Modern People have no Stability

If the old communists lived long enough to see the world of today, they would be devastated by the contrast between how little they themselves had managed to achieve in their antireligious war and how successful the liberal democrats have been. All the objectives the communists set for themselves, and which they pursued with savage brutality, were achieved by the liberal democrats who, almost without any effort and simply by allowing people to dri ft along with the flow of modernity, succeeded in converting churches into museums, restaurants, and public buildings, secularizing entire societies, making secularism the militant ideology, pushing religion to the sidelines, pressing the clergy into docility, and inspiring powerful mass culture with a strong antireligious bias in which a priest must be either a liberal challenging the Church or a disgusting villain. Is not—one may wonder—this nonreligious and antireligious reality of today’s Western world very close to the vision of the future without religion that the communists were so excited about, and which despite the millions of human lives sacrificed on the altar of progress, failed to materialize?

A lot of Christian communities overpowered by the march of time gave up any idea of a head-on confrontation with liberal democracy, or even of any energetic defense policy. Those that capitulated unconditionally had to perform theological acrobatics to justify their position, and in so doing, agreed to suppress any formative ambitions of their own and remained silent when before their eyes the Christian practices and ideas were being destroyed. After making some timid gestures of resistance at the beginning, they soon agreed to recognize so-called homosexual marriage, to condone abortion, or even to tolerate euthanasia. The ubiquity of liberal-democratic rights and ethical permissiveness may have generated, in a lot of Christians, such a feeling of resignation that any vigorous resistance must have seemed to them futile. The only option left for Christians to maintain some respectability in a new world was to join the great progressive camp so that occasionally they would have an opportunity to smuggle in something that could pass for a religious message.

But this conciliatory attitude on the part of Christians is certainly wrong if it is motivated by the conviction that the current hostility to religion is a result of a misunderstanding, social contingencies, unfortunate errors committed by the Christians, or some minor ailments of modern society. The truth is that all these phenomena, as well as other anti-Christian developments, are the genuine consequences of the spirit of modernity on which the liberal democracy was founded. Modernity and anti-Christianity cannot be separated because they stem from the same root and since the beginning have been intertwined. There is nothing and has never been anything in this branch of the European tradition that would make it favorably predisposed to Christianity. The waves of hostility appeared and disappeared, ranging from outward aggression to indifference mixed with contempt, but never did the tide turn into an open and sincere sympathy. There have been several Christian authors of liberal persuasion who tried to find common elements between Christianity and liberalism, which occasionally produced interesting theoretical insights, but generally the inexorable tendency to liberalize and democratize the world that we have witnessed over the last centuries always supported the forces of anti-Christianity.

Therefore, whoever advocates the conciliatory strategy today fails or refuses to see the conditions in which Christians have been living. It is utterly mistaken to take the position that many do: namely that the Church should take over some liberal-democratic ingredients, open up to modern ideas and preferences, and then, after having modernized herself, manage to overcome hostility and reach people with Christian teachings. One can see why this plan has gained considerable popularity, but whatever its merits, it cannot succeed.

In order for the Church to be praised [by liberals], or even to be spared the heaviest blows, it is no longer enough to make the sacral architecture less hierarchical, and more democratic, or have the priest face the faithful during the mass, or to consider the abolition of celibacy. Nowadays one must go much further: prohibit the condemnation of anything other than what the liberal-democratic orthodoxy mandates to condemn, and decree to praise everything that this orthodoxy mandates to praise. Today the Christians’ devotion—or rather, surrender—to liberal democracy is measured by their enthusiastic support of the claims of homosexual activists and by the acceptance of what the feminists call "women’s reproductive rights." One shudders at the thought of what will be expected of the Christians in a few years’ time.

Rangers hiked for miles to confirm the deaths of two people who were camping at an island national park in Michigan’s Lake Superior. The deaths were reported to staff Sunday at Isle Royale National Park. No other details have been released, and the park said yesterday the deaths were under investigation.