The War on Liberalism
We’ve labeled what is going on in America as the Second American Revolution and the Second Civil War. Both these labels convey the seriousness and the stakes of what is involved, but they may not be as accurate as the description Rush Limbaugh has recently been using, which is that we are in a war against liberalism. Of course, anything Rush says will drive self-identified ‘liberals’ into hysteria, but there is an impersonal truth in what he is saying that needs to be understood. The ‘war against liberalism’ is really a military-style moniker for Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’. Both have nothing to do with physical fights against individuals or groups of individuals, and everything to do with defending and restoring the rightful place of God, and faith in God, in American thought and life. In one of the oldest essays on this site, we wrote:
About a century ago, the word ‘liberal’ generally referred to attitudes and ideas promotive of political and economic freedom. To be liberal was therefore right in step with American patriotism—with a pride borne of genuine reverence for the freedom-honoring Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of America. But over the last hundred years or so, the concept of what is ‘liberal’ has shifted dramatically. Whittaker Chambers was an American-born Communist who spied for the Soviet Union and famously later rejected Communism and turned witness against Alger Hiss in the 1950’s. Chambers understood communism’s oppression of freedom and its effect on the human spirit, and zeroed in on the error that corrupted the idea of liberalism: the mistake of believing the definition and promotion of political and economic freedom is the province of man to the exclusion of God. In describing the argument of the communist, Chambers wrote: "if man's mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?" He correctly noted that the core struggle between communism and the free world was a struggle between "those who reject and those who worship God." This conflict is not new to mankind. St. Paul had already spotted this type of thinking and rebuked it, calling it the ‘carnal mind’ that is ‘enmity against God’. But as this thought of man as supreme over God has subtly but persistently and forcefully spread, its effect is to argue that human government, alias ‘man’s mind’, can be the substitute for God. It encourages man’s faith to be in government and men rather than God, and to inject human opinion to supplant God’s laws of righteousness and moral living. We wrote those words as a preliminary to a discussion of how government-as-god thinking created the sub-prime mortgage mess. We’ve since written of how the same government-as-god thinking is behind the Obamacare disaster: The nationalization of healthcare does not reflect a harmless swing of the political pendulum that does not concern the church. It is not dismissible under some high-minded but utterly misguided notion of ‘rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’. It is the singular method of forcing all Americans, and by extension, all the rest of humanity, to fully and finally accept human government in place of God. If you think that last sentence is alarmist or too extreme, sit yourself down and force yourself to think again. The design of nationalized healthcare is that human government becomes the definer and regulator of what is called ‘health’ for all of the governed, and the sole determiner of what life’s potential shall be for any individual. Do you not see how absolute and far-reaching that is? Everything we eat, drink, think, say or do can be regulated in the name of the government’s evaluation of its impact on our physical and mental health. Everything. And to be sure the point is not lost, we’ve also written bluntly about liberalism’s twin sister, socialism:
Socialism is the removal of God and individuality from society, replaced by human government and its control of the masses. Socialism dishonors and denies the connection between individual initiative, responsibility, accountability--and reward or punishment. Theologically speaking, socialism is the denial of the fundamental Christian concept of working out one’s own salvation according to the laws of moral living. Socialism denies God as the source of morals and substitutes the opinions of humans in power—in simpler terms, socialism replaces Christian morals with the shifting whims of political correctness. Socialism then defines its own heaven and hell on earth, and carries out the sentencing of humans to one or the other based on conformity or non-conformity with these ever-shifting standards of what those in power like or don’t like. A society-wide determination to deny God is the path to ruin. Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” was all about reversing this society-wide determination to deny God. Because he knows, as we’ve warned, the stakes in this war are extreme: Let’s be as plainspeaking as possible. Judeo-Christian theology and teachings formed the foundation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of America. They have shaped the nation and its citizens from the very beginning; in fact, American society reflects the fact that Judeo-Christian teaching has permeated the laws of the US. The American culture that has evolved from this theology and these teachings is far from perfect in many respects, but it is infinitely better in every material respect—fairness, justice, mercy, opportunity, individual dignity—than any other culture. To say so is to be informed and honest, not arrogant; but to refuse to say so is to endorse and enable a national, cultural suicide that would harm all of humankind. So as usual, Rush Limbaugh has helped immensely in identifying more precisely just exactly what this war is all about. There is just one more dimension to this war—and that’s the way in which Islam enters the war in a bizarre alliance with the godlessness of liberalism. More on that later… Paul Gable September 8, 2010 |