Top Knight of Columbus: ‘if America amputates religion, liberty will vanish as well’

WASHINGTON, April 19, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Obama administration’s attacks on faith-based groups represent a political power grab that, by attempting to control even the definition of religious expression, are an unprecedented danger to America’s tradition of liberty, according to the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus.

Carl Anderson, the head of the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization, published the remarks on National Review Online on Thursday, the same day he gave remarks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. The prayer breakfast follows on the heels of the announcement of a new HHS mandate forcing religious groups to pay for abortifacient drugs, sterilizations, and other forms of birth control.

The Knight of Columbus recalled the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, who warned against the Communist’s ideological manipulation of history that caused “a closing, a locking up, of the national heart”: “even though compatriots apparently speak the same language, they suddenly cease to understand one another.”

“Religion has long been a key component in America’s national life. But today it is increasingly marginalized and erased,” said Anderson. “Today we find a new hostility to the role of religious institutions in American life, while the role of government is expanding in unprecedented ways.”

Anderson pointed to the Obama administration’s assault on religious institutions, both through the HHS mandate and the recent Supreme Court battle Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, as signs of a dangerous turning point in the government’s perspective of its relationship with religion. “The administration’s logic is shockingly consistent on these matters: Faith-based groups may function only if their ‘faith and mission’ are acceptable to the government,” he said.

Now, Anderson notes, religious leaders speaking out on moral issues in the public square are criticized for breaching the “separation of church and state” by “government officials who use their power to refashion church identity according to their own design.”

The very concept of the separation of church and state, he notes, has been corrupted to bring about precisely the “political use of religion at the service of the state” it was intended to prevent.

“I think Jefferson would have been the first to agree that if America amputates religion from American public life, liberty will soon vanish as well,” wrote Anderson.

The article cites Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his landmark The Gulag Archipelago as a guide to where this leads. I recall this quote from "From Under the Rubble," from the essay As Breathing and Consciousness Return - October, 1973. Speaking about Russia as it existed then, Solzhenitsyn said,

“The state system which exists in our country is terrible not because it is undemocratic, authoritarian, based only on physical constraint - a man can live in such conditions without harm to his spiritual essence. Our present system is unique in world history, because above and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent.“
“When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make!” “The most important part of our freedom, inner freedom, is always subject to our will. If we surrender it to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human.”

Long, low whistle on that one. But why? And to what end? I think that another one of the 20th century’s great writers understood the nature of that “pure, naked, smirking evil” and its ultimate aims all too well:

“We’ll cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman… In the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth as one takes eggs from a hen… Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card… There will be no loyalty except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love except the love of Big Brother… There will be no heart, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science… Do you begin to see then what kind of world we are creating… a world of fear and treachery and torment… ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement; everything else we shall destroy…it will be a world of terror… The more the party is powerful the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition the tighter the despotism… Always we shall have the heretic at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible; and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing.”
"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."
"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

That’s the triumph of the Will to Power in all of its malignant narcissistic glory, as Eric Blairs, writing under the pseudonym of George Orwell, described with merciless clarity in 1984. From all indications, he was off by only a couple of generations. The true horror is to now watch this nightmare unfold under our very eyes. People need to wake up and smell the killing fields that inhabit the imaginations of these monsters.

There will be only one way to stop them.

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