Hide your children! The Christians are coming!
Bob Cooper
as likely as Rosie getting married. To a man.
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http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20061127_136908_136908
Code word: God bless America
According to a spate of recent tomes, the Christianist takeover of the U.S.
is imminent
MARK STEYN
More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie
O'Donnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on The View was musing on
current events and opined, "If you take radical Islam and you want to talk
about what is going on there you have to . . ."
And at this point Rosie interrupted. "One second. Radical Christianity is
just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we
have a separation of church and state."
Does she really believe that? That "radical Christianity" is "just as
threatening" as "radical Islam"? These terms are imprecisely defined.
You get the feeling that to Rosie O'Donnell, "radical Christianity" is pretty
much Christianity -- or at any rate any Christian denomination without an
openly gay bishop. Still, it's hard to imagine even Rosie would feel "just
as threatened" by an evangelical Protestant church opening up next
door as by, say, a Wahhabi madrasa.
But who knows? The left's preference for phantom enemies over real
ones is such a feature of the current scene one assumes that for a few
of them at least it has to be genuine. To the likes of Miss O'Donnell,
"radical Christianity" affords opportunities for moral equivalence theory
unseen since the Cold War. Pierre Hassner of the Center for International
Studies and Research got the ball rolling shortly after 9/11. "It's nonsense
to say, 'We're the force of good,' " he scoffed. "We're living through the
battle of the born-agains: Bush the born-again Christian, bin Laden the
born-again Muslim."
And, if that's the choice, the lefties know whose side they're not on.
Plugging my new book in the Great Satan in recent weeks, I've taken
to dropping by the local Borders or Barnes & Noble just to check if the
thing's in stock. And praise the Lord (if Rosie will forgive the expression),
you can usually find it in there somewhere, though you have to wade
past a huge front-table display of tomes about the imminent Christianist
takeover of America: The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by
Damon Linker, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
by Michelle Goldberg, American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips, etc.
"Christianist," by the way, is a neologism of Time's Andrew Sullivan,
and his own meditation on The Conservative Soul also addresses
some of these questions. Damon Linker's book is the funniest, albeit
unintentionally. "Theocons" are like neo-cons, only not Jewish but
sinister Catholics with a well-advanced plan to conscript American
conservatism for a political project that will transform the nation beyond
recognition. They were the ones who spotted George W. Bush as the
perfect stooge for their Christianist coup and then surrounded him
with Jews to confuse the media. Oh, sure, go ahead, laugh. But it's
hard not to warm to an author who describes the United States as
"the world's God-intoxicated hegemon" with such implacable plonking
earnestness.
Alas, other than that, Linker's book is a rather lame attempt at score-settling.
A few years ago, he used to work at Richard John Neuhaus's magazine
First Things. Somewhere along the way, he and Father Neuhaus fell out,
Linker drifted left, and decided that his old boss was waging a "stealth
campaign" to inflict upon the U.S. "a future in which American politics
and culture have been systematically purged of secularism," and in which
the constitution will be rewritten to bring it into line with "the moral and
sexual world view of the Vatican." That's quite the ambition. American
religiosity is for the most part strikingly un-Roman, and Father Neuhaus
himself finds the evangelicals a bit of a bore, what with their "forced
happiness and joy" and "awful music." But so far the conspiracy seems
to be going swimmingly, with the Supreme Court claiming to have
discovered a constitutional right to sodomy, and its fellow jurists in
Massachusetts having legalized gay marriage. That's exactly the kind
of cunning distraction you'd expect these theocons to come up with to
throw the rest of us off the scent.
By now, the alert reader will have spotted that Linker's book is called
The Theocons -- i.e. plural. So it can't all be down to Father Neuhaus,
sinister though he is. So Linker rummages around for a few sidekicks
in the plan to wipe out secular America, and comes across Michael
Novak, Robert P. George and George Weigel. I like a conspiracy theory
as much as the next chap, but Weigel is an unlikely peg on which to hang
it. He's the author of an excellent biography of the new Pope, God's
Choice, and also of one of my favourite books of recent years, a slim
volume called The Cube and the Cathedral. The title contrasts two
Parisian landmarks -- the cathedral of Notre Dame and the giant
modernist cube of la Grande Arche de la Défense, commissioned by
President Mitterrand to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
As la Grande Arche boasts, the entire cathedral, including spires and
tower, would easily fit inside the cold geometry of Mitterrand's cube.
And that's the question Weigel's book addresses: in modern Europe,
how did the cube (the state) come to swallow the cathedral (the church)?
Which is, of course, the exact opposite of Damon Linker's thesis -- that,
thanks to Weigel and others, in America the church is about to swallow
the state. Of these two scenarios, one has already happened, and the
other seems to have been concocted out of thin air by opportunist lefties.
As proof of how advanced the theocon takeover is already, Linker invites
us to consider the difference between two speeches: in 1962, in his
address to the nation during the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy
concluded with the scrupulously non-theocratic "Good night." But in 2001,
in his address to the nation after Sept. 11, President Bush had the
effrontery to ask the Lord to "bless the souls of the departed" and to wrap
things up with "God bless America." "Something has happened to the
United States during the past four decades," concludes Linker, darkly.
At the risk of offending Linker, God Almighty. Insofar as anything
happened during those four decades, it was this: prayer was banished
from public schools, the separation of church and state became an ever
wider chasm, and Americans deserted mainline Protestant
denominations for evangelical churches. In other words, the overzealous
attempt to purge religion from the public square drove many Americans
toward more effective vehicles for their faith. As for the difference
between the 1962 and 2001 speeches, it's simple: those 3,000 "souls
of the departed." Indeed, to attempt to acknowledge the deceased
without invoking the deity would have sounded very weird, as weird as
that hollow 9/11 memorial in Ottawa which (much to Linker's taste
presumably) avoided all mention of God. Or as weird as the peculiarly
ferocious objections by European politicians to referencing the
Continent's Christian inheritance in the preamble to the EU's constitution
(since rejected). A former Swedish deputy prime minister dismissed the
proposal as "a joke"; a French socialist called it "absurd"; Scandinavia's
largest newspaper said it would be a "huge mistake."
The post-Christian Europe George Weigel writes about is a fact: it is
the spiritual vacuum into which Islamism has poured. But the radically
Christianist theocon takeover of America is a ludicrous fantasy. Yet it's
the latter hogging the prime real estate at bookstores across the land.
The existence of this thriving new sub-genre is a more telling comment
on the times than anything in the books themselves.