perfidy

My defense of the TC was part of my view that there is a larger animus against Christianity. Which is why I mentioned the Catholic issue with the federal judicial appointments. The left likes to think that those with religious beliefs, sincerely held, are the far right wing. They are not, not by far.

In the comments to a prior post, Bridgit said this case involved one "southern white protestant" view. That is disingenuous, because how many black southern protestants, or Korean DC area protestants, or Martian Jews for that matter would agree with the views expressed by the TC? Again, this is (a very mild version of) the contempt that is generally cast on Christianity. Christianity is not the quaint and curious folk ways of backwoods crackers.

The Judicial appointments debate involved a Roman Catholic view under the microscope, but I think that the motivations were similar. The left would not merely like to exclude religion from the public arena, they have it in for Christianity and pretty much everything traditional. Everytime some 99.44% Christian community somewhere in the midwest puts up a nativity scene, someone, of a certain political group, sues the city. Kwanzaa decorations and the whole panarama of other faith's symbols do not get the same attention.

Now, I am a conservative. Not in the European sense, which is reactionary and monarchist, etc. I love and look forward to technological change. I feel that reform is possible, and given sufficient forethought, desirable. The beliefs that I feel are worthy of conserving are the revolutionary ideals of the founding generation, as amended by the Union's position in the civil war. But there are other things worthy of conserving. We should not throw out religion because a small fraction of our population is anticlerical, and feels that Christianity is the opiate of the masses, ie, the stupid.

The founding fathers felt that religion was essential for the survival of the republic. They were right about so many things that I am wary of saying, "Oh they were just kidding about that one." Whitaker Chambers (and for that matter Solzhenitsyn) felt that religion was in opposition to modernity. They felt that Communism (which I think we can all agree was very, very bad) was not something different from the liberal west, but rather the purification of it, the assumptions of modernity taken to their logical extremes. Chambers feared that the liberal west would lose to the powerful faith of Communism, or that it would lose its soul in the process of winning.

We should not be so quick to exclude religion from the public arena. Tolerance does not require that we banish all representations of the majority faith of this nation. It should not require the cultural cover of a picture of Confucius to have a picture of Moses. The founders feared the tyranny of the majority, and guarded against it. But Toqueville was right to fear the tyranny of the minority. And that is what I see growing in this country.