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THE PERILS OF CIVIL RELIGION (Awesome read!)
Shirt of Flame ^ | January 5, 2013 | HEATHER KING

Posted on 01/05/2013 1:39:07 PM PST by NYer


 As I contemplated Shin Dong-hyuk and his escape from North Korea last week, I also happened to be reading Ralph C. Woods Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South--an unintentionally apropos pairing.

One of Wood’s main theses is that O’Connor--the novelist, short story writer, and devout Catholic--preferred the excesses of fundamentalism, which at least takes God seriously enough to take him literally, to the bland “civil religion” practiced by most Americans, including most Catholics.

"O’Connor discerned that something deadly had occurred when national identity had been made to trump religious faith”…

“[Her] objection to a blithe indifferentism concerning truth and error, to an all-tolerant notion that one church or synagogue or mosque is as good as another, to a reduction of doctrinal and communal faith to uncritical moral earnestness, was also voiced by the Jesuit Gustave Weigel in a debate with the liberal Protestant Robert McAfee Brown: 'The average Protestant seems to think it makes little difference what you believe so long as you are decent and virtuous. About the only faith he seems to demand is the one implied in the sincere effort to do the right thing' "…

'Not only did the civil religion of the 1950s melt particularized historic faiths into a thin religious gruel; it also made even the most secular Americans into allegedly religious people. As Dwight Eisenhower once declared, 'Our government makes no sense…unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith…and I don’t care what it is.' "

"Religion itself, as James C. Edwards once put it, has become another consumer choice at the smorgasbord of the American emporium”…

As Wood points out, the final showdown will not be between religion and science, but rather between nihilism and the Gospels:

"Though Flannery O'Connor's death came more than a quarter-century before [the Catholic novelist] Walker Percy's, the latter shared her worry about the nihilistic gas that is asphyxiating our church and culture alike. Percy believed that it was having an especially deadening effect on certain souls who sit in the high places of American cultural and ecclesiastical power. Only two years before his own death in 1990, Percy wrote a letter to The New York Times, which it refused to publish. That our national "newpaper of record" refused to run a plea voiced by one of our major novelists makes the letter all the more worth hearing:

The most influential book published in German in the first quarter of this century was entitled The Justification of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. Its co-authors were the distinguished jurist Karl Binding and the prominent psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. Neither Binding nor Hoche had ever heard of Hitler or the Nazis.

Nor, in all likelihood, did Hitler ever read the book. He didn't have to. The point is that the ideas expressed in the book were the product not of Nazi ideology but rather of the best minds of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic--physicians, social scientists, jurists, and the like, who with the best secular intentions wished to improve the lot, socially and genetically, of the German people--by getting rid of the unfit and the unwanted...


I would not wish to be understood as implying that the respected American institutions I have named [The New York Times, the United States Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women] are similar or corresponding to pre-Nazi institutions.

But I do suggest that once the line is crossed, once the principle gains acceptance--juridically, medically, socially--[that] innocent human life can be destroyed for whatever reason, for the most admirable socio-economic, medical or social reasons--then it does not take a prophet to predict what will happen next, or if not next, then sooner or later. At any rate, a warning is in order. Depending on the disposition of the majority and the opinion polls--now in favor of allowing women to get rid of unwanted babies--it is not difficult to imagine an electorate or a court ten years, fifty years from now, who would favor getting rid of useless old people, retarded children, antisocial blacks, illegal Hispanics, gypsies, Jews...."


A holocaust rages in North Korea. That innocent people of all ages are suffering, starving, being shot on sight for having sex outside that ordered by the camp administration, disobeying a guard, or failing to rat out their parents is a crime against humanity, a crime against reason and truth, and a crime against Christ.

We would like to blame the [psychopathic] "dear Leader." But I wonder sometimes if we are not headed in the same direction.


TOPICS: Catholic; History; Religion & Culture; Religion & Politics
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 01/05/2013 1:39:15 PM PST by NYer
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To: netmilsmom; thefrankbaum; Tax-chick; GregB; saradippity; Berlin_Freeper; Litany; SumProVita; ...

Ping!


2 posted on 01/05/2013 1:40:30 PM PST by NYer ("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." --Jeremiah 1:5)
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To: NYer

Yes, an excellent article.

And I would like to take the opportunity to recommend Flannery O’Connor. She is, I think, the single best American writer since the Second World War, and that’s saying a lot.

Her novels, her short stories, her correspondence—it’s all very much worth reading. She was an extraordinarily powerful writer, and one of the few who escaped the deadening influences of modernism to write things that are spiritually brilliant.


3 posted on 01/05/2013 1:57:34 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: NYer
I would not wish to be understood as implying that the respected American institutions I have named [The New York Times, the United States Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women] are similar or corresponding to pre-Nazi institutions.

I suspect that today Mr. Percy would, in fact, wish to be understood as implying that those institutions are corresponding to pre-Nazi institutions.

(It is a good day when both Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor are both mentioned on FreeRepublic.)

4 posted on 01/05/2013 1:57:51 PM PST by newheart (The greatest trick the left ever pulled was convincing the world it was not a religion.)
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To: NYer
Hope this author isn't surprised that we have the culture we do.

If children attend government schools that teach a lukewarm and generic Protestant worldview, they risk learning to be lukewarm and generic in their Christian faith. And...This is, indeed, the religious worldview taught in government schools prior to the 1960s.

Today's government school that are godless in their worldview, ( and all government owned and run K-12 schools are), they **will** learn to think and reason godlessly. They must just to cooperate in the godless classroom, read the godless textbooks, and conform to the godless school policies.

I fear for our nation. With spiritual foundations such as this, our population is at extreme risk of succumbing to the push and pull of the beguiling siren call of Marxism and will not have the spiritual depth or energy to confront Islam.

By the way, what does Christ do with the lukewarm? Answer: He spits them out of His mouth!

5 posted on 01/05/2013 2:09:36 PM PST by wintertime
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To: Cicero
An excellent article?

"I would not wish to be understood as implying that the respected American institutions I have named [The New York Times, the United States Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women] are similar or corresponding to pre-Nazi institutions.


I really tried, and continued to read, in spite of citing a LIBERAL protestant as some sort of an authority by saying,

"'The average Protestant seems to think it makes little difference what you believe so long as you are decent and virtuous. About the only faith he seems to demand is the one implied in the sincere effort to do the right thing' "…"

Which is as blatently false as any I know.

If anything, it is the Catholic that relies more on a good life than a theological dictate, ie; Ye MUST be born again.


The title intrigued me, but the content was a waste of time to read.

6 posted on 01/05/2013 3:57:59 PM PST by knarf (I say things that are true ... I have no proof ... but they're true)
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To: NYer
One of Wood’s main theses is that O’Connor--the novelist, short story writer, and devout Catholic--preferred the excesses of fundamentalism, which at least takes God seriously enough to take him literally, to the bland “civil religion” practiced by most Americans, including most Catholics.

Why is it that Catholics don't seem capable of giving Fundamentalists any kind of compliment but a left-handed one?

7 posted on 01/05/2013 4:10:34 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator (Ki-hagoy vehamamlakhah 'asher lo'-ya`avdukh yove'du; vehagoyim charov yecheravu!)
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To: Zionist Conspirator

My opinion only: Fundamentalists do harm to the body of Christ by forcing false choices. And, subsequently further secularism more than Christianity.


8 posted on 01/06/2013 1:15:54 AM PST by D-fendr (Deus non alligatur sacramentis sed nos alligamur.)
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To: Zionist Conspirator
Why is it that someone who says Jesus Christ is a false god and Christianity is a sham constantly try to spread divisions where none exist?

Someone works to cause division and arguments between Christians because they are afraid of Christians standing together on common ground to resist the anti-Christ society and all the little anti-Christ factions that only thrive when Christians are divided.

Someone who denies that Jesus Christ is God from God, the only begotten Son of God who died for our sins so that all who believe on him will be forgiven and have eternal life "wondering" about a Catholic "left handed" compliment regarding Fundamentalists is every bit as dedicated to seeing anti-Christ laws and leaders controlling this country as King Barry and his crew are.

You can recognize such fifth column liars by their use of the same tactics all the other fascist democrat thugs use. They pose as several different posters, constantly misquote and twist what others say, spread misinformation and disinformation, and always, always, always, lie about what they actually believe.

Usually such fifth columnists deal with religious subjects by pretending to be an "impartial observer", when in reality they are totally dedicated to the anti-Christ agenda and very, very, dedicated to spreading divisions among Christian conservatives any way they can. Once they start an argument, though, they change to another name and play the role of "expert" on one side of the issue or the other. Such people are dedicated to their task because the most frightening thing they can imagine is Christians uniting to end the mass murder of infants, the exclusion of Christianity from the public square, and the nation being governed by Christian principals rather than by fascist humanist principals.

9 posted on 01/06/2013 2:07:47 AM PST by Rashputin (Jesus Christ doesn't evacuate His troops, He leads them to victory.)
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