[Paleopsych] Auster: How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism
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How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=16157
4.12.3 [Part 2 of 2 appended]
[He makes a very good point, namely that if you don't treat god as the
Other, you can wind up treating peoples and civilizations very different
from your own as the Other. I've gotten used to appeals for a return to
true Christianity of the "this is how I want the world to be" sort without
producing any evidence even for the existence of god. My own gloss on
Christianity, and Judaism, for that matter, is that God is a liberal. He
created the world and gave humanity rules to live by, which they promptly
disobeyed. God kept making covenants and people kept failing to live up to
them. God constantly overestimate human nature, as liberals to. By the
time of the Roman Empire, God got so fed up with His creation that He
decided to do away with Heaven and Earth (but not Hell) completely. Being
merciful as well as just, He offered escape from Hell to those who would
accept the offer, namely to ask His son for forgiveness. It seems that God
is not obliged to carry out this promise (the doctrine of Grace) and it's
unclear what else needs to be done (the doctrine of Works). God remains a
liberal still: in the next to the last chapter of the Bible, God promises
a second Heaven and a second Earth. What's new to me is Auster's emphasis
on what I overlooked, namely that there will be individual nations on the
second Earth. I am still concerned with the tiny matter of evidence,
though.]
By [1]Lawrence Auster
According to historian Arnold Toynbee, civilizations grow and survive
by overcoming successive challenges, and break down when they fail to
meet some new challenge. With regard to mass non-European immigration
and its attendant problems of multiculturalism, Islamization, and
globalism, America and other Western nations face a challenge unique
in history: to save ourselves from open-borders chaos and cultural
destruction without becoming, in our own eyes, "racist," "mean,"
"exclusivist," and "un-Christian." This is a moral and intellectual
dilemma that most contemporary Westernersif we bother thinking about
it at allfind paralyzing. Unable to solve it, we have opted for a
state of active or passive surrendera condition from which we are only
intermittently stirred by shocking acts of violence such as the
September 11 attack on America or the jihadist slaughter of Dutch
filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
In fact, the moral dilemma described above is illusory. It is based on
the false premise, unique to Western and especially modern Western
society, that to preserve one's own nation or culture is somehow to be
unjust toward other nations and cultures. Whenever this sentiment has
gained ascendancy, as under the influence of ancient Stoicism or of
modern leftism, it has led men to believe that the only just social
order is a world state, in which there is no Other because everyone
belongs to the same society. The problem with this idea is that a
world state can only exist by depriving individual nations of their
right of self-government, indeed of their existence, and by subjecting
all mankind to the rule of a distant and unaccountable regime.
Therefore, based on all our experience of politics and human nature, a
world state could not be just either. Traditional Christianity
resolved, or at least managed, this conflict between the particular
and the universal by locating true universality in the City of God,
while recognizing the limited but real value of distinct societies on
earth.^
But a moral tension that remains manageable so long as different
peoples with their respective cultures are living in different
societies, becomes insoluble when radically different peoples and
cultures are living in the same society, especially if it is a
democracy. If a democratic country has a large and culturally
different immigrant minority, the native majority cannot readily
announce that they are against the continuation of more immigration,
because if they did so, the immigrant group, who are now the
majority's fellow citizens, would feel that the natives regard them as
undesirable. As civilized, democratic people, the native majority do
not want to insult the immigrant minority, or to deny their equal
humanity, or to create even the slightest appearance of doing those
things. So instead theymeaning wesurrender to the situation, accept
continued mass immigration, and allow their country to be steadily
transformed by an ongoing influx of unassimilated peoples and
incompatible cultures.
Our challengethe Toynbean challenge we must meet if we are to save our
civilizationis to understand that the moral assumptions that have led
us into this paralysis are false, and to break free of them. But this
is extraordinarily difficult for us to do, because these assumptions,
which are liberal assumptions, have over the past century become
closely bound up with the Christian religion, the spiritual core of
Western culture and identity. To work our way out of the present
crisis, therefore, it will be necessary to criticize certain aspects
of modern Christianity. This may offend some readers, particularly
Christian conservatives who have come to identify Christian belief
with American political virtue itself.
The problem would be lessened if people understood that Christianity
is not a governing ideology, and that it is distorted when seen as
such. The path and goal of Christianity is life in Christ, not the
organization of society according to any particular scheme. Over the
last two thousand years, Christianity has been compatible with any
number of political forms, ranging from the Roman empire to medieval
feudalism to modern democracy, so long as they have been reasonably
benign and compatible with a Christian life. And here lies the
paradox: though Christian faith is the center of the West's historic
being, it cannot by itself provide the enduring structure of Western
society or of any other concrete society. As indicated by Jesus in his
distinction between the things of Caesar and the things of God,
religious faith must work in a proper balance with worldly
concernsamong which are considerations of political power and of
culture. The balance is delicate and many things can go wrong with the
spiritual-secular partnership. For example, if the Christian community
breaks free of the surrounding earthly society and ignores the
ordinary dictates of political prudence, or if it becomes corrupted by
bad ideas emanating from the society itself, such as those of modern
liberalism, it can become destructive of the surrounding society and
culture. It can easily spin off into utopian universalist notions,
such as the open-borders ideology, that spell the death of any
culture.
In the remainder of this article, we will first recount the process by
which Christianity has become liberalized. Then we will look at the
doctrines, particularly the "cult of man," that define this
liberalized Christianity and help engender the cultural radicalism
that so threatens our society. Finally we will consider the role this
liberalized Christianity has played in advancing open immigration and
one-worldism, especially through its literalist reading of the
Scriptures.
Confused Christianity
When the liberal order was born in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it did not immediately appear, at least in America, as a
social force hostile to religion. Far from attacking or banning
religion, liberalism marked out a religiously neutral public space
where religious conformity would not be demanded and a person's
religion could not be used against him. The various Protestant
denominations plus Catholicism and Judaism were tolerated, and a
genericand rather strictProtestant morality was authoritative
throughout the society. In his journey through America in the 1830s,
Toqueville was deeply impressed at how in America, more than in any
other country in history, religion and liberty worked in harmony.
But over the past two centuries, as the demand for individual freedom
has become ever more insistent and far-reaching, the respect accorded
religion and religious morality in American public life has steadily
diminished, a process that has reached an extreme stage in recent
years. Education, the arts, entertainment, architecture, public
monuments, and many other areas of society in which religion was once
honored or deferred to, or which were at least open to a religious
sense of life, have become thoroughly secularized, as has the
Christmas holiday itself. For the first time in American history,
prominent individuals and established political movements, not to
mention many movies and television programs, are openly atheistic and
hostile to religion, seeking, in the name of liberal tolerance, to
drive religion out of the public sphere altogether. Or, to be more
precise, they seek to drive Christianity out of the public sphere,
while welcoming non-Western religions such as Islam. The only
Christianity tolerated by these left-liberals is a desiccated
Christianity that keeps up the external forms and formulae of the
faith but no longer adheres seriously to any Christian beliefs that
are distinct from those of liberalism. Even conservative Christian
leaders have given up the traditional idea of America as a basically
Christian society and now subscribe to the liberal view of America as
a level playing field where different beliefs, including non-Western
beliefs, can strive for influence.
The effects of this leftward drift on the mainline Protestant churches
and on significant parts of the American Catholic Church have been
profound. No longer looking for the meaning of life in God and Christ,
but in the celebration and achievement of human rights and
equality,or, rather, defining God and Christ in terms of human rights
and equalitythese liberal Christians tend to look at every issue
through the lens of social justice, one-worldism, and U.S. guilt, and
are deeply committed to diversity, multiculturalism, and open borders.
The liberal belief in the equal freedom of all human beings as the
primary political and spiritual datum leads inexorably to the idea
that our nation should open itself indiscriminately to all humanity.
President Bush's proposal to give a green card to every person on
earth who can underbid an American for a job is an example of this
utopian attitude, and is plainly motivated, at least in part, by the
liberal evangelicalism to which he subscribes.
The Church and the cult of man
In America, as we've said, a moderate liberalism that deferred to
Christianity gradually became more secular and radical over time and
brought much of the Church along with it. In Europe, by contrast, the
left was in open rebellion against Christianity from the eighteenth
century onward, seeking to create a new, materialistic society in
which all human needs would be met without reference to anything
higher than man. Catholic Popes thundered against these developments.
Pope Pius X declared in 1903: "[W]ith unlimited boldness man has put
himself in the place of God, exalting himself above all that is called
God. He has ... made the world a temple in which he himself is to be
adored ... "(1) The Church was fighting a losing battle, however.
With the ever-advancing march of secularization and the seeming
triumph of human technological power over nature, the belief in man's
spiritual and material autonomy had become so well-established by the
mid-twentieth century that the Church felt it had to adjust itself to
these new developments instead of condemning them.
This momentous event was announced by Pope Paul VI in his closing
speech at the Second Vatican Council, in December 1965. The Council,
the Pope declared, had not been content to reflect on the relations
that unite her to God.
[The Church] was also much concerned with man, with man as he really
is today, with living man, with man totally taken up with himself,
with man who not only makes himself the center of his own interests,
but who dares to claim that he is the principle and [the] final cause
of all reality. Man in his phenomenal totality ... presented himself,
as it were, before the assembly of the Council Fathers.... The
religion of God made man has come up against the religionfor there is
such a oneof man who makes himself God.^ [Emphasis added.]
And how did the Council respond to this heretical specter of godless,
secular man, of "man who makes himself God"? Far from condemning this
monstrous falsehood and asserting the superior claims of the Christian
faith, the Council, said the Pope,^
was filled only with an endless sympathy. The discovery of human
needsand these are so much greater now that the son of the earth has
made himself greaterabsorbed the attention of the Synod.... [W]e also,
we more than anyone else, have the cult of man...^
A current of affection and admiration overflowed from the Council over
the modern world of man ... [The Catholic religion] proclaims itself
to be entirely in the service of man's well-being. The Catholic
religion and life itself thus reaffirm their alliance, their
convergence on a single human reality: the Catholic faith exists for
humanity ...^ [Emphasis added.]
Thus, alongside God, the Church seemed to have added a second Lord,
man, with everything ultimately focusing on man instead of God.(2) In
so doing, the Church adopted the very heresy of modernism that Pope
Pius X had warned against sixty years earlier.
Pope John Paul II, a twentieth century Christian humanist who is
mistakenly believed by many to be a staunch traditionalist, fully
subscribed to the Vatican II doctrine, having been one of its leading
framers. In his first encyclical after becoming Pope in 1978, he
declared that human nature has been permanently "divinized" by the
advent of Christa startling departure from traditional Christian
understandings of the distinction between God and man. He has
repeatedly put man on a pedestal, as when he spoke of his "gratitude
and joy at the incomparable dignity of man." While in keeping with the
spirit of Vatican II, this extravagant praise of man is very far from
the language we would expect to hear from traditional Catholics or
Protestants, who adhere to the Augustinian belief in man's basic
sinfulness and his continuing need for God's mercy.
Under the post-Vatican II Popes, including John Paul II, the cult of
man has worked itself into the body and practice of the Church. In
place of the Creed, which begins, "I believe in God, the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," a diocese in France sings a hymn
that begins: "I believe in God who believes in Man." In another
diocese, instead of the Creed a poem is read which begins:^
I believe in meson of an almighty Father,
creator with him of a more human world...
I believe in me because he believed in me ...
Equally important in lowering Christianity toward the human level are
the radical liturgical changes that were initiated in the 1960s. In
the traditional Eucharistic service, the priest faces away from the
congregation, toward the altar, toward God, so that both congregants
and priest are communing with God. In the New Mass, the priest faces
the congregation as he consecrates the host and chews it in the sight
of all. This democratization of the Liturgy of the Eucharist destroys
its sacramental nature, turning it into a celebration of human,
instead of divine, community. And, of course, in many Catholic and
Protestant churches in the United States, folk songs, "singalongs,"
electronically amplified contemporary music, and other pop culture
manifestations have replaced sacred music and liturgy.^
Cultural radicalism and the cult of man
Some readers, especially those who are not religious, may wonder what
all the fuss is about. Why is the cult of man a problem, they may ask.
Why is it a bad thing to make humanity the ultimate focus of our
religious as well as of our secular concerns? What harm does it do if
we honor "man who makes himself god," and so free ourselves from the
weight of the traditional, judgmental God hanging over us? My answer
is that the cult of man is harmful because it does not (as it promises
to do) ennoble human beings, but degrades them. It is, in fact, a
principal source of the cultural radicalism that is dragging down our
whole society and making it incapable of defend itself from evil and
from enemies. Three aspects of this cultural radicalism are relevant
here: moral liberationism, cultural egalitarianism, and the worship of
the Other.
- Moral liberationism
From the traditional Christian perspective, God is our father, as well
as the archetypal "father figure," the source and structuring
principle of our existence. Other and lesser "father figures" include
our country, our culture, our government and laws, even the laws of
nature. These are the biological, cultural, and spiritual givens of
our existence. They place limits on what we can be, even as they
provide us with the very world in which we can live and realize
ourselves. To put man in the place of God implies a rebellion, not
just against God as traditionally understood, but against all "father
figures" and the structuring order of reality that they represent. If
there no reality higher than ourselves, then there is nothing
preventing us from releasing our lowest tendencies.
Thus the humanistic distortion of religion is only one part of the
picture I am describing. The rebellious cult of man may begin with the
denial of God's supremacy, but it doesn't end there. It ends with the
denial of all things higher than human desirelaw, morality, culture,
nation, and even nature itself.
- Cultural equality and the double standard
Another consequence of the cult of man is radical egalitarianism,
particularly in the area of culture. If there is no truth higher than
humanity, then there is no objective basis on which to determine the
relative value of various human things. All human thingsall
culturesmust be of innately equal value. But if all cultures are of
innately equal value, how then can we explain the persistently
backward state of some cultures? At bottom, there is only one answer
to that question: the backward cultures must have been artificially
placed in their inferior situation by the better-off and more powerful
cultures, namely our own.
Thus the denial of higher truth makes all things seem equal, which in
turn requires an explanation for why things are not actually equal,
which in turn leads to a belief in some all-pervading oppression to
account for the actually existing inequalitiesan oppression that is
always blamed on the West, or America, or Christianity, or capitalism,
or the white race, or white men, or the patriarchal family, or George
Bush, or what have you. And the attack on the West does not end there.
Since the less advanced condition of certain other peoples and
cultures is our fault, we must, in order to raise them up, excuse them
from normal standards while subjecting ourselves to the harshest
standards. This is the [3]leftist double standard, of which I've
written about previously at FrontPage Magazine.
- Worship of the Other
Finally, and most dangerously, the cult of man leads us, not just to
put down our own culture and sympathize inordinately with other
cultures, but to worship other cultures. Again, we need to think about
why this is so.
Central to Western culture, in both its Jewish-Christian and its
Greco-Roman forms, is the experience of God or truth as transcendent,
beyond the material, beyond man. A similar experience is central to
other cultures. Man partakes of, and is perfected by, a truth whose
source lies beyond himself. If we lose or reject this experience of
transcendence and start to glorify human rights and human desires as
our highest value (an attitude that the ancient Greeks would call
hubris and that traditional Christians and Jews would call idolatry),
we will still feel the need for the divine quality of "beyondness,"
but, since man has now become for us the highest value, we will
inevitably begin to seek that quality in human beings.
But what quality do human beings have that can stand in for God's
transcendence, his quality as beyond and wholly other? Simply this,
that other human beings are other and different from us. If we combine
this divinization of man (which is already harmful enough) with the
liberal belief in the equal freedom of all persons, or, even worse, if
we combine it with leftist notions of Western guilt and multicultural
equality, then the more "Other" the others are,that is, the more
different, foreign, alien, incomprehensible, or even dangerous and
evil they arethe more "transcendent" they will seem to us, and the
more we will worship them. In the most extreme form of this attitude
(though it is terribly common today), secular or Christian liberals
laud a terrorist murderer like Yasser Arafat and cast a sacred glow
around everything connected with Islam, while reviling conservative
Christians as a monstrous threat, simply because Arafat and Islam are
radically Other from America and therefore seem to stand beyond the
suffocating confines of our radically secularized society.
To put this idea another way, as human beings we are free to deny God,
but we are not free to do away with our need (because it is built into
our nature) for something that is beyond us, that transcends us and
provides the meaning of our existence. So, when people deny God, who
is, as it were, the "vertical" transcendent, they start to look for a
"horizontal" transcendent as a substitute. This horizontal
transcendent is, pre-eminently, other people. Furthermore, as I said,
since God is that which is most Other from ourselves, the more
different other people are from us, the more they seem like God or
fulfill the function of God in our psyches. Thus the worship of man
devolves into the worship of other men, other cultures, other peoples,
combined with a contempt for our own. This is the mystical cult of
multiculturalismthe uncritical identification with the Other, whoever
the Other may happen to be.
Liberal fundamentalism
For Catholics, the ultimate authority for the idea of unconditional
openness to foreigners is the pronouncements of Pope and the Church
hierarchy. For liberal Protestants, it is the Bible, namely a
literalist interpretation of certain scriptural passages. One of the
most important of these is Jesus' parable of the Final Judgment in the
25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, when the Son of man comes and
gathers all nations before him:
Then shall the king say to those who are on his right: Come, you who
are the blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom which has been made
ready for you from the beginning of the world. For I was hungry and
you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger
and you took me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you
visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.
When the just people ask when they did these things, he answers:^
Truly I tell you, inasmuch as you have done it for any one of the
least of these my brothers, you have done it for me.
As author and immigration reformer Roy Beck has pointed out, a
literalist reading of this parable gives Protestants the idea that
every prospective immigrant to Americaindeed every needy person in the
worldis, literally, Jesus. I myself have seen evangelicals who, on
hearing arguments for reasonable immigration controls, replied: "Would
you turn away Jesus if he was at the border?" The notion that everyone
trying to get into America is Jesus obligates Christians on pain of
hell to give every prospective immigrant what he wants, or rather to
get the U.S. government and taxpayers to give him what he wants, even
though the great majority of immigrants come here not because of
persecution or misfortune but simply because they desire the greater
opportunities (and the cornucopia of government benefits) available to
them here.
The parable of Matthew 25, like other difficult passages in the Old
and New Testaments, becomes grotesque if taken in a literal sense,
without reference to the full context of meaning in which it appears.
For example, Jesus is certainly not telling his disciples to help
law-breakers, yet liberal Christians take his words as a command to
harbor illegal aliensand not just an occasional illegal alien, but an
ongoing mass invasion of them. Jesus is also not telling his followers
to use the government to advance their ends. The Gospels show the way
to eternal life in God through Christ. The supreme commandment is love
of God and neighbor. Such love is intrinsically a voluntary,
individual act, or the act of a cohesive group of believers, as when,
for example, a congregation votes to send money to fellow Christians
who have been devastated by a natural disaster. But what today's
liberal Christians find in the Gospels is a political platform.
Instead of minding their own business and practicing charity to their
neighbor, they want to use the power of the state to compel their
fellow citizens to hand over their country to foreigners, foreign
cultures, and foreign religionsincluding religions and cultures that
seek the destruction of Christianity and the West.
Another of the liberals' favorite biblical passages is God's command
in Leviticus 19 concerning the proper treatment of foreigners:
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him
wrong. But the stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as one
born among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were
strangers in the land of Egypt.
While liberals have often quoted this passage to provide support for
an open borders policy, it has little to do with immigration. The text
refers to one who "sojourns," meaning a temporary resident in the
land, not an immigrant. It is telling us to treat such a stranger as a
fellow human being, not to vex or persecute him. It is most decidedly
not telling us to open our borders to a mass immigration of such
strangers, so that they can change our society from what it is into
something else. If you, taking a literalist approach, believe that it
is telling us that, then you must also believe that Jesus' command,
"Give to him who asks of you," means that we should instantly hand
over our entire national product to leftist international
organizations who are demanding the global equalization of wealth and
income.
But what about that commandwhich we can't get away fromto "love the
stranger as yourself"? The main Gospel authority concerning love of
others is the passage in Matthew where Jesus, asked what is the
greatest commandment, quotes two verses from the Torah: "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a
second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Matt
22:37-39.) The key to understanding this teaching is that love of God
comes first. It is the love of God that disciplines us toward the good
and restrains our self-aggrandizing impulses, including the impulse to
display conspicuous compassion for others. An unconditional love of
neighbor apart from love of God would lead us to mad acts of
do-gooderism or self-sacrifice.
To this, a liberal literalist might say that since the first
commandment is to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind; and
since the second commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves; and
since the second command is "like the first," therefore we're supposed
to love our neighbor just as we're supposed to love
Godunconditionally, with our whole heart, soul, and mind. In reality,
Jesus tells his followers to love the neighbor as one loves oneself,
not as one loves God. It would be an absurdity to say that God wants
us to love ourselves unconditionally, with our whole heart, soul, and
mind. Therefore we are not to love our neighbor that way either. We
are commanded to love and follow God, and once we do that, we will
feel and behave rightly toward ourselves and our neighbor as well.
Ironically, the very words, "you shall love him as yourself," which
liberals take as commanding unconditional love for the Other, back up
my narrower interpretation. Since it is only possible, at best, to
love one person or a few people as one loves oneself, not an entire
populace or the entire human race, the passage must be referring to a
voluntary, personal relationship, not to some politically coerced
process of national self-sacrifice.
Furthermore, as the Bible states over and over, God wants mankind to
exist in separate nations. Deuteronomy 32:8 says: "When the Most High
gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of
men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples ..." Acts 17:26-27 says that
God sets "boundaries of their habitation" for every nation of mankind.
The Old Testament is filled with admonitions to the Israelites to make
distinctions between themselves and strangers. The most extreme
instance is in the book of Ezra, Chapters 10 and 11, where the Jews
are commanded to disown their non-Jewish wives and children in order
to preserve the ethnic purity of the Jewish people (which if they
hadn't done, by the way, the Jewish people would have gone out of
existence, and there would have been no Jewish people for Jesus to be
born into, and there would have been no Christianity). When so much in
the Bible counsels national and ethnic exclusiveness, it is dishonest
to take isolated scriptural passages as a mandate for open borders.
References
1. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=650
2. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=16157
3. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14579
--------------
How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism
(Continued) by Lawrence Auster
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=16159&p=1
Tempting God
But liberal fundamentalists are unconcerned with getting a true and
balanced understanding of these scriptural passages, just as they are
unconcerned with the real-world results of putting their altruistic
beliefs into practice. They seem to believe that acting on their
religious principles makes it unnecessary to heed ordinary rules of
prudencean attitude that Jesus famously rejected. After he has been
fasting in the wilderness for forty days, the devil tempts him to
throw himself down from a high cliff, so as to prove that God's angels
will rescue him, as promised in Psalm 91, which the devil, who
evidently reads Scripture, quotes:
He shall give his angels charge over thee,
and in their hands they shall bear thee up,
lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.^
Jesus answers Satan: "Thou shalt not tempt [that is, test] the Lord
thy God." What Jesus is saying here is that you must not apply the
words of Scripture mechanically. Having faith in God does not mean
that you can ignore physical laws. You cannot jump off a cliff in the
expectation that God will come to your rescue. To do so is to "tempt"
God.
The same analysis applies to liberal fundamentalism and open borders.
Liberal Christians argue that since God created all men, therefore all
humanity is one, and therefore cultural, ethnic, and national
differences don't matter and we should all be mixed into one society.
But to believe that such a blending of humanity can be practically and
safely achieved in the present stage of human developmentto turn
America into an extravagantly multi-ethnic and multicultural society,
shorn of its historic majority culture, in the expectation that God
will save us from the consequences of this insane experimentis to
"tempt God." It is a suicidal act of arrogance. If we ignore the laws
of cause and effect that operate in this world, believing that our
good intentions will protect us from the operation of those laws, we
will only succeed in bringing ruin on ourselves.^
Here is yet another illustration of the literalist fallacy. The
highest human state, the goal of Christianity and of all true
religion, is self-forgetful love. Yet it would be madness to adopt
such love (which even in the best of circumstances is consistently
practiced by very few human beings), as the organizing principle of
society. James Madison in the Federalist warned against the error of
idealizing mankind: government, he said, is designed for men, not
angels. Jesus also warned against idealizing mankind when he told his
disciples to be wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. To be wise as
a serpent means that you guard yourself against the evils in human
nature. Unlike the liberal Christians, Jesus did not indulge in vain
Rousseauist fantasies about the innate goodness of man, or try to
force such fantasies on society. The second chapter of the Gospel of
John pointedly tells us that "Jesus did not trust himself to them ...
for he knew himself what was in man." [Emphasis added.] But liberal
fundamentalists only heed the part of Jesus' message that fits their
liberal preconceptions. They tell everyone to be gentle as a dove,
while conveniently forgetting the business about being wise as a
serpent. They distort the Christian teaching of faith and salvation
into a politics of indiscriminate global charity.^
The Christian belief in a common humanity under God should not tempt
us to weaken or eliminate national borders. The division of mankind
into distinct nations provides indispensable human needs, including
stable social settings and systems of shared habit and culture.
Equally importantly, national boundaries help keep human hatreds at
bay. Common sense tells us that humanity tends to certain vices, and
we should therefore not gratuitously remove the obstacles that impede
those vices. It tells us that to adopt unconditional love as a
political principle and to erase all boundaries on human behavior is
to license unlimited aggression. But the liberal fundamentalists,
having rejected the doctrine of man's innate sinfulness and even the
cautions of ordinary common sense, cannot grasp these obvious facts.
They condemn racism, while fanatically spreading the very conditions
of unassimilable diversity that increase racial conflict. They have no
qualms about the effects of immigration on the host society because
they regard openness to immigration as a religious obligation, not as
political choice governed by prudence.^
Let us also remember that while both Christian and secular liberals
may urge open borders for reasons of love, human motivations are
always mixed. Much of the support for open immigration is plainly
self-interested. Corporate executives do not want mass immigration in
order to spread Christian charity, but to assure the presence of a
low-wage work force. Ethnic activists do not call for amnesty to
spread compassion, but to increase the power of their own racial
group. Democrats and Republicans do not seek open borders out of love,
but out of a desire to swell their respective party ranks (a deluded
hope in the case of the Republicans) and gain political advantage over
the other party.
Nevertheless, in this welter of contradictory motivations, by far the
most effective remains the moral and altruistic. As far back as 1957,
the liberal Protestant journal The Christian Century stated in an
editorial:^
We are in danger of preaching freedom and reveling in it ourselves but
denying it to those who knock on our doors.... The denial borders on
blasphemy in Bethlehem. Fling wide the gates and let some glory
in.(3)^
America is not seen here as an earthly society, with earthly
responsibilities to its citizens. It is seen as Bethlehema symbol of
Heaven. From this perspective, to admit immigrants into our country is
not to let in concrete human beings with their concrete good and bad
qualities. It is to let in "glory"a divine attribute. By erasing the
distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms, and thus the
distinctions among relative temporal goods, the liberal Christian view
makes rational discussion of the immigration issue impossible.
Yet the liberal Christianity of the 1950s was a model of
reasonableness compared to the aggressive open-borders policy of the
Roman Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II. Like any alienated
liberal or one-world capitalist, the Pope sanctified non-Western
immigrants while delegitimizing the Western nations he was ordering to
include them. He deliberately undermined U.S. law when he came to
Texas in 1987 and endorsed the Sanctuary Movement, a network of
organizations that transport and hide illegal aliens who come here
from Central America. Most appallingly, he repeatedly equated
immigration restrictions with abortion, arguing that to refuse to
admit a prospective immigrant into your country is as sinful as to
kill an unborn child. Both acts, the Holy Father declared, are part of
the "Culture of Death," which, he said, also includes such practices
as contraception and euthanasia. His proposed "Ethic of Life" enjoined
Christians to stand in "solidarity with society's weakest members"the
elderly, the infirm, the unborn, and the illegal immigrant.(4)
In portraying immigration restriction as a moral crime, but only when
it is practiced by Westerners, the Pope would have effectively denied
Western countries any control over their own borders. In his trip to
the U.S. in October 1995 he further intruded himself into American
domestic politics, declaring that any attempt to control legal or
illegal immigration or to ban public assistance to illegal aliens was
a sin. Speaking of Third World immigrants who want to get into the
West, he told American audiences that we must treat our neighbor as
ourselves, and that "everyone in the world is our neighbor."
As immigration expert David Simcox summed up the Pope's policy,
"Church pronouncements now affirm immigration as a virtually absolute
right, while they have qualified the regulatory rights of states to
the point where they are emptied of any legitimate scope of action." A
Church official has written: "Catholic citizens are required to work
to see that as far as possible the laws of their countries adhere to
this universal norm [of open borders]."(5)
We can't help wondering, what does the Church's open-borders posturing
have to do with Christianity? Jesus preached the Gospel to the poor in
spirit, telling them to open their souls to the love of God. John Paul
II preaches liberalism to materially prosperous Western peoples,
telling them to open their pockets, their borders, and their national
identity to foreign peoples. True, Jesus told a rich young man to give
all his wealth to the poor. But he did not give that counsel to
everyone he met. He said it to a particular individual, who, it is
apparent from the Gospel text, needed that particular advice if he was
to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus did not, as John Paul has done,
tell an entire political society to sacrifice its goods, which in the
modern context would mean the government sacrificing the goods of all
the people in that society, whether they wanted their goods to be
sacrificed or not. ^
Efforts by Catholic intellectuals to explain the Pope's open borders
policy have only revealed how extreme it really is. The Catholic
neoconservative George Weigel, after saying he agreed with immigration
restrictionists that "national identity is important and that
patriotism is a virtue," added the qualifier that "patriotism is not
an absolute virtue and national identity is a secondary, if honorable,
definition of one's self. Our national identity is subordinate to our
identity as members of the Body of Christ, the Church." Weigel's
remark that patriotism is not an absolute virtue seems unexceptionable
from a Christian standpoint, until we realize that our "identity as
members of the Body of Christ," which Weigel upholds as the highest
value, translates in practical terms into his preference for open
borders. "The general rule [concerning immigration]," he continues,
"ought to be generosity." But if the general rule is generosity, what
happens to the national identity that Weigel said is important? Under
the existing open borders policy that Weigel supports, our national
identity is not being properly subordinated to a higher value, it is
being steadily eliminated by the mass intrusion of foreign cultures.
Thus Weigel pretends to subsume the secular value of nationhood under
the spiritual value of membership in the body of Christ, an idea to
which no Christian could object. But what he is really doing is
subsuming the secular value of nationhood under his own secular
valuemass Third-World immigration. Weigel, as a devout Catholic,
speaks of the Body of Christ. But what he really has in mind is Ben
Wattenberg's Universal Nation.(6)
Contrary to the liberal and neoconservative strands of Catholicism
which regard the nation as dispensable, traditional Church teachings
acknowledge the desirability of organizing mankind into subsidiary
units, the largest of which is the nation. The writings of the Church
Fathers say nothing about an obligation of a national community to
sacrifice itself for other national communities. As the Catholic
historian Thomas Molnar points out, Catholic doctrine has long
recognized that the nation, like the family, is an entity possessing
inherent rights and serving indispensable functions. Like the family,
the nation has special claims on the individual's love and loyalty,
and promotes important virtues that can be promoted in no other way.
And the nation, like the family, needs protection. The sovereign's
first duty is the care of his own people. He must attend to the good
of his own subjects before he concerns himself with foreigners. The
idea that there is some unlimited right of foreigners to immigrate
into a country is not in Christianity. "Unconditional
love"particularly unconditional love for all foreignersis strictly a
New Age concept.^
Babel
The above thoughts lead to a surprising conclusion. Most liberal
Christians today affirm that creating culturally diverse societies is
the moral, Godly, and just thing to dothe more diverse, the more just
and Godly. But if it is our purpose to discern God's purpose, doesn't
it seem far more likely that God would oppose the creation of
multicultural, majority-less societies? He would oppose them, first,
because they rob human beings of the stable cultural environments and
the concrete networks of belonging that are essential conditions of
personal and social flourishing; and, second, he would oppose them
because they lead to unresolvable conflict and disorder. In opening
America's borders to the world, our political leaders are not
following any divine scheme, but are indulging an all-too-human
conceit: "We can create a totally just society," they tell themselves.
"We can stamp out cultural particularities and commonalities that have
taken centuries or millennia to develop. We can erect a new form of
society based on nothing but an idea. We can ignore racial and
cultural differences and the propensity to inter-group conflict that
has ruled all of human history. We can create an earthly utopia, a
universal nation."
All of which brings us to the biblical account of Babel. The
comparison of multicultural America to the Tower of Babel has become
such a cliché in the hands of conservative columnists over the last 20
years that a true understanding of this parable has been lost. Indeed,
as I will show, the conservative, or rather the neoconservative,
understanding of this parable is the exact opposite of its true
meaning.
As told in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the human race, in a burst
of arrogant pride, attempts to construct a perfect human society
purely by their own willa tower "with its top in the heavens, and let
us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the
face of the whole earth." Mankind hopes that this one-world society
will prevent them from being divided into separate societies. But this
is not what God wants. "The Lord came down to look at the city and
tower which man had built, and the Lord said, 'If, as one people with
one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing
that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.'" God does not
want man to build a universal city, because that would lead man to
worship himself instead of God. So God confusesthat is, he
diversifiesmen's language so that they cannot understand one another,
and then he "scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."
It becomes clear that the Tower of Babel is not, as neoconservatives
have often said, a multicultural society which breaks down because it
lacks a common culture based on universalist ideals. On the contrary,
the Tower of Babel represents the neoconservatives' own political
idealthe Universal Nation. And the moral of the story is that God does
not want men to have a single Universal Nation, he wants them to have
distinct nations. "That is why it was called Babel," Genesis
continues, "because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole
earth." But that's not all. Having divided men's language into many
different languages, God does not want these many languages to
co-exist in the same society: "And from there the Lord scattered them
over the face of the whole earth."
Thus God rejects the universal society, where the whole human race
lives together speaking the same language, and he also (implicitly)
rejects the multicultural society, where the whole human race lives
together speaking different languages. God wants the human race to
belong to a plurality of separate and finite societies, each with its
own culture and language. This providential system for the
organization of human life allows for the appropriate expression of
cultural variety, even as, by demonstrating that human things are not
absolute, it restrains and channels man's self-aggrandizing instincts.
And this view of mankind is not limited to the Book of Genesis, as a
supposedly primitive account of an early, tribal period of history
when mankind presumably needed a more rudimentary form of social
organization. If we go from the first book of the Bible to its last
book, The Revelation of John, we find, to our astonishment, that God's
plan still includes separate nations. In Chapter 21, after the final
judgment on sinful humanity has occurred, after the first heaven and
the first earth have passed away and a new heaven and a new earth have
appeared, after the holy city, New Jerusalem, has come down out of
heaven, a dwelling for God himself on earth, and after the total
transformation of the world, when even the sun and moon are no longer
needed to light the city because the glory of God is the light of it,
and the Lamb is the lamp of it, even then
... the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it:
and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it....
And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.
In the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, there are still distinct
nations, and kings of nations, and these are the glories of humanity
which are brought before the throne of God, and there transfigured in
the light of Christ. Mankind, following the end of the world, is still
providentially constituted of separate nations, which give it its
character and distinctiveness, even as, for example, our earth is
constituted of separate continents, islands, mountain ranges, and
valleys, which give it its shape and its meaning. The physical earth
is not a homogenous mass consisting of nothing but "equal" individual
particles, and neither, in the biblical view, is mankind.
The Bible and the American Founding
Coming back to earth after that visit to the New Jerusalem, we realize
that we do not need to rely only on the Bible to establish the
importance of nationhood. The Scriptural view of God's plan for human
society turns out to be in accord with the natural rights tradition
that underlies our own Declaration of Independence. Before we conclude
this article, let us look at how nationhood is supported by philosophy
as well as by revelation. As Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of
Government, man receives his existence from God, and therefore has a
natural right to preserve his existence, as well as a natural right to
the liberty that is needed in order to preserve it. The Declaration of
Independence took these Lockean rights of man in his individual
capacity and applied them to man in his social or national capacity,
when it affirmed that the American people are endowed by God with the
rights of liberty and sovereignty, such rights being necessary for
their collective preservation as a political society.
In our hyper-individualism, we modern Americans have lost sight of the
idea that the universal rights of man are not just individual but
social. As the philosopher Leo Strauss observed, it is the
hierarchical order of man's "natural constitution"the order of man's
natural wants and inclinations as a being created in God's imagethat
supplies the basis for natural rights such as liberty and property.(7)
Furthermore, since man is not only an individual being, but a social
being, the hierarchy of man's natural wants includes his need for
membership in a coherent political community. Among other
requirements, such a community cannot exist without organic links
joining the members to each other and to the past; in other words, it
cannot exist without a degree of cultural homogeneity.
There is therefore a universal right, proceeding from divine and
natural law, to preserve our own particular society, including its
inherited cultural characteristics, the kinds of distinct qualities
that, for example, make the Irish different from the Italians, and
that make both of those national groups different from Indians or
Indonesians. While the right of cultural preservation may not be
absolute, it is nevertheless derived from the same transcendent moral
order that is the source of our other political and civil rights.
Indeed, it is part of what makes it possible for human beings to
participate in that order. As C.S. Lewis put it, "If justice is a
superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race."^ When
Lewis said "race," he wasn't thinking of biological race in our
contemporary, reductive sense of the word, but of the historic fact of
the English people, as an extended family sharing a common descent and
a common history.
In conclusion, whether we look to the Bible or to the American
Founding tradition, we find that the dream of erecting a single,
undifferentiated global society violates God's plan for humanity. And,
as Genesis tells us, God punishes this universalist society by
converting it into a Babelthat is, he destroys it.
The heart of our civilizational crisis
That the Christian churches have nevertheless urged this universalist
project on the West leads us to a terrible paradox. On the one hand,
Christianity is the historic and spiritual foundation of Western
civilization and of the nations that have constituted it. On the other
hand, much of organized Christianity as it actually exists
todayChristianity infused with liberal One-Worldismis the avowed enemy
of the West and its historic peoples. This One-World Christianity is a
distortion of true Christianity, it is what Christianity has become
under the influence of left-leftist ideology. A more sane and balanced
Christianity is possible, which gives due regard to the subsidiary
values of culture and nation.
An example of this healthier Christian attitude was the reverence that
Pope John Paul II expressed toward the Polish nation during his
epochal first papal visit to that country in 1979. During that
extraordinary journey, which played a key role in the ultimate defeat
of Soviet Communism, he spoke of Poland, not as a political and
economic project or as an abstract idea, but as a distinct historical
and spiritual entity, as a collective personality whose life has
extended over centuries. Unfortunately, the Pope throughout the rest
of his papacy gave such recognition only to his native Poland, and,
apparently, only because Polish culture was struggling to survive
under Communist oppression. When it came to the United States, he took
the opposite tack. America as the Pope saw it (and indeed as American
liberals and mainstream conservatives themselves see it) has no
national culture of its own, but exists only as a charity service for
the world (the left view) or as the generator of a global
democratic-capitalist ideology (the neoconservative view).
Nevertheless, John Paul II's magnificent, if too narrowly applied,
evocation of national culture as the vehicle through which a
historical people express their relationship with God can be seen as
the model for a restored, pro-Western Church. Liberal Christianity's
denial of the identity and sovereignty of the historical Western
peoples has led many Western patriots to be deeply suspicious of
Christianity, even to reject it altogether, when what is most needed
is a comprehensive renewal of the Christian faith, the religion which
glorifies God and his truth, not man and his desires, and which
provides a place under God for all peoples.^
[24]Lawrence Auster is the author of [25]Erasing America: The Politics
of the Borderless Nation. He offers a traditionalist conservative
perspective at [26]View from the Right.
References
1. Pope Pius X, E Supremi Apostolatus, 1903.
2. Abbé George de Nante, The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth
Century, August 15, 1997, p. 10.^
3."Fling Wide the Gates," The Christian Century, September 4, 1957, p.
1028.^
4. David Simcox, "The Pope's Visit: Is Mass Immigration A Moral
Imperative?" The Social Contract, Winter 1995-96, p. 107.^
5. Alfonso Figueroa Deck, S.J., quoted by Simcox.^
6. George Weigel, "Why the New Isolations are Wrong," American
Purpose, January 1992.^
7. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 1953, p. 127.^
References
11. http://cspc.org/
12. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Contact/Contact.asp
13. http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/createcomment.asp?ID=16159
14. http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/createcomment.asp?ID=16159
15. http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/?ID=16159
16. http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/?ID=16159
17. http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Printable.asp?ID=16159
18. http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Printable.asp?ID=16159
23. http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/authors.asp?ID=650
24. mailto:Lawrence.auster at att.net
25. http://www.aicfoundation.com/booklets.htm
26. http://www.amnation.com/vfr
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