The End of Christian America - Newsweek's cover story

[rien]

newsweek.com/id/192583

 

[St_Francis]

newsweek.com/id/192583

And your point is…?

 

[Mark77]

It should read “The End of Christian America means the end of the Greatness of America!”

We no longer believe in right and wrong, everything depends on the situation, even the right to life itself!

We were founded as a strong, moral country, wiling to sacrifice everything for Freedom! We fought tyranny and oppression at home and abroad. We saved Europe and much of the World from murderous dictators, fascist and communist regimes, at a great cost of life and treasure.

Now we are too elite, too Euro, to sophisticated to care about anyone but ourselves.

We’ll soon be totally broke and 100% owned by the Chinese and the Saudis (Obama already bows to the Saudi King!) and then well just be like Great Britain , a once powerful country now relegated to a run of the mill, second rate nation.

That’s progress, secular progressive style!

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, Ora Pro Nobis Peccatoribus!

Mark

 

[KathleenElsie]

Don’t read it don’t subscribe to it.

 

[averheyen]

I don’t think it’s so much a reality, as it is that news papers and magazines are getting more and more comfortable making bold declerations like that.

 

[KC91]

It’s Protestant America (which had and still has Anti-Catholic prejudices) , not Catholic America. So why the big fuss?

 

[RWMorris]

It’s Protestant America (which had and still has Anti-Catholic prejudices) , not Catholic America. So why the big fuss?

But the same thing is happening to Catholic America. Most American Catholics are now politically liberal. Not classically liberal, but liberal as in leftists. Have you noticed the fruits of their labor, their harvest if you will? Many of our top Congressmen are Catholic, our Supreme Court has several Catholic justices. Our Bishops openly support many anti-Christian, pro-abortion organizations, in the name of social justice. Our President, while not Catholic, is their hero.

Modern liberalism, if you follow their reasoning and philosophy, always leads to agnostism, disobedience, atheism, and injustice. What is happening to Protestantism is happening to Catholicism. It is just that most leftist Catholics, like many main-line Protestants want to stick around and rot their Church from the inside. It’s their God given right to do it if it feels right.

Can’t you just feel the love in modern America?

 

[Kscrawler]

It’s Protestant America (which had and still has Anti-Catholic prejudices) , not Catholic America. So why the big fuss?

To be fair it is not all of Protestant America. There are those sections of Protestantism that are as supportive of what America should be about. Both those Protestants, and simliar Catholics are labelled as “conservative”. We Catholics have little to point to, our voting records and the actions of Catholic legislators are reflective of the society as a whole, there no longer is anything you could call a “Catholic Vote”.

 

[MrS]

The distain for Catholics has been evident for oh, about 2000 years. But another quiet, or hidden, dislike started to fester, IMHO, around the time Kennedy was elected. It seemed like very few called him a Catholic President… just President. Combine that with the sad actions of many clergy at the close of VII (they didn’t get “their” way), and we had the candle burning at both ends.

.

 

[NHInsider]

It’s a thoughtful, well-written article with some interesting points. The title is meant to catch attention and sell copies, as titles always are.

Worldly success tends to mark the beginning of the end for the overtly religious in politics.

The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. “No country can be truly ‘Christian’,” Thomas says. “Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that ‘All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing’.” Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. “We were going through organizing like-minded people to ‘return’ America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!”

Religion is not only about worshipping your God but about doing godly things, and a central message of the Gospels is the duty of the Christian to transform, as best one can, reality through works of love. “Being in the world and not of it remains our charge,” says Mohler. “The church is an eternal presence in a fallen, temporal world—but we are to have influence. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we are to do—but it does not come with a political handbook.”

How to balance concern for the garden of the church with the moral imperatives to make gentle the life of the world is one of the most perplexing questions facing the church. “We have important obligations to do whatever we can, including through the use of political means, to help our neighbors—promoting just laws, good order, peace, education and opportunity,” wrote Noll, Hatch and Marsden. “Nonetheless we should recognize that as we work for the relatively better in ‘the city of the world,’ our successes will be just that—relative. In the last analysis the church declares that the solutions offered by the nations of the world are always transitory solutions, themselves in need of reform.”

Just a few cogent samples. The underlying issue, it seems to me, is not only “is it appropriate for American Christians to try and bring about a 'Christian” America’" but “what is the cost to our witness of the effort to legislate Christian values?”

 

[RWMorris]

… The underlying issue, it seems to me, is not only “is it appropriate for American Christians to try and bring about a 'Christian” America’" but “what is the cost to our witness of the effort to legislate Christian values?”

I’ll redirect the question back to you. What is the cost to our witness of the effort to not legislate Christian values?

Our Founders understood that faith in God is indelibly linked to liberty. Thomas Jefferson declared, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” Shortly before his death, he wrote, “Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence.”

James Madison stated, “The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it.”
John Adams averred, “It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe.”

John Jay affirmed, “The Bible is the best of all books, for it is the word of God and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and in the next. Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.”

Justice Joseph Story, however, cautioned us: “It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape.”

Looking at the degraded state of constitutional rule of law today, and the abject corruption of our executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, it would appear that “separation of church and state” has proven conclusively that liberty is in great peril when its source, the God of all nature, is evicted from those institutions.

Notice to readers. Starting with the second paragraph of this post and continuing to the end was a direct quote from as essay entiltled *PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE *by Mark Alexander. The complete essay can be found at http://patriotpost.us/pdf/09-14s.pdf. I choose not to use the quote function because it sometimes disrupts the flow of a reply.

 

[NHInsider]

I’ll redirect the question back to you. What is the cost to our witness of the effort to not legislate Christian values?

Looking at the degraded state of constitutional rule of law today, and the abject corruption of our executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, it would appear that “separation of church and state” has proven conclusively that liberty is in great peril when its source, the God of all nature, is evicted from those institutions.

Did you read the article? The issue is not about driving God out of government (which I agree some have tried to do and it has been a bad thing.

But that does not change the on-the-ground reality that the “christianization” efforts of the last two decades have coincided with the decrease in church attendance across all denominations and the increase in the number of those who claim to be aetheistic or agnostic.

Historically and globally, the combination of Church and State has been bad for both.

A related article, for those seriously interested in the subject:

Creating A Political Firestorm That Is Still Burning

This is the transcript of a John Whitehead interview of Frank Shaeffer. Not for the faint-of-heart, with plenty of blame to go around, but very thought-provoking.

A couple of cogent quotes:

JW: As you’ve written in your book Crazy for God and in your blogs, you and your father created the Religious Right. I was there, as well. In fact, people were carrying my book, The Second American Revolution, around at political rallies. Almost 30 years later, do you regret the part you played?

FS: I look back on it all like somebody who finally sobered up after drinking all their life. They realize that when they were a drunk, they used their relationships, smashed their businesses and impoverished their families. But they finally got sober, went to Alcoholics Anonymous and mended their ways. So I look back with horror because the small part I played, and certainly the larger part my father played, and the part you played with me has brought us to this place. We lifted up a number of single-issue political things like abortion, and we opened up a floodgate of a moralistic style of grandstanding from the sidelines, which has made this country essentially ungovernable. It also unleashed a culture war. The Left bears responsibility as well for that because Roe v. Wade was very ill-conceived—a kind of “one-stop solution” to a contentious issue that essentially set everybody on their ear. So it works both ways. But for the part I played, I have nothing but regret.

JW: You’ve written that the Christian Right was anti-American. What do you mean by that?

FS: We set this negative tone, in that, for us, bad news about America was good news. This was true whether it was fund-raising or whether it was the call to be a Christian society. Our basic premise was that the only way America could function was as a biblically based Christian society. We live in a multicultural, pluralistic, multi-religion society ranging all the way from atheist Jews to Hindus to Muslims to Christians to Episcopalians who are liberal, to Unitarians to Fundamentalists. Essentially, that vision of America was one of our enemies. We didn’t want a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society. What we wanted was a homogenous Christian country built somewhat along the lines of Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritan-based state colonies. That essentially put us at cross purposes with and made us hate America as it is. So the America we envisioned actually didn’t exist, and probably never did. Thus, we were the enemies of America as it is today. America is not a religious state. It is a pluralistic, secular culture built around certain religious principles, along with certain other philosophical principles. But it doesn’t belong to us or the evangelicals any more than it belongs to any other group.

FS: You put your finger on it when you said that we identified Christianity with a political movement to the point where the politics and the religion were confused. When you now use the term “Christian” to Americans, whether they are evangelicals or atheists, they immediately think of evangelical American Christianity. They don’t think of Byzantine Orthodox. They don’t think of Roman Catholicism. They don’t think of the historic church. They don’t think of liberal Christians. In other words, the first confusion is that the word Christian was equated with evangelical. What was the result? All Christianity and all its true claims and all its philosophy will be judged on the basis of what evangelicals do. What did evangelicals do? The word “evangelical” became synonymous with Republican. And then it became synonymous with right-wing Republican. Picture Christ. Christ is bearing the burden of being identified exclusively with evangelicals. And then evangelicals jump on his back carrying the burdens of the Republican Party. And the Republican Party is driven to the right by those very same evangelicals who bring their moralistic crusades on everything from gay rights to abortion to the table. When those things fail or they are hypocritically used, for example, as fundraising measures rather than actually doing something about the issue, they indulge in hatred or homophobic behavior. All of a sudden, Christ has the Republican Party, the evangelicals and their hatred and their failed policies on his back. Thus, who is going to be looking at Jesus Christ anymore as a religious figure or the Son of God or even as a prophet? What they are seeing is the Republican Party. And what they are seeing is economic failure. And what they are seeing is social programs that don’t work. And so essentially the cart not only flipped and drove the horse, the horse disappeared altogether. All that is left is this stalled cart of Republican right-wing failure.

tough stuff

 

[KC91]

What is wrong with an official state religion? Catholicism has always worked well with robust leadership, just look at the examples of Charlemagne, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Franco.

 

[NHInsider]

What is wrong with an official state religion? Catholicism has always worked well with robust leadership, just look at the examples of Charlemagne, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Franco.

This is a joke, right?

 

[KathleenElsie]

This is a joke, right?

I believe that unless we make an effort to turn toward God this country is going to be judged sometime soon if it is not already being judged.

 

[PA650]

What is wrong with an official state religion? Catholicism has always worked well with robust leadership, just look at the examples of Charlemagne, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Franco.

The Founding Fathers never endorsed an official state religion, partly because of experience with the Church of England–If I remember correctly, the Puritans came to the New World in order to escape state sanctioned religion, which did not tolerate their beliefs. Not only that, but the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights clearly states that there is to be a freedom of religion not instituted by the government. Moreover, I wish not to live in a theocracy no matter how just it might be.

 

[Ceil-1]

About the same time this article came out, I heard Fox news report that there has been a literal world-wide explosion of conversion to tradition religions. I assume this probably includes Islam and Buddhism. In any case, I would believe that to be the case. Just not in the US. :byzsoc:

 

[RWMorris]

The Founding Fathers never endorsed an official state religion, partly because of experience with the Church of England–If I remember correctly, the Puritans came to the New World in order to escape state sanctioned religion, which did not tolerate their beliefs. Not only that, but the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights clearly states that there is to be a freedom of religion not instituted by the government. Moreover, I wish not to live in a theocracy no matter how just it might be.

I agree 100%; I would not want to live in a theocracy either. Our founding fathers did not envision such a government, but they did say that public worship, and a commitment to God by all men was mandatory for our form of government to survive. John Adams said it best, “It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe.”

Representative democracy cannot survive without Godly living. Without God, humans cannot make it function, just as the Jews could not live under the Judges and God’s law, demanding instead to be ruled by a King (a man). The movement over the past half century of “freedon from religion” will destroy our nation, not necessarily violently, and not necessarily by name. The name United States of America may live on for another millenium. But the Constitution cannot, it has too many rules that were laid down in principle by the God of the Universe. Ungodly people want freedom from God, even many who claim to be Catholic, or Protestant, or non-denom. And the only way to get that freedom is to rid ourselves of the rules in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, public worship of God, and a public commitment to God’s law.

 

[bradwill911]

Already posted elsewhere, but here Fr Jon’s response:

foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/04/06/morris_newsweek_christian/

 

[RedGecko]

But that does not change the on-the-ground reality that the “christianization” efforts of the last two decades have coincided with the decrease in church attendance across all denominations and the increase in the number of those who claim to be aetheistic or agnostic.

I agree. I think many of those who no longer identify as Christian have been turned off by Christianity’s apparent focus on politics, rather than on spirituality. I think the Religious Right movement is much to blame.

But let’s keep things in perspective. 3/4 of Americans still identify as Christian. Christianity is still profoundly influential in the US. The title of the article is vastly exaggerated.

Rather than being an indication of doom and gloom, I think the poll results are an indication that we need to change our ways. Focus on individuals and families, and not on politics.