The Modern Left Hates and Fears Christians, by Tom Pauken.
In the United States, the forces of the cultural left have been particularly aggressive in seeking to diminish the influence of our Christian heritage on American society.
The Obama administration has led the campaign for the complete separation of religion from the public square. It has used executive orders, regulatory rule-making authority, and the bully pulpit to promote policies that are antithetical to the Christian traditions of our nation.
More ominously, it has attempted to force Christian businesses, nonprofits, and public officials to affirm the core elements of its social agenda. That includes the requirement of abortion coverage in health-insurance policies and the acceptance of same-sex marriage on an equal plane with marriage between a man and a woman.
Failure to comply with the Obama administration’s social agenda — an agenda shared by the President’s allies at the state level — has bankrupted businesses, caused individuals to lose their jobs, and resulted in non profits having their government funding removed. Violate your religious principles, or pay a heavy price financially and personally if you choose to resist.
All of this is taking place in a so-called liberal democracy. This is not just an attempt to build a wall of separation between Church and state: It is an expression of active hostility toward Christianity, reminiscent of the French Revolution. …
PC post-modernism is winning at the moment:
This, then, is the ongoing Culture War between the defenders of our traditional Christian values and those who demand a purely secular state along the lines envisioned by the leaders of the French Revolution.
At the moment, the Christians are losing — and losing badly. The counterculture of the 1960’s has effectively become the dominant voice of American culture today. The secular left has followed the advice given by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that, if you capture the culture, you will capture the country. The secular left has done just that — in Hollywood, the mass media, the academic community, the foundations, big business, and the courts.
What is happening in the United States is not taking place in a vacuum. It is endemic in the liberal democracies of the West where the secular left has captured the culture.
Western culture is Christian, and has been since before the fall of the western Roman Empire. Christianity shaped the West, and its success. Christianity is also one of the few (the only?) tradition that is able to stand up to state power, rooted in its DNA as it stood up to Roman power for its first three hundred years. The left hate it.
Joseph Stalin famously joked sarcastically, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” The communist USSR banned religion almost entirely, except for reviving it briefly to help it win WWII. But today eastern Christianity, the Orthodox Church, is flourishing in Russia and communism is discredited and buried. Who’s laughing now?
In his Templeton Lecture delivered on May 10, 1983, [the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the man who told the truth about life under communism in The Gulag Archipelago] told a story from his childhood under communist rule:
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all of this has happened.”
The Noble laureate went on to describe how he spent 50 years studying the Russian Revolution, only to come to the same conclusion:
In the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty-million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all of this has happened.”
hat-tip Stephen Neil
