The article “Conservatism that Assures the Unthinkable: the Reelection of Barack Obama,” by Chuck Rogér, that appeared on the American Thinker website caught my attention:
“As America flirts with permanent economic decline, certain GOP presidential contenders talk of gay marriage, Charles Darwin, and religiosity. Are we losing our minds?
“While the current progressive regime is rife with overbearing economic and social agendas, the critical battle – which, if lost, would render all other battles irrelevant – is singularly economic in nature.”
I’m sure the German people before Adolf Hitler said something similar. “Let’s not concern ourselves with the moral direction of the nation but with the possibility of a “permanent economic decline. Religion and government should remain separate.” Germany was ripe for Hitler because religion had been relegated to the inner man, the private life, while the civil sphere operated within its own autonomous sphere of authority. Historian Richard V. Pierard comments:
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In the nineteenth century . . . German Lutherans made a strong bifurcation [separation] between the realm of public and private concerns. . . . Religion was the domain of the inner personal life, while the institutional and external, the public, so to speak, belonged to the worldly power. Redemption was exclusively the province of the church, while the law, determinative for external conduct of human affairs, was solely the province of the state. Religion was a private matter that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order — nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft — operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws. ((Richard V. Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” Fides et Historia, X:2 (Spring 1978), 13.))
While many Germans might have been opposed to Nazi policies at a personal level, they had been conditioned to believe — because they were Christians living in two kingdoms operating with two sets of standards — that they could not do anything about these rapidly implemented policies at a political level.
Mr. Rogér wants a “candidate with a solid plan to defeat Barack Obama even if that plan is silent on social issues.” Let’s leave the lives of the unborn, the redefinition of the family, the privatization of religion, and the persecution and intimidation of those with opposing views out of the equation. I will refrain from drawing any more parallels with Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazi state. I know, I know, it can’t happen here.
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The media are the ones who have made Darwinism and religion campaign issues. It wasn’t Rick Perry who brought up the subject of evolution at a campaign stop; it was a liberal woman who used her child to ask the governor a question on the subject. It was a low-key encounter that the press tried to turn into a national incident. They and Mr. Rogér should be reminded that the Declaration of Independence states unequivocally that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Any president who does not question evolution on scientific and political grounds is a fool. If our rights do not come from God, then from where did they arise if we evolved when “earth was a cold planet of rock-crust and water”? ((Back-cover copy from Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life (New York: New York: Signet Science Library, 1960).))
Speculative physicist Stephen Hawking has made the origin of rights even more impossible than Asimov with his claim that all that we see around us came from nothing. His view of origins can’t legitimize or protect anything. Given the “nothing” hypothesis of Hawking, rights are for the moment neither good nor bad that can be raised or lowered as easily as a woman’s hemline.
What about the “gay marriage” issue? Redefining the family is a big deal. It was a big deal in the 19th century when the Supreme Court ruled on bigamy and polygamy. Once the prohibition against marriage is gone, there is nothing to stop all kinds of marital relationships. America’s polygamists are waiting for an opportunity to press the issue in the courts. They want long-standing anti-polygamy laws overturned since they were argued in a way similar to the illegitimacy of homosexual marriages. In Reynolds v. United States (1878) the Supreme Court determined that “[Polygamy] is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity had produced in the Western world.”
In Davis v. Beason (1890), a similar ruling was made: “Bigamy and polygamy are crimes by the laws of all civilized and Christian countries. . . . To call their advocacy a tenet of religion is to offend the common sense of mankind. If they are crimes, then to teach, advise and counsel their practice is to aid in their commission, and such teaching and counseling are themselves criminal and proper subjects of punishment, as aiding and abetting crime are in all other cases.”
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In The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States (1890), the court determined that “the property of the said corporation . . . [is to be used to promote] the practice of polygamy — a crime against the laws, and abhorrent to the sentiments and feelings of the civilized world. . . . The organization of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in a measure, a return to barbarism. It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity had produced in the Western world.”
Religion, Darwinism, and homosexual marriage are related. If Darwin is right, then all moral certitude is eliminated. Everything is up for grabs, and I mean everything, even economics. If the State can redefine the family, it can redefine freedom, liberty, and economics. It can redefine you and me out of existence. The State doesn’t need a reason to do what it does since it is not bound by any transcendental truth. The Guillotine of the French Revolutionaries and the gas ovens of the Holocaust are standing reminders of this truth. Mr. Rogér believes, as do so many other conservatives and libertarians, that God is not a factor in government. If God is left out, all we have left is man.
In 1986 the NBC television network presented “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story,” a drama about the gripping and courageous story of Raoul Wallenberg and his attempts to save European Jews from their Nazi tormentor, Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Wallenberg’s efforts may have made the difference between life and death for nearly 120,000 Hungarian Jews.
During the course of the story, the viewer is struck by an emotional scene of Jews being loaded into trucks for shipment to a concentration camp. A Jewish teenager turns to a rabbi and confronts him with a seemingly unanswerable question: “How can you still believe in God after all of this?” The rabbi does not take long to respond: “How can you still believe in man?”
If we do not trust in God for our laws, then man is all that is left. Of course, without God man is irrelevant and evil does not exist. Protest is impossible. A society that resists the solid foundation of God’s revealed law will build an ethical edifice governed by either anarchy or totalitarianism. An anti-Christ culture will either raise up the god of self (libertarianism) or the gods of Statism (totalitarianism).