March, 2008

Deal Hudson discusses his book.

Onward, Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States, Simon & Schuster, March 11, 2008

There have many books about the so-called Religious Right in American politics. What makes Onward, Christian Soldiers distinctive is my exploration of its Catholic dimension. What is usually treated as exclusively an Evangelical movement is closely intertwined with the travails of the post-Vatican II era in the United States. I look not only at the Catholic contribution to the beginning of the movement in the 70s but also the specifically Catholic controversies that arose along the way involving figures like Joseph Cardinal Bernadin, Gov. Mario Cuomo, Sen. John Kerry, Father Robert Drinan, S. J., Father Frank Pavone, Archbishop Raymond Burke, and, of course, John Cardinal O’Connor.

Catholics don’t consider themselves part of the Religious Right. When I give lectures, I often ask Catholic audiences a series of questions. First, I usually ask, “Raise your hand if you consider yourself a social conservative.”  I remind them that a social conservative is someone who votes primarily on issues such as abortion, the defense of marriage and the family, opposition to euthanasia, and the need for traditional values in education. Most of the Catholics I talk to raise their hands.

Then I ask how many consider themselves religious conservatives. “Are your socially conservative attitudes rooted in your Catholic faith?” Again, most will raise their hands. But then I ask, “How many of you consider yourselves members of the political movement known as the Religious Right?” The number of raised hands drops at least to half, sometimes there are only a few still raised.

Even those Catholics whose voting behaviors, and the reasons for it, are identical to their Evangelical counterparts resist being stuck with the Religious Right label. One of the  stories I tell in Onward, Christian Soldiers is how Catholics were integral to the dramatic increase of religious conservative influence in American politics.  I also explain why Catholics fail to recognize that fact.
Catholics still haven’t quite become comfortable with Evangelical piety, as evinced recently in the weak Catholic response to the candidacy of former Baptist minister, Gov. Mike Huckabee.

More importantly, at the very moment Evangelical leaders were forming groups like the Moral Majority, the Catholic bishops were marching to the political left, using the then newly-created United States Catholic Conference as their political mouthpiece. The late 70s and early 80s began the migration of Catholics from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Alienated by the McGovern revolution, put off by the feminist agenda of the Carter administration, and attracted to the traditional patriotism of Ronald Reagan, Catholics started becoming loyal Republicans at the very moment their bishops ramped up their efforts to mobilize them for “social justice.”

While the effect of the Reagan presidency was to legitimize and empower Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the effect on Catholics was to leave them caught between their newly-discovered regard for the Republican Reagan and their respect for the authority of their bishops. These same bishops made it clear that Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies were at odds with Catholic social teaching as interpreted by their Conference. The problem for the bishops in their constant diatribe toward Reagan was the looming presence of the new pope, John Paul II, who obviously respected Reagan in spite of his low esteem among American bishops.

Although John Paul II helped to bolster the regard for Reagan among Catholics, the bishops’ message had its influence. With their pastoral letters, such as “Economic Justice for All” (1982) the bishops made many Catholics who voted for Reagan wonder if they should return to the Democratic Party of their parents and grandparents. They hoped the Democrats would eventually produce leaders who, like Reagan, wanted to protect unborn life, defend women who wanted traditional family roles, and raise the banner of patriotism and American exceptionalism. Those Catholics, often called “Reagan Democrats,” are still waiting.  Some have waited so long they have grown comfortable with calling themselves “Republicans,” even though they draw the line at being called members of the Religious Right.

Many of the Catholics who voted for Reagan over Carter and Mondale, George H.W. Bush over Dukakis, and George W. Bush over Gore and Kerry, were motivated by their religious conviction—life, family, and traditional values—which they saw best represented by the GOP and its candidates. Both their voting behavior and the convictions behind them made many of these Republican Catholics part of the religious conservative movement that made the GOP the dominant party between 1980 and the present. These Catholics were part of the Religious Right, whether they liked it or not.

It came as no surprise to me to be told by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Don Wildmon that Catholics made up as much as 30% of the membership in their organizations.  Catholics had nowhere else to go if they wanted to be politically engaged outside of a political party. Those who were specifically motivated by the pro-life issue were convinced Evangelicals were doing more to overturn Roe v. Wade than their own bishops.

In Onward, Christian Soldiers, I document the surprising role of Catholics in the creation of the religious conservative movement. Paul Weyrich, a member of the Melkite Greek Orthodox Church, gave Jerry Falwell the idea for organizing the Moral Majority, as well as the name itself. The anti-ERA organizing effort of Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic attorney from St. Louis, was the first time religious activists were brought together to oppose the liberalizing trends of the 70s. Weyrich and Schlafly are, without any exaggeration, the godparents of the Religious Right.

Another important Catholic figure in the founding of the Religious Right is Dr. Jack Willke, the first president of National Right to Life (NRTL). It was Catholics like Dr. Willke who made the abortion issue important for Evangelicals. Dr. Willke explained to me that it was predominately Catholics who participated in the early days of the pro-life movement. It was the Catholic involvement among religious conservatives in the late 70s and early 80s that put abortion to the forefront.  Evangelicals were originally motivated to get organized by an IRS threat, during the Carter administration, to strip private Christian schools of their not-for-profit status for reasons of racial discrimination. When critics of the Religious Right call it a one-issue movement they are missing the broader concerns, all centered around the protection of the Christian family, that led to the frustrations creating the mobilization of pastors across the country, not just in the South.

The pivotal role of Catholics in the abortion fight during the early 70s was also the result of the pro-life office of the United States Catholic Conference led by Monsignor James McHugh. McHugh had helped organize National Right to Life under the auspices of the bishops. Within a few years the bishops allowed the lay leaders of NRTL to take the organization under lay control. At the same time, the bishops were moving away from their focus on abortion—they were adopting the social teaching of the “seamless garment,” in which abortion became one issue among others.

The McGovern revolution occurred in 1972, and by 1976 it was firmly ensconced not only in the Democratic Party but in the United States Catholic Conference. The political left in the Catholic Church has remained at the head of most significant Catholic institutions. They have attempted on several occasions to generate a Religious Left to offset the influence of the Religious Right, but to little effect. There is little or no religious vitality to support the Religious Left—religious groups who have embraced liberal political causes have been in decline for decades.

In addition, the Religious Left has not challenged the Democratic Party in the same way the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority impacted the GOP. Religious Left leaders have simply provided religious justification for the feminist and homosexual activism in the Democratic Party, while the Republican Party was forced to embrace a pro-life, family values platform considered extreme by its traditional mainstream Protestant leadership.

As I predict in the last chapter of Onward, Christian Soldiers, the Democratic Party will do its best to appear more faith-friendly in time for the 2008 election, a challenge for which Sen. Barack Obama seems custom made. The Republican Party has already dodged the bullet of a Rudy Giuliani nomination which would have destroyed the religious conservative coalition, but there will always be pressures within the GOP to limit the influence of the pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals, as I found out myself as chair of Catholic outreach in the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns.

The Religious Right has been pronounced “dead” many times, 1992, 1998, and, most recently, 2006. What these eager prognosticators refuse to recognize is that the vitality of American religion, especially among Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and orthodox Catholics, continues to fuel the movement. Take away the growth of these Christian groups and the Religious Right would come to an end. As long as there is growth among these groups who believe the Scriptures and the Christian tradition that teaches an objective truth about morality and society, there will be people of faith in politics who oppose the use of law and government to drive religious influence out of American culture.

Deal Hudson is the president of the Morley Institute and the former editor-in-chief of Crisis magazine. He runs a Catholic website and is a Catholic activist.

December 2007

Dinesh D’Souza, a member of the Catholic League’s board of advisors, is the author of the recently published book, What’s So Great About Christianity. Bill Donohue spoke to him by phone about his new book. Here is an excerpt of their conversation:

Bill: You talk about the resurgence  of atheism at the same time that you note the global triumph of Christianity. How do you account for this kind of bipolar response?

Dinesh: We have two trends that on the surface seem to be contradictory. One is the rise of atheism, and there’s certainly a rising militancy of atheism, and on the other hand, the sort of triumph of religion, and specifically Christianity, worldwide. Many people think that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, but in reality it’s Christian-ity. Islam is growing mainly through reproduction or through Muslims having large families. Christianity is growing both through reproduction and through conversion.

I see the militancy of the new atheism as a sort of a backlash against the realization that religion isn’t going away and there’s a sort of almost explicit atheist campaign now to say, “Okay, we can’t do much about the current generation, let’s go after the minds of the younger generation through the schools and through the universities. So we lost this round but maybe we can do better in the future.”

Bill: To one extent, 9-11 triggers in one’s mind what is going on with the radicalization of Islam, yet so much of militant atheism comes down to thrashing the Catholic Church on matters having nothing to do with Islam and terrorism, but sexuality. Could you comment on that?

Dinesh: Yes, I think that on first glance, it seems strange that people in the West who are liberal or secular in their values would see Christianity as a bigger threat than Islam. The reason this is odd is because Christianity has a lot to do with forming the central institutions and values of the West, including values secular people cherish. In fact, one of the themes of my book is to show how institutions like democracy, even science, certainly human rights, the concept of just war, the idea of compassion, which has become such a powerful value in our culture—these ideas are rooted in Christianity.

Bill: Ahmadinejad was at Columbia University recently and he was cheered by a certain segment of the student population. The only time they booed him was when he said that they didn’t have any homosexuals in Iran. So the sexuality aspect of this really seems to be more troublesome to some people than the threat of terror.

Dinesh: Well, here you’re putting your finger on something very critical and that is that Islam is viewed as a threat, you may say over there, but Christianity is viewed as a threat right here. In other words, Islam may want to impose the burqa and the rest of it on people in Afghanistan and in Iran, but Christianity is seen as interfering with the moral freedom of people here in the West, in other words, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco and so on. But this is why Christianity is the enemy—it’s not even so much a theological enemy—it’s a moral enemy. People don’t object to the Trinity or transubstantiation, as so much as what they object to is the Ten Commandments, the sort of moral code. This is very important because very rarely is the objection to Christianity explicitly stated in that way.

What’s the motive for atheism? Why are people attracted to it? Think about it his way: I don’t believe in unicorns but I don’t go around writing books about them. Why are guys like Hitchens on a secular crusade against Christianity and against religion? I think that their objection ultimately isn’t so much rational as it is a kind of objection that says that the idea of God puts moral judgment on the world. What the atheists want to do is get rid of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.

Bill: In your book you made a very insightful comment about the effect of Darwin on today’s militant atheists. How do these people account for the very existence of morality?

Dinesh: Morality is a massive problem for Metaphysical Dar-winism, and by Metaphysical Darwinism I mean the people who believe that evolution is not simply a theory of how life from A gave rise to life from B, but rather it is a comprehensive key that is the clue to unlocking how the entire universe, and certainly all of life, functions. The problem for the Darwinians is simply this: evolution is based fundamentally on survival, reproduction, and self-interest. As Kant noted a long time ago, it’s the very definition of morality to check self-interest. “I would like to do this but the little voice says no,” or “I’m inclined to do that but the commandment says no,” so the essence of morality is ultimately to militate against self-interest. Now, why would such a quality evolve? The Darwinians have been now for several decades beating their heads to the ground to try to find an adequate evolutionary account for morality. They essentially have to show that what seems to be unselfish, what seems to operate against self-interest is actually a disguised form of self-interest that is simply not obvious to us. So for example, a mother who jumps into the car to save her son is actually just trying to perpetuate her own genes. She may not be aware of that but that’s the reason she’s doing it. That’s the evolutionary fraud that’s pushing her in that direction.

The evolutionists have had modest success in trying to explain why people who share the same genes might act for the welfare for each other. But, of course, as I get up to give my seat to somebody on a bus, I don’t know that person. There’s no reason to believe that they would ever help me. Or if I donate blood, or if I am a soldier giving my life for my country. Here these are sacrifices of strangers, or Mother Teresa, or Maximillian Kolbe, and so on. You can go on and on down the list as a whole domain of human morality that cannot be reduced to simply, “I’m just doing it because this person is, in some sense, related to me.”

Bill: It’s funny you mention that, because the fixation on Mother Teresa that Christopher Hitchens has lies to some extent with the fact that he thinks that the state ought to salvage the poor. He doesn’t accept the idea of altruism and so he looks at this little Albanian nun as almost a threat to everything that he stands for.  

Dinesh: I think that is part of it but there’s another part of it that is much deeper than that, and it’s the following: Mother Teresa, at one point, was hugging a leper, at which point someone said to her, “I wouldn’t do that for all the money in the world.” And she replied, “I wouldn’t either, I’m doing it for the love of Christ.” Now what this suggests is that Mother Teresa’s motivation goes way beyond secular explanation. Ultimately a certain level of human goodness requires transcendent motivation. This is what gets Hitchens. They can say, “Obviously one does not have to be a believer to do good.” And that’s true. But the question is, “Does the kind of life that Mother Teresa represented, can that occur with a purely secular outlook? What would be its rationale? Why would you act that way if you didn’t have her motive?” I think this is what makes Mother Teresa a supreme example of human goodness. That’s why it’s so important for the atheists to pull her down.

Bill: You mention also in your book about Darwin, how he lost his faith at least in part because he rejected Christianity’s concept of eternal damnation. I can’t help but think there is almost an infantile rejection of authority that we are working with here, or a kind of  narcissism. The concept of do’s and don’ts, and eternal damnations, and the Ten Command-ments—this is positively threatening to these people, and particularly when it gets into the realm of sexuality.

Dinesh: Yes, I think we’re seeing a new phenomenon that’s occurred in the West really since World War II. This is the idea that the only guide for how I should act is my inner self, an inner self in pursuit of unceasing self-fulfillment and self-expression. My point is that what happened in the 1960s was that this morality went mainstream. And so we began to see, if you will, not only an attack on traditional morality as sort of constraining this quest for self-fulfillment, but a sort of new morality that adopts self-fulfillment itself as a moral ideal and sort of turned against traditional morality as being nothing more than a disguised form of hypo-crisy. This is why whenever people espouse moral values and fall short of them, there’s almost a gleeful howl that goes through the culture: “Look, you espouse A but you do B.” And so hypocrisy has now become our cardinal virtue. And why? Because in this code of self-fulfillment, the only value is be true to yourself, and to be true to yourself means, “Don’t say one thing and do another.” In a sense, you may say that the standard is lowered to bring it into line with human desire.

Bill: Atheists talk about how religion poisons everything, yet when atheism is embraced by the nation-state—we’ve seen this in the twentieth century with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao—it always winds up with blood. How can they logically even begin to say that the secular crusade embraced by these totalitarians in the twentieth century is somehow triggered by some religious impulse?

Dinesh: Well, this is where the atheists are on very weak ground. They try to show that religion is the source of most of the mass murders and conflict in history, but the reality, of course, is that the atheist regimes are. And so people like Dawkins and Hitchens do backwards somersaults to try to show that totalitarianism, even if it is explicitly secular, arises out of a mindset that is very similar to that of religion. And so, for example, their extremely convoluted efforts to show that communism was just another name for a certain kind of religion. So the idea here is to blame religion not only for the crimes of religious people but also for the crimes of atheists.

Bill: It’s been great talking to you. Congratulations on your splendid book.

Dinesh: Thanks, Bill.

Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity is published by Regnery. 

Libby Sternberg

November, 2007

As they went to the polls on November 7, 1922—85 years ago this month—the voters of Oregon were asked to approve an amendment to the state’s education laws that read in part:

“…Any parent, guardian or other person in the state of Oregon, having control or charge or custody of a child under the age of 16 years and of the age of 8 years or over at the commencement of a term of public school of the district in which said child resides, who should fail or neglect or refuse to send such child to a public school for the period of time a public school shall be held during the current year in said district shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and each day’s failure to send such a child to a public school shall constitute a separate offense….”

Translation: if you send your child to a private school instead of a public one, you face a fine, imprisonment, or both.

Nowhere in that law was the word “Catholic” mentioned, but the goal was clear: to shut down all Catholic schools and to steer their students into public schools, where threatening “papist” views could be safely blanched from the youngsters’ minds.

The law was championed by the Ku Klux Klan and other zealous nativists who believed that Catholic immigrants threatened to bring bolshevism to America after World War I. Grand Dragon Fred Gifford, a chief advocate of the school statute, believed that “the American public school, non-partisan, non-sectarian, efficient, [and] democratic,” was “for all the children of all the people.”  (By “non-sectarian,” he meant “non-denominational Christian;” public schools, though drenched in religion at the time, were of a “non-sectarian” type.)  Gifford went so far as to say that immigrants (“mongrel hordes”) “must be Americanized. Failing that, deportation is the only remedy.”

Anti-Catholic nativists believed that Catholics could overthrow the government at a moment’s notice, turning Americans into knaves of the Roman pope. They believed that only by attending a government-controlled school could children learn to be true Americans, and become properly grounded in American history and the principles of liberty.

The campaign for the Oregon law included a mix of hysteria and grand theater. An ages-old anti-Catholic device—lectures by an “escaped nun”—was trotted out.  “Sister Lucretia” was taken around the state, sometimes speaking in public schools themselves, to denounce Catholicism and stir up audiences against the Roman church.

An anti-Catholic, pro-public school booklet entitled The Old Cedar School was circulated as well. This allegorical tale included the story of a farmer’s son who converts to Catholicism and sends his children to the “Academy of St. Gregory’s Holy Toe Nail,” where they study “histomorphology, the Petrine Supremacy, Transubstantiation, and…the beatification of Saint Caviar.”

The story isn’t content to merely ridicule Catholics and what they believe. It paints a picture of a Catholic bishop who actually burns down a public school.

The message was hardly subtle—Catholics and their schools were not just threats to the public schools, but a mere matchstick away from destroying them entirely. It was no wonder, then, that the King Kleagle of the Pacific Klan declared that the battle for the Oregon School Law was about “the ultimate perpetuation or destruction of free institutions, based upon the perpetuation or destruction of the public schools.”

In short, if you sent your kids to private schools, particularly Catholic ones, you were against public schools and against what America stood for.

Ironically, though the nativists feared bolshevism, their insistence on one government-controlled school system actually smacked of the very communism that they sought to avoid, a point made by Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore. “The whole trend of such legislation,” wrote Curley, “is state socialism, setting up an omnipotent state…on the principles of Karl Marx.”

Catholic defenders felt compelled to point out the obvious—that Catholic schools were absolutely American, that English was the language spoken in the schools, and that even their mottos were American (“For God and country”).

These arguments failed to persuade. Oregonians passed the law by a vote of 115,506 to 103,685.

But the arguments continued, this time in the courts of law, where Catholic plaintiffs challenged the new law as unconstitutional.

The lawyer for the state of Oregon told one court that juvenile delinquency had increased as attendance at non-public schools increased. Thus, he said, forced attendance at public schools was the only way to ward off “the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts.” He, like the anti-Catholic nativists who had championed the law, also warned of bolshevism. Children educated in private schools would be inclined to adopt the principles of “bolshevists, syndicalists, and communists,” he contended.  And he went on to warn that if the law was not upheld, cities across the country would be dotted with “elementary schools which instead of being red on the outside will be red on the inside.”

Despite such heated rhetoric, reason eventually prevailed. On June 1, 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “the child is not the mere creature of the state,” overturning the Oregon law and settling once and for all the question of whether Catholic schools had a right to exist in America.

In the unobstructed view of retrospect, it’s hard to understand the fear-mongering that led to the passage of the Oregon law. Even if one were to accept the preposterous claims of the law’s anti-Catholic supporters—that Catholics, out to destroy the Republic, were using their schools to advance their plan—Oregon’s demographics should have put nervous xenophobes at ease.

At the time, fewer than 10 percent of Oregon’s inhabitants were Catholic, and only 13 percent were foreign-born. Of the students attending school, 93 percent were in public schools already.
But the Oregon law was only the tip of a much larger iceberg that had been gaining heft for nearly a century.

From the mid-1800s until the battle for the Oregon law, the very formation and growth of America’s public school system was intertwined with an unsavory nativist movement that sought to use the newly-formed “common schools” to turn immigrants—mostly Catholics—into true Americans. Unfortunately, these reformers’ vision of what made a true American didn’t include the tenets, the rituals, the prayers, or even the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, they wished to inculcate children with a non-denominational brand of Protestant Christianity.

In these new common schools, Catholic children were forced to recite Protestant prayers, sing Protestant hymns, and use the King James, rather than the Douay, version of the Bible. Resisting students were punished, and the punishment was upheld by the courts.

Not surprisingly, this led to the blossoming of the Catholic school system; Catholic schools became havens for new immigrants. And while English was the language spoken in the schools, some classes were also offered in the immigrants’ native tongues. My father’s Catholic elementary school in Baltimore, for example, taught religion classes in Polish.

While the Oregon School Law might have died in 1925, the anti-Catholic sentiments that spawned it still leave a troubling legacy.  Today, the only K-12 schools that are cost-free to students in America are public ones. Unlike our post-secondary system, where students can use public funds in the form of grants, scholarship, GI Bill money, and the like at the institutions of their choice, the only schools automatically getting public funding at the K-12 level are public ones.

Nativist entanglement with the school law also led to the passage of so-called Blaine Amendments  in several states. Enacted in the late 1800s, these amendments prohibited the use of public funds for sectarian schools or institutions. For all practical purposes, “sectarian schools” was code for “Catholic schools.” As explained previously, “non-sectarian” meant the non-denominational brand of Protestant Christianity taught in public schools.

Even today, Blaine Amendments still stymie voucher and school choice advocates in the courts. And even in states without such amendments, courts will sometimes interpret state and federal law as if Blaine Amendments were on the books.

In addition, today’s voucher opponents, when making their case, often unwittingly use the language of the proponents of the Oregon law, by asserting claims about the necessity for enshrining the public school in a special place in American life because such schools teach us how to be Americans.

Even a current mainstream organization that attempts to block voucher programs has some roots in a movement to stop Catholics.  Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a prominent voucher opponent in the public square and in the courtroom, started out with a different name—Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Formed in 1947, the organization didn’t change its name until 1971.

This is not to say that those who oppose vouchers today are anti-Catholic. But they might be surprised to learn that they are standing shoulder-to-ideological shoulder with an unsavory cadre from history—those who, 85 years ago, sought to make the public school the preeminent educational institution in America by quashing diversity and stifling Catholics.

Making education free and available to all children was a noble goal. Had it not been overrun by distasteful political forces, parents might have been allowed to choose where that education would take place, without incurring a financial penalty.

Libby Sternberg is the former head of Vermonters for Better Education, a school choice organization. She is an Edgar-nominated author of several teen mysteries. Her new book, The Case Against My Brother, is set in 1922 Oregon against the backdrop of the campaign for the state’s School Law.

Donald Dietrich

October, 2007

Donald J. Dietrich, Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition. Transaction Publishers: To order, call (888) 999-6778.

Reviewed by Kenneth D. Whitehead

Hardly anyone disagrees today about how bad Hitler and the Nazi regime were for the world. Besides unleashing World War II, Hitler had plans to exterminate entire peoples—plans which he proceeded to carry out before the eyes of a too-long unbelieving world in his Holocaust against the Jews and others considered subhuman, and which surely did mark some kind of evil low point even amidst all of the other violence and horrors that characterized the unhappy 20th century.

Nazism was especially bad for the Germans themselves. They lived under it longer than anyone else and suffered greatly from it, even though as a people they also furnished the principal means by which Hitler was able to inflict it upon the rest of the world for a time. German Catholics, in particular, were placed in the unenviable position of living under a government run by elements who only later finally came to be seen as criminals and madmen. While these criminals and madmen were in power, however, they constituted for German Catholics “the governing authorities” to whom St. Paul teaches Christians must be “subject,” since “there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). The Church has generally interpreted this teaching to mean that good Christians must normally obey the duly constituted “powers that be” where they live—but obviously not to the point of falling into sin themselves.

Thus, living under the Nazi regime did constitute a genuine moral dilemma for Catholics and for the Church. This was especially true at first, when it was not always as easy for people living at the time to see the evil of the regime as it is for us today looking back. As the regime’s evils unfolded, many of them could be interpreted, at least for a while, as mere aberrations or excesses. If the Western powers themselves went on for years trying to “do business with Hitler,” it is at least understandable that Christians living under the regime should perhaps have tried to do the same more extensively and for a longer period of time than we would consider to be wise or even moral today.

So while resisting pretty much from the outset some obvious evils—such as the Nazi takeover of the media, education, youth activities, and the like—the Church did also try to accommodate the regime in other ways. For example, the concordat which Pope Pius XI concluded with the Nazi regime in 1933—it was signed by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII—is much criticized today, but nevertheless provided the legal basis for the Church to try to deal with the regime at all.

Donald J. Dietrich is a professor of theology at Boston College and a specialist in German Catholic history. He has written other books, notably on the subject of why some Catholics in Germany supported and others opposed the police state. In Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition, he focuses on the experience of German Catholics as they attempted, in the light of their faith, to deal with the barbarism of the Nazi era and the problems and conflicts brought about by Nazism and the Second World War.

One of the author’s basic premises is the incompatibility of Catholic moral teaching with Nazism. Hence, as the true nature of the regime became clearer, both the Church and individual Catholics generally became more opposed to it and more inclined to mount various forms of resistance to it (although the penalties for resistance of any kind could sometimes be drastic!). But these developments were neither automatic nor particularly rapid. As Dietrich notes, “until it was too late, most Germans…did not realize that the Nazis wanted something totally revolutionary.”

The incompatibility between the Catholic faith and the Nazi regime was real. Dietrich examines and documents how Catholic moral teaching came to be applied to what was actually going on in Germany. His main focus is not on what the Church or the Catholic bishops were doing or reacting to, but rather on what Catholics themselves were doing and reacting to. In particular, he covers in some detail how various Catholic theologians and thinkers gradually came to see, and hence to condemn, the evils being perpetrated by the Nazis.

Not only did these thinkers and theologians finally reject the tenets of the regime. In the course of the Nazi era, they succeeded in developing a new personal and existential theology of the human person—emphasizing the dignity of the human person—which became one of the pillars of the official teaching adopted on this subject by the Second Vatican Council. This new approach proved essential in enabling the Church to participate as a full partner in the debates and discussions concerning democracy and human rights that took place after World War II. Both the vocabulary and the concepts of this new theology were largely developed by German theologians in reaction to the brutality of the Nazis.  Some of these same German theologians also proved to be very influential at Vatican II.

The major achievement and importance of this book, in fact, lies in Dietrich’s survey and analysis of the thinking of a number of major Catholic thinkers and writers who developed this new theology in reaction to Nazism. They include such still well known figures as Karl Adam and Romano Guardini, or, in the next generation, the Jesuits Gustav Gundlach and Karl Rahner as well as the latter’s student, Johannes B. Metz. The degree to which some of these writers at first thought they were obliged to come to some kind of accommodation with Nazism was a surprise to this reviewer—although, of course, that stance did not endure.

The author also includes chapters on Nazi terror, sometime Catholic ambivalence towards the Third Reich (especially at first), the scope of Christian resistance, and resistance in the daily life of German Catholics. Dietrich is not uncritical of the overall Catholic record. He does not think the Church opposed Nazism as vigorously as she should have; this was because she continued to seek “institutional survival” instead. “Nazi ideology was critiqued by the Church when it affected the institution…but accepted when it focused on nationalistic patriotism.”

“Since the churches sought institutional survival,” he further generalizes, “meaningful resistance did not spring from Christian churches but from their members’ attempts to uphold their faith.” He includes an interesting chapter on how average German Catholics in practice often did act on their Catholic and Christian principles, contrary to what the Nazi regime was urging.

Dietrich is especially critical of what he sees as the inadequacy of the general Catholic reaction to Nazi anti-Semitism and aggression against the Jews in particular. He thinks Catholics and the Church tended to see and condemn only “pagan racism,” and hence did not always take the full measure of the evil of the virulent and indeed lethal brand of anti-Semitism which, in the hands of Hitler’s minions, led to Auschwitz and the Holocaust against the Jews.

Though he is critical, however, Dietrich’s book is in no way an attack on Catholics or on the Church in the way that has become familiar in the anti-Pius XII books which have continued to appear; the authors of these books accuse the wartime pope as well as German Catholics of being sympathizers and even collaborators with the Hitler regime. On the contrary, Dietrich himself documents many instances of Catholic resistance even as he also judges that the Catholic resistance could have been stronger. Nevertheless, his own focus is so narrow in this book that he scarcely touches upon the Pius XII question at all, even though this would seem to be almost inescapably related to his own chosen subject matter. The period of German Catholic history with which he is concerned is exactly contemporaneous with the period during which the pope and the Church in Germany have been accused by a veritable legion of critics of having been “silent” in the face of Nazi persecution, if not actually enabling of it.

Not only is all this scarcely mentioned or even referred to, but Dietrich actually includes references to such anti-Pius authors as Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, David Kertzer, and even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, as if the biased, inaccurate, and agenda-driven “scholarship” of these writers merited serious consideration. Meanwhile he seems totally unaware of the considerable and formidable body of work produced by Catholics over the past decade in defense of the unjustly slandered wartime pope. This is a serious deficiency, considering the author’s subject matter.

Again with his narrow focus, Dietrich also seems oblivious to the fact that another Holocaust is currently going on before our very eyes in the current war on the unborn being waged by means of legalized abortion. He correctly draws the conclusion from the Nazi period that “dehumanization…does seem to be the crucial component needed for sanctioned murder.” Yet he also refers at one point to what he calls “the pro-choice culture of today” as if this were a wholly neutral fact and not another case of “state-sanctioned murder.” Yet the great value of this book lies in how it brings out the way German theologians grew in their understanding of the evil being done around them and reacted creatively. Should we not be doing the same in the face of the Holocaust that confronts us?

Kenneth D. Whitehead is a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League. His survey of the recent books on the Pope Pius XII controversy can be found on the League’s website: www.catholicleague.org.

September, 2007

Reviewed by William Donohue.

Every now and then I read a book that makes me want to stand up and cheer. The latest entry is Who Really Caresby Arthur C. Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. We’ve become e-mail “pen pals,” and I’m happy to say that Arthur is Roman Catholic.

Brooks has put together one of the most incredible indictments of the finger-pointing left-wing secular elites in recent memory. The same people who never stop lecturing the rest of us on our alleged greed, we learn, turn out to be the stingiest of them all. Others may have said this before, but no one has presented the data like Brooks. His evidence is overwhelming.

Who Really Cares pairs nicely with Paul Johnson’s 1988 best-seller, Intellectuals, and Peter Schweizer’s more recent book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do). Johnson detailed the unbelievable hy-pocrisy of some of the West’s greatest minds, from Marx and Rousseau to Sartre and Lillian Hellman; Schweizer did the same with today’s celebrities, from Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton to Barbara Streisand and Edward Kennedy.

Unlike the Johnson and Schweizer contributions, Brooks doesn’t focus on the big names—he makes comparisons based on demographic groups—but his rendering is similar: the reader walks away feeling a genuine contempt for the duplicity and arrogance of the lecturing class. And what will be of most interest to the readers of Catalyst, Brooks makes plain the wholly unearned reputation that secular liberals have in caring for the poor. They may have mastered the rhetoric of caring, but it is religious conservatives who are the champions of actually doing something to help the dispossessed.

Brooks is nothing if not honest. He approached the subject of charitable giving through the lens of his graduate-school years, i.e., he took it as axiomatic that because secular liberals expressed greater interest in the poor, they were necessarily more generous. But as he learned, the data do not support this conclusion. Hence, he changed his mind. The “hence” should not be read flippantly: it is a rare scholar, in my experience, who allows the evidence to affect his conclusions; most are so ideologically driven that they do not let the evidence get in the way of their conclusions.

There are several myths that Brooks explodes in his book. One of them is that the American people are a selfish lot who turn their backs on the poor. Not true. “Private American giving could more than finance the entire annual gross domestic product (GDP) of Sweden, Norway, and Den-mark,” Brooks writes. And contrary to what many people believe, charitable giving cannot be explained by tax breaks afforded by the IRS. Only 20 percent of those who give to charities do so because of a tax deduction; 80 percent give because “those who have more should give to those who have less.”

Charitable giving, as Brooks informs, should not be measured simply by writing checks. Using available data, he calculates time, as well as money. More than half of all Americans, for instance, volunteer their time to help some cause. Others, often the same people as it turns out, give blood; others may baby-sit for a neighbor. And so forth. Interestingly, those who give also appear to be more tolerant and maintain less prejudices that those who do not.

It is commonplace in the halls of academia to assume that conservatives are greedy and liberals are caring. But, in fact, it is conservatives who are by far the most generous—not only with their money, but with their time. It is not as though they are richer: as Brooks shows, “liberal families earn on average 6 percent more per year than conservative families, and conservative families [give] more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich.” Similarly, Republicans give more than Democrats.

Why is the conventional wisdom wrong? Because liberals get brownie points for talking about the poor more than conservatives, even if their idea of “helping” the indigent is through government transfers. Quite frankly, they love to play Robin Hood with other people’s money, having never found an income redistribution scheme they couldn’t endorse. But as Brooks correctly notes, “Government spending is not charity.” (His italics.) The data also allow him to conclude that “People who think the government should redistribute income are less likely to donate to charity than people who don’t think so.”

All of this reminds me of Marx and Rousseau: Marx, the father of socialism, fathered a child out of wedlock (he impregnated his maid) and never gave his child a dime; Rousseau, another radical egalitarian, fathered five illegitimate kids and walked away from his responsibilities (though this didn’t stop him from writing a book on child rearing). For a modern day example of Brooks’ point, consider the Clergy Leadership Network founded by Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson.

For Peterson, “paying taxes is a way of loving thy neighbor,” and for her clergy organization, slashing taxes is “inevitably an appeal to our greed, not to our generosity or compassion.” In other words, those who want to keep the money they’ve earned and spend it the way they choose (often on others) are the greedy ones. Those who want the government to pick the pockets of the rich are the altruists. They actually believe this!

The conventional wisdom is also wrong with regards to the generosity of the faithful vs. the faithless. It is a staple of liberal thought that secularists are more charitable than churchgoers, but the evidence shows just the opposite. “Religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people,” writes Brooks. Indeed, he says that “In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”

What Brooks found was that the faithful are more charitable across the board. “Religious people are more charitable in every measurable nonreligious way—including secular donations, informal giving, and even acts of kindness and honesty—than secularists.” They give more blood and are 57 percent more likely to give to the homeless than secularists. What is really astounding is that in the aftermath of 9/11, “People who never attended church were 11 percentage points less likely than regular churchgoers to give to a 9/11 cause (56 to 67 percent).”

Brooks drives his point home by comparing the charitable giving of San Franciscans to South Dakotans. Families in both groups give away about $1,300 a year, but because the former make 78 percent more money than the latter, “The average South Dakotan family gives away 75 percent more of its household income each year than the average family in San Francisco.” There’s a reason for this disparity: “Fifty percent of South Dakotans attend their houses of worship every week, versus 14 percent of San Franciscans. On the other hand, 49 percent of San Franciscans never attend church, but the statistic drops to 10 percent for South Dakotans.”

Could it be that those who are religious earn more than secularists, thus accounting for the discrepancy in giving? Not at all. Brooks details that “an average secularist nongiver earns 16 percent more money each year than a religious giver.” (His emphasis.) Yet secular liberals “are 19 percent points less likely to give each year than religious conservatives, and 9 percent less likely than the population in general.”

Family life is also an important explanatory variable. Married people give more than single people; they are also happier. And happiness is “strongly associated with high levels of giving.” To top it off, “American conservatives consistently report higher levels of subjective well-being than liberals.” These factors are all related. “Conservatives tend to enjoy more traditional, religious, and stable families than liberals,” says Brooks, and “these types of families bring ongoing happiness for most people.”

Brooks concludes that “religion, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism” are the four most important qualities that account for charitable giving. Because the poor actually are the most generous of all socio-economic classes—they give proportionately more than the middle class or the upper class—Brooks recommends that their charitable giving be given a tax break even if they don’t itemize. This makes eminently good sense.

As I said at the beginning, it is the non-stop lecturing we get from the educated talking heads in the classroom and in the media about the compassion they have for the poor—unlike those religious conservative types—that galls me most of all. Their idea of helping the poor comes down to higher taxes and soup kitchens, neither of which extracts a whole lot from them.

In the 1970s, I taught in an inner-city Catholic elementary school in Spanish Harlem during the day and went to New York University at night for my Ph.D. in sociology. In one class, after listening to hippie students blaming Exxon for the low achievement of inner-city students (I still haven’t figured that one out), I commended them for their interest in servicing the poor and then asked if they wanted to spare some time on a weekend tutoring my black and Puerto Rican students. No one spoke.

There is more than hypocrisy involved. These hand-wringing leftists are quick to condemn the pro-life community for its alleged fixation on the unborn, yet it is the faithful who are more generous to the poor than the faithless. Yet all Castro has to do is don his fatigues and talk compassionately about the oppressed—all the while grinding his boots into their faces—and he is a saint in their eyes.

Ronald Reagan once defined a conservative as someone who sees someone drowning from a pier, throws him a rope, but intentionally throws one that is a bit short, thus making the needy one work a bit before he’s rescued. A liberal, by contrast, throws a rope that is plenty long enough, and when the needy one picks up his end, the liberal drops his and then goes off to help someone else.

Reagan would have loved Brooks’ book. You most certainly will.

David R. Carlin

July-August 2007

Once upon a time—let’s say from the time of Franklin Roosevelt till the time of Lyndon Johnson—the Democratic Party was the clear party of choice for American Catholics.  The party had a special concern for the urban working classes and for the children and grandchildren of immigrants; its social justice ideas were often very similar to the social justice ideas outlined in papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum andQuadrigessimo Anno; it was emphatically patriotic and, like the Vatican, emphatically anti-Communist; it was strong on military defense; and it did almost nothing to defy or to undermine Catholic moral values.  It was a party that Catholics, at least Catholics of the kind that flourished in those long-ago days, could feel very comfortable with.

I myself was one of those Catholic Democrats.  Born in 1938, the second year of FDR’s second term, I first voted for president in 1960, the year that represented the summit of Catholic satisfaction with the Democratic Party, since that was the year John Kennedy was elected president.  I was elected as a Democrat to the Rhode Island Senate in 1980; in 1989-90 I was the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate; and in 1992 I was the Democratic candidate (alas, a losing candidate) for the United States House of Representatives.

During my political career, despite my prominent position in the party, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the new direction the national party had taken.  Today I am worse than uncomfortable; I am downright distressed and disillusioned.

The Catholics of the United States have changed greatly since those far-off days of FDR and LBJ.  They used to be, religiously speaking, a relatively homogeneous group, but they are now divided between what may be called “real Catholics” and “nominal Catholics.”  By “real Catholics” I mean those who go to church every weekend, who actually believe the doctrines of the Church, and who make a serious effort (while not always succeeding) to let their lives be guided by the moral rules and moral values endorsed by the Church.

By “nominal Catholics” I mean those who are quite opposite.  They rarely or never attend Mass, and they have a “pick and choose” attitude when it comes to faith and morals.  They are Catholic in the sense that they were baptized Catholic and have not yet sent in a letter of resignation.  And of course there are shades of gray between these two extremes: Catholics who may be called semi-real or semi-nominal.

If Catholics have changed over the last three or four decades, so has the Democratic Party “changed utterly” (to use the words of Yeats).  From being a party that Catholics could feel very comfortable with, it has become a party that Catholics—at least “real Catholics”—feel profoundly uncomfortable with.  Not to put too fine a point on it, the national Democratic Party has become an anti-Christian party.

At about this point some Catholic Democrat will tell me that my assertion is preposterous.  I’ll be told that Catholic politicians who play a leading role in the Democratic Party—for instance, U.S. senators and representatives—are for the most part Sunday churchgoers of good moral character.  No doubt this is true, but the Democrats who sit in Congress are only the tip of the party iceberg:  nearly 90% of the typical iceberg is under water.  That is to say, the relatively invisible people who mainly determine the policies of the party are the political contributors and activists, not to mention those who spread pro-Democratic propaganda from the “command posts” of American culture—by which I mean the press, the entertainment industry, and our leading colleges and universities (including law schools).

Julius Caesar once said that money is the “sinews of war,” and it is most definitely the sinews of modern American politics.  The old local Democratic political “machines” used to deliver the vote for Democratic governors and senators and representatives, but these machines largely vanished decades ago.  And so now the vote has to be delivered (or perhaps a better word would be “incited”) by TV advertising, and it is a notorious fact that TV advertising is colossally expensive.  Politicians running for higher office, then, need great amounts of money, and they therefore have to cater to those who contribute.  (“He who pays the piper calls the tune.”)

The demographic base of the old machines consisted of working-class and lower-middle-class voters; and so, with the waning of the machines, there has been a corresponding waning of influence in the Democratic Party of these voters.  An influence vacuum was created, which was soon filled by upper-middle class professionals with enough disposable income to be able to throw cash at politicians who hold views pleasing to these contributors.  Not only that, but these relatively well-to-do Democratic contributors usually hold an ideology; that is, they are secularists (or semi-secularists) and moral liberals.

Now what do I mean by a “secularist”?  I mean a person with three striking traits:  (1) In his personal life he has no use for religion; he is normally an atheist or agnostic (and if an agnostic, his agnosticism is barely distinguishable from atheism).  (2) He considers religion to be not just useless, but positively harmful; and therefore he is anti-religious, especially anti-Christian.  He doesn’t mind “liberal” Christians all that much, since their Christianity is a kind of semi-secularism; but he detests and fears Christians of a more orthodox kind, whom he suspects of wishing to impose a “theocratic” regime on the United States.  (3) He believes in and promotes a new morality that is intended to replace traditional Christian morality, e.g., the morality of the Ten Commandments.  This is a morality of moral liberalism, whose two fundamental principles are: the Personal Liberty Principle (you are free to do whatever you like provided you don’t harm non-consenting others in a tangible way), and the Tolerance Principle (you must tolerate the conduct of anyone who is not harming others in a tangible way).

The Personal Liberty Principle and the Tolerance Principle have most notably been invoked to justify a new personal morality whose characteristic note is sexual freedom.  In other words, they have been used to justify the sexual revolution: premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, easy divorce, cheap and readily available contraception, a somewhat lax attitude toward adultery (remember the tolerance moral liberals exhibited toward Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky), abortion, pornography, and homosexuality, including in recent years same-sex marriage.  “How do any of these things hurt innocent bystanders?” asks the moral liberal.  “And if they don’t hurt, then they are morally permissible.”  (It’s a bit puzzling that moral liberalism feels that abortion is justified, since abortion obviously causes harm to another.  Moral liberals get around this difficulty by the clever device of not thinking about it.)

Another way of putting all this is to say that there is a “culture war” going on in the United States between moral liberals and moral conservatives; or more exactly, between secularists and Christians.  The secularists, who hold Christianity in disdain, would like to drive Christianity out of the public arena and into a corner, where those nitwits who like to practice it would still be free to do so, to the infinite amusement of the more “enlightened” people.  Christians of the old-fashioned kind, both Catholic and Protestant, would like to preserve their religion, not just as a private hobby, but as an important factor in the public culture of the United States.  As for the third party in this culture war, the liberal Christians: they have a nostalgic and sentimental attachment to Christianity, but in most of the actual battles between moral liberals and moral conservatives—e.g., battles about abortion and homosexuality— they come down on the side of moral liberalism, although they do so (let it be noted to their credit) with something of a long face.

This culture war has long since spilled over into politics.  And in politics the Democratic Party has allied itself with the secularists/moral liberals, while the Republican Party has decided to ally itself with the Christians/moral conservatives.  I don’t mean to say that the Republican Party has become the Christian party.  For one thing, while the party is anti-secularist, it has many features that are not especially Christian.  For another, as history teaches, it would be very dangerous for Christians to identify their religion with a political party.

But although I won’t say that the Republican Party has become the Christian party, I will say that the Democratic Party has become the anti-Christian party; for to take sides with the secularists/moral liberals in the culture war, as the Democrats have done, is to take sides against Christianity.

And so, the Democratic Party has gone from being a Catholic-friendly working and lower-middle class party to being a secularist and upper-middle class party.  Can a Catholic be a Democrat today?  It is virtually impossible, assuming that the Catholic in question is a “real Catholic,” is acquainted with policies of the party such as its support for abortion and homosexuality, and is capable of reasoning logically.  And this is what is actually happening: Increasingly, “real Catholics” are leaving the Democratic Party, although “nominal Catholics” (who are really semi-secularists) remain.  Since there are millions of “real Catholics” in America, their exodus from the party should cause alarm among party leaders.  But apparently it does not, at least not much, they are so in thrall to their secularist/moral liberal supporters.

Nonetheless I confess (with some embarrassment and perhaps even shame) that I remain a registered Democrat, even though this doesn’t mean that I can be counted on actually to vote for Democrats.  But I feel that my protest against the anti-Christian course the party has taken will be more effective if I remain officially a Democrat.  After all, it was my party before it became the party of the secularists.  Why should I allow them to drive me out?

David R. Carlin is the author of Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?: How the Party I Loved Became the Enemy of My Religion, published by Sophia Institute Press.

David French

May, 2007

Emily Brooker is a recent honors graduate in social work from Missouri State University. A bright and attractive young woman, she has a ready smile, a heart for serving the poor, and an enduring stain on an otherwise sterling academic record.

University of Florida student Christine Miller is one of the most engaging people you will ever encounter. Compassionate, intelligent, and intellectually curious, she serves her classmates as an R.A., and by all accounts she is widely admired. She, too, is living with a stain on her record.

Scott Savage is a pacifist. He is gentle in speech, slow to anger, and almost painfully thoughtful in conversations. He is a librarian at The Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus, and the dark cloud of a faculty-initiated harassment investigation hovers over him still.

From the threats of violence directed against Ruth Malhotra at Georgia Tech, to the attempted expulsion of Ed Swan at Washington State, and the actual expulsion of Scott McConnell at Le Moyne College, the stories goon and on—one of the great underreported scandals of higher education. It is as if the academic establishment has collectively decided a certain group of people is so reprehensible and abhorrent that they must change or be cast aside, relegated to the dustbin of history along with the racists of the Old South.

And who are Emily, Christine, Scott, and the others? They are certainly not violent or radicals of any stripe. In fact, their political views vary widely—they have different views about the Iraq war, on economic programs, and even social issues. They do, however, share a single, defining characteristic: they are theologically conservative Christians, who believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God .

For Emily Brooker, it all started when one of her professors gave her class an assignment to draft a joint letter that was intended to express public support for same-sex adoption. While she has no problem exploring alternative views in class, she drew the line at drafting and signing a public document expressing a viewpoint that violated her deeply held beliefs. For her respectful moral stand, she was investigated by the socialwork department and charged with ethics violations.

Christine Miller made the mistake of expressing a Biblically orthodox view of sexual morality—that sex should be reserved for a man and woman within marriage. She was reprimanded by a university housing department who saw that view as incompatible with its own expressed “solidarity” with the university’s “GLBT community.”

Scott Savage’s case is even more bizarre. He volunteered to serve on a book selection committee for the “First Year Reading Experience”—suggesting book options for freshman students. After the other members of the committee suggested a series of books from a leftist perspective, Scott suggested the students read a series of conservative books, including one, The Marketing of Evil, by David Kupelian, that refers to homosexual sexual behavior as “sinful” or “evil.” Acting on complaints from homosexual faculty that the book recommendation made them feel “unsafe” on campus, the faculty assembly voted without dissent to accuse Scott of “sexual harassment.” Later, several professors—acting with the full knowledge and express approval of the faculty—filed formal charges against Scott.

And what of Ruth Malhotra, Ed Swan, and Scott McConnell? Ruth was threatened after challenging Georgia Tech’s unconstitutional policies in court. Ed was almost denied a degree after he expressed opposition to same-sex adoption and affirmative action during classroom discussions. Scott was actually expelled after writing a paper in which he decried the multicultural orthodoxy of the school and noted that corporal punishment could be an appropriate method of school discipline.

While a few anecdotes do not necessarily describe a trend, or even a crisis, the anecdotes keep coming and coming. In the last six years, approximately 50 colleges and universities have either expelled or attempted to expel Christian student groups from campus. These actions have led to multiple lawsuits as Christians struggle to maintain ministries that have—in some cases—existed for decades. Student groups have sued Rutgers, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ohio State University, Southern Illinois University, Penn State, the University of Minnesota, Washburn University, Arizona State, the University of California at Hastings, Cal State Long Beach, and San Diego State all in the effort to maintain a presence on campus.

Aside from the actual violation of their rights, Christian students widely report their faith being mocked by professors and fellow students alike. A January 2005,article in theChristian Science Monitor documented some of these stories. The article begins:

When Chris Gruener moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin graduate school, he looked forward to experiencing the region’s renowned tolerance of all people and lifestyles.

Mr. Gruener was raised in a devout Christian family near Seattle and attended a Baptist high school and a Christian college, where he studied business. His passion, however, was literature, and so he was excited to begin a master’s program in English at Sonoma State University. But during his first semester, a classroom incident put a damper on Gruener’s ardor.

While lecturing on James Joyce’s rejection of the church, a professor drew two mountains with a valley between them on the chalkboard, explaining that Joyce’s church believed one mountain was man and the other mountain was God.

Next he drew a cross in the valley, touching both peaks—a visual metaphor Gruener knew from childhood—and explained that this was Christ on the cross connecting man to God. Then the professor broke into peals of mocking laughter. The rest of the class joined in.

Stories like this are not uncommon. Spend any time at all with a Christian fellowship group at a secular university and you will hear similar tales. If the students are fortunate, their experience is limited to mere mockery. All too often, however, the mockery moves into actual action, and the students face the censorship, punishment, and threats outlined above.

Beyond the anecdotes are the statistics, which show that Christian faculty are profoundly underrepresented in higher education and that Christian students dramatically abandon faith practice as they progress through college. According to Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte’s recent analysis of the role of politics and ideology in faculty professional advancement, “religiously observant Christians are disadvantaged in their placement in the institutional hierarchy” even “after taking their professional achievements into account … Republicans, women, and practicing Christians fare significantly worse than their colleagues at similar levels of achievement.”

Clearly, when it comes to religion, the campus culture wars are building to a climax. Not content with cleansing our secular universities of an institutional religious presence, the academic left moves now to remove any meaningful individual religious voice. Why?

The answer lies in an important article by Maggie Gallagher in the 15 June 2006 issue of the Weekly Standard. In “Banned in Boston,” Gallagher outlined the next phase of the constitutional conflict: the assault on fundamental civil liberties in the name of civil rights for homosexuals.

Now, if same-sex marriage and gay rights” are the next great civil rights struggle, then campus administrators and faculty are cast in the role of Martin Luther King and those who defend traditional sexual morality take the role of Eugene “Bull” Connor. To the campus establishment, there is no functional or moral difference between an evangelical Christian proponent of traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality and George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.

When viewed through this prism, each of the cases discussed above makes sense. Emily Brooker and Ed Swan opposed same-sex adoption; Christine Miller and Scott Savage think that homosexual sex is sinful. Ruth Malhotra opposed speech codes designed to protect homosexuals from “hate speech,” and even Scott McConnell’s opposition to “multiculturalism” can be read as a stand-in for moral opposition to the university’s agenda. And for each of the Christian fellowships booted from campus, the issue is their alleged “discrimination” when they choose to reserve membership and leadership of Christian organizations for practicing Christians. As cases at Tufts University, Hastings, Southern Illinois, Ohio State University, and elsewhere make clear, the real university concern is not whether groups like Muslims or Jews can join Campus Crusade for Christ but instead whether practicing homosexuals have the opportunity to join (or even lead).

What is also crucial to note is that none of the Christians in any of the cases above had taken any action whatsoever to censor, silence, or deprive any homosexual student of their rights recognized by law. It is not as if Christian student groups are asking that they be permitted to organize while “gay rights” groups stand on the sidelines. Ruth Malhotra’s opposition to speech codes would have the practical effect of granting greater free-speech rights to everyone. Scott Savage was not asking that any member of the faculty be silenced. He simply made a book recommendation.

The campus culture wars will continue until one side triumphs. There is too much at stake for our side not to win.

David French is a senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He served as counsel to the students mentioned. This is an excerpt of an article from the Spring 2006 edition of Academic Questions. It is reprinted here with the permission of Mr. French and the publisher.

Ronald J. Rychlak

(Catalyst, 3/2007)

Eugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in 1939, after having spent nine years as Cardinal Secretary of State. Prior to that, he had been the Vatican’s representative in Germany. During his lifetime, Pius XII’s opposition to Hitler was well known. Nazis condemned him, Jews thanked him, and rescuers identified him as their inspiration. More recently, however, some writers have raised questions about how actively he opposed the Nazis. One even dubbed him “Hitler’s Pope.”

Critics often claim that the Vatican is hiding evidence of the Pope’s activities during the Holocaust because, like most nations, the Holy See keeps diplomatic records sealed for a number of years. This respects the confidentiality of people who are still living, protects state secrets, and gives archivists time to index and catalog documents. The Vatican has, however, tried to accommodate the researchers.

In the 1960s, Pope Paul VI appointed a team of four Jesuits to cull through the archives for relevant documents from the Holocaust era. By 1980, they had produced and made public 11 thick volumes of documents. This did not satisfy the critics, because the actual archives containing post-1922 documents remained closed to outsiders.

In 2003, some archives from the years 1922-1939 were opened, and in 2006 more were opened. These archives cover the years during which the Nazis came to power and during which the future Pope Pius XII was very involved in German-Vatican diplomacy. Even though these archives (not to mention the 11 volumes prepared by the Jesuits) have not been fully mined, many researches, some with personal agendas, continue to clamor for more access.

Recently, 35 such researchers petitioned the Vatican to open all Holocaust-era archives. One of the petitioners, Seymour Reich, wrote to Jewish Week complaining that the beatification of Pius XII before all archives were open would cause “serious problems with the Jewish community’s attitude toward the Vatican.”

One wonders whether these petitioners are aware of the new archival evidence. One piece of recently discovered evidence is a letter written in 1923, when Hitler was just emerging as a force within Germany, in which papal representative Pacelli reports that “followers of Hitler” are persecuting Jews and Catholics. The future Pope refers negatively to this group (not yet known as Nazis) as “right-wing radicals.” He also praises the “learned and zealous” Cardinal Archbishop Michael Faulhaber of Munich whom the radicals attacked because he “had denounced the persecutions against the Jews.”

It had long been known that philosopher Edith Stein (recently canonized as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) wrote to Pope Pius XI in 1933 concerning the Nazis and their treatment of Jews. The precise words she used, however, were not known. It had been assumed that she asked for an encyclical—a formal papal document—condemning Naziism. It turns out there was no such request.

The reply letter to Stein, which was not seen until the new archives were opened, came from Secretary of State Pacelli. The future Pius XII assured Stein that the Vatican shared her concerns and that the Church would ultimately score a “final victory” over Nazism. The newly opened archives also show that even before Stein sent her letter to Rome, the Vatican had instructed its representative in Berlin to intervene with the German government on behalf of the Jews. Upon reviewing these documents, CNN’s Vatican correspondent concluded that its release “resolves a historical debate in favor of the Vatican’s position.”

An event that took place in 2003 shows why the Vatican is so concerned about archiving and indexing the documents. Shortly after new archives were opened, an Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, claimed that a 1934 letter had been found in which a Jesuit priest named Friederich Muckermann accused Secretary of State Pacelli of collaboration with the Nazis. The paper reprinted what it claimed was the actual letter.

After reading the article, officials from the Congregation For the Causes of Saints called the reporter to find out where he got his information. The reporter had not seen the letter; it had been read to him over the phone by a researcher who had been given access to the archives. Vatican officials pulled the files that the researcher had been using. Not long thereafter, they found the original letter.

As printed in the newspaper the letter was about 550 words long. The letter Fr. Muckermann wrote, however, was almost three times that long. The newspaper had changed words (“unjust” charges against the Holy See were published as “just” charges) and omitted entire passages (“The whole world knows that the German Bishops have done much” against Hitler) without any indication that the letter had been edited. Obviously, someone wanted to cast the Church in a bad light, and sloppy reporting let that happen. Fortunately, the Vatican was able to issue a correction not long after the story was first published precisely because of the care it had taken with the archives.

A similar mistranslation hit the press in 2005, when the New York Times ran an article based on an unsigned document, not on Vatican letterhead and in the wrong language, that reportedly had been found in a Paris archive. According to the Times, this was a directive from Pius XII instructing Catholics who had taken Jewish children into their households during the Nazi occupation. Supposedly, the Pope told these rescuers not to return the children to their parents if the youngsters had been baptized.

Within a week, thanks again to careful archiving, the Pope’s original instruction was found, and it was quite different from the news reports. The Pope actually said that Catholic parents had an on-going duty to the Jewish families. They were instructed not to dump these children on the first charity group that approached them. They should, of course, return the children to their parents.

The current charge is that Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was critical of Pius XII because he did not assist Roncalli’s efforts on behalf of Turkish Jews. This is not new. As early as 1968, there were several false charges that John was a critic of Pius. Archbishop Loris Capovilla, John’s private secretary, has expressly answered this claim:

With regard to the actions in favor of the Jews, affected particularly in Istanbul in the years 1935-1944, which was recognized and praised by Hebrew communities in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and the United States, it is obligatory to recognize that Roncalli was and declared himself the executor of the thought and the directives of Pius XII. He repeated, in fact “The papal representative is the eye, the ear, the mouth, the heart and the effective hand of the Pope.”

Capovilla said that Roncalli’s rescue efforts on behalf of Jews make sense “only if they are referred above everything else to Pius XII, of whom Roncalli was the careful and most faithful interpreter. Any strictly personal action, even though it be heroic, of Roncalli himself, would otherwise be inconceivable.”

Throughout his life, John praised Pius. Before he was made Pope, John was offered thanks for his wartime efforts to save Jewish refugees. He replied: “In all these painful matters I have referred to the Holy See and simply carried out [Pius XII’s] orders—first and foremost to save human lives.” When Pius died, the future John XXIII said that Pius had been like a “public fountain” pouring forth good waters at which all the world, great and lowly, could profitably drink. As one reporter of the times wrote: “In the autumn of 1958 the world showed little doubt that one of its great ones had departed, and none showed less doubt than Angelo Roncalli.”

As Pope, John prayed monthly before Pius XII’s tomb and even considered taking the name “Pius XIII.” One of the first things he did upon becoming Pope was to place a photo of Pius XII on his desk. He also had his predecessor’s photograph published with a prayer on the back asking for his canonization. The prayer called Pius “a fearless defender of the Faith, a courageous struggler for justice and peace… a shining model of charity and of every virtue.” A million of these cards were soon in circulation.

In his first Christmas broadcast, Pope John said that Pius XII’s doctrinal and pastoral teaching “assure a place in posterity for the name of Pius XII. Even apart from any official declaration, which would be premature, the triple title of ‘Most excellent Doctor, Light of Holy Church, Lover of the divine law’ evokes the sacred memory of this pontiff in whom our times were blessed indeed.” It should be noted that only a saint can be declared a Doctor of the Church.

It is true that some archives remains sealed, and historians do not have all of the evidence. At the same time, the evidence that we already have shows conclusively that Pope Pius XII intervened frequently; encouraged rescue efforts; and tried to comfort all victims, including persecuted Jews. During and after the war Pius XII’s efforts were recognized by virtually everyone. As more archives are opened, after they have been properly cataloged and indexed, we can be confident that the reputation that he once enjoyed—as a firm opponent of the Nazis—will be reconfirmed. Catholics should all take pride in knowing that Pope Pius XII stood tall in a time of great difficulty.

Ronald J. Rychlak is the MDLA Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor Press) and Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis (Spence Publishing).

(March, 2007)

The following is a list of books, articles and television shows that have called into serious question the core beliefs of Christianity during the Lenten season. No other religion is subjected to such scrutiny and none has its central tenets questioned during its holy days. 

2007

·  “Titanic” director James Cameron and TV-director Simcha Jacobovici claimed they have evidence of a Jerusalem tomb that allegedly houses the remains of Jesus and his family.  The men present their extraordinary claims in a March 4 documentary for the Discovery Channel.

2006

·  On April 2, NBC’s “Dateline” discussed The Jesus Papers, the new book by Michael Baigent, coauthor of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Baigent contends that Jesus wasn’t divine, wasn’t born of a virgin birth, married Mary Magdalene and sired a child.

When Baigent was recently asked where he got the proof that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45, he said he got it from reports about a book he cannot find (we’re not making this up!). When asked how he knows the tomb was empty because Jesus needed some R&R, he said, “Unfortunately, in this case, there are no facts.” Put differently, the guy is a crook and “Dateline” has been had.

2005

·  In 2005, Easter was on March 27. Pope John Paul II was dying at the time and so the ABC special “The Resurrection: Searching for Answers,” didn’t air until May 20. Hosted by Elizabeth Vargas, it reported: “Nearly every single detail of the Easter story remains a question of debate. Among them: Was the tomb really empty? And even more basic: Was Jesus ever buried in the first place?”

·  On March 28 (Easter Monday), Newsweek ran a lengthy piece by Jon Meacham called “From Jesus to Christ” that was quite good. But even in this article, the reader is asked to ponder, “How much of this is remembered history, and how much heartfelt but unhistorical theology? It is impossible to say.”

2004

·  The April 12 (Easter Monday) issue of Time magazine featured a major cover story called “Why Did Jesus Die?” It presented both liberal and orthodox Christian beliefs on the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.

·  On April 5 (during Holy Week), ABC had a Peter Jennings special report, “Jesus and Paul, the Word and the Witness.” Lasting three hours, it included the Doubting Thomas’ from the so-called Jesus Seminar. Viewers were treated to the work of Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan, skeptics who believe that Jesus’ body was eaten by wild dogs. The documentary clearly did not take the New Testament seriously.

2003

·  On April 20 (Easter Sunday), the Discovery Channel showed a documentary called “James: Brother of Jesus.” It was based on a book which claimed that James was Jesus’ brother and that he was the true leader of the early Church.

2002

·  On March 19 (Easter was March 31st), NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” ran a segment on “Biblical archaeology” wherein the host said, “Two central holidays for Jews and Christians are right around the corner, Passover and Easter. Both are based on those religions’ holiest book, the Bible. For Jews, the story is the exodus from slavery in Egypt; for Christians, the story is the crucifixion of Jesus and his return from the dead on the third day. But what if those stories were not literally true? What if the ancestors of the Jews were never slaves? What if Jesus did not rise from the dead? What would happen to Judaism and Christianity?”

2001

·  On April 15 (Easter Sunday), the Discovery Channel aired a three-hour documentary called “Jesus: The Complete Story.” According to the Houston Chronicle, the film was about scientists, archaeologists, theologians and historians whose “mission is to confirm or deny the facts of Jesus’ life and death as written in the Gospels, that billions of Christians around today’s world accept as gospel truth.” The documentary suggested that perhaps Jesus and Judas planned for Judas to hand Jesus over ahead of time.

·  On April 13 (Good Friday), ABC’s 20/20 had a segment called “Modern Archaeologists, Theologians and Scholars Develop New Theory About Death of Jesus, and Who Was Responsible.” Barbara Walters announced, “Tonight, with the help of leading religious experts, we bring you startling revelations about the life and death of Jesus. In the nearly 2,000 years since his crucifixion, countless acts of love and terrible acts of hate have been carried out in his name. But even as the story endures, it continues to change. Tonight, Bob Brown takes you back to Jerusalem in search of the real Easter story.” A Catholic priest, Fr. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor discussed how the seven last words of Jesus should not be taken historically and said of the words in Matthew “His blood be upon us and our children”: “This was the root of anti-Semitism in Christianity. This was the root of the Holocaust.”

2000

·  The April 24 (Easter Monday) issue of U.S. News and World Report had a cover story called “Why Did He Die?” Jeffery L. Sheler’s piece stated: “But while the Gospel story has inspired piety and devotion through the centuries, it also has spawned darker passions. From the rise of the Holy Roman Empire to the fall of the Third Reich and even today, purveyors of anti-Semitism have sought to justify their prejudices by appealing to the Gospels’ depiction of Jews as jealous villains who plotted against Christianity’s founder.”

1999

·  The April 5 (Easter Monday) issue of U.S. News & World Report featured a 2317 word article called “Reassessing an Apostle: The Quest for the Historical St. Paul Yields Some Surprising New Theories.”

The article by Jeffery L. Sheler reports that scholars suggest that as St. Paul believed the Second Coming was imminent, “he did not intend his sometimes stern judgments on doctrinal matters and on issues of gender and sexuality to become church dogma applied, as it has been, for nearly 2,000 years.” It also reports that many say he didn’t write many of the letters in the Bible attributed to him.

1998

·  On April 9 (Holy Thursday), NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” with Lynn Neary did a segment called “The Historical Jesus” with John Dominic Crossan (ex-priest and former co-director of the Jesus Seminar) as a guest. It was all about the Jesus Seminar theories. While Lynn Neary simply interviewed Crossan about his beliefs on the resurrection, it did give him quite a platform.

1997 

·  On March 28 (Good Friday) PBS’s “News Hour” with Jim Lehrer presented a piece called “Considering Jesus” by Richard Ostling of Time magazine. The piece was all about the Jesus Seminar and asked the question, “Should New Testament accounts of his [Jesus’] life be taken literally or figuratively?”

While Ostling did not take any positions, the entire piece was about the Jesus Seminar, and how they say much of what is in the Bible didn’t happened. Professor Marcus Borg (Oregon State University) was one of these men who says the resurrection was only symbolic. He was given a lot more time than N.T. Wright, a scholar (Dean of Lichfield Cathedral) who said the resurrection literally happened.

1996 

·  The April 8 (Easter Monday) issue of Time magazine featured a big story called “The Gospel Truth?” The subtitle accurately conveyed the gist of the story: “The Iconoclastic and Provocative Jesus Seminar Argues that Not Much of the New Testament Can Be Trusted. If So, What are Christians to Believe?”

·  The April 8 issue of Newsweek ran a lengthy article called “Rethinking the Resurrection” by Kenneth Woodward. The piece was fairly written, though much space was given to those like John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar writer who likes to try to debunk the story of the resurrection.

1995

·   The April 10 issue of Time magazine included the cover story called “The Message of Miracles.”  The piece contrasted the faith of American individuals who believe in miracles with the claims advanced by heterodox Christian theologians.  The article paid special attention to the group of theologians known as the Jesus Seminar, who had declared in the days before Lent began that Jesus did not literally rise from the dead and who had previously denied the virgin birth.

The article also described other scholars who claim that modern science and archeology show that the miracles of the Bible did not actually happen.  Special attention was paid to the renegade professor of biblical studies and ex-priest John Dominic Crossan, who claims that Jesus’ followers were too afraid to bury him, so Jesus’ body was left hanging on the cross or eaten by wild dogs.  Also mentioned was Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, who rejects much of the Bible and declared, “I’d like to think Christianity is something that would appeal to people who are also well educated and who are modern people.”

1994

·   On March 31 (Holy Thursday) CNN aired a segment featuring a debate between Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong and Rev. Peter Stavinskas.  Spong claimed that the Gospel story of an angel appearing, putting the soldiers to sleep and rolling back the stone of Jesus’ tomb is “stuff of legends.”

He also stated that, “I just don’t believe that modern men and women are going to be called into faith by things like the story of the empty tomb.  If you look at the first Gospel to be written, the first time the tomb story appears, no faith is born.”

·   The April 4 (Easter Monday) edition of the NPR show “Weekend Edition” hosted by Scott Simon included a segment with Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong where he discussed his new book, Resurrection: Myth Or Reality?  Spong said of the resurrection, “I don’t think it’s fair to say that what the resurrection originally was was a physical resurrection, or Jesus sort of walking out of the grave and being seen in a physiological way.  The question is, what happen to the story between whatever it was that occurred, and the first writing of that?”

·   The April 4 (Easter Monday) issue of Newsweek featured a story titled “A Lesser Child of God” about the Jesus Seminar and its portrait of Jesus.  The seminar claims that the real Jesus was not the Son of God, but an illiterate Jewish peasant.  The Jesus Seminar contributors also believe that Jesus did not physically rise from the dead, rather he was taken down from the cross and buried in a shallow grave where he may have been eaten by dogs.

1993

·   Harper waited until the month of Easter to release The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, a book by Burton Mack that challenges orthodox Christian beliefs; Mack summoned Christians to “rethink how to live in a multicultural world.” The Boston Globe chose Easter Sunday to review it and the Chicago Tribune published its piece on the book on Easter Monday.

1992

·   Ex-priest and Jesus Seminar guru John Dominic Crossan published his famous book, The Historical Jesus, in 1991 but the major newspapers waited until the Lenten season to promote his heterodox views about Jesus being nothing more than a nice peasant who entertained egalitarian ideas. For example, though the New York Times had already given Crossan’s book a front-page story, just one week before Easter it ran another story on it. The San Francisco Chronicle treated Christians to a review of the book on Good Friday, the Los Angeles Times delivered one on Holy Saturday and the Washington Post gave its Easter-present review on Easter Sunday.

1991

·   On March 28 (Holy Thursday), CNN’s “Larry King Live” featured a debate between two Episcopal leaders, Bishop William Frey and Bishop John Shelby Spong.  Spong had recently released a book called “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.”  Larry King introduced the show by asking, “Was Saint Paul a repressed homosexual; Mother Mary not a virgin? These are the claims of” Bishop Spong.

Throughout the show, Bishop Spong advanced his heterodox views.  When a caller challenged him, the bishop stated that his ideas were new, and “I would like to say that every new idea that’s come about in the Christian faith has always been resisted…we don’t believe that the earth is the center of the universe, but we surely did persecute Galileo when he first suggested that.”

1990

The “Horizons” section of the April 16 (Easter Monday) edition of U.S. News & World Report featured three  articles by Jeffery L. Sheler titled “The Last Days of Jesus,” “The Burial,” and “The Resurrection.”  The pieces focus on the “controversy” over the crucifixion of Jesus, noting scholars who claim the historical accounts of Christ’s death and resurrection do not hold up and others who maintain the Easter narrative is a mix of legend and fact.

Sheler describes critics who maintain that the accounts of the burial of Jesus conflict with the likely behavior of Jews of that time, as well as theologians who hold that Jesus’ resurrection was purely metaphorical.

by Dinesh D’Souza

(Catalyst, 1/2007)

This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, just published by Doubleday. 

Is Osama Bin Laden right when he alleges that America is a pagan society, the “leading power of the unbelievers”? Bin Laden and the Islamic radicals point to America’s policy of separation of church and state to prove their point. To many Americans, of course, this charge is ridiculous. Even so, it is worth asking why America is so committed to such a systematic exclusion of religion from government and public life. Even European countries, where religious belief and practice is much lower than in the United States, treat religion more sympathetically and provide recognition and support to religious institutions and religious schools.

So why is America virtually alone in the world dedicated to strict separation of church and state? Many Americans have become convinced that religion represents, as author Sam Harris puts it in The End of Faith, “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.” Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. “The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.” In a recent book, Richard Dawkins contends that most of the recent conflicts in the world—in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, in Sri Lanka—show the continued vitality of the murderous impulse that seems inherent in religion.

The problem with this expose is that it exaggerates the crimes of religion, while ignoring the vastly greater offenses of secular or atheist fanaticism. The best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem Witch Trials. How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, nineteen. Yet the event continues to haunt the liberal imagination.

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular people rail against the Crusaders’ and Inquisitors’ misdeeds of more than five hundred years ago. Ironically these religious zealots did not come close to killing the number of people murdered by secular tyrants of our own era. How many people were killed in the Spanish Inquisition? The actual number sentenced to death appears to be around 10,000. This figure is tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time.

But even taking that difference into account, the death tolls of the Inquisition are miniscule compared to those produced by the secular despotisms of the twentieth century. In the name of creating their version of a secular utopia, Hitler, Stalin and Mao produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that liberals count as “religious wars” were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power. Can the wars between England and France be counted as religious wars because the English were Protestants and the French were Catholics? Hardly. The same is true today. The contemporary conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims—”God gave us this land” and so forth—but even without these religious motives the conflict would remain essentially the same. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

“While the motivations of the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious,” Harris informs us, “they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death.” In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as fighting for land and the right to rule themselves—in other words, as combatants in a secular political struggle—Harris detects a religious motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be some underlying religious craziness that explains their fanaticism.

It’s obvious that Harris can go on forever in this vein. Seeking to exonerate secularism and atheism from the horrors perpetrated in their name, he argues that Stalinism and Maoism were in reality “little more than a political religion.” As for Nazism, “while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.” Indeed, “The holocaust marked the culmination of…two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews.”

Is anyone fooled by this rhetorical legerdemain? For Harris to call twentieth-century atheist ideologies “religion” is to render the term meaningless. Should religion now be responsible not only for the sins of believers, but also those of atheists? Moreover, Harris does not explain why, if Nazism was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler. How can a self-proclaimed atheist ideology, advanced by Hitler as a repudiation of Christianity, be a “culmination” of two thousand years of Christianity? Harris is employing a transparent slight-of-hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name.

A second justification for America’s church-state jurisprudence is the claim that the founders enshrined secularism in the Constitution as the basis for their “new order for the ages.” In her book Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby argues that it was precisely to establish such a framework that the founders declined to make America a Christian nation and instead gave us “a nation founded on the separation of church and state.” Jacoby credits the founders with “creating the first secular government in the world.”

But consider this anomaly. The idea of separating religion and government was not an American idea, it was a Christian idea. It was Christ, not Jefferson, who said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The American founders institutionalized this Christian idea—admittedly an idea ignored for much of medieval history—in the Constitution.

The framers’ understanding of separation, however, was very different from that of today’s ACLU. From the founding through the middle of the twentieth century, America had religious displays on public property, congressionally-designated religious services and holidays, government-funded chaplains, and prayer in public schools. So entrenched was religion in American private and public life that, writing in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville called it the first of America’s political institutions. In a unanimous ruling in 1892, the Supreme Court declared that if one takes “a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs, and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth…that this is a Christian nation.”

Virtually all of the actions that secular liberals claim are forbidden by the no-establishment clause of the First Amendment were permitted for most of American history. Thus liberals like Jacoby are in the peculiar position of claiming that the religion provisions of the Constitution were misunderstood by the founders and by everyone else for a hundred and fifty years, until finally they were accurately comprehended by liberals. The arrogance of this claim is exceeded only by its implausibility.

Finally some people defend church-state separation by pointing to the religious diversity of America. Historian Diana Eck has a recent book titled A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. Since America is no longer religiously homogenous, Eck’s argument goes, there is a pressing need to adopt constitutional rules that permit minorities to freely practice their religion. We frequently hear that nativity displays, monuments with the Ten Commandments, and prayers at high school graduations all make the multitudes of American non-Christians feel extremely uncomfortable.

But where is the evidence for this? It is not the Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist immigrants who press for radical secularism, it is the liberal activist groups. So the mantra of “diversity” seems to be secular ruse to undermine all religious expression in the public sphere. Moreover, the factual premise is unsound. Contrary to Eck, America is not the world’s most diverse nation. Surprising though it may seem, the total number of non-Christians in America adds up to less than 10 million people, which is around 3 percent of the population. Many Asian and African countries have religious minorities that make up 15 to 20 percent of the population.

In terms of religious background, America is no more diverse today than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How is this possible? Because today’s immigrants come mostly from Mexico and Latin and South America, and virtually all of them are Christians. So not only does America remain a Christian country, but as historian Philip Jenkins points out, its Christian population relative to non-Christians is growing. Jenkins notes that the real story of America should be titled, “How this Christian country has become an even-more-Christian country.”

My conclusion is that the radical Muslims are wrong about America but they are right about separation of church and state. America’s church-state doctrine, in its current form, is a fraud. It is built on a bogus historical, constitutional and sociological foundation. The real purpose of its advocates is to marginalize traditional religion and traditional morality, so that the public sphere can be monopolized by their ideological agenda. It is time to dismantle the anti-religious scaffolding erected by the party of secularism.

Dinesh D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution and is on the Board of Advisers of the Catholic League.