Christian left newspaper recognizes need for separation between different peoples

As far back as memory goes, the Christian Science Monitor has been as liberal as any liberal or liberal-Christian organ in America. This has especially been the case when it comes to issues related to race, cultural diversity, and immigration. For the Monitor, it’s been unqualified equality, openness, and inclusion all the way.

Something has changed. In its April 1 editorial, about the fence on the Mexican border that the Congress authorized in 2006, the Monitor recognizes that differences of culture and of level of economic development between different peoples are real and will naturally result in conflict, that such differences must be recognized and dealt with, and that the way to deal with them, consonant with the well-being of all parties, is through good fences—through separation. And, finally and most importantly, that such separation between different and incompatible peoples is God’s way, as clearly shown in the Bible. In short, the Monitor is embracing a traditional, culture-based understanding of national identity and sovereignty—a complete reversal of the left-liberal view. As I was reading the editorial aloud to a friend (see it below, with key passages bolded), I kept stopping and saying I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

ON THE SECURE FENCE ACT
Christian Science Monitor
April 1, 2008

When the “Secure Fence Act” became law in October 2006—instructing the Department of Homeland Security to build 700 miles of fence along the US-Mexican border and instituting other measures to slow the tide of illegal immigrants into the US—it was hailed by supporters and derided by critics.

The vehemence of the debate took many by surprise. Since the act’s passage, the dust has never settled. In some ways, the controversy has grown more intense. The argument now extends beyond whether the original plan was good. Politicians now also quarrel over the ever-growing cost.

Underlying these debates are not just the obvious questions of national security, immigration, and financial oversight. Timeless questions also reside here. How do peoples in close proximity but with differing cultural values and different languages get along with each other? How do you balance competition and cooperation—especially when, financially speaking, the two sides of the border are so out of balance?

In the quest for answers, among the most valuable resources—but easiest to overlook—are those that are spiritual. Spiritual resources not only have a way of bringing calm when tempers might otherwise start to flare. They also offer unique, problem-solving perspectives, ones that hint at answers to even the toughest questions.

Consider the Bible’s account of Abram (later known as Abraham) and Lot. It’s a success story, one of the earliest, of conflict resolution between neighboring peoples. Abram and his brother Lot each had large flocks and herds, and a significant band of followers.

The friction between the two groups was almost inevitable. The resolution, unforeseeable. It wasn’t a matter of reluctantly learning to live with risk. Nor was it a case of one side resignedly accepting a burdensome influx of too many newcomers. Something divine was at work. We can’t trace Abram’s growing spiritual understanding and his budding relationship with the Almighty. But it appears he had an inborn conviction that might be summed up this way: Because the Almighty is present, good solutions can’t be far off.

At a key meeting, Abram said to Lot: “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren…. if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left” (Gen. 13:8, 9). It worked. Harmony became the norm. Everyone felt the Almighty as a “present help in trouble.” Neither side came away feeling disadvantaged.

That desire for a resolution that was good for all parties was prayer in action. And prayer is a most valuable spiritual resource. True prayer is not pushing, or asking God to push, an agenda. It’s letting thought fill with a recognition that God is the infinitely wise, all-knowing Mind. And the one universal and impartial Love. This God of fathomless love and intelligence smooths out troubles.

Our part? Remember that He is on the scene. Recall He cares equally for all parties. Realize He knows that to benefit one side is not to penalize another. Divine Love does not send its children off wandering through the desert to look for a solution. Love stays present. Love calls each one and provides solution-finding inspiration fresher than a mountain spring.

Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “In divine Science, where prayers are mental, all may avail themselves of God as ‘a very present help in trouble.’ Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, ‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters’ ” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” pp. 12-13). The inspiration that flows from divine Love, divine Mind, helps authorities—even those who know nothing of God—find the best solutions for the most troubling of challenges, including those along the border.

Thus God wills order and harmony, he does not will conflict and chaos. But to bring incompatible peoples into the same society, as liberalism demands, is to produce conflict and chaos.

In other words, God’s plan is that mankind, far from living in one, increasingly global society, live in a multitude of societies. As I wrote at FrontPage Magazine in 2004::

The above thoughts lead to a surprising conclusion. Most liberal Christians today affirm that creating culturally diverse societies is the moral, Godly, and just thing to do—the more diverse, the more just and Godly. But if it is our purpose to discern God’s purpose, doesn’t it seem far more likely that God would oppose the creation of multicultural, majority-less societies? He would oppose them, first, because they rob human beings of the stable cultural environments and the concrete networks of belonging that are essential conditions of personal and social flourishing; and, second, he would oppose them because they lead to unresolvable conflict and disorder. In opening America’s borders to the world, our political leaders are not following any divine scheme, but are indulging an all=too-human conceit: “We can create a totally just society,” they tell themselves. “We can stamp out cultural particularities and commonalities that have taken centuries or millennia to develop. We can erect a new form of society based on nothing but an idea. We can ignore racial and cultural differences and the propensity to intergroup conflict that has ruled all of human history. We can create an earthly utopia, a universal nation.”

All of which brings us to the biblical account of Babel. The comparison of multicultural America to the Tower of Babel has become such a cliché in the hands of conservative columnists over the last 20 years that a true understanding of this parable has been lost. Indeed, as I will show, the conservative, or rather the neoconservative, understanding of this parable is the exact opposite of its true meaning.

As told in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the human race, in a burst of arrogant pride, attempts to construct a perfect human society purely by their own will—a tower “with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” Mankind hopes that this one‑world society will prevent them from being divided into separate societies. But this is not what God wants. “The Lord came down to look at the city and tower which man had built, and the Lord said, ‘If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.’” God does not want man to build a universal city, because that would lead man to worship himself instead of God. So God confuses—that is, he diversifies—men’s language so that they cannot understand one another, and then he “scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”

It becomes clear that the Tower of Babel is not, as neoconservatives have often said, a multicultural society which breaks down because it lacks a common culture based on universalist ideals. On the contrary, the Tower of Babel represents the neoconservatives’ own political ideal—the Universal Nation. And the moral of the story is that God does not want men to have a single Universal Nation, he wants them to have distinct nations. “That is why it was called Babel,” Genesis continues, “because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth.” But that’s not all. Having divided men’s language into many different languages, God does not want these many languages to co-exist in the same society: “And from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

Thus God rejects the universal society, where the whole human race lives together speaking the same language, and he also (implicitly) rejects the multicultural society, where the whole human race lives together speaking different languages. God wants the human race to belong to a plurality of separate and finite societies, each with its own culture and language. This providential system for the organization of human life allows for the appropriate expression of cultural variety, even as, by demonstrating that human things are not absolute, it restrains and channels man’s self-aggrandizing instincts.

And this view of mankind is not limited to the Book of Genesis, as a supposedly primitive account of an early, tribal period of history when mankind presumably needed a more rudimentary form of social organization. If we go from the first book of the Bible to its last book, The Revelation of John, we find, to our astonishment, that God’s plan still includes separate nations. In Chapter 21, after the final judgment on sinful humanity has occurred, after the first heaven and the first earth have passed away and a new heaven and a new earth have appeared, after the holy city, New Jerusalem, has come down out of heaven, a dwelling for God himself on earth, and after the total transformation of the world, when even the sun and moon are no longer needed to light the city because the glory of God is the light of it, and the Lamb is the lamp of it, even then

… the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it….

And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.

In the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, there are still distinct nations, and kings of nations, and these are the glories of humanity which are brought before the throne of God, and there transfigured in the light of Christ. Mankind, following the end of the world, is still providentially constituted of separate nations, which give it its character and distinctiveness, even as, for example, our earth is constituted of separate continents, islands, mountain ranges, and valleys, which give it its shape and its meaning. The physical earth is not a homogenous mass consisting of nothing but “equal” individual particles, and neither, in the biblical view, is mankind.

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Mike in New York writes:

I’ve lived a quick walk away from a Christian Science Monitor Reading Room here in Albany, New York for almost 15 years. Back copies of the paper are almost always available for free, and until I bought my first computer in 1999, I frequently helped myself to this paper. Although I am anything but a fellow traveller, religiously or politically, I found it to be a well-presented and physically attractive publication. The articles were generally well-researched, often presented an in-depth look at current issues, and while I found it to be harshly feminist, the “multicultural” aspects, while present, were rarely “in your face.” I guess that a religion whose adherents seemingly consisted overwhelmingly of elderly white ladies could not “do” the multiculti thing too deep.

Anyway, as I went online, less of my reading was of the old-fashioned hard-copy variety, and this included the CSM. However, over the past few years, as I clicked from one link to another in articles about immigration, I noticed that a surprising number of articles I ended up reading were from the CSM. I can’t give a number, in the grand scheme of things it was perhaps no more than a dozen or so articles, but it was surprising none the less.

These articles, while careful to explain all sides, had a definitely sceptical view of the wonders that immigration, especially illegal immigration, would bring, was bringing, to the U.S. and Europe. Perhaps liberal Protestants—and Christian Scientists are very liberal—are beginning to understand that in a truly “diverse” society, quiet, reticent, and self-effacing groups like Christian Scientists will simply and unapologetically be pushed rudely to the sidelines by those religions and ethnic groups more inclined to a louder and pushier way of doing things.

In other words, those who are careful to weigh all options and to hear all opinions, or at least consider themselves to do so, will be drowned out by those groups who follow the racial and ethnic party line, who believe that its all about “for those in my group, everything, for those not of my group, nothing.”

Perhaps libs are not as brain-dead as I had long since thought then to be.

LA replies:

I may have overstated how left the CSM is on cultural issues. True, they’re not aggressive about it (they’re not aggressive about anything), and they do mention other points of view, and, yes, they’re much more oriented to feminism than to multiculturalism. But still the overall drift I have picked up at that paper since the early ’90s was the assumption that open borders is the way to go. Before I posted my item, I checked it with a conservative Christian Scientist who said my description of the CSM’s leftism sounded correct.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 03, 2008 07:26 PM | Send