Posted on 08/25/2017 10:47:51 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
The Church of the Left The Left has written its values into our laws. August 25, 2017 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."
The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values.
The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs.
But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the left. The left was the least religious in the traditional sense. And the most likely to build up an ideology of secular values with which to displace traditional religious values.
The last century witnessed an extensive effort to scrub religious values out of government. But this effort was matched by an equally comprehensive project to replace them with the left’s own values. Unlike the wall between church and state, there were few legal safeguards against writing values into legislation if they were irreligious ones. The church was deemed to be the true threat. Not the state.
But the end result looks very much like an establishment of religion. Even in the church sense.
The values written into the legislation reflect those of certain churches, but not others. When nuns are forced to pay for birth control and Christian photographers with traditional beliefs are compelled to participate in gay weddings, the government is picking religious establishment “winners and losers”.
The winners are roughly on the religious left and the losers on the religious right.
Unitarians win, Baptists lose. Quakers win, Mormons lose. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) triumphs over the Presbyterian Church in America. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America prevails over the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It’s hard not to see this as an establishment of religion.
This isn’t about doctrinal battles or gay marriage. It’s about the culture war fallout from the left’s power to write its values into law and into the codes of conduct that hold sway in in private organizations.
We take the truth of our values on faith. They are a matter of subjective conviction, not objective fact. To those who believe in them, they appear to be the absolute truths of the enlightened. But they cannot be proven to be true in any meaningful way. You either believe in them. Or you don’t.
Google fired James Damore for questioning a tenet of its beliefs. That is in theory illegal. The search engine monopoly created forums in which employees were meant to discuss these very issues. Damore was not fired for expressing his views at work, but for politely expressing the “incorrect” view.
California law protects employees fired for both religious and political views. But the “hostile workplace” pretext that led to Damore’s firing is an example of how the left’s values are the basis of legislation. Much as “public accommodation” civil rights protect the demand to participate rather than the right of religious dissent, the protection of minority participation is at the heart of the left’s bid for equality. But this has never truly been a matter of law, but of values. The law mandates the elimination of obstacles. It does not demand that values winners and losers be chosen to achieve equality. That is a leftist bias.
The left defends imposing its values by force through outrage at selective “suffering” on the one hand and abstractions about the empowerment of participatory equality on the other. Ultimately though it cannot defend its values without reference to those values. That is typical of belief systems.
The left’s secular religion functions as a theocracy. It promises salvation through Socialism, warns that human sin will destroy the world through global warming and is engaged in a perpetual struggle against those who do not share its values. It wages war on religious freedom because it is a kind of religion.
There can be no political freedom where there is no religious freedom. Religion is more encompassing than politics can ever be. Politics addresses which policy best accomplishes a particular goal. Religion tackles the question of what the goal should be. If you don’t have the freedom to determine your own goals, then your ability to choose policies is as meaningless as some European elections.
Leftist systems seek to create “democratic” arenas in which we are free to disagree on policies, but not goals. They do this by writing values into the system so that only one sort of goal is deemed acceptable.
Deviations from the goal are not acceptable. Questioning the goal is heresy. And leads to sanctions.
Trump Derangement Syndrome, Google’s firing of James Damore and the violent attacks on conservative speakers are all examples of what happens when the goals are blasphemously challenged.
Politics is far more likely to turn violent over values rather than policy. That is why the Founders wanted politics to be confined to policy rather than values. We can rationally debate policy, but we can’t debate values. We can argue over what we feel to be true, but the revelations of our deepest selves cannot be proven. And when they are challenged, anger, hostility and even violence quickly follow.
The First Amendment helped build a system where our representatives debated what we should do, rather than what we should think. Politicians were meant to get things done, not argue dogma. The culture war we are in is less about what we should do than what we should think. The violent confrontations and clashes are not really about campus safe spaces or Confederate memorials, but how we should see ourselves. The confrontations are meant to be both polarizing and clarifying.
They’re a religious war. The left has established its religion. And violence against heretics swiftly follows.
America is in the midst of an ugly conflict because our political system was hijacked by the Church of the Left. The legislative and judicial hijacking of our system has turned our politics into a culture war. To end the conflict we must return to a true understanding of the First Amendment. It is not the role of government to tell us what to think or what to believe. And any government that embarks on such a totalitarian enterprise will tear apart our society and destroy our way of life.
As the left has been doing.
Restoring the Constitution and ending the violence will require unwriting the left’s values from our laws.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
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Sultan Knish: “America is in the midst of an ugly conflict because our political system was hijacked by the Church of the Left.”
That’s true.
It can also be viewed as .....the extreme political left (communist/SorozNazi, etc.) has hijacked many of our churches and synagogues. Just as they did in Nazi Germany
This is scary because I’m old enough to remember when America was religious.
Soros wants to destroy everything he touches.
Please add me to the list.
faithhopecharity: Agree with you and the article. Between the secular humanists and the churches and synagogues that have submitted to that anti-God progressive worldview, conservatives have their work cut out for them but to quote Samwise Gamgee: “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
ps:
a second reason to say that it is mostly the extreme POLITICAL left (Nazis, commies) that have taken over many of our churches and synagogues.....
just like the Nazis did in Germany of the 30’s....
is.....
because the Church or Synagogue does not naturally come with a very strong ‘left wing’ .....yes, it has a strong left/commie wing today.....................but where did that come from? Did it come naturally from within the church? Not really much. Yes, we could say that the Unitarian and Universalist movements were “leftist” in some visible ways. But these were (and are still) fairly small AND they never had the practice of trying to force their ideas on the rest of us. You never hear about an Unitarian Jihadist terrorist murder gang attacking us ...or trying to force us to convert to Unitarianism. And Holy Scripture, whether Hebrew or Greek, certainly does not teach the “joys” of dictatorship, whether in its Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek-Macedonian, Roman, Communist, or Nazi versions. Far, far from it. Holy Scripture teaches how evil big government is...
Primarily, the leftist/commmie/Nazi-type churches we see today....are the products NOT of any internal evolution.. but rather resulted from without...via the infiltration or infusion or invasion, if you will, of extreme leftist commie/Nazi type political operatives INTO the traditionally quite conservative or moderate church. Again, quite like how the Nazis entered and seized control of so many churches in 1930’s Germany
Agreed.
Soroz destroys anything he can
he is extremely dangerous
yes it is worth fighting for, we agree
it is a tough fight
perhaps it always has/will be a tough fight
Sometimes after a big win, our side gets a little breather but yes, in this world, there will always be the battle. I give thanks that went before us to give us the opportunity to fight.
Yes but do you really think that Soros can destroy Christianity in America? If so what would that say about Christianity?
Agreed.
we (of my generation, anyway) had the world (in quite good condition) handed to us (by our forebearers) on a silver platter
I am so thankful to that “greatest generation”
A vital clarification. This is a SCOTUS level position. Perfect clarification. This needs to go to court.
Absolutely not! This country was ordained by God, and THAT is what I believe! I believe also that with Trump as our POTUS, we are going to see a lot of changes in the way things are done, and laws that are designed to stop the chipping away at the Constitution, which I also believe was inspired by God.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!
'Face
Some of us non-pundits figured this out 40 years ago.
I was debating theologians at 16. I know religion - and religious fanaticism - when I see it.
I see it in the Marxist Cultural Left: bureaucracy, academia, media, entertainment.
(This is not to trivialize Daniel Greenfield.)
It has reformulated Original Sin as White Privilege, as well. And is holding it with all the fervor of a religious convert.
Major seminaries were taken over in the 50’s by Marxist ideology. Harvard, Boston U., Chicago Div School, and other dominant schools were infiltrated by Communists and began teaching social doctrine.
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