institutions,” religious, cultural, and educational, of the West, uprooting Christianity and its teachings about God, man, and morality, to create a new people who would not reflexively reject Marxism. Gramsci was a diagnostician of society and the cultural Marxism he preached triumphed in the West while the revolutions of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao ultimately failed in the East.
For two millennia, Christianity provided the immune system of Western man. And when an immune system breaks down in a society, just as it does in a man, opportunistic infections enter and kill the organism. And no cocktail of drugs can fend off the inevitable. Souls in Transition, by University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, seems to confirm the point. Smith sifted through data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, and Naomi Schaefer Riley summarizes the stark differences that Smith found in the social outlook and attitudes of religious and nonreligious youth:
Not only does religion concentrate the mind and help young people to think about moral questions, it also leads to positive social outcomes. Religious young people are more likely to give to charity, do volunteer work and become involved with social institutions.… They are less likely to smoke, drink and use drugs. They have a higher age of first sexual encounter and are less likely to feel depressed or to be overweight. They are less concerned with material possessions and more likely to go to college.101
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