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Article Excerpt
THINK not that I am come to send peace on earth," Christ declares in the Gospel of Matthew. "I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."
The Bible is full of hard sayings like this--too many, too hard, to be entirely exegeted away in historical criticism, or eased with gentler passages in antidote, or shrugged off as the overstatement of prophetic rhetoric. From the Pentateuch to the prophets, from the gospels to the Book of Revelation, there is something in both testaments that has no patience for political compromise, or moral casuistry, or conventional prudence, or philosophical judiciousness. It's not the only thing in the Bible, of course, but without it, we have no Bible. "A fire is kindled in mine anger," as Deuteronomy puts it, "and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains."
There is something in America, as well, that has always burned against the world. From Cotton Mather to William Lloyd Garrison, from John Brown to Martin Luther King, Jr., there has been a hunger here to speak with lips touched by burning coals, a blessed rage for the apocalyptic lessons taught only by tongues of fire. A nation formed by political geniuses--masters of compromise, philosophers of prudence, judges of wisdom--we are also a nation with another theme. Something here has, from the beginning, disdained political order and sought not to be brilliant, wise, and learned, but only true, though the heavens fall as a result. "I am come to send fire on the earth," Christ says in the Gospel of Luke, "and what will I, if it be already kindled?" It's not the only thing in America, of course, but without it there is no America.
THIS is a problem for politics. Indeed, it is the root of the theologico-political problem that haunts us to this day. The radical secularists--with their determination to strip the public square of all references to religion--began their long march through the nation's universities and law schools in the 1930s and 1940s, and they now wield considerable power. How else could we read the Ninth Circuit's recent decision about the deep unconstitutionality of having school-children say, "one nation, under God," each morning?
But I have the sense, insofar as one can judge the tides of such things, that the secularists have lost the intellectual part of the battle and are running now only on the fumes of their irrational belief in anti-belief. There is something quaint about them, some throwback to the days when people boasted of being "freethinkers," to use a marvelously dated word that fits them. And they seem, as a result, very much beside the point. It will take at least two generations to undo the damage they did, and in the meantime there will be much to rage about in their sneers and stratagems. But hasn't the actual intellectual discussion of America left them...
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