Why the left’s ever-more fervent attack on “Christian theocracy”?

In an April 2005 article at FrontPage Magazine, I argued that the underlying reason why liberals wanted Terri Schiavo to die was their paranoia about a “theocracy,” a “Christian fascism,” that is supposedly striving to take over America. But whence comes this paranoia? An answer is suggested by Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society.

The First Law states that because of the modern liberal belief in the moral and substantive equality of all peoples and cultures, the worse any minority or non-Western group really is, the worse the West must be made to appear, as the guilty cause of the non-Western group’s bad or dysfunctional behavior, or as simply bad in itself. If the worse is made to look better, and the better made to look worse, an apparent rough equality is maintained between them, and the liberal view survives. In the case of Islam, if it is true that Islam seeks to impose an Islamic theocracy over the world, liberals cannot acknowledge this fact, because Islam would then cease being the morally equal and culturally rich Other whom we must tolerate and embrace, and become a morally inferior and hostile destructive adversary whom we must resist and exclude. Therefore, in a massive act of denial, liberals displace the danger Islam poses to the West onto the West itself, especially onto American conservative Christians. Instead of the threat being the historically and actually existing Islamic agenda to establish an Islamic world theocracy, the threat becomes a non-existent American Christian agenda to establish an American or even a world Christian theocracy, a threat that must be met by radically weakening Christianity or even eliminating it altogether.

Thus, having discovered that a non-Western religion is waging war on the West, the left responds by waging war against the West’s own religion.

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David B. writes:

You are right about liberals and the “Christian Theocracy.” Whenever I start a conversation with a liberal friend of mine, the first words out of his mouth is a denunciation of the “Christian Right.” He professes to be terrified of it and sees it as a dangerous threat. He thinks Ralph Reed types are “racists.” This same man says, “I’m not afraid of Mexicans and Muslims.”

Several years ago, I had a section manager whom I often talked political issues with. He continually expressed fear of the “Religious Right.” I assured him that he had nothing to worry about, in that the GOP only paid lip service to it. Liberals feel a need to denounce “Christian Theocracy” to keep the focus off of the real threats to our survival.

LA replies:

David’s last sentence really brings home what I was saying.

“Snouck Hurgronje” writes from the Netherlands:

Just today I heard two remarks that fit this pattern. “Muslims are repressive towards women, but so are Calvinists.” (I am a Calvinist). Plus I heard a South African doctor argue that the farm murders and other crime which blacks inflict on whites in South Africa are due to the legacy of apartheid (exclusion). They could not be blamed.

If I just memorize your rule on liberal belief I’ll have a perfect retort, ready to fire off.

By the way, there is a Dutch Libertarian who wrote a hilarious book with a whole bunch of these liberal laws in the mid 1990s. He did not catch this one though. His name is Bart Croughs. His book is called: “In the name of the woman, the gay and the foreigner,” the holy trinity of the liberals.

Very entertaining chap this Bart Croughs. Pity he is a Libertarian. Here is a (mediocre) English translation of an article by him.

Gintas adds:

Another reason is the absolute generalized revulsion that liberals have toward the Christian Right. They’d rather die than to be found in such company, or to be seen in alliance with them.

Alan R. writes:

Here are some additional reasons for the increase in the liberal attacks on Christianity.

First of all, liberalism was deliberately designed to defeat Christianity, because Christianity has been the most important part of the West’s identity for more than a thousand years now. True, the West contains various important pagan elements (Greek, Roman, Norse, etc), but these elements are not comprehensive and ubiquitous, as Christianity was. Indeed, as far as I know, the various nations of the West were (except for the U.S.) officially “Christian nations” prior to roughly World War I, and even the U.S. has always been an unofficially Christian nation. Therefore, those wishing to make a fundamental change in society recognized that enemy #1 is Christianity.

Furthermore, the liberal campaign to change the West may be likened to a large army invading a huge nation. (Think of the Japanese invasion of China in WWII, or the invasions of Russia by Napoleon or Hitler.) The invaders have occupied a large territory, but vast regions remain unconquered, and the high command of the invading army recognizes that resistance is stiffening. True, the invaders are still advancing, but the more perceptive officers recognize that if current trends continue, the advance could be halted or even (God forbid!) pushed back. Thus, although liberals are the (unofficial) rulers of America, their more astute strategists recognize that their rate of advance into enemy territory is slowing down, and the enemy is gaining strength. Thus the need to rally the troops with lurid stories of Christian partisan fighters being on the brink of taking over the country, when, in fact, conservatism and Christianity have less real power than they ever have.

Also, as you pointed out in a slightly different context, atheism can never be the basis of an actually independent, properly functioning society. Therefore, although atheism must be countered publically and intellectually, and although it has the potential to seduce away some bright young people, explicit atheism is, I intuit, not a major threat to the West. The major threat (aside from Islam!) is liberalism, which, although it is philosophically premised on atheism (which makes man the supreme being, and thus leads to all of the folly of liberalism), is generally not explicitly atheistic.

M. Mason writes;

One of the strangest aspects of all this is to witness the bizarre myopia which occurs once atheistic left-liberalism consumes a person, for it blinds as it grows. To many, their sheer rage (and that is not too strong a word for it) against the very idea of the transcendent God of the Bible is so overpowering that they refuse to see the political superiority of a pluralistic, traditional Western society over the real totalitarianism of a sharia-based Muslim one, though in many ways it would be in their own self-interest to do so.

Instead, they continue to prattle on about the “free, autonomous self” and Western “oppression” even as they’re being dragged inexorably by nihilism deeper into the existential vortex of non-being and surrender to the Other.

Clark Coleman writes:

I am not sure I buy the connection to Islam. First, because I distrust psychoanalytical explanations of someone’s secret motivations that are secret even from themselves. Second, because fear and loathing towards the Christian Right long preceded 9/11, existing with quite a bit of intensity before radical Islam was even on the radar screen of liberals in the USA.

I think the simpler explanation is that liberalism believes in unfettered exercise of certain individual liberties, particularly sexual liberties, and conservative Christianity is their implacable foe in this regard. Throughout the sexual and abortion revolutions, animosity towards conservative Christians has been displayed, and the opinion has been expressed countless times that such Christians must not let their religious beliefs determine their political beliefs, because of the “separation of church and state.” To put a date on this, I recall phoning in to the Larry King radio show, before he ever had a TV show on CNN, to protest his vituperations on this matter.

Based on my recollection of where I was living at the time of the phone call, this was no later than 1979.

LA replies:

Everything Mr. Coleman says is true, but he leaves out a key fact that I was addressing: the notable increase in paranoid attitudes about the Christian right, often cast in terms of a menacing “theocracy,” over the last several years, that is, since 9/11. Does Mr. Coleman agree with me that there has been such an increase, and, if so, what does he think is the cause of it? My theory attempts to account for it. After the 9/11 attack, the threat of Islam—the ultimate reproof to liberal views of the world—for the first time in modern times loomed onto the consciousness of the West, and liberals had to find some way of dealing with it, which they did by denying that it is a threat and displacing the threat onto Christian theocracy.

Ben writes:

G.W. Bush is another element in this since 2000. The constant claims that Bush is a right wing Christian. With his great influence after 9/11 and in 2003-2004, this caused the left great concern, way more concern then terror attacks or Islam. Their fear that George Bush was gaining the power to turn us into theocracy was and is real to them. Of course, this is all a fantasy and not driven by his polices or reality.

This paranoia on the lefts part has only driven the conservatives to actually believe that Bush is a true conservative. Bush has been a disaster for the Christian right even though they do not see it.

Jacob M. writes:

I was wondering how you think what to me is the most unusual feature of the left’s worry about Christian “theocracy” fits into your analysis: that they talk as though traditional religious belief is something that’s on the increase in our society, saying things like “given the frightening direction our country is headed…” or “if this goes on…” , when it’s obvious that by any conceivable measure religiosity is decreasing in America. They make it sound as though until recently, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave atheists, with no religion in public schools, legal abortion and pornography, and other such “freedoms” until we crazy right-wing religious nutjobs just recently came out of nowhere and started trying to take over the country. Can they really possibly believe this? Do they not know that prior to the 1960’s, public schools all across America opened with a prayer and Bible reading, that prior to 1972 abortion was largely illegal, that women really used to be all but formally excluded from the professions, that it was only in the 21st century that sodomy laws were struck down, that many of the states used to have established churches, or even in colonial times made it a crime not to go to church on Sunday? Perhaps the absurdity of the notion of ignoring the trend of religion in America, even pretending that the trend is exactly the opposite from what it really is, shows that they can’t possibly really believe it, and that Christian theocracy really is just a stand-in bogeyman for Islam.

Indeed, I would like to ask one of these liberals (and would do so if I ever got into a face-to-face discussion about it) the following question: given that all of America’s past prior to the 1960s, from the time of our very Founding, looks exactly like what you are calling a “theocracy,” do you believe that for most of America’s history we were a theocracy? If the answer is no, then they would have to admit that the religious right’s goals are not a theocracy, and stop kvetching about it. If the answer is yes, then they’d have to admit that the religious right’s goals represent not a perversion, or “hijack” in modern parlance, of America, but instead a return to a state of affairs that is well established within and consistent with the American tradition.

LA replies:

I have nothing to add to this excellent analysis but this: when the left today speaks glowingly about America’s great tradition of freedom that they are defending, they mean post-’60s America. The previous America doesn’t count, it doesn’t exist. The America they laud is their America, the America they created.

On how they would respond if asked your question, I think they would shift ground. They wouldn’t exactly say that America prior to the ‘60s was a theocracy, but it was a very dark place indeed, where women were oppressed, homosexuals were oppressed, blacks had to sit in the back of the bus. For them there is nothing good about the pre-’60s America.

Years ago I was at a party where a woman said that Mayor Giuliani “is a fascist.” I asked her, what has he done that’s’ fascist? She backtracked and said, “Well, fascist-like,” or something like that. That’s how the left would respond to your question about a historic American theocracy. Not literally a theocracy, but something very bad for women and minorities and we don’t want to go back to that.

Alan R. writes:

Regarding Jacob M.’s comment about the liberals’ seeming ignorance of pre-60’s America, and your response, I think it is entirely possible that the majority of liberals do not know that America prior to the ’60s (and definitely prior to the Twentieth Century) was exactly what liberals currently are describing as a “theocracy. The actual study of history seems to have been largely removed from the public schools, to be replaced with liberal clichés about oppressors, and heroic liberals fighting back. And few people bother to read literature from pre-liberal America, or even to watch old movies, both of which convey a strong sense of the convictions and customs of the time. Without studying history or literature, John Q. Public has no way of knowing what pre-liberal America was like, so he is easily taken in by anti-”theocratic” propaganda. (In college, history is no longer a required subject, and most professors are liberals, so we cannot count on college to set the record straight.)

But there is a contradiction in the way liberals handle the past. On the one hand, they claim that it was drenched with racism, sexism, homophobia and theocracy, so as to justify their campaign to radically change America. On the other hand, there is a major campaign underway by secularists to try to prove that America has always been a “secular nation,” with our basic values coming from the Constitution, not the Bible. (Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” letter being their key document.) Liberals seem to be unconsciously acknowledging that the past does have some claim on the present, that is, they seem to recognize that if America really was a Christian nation from its founding, then there would be a presumption that it still is. They cannot just claim that traditional society is defective, and needs to be fixed; they need to justify themselves by claiming that they are the true upholders of American tradition (think of “People for the American Way.”)

M. Mason writes:

Adding to my brief comment above, I’ll make a run at responding directly to the question Mr. Auster has raised. Though there have been certain extremist elements across the broad political spectrum which have been dominant users of the paranoid style over the years, we’ve now reached the point in political discourse at which this pathology seems to be escalating on the left as a whole.

In their latest version of re-packaged paranoia, groups like “Not In Our Name” (which has taken out full-page ads in major American newspapers) raise the semantic hydra of “Christian Fundamentalism” as a useful piece of disingenuous propaganda, lumping it together in the public consciousness with Islamic fundamentalism and, by association, an assault on human rights. Then they ludicrously label the entire Bush administration as “Christian,” as if somehow the President’s beliefs are shared by or influence hundreds of current government officials, many of whom are holdovers from previous administrations who do not share his political constituency. Furthermore, anyone who writes intelligently about this subject knows that the system of checks and balances inherent in our political system would, if anything, prevent changes even remotely harboring the intent to create a “theocracy.” But it will take a book (and I’m sure several will eventually be written) to respond fully to the left’s hysterical caterwauling about an imminent “Christian Theocracy.”

So, is a large part of the explanation for all this “a massive act of denial” of the left, as Mr. Auster claims,”[displacing] the danger Islam poses to the West onto the West itself, especially onto American conservative Christians”? Well, obviously something abnormal happening in the minds of these people that drives their pathetic attempt to deny, distort and rearrange outer reality, so I have to agree with him there. It’s easier for many of them to engage in these mental contortions and simply create a complex paranoid fantasy rather than have to deal with disturbing considerations that do not validate their core beliefs. That they occur with alarming frequency these days is hardly surprising, though, for postmodernism with its denial of objective truth practically glorifies this kind of thinking.

But what really comes through in these writings— and the primary reason for this frontal attack— is how it represents its unmitigated prejudice and seething hatred toward historical Christianity as being perfectly normal and valid, creating false fears in order to malign Christian beliefs in general.

LA replies:

In addition to my theory presented here, which I do not claim to be exhaustive, I also would like to reference what I wrote in 2004 at FP and quoted last night in my blog entry “Why I agree with D’Souza”: that the fact of America’s being in a long-term war (or whatever we call it) against radical Muslims threatens liberals’ very sense of being:

There are plenty of good reasons to be unhappy about this war—its terrible costs in life and limb, the bitterness it has engendered at home and abroad, the mistaken intelligence that was used to justify it, and the increasingly ideological and detached-from-reality manner in which Bush is waging it. But people on the left loathe the war for a bad reason, namely that it confirms traditional values of sovereignty, patriotism, and national defense that are the contrary of everything the left believes in. [Emphasis added.] In fact, the left hates our war against militant Islam far more than it hates the Islamists’ war against us. Islamism only poses a threat to Western civilization, a heritage toward which the left feels at best an ambivalent loyalty. But the looming, years-long struggle against Islamism, by calling on principles and virtues that the left not only lacks but regards as alien and repugnant, poses a threat to the survival of the left itself. And that is why [George] Soros thinks Bush is a Nazi. [Emphasis added.]

If we put this explanation together with my explanation above, I think we’re getting closer to a reasonably accurate view of the left’s mindset. On one hand, the left, needing to maintain the illusion that our side is at least as bad as the other side, displaces the threatening theocratic character of our Islamic enemies onto us and says we are advancing “Christian Theocracy.” On the other hand, our protracted confrontation with Islam objectively threatens the left’s very existence, so the left sees our side as anti-liberal and evil, a view they symbolize through such standard leftist demonological slogans as “fascism,” “Nazism,” and “Christian theocracy.”

Gintas J. writes:

Alan R. brings up an intriguing point. So many folks are focussed on Jefferson’s letter about “separation of church and state.” That letter is certainly not an authoritative founding document, but points instead to his own (and others’?) intentions. So does that bring the intent of the Founders—aka “Original Intent”—back into the discussion? How would the left handle that?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 16, 2007 11:45 AM | Send