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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to part nine of my reading of Raizard Lagut
Goos demon in Democracy. I'm judging we only have two episodes. Left.
There'll be total of ten on this one, so let's
get going. We have chapter five. This is the last chapter.
Read half of it, read the other half, and then
the conclusion on the next one. Chapter five is called
Religion Part one. For the Communist ideology, religion has always
been a matter of pressing concern. Marx hated religion with
all his heart, but at the same time distanced himself
from those criticisms of religion, such as Ludvik Foyerbachs, that
he thought too crude. Using a quasi Hegelian argument, he
contended that religion would be abolished at some point of
a not too distant future history, and that with human
development coming to its completion, it would no longer be needed,
and that when this happened, man himself, in full bloom
of his humanity, would become the proper object of worship.
It was going to worship something right. Marx's attitude well
reflects the feelings that the socialists and Communists have always
had about religion. On the one hand, a profound hostility,
often accompanied by an almost sadistic longing for a world
in which religion would be wiped out without a trace.
On the other, a wish to socialism become a genuine
form of religion in the sense that it would satisfy needs, dreams,
and desires, similar to the way in which religion did,
and which apparently adhered in human nature. The problem with
religion was that, as they said, it satisfied those needs, dreams,
and desires in a perverse way, pushing people toward goals
that were not theirs, but imposed on them through an
ideological manipulation, and ultimately bringing calamities on them and the
entire society. That could be anyone's religion, not necessarily the
from history, we see that more with political ideology than
we do with actual quote unquote religion. But whatever the
crimes or religion, its mobilizing power was truly inevit enviable
to the socialist and communists who up that once there
ideology ascended to a similar ruling position in human hearts,
humanity would reap immense benefits. In the communist practice, hostility
to religion clearly absorbed the party and its functionaries far
more than the task of making it redundant. As a
result of the socialist ideology winning the hearts of the people,
no matter how quickly communism progressed the initial plantar replace
the worship of God with the worship of man in
its full bloom, advance more and more into the Future's
starting to understand where he's gone with this. So throughout
its entire history, the Communist system was waging its war
against religion, religiosity, religious superstition, clerical obscuritanism, obscuritism, clericalism, and
particularly that despicable institution called the Catholic Church. The war
was brutal, oftentimes murderous, and the atrocities committed by the
Communists still boggle the mind. The Communists felt quite rightly
that the Church and Christianity were the strongest barriers that
protected the nation against the regime and its ideology, and
that their power would not be secure until the Christians
were totally subdued. In Poland, the strongly felt allegiance to
the Catholic faith, as well as the historically well established
position of the Catholic Church within the society, or perhaps
regardless of the political games that the bishops sometimes played
with the regime. The key factor that accounts for the
fact that too many Poles never really sold their souls
to the Communistic regime and if you remember my reading
of the Last Crusade by Warren Carroll, Oh what did
they say? They said they would have to They attempted
to destroy completely the Catholic Church and said that they'd
probably have to kill half of the Catholics in the
country before the others just gave in. But Communism, although
eventually defeated, enjoyed a considerable success in various fields, also
in strengthening and enlarging the anti religion front. It's applied
an additional fuel to the anti Christian and particularly anti
Catholic streak that had long been present in the European tradition.
Also in Poland, even though despite the new powerful means
of propaganda, it never managed to change the overall pro
Catholic stance of the majority of the Polish population. Also
in Poland, the biggest inroads made by Communists anti Catholic
propaganda were among educated groups, especially the intellectuals, who took
over the old pre war secular stereotypes, and imbued them
with so much venom that it paralyzed their own moral
reflexes and pushed them to endorsing without a moment's hesitation.
The most outrageous acts of the brutality perpetrated by the
regime against the Catholics in the Church. There is a
well known letter, nowadays spoken of most reluctantly, written by
a group of the leading Polish writers and intellectuals in
the early nineteen fifties, condemning the Krocile priests, whom the
Communist charge was spying for the Vatican and America. The
charge was utterly nonsensical, but the sentences were ruthless. The
letter is a dark page, unfortunately one in many in
the history of the intellectuals depravity. In this age of
human folly. It may be that those intellectuals who were
duped or duped themselves to serve totalitarianism were occasionally capable
of feeling guilt for what they had done. But it
seems that infamous letter, signed by Vslawa Zimboska, future Nobel
Prize winner in literature, Lamir Russik, a prominent playwright, and others,
did not provoke any special moral self examination. Supporting the
Communists in their war against the Church must have appeared
to them ideologically the least doubtful of the moral transgressions
that they committed in communism. Whoever was against religion and
against Christianity, made a first step to make a good
comrade and to deserve special protection from the Party, but
above all to earn a label of being enlightened. No
true Communists stated that each human being with a minimal
claim to intelligence had to be agnostic or atheist, that
he had to be highly critical of the priests, harsh
toward the holy scriptures, and flippant about church dogmas and all.
This was believed to be to be not a revolutionary eccentricity,
but a continuation one of the most enlightened European traditions,
especially those of the Enlightenment. The Party intellectuals convinced themselves,
through fear, ignorance of self deception, that their humiliating servility
was not that but a somewhat modernized version of vultarianism. Interesting, huh.
Some people claim that communism was responsible for well, there
was a certain group that invented communism spread it. Yet
they also claim that. Some of them also claim that
the Church has always been a there's always been that
they control that too. Yet when you look around, the
Catholic Church was the one fighting against it in the
twentieth century. I don't know you know, a house divided
against hisself can't stand. I don't know. Maybe. Unfortunately, the
Christian faith did not make the believers immune to the
communist temptation. For a long time there was a trend
in Christianity with an obsequious proclivity toward communism and socialism,
which probably spread it out of common strong anti capitalist sentiments,
but also of a conviction shared by some Christians but
not reciprocated by the secular left, that both Christianity and
socialism in their roots stem from the same moral impulse,
the good of the people. Both Protestants and Catholics, and
even the greatest the theologians fell prey to this illusion.
Karl Bart, Paul Tillik, Jacques Martine, and many others had
such episodes. Some, like Emmanuel Monnier, went clear beyond, clearly
beyond sympathy and became openly pro communist and pro Soviet
fellow travelers. Thousands of pastors in Roman Catholic and Eastern
Orthodox priests joined them the system and for many years
served it faithfully out of stupidity, opportunism, ideological blindness, or betrayal,
all of which they supported with pathetic intellectual contortions. Dean
of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, was once Stalin's notorious puppet at
propaganda meetings organized by the Soviet Communist Party in Poland,
the church was sabotaged from inside by renegade priests, whom
the Communist authorities called, in the mendacious language so typical
of them, patriot priests, and whose number in absolute terms
was by no means small. When the terror evaded an
indoctrination began to subside, the Communists tried another strategy, this
time by luring a larger group of Catholics into the system,
not only traders and pathological opportunists. They even allowed a
small party group of Catholics to be represented in the Parliament,
which for many seemed the promising beginning of an evolutionary
change for the better. At one point, immediately after the
nineteen fifty six Thought Law, the Polish Episcopate officially urged
their flock to support the reformist parties of the Communist Party,
and the government gave permission to establish a few quasi
independent associations of Catholic persuasion. It soon became clear, however,
that no further changes would be made and no further
political plurality tolerated. But the door for those Catholics who
wished to support the regime was still open. That's why
we call it a remnant people. The Communist Party went
so far as to encourage what was then called the
Dialogue between Marxist and Catholics. To launch such a dialogue
was on the one hand, a propaganda ploy to show
how the Communists cooperated with all the people of goodwill,
but on the other a clever tactic to divide the
Catholics and to push those intransigent, those intransigent into the corner,
into the corner. Whatever the reason of the propaganda, this,
the mere fact that the so called dialogue lasted for
at least a decade proved that the Communist side theology
was still effective. Behind the decision of quite a few
of those Catholic intellectuals who decided to converse with the
Marxist was a sort of practical imperative. They felt that
socialism communism was inevitable, ubiquitous, and philosophically unchallengeable, and therefore
thought it a matter of urgency for the Catholics within
the world as it was, or rather as they believed
it was to find a safe place and obtain some
kind of official intellectual legitimacy. This dialogue, when we look
at it today, is not an uplifting spectacle and reveals
essential asymmetry between the two sides. One had to make
serious concessions to accommodate itself to the communist reality. The
other conceded nothing, promised nothing, and treated its opponents patronizingly.
The Catholics concession were the following. They spoke highly of
socialism as both theory and practice, and distance themselves from
those bad Catholics who did not appreciate the benefits and
virtues of the new regime. They postulated that because Catholicism
had much in common with socialism, the Church should be
more listened to and its presence more recognized in the
socialist society. The Marxists, in turn, made no concessions at all.
They noted with satisfaction the fact that progressive Catholics finally
came to accept socialism, although they should have done it sooner,
and that they came to denounce the bad Catholics, although
they should have done it more forcefully. To the Catholics
postule that the Marxists respond responded that of course the
Catholics could find their place in the process of building socialism,
but they must be aware that socialism has to higher
value in that because the historical record of the church
was ugly, they should try harder than others to earn
the trust of the socialist community. The Catholic Church in Poland,
led by Primate Stefan Wazinski, later to be called the
Primate of the Millennium, was generally hostile to the reproachment.
The Polish Episcopate, however, had not been so adamant in
the past. They had treated the patriot priests with surprising
leniency and made declarations that were quite painful to the faithful,
for example condemning anti communist resistance groups as gangs. But
in his rejection of the dialogue, Primate Wazinski was right.
He did not trust the intellectuals, and in fact he
never trusted them, as one can see from a well
known article published before World War II, when the specter
of communist Poland was not yet in sight. Hence his
decision to make the Catholicism of the people, the Catholicism,
so to speak, the stronghold of the Catholic faith was
quite understandable and compatible with his deep convictions. The decision
had far reaching, in generally positive effects. By relying on
rural religiosity, the Church managed to preserve a large area
of social practices and religious traditions that was not accessible
to the communist ideology. In countries where this type of
full Christianity did not exist or was considerably weaker, the
communist system managed to wreak more havoc and penetrated deeper
into the social fabric. The Primist decision, however, had negative
effects as well. Polish Catholicism survived in amazingly good shape,
but not without flaws. What it clearly lacked was an
intellectual leadership. Most of the Catholic intelligentsiare represented so called
open Catholicism, which had scarcely any influence on the people's
minds and souls, or if it had, was largely destructive.
Probably the only period when one could see a close
alliance between the Church and the intelligentsia was in the
nineteen eighties, but the love affair was short and its
disappearance was as abrupt as its coming into being. No
signs indicating that it would happen appeared before. No signs
indicating that it would happen appeared before, and it would
have been almost incomprehensible were it not for the emergence
of the magnetic personality of Karl Attila, who ascended to
the papal throne in nineteen seventy eight. Unfortunately, this cordial
alliance came apart even before the fall of communism. It
is interesting to note that its beginning and its end
were proclaimed by the same man at a Mishnik, a
top anti regime dissident who for decades had been dictating
to the Polish herd of independent minds which way they
should be going. When read today, both of his proclamations
marking the beginning and the end of the entant corgial
with the Church disclosed what previously was overlooked, namely a
consistently anti church and anti religious bias that has now
been laid bare. After the rhetoric of purely tactical concern
for the fate of the Church and religion in Poland
became worn out and lost its persuasive power due to
the absence of the vigorous Catholic intelligentsia. The effects of
Communism on the Polish elites proved more durable than previously thought,
and an anti religious ideology left a permanent mark on
the soul of Polish academics, writers, and artists. No wonder then,
that after the fall of the regime, an anti religious attitude,
this time in a new and liberal democratic formula, found
fertile ground and spread quickly among a wide range of
educated people, and even more quickly among those who, through
down rights though downright stupid, had intellectual pretensions because they
graduated from something or other, or, as was not uncommon,
worked at some educational institution. It simply did not occur
to them that the Church was so helpful to the
nation under communism, not because she was simply against this
particular political system, but because the system was wrong in everything,
and the Church was right in almost all the issues
that were critical to the existence of a viable society,
and if so, the Church should have been worth listening to,
regardless of what political arrangement the society took, and perhaps
even more so after the communist regime fell and the
liberal Democrats took over. Part two. The attitude of liberalism
toward religion was from the start frosty and sometimes hostile.
Like the socialists later on, the liberals were aware of
the great ideological power wielded by religion, although the term
ideology had not been coined yet, which they found politically
most troubling. Religion, they said, provokes deep divisions, insite civil wars,
pushes people to violence against their neighbors. The grounds for
this view, as well as general philosophical framework for the
classical liberal concept of religion, were provided by the Reformation.
Speaking somewhat simplistically, the Protestants moved religion more than ever
before into the realm of faith, so that its outward
forms and even its dogmatic aspect, lost their importance. They
brought back Saint Paul's old distinction between the inner man
and the outer man, which they translated into the analogous
distinction between internal and external religion. The former was considered
to be appropriate and protected, the latter secondary and not
deserving of any special protection. It was the external form,
the traditions and additions, as John Milton called them, that
could destabilize the political order and generate irresponsible behaviors, zealousness, fanaticism,
and a desire to convert dissonance by force. The controversy
that was going on at that time between the tolerationists
and the anti tolerationists i e. Those who wanted to
allow public presence of external religion and those who wanted
to have it significantly reduced heated, though it was did
not dramatically set apart. The disputing parties both actually agreed
that internal religion deserve respect because, and both use the
same argument this is so deeply embedded in the human
soul that it is impervious to any political control, including
the most ruthless coercion. They also agreed that external religion
can be politically dangerous and is arguably the most important
source of political conflict. The major difference between the two
parties was that the anti tolerationists asserted that outer religion
should be totally controlled by the government, while the tolerationists,
such as the Old John Locke. The Young Locke belonged
to the opposite camp, allowed for its public presence, sometimes
quite considerable, but gave the state the right to supervise
its religious rights in dogmas Politically, if any among these
rights in dogmas appeared to threaten social peace, public order,
existing laws, or political stability, then claimed Locke and others
and other like minded thinkers, the state should not hesitate
to step in and remove the threat. Such a decision
would be purely political, not religious. The government or its
officials banning a right or a dogma would not be
motivated by its alleged religious truth or falsehood. Such verdicts
would not be in their power to make, but would
solely assess its practical consequences for the stability of the
political order. The political argument was almost behind the exclusion
of Catholics from the shield of religious toleration, the standard
rule among the Protestant tolerationists. It was claimed that the
Catholics were not trustworthy as other citizens because of their
divided loyalty one part of the country the other to Rome,
whereas a good citizen could not have but one sovereign
the state. This exclusion was widely supported in the Protestant countries,
apparently in the belief considered self evident that whatever message
religion conveys, it cannot override the will of the sovereign
and cannot exempt citizens from civic obedience. But because the
genuine religion was in a religion, this prerogative that gave
the state the power to supervise out a religion did
not seem to those who accepted it particularly painful. Regardless
of how sincerely the Reformation theologians desired to liberate religion
from the institutional strait jacket, and how ardently they defended
the purity of faith, the overall result of the schism
was different. Religion, freed from the dictates of Rome, fell
under the control of the state, to which the liberals,
so distrustful of revealed religion of any kind, readily assented.
It is often said that the controversy over toleration led,
thanks to the perseverance of the liberals, to the establishment
of a constitutional principle of the separation of Church and
a state, which was to become one of the key
standards in liberal democratic societies. Nothing could be Nothing could
be further from the truth. The principle was binding in
the United States, but certainly not in European Protestant societies.
In the United States, the First Amendment ruled out the
existence of what it calls an established religion, which in
fact means the state religion. What Britain and several other
Protestant countries did was the opposite, by making the head estate,
the head of the church they institute, is something that
clearly falls into a category of established religion. The idea
that the state is the ultimate supervisor in all matters
relating to the political community, including religious ones, had a
long tradition and in itself was not revolutionary. The problem
was that the state could go too far in imposing
discipline and be tempted to use the argument from political
rationality to extirpate some religious groups. Some religious groups deemed
suspect to violate human conscience on a massive scale and
to usurp the role of the spiritual and moral authority
under the pretexts of the disinterristed political supervision. This has
occasionally happened in Europe for several centuries, usually at the
time of political turmoil, example, the brutal persecution of Catholics
after Henry the eighth broke with Rome, or when the
state officially accepted an ideological agenda hostile to Christianity, as
was the case after the French Revolution when the new
Assembly passed the civil Constitution for the clergy. The usual
practice was to humiliate the potentially suspect group by forcing
them to take an oath interpreted as a purely political
act of allegiance on the regulations that they found morally
repugnant or religiously unacceptable, as in the case of Thomas Moore, who,
despite his de facto loyalties to the British monarchy after
the king's breach with Rome, was executed for not taking
the oath on the Act of supremacy. With respect to
the separation of church and state, the Catholic countries in
Europe fared better than the Protestant countries. The secular and
ecclesiastical powers were, by definitions separated. In Catholicism, the supreme
authority as the church in the Church was in the
hands of the Pope, who was sovereign with respect of
the powers of emperors, kings and presidents. Such was, of
course the theory. In practice, the relations between thrown and
altar varied, and in a long and complicated history of
those relations we have had various combinations, from the de
facto subordination of one authority to another though close cooperation,
to deep political and doctrinal conflicts. Of course, some time
after the religious wars in Europe ended, religious peace prevailed,
with the exceptions of such extraordinary developments as the French Revolution.
As a situation became stabilized, most governments in Protestant and
Catholic countries pursued the policy of accommodation, not interfering too
much in religious matters, and thus respecting in practice religious liberties.
This began to change in recent decades when the European governments,
by having expoused an ambitious ideological mission, started legislating morality
in an open confrontation with the teaching of Christianity and
other religions. Moreover, to justify their policy, they used an
analogous political argument, spurious as it is easy to see,
but enormously effective, that ran as follows, quoting, what we
enforce is the law of the land and the constitutional rights,
be it in matters of abortion, marriage, education, life, death
and not religion. And what we supervise is not the
people's souls, but our citizens' loyalty to the existing legal
and political system. This offensive was so formidable that a
lot of religious groups, mostly Protestant but some Catholic too, acquiesced.
Those that acquiesced had to adapt their teaching to the
requirements of the liberal democratic state, and consequently to revise
their doctrines substantially, sometimes beyond recognition. Those that resisted put
themselves on a collision course with the liberal democratic state, and,
as their critics repeatedly said, with modernity as such videism
characteristic of protism, but spreading beyond its boundaries, which encouraged
the subordination of external religion to the state, caused a
gradual marginalization of Christianity in the public realm, which, as
was to be expected, had to result in progressive secularization
in any highly political society. As a liberal society is,
whatever lacks political legitimacy to appear in the public square
loses its race on deetra. Altogether, internal religion regarded as
the only form of religion that could be tolerated. If
it wanted to retain this quasi protection, had to seek
some political respectability, and the only way to do it
was first to dispel any suspicion it might that it
might undermine liberalism and human souls, and furthermore, to prove
that it motivates people to do things that are politically useful,
such as bringing about peace, preaching the attitude of toleration,
and inspiring philanthropy. In other words, religion was to demonstrate
that it supported the liberal order and help the liberal
state to perform its functions. Religion in a non political
sense should be confined to the church and the inner life,
or better yet, exclusively to the inner life and family life, because,
for example, a politician os ostentatiously going to church could
be accused of encroaching on the secularity of the state.
Those Christians who took this view did not put up
a heroic fight against the liberal state usurping the role
of the legislature of morality. The usurper seized his power
almost unopposed, and his victorious army did not even bother
to take prisoners. All goes back to that remnant Part three.
Democratic theories, as opposed to liberal ones do not emit
such an obvious critical message about religion, but neither are
they particularly favorable. The basic objection was that the divisions
in the democratic system should be political, which meant that
they should have as their foundation different ideas about how
to organize the state and its institutions, and under no
circumstance should they relate to religion. The political parties could
be socialists, liberal, conservative, monarchist or anarchist, but they must
not be Catholic or Evangelical or Orthodox, nor could they
be based on ethnicity or race. The democratic state should
provide a place for different ethnic groups, different races, or
different religions, but it could not endorse one race or
religion at the expense of the others. But it can't.
What was it that I read the other day that's
been coming out ever since this whole brujaja on Twitter?
A six percent of new hires or white males, and
that's basically by law. I don't know that the number
is by law, but that's the way it's worked out.
A democratic man is a citizen of the state, and
citizenship does not differentiate between races, ethnic groups, or religions.
The difference between the so called mature democratic societies and
those societies that have not reached political maturity, whatever the
exact meaning of that is to be, is precisely that
in the latter people are not grouped around political parties,
but around tribes, clans, and religious cults. This co this
core of this argument is correct, but its general formulation
can be misleading. In the course of the intellectual and
political history of Europe, Christian religion did influence and significantly
so political programs, including concepts of the state, the duties
of the citizen, and the hierarchy of political objectives. Thus
one can legitimately speak of Christian political thought, developing system
Middle Ages to modern times, rich in content and diavorse
and implications. It is therefore obvious that political parties may be,
and in fact have been, called Christian, although it is
also true that no specific single political system the political
system dostrine can be derived from Christian philosophical and theological heritage.
For more on that, Tom Woods has a book called
How the Catholic Church Built the West is triggering as
that may be to some. Removing Christianity from the public square,
be it directly or indirectly, was a decision taken not
only against religion as such, and against this particular religion,
but against certain political ideas having a long and honorable
tradition which could have had a positive effect on the
institutional order and on our thinking about politics. Of course,
the primary impulse of the critics was a strong anti
Christian bias, not a rational desire to save politics from
what did not properly belong to it. In liberalism at
as it emerged in early modernity. There were additional factors,
such as a vehement rejection of medieval philosophy and of
scholastics in particular, with which Christianity was often associated. Sometimes
a modern philosopher's hostile to Christianity and to the Catholic
Church as they were, had an ambitious plan to find
an entirely new theological basis for the political order, with
no reference to previous theories or the classical tradition. Authors
such as Hobbes and Locke, nominally Christian, sought a new
interpretation of the Christian religion, this time went no links
to existing tradition, which made them, of course automatically anti Catholic,
but congruent with the modern view of rationality. They recognized
the religion, thus transformed and radically deluded, was said to
be free from alleged and anachronisms, and made palatable to
the tastes and needs of modern man. Hobbes devoted half
of his Leviathan to religion, where while not directly denying Christianity,
he interpreted it in the way modern men, without the
burden of scholastic philosophy and armed with the achievements of
the new natural sciences, could accept Hobbes told him what
hell and heaven could be in light of reason, and
which parts of Christian teaching were defensible and which were not.
Locke's approach was similar in the reasonableness of Christianity. He
explained how a man having locks of views of politics
and knowledge should interpret basic teachings to the Christian religion
with the intention to save it for modern times. Such
theoretical exercises were meant to liberate people from the irrationality
within which they remained enslaved. Having believed in religions, superstitions, revelations, miracles,
magical rights to purify their souls, and fantastic stories about
the afterlife. All this entangled those thinkers in a paradox
typical of modern thinking, intermingling coercion with liberation. Because religion
was to believe to have pushed man to the phantasmagorias
invented by unthinking minds and by authoritarian institutions such as
the Church, the subjection of people to political coercion was
not only an act of liberating them from the yoke
of ignorance and servitude, but also of strengthening their freedom.
The political coercion was, insofar as it limited itself to
self evident goals such as peace and cooperation, which should
clearly be considered as a most natural expectation of every
living creature. This is the reason why John Locke the
Liberal could, without contradicting himself, preach religious tolerance while granting
the state vast prerogatives to control religious practices and ideas,
and to use coercion if these put at risk political
peace and social cooperation. Kant made a similar point in
his famous essay on the Enlightenment. He started with a
triumphant announcement that the human race had left the stage
of adolescence, which for him meant a very precise thing, namely,
that man had freed himself from the influence of religion
and was at last able to use his reason as
the sovereign authority. Kant concluded his essay by praising the
autocratic rule of Frederick the Great as a great victory
of freedom. The same argument, albeit in a cartoonish form,
is found in Voltaire, who, in his work on toleration,
was depicting with a predictable with a predictably obsessive monotony
that he thought to be the persistently harmful influence of
Christianity on every society and epoch. While bashing Christians, he
shamelessly justified various autocrats and tyrants in the history of
Europe and Asia. He commended, for example, the Romans for
their repression of Christians, in which he saw an act
of toleration, and criticized the repressed Christians, who, as he said,
provoked the Romans with their intolerant religious zeal. The most
radical version of making religion a servant of politics we
owe to Jean Jacques Rousseau, notably in his concept of
civil religion, which was intended as the bedrock of the
deep emotional cohesion of a society. The new type of
religious belief was to supersede the earlier forms, of which
he enumerated three. A religion exclusively internal, a religion of
traditional societies based on social mores and rituals. And a
religion most bizarre, which for him was Christianity, primarily Catholic,
but partly Protestant too. What was bizarre about it about
it was its being both otherworldly and this worldly, the
combination of which was politically pernicious because it undermined the
unity of a community and subverted the sovereign power of
the state. The new religion he proposed was an artificial construction,
events it solely to serve a political purpose, but it
contained elements from other religions, the existence of a powerful
and compassionate deity, the sanctity of life, and the belief
in the afterlife, where the righteous are rewarded and the
wicked are punished. The function of the civic civil religion
resembled that of an ideology, giving a society deprived of
old loyalties, a new identity and a new sense of belonging.
The imposition of the civil religion was primarily a political operation,
with implications similar to those that were later to be
seen in highly ideological regimes. The sovereign could get rid
of non believers and even punish with death those who
betrayed the new religious dogmas. The anti Catholic and anti
church attitude was something that from the beginning permeated the
liberal notion of politics. Because the majority of the liberal
thinkers were or were or were born Protestants, the anti
despotic edge of their theory found in the Catholic Church
an obvious villain. Their religious background and their theories reinforced
each other, with the monarchies weakening or turning into constitutional
parliamentary systems, the Church and her religion remained unabashedly and
ostentatiously at the nonliberal position as a deliberately provoked as
if deliberately provoking all liberal critics to use all the
polemical artillery. Nineteenth century socialism, with its hostility to religion, is,
in a way of version of a similar attitude. The
Church and Catholicism represented an old order that long ago
outlived its usefulness and deserved to perish. The twentieth century
version was, of course, rhetorically and in practice far more deadly.
The architects and helmsmans of the communist system were convinced
that when fighting religion, whatever the means, they did humanity
a great service by contributing to its liberation. The more
radical the coercive means applied, the nearer they thought was
the time when man became his own master. Do you
know how many communists I know who don't think they're communists.
The fact that the anti religion policies of the Communists
were so much more brutal than those of the liberal
and democratic states is of course crucial and should never
be forgotten or minimized. But it remains true that their
views on religion and on Christianity and in particular, converge
too often. Not only do they not know that they
are communists, but they're also liberal. I no, I guess
they can pick which one they want. It's kind of
hard to run away from it. When in the early
nineteen twenties Bertrand Russell, after having visited Bolshevik Russia, wrote
a book on the theory and practice of Bolshevism, He
and no uncertain words, expressed both his admiration for the
general idea of the system and his equally strong distaste
for the means used. He finished his book on the
relatively optimistic note that the Communist program, once freed from
the Asian like barbaric heritage so powerfully present in Russia,
would remain a great hope of mankind. The Communists were
indeed aware that such worthy feelings of the liberal minded
Western elites, and wishing to ease the criticism of their
brutal policies, willingly presented themselves as continuing the Western secular
and anti Christian tradition. This tactic proved most proved quite effective,
as it gave the Communists an image of splendidly daring modernizers.
After all, both the Communists and the Western liberal progressives
shared an assumption that religion, unless itself radically modernized, was
an impediment to modernization. Both shared a similar vision of
a better world to come, in which there would be
no religion at all, or, if it was to survive,
it would be entirely subservient to the ideas and institutions
of the new society. Neither the communists nor liberal progressives
could ever imagine religion to be a carrier of wisdom
and a valuable corrective force that was necessary to challenge
the dogmas of the grand plan of modernization. To accept
this authority, if only partially, would have been as unthinkable
to them as it would have been for Kant to
argue that man, after having matured, should go back to
the state of adolescence. The notion that to be for
freedom and modernity presumes being also anti Christian has imprinted
itself on the European mind and as as strong today
as it was in the past. An anti and anti
Christian rhetoric in the media and in politics, and in
anti Christian art, including paintings, installations, plays, novels, films, articles
and slogans fills the public space today, making the Christian religion,
its institutions, and its articles of faith objects of endlessly
multiplying derisions and accusations. Homosexual activists seek Christianity as the
original source of homophobia, and feminists as the foundation of patriarchy.
Countless intellectual is accused of totalitarianism, reactionary sexual ethics, pedophilia,
an inquisition like mentality which hunts anti Semitism and the Holocaust,
intellectual infantilism, a morbid fascination with guilt, and numerous other sins.
On the one hand, there is an ever present feeling
of satisfaction that Christianity has been in retreat for some time,
being driven back by a victorious wave of secularization. On
the other, is invariably seen as an evil that miraculously
resurrects itself and continues to cast its ominous shadow over
the Western civilization. The participation of Christians in public life,
even as paltry as it is now, revives the usual
suspicions and resuscitates the old anti Christian stereotypes. The crusade
against Christianity verges on the absurd. Liberals continue to make
new conquestions to colonize more and more areas of human life,
leaving practically no territory outside their control, and the more
they grab, the latter They ran against Christianity, flogging it
with new accusations, invectives, and blasphemies. The analogy to what
was happening under the communist rule seems irresistible in the
countries where as a result of brutal repressions by the
Communist regime, sometimes induced by historical and cultural peculiarities, Christianity
was believed to be on the wane, and where the
forces of sectism trans triumphed to the satisfaction of the
apostles of the communist ideology, the anti Christian warriors did
not lay down their arms. They continued to fight, as
if fearing the Christian Canity's death was temporary and that
the religion reborn again, was soon to resume its sinister
role as a major obstacle to the march of modernity.
In a sense, the communists were right. Much of the
resistance that finally led to the disintegration of the Communist
system came from religious groups and from religion itself. At
the end of the day, it turned out that the
fear of religion was justified. The pope had indeed far
more troops than the communist dictators. It is quite possible
that the anti Christian crusaders of today are haunted by
a similar fear. I don't know what to comment on this.
It all speaks for itself, so let us continue Part four.
In today's liberal democ or see the anti Christian attitude
has been slightly modified. An authoritarian rhetoric willingly used in
the past by even the most renowned tolerationists such as
Locke and Bail disappeared. The public space, including public language,
has been for some time governed by two formal rules.
These rules, long present and liberal thinking, are now included
in the legal and constitutional systems and are believed to
have settled once and for all the problem of religion
and politics. First, religious freedom is recognized as a fundamental
human right, and second, the state must be ideologically neutral.
In real terms. The first rule entails that no religious
group can be prevented from practicing their religion. The second
asserts that the state must be free from any religion
and is not allowed to support any. Theoretically, the solution
is clear, but despite appearances, the old problems did not vanish.
The allegedly formal rules turned out to be substantive. First
of all, what these rules legitimized was an assumption that
christian should be treated like other religions, and that there
was no reason why it should have a superior status.
Such an assumption would be inconceivable to most of the
old tolerationists. Even Voltaire, clearly loathing Christianity, explicitly rejected this
view in his Treatise on Toleration, admitting that the position
of this religion in Europe was exceptional and therefore privileged.
The new rules were in the intentions of the liberals universalists,
and thus allowed no except either allowed no exceptions either
on the historical or philosophical grounds. This universalism the Liberals
are particularly proud of, because they saw it in manifestation
of their neutrality. They, however, disregarded an obvious fact that
in practice what they called neutrality had irrevocably dethroned Christianity
from the position it had had for many centuries, and
thus led to redefining the nature of European civilization. As
one can see The rules in question, although intended to
be formal, were easily adapted to the prevailing ideology and
soon became a part of it. Today, they are among
the standard inventory of those who assumed the irrelevance of
Christianity for the identity of Western civilization, or, stating it
more mildly, who assumed the post Christian nature of this
civilization in which Christianity is a fortunately closed chapter. The
view that the modern world is essentially non Christian, only
timidly uttered a few decades ago, is now widely accepted,
articulated explicitly and loudly by philosophers, political scientists, and writers.
It has penetrated public opinion and become a sort of
uncontested axiom of social wisdom. A reference to Christianity as
an important part of European identity in the preamble of
the EU Constitutional Treaty provokes such an angry reaction that
had to be dropped as allegedly incongruent with what the
EU calls European values. Even acknowledging the historical role of
the Christian heritage is now thought too extravagant to be tolerated.
All these manifestations of an anti Christian sentiment are not
a trifling matter. They illustrate the triumph of the ideological thinking,
whose distinguishing feature is a reorganization and quite often a
falsification of the past in order to put at the
service of the contemporary political project. Who controls the past
controls the future. As orwell accurately observed in his dissection
of totalitarianism, the communist did on a large scale. The
EU and its effort to build a new European identity
is doing something quite similar, though on a smaller scale,
paralyzed by their chrysophobia. To use Joseph H. H. Wiler's
well known expression, the European Union as well as the
European governments do not react to the brutal persecution of
Christians and other continents, and if they do, their reaction
is low key. This is all the more shameful that
the Christians are, and it must be repeated over and
over again, the most persecuted religious group in the world.
It seems almost unthinkable that the EU of today would
take a more resolute standby, for instance, asserting that due
to the special role of Christianity in the history of Europe,
Europeans have an obligation to defend the Catholics, Protestants and
Christians of other denominations and other continents who were imprisoned, expelled,
tortured and massacred. More outspoken statements condemning the persecution are
rare and written in a universalist language in which Christians
are mentioned alongside other groups, as if the EU were
afraid to be too committal. It is significant that in
the famous case Lasi versus Italy, where the first verdict
by the European Court of Human Rights decided that crucifixes
in schools were unacceptable, most other European governments did not
support the Italian government, which appealed the ruling and failed
to act as amicus cure curia. Those that did are Meenia, Bulgarias, Vipris, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Monaco, Romania,
Russia and San Marino, or either secondary players within the
EU or like Russia, outside of it. None of the
major European countries sided with the Italians. Neither did neither
did I am ashamed to say Poland under the Civic
Platform government, the Polish government, sensitive to what the big
guys might think about it, decided not to get involved.
The coldness to the plight of Christians and Christianity is
concealed by the language of universalistic egalitarianism, which is in
its ostentatious generosity, is supposed to express concern for all
religions and all religious groups. But the principle of equality
and its two rules equal freedom of all religions and
neutrality of the state, are anything but generous. Under the
banner of equality, the religion that has been of paramount
importance is being equalized with the religions that had no
importance at all. In concrete terms, equalization means that Christianity
must be rastically devalued, while other religions a little impact
on European identity are given a tremendous boost. That's what
we call replacement. The nonsense of this new and you know,
you know Thomas makes the argument that you know you
would rather be what would you rather do? Would you
rather be persecuted physically or just have your whole identity removed?
Where not only is it stripping you of who you are,
but it's stripping you of who you were and who
your family was, and who everyone in your line was,
and who everyone in the future will be most people
just concentrate on the material. In concrete terms, equalization means
that Christianity must be drastically devalued, while other religions a
little impact on European identity or given a tremendous boost.
The nonsense of this new perspective leaps to the eye.
For example, some of the British bishops and politicians played
with an idea of introducing elements of Sharia law into
the British legal system in areas with a large Muslim population,
so that Muslims could feel better in a Christian environment.
Those who came with this generous offer seemed to forget
that British society had already effectively eliminated Christianity, and what
they suggested would be would amount to making Britain more
Muslim while pushing Christianity further aside. Another example is a
law prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols. While it originally
targeted Muslims, it has in fact become a legal major
legal measure to eliminate from the public presence to Christian
symbols after two millennia have been an integral part of
Western civilization. Such actions are reminiscent of the wars against
religious symbols waged by the communist government against religious communities,
and the pretexts that these symbols violated the secular character
of state institutions. The communist authorities had not tall the
rate crucifixes in schools were irritated when the citizens of
the communist state were wearing them in a too conspicuous manner.
If the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights
in the case of Latzi versus Italy had been upheld
in the Grand Chamber, the Italian schools and in the
end probably also the schools in other countries, would have
been similar to those in the communist countries, where the
presence of crosses in classrooms or holy metals around the
next of students would be extirpated by law. In the
first case, the censure would have been enforced by the
European Court of Human Rights and in the other by
the system of communist justice, but the practical consequences for
the Christians would have been the same. It is also
worth remembering that most communist countries, after the brutal attempts
to annihilate religion had failed, also upheld the two rules
of freedom of religious worship and the ideologically and the
ideological neutrality of the state. The Communists were perfectly happy
to accept these rules as long as they meant that
religious communities were not all allowed to make non religious
public statements other than those that supported the regime. The
Polish communist authorities also willingly resorted to those rules whenever
they thought it expedients to reduce the significance of Catholicism.
Then they took the pose of a neutral arbiter and
in the name of what they called fairness, gave a
disproportionately well publicized hearing to various representatives of small churches,
particularly those that were conditioned unconditionally endorsed in the Communist Party,
having been sometimes infiltrated by the secret police, and were
eager to take part in any anti Catholic action. The
decision about the public presence of religion based on the
two mentioned rules is, let me reiterate to a large
degree of substantive not formal, and the substance depends on
the ideological interpretation given to it by governing bodies in themselves.
These principles do not determine much, but the intention of
the interpreters, pushes them in one direction or another, and
gives them a substance of character. The rules stated out
of any context include too many components, vague or unsaid.
Freedom of religion is never absolute. Religious communities never limit
themselves to religious matters. The state is never neutral and
has its own ideological preferences, etc. Under Communism, the government
hated religion and use both rules to eliminate Christianity from
the public square and ultimately from the people's hearts and minds.
The Communist Constitution, of course, guaranteed equality of religions and
religious freedom. There was an article added to its stipulating
that this freedom must not be used to attack the
socialist system. The article was completely superfluous, with or without
its policy of the Communist party toward the Church and
the Catholics would have been the same when read in
the context of the liberal democratic rules. The article did
not say anything shocking. Liberal democracy takes for granted that
the churches do not attack the political system in which
they live, that is, the system of liberal democracy. If
they do, they are in trouble. In the United States,
that is, in a country where one could speak of
the real separation of church and state. The power, at
least until the nineteen sixties, was in the hands of
the Christian majority, mostly Protestant, who interpreted the rules of
freedom of religion and neutrality of the state in a
way that allowed for a strong presence of religion in
the public square, to the extent that American society could
be accurately called the society of the Book. In today's
post communist Poland, Catholicism has been the subject of constant
attackses to the moment the old regime collapsed, but the
Church still retains an important position in the life of
the country, which comes not from constitutional provisions, but her
political and historical role in the nation's history and the
existence of a large Catholic community. In today's Europe, the
power has been in the hands of the political class
hostile to Christianity, and this class, supported by the elites
and by large segments of society, have been interpreting the
two rules with complete impunity, in a manner inappropriate to
its anti Christian prejudice. That's it, Part nine. We'll come
back and finish. We'll finish part chapter five, and then
we'll read the summary. And yeah, if you Thomas and
I just dropped a review of the nineteen thirty five
movie documentary Triumph of the Will by Lenny Riefenstahl. If
you go to freemanbyon Thewall dot com forward slash Movies,
you'll see a link to it there. And we do
movies every month, movie reviews every month, watching reviews, and
there's also a year you can subscribe for a year.
There there's a link so you can also check out
the movies we've done in the past. Anyway, we'll be
back in a couple of days and we'll finish us up.
Thank you very much for tuning in. Take care,