Come Home, America

Pat Buchanan wrote a hard-hitting indictment of America's slide downhill, both culturally and morally. America began as a speck on the landscape of civilization, a seemingly god-forsaken people on the edge of the earth, as it were. But our ancestors possessed a secret. They clung tightly to a hidden hope, and a set of values that set them apart from other Europeans of their day. The hardships they faced, the struggles they endured, the sufferings they overcame -- are all known to history. But also known to history are their biblical influenced faith in God, their deeply rooted faith in the God who transplanted, that he would sustain.

[The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization ]

Tocqueville came to the United States when it was young, and was favorably impressed by the middle class democracy he found in New England. As a Frenchman with more than a little familiarity with his own nation's Revolution, he greatly admired the cultural and commercial legacy of the Puritans in America. He actually prophesied that all of America would in coming days be like New England (literacy, hustle and bustle, civic participation, middle class democracy) .... and went further to predict that all the world would eventually emulate the United States.

In our own days, we indeed see much of the world straining to copy the United States (for better or worse). But what they are copying are not the virtues that Tocqueville saw -- middle-class values, religious sentiments, broad-based education. Instead they see the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and seem most seduced by the lowest grade of American enticements, not the highest.

Indeed, the West, for all its enlightenment and lofty materialist gains, has not done very well curtailing the primal and untamed core of the human animal. The modern and affluent condition of much of contemporary American society is dominated more by a Hollywood unleashed libertinism than by the old morals. And the rest of the world cannot help but notice. Cardinal Castrill§ån, the Vatican's Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, criticized America's culture of "pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness." It is the decadence and hedonism that Solzhenitsyn decried; pleasure minus God, indulgence minus duty. [A new book in 2008 by Carol Platt Libeau makes a crucial, and related, point. "Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!)" Something Andrea Dworkin and others have claimed for over a generation.]

James Dobson asked why it is that American white women have ever increasing rates of abortion, while minority women dare to be pro-life in their actions, pro-life in their lives and sacrifices. Has fun replaced responsibility for the pampered West? Is the white race, after benefiting from so many of God's blessings, now forgetful of its humble beginnings?

Malcolm Muggeridge declared, "Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society."

Rustum Roy said:

In our culture, every possible sexual angle is exploited, daily and incessantly. Advertising profits correlate directly with degree of sexual innuendo. Movies and television reek with exploitative sexuality. Pornographic videos make up the largest portion of video rentals, and pornographic magazines sell in the tens of millions each month.

Malcolm Muggeridge lamented the loss of religious faith: The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

Douglas N. Morgan traces Christianity's puritanism with regard to sex back to Saint Paul and his negative attitude toward "erotic-sexual love" being carnal, or of the flesh, as compared to the unclaiming or "agape" love that theologians (Martin Luther King Jr, for example) touted as a kind of unclaiming, all-inclusive, unconditional [divine] love.

Are the values we get from the Bible a positive inheritance or are they doing more harm than good? Abraham Isaac Katsh had high praise for the Hebraic thread running througout America's history, beginning with the early days when Pilgrims (Brownists), then the Boston Puritans, settled "New England." (Having been "harried out" of old England by King James.)

Like Katsh, the Jewish historian Gabriel Sivan believes that the biblical inheritance of the West has been unequivocally positive. Sivan states (p9)

"The Hebrew Bible's stand on sexual relationships is uniquely clear-cut and severe. Incest, adultery, homosexuality, and bestiality ... are grave crimes in the eyes of Heaven incurring stern penalties; as such, they can never be viewed permissively, as they were in pagan cults, where deities themselves behaved lewdly toward one another."

More and more, it seems that third world preachers express surprise at the decline of the West. America in particular. There seems to be, in some quarters, an almost racial dimension. Some spokesmen have given vent to this perception. Gandhi chided the West for claiming to worship God, when in fact western materialism has no god but Mammon. "Where Mammon is God, no one worships the true God."

Mohammad himself said much the same. Christians were turning Jesus, whom they claimed to worship, into an idol. Yet their actions did not match their profession of faith. They failed to honor Christ by obeying his commandments. (Obedience is much harder than flattery, than cant.) See Mohammad's high respect for Jesus.

In our day, our material success seems to correspond to moral poverty. America is a world super-power. Educationally and monetarily, America (with Europe and Japan) sits smugly as the elite of all the world. Yet the self-absorption, the "feather bed of success" may in fact be turning into our doom. America's privileged youth have turned away from the rigrors of earlier times, and are sliding far down the road of hedonism and unrestricted pleasure.

Molefi Asante focuses on the playboy sins of the white West. Asante identifies homosexuality as a form of white-man degredation. He calls it "European decadence" -- and instead he exalts the core VIRTUE of African Negro "warrior mentality." Indeed there seems to be a range of "moral diseases" that the privileged classes, through history, have lapsed into. The Bible says the poor are rich in faith, and history seems to prove that the poor or dispised often develop a moral hardiness, a spiritual "sturdiness" that the spoilt and pamper class lack.

In a similar vein, another African commentator, Nsenga Warfield-Coppock alleges that the superior spiritual advantages of non-whites, and specifically African heritage, stems from the pineal gland. She says that in white men, the pineal gland calcifies at a rapid rate, and this results in sexual perversions. She notes: "The prison population of gruesome sexual crime is approximately 97 percent white men, with sometimes as many as a third of all incarcerated American men in a given prison being there for sexual offenses."

Our courts are hardly to be blamed for the stand against sexual wantonness. Indeed, even seeming innocuous behaviors apparently exact a cost. Consider the warning of Carol Platt Liebau; that our sex-obsessed culture damages girls (and America, too!). Her book Prude urges the restoration of common sense values to our sex-saturated society.

On the other hand, how much can we blame Hollywood alone, or our merchants, for only giving the consuming public what they want? The marketplace is an inexorable master, and Hollywood cannot help but respond to the economic "Demand" -- i.e., to the appetites of the buying public. "Money talks."

President John F. Kennedy, in measured tones, warned that
"This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor."
More radical preachers and pastors and moralistic prophets of God's wrath and punishment are even less inclined to mince words. Perhaps we owe to them the "CIVILIZING" influence of the impetus which curtails raw impulses and energies, and prompts us to channel them, to sublimate them, into constructive outlets. Freud said something like that. Religion is cast in the role of Super-Ego. It is the "parental values" which prepare the child for life in society.

The Church in Europe has long looked across the waters and chided this Yankee nation for its "Americanist" sins and heresies, whether that be the dilution (watering down) of theology, or compromise with worldliness and the profit-motive, our Americanist obsession with freedom of conscience (separation of church and state), and the questionable religious situation (America being a magnet for a multiplicity of sects and churches -- religious pluralism). But maybe it's the job of preachers to preach. (As Cardinal Castrillon , among so many others, do!) Indeed, in this present hedonistic culture, it must seem like basic responsibility when they speak out. After all, to much of the world, it must appear like America has become the chief exporter and corrupter in this realm of sexual excess.

Pat Buchanan, in his books like an angry prophet of old, a Jonah, perhaps -- and America a modern Nineveh -- warns of the coming wrath for a nation that has abandoned its roots, its values, the rock-ribbed faith of our fathers. Life is a sacred value, but the rush toward hedonism may become our doom. Denouncing the spiritual sterility of extreme feminism, Buchanan also directs his sharp rhetoric against the playboy mentality of good old boys (who, though they should know better, behave much like adolescents).

Consider the lessons of Rome, when the upper classes ceased to put children first.

Those upon whom the future most depended for the transmission of the old values, for whatever reason, cared least about passing those treasures on.

"It is a marked feature in all the higher classes of the population, that they are unwilling to continue their kind and found a family. Apparently their motive was to secure full enjoyment of their wealth for themselves personally; and they were not willing to hamper their freedom with the cares of a family." [M. Rostovtzeff, Rome]



The Welcome Mat
Emma Lazarus' celebrated poem hail's America's welcome mat invitation to the lowly. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free." The Statue of Liberty gives visible form to that welcome. Writers from Israel Zangwill to Eric Hoffer have sung America's praise for extending this welcome. We are, in the words of John F. Kennedy, a nation of immigrants. Our true treasure is not the material wealth, the true wealth of America is the human treasure -- the people. America is still on the gold standard, but the real gold standard is the toil of the American people themselves. Do we refuse the refugees, the outcasts of other nations? No. We say,
"Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

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A personal apologia



Torn Allegiances
    For me, a lot of my personal dilemma comes down to my sense of conflict between the two sides.
See Romans 7:19 I have a yin and yang within me. How can Pat Buchanan's cutting indictment be ignored? Neverthless, there are alternative voices, and many of them have merit. I could name, among others, Anne Roiphe with her gentle wisdom and thoughtful, reasoned feminism.

non enim quod volo bonum, hoc facio: sed quod nolo malum, hoc ago.