Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

An updated version of the Three Little Pigs was turned down for a government prize in England because “the use of pigs raises cultural issues.” The Brits felt the story might be offensive to Muslims, who consider pigs to be unclean. But no Muslims even complained!

Note the progression from stifling oneself because of external fears to stifling oneself voluntarily for no good reason. Notice too how an earnest multiculturalism is destroying actual culture.

Canada has “human rights” commissions that seem bent on shutting down human rights. At least the right of free speech. The board is currently prosecuting an editor for publishing the infamous cartoons of Muhammed. Other targets include a Catholic publication for upholding the church’s teaching about homosexuality and Canada’s main newsmagazine, Macleans, for printing a column by conservative pundit Mark Steyn who was critical of Islam. Read this and be appalled.

There are other meandering cases in the works, or that were in the works, often against Internet website owners or the contributors to their online forums. It is almost impossible to get clear information about these. In the notification process, the recipient of a human rights complaint need not be told who the complainant is, or what he is alleging. The recipient is just left to guess for a while, as the bureaucratic machinery of quasi-legal “justice” proceeds at its glacial pace.

By forbidding speech criticizing homosexuality and Islam, Canadian law is also throwing out freedom of religion. Are any of my Canadian friends and readers out there who could comment on this? If the United States government agitates for human rights in Russia, China, and the Middle East, shouldn’t it do the same for our friends to the north?

HT: Nathaniel Peters at First Things

As I mentioned, I have become a fan of Life on Mars, a British mystery series shown here on BBC America on Tuesday nights. The premise is that Sam Tyler, a detective from our day, went into a coma, whereupon he finds himself as a detective back in 1973.

What I like most about the show is not so much that science fiction overlay but the well-scripted mystery plots, which are stellar examples of the police-procedural mystery genre. Also the characters, especially the Neanderthal-by-our-standards Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, referred to as “Guv.” Where the time-travel frame works best is in the contrast between police work in the 21st century and the way it was back in the 1970’s, before cops worried too much about suspect rights, ethnic and gender sensitity, or police brutality.

Sam just cannot stand the chauvinistic way everyone treats Annie, the loan female on the force.

Guv: “Get me some coffee, will you love?”

Sam: “Annie is the best detective on the force! She shouldn’t have to bring you coffee!”

Annie: “But I don’t mind!”

Then there are the different approaches to criminal investigations:

Sam: “We’ll have to put the suspect under surveillance.”

Guv: “What’s that?” [Sam explains, adding that before too long surveillance will take up a lot of what police officers will do.]

Guv: “Surveillance doesn’t sound like a very manly way to do police work.”

Then there is the wildly, embarrassingly, politically-incorrectness of those old-school cops, highlighted by Guv’s over-the-top sarcasm:

Sam: “I think we should investigate whether this was a hate crime.”

Guv: “As opposed to an I-really-really-really like you crime?”

Knowing you readers as I do, I think a lot of you would like it. Caution, though, for bad language. Though much of it you may find inpenetrable, due to the array of British class accents.

In Jeffrey Bell’s article discussed below, he makes an even more important point, one of those obvious-if-you-think-about it points that nevertheless may come as a revelation. The social conservative’s emphasis on culture is crucial because cultural change–not economics–is the main agenda of today’s leftists.

At first it was widely assumed that the collapse of Soviet communism, and of government ownership and/or direction of business as a serious economic recipe, had dealt a devastating, possibly mortal, blow to the left. But after a brief period of licking its wounds the international left found itself far from devastated. The truth is that old-fashioned, state-administered socialism had become something of an albatross for the left, impeding rather than advancing its ability to benefit from the worldwide political and social upheavals of the 1960s.

Indeed, not long after those upheavals peaked in 1968, it became obvious that the enduring, truly revolutionary impact of the 1960s was moral and cultural, not economic. By the end of the 1970s a new and adversarial form of politically engaged feminism not only became all but unassailable among North American and European elites, but also took a central political role almost everywhere the left was strong.
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But when it first arose in recognizable form in Europe in the closing decades of the 18th century, the left was primarily about other things [than economics]. Among these were ending monarchy, eliminating or at least circumscribing the role of traditional religion in society, and liberating humanity from what it saw as repressive institutions. Often included among such institutions was the traditional family, anchored by the Christian ideal of monogamous marriage.
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The striking thing about the history of the left is its singleness of vision amid a breathtaking variety of means. The goal of the left is the liberation of mankind from traditional institutions and codes of behavior, especially moral codes. It seeks a restoration (or achievement) of a state of nature, one of absolute individual liberty–universal happiness without the need for laws.

The proposed political way stations chosen by the left in its drive toward this vision have varied greatly. To name a few: abolition of private property (socialism); prohibition of Christianity and/or propagation by the political elite of a new civil religion to replace it; confiscatory taxation, especially at death; regulation of political speech to limit the ability of certain individuals or classes to affect politics; the takeover of education to instill new values and moral habits in the population; confiscation of privately held firearms; gradual phasing out of the nation-state; displacement of the traditional family in favor of child-rearing by an enlightened governmental elite; and the inversion of sexual morality to elevate recreational sex and reduce the prestige of procreative sex. This is, it must be emphasized, a partial list.

While many conservatives in Europe and the United States focus on free market economics and small government, they do not realize that hardcore leftists do not really care about such things! Meanwhile, they are marching through the culture unopposed. This is why the country needs social conservatives, since there is no one else to counter the left’s assault on the culture.

What do you think of this analysis? How could social conservatives be more effective? To what extent is this a political issue? Might there be other forms of cultural activism that social conservatives might pursue?

Provocative thoughts on the meaning of the Huckabee upset–as well as why cultural issues trump economics–from David Brooks:

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize.

First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has. In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition. A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into amateurishness simply won’t fly in a national campaign. So the race will move on to New Hampshire. Mitt Romney is now grievously wounded. Romney represents what’s left of Republicanism 1.0. Huckabee and McCain represent half-formed iterations of Republicanism 2.0. My guess is Republicans will now swing behind McCain in order to stop Mike. Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.

His third point is the best, articulating well how “it’s not the economy, stupid”; rather, “it’s the culture, stupid.” But do you think the Republican party needs a reformation? And, if so, who is its Luther?

In the rioting in Kenya over a disputed election that has sparked inter-tribal warfare, Springs of Life Lutheran Church has been looted and burned. The congregation is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Kenya, which is in fellowship with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The home of the ELCK bishop, Dr. Walter Obare, a noted spokesman for orthodox Christianity against the liberal west, was said to be in danger.

Springs of Life lost not only its sanctuary but its nursery school and its medical clinic that ministered to the Kenyan poor. That clinic had just been remodeled with the help of American congregations.

For more details and for a way you can help click here.

 UPDATE:  This conflict is NOT between Muslims and Christians.  Both of the tribes tearing each other apart are predominately Christian from many different denominations.  The Kikuyus have been the ruling tribe, with the Luos feeling oppressed and mistreated.  The riots started when the Kikuyu president was re-elected amidst charges of stealing the election, whereupon the Luos rose up in protest. 

According to my research, the Lutherans are primarily Luos.  It was Luos–hopefully, not any of the relatively small number of Lutherans–who burned the Assemblies of God church and slaughtered between 30 and 50 Kikukyus who had gone there for sanctuary.  Apparently, the Kikuyus are now burning Luo churches. Or perhaps this is not so much revenge as what happens in a state of anarchy when all social order breaks down. 

 If anyone has any more background information. please comment.

UPDATE: Rev. Mark Sell, whose Friends of Mercy organization does work in Kenya, gives some more perspective in a comment here. And on his blog he gives more details and pictures, including of the people the church ministered to and of the church burning.

HT:  Mary Moerbe

A piece on how a court ruling opens up the possibility of Islamic law being applied in a libel case gives more evidence of how Islam may indeed become THE postmodernist religion:

In the U.S., the Supreme Court’s seminal 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision defined libel or slander by a journalist as stating or writing falsehoods or misrepresentations that damage someone’s reputation—and in cases of public figures, doing so with malice.

Under sharia, by contrast, libel constitutes any oral or written remark offensive to a complainant, regardless of its accuracy or intent. Slander “means to mention anything concerning a person that he would dislike, whether about his body, religion, everyday life, self, disposition, property, son, father, wife, servant, turban, garment, gait, movements, smiling, dissoluteness, frowning, cheerfulness, or anything else connected with him,” according to Ahmad Ibn Lulu Ibn Al-Naqib (d. 1368).

If truth is relative, how can there be slander or libel laws? The answer has to be that slander must consist of words that someone does not LIKE and so finds “offensive.” In our popular discourse, we have ALREADY adopted the Islamic definition.

In response to my post yesterday on our two books about the connections between fascism and today’s left, Jonah Goldberg, the author of “Liberal Fascism,” posted this comment:

Dear Professor Veith - Well, I can tell you didn’t write *this* book. There are important differences between Liberal Fascism and Modern Fascism. That said, it would have been very, very, hard for me to write my book without yours.
I found your book to be extremely helpful in helping me to understand many of the themes I deal with in my book. I have touted it to friends many times. And when I post my bibliographical essay next week, you’ll see it mentioned prominently.
Anyway, I’d be delighted to know what you make of my book. All the best,

Jonah Goldberg, Author, Liberal Fascism.

Wasn’t that nice of him? I apologize if I violated the commandment against covetousness in the tone of my post, envying him the certain success of his book. Actually, the vocation of a scholar is to lay the foundation for further writing, so I find deep satisfaction in what he says and I hope it blows the top off the bestseller charts and confounds all the leftists.

I have always been a fan of Jonah Goldberg, being a regular reader of his columns on National Review Online. He is a master of penetrating insight combined with lacerating wit. So this book should be really good.

Again, buy it by clicking this link. I did, and when I get it sometime after its release on January 8, we’ll discuss it.

National Review editor Jonah Goldberg is coming out with a new book entitled Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning: Books: Jonah Goldberg. From the Amazon description:

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots.

Goldberg’s book is already an Amazon bestseller, the #1 book in the “political science” and “conservatism” categories, even thought it won’t be released until January 8.

I’m hoping that he was influenced by my book Modern Fascism and built on some of my research. That book traced those common “intellectual roots” between classical fascism and both modernism and postmodernism, though I suspect I do more with religion, ethics, philosophy, and worldview.

I always thought that book had the potential to be a best-seller, but it was sort of buried in a CPH monograph series and the editors then gave it a horrible title, one that was both blase and misleading about what it was actually about. I think the new CPH would do a better job with it. (Hey, Paul McCain, if you are reading this, how about a new edition with a new title to piggyback on the Goldberg book if it is a big success?)

I’m not complaining, mind you. There is an abundance of work that needs to be done exploring these connections. I’m happy that these facts are finally coming out.

Order Goldberg’s book by clicking this , and I’ll at least get a commission. It would also be a kindness if you would also click here or the CPH box at the right margin of this blog to order mine.

Another interesting tidbit from is a poll on
what Americans believe about the Bible. It found that nearly a third, 31%, believe the Bible is the “actual word of God, to be taken literally.” Nearly half, 47%, believe the Bible is “inspired by the word of God.” Nearly a fifth, 19%, believe that the Bible is just “ancient fables, history, legends recorded by man.” (Read the linked report for various demographic breakdowns as to age, education, church attendance, etc.)

It would seem that over three-fourths, 78%, see the Bible as some kind of spiritual authority. But I wonder what nearly half of our fellow citizens mean by the second category and how they know what parts of the Bible to believe and what they don’t have to believe.

Findings from a Southern Baptist-sponsored study of young adults leaving the church:

70 percent of 18-year-olds who attended church regularly in high school quit by age 23: they don’t like it. And by age 30, 34 percent still have not rebounded. That means one in four young Protestants has left the church.

On their laundry list of reasons: they wanted a break (27%), church is too judgmental (26%), they moved away to college (25%), busy with work (23%).

On the positive side, the 30 percent who kept attending church cited solid spiritual reasons, including: “it’s vital to my relationship with God” (65%) and church “helps guide my everyday decisions” (58%).

So churches lose three-fourths of their young people. About half of those eventually come back. But one-fourth never do.

Some of this can be explained in terms of the natural separation that happens when young adults break with their families on the road to starting families of their own. Church is something they did with their parents, so, in their separation from their parents, church gets dropped. Once they become parents themselves, church becomes a part of their lives again.

And yet, separating from the church is dangerous, since in this interim young people often fall into serious sin, which, as the Bible teaches, if not dealt with and forgiven, can harden the heart and become a pretext for unbelief.

There are other factors: The more legalistic the church–that is, the more the church seems all about strict external rules and harsh monitoring of behavior, rather than internalizing the law through the Gospel– the more eager the young person is to get out of there. Also thoughtful young people often find their churches so unthoughtful that they readily consider all of Christianity to be childish. Then there are the widely ineffective Youth Groups that, in trying to address the lack of interest, often make it worse.

This is an enormously important issue for churches to address, so let’s use this blog to get at some answers: Did YOU break away from church? Why? What brought you back? What could the church have done to keep you and to minister to you through that crucial period of your life? Or, why did you stay? What was your church doing right?

Gallup, one of the most reliable pollsters, offers some useful and intriguing statistics about the state of religious belief in America. This remains a very religious country, especially compared to our peer nations, but there has been some slippage. Excerpts from the report:

About 82% of Americans in 2007 told Gallup interviewers that they identified with a Christian religion. That includes 51% who said they were Protestant, 5% who were “other Christian,” 23% Roman Catholic, and 3% who named another Christian faith, including 2% Mormon.

Because 11% said they had no religious identity at all, and another 2% didn’t answer, these results suggest that well more than 9 out of 10 Americans who identify with a religion are Christian in one way or the other.
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The percentage of Americans who identify with a Christian religion is down some over the decades. This is not so much because Americans have shifted to other religions, but because a significantly higher percentage of Americans today say they don’t have a religious identity. In the late 1940s, when Gallup began summarizing these data, a very small percentage explicitly told interviewers they did not identify with any religion. But of those who did have a religion, Gallup classified — in 1948, for example — 69% as Protestant and 22% as Roman Catholic, or about 91% Christian.
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Sixty-two percent of Americans in Gallup’s latest poll, conducted in December, say they are members of a “church or synagogue,” a question Gallup has been asking since 1937. . . . In the 1937 Gallup Poll, for example, 73% of Americans said they were church members. That number stayed in the 70% range in polls conducted in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. By the 1970s, however, the number began to slip below 70% in some polls, although as recently as 1999, 70% said they were church members. Since 2002, self-reported church membership has been between 63% and 65%.
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in general, year after year, roughly the same percentage of Americans — in the low 40% range — report to survey interviewers that they have gone to church within the last seven days.
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This year, 56% of Americans have said religion is very important. Only 17% say religion is not very important. . . A couple of measures of this question from the 1950s and 1960s indicated that at that time, over 70% of Americans said religion was very important in their daily lives. That percentage dropped into the 50% range by the 1970s, and since then it has fluctuated somewhat, but has generally been in the 55% to 65% range.

There is much to talk about here, and feel free to raise what issues you wish, but notice that Protestantism seems to be slipping, while those with no religious identity are rising. But how does that jibe with all of those megachurches that are everywhere using all of these techniques to make church more palatable to the unchurched?