America's Religious Awakening

We recently quoted Winston Churchill:

”When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits – not animals. There is something going on in time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

We’re in the middle of one of those times when great forces are on the move, and great questions are being pressed on thinking people everywhere and of every age. Duty is calling.

• Are all religions the same?

• Do all monotheistic religions worship the same God?

• How do societies differ if the God they worship is hateful, vengeful, violent and oppressive, as compared with a God who is love?

• Is it possible to have a civilized society where one family practices the honor killing of its female children for the clothes they wear or the other people they speak to, and the family next door doesn’t?

• Can one society hallow women’s rights and at the same time accommodate enforced polygamy for men and monogamy for women?

• Can one society have judges who pronounce homosexual marriage to be a Constitutional right and at the same time accommodate a religion that ordains that homosexuals shall be killed?

• Did the founding fathers of America have Islam in mind when they wrote of ‘freedom of religion’?

• Is America a Christian nation?

The twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings of America may be feeling the press of these questions more than any age group, because they comprise a group that came of age mostly in a time of peace and relative prosperity, and are largely noncommittal or simply uninformed as to the importance of religion and theology in human history. Many have been led by their liberal professors to believe that the whole question of God, and of man’s relationship to God, is really just a marginal issue for humanity; something that ‘bitter clingers’ and other simpletons fret about, but the bigger, better thinkers among us can just ignore. But human life has a way of teaching every generation that these subjects just can’t be ignored. The price of ignoring or wishing them away is human catastrophe. Truth matters.

“Religion” and ‘theology’ are, in the first instance, just words. They bring forth dramatically different meanings in different eras. For those coming of age in the secularized media culture of the last 30-50 years, religion is some ancient subject having something to do with Christmas or Easter, plus some boring weekly ritual that grandparents followed on Sundays at a church. “All” religions are more or less the same; no one really intelligent takes any of them seriously; and the elite of society just have to navigate around this silliness to get on with the real purpose of life, which is the accumulation of really cool experiences—bucket lists; ‘been there, done that’ lists—the best of which are also morality-free, ‘if-it-feels-good, do-it’ triumphs of sensualism (or as Churchill would have put it, of the things that keep us believing that we’re just animals, albeit smarter than average).

If there is to be a positive legacy of Obama, it will be that his radical left agenda, hidden in the election campaign but then sprung on the American people with stunning speed and brazen action, has awakened an entire American population, and many more around the world, to the need to think seriously about the questions we’ve described. The nationalization of healthcare is itself a displacement of God in favor of government, as we’ve noted before. But Obama’s support of the Ground Zero mosque has raised the subject of religion to a whole new level.

Pat phrases about legal rights and ‘freedom of religion’ just don’t cut it on the GZM question. The American people know damn well this isn’t a gesture of peaceful reconciliation. If it were, why not build a mosque, a church and a synagogue on the property? For that matter, why doesn’t Saudi Arabia build a Christian church in Mecca as a gesture of peace in the aftermath of 9/11?

Something much deeper is at issue here, and it is not too much to say that it is placing ‘modern’ humanity at a crossroads. The deepest question, paraphrasing Angelo Codevilla, is: who decides what truth and love are?

One simple answer to this question is: not mankind. A next-step answer to the question is: religion and theology. But then the inevitable question arises: which religion and theology?

The founding fathers of America were on the right track in answering this question. They enshrined Judeo-Christian principles in the founding of the nation, and ‘the tree is known by its fruit’. Leftist disinformation and historical revisionism notwithstanding, the United States of America as founded gave rise to the best, most civilized, prosperous, compassionate, forgiving, magnanimous society in all of human history—the direct result of following Judeo-Christian teaching as to what truth and love are.

Now, does this mean the founding fathers injected coded Judeo-Christian Scripture about truth and love into the founding documents? Not literally, but they captured the spirit of Judeo-Christian teaching in self-evident truths about the Creator, about men and women being created equal, and about individual rights endowed by God and inalienable from man. That spirit was strong enough to end human slavery; it is strong enough to equalize the sexes; it is strong enough to allow individual freedom and responsibility under God to serve as the foundation of a nation.

The stirring going on throughout the nation is really not about 2,000 page legislation that no one has read, or immigration law, or tax rates in this or that year, or even budget deficits—though all of those topics are important and have a secondary stirring effect in their own right. It’s really about the central importance and power and rightness of Judeo-Christian teaching about God and man, and whether we as Americans are awake enough to realize and affirm that teaching as the right place to start in deciding what truth and love are. It’s about whether we are awake enough to defend and protect that teaching ‘against all enemies, foreign and domestic’.

It’s truly a religious awakening, and truth will prevail.

Paul Gable

August 15, 2010