2017-07-12
Excerpted from "The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization" with permission from Dunne Books.

The Great Experiment

What we are attempting is truly audacious. Like Lucifer and Adam, Western Man has decided he can disobey God without consequence and become his own God. In casting off Christianity, Western Man is saying: "Through medical and biological science, we have learned how to prevent life, how to prolong life, how to create life, how to clone life. Through our military technology, we know how to win wars now without losing a single soldier. Through our understanding of monetary and fiscal policy, we know how to prevent depressions. Soon we will know how to prevent recessions. Our global economy promises prosperity for all through free markets and free trade. Global democracy will bring us world peace, and we have in place the institutions of a world government. Time and goodwill will take us there. God was a good flight instructor, but now we no longer need Him. We will take over from here."

The de-Christianization of America is a great gamble, a roll of the dice, with our civilization as the stakes. America has thrown overboard the moral compass by which the republic steered for two hundred years, and now it sails by dead reckoning. Reason alone, without Revelation, sets our course. The Founding Fathers warned that this was a bridge too far. No country could remain free unless virtuous, they said, and virtue could not exist in the absence of faith. Do not "indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion," said Washington in his Farewell Address. "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." John Adams agreed: "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Consider what has happened to our society with the overthrow of the old moral order.

One in four children born to white women are out of wedlock. In 1960, it was 2 percent. Three in four unmarried white women have had affairs by age nineteen. In 1900, the figure was 6 percent. Teenage suicides are triple what they were in the early 1960s. The test scores of high school students are now among the lowest of the industrialized nations.

Abortions in the United States now run at 1.2-1.4 million per year, the highest rate in the West, with 40 million performed since Roe. v. Wade. Births to married women in the United States, 4 million in 1960, fell to 2.7 million in 1996.

The U.S. divorce rate is up 350 percent since 1962, and one-third of all American children now live in single-parent homes.

Nearly 2 million Americans are in jails or prison, 4.5 million on probation or parole. In 1980, the prison and jail population was 500,000.

There are six million narcotics addicts in the United States.

In the African-American community, 69 percent of all births are out of wedlock, two-thirds of the children live in single-parent homes, and 28.5 percent of the boys can expect to serve a jail or prison sentence. In major cities four in ten black males aged sixteen to thirty-five are in jail or prison, or are on probation or parole. Drugs are pandemic. Children do not learn in schools. Conscientious kids are intimidated and beaten up. Girls are molested and assaulted by gang members high on dope and rap.

These are the statistics of a decadent society and dying civilization, the first fruits of the cultural revolution that is de-Christianizing America. Reading these statistics, one is reminded of Whittaker Chambers in Witness: "History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that have become indifferent to God, and died." Again, Jim Nelson Black:

"No matter how far back you look, you will find that religion was always foundational to the great societies. Whether in India, China, Palestine, Greece, Carthage, Africa, or the civilizations of South and Central America, the story is always the same: Civilization arises from religion, and when the traditional religious beliefs of a nation are eroded, the nation dies."

Europe has begun to resemble the United States. Between 1960 and 2000, out-of-wedlock births soared in Canada from 4 percent to 31 percent, in the U.K. from 5 percent to 38 percent, in France from 6 percent to 36 percent.

As a guide to people's moral lives in Britain, Christianity has been "vanquished," Card. Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the archbishop of Westminster, told a gathering of priests in September 2001. People now seek happiness in alcohol, drugs, pornography, and recreational sex, said the cardinal in echo of the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, who had observed, a year earlier, "A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life. Our concentration on the here and now renders a thought of eternity irrelevant."

But what is one man's septic tank is another's hot tub. To a devout Marxist, Castro's Cuba is paradise compared to the Cuba of the 1950s and a more just and decent society than what the exiles have created in Miami. To our cultural elite, divorces, abortions, and the junking of obsolete Christian concepts like sacramental marriage may be seen as milestones of freedom.

But how do we create a moral nation and good society if we no longer even agree on what is moral and good?

When Boy Scouts Became Bigots

"Culture is religion externalized and made explicit," said theologian Henry Van Til. Echoing historian Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk wrote that all culture is rooted in the "cult," i.e., in religion. "This is no mere wordplay," argues Bruce Frohnen, senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

"Culture and cult share a common root in the Latin colere, which means to cultivate, as in cultivating one's garden or one's character...Dawson's point was that a people grow together from its common worship. As a people develop common liturgical habits - be they a formal liturgy or the simple singing of hymns - they also develop social habits concerning things like cuisine, art, and daily ritual. These common habits bind them together as a people into a common culture. They also tie forever, the culture of people with its common religion."

The goal of the secularists is to cut the ties between our culture and "common religion." If that happens, the culture dies. Again, Dr. Kirk:

"All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief. But neither can religion subsist if severed from a healthy culture; no cultured person should remain indifferent to erosion of apprehension of the transcendent."

That this culture war is thus a religious war may be seen in the latest skirmish - the Battle of the Boy Scouts. By the 1911 Scout handbook, "No boy can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God." "On my honor I will do my duty to God and my country," reads the Boy Scout Promise. "Homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirements in the Scout Oath that a Scout be 'morally straight,'" reads the Scouts's official position.

Since its founding, the Boy Scouts of America has held faithfully to these principles. But while the Scouts have remained true to their beliefs, fashionable opinion has done a somersault. What was morally upright in 1980 is intolerable bigotry in 2001 To the New York Times, the Boy Scouts of today are "something akin to a hate group." And either the Scouts will conform to the altered moral code of the cultural revolution, or they will be ostracized, defunded, and destroyed.

The revolution simply cannot coexist with a Boy Scout organization that is huge, respected, and beloved, but shapes the souls of boys in ways it finds abhorrent. Thus a nonnegotiable demand is on the table: the Boy Scouts may retain their respected position in society only if they cut out certain core beliefs and substitute the opposite beliefs. Specifically, atheists and homosexuals must be allowed to become Scouts and Scoutmasters.

"Make him an offer he can't refuse," said Don Corleone. The revolution is making the Boy Scouts an offer it can't refuse: yield, change your beliefs, or we destroy you.

Given what has happened to the Catholic Church, where a screening process failed to weed out potential pedophile priests, resulting in tragedies for altar boys and scandals for the church, the policy of not permitting homosexuals to take Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts camping would seem simple common sense. But ideology has crippled common sense. The ACLU today defends both the right of homosexuals to lead Scout troops and the right of the North American Man-Boy Love Association to publish manuals on how to pick up kids and evade cops--i.e., a how-to manual to help pedophiles get away with statutory rape. The plaintiffs in the case against NAMBLA are the parents of a ten-year-old boy who was raped and murdered by a NAMBLA member.

Where Does the Battle of the Boy Scouts Stand?

Dismissing the Scouts' claim that they are a private organization and thus exempt from state antidiscrimination laws, New Jersey's Supreme Court ordered the Scouts to admit homosexuals in the name of a higher goal: "eradicating the 'cancer of discrimination.'" Thus, the court equated the Scout creed and Christian doctrine that homosexuality is "not morally straight" with a "cancer" on American society.

In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court spared the Scouts from having to decide whether to be true to their God-centered beliefs or to be broken by state power. But the Scouts's courage cost them one million dollars in funding. In New York, California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, school boards have cut ties and denied the Scouts access to school facilities. Local governments in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale have denounced them. Thirty-two United Way chapters have severed connections. Levi Strauss, Wells Fargo, and Textron have ended support. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations sent a memo to its affiliates urging a cutting of ties. Film director Steven Spielberg resigned from the BSA advisory board with a statement reading: "The last few years in scouting have deeply saddened me to see the Boy Scouts of America actively and publicly participating in discrimination. It's a real shame." When Eagle Scouts participated in opening ceremonies at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, delegates booed them. Wrote reporter Valerie Richardson:

"Under normal circumstances, jeering at children is the sort of behavior that might get a delegate sanctioned, if not booted from the convention altogether. But anyone who expected the Democratic leadership to scold the Boy scouts of America bashers is attending the wrong convention.

Support for homosexual rights has become and integral part of the Democratic Convention orthodoxy, as unassailable as the party's pro-choice or civil rights planks."

In April 2001, the cultural revolution rolled out its siege gun, CBS's "Sixty Minutes," and, in what columnist Nat Hentoff called an "attack" and "prejudicial reporting," blasted the Scouts for bigotry. Hentoff, for the defense, quoted Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: "The right of association is as inalienable as individual liberty."

But such rights are early casualties in a cultural war in which there will be no truce. Traditionalists can run, but they can't hide. With our public schools and public square de-Christianized, our private schools and private institutions are next. Through the hook of public money, all will be made godless, all forced to conform to the catechism of a revolution that declares infallibly, "All lifestyles are equal." Who says otherwise--let him be anathema. What, then, is the future of the West? Again, Eliot:

"If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must first wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren; and if we did not one of us would be happy in it."

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