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Showing posts with label Christian Civilization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Civilization. Show all posts

Friday, July 7, 2017

Melanie Phillips: Trump in Poland


In his magnificent speech in Poland, President Trump asked whether the west “still has the will to survive”.

If he’d listened to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning (approx 0840), he might have lost his own.

The issue that seemed to have startled the BBC was the suggestion that there were now threats to western bonds of culture, faith and tradition. (The fact that some of us have been writing about this for years has of course totally passed the BBC by). Two guests were invited to discuss this question: Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at Oxford university where she is also Warden of St Anthony’s college, and Lord Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff.

The interviewer’s loaded question about Trump’s speech, “Is he in any sense right?” invited them to agree that no, there could be no sense in which he was. Both duly agreed. Three against Trump, then. But if anything illustrated precisely what he was talking about, this conversation could scarcely have been bettered.

Opined Professor MacMillan: “There are bonds that hold us together and there are often bonds of history, but the idea there is something called ‘the west’ seems to me very dubious indeed. There are many wests, there are many different ways of looking at who we are, and I’m worried by the whole tenor of his speech. The talk of the ‘will’, the family, traditional values, what does that all mean?”

Lord Dannatt was equally perplexed. “What threat does he have in mind? From Russia? Islamic State? From climate change? Well he ruled that one out by pulling out of the Paris agreement. Or is it the nuclear threat from North Korea?”

Helpfully, the interviewer observed that what Trump had meant was a waning of cultural self confidence; he further ventured to suggest, with appropriate BBC diffidence, that “the project that we’ve all been involved in for centuries is a decent one”.

Professor MacMillan agreed there was a “decent side to what the west has done”. But just in case anyone might have thought she believed it to be better than other societies, she added there were many sides that weren’t decent at all “when you think of some of the things we’ve unleashed on the world” (presumably as opposed to the unlimited decencies that countries which don’t subscribe to respect for human life, freedom and democracy have bequeathed to humanity).

She conceded that the west had built a “liberal intentional order since the first and second world wars”. She agreed that respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions were very important and that these should be defended. “But if you talk about defending the power of the west and the dominance of the west that’s very different and I’m not sure that does make the world more stable… What worries me is that part of the enemy is seen as those who live among us… Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, is [as presented by Trump] in some way a threat, and that means not just from outside but inside and that to me is really troubling”,

This professor of history, who teaches the young and thus transmits the culture down through the generations, didn’t even seem to know what that culture was. She implied that the will to survive was something out of Nietzsche or fascist ideology rather than the impulse to defend a society and a civilisation. She seemed to find incomprehensible the very idea that certain values defined western civilisation at all, or that it had a coherent identity.

She found something frightening or sinister about traditional values or the emphasis on the family: the very things that keep any society together. The one good thing she conceded was associated with the west – the “liberal international order” – had developed only after the two world wars. So much for the 18th century western Enlightenment, the development of political liberty and the rise of science.

The idea of the west having power filled her with horror; but without power the west can’t defend itself. And she thought the idea the west was threatened from within as well as from without was “troubling”. In other words, she doesn’t believe home-grown radicalised Islamists pose a threat to western countries. Now that really is troubling.

As for Lord Dannatt complaining Trump wasn’t specific about the threats he had in mind – well, talk about missing the point! Russia, Isis and North Korea are all threats to the west. The question was whether the west actually wanted to defeat any or all of these and more.

And Lord Dannatt’s reference to climate change was unintentionally revealing – about himself. Climate change supposedly threatens the survival of the planet. No-one suggests it poses a threat to the west alone! So it was irrelevant to the issue under discussion. Its inclusion implies that Lord Dannatt knows one thing: that Trump is wrong about EVERYTHING. So he just threw in climate change for good measure to show how wrong about everything Trump is.

So what exactly did Trump say to produce such finger-wagging disdain? Well, he produced an astonishing, passionate and moving declaration of belief in the west, its values of freedom and sovereignty and his determination to defend them.

He summoned up Poland’s resistance against two terrible tyrannies, Nazism and the Soviet Union, to make a broader point about western civilisation. Most strikingly, he identified Christianity as the core of that civilisation, that it was Christianity that was crucial in Poland’s stand against Soviet oppression – and that, in an echo of Pope Benedict’s warning years ago, the west has to reaffirm its Christian values in order to survive.
    “And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.  They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer.  A million Polish people did not ask for wealth.  They did not ask for privilege.  Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words:  ‘We Want God.’
    “In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future.  They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.
    “As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history.  Their message is as true today as ever.  The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”
    “Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.  And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live.  You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls.  And you won.”
    “Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.”
    “We write symphonies.  We pursue innovation.  We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.
    “We reward brilliance.  We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God.  We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.
    “We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success.  We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.  And we debate everything.  We challenge everything.  We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.
    “And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.
    “What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.  And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.  So we cannot fail.”
But the danger is that we might do just that.
    “We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?
    “We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive”.
The millions who voted for Trump did so because of the promise he made them that he would defend America and the western values of life and liberty that it embodies. They understand very well that America and the west are not just being threatened from outside but are being undermined from within by the kind of people who are engaged in a fight to the death to destroy him – and by the kind of people who took part in that discussion on Today.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Leading British Clergyman:‘The Foundations of Christian Civilization are Crumbling’

By Charles Gardner

DONCASTER, UK (ANS) -- The "red line" has been crossed in Britain as the foundations of Western civilization crumble, a leading clergyman has stated. And as "a spirit of madness" grips the nations, he said, European Christians may well be driven underground in the very near future.In a paper on the current world scene released on behalf of Issachar Ministries, which seeks to understand the times in which we live, Dr. Clifford Hill, a sociologist and theologian, pointed out that almost half of Britain's babies were now born out of wedlock as opposed to just five per cent in the 1960s.

Monday, June 3, 2013

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization


In How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, leading cultural critic Mary Eberstadt delivers a powerful new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt, however, marshals an array of research, from historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, showing that the reverse has also been true -- the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself.


Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Americans Highly Religious, Likely to Become Even More Religious, Pollster Predicts

Protestants Shrinking, 'Unbranded' Christianity Growing

Seven in 10 Americans are very or moderately religious. Looking at demographic trends, Frank Newport, editor in chief for Gallup, predicts that Americans will become even more religious, on average, in the future.

In surveys conducted this year by Gallup, 40 percent of Americans can be categorized as "very religious," while 29 percent are "moderately religious" and 31 percent are nonreligious. Religiosity is measured by frequency of attendance at worship services and the importance of religion in the respondents' daily life. The sample of 326,721 adults has a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point.

Read the rest of this entry at The Christian Post >>


Sunday, July 15, 2012

A Star in the Darkness of Night

From CNA
By Joe Tremblay

St. Benedict, father of the West
In 1947, seeing that Western Civilization was weighed down by a long and exhausting world war, Pope Pius XII penned a wonderful encyclical on St. Benedict.

Contained within this letter to the Church are shafts of light that have the potential, if we just lay hold of it, to illuminate the moral and spiritual darkness which envelopes our public institutions. Using St. Benedict as an example, he recounts what it means to forsake all for Christ only to "receive a hundred times more now in this present age." (Mark 10:30)

What was accomplished in the fifth century can be revived and brought to bear upon the trying circumstances which challenge America's future. "St. Benedict," as Pius XII reminds us, "reclaimed the uncultured tribes from their wild life to civic and Christian culture; directing them to the practice of virtue, industry and the peaceful arts and literature, he united them in the bonds of fraternal affection and charity." And the Church herself, always needing an infusion of Christ's eternal youth, can also benefit from St. Benedict's sanctity and teachings.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Without Return to Christian Culture U.S. Will Face Future as Conglomeration of Enclaves


We have been talking about Bethlehem and the amazing fact that this town so crucial to Christianity is now walled off from Jerusalem and totally Arab in population (although thirty percent of the Arabs are Christian).

Across and throughout the Holy Land are such barriers and enclaves, the fences slashing across desert the Holy Family once traversed. Will there one day be encirclements -- not as extreme, but enclaves -- in the U.S.?

More to the point: will major future events involve Israel? And how -- surrounded by enemies, but also with many Muslim enclaves within its own borders (entire towns), or in the occupied zones -- can the nation possibly survive?

(The number of Christian Arabs diminished greatly after Israel built settlements here.)

One day, there may be division in North America -- the U.S. and Canada -- as there is now in Israel.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

BBC's Sacred Music Series - Pt 1 of 4 'The Gothic Revolution'

The following is the first of a four part BBC documentary in which actor and former chorister Simon Russell Beale explores the flowering of Western sacred music.  It is a beautiful survey of "a thousand years of praise through song" and some of the greatest music "ever written for the human voice." We will be posting the rest of this documentary over the next three Saturdays.  

Like Lord Clark's landmark "Civilisation" documentary which we have posted previously, this series is a tribute to and reminder of the great patrimony of  Western, Christian civilization.



Thursday, May 19, 2011

What the Church Has Given the World

From astronomy to philosophy Catholics have made an extraordinary contribution to western civilisation, says Fr Andrew Pinsent


By Father Andrew Pinsent

Physicist Stephen Hawking meets Benedict XVI during an audience for scientists at the Vatican (AP Photo/L’Osservatore Romano, HO)
Introduction

At a recent debate, broadcast worldwide by the BBC, over 87 per cent of the audience rejected the notion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. Although the defenders of the Church were confronted by two masters of rhetoric, there is little doubt that the vote reflected a shift in attitudes towards Christianity in general and the Catholic faith in particular. To put this shift in blunt terms, whereas we were regarded recently as nice but naïve, today we are increasingly regarded as evil. As a result, teaching the faith and defending Christian ethics has become much more difficult.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Cardinal Raymond Burke on 'The Fall of the Christian West'

Cardinal Raymond Burke
Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American Cardinal who serves as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, essentially the Chief Justice at the Vatican, has given an important address to the Australian Catholic Students Association in Sydney, Australia.  He spoke on "the crisis of Christian culture in the West and our call to build anew a strong Catholic culture, in fidelity to our vocation to give witness to Christ and, therefore, to be martyrs for the faith."  

The full text of Cardinal Burke's address is here.


Thursday, February 17, 2011

What's Wrong with the West?

Is the West in decline because it has lost touch with its Christian roots?

The following is a chapter by Robert P. George and William L. Saunders from Exiting a Dead End Road: a GPS for Christians in Public Discourse, a new book published by Kairos Publications in Vienna, and edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler. The book can be ordered here.  

The West has faced many challenges in the past, many turning points, from the Asiatic invasions of the Dark Ages to the dark ages of Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin. And it faces one now -- the eclipse of its historical Christian identity.

In the past, when armies of aggression threatened our society, those threats were met with nerve and with steel. We pray God that steel will never be necessary again, but certainly it will require nerves of steel -- steely determination -- to meet what may be the greatest threat Christianity has faced in its history.

The threat is this: at just the moment when many Christians have lost self-confidence, ideologically doctrinaire secularists have launched a determined attack on all public vestiges of Christianity. They have chosen their moment well, but their attack need not succeed. If Christians will regain the confidence that comes from their Creed, they can arrest the assault being waged in the cause of secularist ideology. Courage was required in the past; it is required again.

Christians are well-equipped for this battle. Christianity enables man to use twin tools in engaging the world and its problems -- reason and faith. Other than the specially revealed truths of faith, all truths are accessible to unaided reason, and, thus, to all people of good will. When Christian citizens contend over issues of importance in the public square, they should be confident that they bring not a narrow sectarianism but an understanding based upon principles of reason -- natural justice, natural law -- in the interest of the common good. 
 


Wednesday, October 13, 2010

De-population and De-Christianization Leading to Cultural Islamic Jihad: Catholic Apologist

From LifeSiteNews
By Hilary White

The de-Christianization of Europe, the “removal of Christian principles and institutions from the daily life of a country,” has created a religious and social vacuum that is being filled by Islam, a prominent U.S. Catholic speaker said on Thursday. Raymond de Souza, the Program Director for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International told an audience of the world’s pro-life and pro-family leaders that “Europe … is being culturally Islamized.”

“The world in general, and the West in particular, is undergoing a tragic process of de-Christianization. Christian principles, values and institutions have been extirpated from our social, economic, political, legal, educational structures. Sometimes publicly, sometimes stealthily, the process has wrought havoc in Europe and the countries that descended from them.”

De Souza is the founder and director of Saint Gabriel Communications, an international Catholic apologetics organization and a popular program host on EWTN. He said that the failure of Christianity in Europe, has led to “the greatest Jihad ever carried out by Islam,” which takes the form not of physical battles, but as a “silent Jihad” through demographic take-over.

The cause underlying this “silent Jihad,” he said, is the “most crucial aspect” of Europe’s de-Christianization - de-population. “Europeans do not even replace their countries populations.”

“As one Moslem mullah said to an Anglican priest in London, ‘By the end of this century, all great English Cathedrals will be mosques. Why? Because we have children, and you don’t’.

“Contraception promised a freedom without responsibility, abortion promises the right to do one’s own thing with one’s own body, homosexual marriage promises respect for different orientations … result: the end of civilization as we knew it.”

De-Christianization, he said, is not a new phenomenon, but had its start “centuries ago” with the social, economic and philosophical upheavals that resulted in the Protestant Reformation.

De Souza, a professional Catholic apologist, said bluntly that the solution is the “reunification of all baptized Christians under ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ in the one Church of God, the pillar and mainstay of the truth.”

“Why re-unify? Because as long as our separated brethren-in-baptism remain fragmented into thousands of denominations with a wide variety of creeds and moral codes, all claiming to derive their interpretations from the Bible, Christianity will not stand a chance against Islam. It is already sorely weakened by the influence of secularism and the Culture of Death.”

The cultural revolution, he said, is reaching a “climax, in which governments from virtually all countries in the world declare war against human nature, exemplified in the family.”

“The Culture of Death … today reigns supreme. Its weapons are Contraception, IVF, abortion, euthanasia, experimentation with human embryos, homosexual marriage.”

He called for “prayer, study and action” aimed at opposing the “dictatorship of relativism” in society as a whole and in the churches, and the promotion of “true ecumenism” to “bring all peoples together into one faith, not all faiths together into one people.”

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Russell Kirk: We Cannot Separate Christian Morals and the Rule of Law

Russell Kirk gave this paper as one of nine distinguished lecturers leading a seminar entitled, "The Bible and the Republic In a Secular Age," at Hillsdale College's Center for Constructive Alternatives in March 1982.

Editor's Preview: Does a nation that makes too little room for God in its laws make too much room for a Hitler or a Stalin? Is the day coming when American courts could rule that the state may not forbid murder because the church does forbid it?

Russell Kirk, one of the most eminent conservative thinkers of this century, argues that these dangers are more real than most people want to admit.

He shows why religion, and Christian belief in particular, is the most powerful source of ethical principle behind our laws. Attempts to sever this ancient connection, and to base law instead on some new civil doctrine such as liberalism or scientism, would create a vacuum quickly filled by the "the commandments of the Savage God, enforced by some Rough Beast."

The government may encourage religion without establishing it, a distinction understood even by liberals on the bench until recent decades.

Are we human creatures made in the image, of a Creator, or mere fleshly computers? Today, even in our law courts, the war on this issue is fought to the knife. Dr. Kirk writes:


"Two there are by whom this world is ruled," said Pope Gelasius I, near the end of the fifth century. In that phrase may be found the beginning of the doctrine of the "two swords"—of the separation of church and state. In every century, after one fashion or another, church and state have had occasion to fall out—even in this American Republic.

Recently the Supreme Court of the United States found unconstitutional a Kentucky statute requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in public schools. The placards in question bore a notice stating that "the secular application of the Ten Commandments is clearly seen in its adoption as the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States." But the Supreme Court ruled, five justices against four, that this educational employment of the Decalogue breached the famous wall of separation (Stone v. Graham, decided November 17, 1980). This decision carried to an extreme the doctrine of the two swords: the concept that although the spiritual authority and the temporal authority exist in symbiosis, still a gulf must be fixed between the two.

Presumably the majority of the justices who handed down this decision were not expressing hostility toward Judaism or Christianity; but certainly they did not acknowledge any religious consecration of the American Republic. Beyond this present "neutrality" in the courts may lurk the prospect of hostility between church and state, even here in America. And so one thinks of the words of T. S. Eliot: "If you will not have God—and he is a jealous God—you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin."

The vast quantity of litigation in federal and state courts concerning church schools, employees of churches, church tax-exemptions, and related questions, suggests that the old established relationships between church and state in America have become strained.

Litigation may, and does often, become effectual harassment. It is possible, for instance, for American Civil Liberties Union types to harass out of existence public displays of the Nativity at Christmas time. Also it is possible, or may become possible, for the state to harass the church into compliance with political passions of the moment. It is quite conceivable that there is developing among us, even now, a humanitarian "civil religion," an American Erastianism, which might supplant Christian teaching as the basis of public order.

Grim Descent

Now the purpose of law is to keep the peace. When this end is half forgotten, and instead the law is used by some as a means of extortion from others, or as an instrument for class advantage, or as a tool for social direction, or merely for the gratifying of malice—why, the law itself tumbles into injustice. Toward that we have been sliding in this republic; and most of the world has stumbled the whole way down that grim descent.

True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those moral principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied—well, the laws may endure for some decades, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in he long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied, after having been severed from their ethical and religious sources.

With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws—for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience—cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian religion. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness.

Nowadays those postulates are being ignored; nay, we suffer already from a strong movement to exclude from courts of law such religious beliefs, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who fondly cling to the superstitions of the childhood of the race. Permit me to offer two recent examples of this anti-religious tendency in judicial concerns.

Consider the attempt made not long ago to disqualify a federal judge who was about to hand down—and subsequently did hand down—a decision in a case concerned with an extension of time for ratifying the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. Judge Marion Callister is an active communicant of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, and formerly was a bishop iii that church. The Mormon Church has declared its opposition to the Equal Rights proposal. Therefore the federal Department of Justice sought to have Judge Callister disqualified from hearing the case, on the ground that his religious views would prejudice him.

Presumably, if we are to grant this premise, a Catholic jurist, or a Missouri Synod Lutheran, or a member of any other denomination that has declined to embrace the enthusiasts of ERA, also would be found disqualified. On the other hand, a judge who could demonstrate that his conscience lay untroubled by any religious scruples would be found qualified by our Department of Justice.

Religion Divisive?

My second instance is certain litigation about an ordinance regulating abortion in the city of Akron, Ohio. The American Civil Liberties Union, representing two abortion clinics and an abortionist-physician, challenged in a federal district court various provisions of the Akron ordinance. The most curious aspect of the case was the ACLU's argument about "divisiveness": put succinctly, the ACLU contended that any restraint upon abortion must be unconstitutional, because such statutes or ordinances are founded upon a religious belief to the effect that human life commences at the conception of the fetus. In short, any law rooted in religious dogmas is no law at all—or so the zealots of the ACLU contend.

The Supreme Court has yet to instruct us that Christian and Hebraic beliefs are inadmissible in a court of law, and that a new civil religion of "scientism" has supplanted them. The two cases I mentioned a moment ago are not yet the law of the land; they suggest, nevertheless, the direction in which our juridical assumptions have been drifting.

This retreat from the Christian postulates of American law (for there are such Christian postulates, just as there are Muslim postulates of Arab law) soon may encounter unhappy difficulties. Many moral beliefs, although sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific demonstration." Our abhorrence of murder and rape may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our opposition to such offenses is rooted in religious belief, then are restraints upon murder and rape unconstitutional?

At such absurdities we arrive if we attempt to erect a real wall of separation between the operation of the laws and those Christian moral convictions that move most Americans. Theater of the absurd can become nasty reality: "See my pageant passing," says the playwright, looking out of his window upon the revolutionary mob pouring through the street. The doctrinaires of the American Civil Liberties Union would not be spared, were the religious postulates underlying law to be swept away; for that matter, our very civil liberties themselves are held up by theological pillars. Yet not all is lost; and if we are to try to sustain some connection between Christian moral teaching and the laws of this land, we must understand the character of that link. We must claim neither too much nor too little for the influence of Christian belief upon our structure of law.

Christian Foundations Minimized

For the past two centuries, the tendency of writers upon the law has been to claim too little for Christian influence upon the foundations of law.

If we turn to that high juridical authority Sir Henry Maine, who was no Christian enthusiast, we find that in his Early History of Institutions (published in 1875) he remarks many Christian influences upon law: how Christianity restrained the liberty of divorce; how it affected the Brehon laws; how it altered the character of contracts; how it worked in favor of women with respect to the laws; how it promoted donation; how "the Will, the Contract, and the Separate Ownership were in fact indispensable to the Church as the donee of pious gifts; and they were also essential and characteristic elements in the civilization amid which the Church had been reared to maturity." Parallel treatment of Christian influence could be cited in various other important nineteenth-century writers on legal institutions and jurisprudence—although still more about Christian teaching will be found in the works of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century legal writers.

Twentieth-century commentators, nevertheless, have been somewhat timid about referring to religious sources for law. Take Roscoe Pound, in his Interpretations of Legal History, written in 1922. Pound is by no means unfriendly to Christian concepts; he thinks Christian influence has been held in too low esteem; for all that, he grants such concepts no broad sway.

"The prevailing view has been that, after the stage of primitive law is passed, religion has played relatively a small part in legal history," Pound writes. "Yet I venture to think that the influence of religious ideas in the formative period of American law was often decisive and that without taking account of Puritanism we shall fail to get an adequate picture of American legal history as it was in the last century. I suspect also that some day we shall count religious ideas as no mean factor in the making of what are now the doctrines of English equity. Undoubtedly such ideas played a substantial part in the history of the modern Continental law of obligations. So far as it directs attention to a factor which often may be of the first moment in shaping legal rules and doctrines and institutions, the religious interpretation is by no means to be neglected."

Let it be noted that here Pound is writing of the law—both statutory law and common law—rather than of the sources of the law. "One of the main difficulties and causes of confusion in Jurisprudence," J. C. Gray writes in his Nature and Sources of the Law (second edition, 1927), "has been the failure to distinguish between Law and the sources of Law." A country's law is "composed of the rules for conduct that its courts follow and that it holds itself out as ready to enforce." But these rules, Gray continues, though enforced regardless of abstract theories of justice, in part arise from ethical principles. Permit me to add to Gray's observation that ethical principles ordinarily arise from religious perceptions.

Rationalists, Darwinians, Freudians

I am suggesting that Pound and Gray, though conceding something to Christian ethics as a source of law, still conceded too little; they wrote in a climate of opinion not cordial toward religious concepts, a climate in which flourished the dicta and obiter dicta of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. I am suggesting that Christian faith and reason have been underestimated in an age bestridden, successively, by the vulgarized notions of the Rationalists, the Darwinians, and the Freudians. Yet I am not contending that the laws ever have been the Christian word made flesh; nor that they can ever be.

My Puritan ancestors of Massachusetts Bay, like their fathers the "Geneva Men" of Elizabethan England, hoped to make the laws of the ancient Jews into a code for their own time—a foolish notion. My Scottish Covenanting ancestors, too, aspired nearly to that. Upon such misconceptions, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on the distaff side, Abraham Pierce, was tried at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1625, for indolence on the Sabbath; by a miscarriage of justice, doubtless, he was acquitted.

Such attempts at legal archaism, being absurd, failed before they properly began; for the particular laws of a people ineluctably mirror the circumstances of an age. Hebraic legal institutions would no more suit seventeenth-century England, say, than the English common law of the seventeenth century would have been possible for Jerusalem in the sixth century before Christ. No, what Christianity (or any other religion) confers is not a code of positive laws, but instead some general understanding of justice.

Judges cannot well be metaphysicians—not in the execution of their duties upon the bench, at any rate, even though the majority upon the Supreme Court of this land, and judges in inferior courts, seem often during the past three decades to have mistaken themselves for original moral philosophers. The law that judges mete out is the product of statute, custom, convention, precedent. Yet back of statute, custom, convention, and precedent may be discerned, if mistily, the forms of Christian doctrines, by which statute and custom and convention and precedent have been much influenced in the past. And the more that judges ignore Christian assumptions about human nature and justice, the more are they thrown back upon their private resources as abstract metaphysicians—and the more the laws of the land fall into confusion and inconsistency.

Peril of Judicial Metaphysics

Prophets and theologians and priests and pastors are not legislators, ordinarily; yet their pronouncements may be incorporated, if sometimes almost unrecognizably, in statute and custom and convention and precedent. The Christian doctrine of natural law cannot be made to do duty for the law of the land: were this tried, positive justice would be delayed to the end of time. Nevertheless, if the Christian understanding of natural law is cast aside utterly by magistrates, mocked and flouted, then positive law becomes patternless and arbitrary.

Would it be preferable to have the law arise from the narrow, fanatic speculations of some ideologue? Just that disaster has befallen the law in Russia, China, and other lands: a matter with which the gentlemen and ladies of the American Civil Liberties Union do not much concern themselves.

I am saying that Christian doctrine, in the United States as in Britain, is not the law; yet it is a major source of the law, and in particular a major foundation of jurisprudence, that science so neglected in nearly all American law schools. This reality was understood by the two principal legal scholars of the formative era of American law, Joseph Story and James Kent and to them I turn now.

Story and Kent sustained the long-established understanding of the relationship between Christian morals and the law of the land. Sir Matthew Hale, Justice of the King's Bench, ruled in Taylor's Case (1676) that "the Christian religion is part of the law itself." In Woolston's Case (1729), King's Bench found that "Christianity in general is parcel of the common law of England and therefore to be protected by it." (Both were cases concerned with blasphemy.) These precedents, cited by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries, were accepted by those American champions of common law Justice Story and Chancellor Kent. There runs through Story's Commentaries and Kent's Commentaries the assumption that in America also the common law is bound up with Christian doctrine.

In important decisions in their courtrooms, Story and Kent sustained the especial standing of the Christian religion in common law. In Terret v. Taylor (1815), Story recognized that the Episcopal Church in Virginia derived its rights from the common law; in Vidal v. Girard's Executors (1844) he accepted Daniel Webster's argument that the Christian religion was part of the common law of Pennsylvania. Kent, in People v. Ruggles, when Chief Justice of New York, found that the defaming of Christianity might be punished under common law. He wrote in his decision (1811), "The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice."

Story's and Kent's decisions, and their arguments in their respective Commentaries, remained powerful influences upon later important federal and state decisions that touched upon questions of morals—for instance, the United States Supreme Court's stem warning against bigamy and polygamy, written by Chief Justice Waite and Justice Field (in 1879), who called these customs crimes against "the laws of all civilized and Christian countries. " Even though weakened by the ambiguity of a series of Supreme Court decisions during the past three decades, the opinions of Story and Kent continue in some degree to affect court rulings on public morality.

Not an Establishment of Religion

Did Story and Kent imply that an establishment of religion existed in the United States? Not so: both jurists strongly expressed their approval of the separation of church and state. In 1813, touching upon the practice of the New England Puritans, Story denounced (and somewhat misrepresented) the Puritan error of "the necessity of a union between church and state." In his Commentaries, he remarked that "Half the calamities with which the human race have been scourged have arisen from the union of Church and State." And in Vidal v. Girard's Executor, Story noted in his decision that "although Christianity may be a part of the common law of the State, yet it is so in this qualified sense, that its divine origin and truth are admitted, therefore it is not to be maliciously and openly reviled and blasphemed against, to the annoyance of believers or the injury of the public. " In a letter to Story, Kent expressed his full concurrence in the Vidal decision.

In effect, Story and Kent tell us that Christianity is not the law of the land in the sense that Christian teachings might be enforced upon the general public as if they were articles in a code; Story and Kent had no intention of emulating in the nineteenth century the Geneva Men's ambition to resurrect the laws of the Jews. Rather, the two great American commentators point out that Christian moral postulates are intricately woven into the fabric of the common law, and cannot be dispensed with, there being no substitute for them in ethical concerns; and that the Christian religion, as the generally recognized faith (in one profession or another) of the American people, is protected against abuse by defamers, that the peace may be kept and the common good advanced.

It is not Christianity as an exclusive creed, but rather Christianity as the Western, or English, or American form of what C. S. Lewis calls the Tao, or the underlying morality of natural law, which is a source of common law and of jurisprudence. Story and Kent affirmed their belief in the Christian connection with common law, and their belief in the need for separation of church and state—without lack of consistency.

The relationship of federal and state governments to Christian belief, as implied in the first clause of the First Amendment, was taken up by Story in his Commentaries:

"It was impossible that there should not arise perpetual strife and perpetual jealousy on the subject of ecclesiastical ascendency, if the national government were left free to create a religious establishment. The only security was in extirpating the power…

"Probably at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the amendment to it now under consideration, the general if not the universal sentiment in America was that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation."

Even Douglas Bowed

There is no national establishment of religion, but the American governments acknowledge the benefits of religion and desire to encourage religious faith—this, Joseph Story's view, remained the general consensus of the Supreme Court of the United States, with few and partial exceptions, until very recent years. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in the Zorach case (1952):

"We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma... To hold (that government may not encourage religious instruction) would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe…But we find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence."

It will be noted that Justice Douglas referred to religion in general, rather than to the Christian religion in particular; American pluralism had grown more diverse with the passage of more than a century. But also it should be noted that so late as the Zorach case, even the more liberal justices of the Supreme Court did not interpret the "wall of separation" doctrine (a phrase that originated in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, not in any public document) as a declaration of hostility against Christian churches. Story and Kent were heard, at least through echoes, as late as a quarter of a century ago.

A less amicable relationship between state and church has been developing since 1952—although it is true that a series of recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court, somewhat dogmatically reaffirming the separation of church and state, have the beneficial effect of securing church schools and churches themselves against various attempts at direction by the agencies of the federal government or of the several states.

What we call "law" does not exist in an intellectual and moral vacuum. To cut off law from its ethical sources is to strike a baleful blow at the rule of law. Yet such blows are inflicted upon the law today—ordinarily in the names of liberation and modernity.

Apollo vs. Dionysius

The wisest brief treatise on the present plight of the law with which I am acquainted is the Cardozo Lecture delivered in 1962 by Huntington Cairns, entitled Law and Its Premises. Dr. Cairns emphasizes that the forces of order, symbolized in ancient times by the god Apollo, are attacked in every age by the forces of license, symbolized by the god Dionysius. In our time, that struggle affects the whole of the law.

"From the beginnings of Western thought," Cairns writes, "law has been a field of knowledge derived from a larger whole, the understanding of which has been held to be indispensable to any effort to reach the standards applicable to human affairs. At the same time, there has been a volitional element in the legal process stemming from the contrary view that law is not derived from a larger whole; man devises his own standards and law need not be understood in terms of any ultimate order. These two ways of seeing law are in conflict today, and the consequences of this conflict in the long run could be fatal."

In this contest during the present century, the Dionysian powers are those influences that would sweep away altogether any influence of Christian postulates—along with classical wisdom—upon modern law; and the Apollonian powers set their faces against this emasculation of the law. Christian belief is not the only source of ethical principle behind our laws; but it is the most powerful and popular source. If all connection between the Christian religion and the verdicts of courts of law is severed in this country, the law must become erratic and unpredictable at best (when it is supposed to be regular in its operation), and tyrannical rather than protective.

Some moral convictions must be the foundation of any system of law. In this country, were the Christian postulates swept away, by what moral principles might they be supplanted? Not by the amorphous notions labelled "liberalism," now thoroughly unpopular, called by Santayana "a mere adventitious phase. " No. the Christian moral understanding presumably could yield, in the long run, only to the commandments of the Savage God—enforced by some Rough Beast, his hour come round at last.

What Is Man?

How will this struggle over the nature of law, with the followers of Apollo on one side and the votaries of Dionysius on the other, be terminated? Will the Christian sources of the law be effaced quite speedily—as already they have been in eastern Europe—or will the Christian moral imagination and right reason rise up again in strength, even in our courts of law? No man can say. It would be easy to accept, with the Eastern sages in Chesterton's poem The Ballad of the White Horse, "the inevitability of gradualism"—that is, the steady diminishing of religious remnants and the steady advance of the Dionysian. Yet that cannot be the way of the Cross.

"The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.

"Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?"

In the domain of the law today, as in all other realms of human endeavor, there is waged a battle between those who believe that we human creatures are made in the image of a Creator, and those who believe that you and I are not much more than fleshly computers. Even within the courts of law, created to help keep the peace, this war is fought to the knife.

Witness to the truth, my friends, and go gaily in the dark wood of our twentieth century.


Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.


Thursday, June 3, 2010

Major Conference in Edinburgh Marks a Century of Ecumenism

A century ago the worldwide, Christian ecumenical movement was launched at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. That historic conference included various Protestant missionary groups, the Anglican Church, and a single representative from the Orthodox Church. The extraordinary progress in ecumenism realized over the past century is being commemorated with a June 2 - 6 conference in Edinburgh.

Live feed from Edinburgh is available during the course of the conference here:


Live video by Ustream
Pope Benedict reflected on the importance of these historic events in a January 25th homily:
The choice of the theme of this year's Week of Prayer for Christian Unity the invitation, that is, to a common witness of the Risen Christ in accordance with the mandate he entrusted to his disciples is linked to the memory of the 100th anniversary of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, in Scotland, widely considered a crucial event in the birth of the modern ecumenical movement. In the summer of 1910, in the Scottish capital, over 1,000 missionaries from diverse branches of Protestantism and Anglicanism, who were joined by one Orthodox guest, met to reflect together on the necessity of achieving unity in order to be credible in preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, it is precisely this desire to proclaim Christ to others and to carry his message of reconciliation throughout the world that makes one realize the contradiction posed by division among Christians. Indeed, how can non-believers accept the Gospel proclamation if Christians even if they all call on the same Christ are divided among themselves? Moreover, as we know, the same Teacher, at the end of the Last Supper, had prayed to the Father for his disciples: "That they may all be one... so that the world may believe" (Jn 17: 21). The communion and unity of Christ's disciples is therefore a particularly important condition to enhance the credibility and efficacy of their witness.

Now a century after the Edinburgh event, the intuition of those courageous precursors is still very timely. In a world marked by religious indifference, and even by a growing aversion to the Christian faith, it is necessary to discover a new, intense method of evangelization, not only among the peoples who have never known the Gospel but also among those where Christianity has spread and is part of their history. Unfortunately, the issues that separate us from each other are many, and we hope that they can be resolved through prayer and dialogue. There is, however, a core of the Christian message that we can all proclaim together: the fatherhood of God, the victory of Christ over sin and death with his Cross and Resurrection, and faith in the transforming action of the Spirit. While we journey toward full communion, we are called to offer a common witness in the face of the ever increasingly complex challenges of our time, such as secularization and indifference, relativism and hedonism, the delicate ethical issues concerning the beginning and end of life, the limits of science and technology, the dialogue with other religious traditions. There are also other areas in which we must from now on give a common witness: the safeguard of Creation, the promotion of the common good and of peace, the defense of the centrality of the human person, the commitment to overcome the shortcomings of our time, such as hunger, poverty, illiteracy, and the unequal distribution of goods.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Battle of the Textbooks


From Chronicles
By William Murchison

Few things in life are as clear as the futility of a real debate on the clarity of America’s religious origins.

“Debate,” I said? Lay a finger, unsuspectingly, on The New York Times Magazine’s inspection of the attempt by so-called Christian fundamentalists to overhaul history textbooks, and you require treatment for first-degree burns.

I refer less to the article itself than to readers’ sulfurous responses to the claims of Texas State Board of Education members concerning the need they see for forthright teaching of the founding fathers’ Christianity. Yow-ee! “These people are dangerous.” “These people are scary.” “Can’t we simply return Texas to the Mexicans and terminate this national embarrassment?” “Next we will be arresting ‘non-Christians’ and putting them in internment camps.” “There seems to be an unlimited supply of lunatics in America.” This, and more, from readers of our major newspaper of record.

See what I mean? Better yet, see what many Christians, not all of the “right-wing” variety, mean when they suggest the presence in the United States of growing hostility to their faith, or supernatural faith of any kind?

The magazine article in question comes down, tonally, on the side of those who reject the understanding of about half the state education board’s members “that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts”—and that textbooks should reflect that understanding.

The reason this is a big deal is that Texas buys 48 million textbooks annually, which gives textbooks publishers the incentive to “tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State.” Jeepers, some innocent Brooklyn kid, on the instance of boot-wearing yahoos from Bushland, could actually hear in class (shudder) that our country’s founders saw Christianity as more than a personal opinion. Clearly, if you read The New York Times, you’re supposed to stew about such a prospect.

Jeez, guys, I consume The New York Times myself, seven days a week, and the major worry I see emerging from behind the sulfur smoke is the sanctification of religious intolerance. In the name of “tolerance.” Such is the irony here. We can’t talk about claims to religious Truth without reviling those who claim such a thing as religious truth exists and requires intellectual notice, if not affirmation.

Was the United States organized as a “Christian nation”? That’s a claim I’m not sure you can get away with. You can say, with total accuracy, that Christianity informed and inspired the whole of the civilization to which the founders belonged. Which seems to me the claim that really is at stake here. No Texas school board member contends the founders intended to “establish” Christianity as the state religion: Merely that they accepted Christianity’s assumptions, in greater (Washington) or lesser (Jefferson) degree—viewed them as reflective of truth about human origins and destiny. From this a second contention follows: Students need reminding, in greater or lesser degree, that the founders prayed. (And, yes, they did pray!)

Why? What goes on? Chiefly, the working out of trends that set in during the early 1960s: growing secularism, growing depreciation of religion’s—any religion’s—importance in shaping motives and actions and consequences. The U.S. Supreme Court’s often hostile rulings on school prayer and religious symbols in public places reflect a growing view, chiefly on the political and social left, that people who want God can look for Him in church and leave everyone else alone.

OK, interesting. Can we talk about that approach to civic life? Evidently not. As with abortion, the Supreme Court governmentalizes the discussion. A theological matter becomes, in our democracy, a power question. The State Board of Education in Texas takes up the question at precisely the level—the political one—to which the Supreme Court invited us all half a century ago.

My fellow New York Times readers don’t appreciate my fellow Texans getting in their faces. Too bad. The secularists started this whole needless foofaraw. Let them, if they care to, pray for an end to it.


William Murchison is a corresponding editor of Chronicles and the author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Sir Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation: Heroic Materialism"



"Bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn't need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to survive society must somehow be made to work.
At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves."
Lord Kenneth Clark

In this conclusion of Lord Clark's landmark "Civilisation" series, he examines how the heroic materialism of the past hundred years has been linked with a remarkable increase in humanitarianism. The achievements of engineers and scientists - Brunel and Rutherford, for example - have been matched by those of the great reformers like Wilberforce and Shaftesbury.

All 13 episodes of this magnificent view of Western Christian civilization are available on this blog. The series is a labor of love by a gentleman who clearly saw dark clouds gathering. May his remarkable reflections inspire us all to treasure and defend the enormous patrimony we have received.




Saturday, October 31, 2009

Sir Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation: The Fallacies of Hope"


In this twelfth episode of "Civilisation," Lord Clark describes the progressive disillusionment of the artists of the Romantic movement through the music of Beethoven and the poetry of Byron.




Saturday, October 24, 2009

Sir Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation: The Worship of Nature"


In this eleventh episode of Lord Clark's personal look at Western Civilization, he examines how people in 18th century England turned from religion to a belief in the divinity of nature.




Saturday, October 17, 2009

Sir Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation: The Smile of Reason"


From enlightenment to revolution and republicanism - Lord Clark traces the ideological journey which led from the great palaces at Blenheim and Versailles to Jefferson's Monticello.