Suicide by Secularism?
By George F. Will

The astonishing pilgrimage of Europeans to Vatican City for the most attended funeral in history obscured a stark fact confronting the conclave that tomorrow begins selecting the next pope: Vatican City is 109 acres of faith in a European sea of unbelief.

Poles, especially, traveled to Rome to honor John Paul II. But what was said of Georges Clemenceau -- that he had one illusion, France, and one disillusion, mankind, including the French -- might with some exaggeration be said of John Paul II and Poland. He was vexed by the zeal with which Poles, liberated from the asceticism inflicted by communism, embraced consumerism, materialism and hedonism. From Catholic Ireland to Catholic Spain to Poland, the most Catholic nation, the trends of contraception, divorce and abortion are moving against Catholic teaching.

The challenge confronting the church can be expressed in one word: modernity. The church preaches that freedom is life lived in conformity to God's will as manifested in revelation and interpreted by the church. Modernity teaches that freedom is the sovereignty of the individual's will -- personal volition that is spontaneous, unconditioned, inviolable and self-legitimizing.

John Paul II's mastery of the presentational aspect of the papacy -- a mastery dependent on two modern technologies, television and jet aircraft -- may cause the conclave to seek a candidate with similar skills. But the substance of what he presented did not amount to accommodation with the culture of modernity.

In America, a market-driven society, there is a religion market in which the most successful competitors for congregations are churches with clear doctrinal and strict moral positions. For these churches, the "crisis of Christianity" is congestion in their parking lots.

Christianity is a varied and complex structure -- theological and institutional -- erected on a foundation of biblical prophecies and reports of the activities of Jesus. For two millennia these prophecies and reports have been, to say no more, subject to various interpretations. Hence the search, from the earliest days of Christianity, for sources of authoritative interpretation. That search produced great councils -- Nicaea, Trent -- and the post-Reformation papacy. When the conclave begins, a European epoch may begin to end.

It took 455 years to pry the papacy out of Italian hands. Now, after 26 years of a pope from Eastern Europe, the church that is withering in Europe is flourishing in the Southern Hemisphere, where materialism and consumerism are less powerful but people passionately desire the affluence that drives materialism and consumerism.

Europe itself is withering. On the day of John Paul II's funeral, the European Union's statistics agency reported that the decline of birthrates means that within five years deaths will exceed births in the European Union. By 2013 Italy's population will begin to decline; the next year Germany's will begin to drop. After 2010 Europe's population growth will be entirely from immigration. By 2025 not even immigration will prevent declining fertility from accelerating what one historian calls the largest "sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century."

In his new book "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God," George Weigel, biographer of John Paul II, argues that Europe's "demographic suicide" will cause its welfare states to buckle and is creating a "vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing." Since 1970 the 20 million legal Islamic immigrants equal the combined populations of Ireland, Denmark and Belgium.

"What," Weigel asks, "is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation?" His diagnosis is that Europe's deepening anemia is a consequence of living on what he considers the thin gruel of secular humanism that excludes transcendent reference points for cultural and political life. Such reference points are, he thinks, prerequisites for freedom understood as "the capacity to choose wisely and act well as a matter of habit."

Perhaps. But Weigel also argues that Europe's crisis of civilizational morale was catalyzed by World War I. So Europe's retreat from religion may reflect a reasonable weariness and wariness born of four centuries of religious wars and convulsions wrought by the political religions of fascism and communism.

Weigel doubts it is possible to "sustain a democratic political community absent the transcendent moral reference points for ordering public life that Christianity offers the political community." Absent a reconversion of the continent, Europeans, who -- like many Americans -- find the injection of transcendence into politics frightening, are going to find out whether Weigel is right.

Linked on Chronicles website:Wednesday, April 13, 2005

The Cerebral Emperor
By Clyde Wilson

Alas! it is delusion all;
  The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
  Nor dare we think on what we are.
—Lord Byron


Most of us, when emerging from intellectual childhood into intellectual adolescence, pass through a phase of earnest search for certainty about the world.   For instance, George W. Bush recently read a book (by a Mr. Sharansky, we are told) and enjoyed a revelation.  He discovered, as he informed us in his Inaugural Address, that he is a Menshevik, with Zionist leanings.  This is not too surprising.   Verbiage about magical crusades for humanity has a powerful appeal for adolescents.  The verbiage discovered by Bush Jr. is in the air we breathe and has been ever since Marx, taking his cue from the Gettysburg Address, conflated the Declaration of Independence of the free American states with the power-friendly Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Objectively considered, without superstitious awe of his office or sentimentalism about “good intentions,” Bush is a liar and a criminal.  Nothing surprising about that either.  That is commonplace for heads of government.  What is unusual in this case is that the head of government is an ignorant fool and a spoiled brat.  We have entered into the stage of imperial decadence in which a clueless inheritor of the throne is a tool of his courtiers, though, like all courtiers, they must occasionally endure an outbreak of petulant self-assertion or manage a tangent of eccentricity by  their lord.

The Framers and ratifiers of the federal Constitution were hardly conversant with the concept of “personality,” but they were highly conversant with the histories of empires and monarchies and how rulers’ defects of character had introduced distortions into the state.  But about the only consideration of character that came into their view in regard to the president was that he might become too ambitious and employ his considerable powers to the detriment of the public.  This was not too worrisome since it could hardly be thought that the man who would emerge from the electoral process could be other than one long and widely known for integrity, patriotism, and exceptional services to his country.  The Union would not be held hostage to accidents of birth.

The Founders’ assumption held true until 1836, when Martin Van Buren demonstrated that one could become president merely by being a politician, by working the system and cultivating the support of his popular predecessor.  Expansion of the patronage and the electorate had brought the methods of Aaron Burr’s Tammany Hall to national politics.  Lincoln nailed down the point with a vengeance by becoming president with 39 percent of the vote and hardly any record of public service at all.  Presidents have since occasionally been men of distinction and service, but the general trend has been downhill.

Curiously, or perhaps not, the occupant of the Executive Mansion has been ascribed more and more power and status as less and less has been required of him of character and service.  The President was designed to be, as he was commonly referred to up until the War to Suppress Southern Independence, the Chief Magistrate of the Union.  He was responsible for seeing that the laws were executed, appointing and overseeing those who aided him in that task, and recommending new laws as needed.  He was also to be ceremonial head of state, a rather unrepublican role, but one thought necessary in a world in which every foreign relation was with a state represented by a court.

In a blog discussion on the Chronicles website a while back, I was rather severely taken to task by an anonymous correspondent for slighting the accomplishments of President Reagan.  For this writer Reagan represents the most valued “presidential legacy” of his lifetime.  Set aside that Reagan’s legacy  includes a failure to deliver on every promise he made in regard to the internal affairs of the Union.  Why do we need a “presidential legacy” to make us feel good?  Why should a democratic people have any regard for a president’s legacy other than whether or not he had faithfully executed the laws of the country? My reply was that at this time in our national life it is vitally necessary to desacralize the government by giving up the sentimentality of “presidential legacies.”

How did we get to this state of emperor worship—the need to identify with “our” president, as if he were the father of our one big happy family? It would seem that for millions of Americans now, to criticize “our president” is to commit treason against what they imagine to be a family.  Well, the President is not “my president.”  He is a rather mediocre and troublesome man who has acheived temporary (let us hope) power through a corrupt and irrational process that required of him neither an admirable character nor proven services to the country.  The President is most certainly not “my commander-in-chief.”  He is merely during his term of office head of the Armed Forces established by law—that is, he has the responsibility for directing their operations.  He is not commander-in-chief of the United States.  Constitutionally considered he is not even commander-in-chief of the federal government, which was supposed to be a government of divided powers.

How did we get here?  We can’t blame Lincoln, who never claimed divinity.  We can blame his supporters who made use of his death to erect a literally blasphemous Christ-like figure for public adoration.  (Americans are completely  unfamiliar with the vast literature of sacralization that followed upon Lincoln’s assassination, which was truly stomach-turningly blasphemous.)   Beginning certainly with Kennedy, though with intimations at least as early as Teddy Roosevelt, the presidency was absorbed into the corrupt American culture of celebrity.  The president is no longer a hero/patriot but a celebrity.  (When the country was under the most devastating foreign attack in its history, Commander-in-Chief Bush was performing his celebrity routine for elementary school children.  The masses today would likely run screaming in fear if confronted with a real hero/patriot as a leader.

Millions of Americans are now unable to make an elementary distinction between society and government.  This means that the state apparatus is no longer the servant of society, but that society is merely raw material for the emperor and his retainers.