A Remnant Book Review...
IT'S DANGEROUS TO BELIEVE:
Religious Freedom and Its Enemies
By Mary Eberstadt Harper, 2016
Reviewed for The Remnant
By Vincent Chiarello
On May 4, 2017, in a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House attended by religious and political leaders, President Trump signed the Presidential Executive Order, Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty. In its first sentence, the documents reads: «It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce Federal law›s robust protections for religious freedom.» Why would the Trump administration see a need to issue a restatement of one of the rights - and among the first listed spelled out in the U.S. Constitution?
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church of Colombia, Missouri, has a pre-school and day-care program Learning Center, and its administrator applied for a grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to offset the cost of resurfacing its playground with recycled scrap-tire material. The request was denied, citing the Missouri Constitution, which reads: "[N]o money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion..."
On April 19, two weeks before President Trump signed his Executive Order, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer. The legal action of any church, or church organization, appearing as the plaintiff (in the Supreme Court’s language, a "Petitioner") is not common; hence, why would this Lutheran church bring its case to the Supreme Court for adjudication after having lost both of its two earlier pleas in the federal district and circuit courts? To summarize the legal question before the Justices that day: Whether the exclusion of churches from an otherwise neutral and secular aid program (emphasis mine) violates the Free Exercise and Equal Protection Clauses when the state has no valid Establishment Clause concern.
As the attorney for Holy Trinity responded under the crossexamination by the justices, Missouri has provided help for decades: it pays, for example, for the fire extinguishers used in the Learning Center; yet, it declined to help in this case. That denial of assistance, he further opined, was based solely on Holy Trinity’s status as a religious organization, which would violate both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. It should be noted that the newest Justice, Neal Gorsuch, participated in the oral arguments; hence, how he chooses to interpret First Amendment law in this case may give an early clue as to whether or not he is a follower of the late Justice’s Scalia’s jurisprudence.
Is there a problem regarding religious liberty in the land today? Is it fair and accurate to claim that over the past decades - but clearly over the past 8 years - the constitutional tether to religious freedom and, therefore, to our liberty, has been seriously weakened?
If not, why do so many sentient and
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Dangerous to Believe Book Review Cont...
observant citizens believe that we are losing that most precious of liberties? In her attempt to address that problem, Mary Eberstadt has written a book titled, IT’S DANGEROUS TO BELIEVE Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, in which she draws on a career spent reporting on the forces at work that have brought about the current situation, and what the future may hold.
Eberstadt begins by relating an incident during a dinner with a group of Catholic parents in Denver when invited to speak there. During the course of the evening, a member of the group, after hearing the current examples of increasing restrictions on religious liberty, raised the simple question: "Where will we go?"
Inherent in that question is the belief that leaving the U.S. because of those limits, is a distinct possibility. Eberstadt: "...what’s happening among Western religious believers today... is like nothing that has happened before. By 2016, in many influential cultural, political and intellectual precincts, "C" for Christian has become the new scarlet letter."
An exaggeration? Eberstradt then reels off a dozen examples that are the tip of the iceberg: The CEO of Mozilla losing his job after donating to Proposition 8, the California referendum which sought to limit marriage to a man and woman; a New Jersey Professor of Theology fired for posting a statement that supported Catholic teaching about same-sex marriage; an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois fired for using "hate speech" after teaching modern Catholic thought about natural law. There are more...many more... of these incidents that affect those who espouse Christian beliefs, and not only in the U.S.: examples abound in Great Britain and Canada of similar treatment afforded those whose religious beliefs are not "acceptable" to the current zeitgeist.
Answering the question, "Where will we go?" requires another: How did this intolerance begin and develop in the home of the brave and the land of the free?
Although anti-Christian practices go back centuries, Eberstadt reviews the roots of "the New Intolerance" by examining the players and events that have moved many Christians into what the late Catholic priest, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, called "the Long Lent." Two events, although thinly related, form the anvil upon which this new anti-Christian gospel has been forged: the first was the priestly scandals of 2002, which, she claims, "dealt the moral authority of the Church a crippling blow from which it has yet to recover."
The second was 9/11, "an unspeakable act of violence."
Although the work of Muslim "jihadists," the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, gave rise to a reaction she labels, "the New Anti-Christian" atheism, which tarred American Christians with the same brush as Muslim terrorists. Christian-baiting,
particularly towards the traditional followers of Jesus Christ (emphasis mine) was easily disseminated on the Internet and Social Media, which proved to be an essential conduit in getting this message out.
Meanwhile, the political landscape was being designed by the ultra-liberal wing of the Democrat Party, especially by former President Obama, whom Eberstadt identifies as, "the most progressive president who missed few opportunities to castigate non-progressive American Christians with rhetoric that would have been unthinkable had it been aimed at any other religious group." It must be mentioned that former President Barack Hussein Obama called himself a "Christian," which does not square with his actions.
Christianity today in the West faces another form of serious trouble as well: in a study of 35,000 (no typo) respondents, the Pew Research Center reported that the result of their polling demonstrated a serious drop in those who call themselves "Christians," and, at the same time, a commensurate growth in atheistic, agnostic, or "nothing in particular" among those queried. Further, as will be noted later, in the U.S., support for this trend has come, perhaps unintentionally, from the Supreme Court and other Federal courts. For example, what Roe v. Wade did to accelerate the decline of political and religious discussions about the legality/morality of abortion, Obergefell v. Hodges, perhaps even more so, has done to those who do not accept homosexual marriage. How many informed citizens know that, as was reported in the N.Y. Times, unlike any other case in Supreme Court history, no major law firm or celebrity lawyer would take the case against the petitioners, that is, the homosexual couple, for fear of the personal and professional consequences?
In this situation, a well-known jurist and federal judge, wrote: "The level of sheer desire to crush dissent is pretty unprecedented." That ability to crush dissent goes far beyond written law.
The "new anti-Christian atheism" can take many forms, for it can morph from one set of rules and regulations to another in a moment, depending on the situation.
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