Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Why are we so divided? What has changed that makes us Americans so fundamentally different from one another and from our ancestors? Is this division absolutely necessary?
Today, any fair-minded person is confronted with a society irreconcilably divided against itself. As President Abraham Lincoln famously quoted from the Gospels, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Lincoln, whose election sparked the American Civil War, certainly understood the bloody harvests of irreconcilable division.
What makes us so unable to base our hopes upon common ground? More than ever, we are thoroughgoingly educated in a standardized fashion. Connected through social media, we are also more fully immersed than ever before in popular culture.
To an unprecedented degree, modern Americans are homogenized. Our physical and cultural ancestors were very much more definitively formed by their family and their locality, which resulted in everything from diverse regional dialects and cuisines to a wide scope of priorities and guiding assumptions. With all of this unity, then, why are we so deeply divided?
More than anything else, we are as a society far less involved with our inherited and shared Christianity. I think of a former colleague who proudly once told me that he was raising his kids without church so that, as adults, they could make up their own minds about their beliefs. In my judgment, all that this man taught his children was that religion is not important or essential.
In his 1835 masterwork, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that America’s success with freedom was a direct consequence of its faithfulness. He observed that because U.S. citizens overwhelmingly believed in a God that both cared about them and knew them, Americans would largely police their own chosen actions. This moral clarity and personal responsibility rendered Americans worthy of being entrusted with liberty.
The very Enlightenment ideas that define the United States are a unique product of millennia of developing Judeo-Christian Western Civilization. No other human society placed institutions and ideals of faith equal to or above the pragmatic interests of the rulers of the State.
The Western world is inseparable from the Christian faith. Our freedoms of conscience and expression exist so that each and every one of us can explore our understandings of and relationship to God. We are not at liberty so that we may plumb the depths of depravity. We are free so that we might soar the heights of discerning, and then serving, God’s Will.
Each of us is free to discover God. Our culture is designed so that those who do this can express their epiphanies with an eloquent boldness sufficient to stir and inspire others. This is how both our society and our lives become better.
This is, after all, how Jesus Himself worked in His Ministry. As teacher and healer, His life’s choices were evidence as to the loving and involved nature of God, culminating in His willing sacrifice on the Cross.
Christ’s revelations threatened to undo the existing world order. Because of this, it was the religious and secular authorities of His time that condemned and crucified Jesus. As we were founded as part of the legacy of a dissenter, our American variant of Western Civilization abides and even encourages dissent.
Until recent times, we Americans were proudly and self-consciously rooted in the convictions of the Jewish and Christian faiths; particularly in Protestant and Reformed traditions that came to us from England. While we were reasonably tolerant of others with differing convictions within our midst, our Judeo-Christian identity was unmistakable.
Within my nearly sixty years of life, I have seen this essential Judeo-Christian basis of American freedom and identity misconstrued as being oppressive, marginalized as being obnoxious, and assaulted as being problematic. Increasingly, the majority of Americans have been educated and acculturated into a mold that is neither Judeo-Christian nor recognizably Western.
Jewish and Christian truths have become eclipsed by secular and humanist ideals of building a material paradise, without reference to any morality other than a self-annihilating toleration-without-limit. The Holy Trinity is now replaced by human ideology; Moses by Marx.
Every truly revolutionary movement has tried to de-Christianize the West through repression. Their “utopias” never survive the fall of their regimes. But, here in the United States and more broadly throughout the West, evolutionary indoctrination through school and popular culture (including social media) seems to be succeeding beyond Robespierre’s or Stalin’s wildest dreams.
The fall of organized religion directly leads to the destruction of the family. Empowered and independent parents lose their decisive authority over their children as the organs of State and culture undermine it with talk of abuse. Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” to raise a child is really about displacing parental responsibility with communitarian indoctrination.
We are so divided today precisely because we in the West have permitted an irreligious and anti-family ideology to thrive within our midst. This new ideology now dominates both formal education and popular culture.
Without the existential hope inherent to Christianity, life is pointless. Faith in God’s salvation is replaced by a fear of loss so great that, as during COVID, many trade their God-given freedom for even a false promise of security.
Today the feminine instincts of motherhood have been displaced by a feminist hunger for unaccountability that produces mass abortion. Institutional racism is the new Original Sin, justifying a redistribution of wealth and power from the majority to well-connected minorities. Private property and the Free Market, the economic expressions of Christian Liberty, are targeted for replacement by a totalitarian State that converts humanity into a hive organism.
This new order professes its goal to be the restoration of the disenfranchised, the empowerment of the marginalized, the liberation of the human mind, and the salvation of the Earth’s climate; all through the regulation of human choice.
Such terrifying control was never meant for any human being. It serves nothing more than to empower the vanity of the revolutionary leadership. Some now pursue this totalitarian level of dominion through Artificial Intelligence.
The divisions within today’s America are, indeed, religious. Will we Americans remain a part of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization? Or will our fundamental identity be supplanted by a post-Christian secular humanism, redefining absolutely everything about us and our lives?
Between these two mutually exclusive worldviews, there can be no peaceable coexistence. Either one way of life or the other will prevail. No one can escape this division. We must each choose a side!
