Today, the free exercise of religion has
ceased to be a guaranteed right in America. Instead, it has become a battlefield.
– David Horowitz
For years, Morris
County in New Jersey had been giving historic churches money to make
repairs under an historic preservation program. In 2015, the State Supreme
Court ruled that taxpayer funds should not be used to repair places of worship.
A challenge to this ruling recently went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined
to hear the case, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that “[b]arring
religious organizations because they are religious from a general
historic-preservation grants program is pure discrimination against religion.” This
“would raise serious questions under this Court’s precedents and the
Constitution’s fundamental guarantee of equality.”
This seems like a
relatively minor, local issue but it is yet another instance of the fierce conflict
referred to in Horowitz’s quote above. As the Freedom Center’s founder notes in
his brand new book Dark
Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, we are engaged in “a war
against this nation and its founding principles: the equality of individuals
and individual freedom. For these principles are indisputably Christian in
origin. They are under siege because they are insurmountable obstacles to
radicals’ totalitarian ambition to create a new world in their image.”
Those
totalitarian radicals are today’s progressives. “Since its birth in the fires
of the French Revolution,” Horowitz writes, “the political left has been at war with
religion, and with the Christian religion in particular.” He knows this from
personal experience. As a “red-diaper baby,” he learned early on that his
parents and their leftist friends were true believers in a faith, but not one
concerned with the fate of souls. The label “progressivism” masked their true religion,
which was Communism, and their “cause was the salvation of mankind” – but “they
thought of themselves as the
redeemers, not God.”
As Horowitz demonstrates
in his slim but compelling and disturbing new volume, the left’s ruthless
antagonism toward Christianity stems from its own arrogant determination to
shape the world according to atheist Karl Marx’s utopian vision of perfect
equality and social justice (with Edenic environmental harmony thrown in for
good measure). “Those who believe they are changing the world, or saving the
planet, or transforming the human race,” Horowitz writes, “are intoxicated with
self-aggrandizing pride.” Those afflicted with this arrogance, such as the so-called
New Atheists like political comedian Bill Maher, condemn the violence and
bigotry spread in the name of religion (especially
Christianity; Islam is usually off-limits to condemnation partly because it
shares an anti-Western animosity with the left, and partly because open criticism
of Islam tends to get the critic targeted for death). But they “are blind to
all the positive influences religion has had on human behavior, and they ignore
all the atheist-inspired genocides of the last 250 years,” Horowitz writes. He rightly
points out that the danger lies not in religion but in human nature; it is our
flawed humanity that sometimes poisons religion, not the other way around.
But the statist
left demands this authority for itself, so it seized upon the Establishment
Clause of the First Amendment to undermine American religious traditions, and
found a willing instrument in an activist Supreme Court: “In one despotic
decision after another, the Supreme Court inflated the Establishment Clause
while letting all the air out of the Free Exercise protection. Again and again,
the High Court jammed its radical redefinition of the First Amendment down the
throat of an unwilling, unready society.”
“Once the left
had built a wall of separation between church and state,” Horowitz continues, “it
had to change history and make the past conform to the present.” Thus, for
example, schools and textbooks began to reflect a de-emphasis on our Christian
roots, such as referring to the early Pilgrims as merely “settlers” or
“European colonizers.”
Horowitz
identifies the weaponized Supreme Court as the principal villain in this drama:
In case after case – religious
expression in schools, contraception, abortion – the Supreme Court handed down
a string of earthshaking decisions founded on the flimsiest and even bogus
constitutional reasoning. The unintended consequence of these decisions was to
place the Supreme Court on the front lines of an epic culture war. It was not
merely a war between left and right, but between secularism and religion,
especially the Christian religion. The secular left had discovered an
all-powerful instrument – the Supreme Court – with which it could impose its
radical, anti-Christian agenda on an unwilling nation.
The cast of
characters in Dark Agenda includes the
rabidly anti-Christian activist Madelyn Murry (later O’Hair), who filed a
lawsuit against school prayer which Horowitz calls “the Fort Sumter of the war
over religious liberty.” Murray shrewdly found an ally in the Supreme Court,
and the rest is history: “A circus put on by a calculating, truth-challenged
anti-American crackpot, egged on by ACLU radicals, provided an opportunity for
eight lifetime political appointees, elected by no one and accountable to no
one, to reinterpret the Constitution, overturn nearly two centuries of
precedent and tradition, and change the life of a nation.”
Horowitz also
tells the tale of eugenicist Margaret Sanger, a feminist icon who declared in
her manifesto Woman and the New Race
that women could be liberated from what feminists perceived to be the bonds of
motherhood by means of “reproductive freedom,” and may, “by controlling birth,
lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent function, and remake the world.” [Emphasis added] Sanger
strove to implement her aims by promoting the previously socially unacceptable tools
of contraception and abortion.
Horowitz
describes how, in order to get the Supreme Court to legalize abortion, feminists
sought a sacrificial lamb, a woman whose case would be compelling enough to
assure legal victory. That lamb was Norma McCorvey, manipulated into serving as
the “Jane Roe” of the immeasurably damaging Roe
v. Wade decision (McCorvey never actually had an abortion and became an anti-abortion
advocate).
The cast also
includes Horowitz’s friend Christopher Hitchens, the New Atheist author of God is Not Great; constitutionalist Supreme
Court nominee Robert Bork, infamously demonized by Ted Kennedy and the anti-Christian
left; Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker the left tried to destroy because he
refused to compromise his Christian beliefs by baking a wedding cake for a gay
couple; and of course, former president Barack Obama, whom one faith-based
website declared “America’s Most Biblically Hostile U.S. President.”
Today, after
eight years of Obama’s relentless castigation of Christian institutions and
individuals as bigoted (Horowitz even provides a timeline of hostile acts
toward people of Biblical faith during Obama’s tenure), President Donald Trump has
been embraced by the religious right despite Trump’s problematic personal
character because, as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council put it, “My
support for Trump has never been based upon shared values; it is based on
shared concerns.” Predictably, in its obsessive hatred for Christianity and for
the upstart political outsider who “stole” the White House from progressive
icon (and Saul Alinsky protégé) Hillary Clinton, the left set out to
delegitimize Trump by claiming the religious right’s backing is grounded in
racism.
This critical
front of the culture war that has riven our country still rages. David
Horowitz’s Dark Agenda is a must-read
for every citizen who wants to understand, and to fight back against, the radically
secular drift of our country and the assault on America’s core values,
traditions, and freedoms.
From FrontPage Mag, 3/5/19
