THE THEOCONS ARE COMING! ... 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 madrassah.

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 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 neocons, 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’ 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 US “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 worldview of the Vatican”. That’s quite the ambition. American religiosity is for the most part strikingly unRoman 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 – ie, 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 favorite 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 Mitterand 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 Mitterand’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 September 11th, 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 over-zealous 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 service 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.

"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." ~ Mark Steyn

Here's another "cunning distraction" the neo-cons (aka Jooooooze) are probably responsible for:

New Bishop show bankrupcy of 'religious left'
Virtue Online ^ | November 22, 2006 | Michael Medved
Posted on 11/23/2006 11:12:57 AM EST by Alex Murphy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1743093/posts

The Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill provides new energy and aggressiveness for the nation's Religious Left - that faction of clergy and activists who seek to associate organized faith with the liberal agenda in cultural, economic and foreign policy debates. While deriding Christian conservatives for their alleged "intolerance," "ignorance" and "fanaticism," the religious leftists manage to turn off most religious believers of even moderate outlook with their own displays of arrogance and radicalism, and their smug dismissal of traditional values.

The controversial new leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States provided a prime example of these alienating attitudes in a startling interview in the New York Times Magazine on November 19th with Deborah Solomon. When Solomon asked about the current numbers of Episcopalians, for instance, Bishop Jefferts Schori took it as a point of pride that her church experienced declining membership.

Q: How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?

A: About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations.

In other words, it's just those uneducated, unsophisticated Evangelicals and Catholics and Mormons and Orthodox Jews who are bothering with the messy, dirty work of producing and raising kids. Naturally, the Presiding Bishop defends the low Episcopal birthrate as a sign of enlightenment:

Q: Episcopalians aren't interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?

A: No. It's probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth, and not use more than their portion.

In other responses, Bishop Jefferts Schori showed far more sympathy for Muslim extremists than she did for "fundamentalists" within the Christian tradition:

Q: As a scientist with a Ph.D., what do you make of the Christian fundamentalists who say the earth was created in six days and dismiss evolution as a lot of bunk?

A: I think it's a horrendous misunderstanding of both science and active faith tradition...

Q: Pope Benedict...became embroiled in controversy this fall after suggesting that Muslims have a history of violence.

A: So do Christians! They have a terrible history... I think Muslims are poorly understood by the West, and it is easy to latch onto that which we do not understand and demonize it.

Note that when the good Bishop speaks of the shameful record of violence by Christians, she says "they have a terrible history" - not we. In other words, she instinctively excludes herself when she talks of Christian tradition.

At a time when Muslim fanatics seek to influence politics and mores around the world, conducting tireless conversionary efforts in the European and North American heartland of Christendom, it's deeply disturbing that the leader of one of the most influential Christian denominations refuses to recognize what many thoughtful Muslims freely acknowledge-that Islamic culture, today and yesterday, has been marred by uniquely warlike and violent elements. The idea that Christians (or even Muslim reformers) who seek to identify and confront those ugly influences merely "latch onto that which we do not understand and demonize it" is to diminish the significance of the worldwide Islamic terror campaign that's claimed literally tens of thousands of victims from Mumbai to Madrid, from Nairobi to New York.

Finally, Bishop Jefferts Schori casually dismisses the familial and marital norms that most believers embrace and defend as the very essence of Judeo-Christian faith. Instead of traditional pride in a husband and wife building a home together, making heroic efforts and even significant sacrifices to share a life, the Bishop happily announces that she and her spouse occupy opposite ends of the continent.

Q: You were previously bishop of Nevada, but your new position requires you to live in New York City. Do you and your husband like it here?

A: He is actually in Nevada. He is a retired mathematician. He will be here in New York when it makes sense.

In other words, it doesn't "make sense" for a retired mathematician to be at his wife's side when she takes on the leadership of one of the nation's most significant Christian denominations? It doesn't make sense for the first female Bishop to head this denomination to try to model marital togetherness?

The questions and answers with Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori eloquently (if inadvertently) demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Religious Left. If the movement's attitudes toward marriage and child-bearing reflect the trendy ideas of secular environmentalists rather than timeless Biblical truth, then who needs religion? Most Americans understand that the purpose of organized faith is to bring unchanging values to bear in challenging and modifying the fads and temptations of the moment. Religion means nothing if we rather begin with fashionable contemporary ideas and use them to alter the fundamentals of faith. Moreover, what's the point of maintaining any sort of organized Christianity if one of its most prominent leaders will instinctively condemn her own faith tradition while excusing or dismissing the violent excesses of the deadly Muslim enemies of the Christian world?

As with most leaders of the Christian Left, Bishop Jefferts Schori appears be very Left, but not very Christian. Her example shows the way that this new movement of religious liberals amounts to little more than a desperate effort to use the language of faith to repackage the tired ideas of secular, utopian leftism and moral relativism that have failed so spectacularly wherever they've been tried around the world.

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