Boomer Religion (When Sean Hannity and Michael Moore met)

Inside Catholic ^ | October 28, 2009 | Barbara Nauer

[NYer]

 

For anyone who strongly identifies with traditional Christianity, the October 6-9 series on Fox News's Hannity, with Sean Hannity interviewing Michael Moore, was rich in irony and vaguely distressing. The occasion was Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

 

Two bright, likable, and deeply sincere married men of middle age passionately argued the positions of the liberal Democrats or progressives (Moore) and the conservative Republicans (Hannity). What generated some irony was that both celebrity worldlings revealed themselves to be regular Sunday mass-goers. They viewed their years in Catholic schools warmly and with pride, and readily associated some of their viewpoints with the teachings of Jesus. Their faith witness was impressive.

 

Both men view peace -- understood as the absence of military conflict -- as an absolute value. Moore is a thoroughgoing pacifist. His views resemble those of the 1960s hippies and the anarchist mobs that now assault World Trade meetings. Hannity is for peace, too, but "peace through strength," through deterrence. He wants a win in Afghanistan.

 

On other topics, the differences were even sharper. The pair's diametrically opposed attitudes toward socialism -- Moore was pro, Hannity con -- colored everything they said about the economy, taxes, poverty, and health care. Both were mindful of the "preferential option for the poor" that is part of contemporary Catholic theology.

 

Just as in his film, Moore railed against capitalism's excesses in the way of all leftists. He had good things to say about health care in Cuba, Canada, and other nations where socialistic approaches are in force. Naturally, Moore welcomes Obama's public-option health plan.

 

Hannity, though strongly committed to capitalism and free trade, admitted that the capitalist way of organizing societies invites a rise in human greed, selfishness, and reckless ambition. But he seemed in virtual agreement with Moore, who summarized unhappily at one point, "I am not against capitalism so much as against what capitalism has become." They argued hotly about taxation rates and share-the-wealth redistribution programs. Each accused the other of maintaining a household shrine -- candles, picture, etc. -- of some public figure (Obama for Moore, Reagan for Hannity.)

 

But watching all of this, I noticed an interesting similarity: Like members of the baby-boomer generation in general, these two earnest men reflect a strikingly narrow religious worldview. Their combined biblical knowledge seems limited to the four Gospels as described in religion classes and read aloud at Sunday mass.

 

So disposed, the two seem to be less the products of Roman Catholicism than of two virulent heresies that washed through U.S. religious education at all levels beginning in the 1950s: Modernism and Marxism. Theirs is boomer religion.

 

 

Modernism was the first to crash in on the faithful. It came as a hardy transplant from some seminaries in Northern Europe during the late 1890s, reflecting the efforts of theologians to square traditional Christian beliefs with the Enlightenment's scientific rationalism and evolutionary biology.

 

At modernism's heart was "form criticism,"a novel method of interpreting the Bible naturalistically. This approach kept the historical Christ but dismissed most of Scripture's supernatural elements -- divine revelations, atonement, miracles, angels, demons -- as largely mythic. Two academic priests, the French Rev. Alfred Loisy and an Irish Jesuit Rev. George Tyrrell, promoted the heresy among Catholics, while German Lutheran Rudolf Karl Bultmann set Protestant theology on fire with it. The writings of these men and their followers spread the heterodox ideas worldwide.

 

Two popes, Pius IX and St. Pius X, tried to correct modernism's errors with formal writings (the Syllabus of Errors and Pascendi Dominici Gregis), but to little lasting effect. As a result, most of the Old Testament and the New Testament epistles of St. Paul and others rapidly lost their claim to any serious theological relevance among contemporary Catholics. By the mid 1960s, modernist theological experts, both clergy and lay persons, were a dominant force everywhere in U.S. religious education.

 

The Catholic updaters of the Faith made a special project of banning the use in schools of the older Catholic catechisms, such as the Baltimore Catechism, whose content reflected the Council of Trent, the launch pad for the Counter-Reformation. These catechisms were teaching tools whose texts were designed for ease of memorization by children and converts. The inexpensive booklets presented careful statements of the truths and teachings of both Testaments of the Bible and Sacred Tradition -- that is, the non-written understandings and worship practices handed down by the Apostles.

 

The new breed of clerics also set out to revise and "update" the Church's liturgical texts and to write and produce improved religion textbooks. Incredibly, in a surprisingly short period, they accomplished this and more. As Ralph Wiltgen described in The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, the updaters also manipulated the English-language press releases from the Second Vatican Council. They managed to make older scholastic theology, long treasured by the Church, seem obsolete for today's Catholics.

 

As a result of these projects, and although few Catholic parents knew it at the time, most children attending parish schools during the 1960s and 1970s were tragically shortchanged in their religious education. The Catholicism they received was largely supernatural religion denatured. Children were exposed not to the Bible's original texts but to Bible stories about Moses, David, and other major heroes.

 

 

And then came the tsunami's second wave. "Marxism" is our contemporary nickname for the atheistic political and economic system that Russia's 1917 revolution unleashed on the world. Variously called socialism or communism, it puts a twist on the dialectical idealism of Friedrich Hegel.

 

Communism spreads its errors into new societies with a three-phase movement. First, its covert agents use anti-government and anti-Church propaganda to spread social discontent in the targeted nation or population. The agents aim to promote anti-government revolution, either violent or non-violent, which makes possible their ultimate goal: the complete communist takeover of governmental power.

 

Needless to say, Christian believers who embraced the materialism introduced by theological modernists had little resistance to Marxist influence. For them, the supernatural order had vanished entirely or become uncertain. And just as with modernism, forceful and clear papal writings (such as Pius XI's Divini Redemptoris) failed to reverse the error.

 

In the United States prior to the 1960s, Christian churches and their schools had acted as a bulwark against communist infiltration of education and mass media. But that quickly changed: By 1968 the Marxist neighborhood organizer Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals, was a favored celebrity of many U.S. priests and bishops. He was one of the featured speakers at a nationwide gathering of priests in Chicago in 1968, held to protest formally Pope Paul VI's anti-birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae.

 

Of course, Christian sexual morality took the hardest hit from the tsunami of errors that swept through all the churches from the late 1950s onward. Returning to Moore and Hannity, products of this revolution, the attitude of both men toward homosexuality is illustrative. They are scrupulously politically correct: While straight themselves, they have "no objection to what other people do in their bedrooms."

 

When combined with a belief in a non-judgmental Jesus, this breezy attitude toward sex is the position of all fully modernized Catholics, including a good many who are older than Moore and Hannity. (Think of the pro-abortion Catholics in Congress, of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews.) But it is not the traditional Catholic view. That older position, rightly called fundamentalist, took very seriously the Old Testament and the New Testament writings of Sts. Peter, Paul, James, and others. So should we all.

[NYer]

Ping!

[newgeezer]

bright, likable, and deeply sincere

Michael Moore? This thread needs a BARF ALERT.

[2banana]

Can government do the work of God (Charity)?

What I have read and understood from the Bible is that God and Jesus wants us to help each other by using our own time, treasure and talent and to give from our hearts (”Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” - 2 Corinthians 9:7). Nowhere have I found anything along the lines of “Go out and institute huge bureaucracies that will take money from some people at the point of a sword and give that money to other people as a politician sees fit.”

Our Founding Fathers were Christian and very pious men. They founded this country under strong Judeo-Christian tenets and reflected on their religious beliefs on all their decisions. They wrote nothing into the Constitution of any type of government “aid” to help the poor, children or anyone else on purpose. They wanted a very limited government for good reason. Limited government is the best way to ensure that freedom will be preserved. The Scottish philosopher Alexander Tytler, who lived during the time of the American Revolution and writing of the US Constitution, summed these views:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure.

From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years.

These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”

There are many interesting questions if citizens rely on government to do “God’s Work.”

If a government takes a portion of a man’s wages and does good with it, has the man also done good? If a government takes away a portion of a woman’s property and does evil with it, has the woman also done evil?

When a rich man pays more in taxes than a poor person, is he more Godly? If the government then does evil, is he more to blame? A woman works for the government and uses other people’s tax money and does “God Work” with it, is this government woman now a good/Godly woman? If I legally try to avoid paying taxes, does that not make me an “Ungodly” man?

Today, the US government (federal, state and local) takes nearly 50% of a middle-class person’s paycheck after all taxes are factored in (income taxes, Social Security, sales tax, real estate taxes, gas tax, death taxes, phone taxes, highway tolls, sad etc.). Uncle Sam will spend more money in just this year (2004) than it spent combined between 1787 and 1900 - even after adjusting for inflation. I cringe at those numbers.

The Founding Fathers wanted nothing like the tax-consuming monster that we have as a government today. I also think of all the good work that could have be done if people were allowed to keep more of their own money and give it to organizations/people that they believe in their heart are doing God’s work. Maybe it comes down to trust. Will people do the right thing with their own money or must a government take a huge chunk of it to do the “right things?”

Except government rarely does anything right except for those tasks that were explicitly outlined in the Constitution as the Founding Father intended. I could cite many examples (such as where would you rather put $10,000 in retirement money - in Social Security or in your own 401k plan?) but the plight of black America illustrates this failure beyond comparison.

In 1965, the US government was going to wipe out poverty by the “Great Society” programs, in which to date over 3.5 trillion dollars has been spent. These federal programs were designed to “help families and children” or “buy votes” depending on your political viewpoint.

At the beginning of the 1960’s, the black out of wedlock birth rate was 22%. In the late 1975 it reached 49% and shot up to 65% in 1989. In some of the largest urban centers of the nation the rate of illegitimacy among blacks today exceeds 80% and averages 69% nationwide. As late as the 1970’s there was still a social stigma attached to a woman who was pregnant outside marriage. Now, government programs have substituted for the father and for black moral leadership. The black family and culture has collapsed (and white families are not that far behind).

Illegitimacy leads directly to poverty, crime and social problems. Out of wedlock children are four times more likely to be poor. They are much more likely to live in high crime areas with no hope of escape. In turn, they are forced to attend dangerous and poor-performing government schools, which directly leads to another generation of poverty.

Traditional black areas of Harlem, Englewood and West Philadelphia in the 1950s were safe working class neighborhoods (even though “poor” by material measures). Women were unafraid to walk at night and children played unmolested in the streets and parks. Today, these are some of the worst crime plagued areas of our nation. Work that was once dignified is now shunned. Welfare does not require recipients to do anything in exchange for their benefits. Many rules actually discourage work or provide benefits that reduce the incentive to find work.

The black abortion rate today is nearly 40%. Pregnancies among black women are twice as likely to end in abortion as pregnancies among white and Hispanic women.

The “Great Society” programs all had good intentions. Unfortunately, their real world results are that they have replaced the traditional/Christian models of family/work with that of what a government bureaucrat thinks it should be.

I could make an excellent argument that if the US government had hired former grand wizards of the KKK to run the “Great Society” programs, and if they had worked every day from 1965 to today without rest, they could have hardly have done better in destroying black America than the “Works of God” that the government has done or is trying to do.

I have visited many countries in which the government “guarantees” that everyone has a job, a place to live, education, health care and cradle to grave “government help” for all children and families. It all sounds great except that the people in these countries are/were miserable. They wanted to escape but were forced by their governments, at the end of a gun, to stay. The “worker’s paradises” of socialist and communist counties are chilling reminders of letting governments do “God’s Work.”

The Bible clearly states that we are to help those in need. The question is “Who should help those in need?” I firmly believe that scripture and the historical evidence strongly support that individuals, private organizations and churches should be the ones doing the heavy lifting.

Government help should be the last resort. “Charity,” enforced by the government, is not charity, it is extortion. “Charity,” delivered by the government, is not charity, it is a bribe which corrupts both the giver and the receiver.

Very Sincerely,

2banana

[aimee5291]

‘bright, likable, and deeply sincere’

are you kidding me?!! Yikes!!

[brytlea]

If I remember correctly, I was struck by the fact that Moore quizzed Hannity on what the *sermon* was about. As a former Catholic, I don’t recall ever calling the Homily the Sermon (but maybe that’s regional or something) and I rarely recalled what it was about after I walked out the door. It made me wonder if Moore ever attended a Catholic service...it just seemed a little weird. Of course, I also have a difficult time believing Moore as a spokesperson for Christianity. I know we are not supposed to judge someone’s salvation, but we were told that we would know them by their fruits.

[missycocopuffs]

Michael Moore is married?!? This should be in Breaking News!

[missycocopuffs]

Michael Moore is married?!? This should be in Breaking News!

[nickcarraway]

I don’t remember Michael Moore being pacifist in the 90s.

[missycocopuffs]

Wow, my FR has been seriously deranged since yesterday evening...very slow...sorry about the double post.

[nickcarraway]

Hannity has little room to argue with Michael Moore, since he is a big time cafeteria Catholic.

[murron]

We always called it the sermon when I was younger, and I could remember the “sermon” if the priest was a good speaker.

[NYer]

Government help should be the last resort.

And only on a temporary basis. But the problem for most today is that gov't handout programs create dependency which in turn creates a large voting bloc. Essentially, it is a contemporary form of slavery. And once in place, can never be removed without incurring the wrath of the recipients and their lobbyists. It is insidous, at the very least.

[brytlea]

I have only heard a few priests who were good speakers. I think they are more often good administrators. However, it was just weird that he kept pressing Hannity for an answer (which Hannity didn’t give him). As if that marked whether or not he went. I’d like to give Moore a quiz on the Bible.

[GOP Poet]

Yes. I remember these interviews well and specifically Micheal's discussing Jesus and what Jesus taught as it holds up to contemporary events and actions.

My gut instinct often was that Michael knew his audience and was trying to one mock them and taunt them with his intellectual reasoning of God, Jesus, religion, and bible. Which sounds a bit convoluted but Micheal's style is to manipulate people with trite resentments and concerns the audience may hold or hold dear and be unaware of. He does this often with issues of class which many people-- whether they like it or not or want to admit it or not--make assumptions about other 'classes' whether those assumptions are small, large, accurate or inaccurate.

Michael plays on these assumptions and often subconscious concerns to present his own flimsy highly biased presentation. He is highly successful because of this exploitation. He did this very much in the interview with Sean. Might Michael truly be a pacifist because of his religious upbringing? Yes. Does he thoughtfully and with the open heart of a Christian discuss socialism, Marxism its restraints on God or how it undermines God? No he did not. He forth rightly used whatever heart strings may pull on a Christian to manipulate his OWN socialist, liberal ideals which is what Satan does.

Evil quotes the bible too, but only in use toward his objective to get one AWAY from Christ and dependent on evil. This is exactly what Michael did and does. One has to listen to people like this with the holy spirit inside, not just with their intellect. The holy spirit in me at the time notice all of this manipulation right away and it did not sit well then as it did not sit well when I read how the writer of this article was so manipulated as they were trite in their assessment of Micheal missing one very important element of any Christian which is the spiritual gut instinct--the weighing against prayer and how it sits inside the soul of another. My soul felt ill listening to Michael through out. Sort of how I felt when I listened to Barack Obama quoting scripture.

To fight this sort of evil I believe we must also know our own crosses and not let the evil ones tell us what they are (such as telling us we are racists or that we should hate white people or people of wealth--all of which is content to be carried to the Lord and not assessed from people who do not even know us like the Michael Moores' and Barack Obamas' of the world. (Heaving emphasis on OF THE WORLD).

They use the tiniest shame or negative passing thought we may have and exploit it for evil good, not the Lord's. Know your cross and pick it up and follow the Lord or just pick it up and follow the Lord, but do not let Michael Moore dictate what your cross should be according to him and follow Michael.

[Mad Dawg]

Hannity is a CINO.

[GOP Poet]

Michael Moore is married?!? This should be in Breaking News!

EXACTLY!!!!!!!!

[brytlea]

My soul felt ill listening to Michael through out.

Excellent description and I know exactly what you mean. Good post.

Personally, I would love nothing better than for someone like Michael Moore or Bill Mahr to come to Christ and be transformed. What a witness that would be.

[GOP Poet]

oh by the way, I hope it is clear when i said 'your' i meant the universal your as in "pick up your cross" etc. thanks for letting me use your post as a platform for discussing what Michael really is doing to manipulate the world. :-)

I thought your comment was right on as well.

[brytlea]

I knew what you meant. It was very well said.