Today’s magnetic ideologies about sex disorient and invert traditional responsible views on morality and charity so completely as to render discussions of morals or religion offensive or impossible — even amongst surprising numbers of Christians co-opted by radical constructs of charity and humanity.

Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” is the instruction manual used to turn Christianity against itself and deliver it into the hands of big-government progressives.  This will not change until we use the same methods to get in front of radicals and disorient them.

The most revealing and teachable moments in this discourse rise from the objections of detractors themselves.  Whether by accidental or intentional ignorance, the points made by detractors fail to find any tangible factual flaw in Dr. Baskerville’s lecture despite heroic attempts to do so.  The methodology employed by the critics are described in the lecture and become proof that Dr. Baskerville’s premises are correct.

Below are highlights of three of the critics, and why their points are incorrect:

• PHC Alum David Sessions asserts there are factual errors in the lecture despite citing nothing truly contrary in evidence.  I do not understand why he suggests that Dr. Baskerville’s thesis as a conspiratorial ideology in itself, while lowering Christianity to merely another conspiratorial ideology in the sociopolitical culture war.

Mr. Sessions confuses the short-term crisis posed by the sub-prime bubble collapse with the longitudinal deficit-driving spending problem of which Dr. Baskerville speaks.  Social spending has been saddling the nation with ever-larger demand-spending deficits since 1963.  The Wall Street Journal has published many articles (1, 2, 3) about the damage the welfare state has done to federal spending.  Social spending is the largest and fastest-growing line item in the federal budget.  The rapid expansion of social spending leaves the debt-to-GDP ratio of the United States in worse shape than the E.E.C. and nearly as fatal as Greece.

Family Research Counsel, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Center for Marriage Policy all document the fact that we cannot attain a balanced or surplus budget until we reverse the trend of marriage-absence to facilitate natural decreases in demand-side spending associated with weak non-married parents.   More granular facts addressing Mr. Sessions concerns are presented later in this letter.

• Two (apparently gay-activist) critics (1,2) assert that homosexuals had no participation in the rise of the Nazi party.

Dr. Baskerville is correct: The “Storm Battalion” (SA) was Hitler’s homosexual wing comprised of approximately three million corrupt street fighters, many of whom were homosexuals.  Led by “out” homosexuals Ernst Rohm and Edmund Heines, the SA played a significant role seizing the estates of Hitler’s opponents and nationalizing private companies.  The SA did not get the patronage it expected after Hitler rose to power.  The tension between Hitler and the SA continued until Hitler committed suicide.

The lack of knowledgd demonstrated by the two critics above merits analysis.  Hyperbole replaces rational factual discourse. This is the standard methodology applied by ideologues.   They have stolen and redirected core fields of academic study and science to serve unscientific special-interest dicta, with disastrous policy consequences.

An exemplary parallel now widely known is the organized theft of global-warming studies by “scientists”.  They are working self-aggrandizing “green” agenda proponents trying to  generate billions in Federal and international funding.  Their goal is to hand power to lawyers, socialists, and feminists in Brussels and the United Nations.

The “more honest” discussion of global warming now taking place has not yet occurred in fields of psychology, law, socioeconomic policy, and criminal law because the inner workings of social ideology has not been exposed to the general population yet.

I will now address the concerns of Dr. Baskerville’s critics with a finer grain of detail than provided in Dr. Baskerville’s lecture.

Sociopolitics is a labyrinthine Pachinko machine of thoughts, ideas and  philosophies.   Vile organizations hiding behind nice-sounding names, politicians trying to stay in power at any cost, and community  activists are working the streets.  It takes many years of real-time study to understand the American dilemma and why the Pachinko machine almost always wins.

The detail and analysis I provide below provides factual evidentiary support for Dr. Baskerville’s broader statements, a number of which could be construed as being excessive without granular factual support.

Women’s activism vs. politicized socialist feminism

There is a manifold difference between legitimate women’s activism and institutional politicized feminism controlling universities, politics, law, the White House Cabinet, and the welfare state.

Suffragettes were not power hungry feminists. They were female activists who wanted to have simple property and voting rights. In fact, suffragettes discouraged direct involvement in the Votes for Women Movement by the first wave of sexual-power feminists in the Women’s Ku Klux Klan, who wrote many popular mottos in the 1860-1890 timeframe that were later featured in the “original” writings of the 1960’s feminist sexual liberation movement. WKKK feminists later seized control of KKK in the 1920’s (using allegations of sexual improprieties by the Grand Dragon).  A Congressional investigation in 1922 found that a woman, Daisy Douglass Barr, was running the KKK.

WKKK activists, not legitimate “women’s activists”, led and organized the Prohibition movement.

It is important to note that WKKK feminists opposed equal rights for blacks, while a reasonable number legitimate women’s activists (such as my grandmother, Florence Richardson Usher, who founded the Equal Suffrage Association in Missouri in 1908), wanted to include black women in the Suffragette movement.  She had black dignitaries of the day, such as Ralph Bunche over to dinner to discuss advancing equal rights for blacks.

Most legitimate women’s activists folded shop after the 19^th Amendment was enacted.  Radical feminists left the KKK in the 1930’s and continued their work, aggregating the teachings of Frankfurt School expatriates (who migrated to New York after World War I) with Freudian pseudo-science and Kinsey, powered by Marcuse’s realization that sex was the only tool that could divide and break down the contented American middle class.  The acid form of ideological feminism we see today exploded on the American scene in the 1960’s, alienating  America’s children from religion and parents, assuming control of family law, welfare politics, and many religions.

You are probably wondering why I began my analysis with a short history of the WKKK.  Its status as the great-grandmother of radical feminism is a pivotal and largely unrecognized fact of American political history that must be understood to understand how today’s radical feminist movement impacts present-day social policy and cultural thinking.  The WKKK applied a political power model to become the “moral keeper” of America by using wild allegations of rape, violence, and even temperance, to bring about mass political discrimination (backed by the full force of the government) against black men.  The lack of marriage in black families caused black families to be viewed as weak, disempowered, and problematic by everyone from Margaret Sanger to Congress.

The contemporary feminist movement applies the same deceptive moralistic vectors to empower feminists at the highest levels of government, bringing about the same forms of sociopolitical discrimination – but now targeting all men, their participation in marriage, and even marriage itself.

What is feminism?  How does it work? Does it really control American law and politics?

We see two entirely different constructs between legitimate women’s activism (which seeks a specific and reasonable goal using direct language) and institutionalized political feminism, which pursues agenda that does not match the slogans they use.

Most notably, feminism misuses traditional beliefs in equality, protections for women, and charity to fool individuals into pursuing unequal and uncharitable and an anti-marriage agenda.  This expunges men from participation in marriage, parenting, and society via policy and criminal law, leaving women and children in trouble, who then look to government feminists to take care of them.

Here are several shocking examples of anti-marriage feminist policy proving that feminist agenda runs America:

• Despite the fact that all credible studies report that women initiate half of serious domestic violence, the American Bar Association standards of practice legally defines the victim as “her”.  Regardless of the reason for marital conflict, it is common for  the husband to be presumed to be the perpetrator, removed from the home, and all his assets frozen in a restraining order.

• There is no funding and no help for men dealing with a violent wife.  Men: call your local domestic violence hot line and say your wife has been hitting you.  They will usually tell you to call a lawyer. Women: after you have heard that they do nothing for men, call the hotline and say your husband has been hitting you. They will probably offer to get a restraining order in 30 minutes over the phone, provide a free legal team, and send you to a shelter.

• The same feminist activists and lawyers controlling the practice of family law also control the White House Office on Women, which holds a cabinet-level position dictating social policy to the military, social services, and other government agency.  This is the office responsible for turning the military into a circus of “reported rapes”. In the Military, False reports of sexual assaults are rising faster than reports of rape, taking many good men out of action and wasting military resources on feminist witch hunts.  Take for example, the case of Kelly Wilson.The case of Catholic graduate Karalen Morthole illustrates the quandary imposed on military leadership. Young folks get  drunk, inhibitions go out the window, and generals are pressured by White House feminists to override the findings of military investigators when they find no case to prosecute.  It is instructive that the civilian prosecutor refused to file charges in this case because prosecutors tend to err on the side of prosecution in sexual assault cases.

• Feminist activists also control college campuses, injecting feminist dogma into core curricula via mandatory “Women’s Interdisciplinary Studies” programs, in which women’s studies students are sent out to inject their agenda into every other field of study.  In law schools, family law is commonly taught by “Women’s Jurisprudence” departments (imagine a university teaching racial law subjugated by a “White Jurisprudence” department).

• At Yale University, feminists are turning the campus into a monolithic political matriarchy citing unfounded “record rates of sexual assault” not reported to police or tried in the courts.Women’s Studies students are being organized and getting college credit for “Wikistorming” intended to rewrite history, politics and the English language to match the feminist agenda.

• The Duke Lacrosse rape case destroyed the college careers of the entire Lacrosse Team, who were publicly pilloried by 88 Duke professors, the College Administration, and the State of North Carolina because of unsubstantiated claims of a stripper with a long criminal record.  Within two weeks, I declared it a fraud, accurately predicting that prosecutor Mike Nifong would lose his law license and the university and City would be sued by the players.  Despite all the evidence that the case was fraudulent in the early days of the investigation, the National Organization for Women insisted that the accuser was being abused by the media and police.

• Today, college campuses and even high schools are rife with allegations of rape and sexual abuse, mostly alleged by women’s studies students. Harvard reports a mysterious near-doubling of rape allegations. These allegations are heard by student body “courts”, where evidentiary standards do not exist.  These allegations are rarely reported to police, because many cases are unfounded.  Some of the dubious or false campus sexual assault cases filed by campus feminists (often heard only in “campus courts” to bypass the proper venue of police and courts), and pursued as highly-publicized moral witch hunts in the media include Morgan Triplett, Wanetta Gibson, Megan Williams, Bawit Dekele, Melinda Manning, Landen Gambill, and Charlie Rogers.

• The federal Department of Education has determined that flirting or an unwanted date request can be considered sexual harassment.  The “reasonable person” standard has been replaced with a subjective standard based on whatever any one person “feels” – defining crime according to the feelings of the most sensitive individuals.  This is the first subjective legal definition of a crime in my twenty five years of social policy research.

• The prevalence of false or baseless sex allegations was exposed two years ago in the Weekly Standard, but the machine continues to grind.  It is unusual to see conviction, at least in publicized cases, because the allegations are usually by young women seeking big civil-suit winnings from rich men.  Women also use sexual abuse allegations to get even with old boyfriends or to control outcomes in divorce and custody situations. The cases of Jordan Johnson, Robert Dewey, Wanetta Gibson, “Nun” Mary Turcotte, Kayla Earl, Leanne Black, Chaneya Kelly, Keith Hartigan, Morgan Triplett, Al Gore, and NYU professor Hellen Mees.

• The Department of Health and Human Services and a group of psychologists are attempting to decriminalize pedophilia and encourage homosexual and heterosexual experimentation by even very young children in the school system.

• The one form of sexual abuse that has reached epidemic  proportions in the United is sexual abuse of students, most often  by female high and middle-school teachers.  It is also the only form of sex abuse lauded by feminists, as written in the “Vagina Monologues”, which contained a now-bawdlerized vignette about “the good rape” of a young girl by a woman.I am seeing several new cases of child sexual abuse, every week. Nearly all of these cases result in a conviction or plea bargain because they are almost always backed up with cellphone text messages and other physical evidence.Astonishingly, prosecutors and courts usually let most female child sexual abusers off the hook with little more than probation, sending a message that it is OK for mature women to perform personal sex education on young boys or girls.Inexplicably, these cases are usually not even mentioned in the United States media – most likely because there are so many embedded feminist reporters and editors. Here are cases just from the month of August, 2013: Kelly Miller, Ethel Anderson, Diana Farnell, Linda Leann Wallace, Pamela Ann Fahy, Tonya Harris, Stevie Glasspool, Rachelle Gendron, Jennifer Collins McNeill, Nicole Jacques, Summer Michelle Hansen, Lesley Ann Sharp, Abigail Marie Simon, Amber Stroda, Kalee Warnick, Kerrianne Johnson, Erin Haskell, Kathia Davis, and defiant  lesbian Kaitlyn Hunt.

We are witnessing the consequences of the feminist sexual revolution.  This revolution began in the 1960’s as a revolt between consenting young American, but moved on to become formalized in schools and informally by radical activist groups — sexualizing children, animals, individuals of the same sex, and even inanimate objects.

• Pasadena City College is now offering a class in pornography.

Impact of Feminism on Religion

I will share a few high-level observations about the invasion of religions by institutionalized feminism and its impact on religious institutions:

• “The patriarchy” must be destroyed in all its forms — most notably marriage and the church — replaced with government welfare replacing what marriage does naturally.  In many churches “feminist theology” has replaced large portions of the Bible.

• In the secular sense, marriage is a crucial legal institution making all men and women equal in life, able to support themselves, raise children successfully, and care for each other throughout life with little “help” or intervention from government.   Feminism sees marriage as an institution of religious “patriarchal dominance” that must be eradicated. Marriage is the cornerstone of most religions.  The destruction of marriage since 1960, combined with mass redirection of traditional concepts of equality and charity, has left most religions weak and willing to actively replace liturgy for feminist theology.

• Religions that incorporated “feminist theology” have become little more than dating clubs, often with little involvement by pariahed men, who depend on the largesse of unmarried mothers and well-funded feminists for collections at the plate. These religions offer no liturgy encouraging or supporting healthy marital relationships.

• Government’s definition of “charity” destroys marriage with aggressive welfare payments, resulting in more human disasters calling for more charity and even less marriage.   Too many Christians and Catholics feel sorry for victims of the “plantation” and strongly support legislation destroying marriage and subsequently religion.  Representative Nancy Pelosi is selling convoluted “Catholicism” in support of expansive welfare spending programs, opposing necessary budget-balancing cuts by anachronistically asserting that “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make.” Pelosi provides us with a teachable cameo demonstrating how feminists maintain control of policy with volleys of flaming verbal arrows: Those who want to balance the budget are “anti-government … legislative arsonists.”

Religions cannot win in the secular world by moralizing outside the church.  We failed to stop governmental destruction of marriage because our moral approach sounds like just another Temperance movement in the secular world.   In the future, our message must be in plain English.  We must lead with sound socioeconomic policy in legislation.  Religions must take on the task of rebuilding marriage through attractive activism.

The word of God is a healing message only heard by those willing to accept its gift.  Traditional marriage is the a primary component of most Christian churches.  Churches that have support groups such as Marriage Savers, providing parishioners free support group tools to work through the normal problems of marriage and aging, coupled with healing prayer, will succeed and build a growing following.

Too many churches have become adoption centers working for government out of fear of more abortions.  This only discourages marriage and builds big government that weakens the Church.  Churches would be wiser to focus on building strong marriages and encouraging couples to marry and raise their children in the shelter of the church.  Far fewer cases of out-of-wedlock pregnancy take place in counties where Marriage Savers programs are available in every church.
Reversing the trend of marriage-absence

The following chart contains many social metrics between 1959 and 2010, overlaying the metrics longitudinally to prove that everything we have done since the invention of the Great Society in the early 1960’s is a failure.  My article “Poverty is caused by marriage-absence” analyzes the meaning of these metrics.

Dr. Baskerville and many others have documented the damage to society when marriage is replaced by welfare, child support, and the welfare state.  We have known the problem for decades.

Unfortunately, we have not yet discovered what to do about it.

We must think outside of conventional experience, both in religion and public advocacy, to get ahead of the Left and reverse this trend.

Today, everyone focuses on the consequences of marriage-absence.  Amidst political cacophony, we vacillate between throwing open the public coffers and shutting government down, while social metrics plunge.   Nobody is getting in front of the problem to address the policy shortcomings that discourage marriage in the first place.

At the Center for Marriage Policy, our focus is on demand-side socioeconomics.  This is parallel to supply-side economics but strengthens the marriage market.   “Social issues” are cultural battles we usually lose because we wrestle the alligators in their own swamp.  Demand-side socioeconomics forces the alligators to battle us on dry land, where we almost always win.

We have discovered that in each and every case, peer-reviewed science applied towards our policy model, is parallel to Biblical principles but functions in the secular world.  In brief, Francis W. Schaeffer’s window of Apologetics no longer limits our ability to enact legislation that accomplishes what the church cannot possibly accomplish under the separation of Church and State.

Moral views that are uneducated on the scientific realities of the general community sample have the unintended effect of aligning the church with radical feminism, leading to destructive legislation.  For years many religious leaders have improperly blamed men for the breakdown of marriage and other social ills. Two thousand years ago, before feminists and the feminist-inspired sexual revolution controlled the United States and most of Western Europe, this would be reasonable.

I will offer three serious examples of this problem:

• Former Archbishop Timothy Dolan, improperly blamed married men for most child sexual abuse (the vast majority of child sexual abuse is caused by unmarried men). The damage to marriages cannot be calculated.  After that show there were most certainly a lot of wives out there investigating their husbands and looking for child sexual abuse under every rock.   A cohort of my Catholic friends attempted to educate Archbishop Dolan and encourage a public correction, but he refused to even consider it.

• Sienna College, a Franciscan institution, has been strongly aligned with radical feminism for many years.  Mo. Therese Hannah, an Associate Professor of Psychology founded the “Battered Mothers Custody Conference” about 12 years ago, establishing the “protective mothers movement” espousing paranoic radical feminist views about domestic violence.  These fears magically appear during divorce custody cases, not as reason for divorce in the first place. Women imagine their husbands are abusing children and end up going to prison, while in the majority of other cases children are denied a father simply out of free-floating fears injected into the minds of judges.An examination of Therese Hannah’s 2007 “Truth Commission” findings judges the court system for not doing exactly what feminists want them to do.  The list of presenters at their 2007 conference was a “Who’s Who” of feminists controlling the American Bar Association family law and domestic violence sections.In 2006, the Battered Mothers Custody Conference produced a noxious documentary about domestic violence aired by PBS titled “Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories.”  At the time, I was on the board of RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting.  We contested the documentary with the PBS and CPB Ombudsmen.  The “documentary” was taken off the air in a few days for lack of balance.

• In 2006, the Battered Mothers Custody Conference invented the “10 Myths About Domestic Violence”, which was promptly  published as fact on the American Bar Association website.  I researched the points, resulting in a peer-reviewed study published in the esteemed Journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior by my cohorts Donald Dutton, Kenneth Corvo, and John Hamel, which found the Myths are myths in themselves.

Today, junk science clouds our minds and hides evil in a hurricane of claims that fool politicians, people of faith, and the people themselves.  Fraud is now the norm in scientific publications, many of which are advocacy publications.  This is particularly true in predictive, medical research, social, and healing sciences.  The well-known cover-up of truth about global warming is a pristine example.

Reading reams of studies with a trained mind and a ruthless quest for the truth are required to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Hiding behind the debate are unquestionable scientific truths that become obvious when examining a thorough dataset.

The above is evidence that religious institutions and universities need to redouble efforts to understand the real world, to separate out real science from non-peer-reviewed “survey science”, and to prepare students in psychology, law, and public policy to aggressively focus on problem-preventing marriage-building law and public policy.

We cannot reverse the trend of marriage-absence by blaming anyone.  We must not lower ourselves to combat in the “culture war”.  We must walk away from this evil and focus on rebuilding marriage inside the church by applying wise socioeconomic policy in the public sector.

Teresa Scanlan is attending Patrick Henry College soon, and intends to run for President of the United States in 2028.  I pray that the College can prepare her for a very successful life in marriage and public policy that will reverse the trend of marriage-absence, heal the nation, and rebuild the Church.

To end this letter, I would like to briefly outline the new academic field of “demand-side socioeconomics” recently invented by the Center for Marriage Policy, which moves several academic fields of study such as  social sciences, public policy, and law away from “wrestling with consequences” and towards pre-empting the problems before they occur.

This field is related to “passive” studies of marriage economics and the marriage market, but combines that knowledge with aggressive policy addressing the everyday problems of Americans that result in non-marriage.

Existing policy provides choices for every human problem.  In our analysis, the options set out by government always lead to non-marriage, dependency on government, and are rarely what most individuals wanted in the first place.  Our policy approach gives Americans the option that most of them want, most often leveraged at a point before a problem results in non-marriage.

Below is a high-level outline of this new field and how it works.  We hope that Patrick Henry College considers adding it to research curricula for advanced students, and later to core curricula after the field is more thoroughly established.

What is demand-side Socioeconomic Policy?

• Demand-side socioeconomic policy is the equivalent of supply-side economics

• Supply-side economics stimulates business and economy through low taxes and minimal government involvement.

• Demand-side socioeconomics stimulates marriage, economy, tax revenues, and reduces social spending through positive, choice-based policy empowering citizens to get what they want and need out of life.

• Demand-side socioeconomics works by harnessing self-interest with a minimum of government involvement.

How does demand-side socioeconomic policy work?

• Individuals have short-term needs they must meet or desires they wish to attain.

• Unmarried low-income individuals often struggle with short-term survival and do not have time or resources to achieve long-range goals that would assure future economic success.

• Under existing “social” policy, the most attractive solutions available to low-income individuals discourage marriage, leading to bigger problems and entrapped dependence on government.

• Inexpensive demand-side socioeconomic policies establish attractive choices meeting short-term needs of low-income individuals while encouraging healthy forms of marital interdependency, creating time and resources for educational advancement and establishing a pathway to long-term success.

Demand-side socioeconomic policy Example #1:

• The Problem: The primary predictor of domestic violence, family money problems, unemployment, and relation breakup is substance abuse in the family.

• What individuals want: Most spouses want the substance abuser to get well, but Missouri has no policy giving troubled responsible spouses what they desperately want and need.

• The Answer: The “Family Intervention Order” (Missouri HB 402, 2012) establishes a targeted restraining order empowering the Responsible Spouse to leverage the substance abuser family member into recovery without creating all-out war over assets and children.

• The Benefits: Longitudinal substance-abuse recovery rates of 50% to 70% are expected.  Each marriage saved or created will save the state of Missouri approximately $20,000 in social spending annually, for a total of about $200-million annually, with no budget battle.

Demand-side socioeconomic policy Example #2:

• The Problem:  There are no neighborhood resources designed to prepare young couples for successful, lifelong marriage. There are very few good marriage counselors.  There is no effective support group available to help troubled couples work through the normal problems of marriage and aging.

• What individuals want: Most individuals want and need advice they can seek out together without the stigma of going to a marriage counselor.

• The Answer:  Community Marriage Savers Meetings are held at every church.  Troubled couples are mentored by older, trained couples who successfully survived the same problems.  Churches provide premarital mentoring to young couples to prepare them for a successful marriage.

• The Benefits: Marriage Savers is proven to reduce divorce rates by an average of 17.5%, cohabitation rates by 1/3, and improve marriage rates by 16%.   Each marriage saved, each marriage built, and each illegitimate birth avoided saves the state approximately $20,000 annually in social expenditures and improved tax revenue.

Demand side policy is beneficial to individuals, business, and government because it is:

• Pro-Economy: Marriage is the fundamental microeconomic unit of a successful economy.

• Pro-business:  Businesses do better with two adults able to share duties fulfilling responsibilities for work and family.

• Pro-productivity:  Married individuals are the most reliable members of the work force and have the lowest absentee rates.

• Pro-woman:  Fewer women will have to settle for surviving on welfare in dangerous urban areas and will live happier, more contented lives.

• Pro-religion:  Marriage is the cornerstone of the church.  Churches that become the home base for successful life-long marriages will grow and effectively regain moral control of marriage.

• Pro-Limited-Government: When marriage is the social norm, big government is not needed by anyone.

• Pro-balanced-budget:  State or federal budgets can be balanced with marriage being the social norm.

• Pro-Life: Individuals interested in marriage are the least likely to need or want abortions and are far more likely to marry before bearing children.

• Pro-Constitution: Heterosexual marriage prevents serious social problems that led to evisceration of the Constitution in the name of helping troubled individuals.

• Pro-social: Marriage is the cornerstone of trust and cooperativeness with neighbors, community, and government.

I suggest that when we see a “Pro-marriage” sign next to the “Pro-Life” sign in front of every Church, we will be well on the road to restoring marriage as the social norm in the United States and Western Europe.

Sincerely,

_____________________________________

Faith & Reason Lecture: Republished by permission of Dr. Stephen Baskerville.

Stephen Baskerville

Patrick Henry College

September 13, 2013

Some of you may have noticed a plaque on my office wall, designating me the “Professor of Unanswered Questions”.  This may not seem terribly flattering to one of my calling, and what precisely it means must be answered by the Class of ‘08, from whom it was a parting gift.  But in all my years of teaching, the one question I feel I really failed to answer came here at PHC several years ago when an eager student asked me a question about political ideology.  (And then, with that youthful inquisitive zeal that I am sure all of us on the faculty both admire and, at some forbidden level, would sometimes like to extinguish, the same student, having stymied me once, took my course the following semester and proceeded to ask the same question again.)

I had been waxing eloquent on the topic of ideologies.  And the question he asked was this:  Why is what we do here at PHC not an ideology?

Though part of the answer was evident, the question has haunted me ever since.  Is our work here a true alternative to the dominant culture or simply a mirror image of it?  And so I wanted to raise today some questions about the political ideologies that have played such a critical role in modern history.  And then, I want to describe some of the new ideologies that, I believe, are increasingly threatening our freedom today.

~~~

In recent years, we have heard much about the “culture wars,” and it has become popular to emphasize the battle for “culture” in preference to politics.  “Culture is upstream from politics,” it is said.  (And faith, one might add, is upstream from that.)

As a Christian institution of learning, we can certainly all connect with this view.  Our calling is obviously cultural in a deeper sense than many others, even here in the politicized environs of Washington.

Though a student of politics, I believe some things that are not – and should never be – political.  This College in fact represents several such institutions of critical importance:  the Gospel of Jesus Christ, most importantly.  The academy itself is another.  By the nature of our mission and our constituency here at PHC, we also hold dear a third institution, which also should not be politicized: the family.

In all these cases, I think, we as a society do have a broad consensus (at least in principle, and often for diverse reasons) that these are not political matters and should not be politicized.  And yet today all three are highly contentious politically, and in ways that directly involve us all here at PHC.

Ironically, it is precisely the accusation against Christians who resist the politicization of all these institutions is that it is we who are politicizing them.  And while some may indeed be guilty of this sin, other Christians seem so alarmed that they advocate withdrawal from civic life altogether.  So I think it is worth confronting this question directly.

This paradox, I want to suggest, is in fact an optical illusion.  It demonstrates the existing saturation of our culture with pervasive political ideology – ideology so subtle that it does indeed manifest itself in popular and civic culture among many people who are not conscious of acting out political motives at all.

For it is clear that, at bottom, the “culture wars” are often proxy wars of ideas that justify political agendas.  They involve a clash of “ideologies.”

What do I mean by “ideologies”?  Emphatically I do not mean any ideas about politics or civic affairs.  A feature of the ideological mind itself is that it seeks to make everything ideological (just as it seeks to make everything political) and to portray all of public life as a clash of ideologies, which enjoy a status of rough moral equivalence.

True ideologies made their appearance relatively recently.  Indeed, they are a defining feature of modernity.  There were no ideologies in the ancient and early medieval worlds.  There were political ideas, schools of philosophy and thought, but no ideologies.  Likewise, there were none outside the West until they were exported relatively recently.

Ideologies created radical politics, a kind of politics without precedent, and they led to another modern phenomenon: revolutions.  The ancient world saw coups, uprisings, and revolts.  But nothing like the French or Russian Revolutions occurred before modern times or the late middle ages.  (And by the way, I am mindful of Solomon’s warning that “There is nothing new under the sun” and will return to it.)

But it is not just the grand revolutionary upheavals with their “world historical” significance.  Some quite everyday institutions are arguably products of radical ideology:  political parties and organized pressure groups are also modern inventions.  They did not exist in the ancient and medieval worlds; neither did any spectrum of left and right, and little if any concept of “progress.”  These are modern phenomena, beginning sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Studying ideologies had a vogue following the Nazi and Stalinist experiences of the Second World War and the early Cold War.  The post-war scholarship was too quickly eclipsed, I think, by hopeful declarations of the “end of ideology”:  The relative calm of the 1950’s and 1960’s created the false hope that we had put radical and revolutionary politics behind us.  Occasionally we still hear this today, though the collapse of Communism in 1989 has re-awakened an interest in the subject.

The most extreme manifestations of radical ideology so far were the totalitarian movements of the last century:  Nazism and Communism.  The sheer scale of the totalitarian horror places them almost beyond comparison.  Communism alone has been held accountable for up to 100 million deaths by Stephane Courtois in The Black Book of Communism[1], with perhaps 25 million more deaths by the Nazis and other Fascists.

And yet incomprehensible as such numbers are, the horror on the human spirit itself may be even more unfathomable.  With due allowance for technological advance, population growth, and even of course for human depravity, something happened in the twentieth century to allow the Devil free rein in the political cultures of previously civilized countries.  And I am not sure we have really come up with a suitable explanation for why.

The post-war scholars often described these nightmares as political religions, with their own secularized soteriologies, ecclesiologies, and eschatologies.  Leszek Kolakowski called it “the self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression.”[2]  One common feature was to treat the state as savior, and in practice they did invariably exalt the power of the state.

The level of death perpetrated by these political religions may become comprehensible by considering what drives them.  Ideologies take many forms, many of which are mutually incompatible.  But they all share certain features.

Though they claim to advance rights, or equality, or justice – values that in their place may be seductively legitimate – the real aim is power – or as currently phrased, “empowerment.”  In comparison with this shared common goal, differences in content are secondary.  This is why alliances of convenience are readily formed between seemingly incompatible agendas: Hitler and Stalin, or Islamists and feminists.  “Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism,” wrote the communist dissident Milovan Djilas during the repression of the 1950s.  “Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral considerations…– all can be changed and sacrificed.  But not power.”^[3]

But what renders ideologies deadly is that the craving for power is rationalized by a very specific kind of hate:  If Henry Adams can be believed when he described politics itself as “the systematic organization of hatreds,” it becomes easier to see why political religions develop theologies of death.  For they always entail grievances, and they thrive on resentment – grievances that must be redressed by wielding government power and resentment that is open-ended and unquenchable.

At some point, it would be worth exploring the theology of resentment.  One obvious reason why Christian faith is not an ideology is because of its unique and highly qualified relationship with the state; Christianity does not augment state power but limits it.  Yet equally plausible is that Christianity is not an ideology because it has a unique theology of resentment.  All true ideologies channel grievances into government power, with the ultimate aim of settling scores against politically defined criminals.  Christianity alone offers a theology of forgiveness that neutralizes resentment and channels its sources into service for others and for God.

I am not convinced that we have learned enough from the twentieth century experience.  We hope for “the end of ideology” and pledge our determination that it will happen “never again”.  But like generals proverbially preparing fortifications against the threats posed by the previous war, we erect intellectual Maginot Lines against the ideologies of yesteryear.  But eventually the new ideologues find out, not so much how to break through our defenses, as how to make an end run around them.

I am not alone in believing that we again face the threat of radical and even total ideologies, and that we are similarly unprepared.  The excuse to evade it as an intangible decline of the culture is made plausible by the fact that today’s new fanaticisms are not as openly militaristic as those of the last century (an exception is Islamism).  Yet their subtlety may render them, in the long run, potentially more destructive.

Radical movements have taken many forms.  We have seen religious radicalism, radical republicanism, nationalism, and socialism.  The totalitarian movements derived their resentments from national humiliation and inequalities of social class and economic status.  But they have not exhausted the matter.

Each has shared traits with its predecessors, but each has also rebelled against its parent systems’ beliefs and taken on new ones that make it ever more intrusive, violent, and, as we saw before, total.

The grievances change and find new enemies on which to fixate.  But the resentment remains, because resentment is simply the form of pride that is directed at those possessing power that we feel we deserve.  The resentments are expressed not at individuals – who can be confronted personally or formally charged and tried for recognized crimes according to accepted rules of evidence – but against impersonal groups: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, Jews, the Christian West, or Dead White Males.  Membership in a politically designated category is the crime.  And the accused are always guilty.

~~~

Since the collapse of European Communism, two rivals have emerged for the claim of global ideological leadership.  Both have roots in the socialist and fascist movements that preceded them.

The more obvious appears a throwback to the days of religious radicalism.  This is “Islamism,” or Islam as a political ideology.  In fact, it inherited elements of earlier Western nationalism and socialism, on whose grievances it continues to thrive.

Its less obvious rival has emerged in the Western democracies, where we see an assortment of “soft ideologies”: racial nationalism, multiculturalism, environmentalism – some of which raise legitimate concerns, but whose common denominator, again, is always deification of the state.

But far above the others in its grip over both culture and politics, is the one that has been, not the most, but the least subject to scrutiny by academic scholars (like us).  Indeed, it is unchallengeable in academia and the media.  With the discrediting of ideologies based on nationality and race, and on economic and social theories, the ideological mind has found new grievances.

~~~

At the opening Convocation, Dr Veith addressed our calling as an institution of  “liberal” learning.  He spoke about how, if we wish to be free, we must be willing to govern ourselves, and how this government must begin within each of us, because it is not only political but also moral.  He talked about how sin enslaves us and we cannot be free if we are slaves to sin.

As Dr Veith spoke, I was reminded of the words of the Puritan minister, John Geree, preached to the House of Commons (in a political context) in 1641 during the English Revolution:  “There is a service which is freedom,” he said, “the service of Christ; and there is a freedom which is servitude, freedom to sin.  There is a liberty which is bondage and…a bondage which is liberty.”[4]

These words summarize the principles of the Puritans – the people who laid the foundations of this country.  Today the Puritans’ principle – that “freedom is not free” – is in danger of becoming a cliché.   Even as its truth is now unfolding before our eyes, many of our prophets seem almost wilfully blind to the fulfilment of their own prophecies.

The Puritans were early modern Europe’s most sophisticated reformers.  They went far beyond their fellow Protestants in re-structuring both the church and the state.  And it is no accident that the Puritans – famous in popular culture for their strict personal and sexual morality – also produced early modern Europe’s most extensive and influential literature on the family.

Today’s most critical political battleground is the family, and of all the soft ideologies, the most elusive and dangerous is the one encompassing the matrix of issues involving the family, children, and sexuality.

For well over a century – and especially over the last four decades – an agenda of sexual radicalism has exercised a growing influence over the public life of the Western world.  It now constitutes a major and multi-faceted crisis, whose dimensions we do not yet fully understand.  Helen Alvare has coined the term “sexualityism,” for what she describes as “a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, [and] inconsequential sex.”[5]

But today’s sexual ideology is much more than immorality, though it certainly begins with that, and many of the consequences are readily apparent.  As a student of politics, my purpose is to focus on a less obvious danger that is at the heart of this College’s mission:  the loss of liberty.  By examining the politics we can see precisely how sexual license is rapidly destroying true freedom.   Following its predecessors, the Sexual Revolution’s promise of a new age of freedom is already manifesting itself as a new form of tyranny.

This new ideology uses sexuality – and also its products, children – as instruments to acquire political power.  Of course, sexuality has been a feature of politics since the days of Medea or Potiphar’s wife.  But today we are seeing an old phenomenon in a new form.  One scholar calls it the “ideology of the erotic.”  It replaces the older demand for “social justice” with what is now being called “erotic justice.”[6]

This ideology must be confronted in its entirety if we are to understand the enormity of what is taking place in our civilization.  For it manifests itself differently in its confrontations with the different groups and institutions that have become the targets of its open-ended grievances:  the unborn, the family, marriage, heterosexuals, religious believers, the military, and men.  Few of these objects of resentment see their experiences as shared with others.  But it does not require a religious conservative to sense that it is unhealthy for any society to have its civic life so dominated by sex as ours has now become.  When sex becomes a society’s political currency, the public agenda comes to be controlled by those willing to use sexuality as a weapon to acquire power.

Again, this is not new.  It was the argument of Plato – but much more profoundly of the Prophets such as Hosea – that sexual indulgence leads to the abuse of power and to tyranny.  “Since sexual ‘liberation’ has social chaos as one of its inevitable sequelae,” writes E. Michael Jones, “sexual liberation begets…the need for social control.”

In many ways this is the logical conclusion of modern history.  For as Jones observes, “Sexual revolution is, if not synonymous with revolution in the modern sense…then certainly it is contemporaneous.”^[7]  Jones describes how sexualized radicalism emerged during the revolutions in France, Russia, and elsewhere.  We know that the feminists had intimate associations with the Bolsheviks and before them with the Jacobins.  And homosexual activists have played an integral role in the rise of Fascist politics, including Nazism.[8]

In some ways, it is also the purest distillation of radical politics.  As today’s militants clearly realize (and as does any teenager), sex is itself a powerful instrument of rebellion.  Combining this with the lust for political power, this new ideology blends two human drives that are, each in its own way, ruthless and insatiable.

Both liberals and conservatives have perceived this as a crisis of culture and a manifestation of extreme individualism.  Militants have garnered liberal support – and incurred conservative displeasure – by couching their demands in the language of individual rights.  But both liberals and conservatives see only half the picture.

“Liberty,” as Burke observed, “when men act in bodies, is power.”  More than the freedom of individuals, this is an assertion of power by organized groups.  Its methods are strikingly similar to its predecessors’.  The Hungarian Stalinist Matyas Rakosi coined the term “salami tactics” to describe how determined, disciplined, and organized activists can seize power by wheedling their way into key institutions, such as the police, justice system, penal apparatus, and military.  The sexual agenda now pervades precisely these institutions throughout the West, as well as universities, schools, charities, foundations, medicine, corporations, churches, civil service bureaucracies, and international organizations – with very little challenge, all have become thoroughly saturated with what Newsweek calls the “politics of sex.”[9]

Framing this as a decline of culture leaves us paralyzed and provides an excuse for pointless lamenting and bemoaning.  It reduces us to precisely what Christians should never become:  scolds.  When the late distinguished political scientist James Q. Wilson confronted the family crisis, his response was to invoke “culture” and throw up his hands in despair:  “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture,” he wrote, “you will realize that there is very little one can do.”[10]

This is also agenda that is moving today on a direct collision course with the Christian faith.  Sexual liberationists – some with official, taxpayer-funded positions – openly describe religious beliefs and believers as the principal obstacles to their freedom and power.

~~~

Some long-standing battlegrounds are familiar:  abortion most obviously, and more recently same-sex marriage.  But these are only the most salient manifestations.  Almost every public debate today is somehow sexualized.

The new government healthcare is much less about medicine than about sexual freedom: not only abortion and contraception, but also enabling and proliferating single-motherhood.  It has produced the remarkable innovation that, for the first time, Americans must make purchases and finance measures which violate their consciences as a cost of living in their own country.

Healthcare is not the only rationalization for curtailing freedom of religion.  In the Western democracies, the most serious threats to religious freedom all come from demands for sexual liberation:

• preachers have been arrested for expressing views about sexual morality;

• town clerks have lost their positions for not officiating same-sex marriages;

• business owners have been put out of business for “discrimination” against cohabiting couples;
• adoption agencies have been closed because they refuse to place children with same-sex couples;

• Christian firemen have been ordered to participate in sexually explicit political demonstrations, that mock their religion, and police to display symbols of sexual liberation in police stations;

• European Union directives would allow private citizens to be looted financially for expressing their moral convictions.^[11]

This is not likely to be the end of the pressure.  Military chaplains and other are deprived of their freedom of belief and expression.

The military in general is another priority target of militants.  Our willingness to sexualize and feminize, and indeed emasculate, the armed forces – an institution whose existential qualities can only be described as masculine – vividly illustrates how boundless is the determination to purge our civilization of what may be the central object of the radicals’ resentment:  heterosexual masculinity.

The blending of sexual liberation with political ideology is starkly seen in open-ended sex “education” programs.  Many observe this has now reached the point of exposing children to government-authorized pornography.  Less readily appreciated is that this peculiar pedagogy combines instruction in sexual technique with indoctrination in the politics of “gender relations” and “sexual orientation”.  The sexual awakening of children and adolescents is channelled, from the start, into political doctrines.[12]

Disturbing as these developments are, they are only the most obvious.  Equally serious manifestations are much less readily recognized, and generally ignored.  Yet to address this effectively, we must confront the all the heads of the hydra.

The politicization of children and use of children as instruments and weapons for adults to acquire power – often in the name of “children’s rights” – is another consequence.  The corollary is the suppression of parental rights.  Homeschoolers are only the most obvious targets.  The confiscation of children from their parents — legally innocent parents — by government officials is now out-of-control throughout the West, and the number of mechanisms by which it is effected is increasing.

Children are also used to rationalize an array of coercive policy innovations:  from seat-belt laws to tobacco and gun lawsuits to welfare programs and international treaties.  If one wishes to create an entrée for government to intrude into the private lives of adults, the way to neutralize opposition is to present it as being “for the children.”

This both facilitates, and is facilitated by, the separation of children from their parents, a process initiated by the system of unilateral and involuntary divorce, whereby one parent, usually the father, is summarily stripped of his authority and banished from the home.  This may well be the most destructive work of sexual militants, yet it is also completely ignored.  As Alex Harris shows in the George Wyeth Review, the most glaring anomaly in the “pro-family” platform is the failure to defend the family against the divorce regime.  Albert Mohler has called this willing blindness “the scandal of the Evangelical conscience.”[13]  It is no accident that the only regimes ever to enact such measures were Jacobin France and Bolshevik Russia, followed by California.

Combined with the epidemics of cohabitation and unwed childbearing, this has produced tens of millions of fatherless children, who are now wreaking havoc with our social order.  In a self-perpetuating spiral, this both rationalizes, and is exacerbated by, the bloated, open-ended welfare state (an institution created by socialist ideology but now rationalized and expanded by feminists).

This in turn has dramatically increased almost all social ills, above all criminality, substance abuse, and truancy – all more directly attributable to fatherless homes than any other factor, including poverty and race.[14]

These social pathologies in turn rationalize almost all domestic public spending, which is now bankrupting the Western democracies.  Virtually the entire domestic budget of every government from Italy to Missouri is justified by problems proceeding from single-parent homes and connected forms of family dissolution.  This is why the Wall Street Journal and others have attributed the financial crisis entirely to the welfare state.^[15]  Yet it is seldom appreciated that the costs are not simply welfare expenditures themselves, but far more, the destructive and self-destructive behavior among the young that necessitates most domestic spending.  By spending money to turn children into criminals, addicts, drop-outs, and single mothers, welfare is government’s self-expanding engine to generate problems for itself to solve.  History’s most affluent societies are voluntarily bankrupting themselves, financially as well as morally, by underwriting sexual decadence.

Sexualisation is also rapidly transforming our armed forces into a gargantuan welfare state whose generous benefits, intended for real families, act as a magnet for single mothers and, now perhaps, homosexuals with sexually transmitted diseases.[16]

Abroad too, programs marked as assistance for economic development have become a system of global welfare, wreaking the same devastation on families as in the Western democracies, proliferating single-parent homes, perpetuating the problems they claim to be solving, and turning entire populations into dependents on Western aid officials.  With Marxist-Leninist ideology now discredited in the global South, aid programs are designed and administered according to feminist doctrine, and increasingly they are also used as leverage by wealthy countries to pressure traditional societies to compromise their religious principles by accepting the homosexual agenda.[17]

Also in the global South, the AIDS epidemic has been politicized and exacerbated by sexual ideologues, who sabotage effective, proven campaigns for abstinence and fidelity in favor of ideologically inspired but useless condom distributions, resulting in further spread of the disease and millions of needless deaths.  Edward Green of Harvard University calls it “the greatest avoidable epidemic in history.”[18]

~~~

Finally, and least understood, but perhaps most dangerous of all:  New gender crimes and new forms of criminality, based on sexual relations, are rapidly debasing our understanding of justice and criminalizing our population.  This has received almost no attention, but it is what returns us to the politics of the gulag and the laogai.  Even as they perceive the unmistakable logic unfolding, the Sexual Revolution’s most severe critics still insist that [in the words of one] “the women’s movement has produced no gulags – not yet, anyway.”^[19]  But the Sexual Revolution’s most severe critics are not well informed.

In a rare scholarly investigation, feminist Marie Gottschalk attributes exploding prison populations not to conservative law-and-order campaigns but to militant feminist agitation.  “The women’s movement became a vanguard of conservative law-and-order politics,” she writes.  “Women’s organisations played a central role in the consolidation of this conservative victims’ rights movement that emerged in the 1970s.”^[20]  Though she labels it “conservative,” conservatives who insist on the necessity of mass incarceration do not understand what they are defending.

What Gottschalk has stumbled upon is our own homegrown version of Stalinism:  the process by which triumphant radicals first challenge and then commandeer both traditional values and the instruments of state repression for their own purposes as they trade ideological purity for power.

Since the inception of their Revolution – and well beneath the media radar screen – militants have been creating a panoply of new crimes and expanded redefinitions of existing crimes – all involving sexual relations.  While it is very likely that the Sexual Revolution has also increased incidents of real sex crimes, the new gender crimes are different:  They exploit the fear of sex crimes, but they redefine these politically to include not simply acts but deviations from orthodox political doctrines.  The reality of the witch hunts thus bears no necessary relation to what is suggested by the inflammatory language and jargon:

• “rape” that includes consensual relations and in most instances is no more than that;^[21]

• domestic “violence” that involves no violence or any physical contact or threat of it;^[22]

• sexual “harassment” that can mean anything, from simple flirtation to unauthorized opinions about morality or politics;[23]

• “child abuse” that is routine parental discipline, or homeschooling, or concocted altogether to win advantage in divorce court;^[24]

• “bullying” that involves criticism of the homosexual agenda or other differences of belief and opinion;

• “ ” that is forcibly divorced fathers trying to see their own children;[25]

And much more.

These new gender crimes have been created not despite the new sexual freedom but as the inseparable corollary to it.  The new crimes operate in concert with the new freedoms and smoothly combine expanded sexual license with diminished civic freedom, and indeed, state repression.  This is why Jones can write that “Sexual revolution is a form of political control.”[26]

And here we can see – writ large in the workings of today’s public policy – precisely the dynamic highlighted by Jones, by Dr Veith, by the Puritans, by the Prophets and others in the Bible itself:  that sin enslaves and license destroys freedom.  And yet as always, the tyranny is now being permitted to triumph almost unopposed because it does not come in precisely the form we expected.  Indeed, the tyranny is sometimes advanced by the very prophets who warn against it.

The crime usually begins as some new sexual freedom demanded in strident terms as necessary to liberate women from some form of “oppression” – though crucially, the new freedom is also enticing to men, especially young men with strong libidos and few responsibilities.  This then degenerates into a corollary criminal accusation against (usually) the man who takes the bait by indulging in the newly permitted pleasure:

• Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of “rape” in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual.  (This is especially rampant on college campuses.)[27]

• Demands for access to workplaces, universities, the military, and other previously male venues (accompanied with equally strident demands to engage there in female-only activities, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding) invite accusations of sexual “harassment” against the men when relations inevitably develop (and often turn sour), regardless of who initiates them.

• Cohabitation and “no-fault” divorce are demanded to liberate women from “patriarchal” marriage but quickly generate accusations of male abandonment (even when the woman ends the marriage), as well as domestic “violence” and “child abuse,” in order to procure custody of children and the financial awards they bring.

• The proclaimed right to raise children outside wedlock and without fathers to protect and discipline them soon turns into demands to prosecute adolescents and even children for “bullying” one another and eventually for more serious matters (such as real crime).

• Defiant declarations that women do not need men for financial support quickly give way to demands to arrest and incarcerate without trial men who do not provide women with adequate income in the form of alimony or child support.

• Assertions that women do not need men for protection soon produce hysterical outcries for intrusive police powers, innovative punishments, and expanded penal institutions to punish ever-proliferating and loosely-defined forms of “violence against women,” even when no physical contact or threat of it is involved.  (Homosexuals are now mimicking this strategy.)

• The demanded right to engage in homosexual acts and public sexual displays translates almost automatically into the power to arrest or otherwise stop the mouths of preachers, “bullies,” and anyone else who objects or ridicules or offends the “feelings” or “pride” of homosexuals.

• Demands to legalize prostitution feed hysteria to find and prosecute unnamed “sex traffickers.”

• (My favorite, given our setting in higher education:)  Demands for unisex bathing facilities in university residences lead to… – well, any young man lacking the intelligence to detect the trap awaiting him there may not belong in a university in the first place.

And more.

Radical ideology has thus transformed our government into a matriarchal leviathan that operates like a massive, bureaucratic version of…Potiphar’s wife.  Our progressive doctrines have not eliminated a “gender stereotype,” as we were promised; they have merely politicized it – in this case that of the temptress, the seductress who lures men into a “honeytrap” by offers of pleasure before springing a trap that today can mean decades in prison.

Here too, we also see the familiar pattern of radical ideologies creating the very evils they then re-package as grievances, and which then serve to rationalize further “empowerment”.  (Djilas pointed this out of Communism.)[28]  “Utopians are actually multiplying the social problems they claim to be solving,” notes Bryce Christensen.  “Gender-neutering utopians adroitly turn the social problems they cause into a justification for seizing yet more power.”^[29]

This is the dialectical logic and sleight-of-hand that transformed the French Revolution from proclaiming the Rights of Man to instigating the Reign of Terror.  The fanatical Antoine de St. Just could have been speaking for the Sexual rather than the French Revolution when he proclaimed, “No freedom for the enemies of freedom!”

~~~

These loosely-defined crimes are debasing our understanding of justice and our justice system itself.  They politicize criminal procedure, render the law vague and subjective, erode due process protections, and incarcerate vast numbers of men and some women who have no inkling that they are committing a crime.  Until recently, no one had ever heard of most of these crimes and even now no one really understands what they mean because no definition exists.

Seldom are these quasi-crimes adjudicated by trials or juries in standard courts.^[30]  Instead guilt (but seldom innocence) is summarily pronounced by specialized or pseudo-judges: “judges surrogate,” lawyers, social workers, school administrators, campus tribunals, welfare officials, and other petty functionaries with a vested interest in accumulating offenders to administer.  Accusers are identified as “victims” in official documents, and the accused are publicly labeled as “perpetrators,” “abusers,” or other terms that presume guilt – even before they are tried (if they are tried).  The distinction between crime and ordinary conflict is blurred or eliminated, with clear acts of criminal violence (for which existing criminal law has always provided) jumbled together with open-ended terms like “abuse” and “exploitation” to suggest that anything that might fall under these vague but opprobrious terms is also a crime demanding that someone be arrested.  The crime is often defined subjectively, with guilt determined not by the objective act of the accused but by the “feelings” of the accuser.  Guilt can be defined by the accuser feeling “offended,” making the accused guilty by definition.

Convictions and high conviction rates are presented as goals to be pursued for their own sake, regardless of the evidence in particular cases.^[31]  Proceedings are rigged with paid “victim-advocates”: professional witnesses (usually feminists) hired to testify against defendants they do not know and about whose alleged guilt they have no first-hand knowledge in order to secure conviction and maximum punishment.^[32]  Yet the accused are given no equivalent advocate-witnesses to testify for them and often no opportunity even to speak on their own behalf.  Throughout, the presumption of innocence has been replaced with a presumption of guilt, and knowingly false accusations are unpunished and even encouraged.^[33]

Government advertising campaigns claim to “raise awareness” of undefined new crimes allegedly committed by unnamed nonviolent malefactors, and vilify groups en masse by reducing individuals to categories – “abusers,” “rapists,” “batterers,” “harassers,” “deadbeats,” “bullies,” “stalkers,” “pedophiles,” “traffickers” (all reminiscent of Communist campaigns against “counter-revolutionaries” and “anti-social elements”).  Government statistics purporting to quantify these crimes are based not on verifiable convictions but on “reports” that are “confirmed” not by any judicial proceeding but by civil servants.  Statistics and reports are based on definitions so vague that it is not clear what if anything is being reported.^[34]  Accusers are officially “certified” as victims by civil servants, such as welfare agencies, with no judicial proceeding, implicitly entitling the officially certified victims to have their alleged victimizers punished.  For many incarcerations, government statistics and documentation, which in the United States and other free societies are required by law, are not published and do not exist.^[35]  (In other words, secret incarcerations.)  Accusers can profit financially by their accusations, by looting the accused, even without supplying any proof of a crime, as can third parties such as lawyers and pressure groups.

The government propaganda campaigns intimidate anyone who dares challenge the party line and make fair trials impossible for those actually accused of belonging to these categories.  Accusations quickly become available as weapons to be used in personal and political vendettas.  Patently false accusations are processed because they rationalize budgets of feminized and sexualized law-enforcement agencies by turning law-abiding citizens into safe, nonviolent criminals for female and homosexual policepersons to arrest.^[36]

The innocent are easily railroaded into prison because the radicals’ accusations encounter no opposition, even from conservatives.  Few, radical or conservative, are willing to place themselves in a position of appearing to defend “sex crimes” or “sex offenders.”

The result is mob justice and a spiral of silence by journalists, scholars, and other presumed watchdogs.  The accused are quickly abandoned by friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and pastors.

And sadly, it must be said that, when it comes to claims of sexually based crimes, Christians are among the most squeamish and ready to look the other way.

Far from questioning the accusations, conservatives credulously hasten to add their voices to the radicals in condemning “crimes” of which they have little understanding.  One need only observe the zeal with which conservative political operatives abandon traditional stigmas against quaint, old-fashioned concepts like adultery or fornication and adopt agitprop jargon, whose full implications they cannot possibly understand, when they opportunistically accuse President Bill Clinton of “sexual harassment” or Muslims of “homophobia.”

In short, driven by pressure from sexual revolutionaries, the deified government – having banished the traditional Christian definition of sin – is creating its own political redefinition of sin as crime, and punishing it with prison.  Perhaps even more serious, by failing to question the new official government-approved definition of sin, we can all of us – through linguistic sleights-of-hand so subtle we hardly notice – find that our traditional Christian morality is being syncretized and displaced (even in our own minds) by radical ideology.

~~~

It is in this context that current attacks on marriage and the family must be seen.  Past redefinitions of marriage effected by unilateral and involuntary divorce laws have already resulted in the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States.  In the name of divorce, legally unimpeachable citizens are now summarily evicted from their homes, forcible separated from their children, expropriated of all they possess, and incarcerated without trial – while the world mouths excuses and averts its eyes.  The divorce apparat is the government’s purpose-built mechanism for dismembering families and criminalizing the embodiments of the hated “patriarchy”: fathers.

The continuing redefinition of marriage now being proposed by homosexuals is another new freedom that can end nowhere but in prison and in death.  We see this in the growing confrontation between sexual militants and the Christian faith.  “The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether,” writes Rod Dreher, referring to same-sex marriage.  “It…remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity.”[37]

But the question may be answered less by theologians than by gendarmes.  The militants are well aware that the Christian faith is the most formidable obstacle to both unlimited sexual freedom and the political power it is being used to acquire.

Compared to the measures against others, those used against Christians so far are mild.  But the penal machinery erected to criminalize some can easily be marshalled against others.  It is only by the grace of God and the vigilance of some here on this campus that homeschoolers remain free.  The same methods put in place by feminists to criminalize fathers and men are already being proposed by homosexual militants to curtail the freedom of Christians.  Reminiscent of Pastor Martin Niemoeller’s famous lines about the dangers of remaining silent as others are led away in handcuffs, Christians who held their tongues when these measures were used against men by feminists now find similar measures being used against them by both feminists and homosexual militants.

~~~

Christianity itself is also being weakened from within by these pressures on a global scale.  “Most of the reasons” for differences between the Christianity of the affluent West and the impoverished South “involve disputes over gender and sexuality,” observes historian Philip Jenkins.  “These have proved the defining issues that separate progressives and conservatives, ecclesiastical left and right.”^[38]

They are also increasingly the issues that separate Christians from other faiths, and this dilution of Christian morality also weakens us in relation to our rivals.

“Religion is central to sexual regulation in almost all societies,” writes homosexualist scholar Dennis Altman.  “Indeed, it may well be that the primary social function of religion is to control sexuality.”^[39]  This is highly simplistic, but it does demonstrate one concrete reason why the decline of faith in the West leads directly not only to the erosion of both social order and civic freedom, but also to the growth of rival, often “political” religions.

Our liberal illusion that we can simply ignore sex and leave it unregulated is foolish and leaves us vulnerable not only to social chaos, but also to those who will step in and regulate it for their own purposes, imposing criminal penalties and rationalizing their repression with various politicized theologies.  “Ironically,” Altman observes, “those countries which rejected religion in the name of Communism tended to adopt their own version of sexual puritanism, which often matched those of the religions they assailed.”^[40]  Today’s sexual revolutionaries are simply refining what the Bolsheviks’ began.

But of course not all “religion” is the same.  Political pseudo-religions are far less effective for this purpose than real ones, however flawed.  This may explain why Leninist-Maoist ideologies, that once dominated movements of “national liberation” in the global South, have given way to Islamism.

Radical Islamism is not usually seen as a sexual ideology, and its theoretical incompatibility with the others is obvious.  Yet it too bases its claim to political power on control over the terms of sexuality.  “The centrality of gender relations in the political ideology of Islam” [in the words of one writer] is widely acknowledged by scholars,^[41] whatever difficulty they may have making sense of it.  “The issue of women is not marginal,” write Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit; “it lies at the heart of Islamic [radicalism].”^[42]  The relationship between sexual discipline and strong family life, on the one hand, and political freedom – so clearly demonstrated by the Puritans – is now largely forgotten in the West.  But Islamists understand it keenly.  They are using their own simplified version of sexual purity to build a radical and highly repressive alternative to the Western freedom that is the legacy of the Puritans.

Whereas the last century saw an often collusive ideological polarity between the “right” of fascism and the “left” of communism, with liberalism squeezed in the middle, our century has become dominated by a polarity of Islamism versus feminist-homosexualism, each seeking political hegemony by regulating the terms of sexuality and the family.  What is squeezed out today – and it is no accident that it is the foremost target of both sexual and Islamist militants – is the Christian alternative, whose uniquely successful approach to family life and sexual morality has been rewarded with the most stable, free, and prosperous societies in human history.

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It is understandable, but also perhaps ironic, that these trends engender such despair among Christians.  For properly understood, they offer vivid validations of important truths of the Christian Gospel.  Christian morality – for which Christians have been ridiculed mercilessly in recent decades – now stands starkly vindicated before the world as the protector of health, stability, prosperity, and freedom.  Seldom have we enjoyed such moral authority to confront the mistakes of public policy and offer, as the remedy, the truths of the Gospel.  And yet we seem resigned to defeat.

Yes, we do “preach” in the vulgar sense of that word:  We nag and bemoan and wag our fingers at others – for their divorces or their homosexuality or their pornography.  But the real opportunity now is to move outside our “comfort zone” and bring the unique insights and authority that God has revealed to us on family matters to bear on today’s public policy crises.

It is especially incumbent upon Christian intellectuals to make these issues the highest priority of scholarly inquiry.  There could hardly be a field of investigation more appropriate or more glaringly demanding the attention of Christian scholars than one that validates vital truths of the Gospel for our public life.  And yet Christian scholars hardly seem interested.  Indeed, we seem timid if not terrified to apply the tools of learning and scholarship to this challenge.

Finally, these matters are critical for you: university students.  For the family crisis not only affects you directly, at an age when you will be starting families; it also combines two awakenings that also coincide in your age group: sexuality and political awareness – each of which is especially likely to lead to mischief among university students, as our generation demonstrated.  In times of change, students are often a powerful force, both for ill and for good.  Students are easily seduced by political religions and false prophets.  But in your faith, God has blessed you with alternative to worshiping the state.  This “university” is tiny, but so was the army of Gideon.  “And who knoweth,” as Mordecai asked Esther, “whether thou art not come…for such a time as this?”