The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  “Our law and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind,” said the Supreme Court in the 1892 decision Church of the Holy trinity v. United States. “Our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.”33 That America has been abolished, by order of a different Court. The old moral consensus has collapsed, and the moral community built upon it no longer exists.

  Seeing Americans bow to its will, the Supreme Court became supremely confident in its coup. In the Richmond Newspapers decision (1980), Justice William J. Brennan described the new order. Judges, he wrote, “are not mere umpires, but, in their own sphere, lawmakers.” 34 In 1985, he told Georgetown Law School, “Majoritarian process has appeal under some circumstances, but I think ultimately it will not do.” It is the Court’s role “to declare certain values transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities.”35 What Justice Brennan meant was that his personal values were transcendent, the will of the American majority notwithstanding.

  “The Court, not the people, is now the agent of change in American society,” writes Prof. William Quirk, coauthor of Judicial Dictatorship. This contradicts what Jefferson called the “mother principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of the people, and execute it.’”36

  Warren, Douglas, Brennan, and Blackmun have triumphed. We no longer have a republic. And Christianity, driven out of the public square, is slowly losing its hold. In a 1999 Gallup Poll, 62 percent of young adults said religion was losing influence in American life.37 Another study revealed, “America has more atheists and agnostics than Mormons, Jews or Muslim.”38 Of fourteen million nonbelievers, half are Gen-Xers and 31 percent baby boomers. Only 42 percent of Americans still believe Christianity is the one true faith.39 In a 1996 Princeton survey, 62 percent of Protestants and 74 percent of Catholics said all religious faiths were equally good.40 America remains the most “Christianized” nation of the West, but for millions it is not the demanding and fighting faith of old. What Catholic evangelist Bhp. Fulton J. Sheen predicted in 1931 has come to pass. We are producing, said Sheen,

  a group of sophomoric latitudinarians who think there is no difference between God as Cause and God as a “mental projection”; who equate Christ and Buddha, Saint Paul and John Dewey; and then enlarge their broad-mindedness into a sweeping synthesis that says not only that one Christian sect is just as good as another, but even that one world-religion is just as good as another.41

  Yet, no court ordered any church to rewrite its prayers, hymns, or Bibles to conform to the new secular catechism. This the churches have done, voluntarily and even eagerly. Why? For the most human of reasons.

  As many young priests and pastors themselves no longer believed in the inerrancy of the truths they had been taught, and they did not want to be left behind as the young departed, they attempted the impossible: to reconcile Christianity to the counterculture. But in their desperation to make themselves relevant, they only made themselves ridiculous.

  “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” is the opening line of perhaps the most famous of all hymns, written by repentant slave ship captain John Newton in 1779. In some hymnals that has been changed to “that saved and strengthened me,” or “that saved and set me free.”42 Why? To get away from the uncomfortable idea of man’s sinfulness and his need to accept Jesus Christ as his Savior.

  The stanza of “America the Beautiful” that contains the lines, “O beautiful for pilgrim feet / Whose stern impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat …” has been dropped in some hymnals and song books.43 Why? Because, says Rev. Harold Jacobs of the Lumbee Indian tribe, “white men have trampled over the Indian to beat that freedom path.”44

  “Whiter than snow, dear Lord, / Wash me now …” from “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” is now rendered in some hymnals as “Wash me just now, Lord / Wash me just now.”45 It seems that “Whiter than snow” has racist connotations. “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” is being replaced with “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer” to make the phrase more gender-neutral.46 New York’s Riverside Church prefers “Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God, Mother of us all.”47

  Mother of God, pray for us.

  “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Am I a Soldier of the Cross” have been denounced as excessively militaristic. “He Leadeth Me” and “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” are chauvinistic. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is exclusionary. “Faith of Our Fathers” is naturally under fire. Those who love the hymn, but like not the lyrics, may use “mothers” or “ancestors.” “God of Our Fathers” has become “God of the Ages.” Instead of “Son of Man,” some congregations prefer “the Human One.”

  In 1980, the National Council of Churches established a committee of feminist academics to write a nonsexist lectionary. “Lord” was replaced with “Sovereign One,” “Son of God” with “Child of God.” God’s decision to create Eve for Adam was rewritten to read: “It is not good that the human being should he alone; I will make a companion corresponding to the creature.”48

  When Volume I of the Inclusive language Lectionary appeared in 1983, writes Michael Nelson, a political science professor at Rhodes College, “after a week or so of alternative outrage and hilarity, the larger church abandoned it to gather dust.”49

  On his deathbed, the atheist Voltaire said, “I have never made but one prayer to God. Oh Lord! Make my enemies look ridiculous. And God has answered it.”50 No court forced these churches to make fools of themselves. They wanted to be relevant and made themselves irrelevant. And before berating fifteen-year-olds for caving in to peer pressures on sex and drugs, consider the performance of their moral superiors.

  NOW, THE PROVOCATIONS

  In the Communist lexicon, peaceful coexistence did not mean peace. It meant continuing the struggle by means other than war. So, too, the struggle for moral hegemony will end only when one side is defeated and the other triumphs. If traditionalists believe that they can peacefully coexist with the cultural revolution, they might revisit the recent controversies at the National Endowment for the Arts, for most involved desecrations of Christian images and deliberate affronts to Christianity’s moral code.

  Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ was a photograph of a large crucifix immersed in his urine. Robert Mapplethorpe twisted an altarlike image of the Virgin Mary into a bloody tie rack and featured a photograph of himself with a bullwhip protruding from his rectum. In Queer City, a “poet” depicted Jesus in an act of perversion with a six-year-old boy. In an art catalog funded by the NEA, an AIDS activist called the late Card. John O’Connor a “fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on Fifth Avenue.”51 That house was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, desecrated by homosexuals who spat out consecrated hosts at Sunday mass. The altarpiece of the 1999 “Sensations” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art was The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting with the visage of the Mother of God splattered with elephant dung, with a halo of female genitalia. In an adjacent room were half a dozen life-size mannequins of naked little girls with penises sprouting from their bodies.

  “Art is what you can get away with,” said Andy Warhol, but Picasso saw it as having a more serious purpose. “Art” he said, “is not to decorate apartments. Art is a weapon of revolution … .”52 Wheeler Williams, one of America’s great sculptors, “acknowledged that the purpose of modern art ‘was to destroy man’s faith in his cultural heritage.’”53 In other words, art is but another front of the cultural revolution’s relentless war on Christianity.

  In 2001, Brooklyn Museum hosted Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper, featuring a photo of a stark-naked Ms. Cox as Jesus, with eleven black friends as apostles and a white man as Judas.54 When Mayor Giuliani denounced the “pattern of anti-Catholicism at Brooklyn Museum” and announced a commission to set “decency standards,” Bronx borough president Fernando Ferret said the proposal “sounds like Berlin in 1939.”55

 
In truth, the obscene and vile abuse that the arts colony heaps upon Catholics and their holiest symbols does recall Berlin in 1939, specifically Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, which treated Jews and their beliefs the way Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and Cox treat Catholics and their beliefs. The difference? Anti-Catholicism, the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals, is the bigotry du jour of the cultural establishment. And that prejudice is not confined to our cultural capitals.

  Early in 2001, Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art featured a computerized photo collage of Our Lady of Guadalupe, naked except for a bikini of roses, and held up by a bare-breasted angel.56 When Arch. Michael J. Sheehan protested and angry demonstrators showed up, State Museum director Thomas Wilson said, “We never expected anything like this.”57 Exhibit curator Tey Marianna Nunn was puzzled, telling the New York Times that “reimaging” Our Lady of Guadalupe, the holiest icon of Mexican Americans, is quite common, and the Virgin Mother has been portrayed as a Barbie doll, a karate kicker, and a tattooed lesbian.58

  Art, it is said, is the mirror of the soul. T. S. Eliot called art the incarnation of a people’s religion. If that is true, who or what inhabits the souls of these “artists”? What would happen if they mocked the Holocaust by presenting a computerized photo collage of a naked Anne Frank frolicking with SS troops at Auschwitz? Or put on a satirical minstrel show that mocked Dr. King?

  We know the answer. When the French company Alcatel, with permission of the King family, used film of King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in a TV ad, Julian Bond of the NAACP said, “Some things ought to be sacred.”59 In the new paganism a pornographic image of the Blessed Virgin Mary is permissible, but Dr. King’s words are sacrosanct.

  Years ago, when the film The Prophet came out, in which the face of Muhammad was shown, an act of blasphemy to Islam, theaters refused to run it for fear of violent retaliation. When Salman Rushdie published Satanic Verses, a novel judged an obscene insult by Islam, he spent years hiding from the fatwa, a death sentence imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, fatwas and firebombings are not the American way of protest, but economic boycotts and political retribution are. When Christians were told to “turn the other cheek,” it was for offenses against them, not against God. Christ himself used a whip to drive the money changers out of the temple.

  IN 1990, EDITOR James F. Cooper of American Arts Quarterly ran a want ad. As Horace Greeley had admonished Civil War veterans to “Go West, young man!” Cooper exhorted Cold War veterans, “Recapture the culture!”60 Conservatives, he said,

  seemingly never read Mao Tse-tung on waging cultural war against the West. [Mao’s] essays were prescribed reading for the Herbert Marcuse-generation of the 1960s, who now run our cultural institutions … . Conservatives were oblivious to the fact that … modern art—long separated from the idealism of Manet, Degas, Cezanne and Rodin—had become the purveyor of a destructive, degenerate, ugly, pornographic, Marxist, anti-American ideology.61

  To these assaults upon their God, their beliefs, their sacred symbols, and their sainted heros and heroines by Serrano, Mapplethorpe, Cox & Co., the response of Christians has been feeble, even pathetic. As Regis Philbin likes to say, “Is that your final answer?”

  GAY RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS?

  The struggle for the soul of America is not going to fade away. In the spring of 2000, a lesbian student at Tufts University filed a charge of discrimination against the campus chapter of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship for refusing to permit her to serve on its leadership council. In its defense, a chapter leader responded, “When you ask us to give up the Bible, you’re asking us to give up the heart of our religion.”62

  Result: A student court ordered Tufts Christian Fellowship derecognized, defunded, and denied the right to meet on campus. The chapter was told to drop Tufts from its name. A majority of students applauded the tribunal. Not to treat homosexuals equally, they said, is bigotry. After taking its case public, TCF won a reversal. But this is a harbinger of what is coming.

  What happened at Tufts was a collision of faiths. The catechism of the revolution teaches that homosexuality is a preference, not a sin, and that those who treat gays and lesbians differently are bigots who must be exposed and reeducated. In biblical Christianity, homosexuality is unnatural and immoral. And this is the heart of the culture war: Whose beliefs shall be the basis of law? At Tufts, the new faith briefly replaced the old, and Christians were ordered to conform or leave. The revolution will coexist until it attains hegemony. Then it will dictate.

  BUT WHICH STATEMENT is true? Is homosexuality a moral disorder or a moral and legitimate lifestyle? Dr. Charles Socarides, author of numerous books and winner of the Distinguished Professor Award of the Association of Psychoanalytic Psychologists of the British Health Service, has treated homosexuals for forty years. He has helped a third of his patients to lead normal lives by marrying and having children. Dr. Socarides describes how the cultural revolution changed what was a “pathology” into a “lifestyle.” The “reinventers,” he writes,

  didn’t go after the nation’s clergy. They targeted the members of a worldly priesthood, the psychiatric community, and neutralized them with a radical redefinition of homosexuality itself. In 1972 and 1973, they coopted the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association and through a series of maneuvers, lies and outright flim-flams, they “cured” homosexuality overnight—by fiat. They got the A.P.A. to say that same-sex was “not a disorder.” It was merely a “condition”—as neutral as left-handedness.63

  “Those of us who didn’t go along with the political redefinition,” said Dr. Socarides, “were soon silenced at our own professional meetings. Our lectures were canceled inside academe and our research papers turned down in the learned journals. Worse things were to follow in the culture at large.”64 What were they?

  Television and movie producers began to do stories promoting homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. A gay review board told Hollywood how it should deal or not deal with homosexuality. Mainstream publishers turned down books that objected to the gay revolution. Gays and lesbians influenced sex education in our nation’s schools and gay and lesbian libbers seized wide control of faculty committees in our nation’s college[s]. State legislatures nullified laws against sodomy.65

  In Philadelphia, Tom Hanks portrayed a lawyer with AIDS who is victimized by bigoted colleagues. Hollywood gave Hanks an Oscar for his politically correct performance. But Socarides, who claims a cure rate for homosexuals as good as the Betty Ford Clinic, never gave up. Nor should traditionalists. For homosexuality is not liberation, it is slavery. It is not a lifestyle; it is a death style. With the onset of AIDS, Dr. Socarides’s own patients would tell him, “Doctor, if I weren’t in therapy, I’d be dead.”66

  Those who believe the gay rights movement is the twenty-first century’s civil rights movement miss a basic difference. The civil rights cause could successfully invoke the Bible, natural law, and Thomas Jefferson on behalf of equal justice under law. Gay rights cannot. Jefferson considered homosexuality worse than bestiality. As governor of Virginia in 1779, he urged the same punishment for sodomy as for rape.67 The Bible, Catholic doctrine, and natural law hold the practice to be abhorrent and a society that embraces it to be decadent. Christians are to reform such societies or separate from them.

  In Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King wrote, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of Harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”68 But gay rights laws do not square with the “law of God.” They are not “rooted in eternal law or natural law.” By Dr. King’s conditions, gay rights laws are unjust laws “out of Harmony” with the moral law. When imposed, they will be resisted by Christians. Hardly a formula for national unity.

  The only way the gay rights movement can succeed in making society accept homosexuality
as natural, normal, moral, and healthy is to first de-Christianize that society. And, admittedly, they are making headway.

  THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

  What we are attempting is truly audacious. Like Lucifer and Adam, Western Man has decided he can disobey God without consequence and become his own God. In casting off Christianity, Western Man is saying: “Through medical and biological science, we have learned how to prevent life, how to prolong life, how to create life, how to clone life. Through our military technology, we know how to win wars now without losing a single soldier. Through our understanding of monetary and fiscal policy, we know how to prevent depressions. Soon we will know how to prevent recessions. Our global economy promises prosperity for all through free markets and free trade. Global democracy will bring us world peace, and we have in place the institutions of a world government. Time and goodwill will take us there. God was a good flight instructor, but now we no longer need Him. We will take over from here.”

  The de-Christianization of America is a great gamble, a roll of the dice, with our civilization as the stakes. America has thrown overboard the moral compass by which the republic steered for two hundred years, and now it sails by dead reckoning. Reason alone, without Revelation, sets our course. The Founding Fathers warned that this was a bridge too far. No country could remain free unless virtuous, they said, and virtue could not exist in the absence of faith. Do not “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion,” said Washington in his Farewell Address. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”69 John Adams agreed: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”70 Consider what has happened to our society with the overthrow of the old moral order.