Category: Current Events

If you’re wondering why very many Christians support Trump, despite his vulgarities, infidelities and evidence of his moral divagation, consider the vexed question of “conscience rights” that, in the mind of those same Christians, have been challenged or trampled on by previous Democratic administrations. Trump has been their defender, judging from his words and actions. (Remember,too, that Christianity, properly understood, is a refugium peccatorum, a refuge of sinners. I’d say Trump qualifies, provided he doesn’t knock over the lamp in the catacomb.)

There’s easy evidence of the great threat to a widely understood concept of religious liberty and conscience rights in our Democracy. — and a fierce ongoing debate over them. Powerful forces, inside and outside some religious circles, take a more liberal view of things like gay rights and abortion. It’s all swirled up in the “culture wars,” which are at heart, religious-cultural wars. This hardly needs stating, but I state it here for the heck of it. Consider the narrowly decided U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting bakers, printers and florists, to name just a few professions.

According to the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, a Catholic nurse in a Vermont emergency room was ordered to assist in an abortion. A Virginia teacher was fired for using the wrong pronoun with a “transgendered” student (the Catholic Church and other religious bodies believe transgenderism is unnatural and harmful to those who seek to alter their sexual identity). A Michigan  pharmacists lost his job after refusing to dispense an abortion-inducing drug. Again, according to The League, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and Catholic schools to hire those who identify openly as gay. I confess I haven’t checked an ACLU site to confirm this, but, from my memories as a reporter, I believe it to be the case.

So — look for religious liberty to be a burning issue in any debate between Trump and the ultimate Democratic nominee. And consider the possibility that even many Democrats may be conflicted on this score.

We can be very sure, based on his recent statements, that Beto O’Rourke is not among them. And he is not alone among those who believe religious, and specifically Christian citizens should leave their religious convictions in the pews. Once out in the public square, they must march in the liberal’s parade.

I’m always reminded of that old quip by Ukrainian-American comedian Yakov Smirnoff: that it was perfectly alright to practice your religion in the old Soviet Union, as long as you didn’t disturb the other inmates.

And I am aware of at least one American father who went to jail overnight for wanting to be the gatekeeper of what his child was forced to read at school. This was in Lexington, Mass some years back.

A night in jail isn’t exactly a trip to the gulag. But I’m reminded of the late Chicago Cardinal-Archbishop Francis George’s now famous quote:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Old reporter’s adage: time will tell.

 

 

 

 

 

I write, to be (somewhat) clear and in order not to be (totally) misunderstood, not of Trump, the socialist barbarians challenging him or of any particular brand of politics. Rather I reflect briefly on this Saturday morning ( 10/12/19) of the weekend on which Blessed John Henry Newman will be canonized, upon the barbarism — social, political, moral — that is always with us and within us. This has been prompted by a random re-reading of Baylor University Theology and Literature Professor Ralph C. Wood’s monograph on Flannery O’Connor (Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.)

Wood notes that O’Connor, a Georgia native and Catholic, proffered Christianity — even of the fundamentalist variety — as “a divine remedy for the perennial human malaise.” Europe, and much of the rest of the west, is in the process of weeding Christianity out of its civilization. Professor Wood notes what St. Augustine, in The City of God, had to say about that — that evil corrupts “not chiefly individuals but rather civilizations.” Rome believed its civilization to be eternal. The Visigoths put an end to that notion. But so did Rome’s economic, moral and religious corruption.

G.K. Chesterton (quoted by Wood) believed civilizations dwell alongside barbarism, contrary to our notion that the human species has risen steadily from the primordial mud . (For my part, I’d say American life and all of us who live our American lives are currently stalked by wild, ravenous beasts within and without. But I concede that one American’s barbarism is another’s idea of civilization. You have only to go to the internet or the movies to be convinced of that.)

We’ve relied heretofore on “simple majorities” to protect the received traditions and inherited wisdom that are the vanguard of civilization, Chesterton adding, “the civilization sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form.” (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, first published in 1925 — between the barbarity of WWI and civilization’s horrific relapse into WWII.)

At the moment — or, perhaps, once again in our history — civilization is looking exhausted. I know I’m exhausted, and have no one to blame but myself. How about you?

Meanwhile, what does soon-to-be-canonized Blessed John Henry Newman have to say about this? Volumes! But all I can remember right now is his prayer, “lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. The night is dark, and I am far from home.”

I was actually disappointed a few years back when the rabidly, if artfully, politically correct city of Cambridge, Mass. decided to stop dressing up its parking citations with  a flowing sequence of Yoga positions, suggesting that proper parking practices assured greater urban harmony. Don’t know why they stopped that practice. Printing costs, maybe? It was worth it if at least one harried parking scofflaw, finding that dreaded flapper under his wiper, was borne from indignation toward niruddha or nirvana or wherever happy Yogis go to find tranquility. (I concede that a mere warning, a happy face and a piece of chocolate would be my ticket to serenity.)

I thought of this – though  it’s an imperfect parallel – when I read that a Ford dealer in Chatom, Alabama had decided to offer a free shotgun, Bible and American flag with every purchase of a vehicle, first requiring that, in order to redeem the promotion, buyers pass all requirements for firearm ownership as well as for vehicle ownership.

In Alabama, it’s probably safe to say that many, if not most prospective buyers already have perfectly good shotguns, Bibles and flags at home, so the other dealers on ‘Bama’s auto mile probably aren’t being outsold on the strength of this campaign alone. And for many obvious reasons, Ford quickly ordered the dealer to omit the gun from the deal.

I stumbled on this serendipitous tidbit far from current troubling headline. Forgive me if I found some comfort in it – especially in the fact that we remain a diverse nation where law abiding people can follow divergent highways to satisfaction…and harmony. It’s enough to get me into the lotus position.

And the waggish author of this little item must be a Harvard grad or perhaps a frequent flier to the Bay State, because he or she is obviously familiar with life north and south of the great cultural divide. I say this because they suggested that car dealers in Cambridge consider offering a rainbow flag, a yoga mat, and a copy of Rules for Radicals with the purchase of each new Tesla.