Liberal Jahiliyah

One of the assumptions of the messianic Boomer generation --my demographic compatriots--is that prior to the 1960's, America lay in a state of darkness, ignorance and evil. What the Muslims call jahiliyah, the pitiful immoral conditions of a people prior to The Final Revelation. Racism, sexism, homophobia, the military-industrial complex, crushing conformity, religious tyranny. Oh, and anti-Communist hysteria.

Consequently, whatever institutions or groups were dominant prior to The Decade of Revelation must be cleansed, overcome, replaced or otherwise transformed in the image and likeness of the salvation-bearers.

As Mark Levin notes in his new book Ameritopia,

For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual is one-dimensional—selfish. On his own, he has little moral value. Contrarily, authoritarianism is defended as altruistic and masterminds as socially conscious. Thus endless interventions in the individual’s life and manipulation of his conditions are justified as not only necessary and desirable but noble governmental pursuits. This false dialectic is at the heart of the problem we face today.

This is why liberals are so attached to governmental regulation. Left to our own devices, "Americans" --and by that, for once, liberals recognize this as a White-majority and Christian country-- and our so-called freedom, we will oppress blacks, women, "the poor" and all the other victim classes.

Politically correct language is one great example of this. All ways of describing the now-privileged victim classes had to be rewritten in NewSpeak. Just because it was the language of the oppressors. We are now reaping the fruits of the whole thing with the White House incumbent, in that one of the articles of faith is that as long as a Democrat is in control, the Prime Mover of Justice and Inclusion is the federal government. A deeply lamentable outcome of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was, I now suspect, a terribly flawed and overreaching way of dealing with the problem of race.

I see it at the PrayTell blog, too, where variously adolescent commentors --and some of the highly educated and more sobre-seeming ones, too-- appear to hold a version of Alexander Pope's historical judgment: The Gospel and the Gospel's ways lay hid in night/ Then God said, "Let Vatican II be!" -- and all was light. To these cretinous children of the age, the mere mention of Latin, or the thought of kneeling, or of using non-kindergarten language for worship are all anathema. Reversions to the awful jahiliyah days "before the Council."  As if Rome had finally caught up with the Reformation, which had been right all along.

These folks' attachment to either America or to their religion* , their patriotism or their piety, is quite similar. It is really just an attachment to their idea of how it should be and a deep rejection of how it actually was. As Downton Abbey's Lady Grantham says to Mrs Crawley, "You are quite wonderful, the way you see room for improvement wherever you look." This attitude is also a classic recipe for a bad marriage: "I love my idea of who I can turn you into rather than the unsatisfactory and hopefully temporary disappointment you have been until you met me."



*I am aware of the perfectly obvious fact that I do not practice mine and so I could be criticized for harping on others' attachments. As I have said before, my departure was not about something trivial, like a translation or a posture, but about whether one of the deepest parts of my soul was diseased or not,  and my continuing interest in the Christian churches is largely in the health of one of the pillars of the West.