It's Dangerous to Believe

Please give me a helpful vote on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UKGYBOTMY411/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


Mary Eberstadt is a first-rate writer with keen insight and an ability to clearly communicate the facts underlying the issue she is addressing. Her classic article in First Things (November, 2009) on how the Catholic sex-abuse scandal retarded the growing acceptance of pedophilia in American culture - “How Pedophilia Lost its Cool” - is a prime example of seeing a major point that everyone else has missed in the morass of facts and following up on the insight with something that everyone else has missed and following up on that insight with a merciless attention to those facts.

In this book, Eberstadt examines the modern “Kulturkampf.” She canvasses the news of the last few years - often times including vignettes from a few months ago, albeit because of the publication date she barely missed the sorry proof of her thesis of the last few weeks, during which Christians have been paradoxically blamed for the mass murder of gays committed by a Muslim terrorist, registered as a Democrat, who may have been gay, if early news reports are accurate. Eberstadt provides example after example of the cultural shift in rhetoric and conduct that has resulted in Christians being shunned or treated as subversives in America. She provides examples of believing Christians being kept out of university programs because of their Christian culture and of careers destroyed because of Christian expression and of individual and public discrimination against Christians and their association because of their religion. She points out that these same examples would have been unthinkable if the word “Christian” was replaced by “gay” or “Muslim.”

Eberstadt properly calls this “soft persecution” - as opposed to the “hard persecution” suffered by Christians in the Mid-east. However, “soft persecution” is a big deal. Most of the history of persecution involves “soft persecution.” Catholics in England were persecuted “softly” by having taxes imposed on them when they didn't go to the Church of England. Islam has moved generations of Christians into Islam by treating Christians as dhimmis. Soft persecution works.

Eberstadt's unifying thesis for this cultural shift is that the sexual revolution has created a new “faith” with its own dogmas and doctrines. Members of the new faith may not recognize themselves as having a faith, but their conduct - harsh, shrill, threatened, looking for heretics, excommunicating offenders, ritualized shaming - are recognizable as the actions of people who are defending a faith commitment rather than a public policy. I think that Eberstadt made her case in this regard. I had not looked at this issue in this way before, but it has an explanatory power for the insanely threatened and emotional reactions I've observed when I get into Facebook debates with secularists, who escalate to name-calling in zero time.

For those of us who are still trying to occupy the public square, and defend traditional Christian values, and, perhaps, shame secularists for the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that their position entails, Eberstadt's book is a great resource. In the wake of the 2016 Orlando Muslim terrorist attack, secular atheists have unearthed videos of one or two hyperliteralist fundamentalist Protestant pastors who preach sermons that refer to the victims as sodomites who deserve to be dead. This is certainly uncharitable and ugly speech, but it remains speech, and speech totally unrelated to the mass murder. Nonetheless, secularists are cheering that Paypal has eliminated the hyperliteralists accounts and the landlord has evicted them. In response to this, my questions about the traditional liberal value of defending the rights of people to engage in speech, when all they are doing is engaging in speech, is met with the “explanation” that bigots don't deserve rights.

This is a discussion that I am having today.

It is the Eberstadt book in a microcosm.

In response I have quoted this from the Eberstadt book:

“In August 2012, a gunman entered the office building in downtown Washington, D.C., that houses the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian organization dedicated to traditional moral teaching. By his own account, available on video, he was alerted by secular progressive “watchdog” groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, that painted the FRC as a “hate group.” The shooter explained that this made him intend to kill as many of its members as he could, as he later told the FBI. 1 In the event, he fired at and hit a security guard, who disarmed him before his dream of mass murder could be fulfilled.”

Eberstadt, Mary. It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies (Kindle Locations 1361-1366). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I have asked whether - in light of the principle they are espousing with respect to the hyperliteralists - they would support similar treatment to the SPLC.

I have received no answer except some assertions that I must be politically aligned with the hyperliteralist Protestant pastor nutjob.

One of the interesting things, however, is that while the SPLC “incitement” - I don't think the SPLC “incited” this shooter anymore than any other shooter was “incited” by political speech - is a great case for getting secularists to think about whether they always hold the moral high-ground, I would have forgotten it if I hadn't just read it in the Eberstadt book. Why is that? Is it because the narrative of our age pays more attention to “rightwing violence” than “leftwing violence,” so that this example required a special effort to remember before it was sent to the “memory hole”?

A nit that I will pick with Eberstadt is that in her fairly encyclopedic listing of outrageous smears against Catholics, she forgot to mention how the San Francisco City Council passed a resolution declaring the Catholic Bishop of San Francisco to be subversive of San Francisco's values of tolerance and diversity because he shut down the Catholic adoption program rather than violate Catholic teachings about placing children in the households of homosexual couples. This decision was actually upheld by the Ninth Circuit. It would have seemed to be a great example to add to her list, but, again, this news story, which would have been national news if it had been done to a Muslim in Texas, never got news attention, and has slipped down the memory hole.

Weird, that.

I found her conclusion to be the weakest part of her book. Eberstadt looks at the history of hysteria and notes that hysteria dies down when the hysterics have had enough. She therefore calls on the secularists to stop using terms like “hater” and “bigot” and to return to the values of respecting the rights of others to speak as a safeguard for them when their ideas fall out of favor.

OK...maybe....but I think that this is different. The previous examples occurred in Christian cultures, which had values like “do unto others” and “the Good Samaritan” and “shame” and an adherence to neutral principles and logic. Is it the case that this new civilization - Post-Christian, and what I call Civilization 3.0 - has those values? The evidence suggests that this is not the case. My experience with individualists suggests that this is not the case: they are absolutely unembarrassed to tell me that discrimination only occurs when their sacred cows are offended, and they seem unable to understand that their bete noirs can ever be discriminated against.

I am currently reading [[ASIN:162157296X Witness (Cold War Classics)]], which has caused me to reflect that Eberstadt's description of where we are could be a straight line projection of what Chambers was describing as where the Communist party was in the 1920s and 1930s, including “Communist marriage” - which was based on the agreement of the parties to act as if they were married - and the double-think and the definition of justice as “what is good for our side.” I think that those values have largely won through their incorporation into the sexual revolution. If that is the case, an appeal to the better angels of secularist nature is not going to be effective.

What should be done? Keep pitching. Point out the hypocrisy and inconsistencies of secularists engaged in “soft persecution.” It may not make you loved, but Christians have been promised a return for beating hated and vilified “for my name's sake.”