Thursday 4 September 2008

Bauer Power?

Gary Bauer was on the Today programme to urge votes for McCain, not because of abortion, even he seems to have given up on the Republicans there), but in the rather forlorn-sounding hope of Supreme Court nominees who will resist or reverse a more generic secularisation that Bauer claims is making America "like Europe". Why this widespread but baseless theory that America is more "Christian" than "secular" Europe?

While church attendance figures are much higher in the US than in Western Europe, what does that prove? In itself, nothing at all. What is being inculcated, celebrated and even worshipped is very often a collection of economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that the participants have simply declared to be Christianity (or any specific form of Christianity, including Catholicism), despite their fanatically and even hysterically anti-Christian (and especially anti-Catholic) origins and content, which former is very often denied outright. Those participants have made themselves what Lenin called "Useful Idiots".

Churches complicit in all of this might pack them in, but they are ultimately not very different from, for example, the "Catholic" Patriotic Association in China. Lest this seem an overstatement, look at the level of American churchgoing support for the Iraq War (including by Bauer, a PNAC signatory). And why? To what end? The reversal of Roe v Wade? Believe in that when you see it, and not before. Even Bauer is no longer holding his breath.

Third only to the Catholics and the Southern Baptists are the Mormons, who believe that the Native Americans are descended from the Ancient Israelites, that Jesus actually visited America, that the Church flourished there for centuries before Columbus, and that the Second Coming and subsequent earthly reign will taker place in and from Missouri. Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and others all likewise simply presuppose that that Coming and reign will be in and from the Good Old U S of A, as if it were self-evident. Doubtless, so do many millions more in other communities.

In Western Europe, by contrast, no country has on paper, and few have in practice, the American system of abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy (for that, one has to look to America's new best friends in Eastern Europe). There are 10 sacral monarchies (11 if one includes the Vatican), monarchy being an institution for which no purely secular argument can ever be constructed. National events are routinely conducted in the form and course of church services. Church schools, maintained at public expense, are normal in many European countries, while at least broadly Christian Religious Education and (although this law is widely flouted) a daily collective act of Christian worship are compulsory in all British schools.

In Germany, the churches are actually the largest employers after the several tiers of government, with hardly anyone opting out of the church tax system, with the churches routinely providing numerous services of the kind that provoke uproar when suggested in the US under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism", and with three tiers of government funding an annual Kirchentag (Catholic and Protestant in alternate years) from which no major political figure from Left to Right would dare be absent.

Staunchly Nonconformist members of the Methodist and United Reformed Churches (each created and governed by an Act of Parliament, as a matter of fact) should consider that it is they, and not members of the Church of England, who have such ties to Germany's main Protestant body that, unless they specifically opt out, the church tax will be deducted automatically from their pay in Germany, just as it is from that of Catholics.

Anglican bishops sit as of right in the British Parliament (where in 2006 they played a key role in blocking physician-assisted suicide); and while the House of Lords might one day be abolished entirely, no one seriously suggests that it might ever remain with only the bishops removed.

And so one could go on.

None of which is to suggest that there is not a great deal of re-evangelisation to be done in Western Europe. However, the last possible way of going about this would be to emulate a country in which the absolute exclusion of religion from public life is written into the founding documents as a first principle (however long it might have taken the courts to come round to enforcing this properly), with those documents then elevated to the status of Holy Writ, and their rationalist and Deist authors to that of Prophets and Apostles, in the national folk-religion.

So complete, uncritical and even unthinking is the American identification of that folk-religion with Christianity that the US, alas, pretty much needs to be evangelised from scratch.

4 comments:

  1. "Jehovah's Witnesses...likewise simply presuppose that that Coming and reign will be in and from the Good Old U S of A, as if it were self-evident."

    Wrong. Christ's presence will be from the heavens. The US of A has absolutely nothing to do with the Second Coming and Reign of Christ. Can't speak for Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, or others, but Jehovah's Witnesses definitely do not believe what was stated in the quote above.

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  2. I stand corrected.

    Charles Taze Russell, their founder, did, however, predict that Jesus would return in 1914, and idea then current among various Adventist groups.

    He engaged in all sorts of mathematical calculations and even believed that the dimensions of the Great Pyramid proved his prophetic calculations to be true; a preoccupation with those dimensions also characterises British Israelites, although what it has to do with the Bible, I honestly cannot imagine.

    His successor Joseph Franklin Rutherford predicted with more complicated calculations that the end of the world would occur in 1925. Because, of course, it had not occurred in 1914.

    Furthermore, Rutherford held that various Old Testament figures would rise again in anticipation, and he had the Watchtower Society acquire a large mansion in San Diego ("Beth Sarim", "House of Princes") for them to live in.

    Rutherford even had the title deed of the mansion placed in the name of Daniel, King David, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He Himself, of course, had full use it until they arrived. They still haven't.

    Now, I fully believe in the Second Coming, and that we must live every moment in imminent anticipation of it. I reject out of hand the theory that the New Testament writers have been disproved by its failure to happen during their lifetimes.

    It will happen in God's good time, exactly as Jesus said. That is the point. All attempts to calculate it are a spectacular missing of that point.

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  3. CT Russell was actually right...partly. He just misunderstood how Jesus' return would happen. Apparently he expected Jesus to return possibly in person and take up to heaven the chosen ones. Of course that part of it was wrong. Jesus' presence (parousia) did begin in 1914, but there was a huge earthly preaching work to be done since the beginning of that presence.

    Jehovah's Witnesses today also have no idea what the dimensions of the Great Pyramid have to do with Bible prophecy. The year 1914 can be calculated from Bible prophecy in Daniel concerning the "weeks of years" and also from Jesus' description of what conditions would be like during his presence. That can be found in Matthew 24. The prophet Isaiah also had much to say about the subject. 2 Timothy 3:1-5 also provides a very good description of "the last days". And a detailed study of Revelation sheds much light on the events that have occurred down through the march of world powers and since the year 1914.

    Judge Rutherford also had a confused understanding of the "rise" of certain Old Testament figures. Obviously those false beliefs have been cast aside as the spiritual light gets brighter as this world proceeds closer to Judgment Day. Jehovah's Witnesses have come to understand that Jesus' Kingdom is a heavenly government with influence over the earth. Our assignment is to preach the good news of that Kingdom and what it will do for obedient humankind, not to speculate on Jehovah's timetable. Period.

    As far as predicting dates for that Judgement Day...who could do it? Jesus himself said that only God knows the day and the hour. Not even Jesus, the Son of God, knew.

    Perhaps in eagerness to see the wickedness on earth done away with some have tried to set a date for the end of this system of things. The danger of doing that is that one could lose faith (and many did) when their speculation proved a failure.

    I completely agree with your final statement. All things will occur at just the right time for them as Jehovah God purposes. It is up to us to stay awake spiritually and keep on the watch as world events unfold.

    Exciting times, indeed!

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  4. "Not even Jesus, the Son of God, knew."

    The Arian heresy, revived by the JWs as one of the myriad examples of the fact that there are no new heresies: the Early Church dealt with all of them, but they keep coming back - the same ones over and over again.

    Arianism, for example, was also popular among C of E clergy in the eighteenth century.

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