The gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the Heavens —Psalm 96:5

This familiar verse from Psalm 96 characterizes the situation in which we in the United States find ourselves in the seventh year of the new millennium, the sixth of the War on Terror.  The new millennium is simply a way of counting the years.  War is a reality, a state of conflict, usually between nations.  The War on Terror is different, because it has no immediately identifiable enemy entity.  Terror is not a state.  It is a policy, a program, a way of seeking goals.  It is not itself the goal.  If terror were truly our enemy, the best way to deal with it would be by counseling and psychotherapy.  The absurdity of this proposal should illuminate the fact that the enemy is not terror as such, it is people.  People are not by nature terrorists.  They perform acts of terrorism because they are committed to goals that they believe they can reach by such acts.  It is the nature of an idol to deceive.  If we think that the terrorists worship terror, that is our idol, not theirs, and it is deceiving us.

When the airplanes of the Imperial Japanese Navy ravaged our ships at Pearl Harbor, they came as warriors, not as terrorists.  Their bombers bore the emblem of the Rising Sun, leaving no doubt who was challenging us, whom we would have to fight and defeat.  The terrorists’ attacks are real, but their identity is concealed.  Those who began it perished in the attack.  Most of them came from a nation that is our ally, Saudi Arabia.  Such identification as they bore was our own, for they used our own airliners.

The murderers — for that is what they were — professed allegiance to Islam.  Our government has been careful not to blame Islam in general for the deeds of a few fanatics, however much they may claim to have been acting in obedience to their religion.  In part this is prudence, for to blame Islam would invite a worldwide religious war.  In part it is a self-induced blindness.  Americans in general, with few exceptions, do not look on faith in God as a reason for war, murder, and suicide attacks.  To the extent that they are Christians, this is proper, for God, as taught in the New Testament and by the church, does not call for such things.  More important than the teachings of Scripture is the fact that as a people or culture we do not take God seriously.  The freedom of religion on which we pride ourselves is becoming freedom from religion.

Denial or disbelief?  

The great nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge commented on chapter 1 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, “holding down the truth in unrighteousness” (v. 18).  Hodge maintained that we can deny God only by doing violence to our own understanding.  Very few of us actually deny Him.  To deny that God is there would require one to know everything, for if one did not, the one thing not known might be God.  The whole society is increasingly acting as though He were of no importance, whether He exists or not.

All of human history attests that it is very unusual for humans to be altogether without any sense of the divine.  Rather than actually and aggressively denying God, our contemporary culture is creating substitutes to venerate and to serve.  Substitutes for God are idols.  As a people, we have moved from the habitual veneration of God, the LORD who made the heavens, into the service of new idols, which like all of the idols of old are man-made.

Our perception of the heavens has expanded immensely since the days of the Psalmist. Sadly, as we look deeper and deeper into space, all too many forget what he knew:  that God made the universe.  Fascinated by what we know or think we know about how it developed from an infinitely small point in the Big Bang, we ignore the question of the First Cause:  who or what produced the Bang?  Likewise, having put aside belief in Creation by the omniscient, omnipotent God presented in the Bible, we neglect the Final Cause:  to what end, for what purpose, was it done?  These great questions are neither asked nor answered:  the First Cause and Final Cause are no longer being sought in the best circles or our intellectual and scientific world.  But they will not go away.

Throughout history, human beings have had religions that offered answers.  The first stirrings of religion cannot be identified, but it is evident that from the very earliest days of man’s existence, people have discovered or devised figures to venerate and to obey.  Often they expressed them in images, i.e. idols, “the gods of the nations.”  The rise of monotheism, belief in one God, banished those lesser deities and the idols that represented them.  Denial of or indifference to God leaves human beings with a need for someone or ones, something or things, to venerate and to follow.  Lacking the One, they imagine the many.

In past centuries, men carved figures of wood or stone or poured statues of metal to venerate.  Honors of all kinds were brought to the images, in many places including human sacrifice, but seldom were they themselves worshipped by the thoughtful members of society.  Today thought of one God, the Creator of all things and Judge of all men, is largely banished, at least officially, in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States.  This does not eliminate religion; it only turns it to lesser divinities, to idols.  We have magnified ideals and policies, some of them quite sound, beyond all reason, making idols of them.  Do we sacrifice to those idols?  How many men have been sacrificed to democracy, and how many babies to choice? 

Not God, but many gods  

In America today we no longer have idols of wood or stone.  Having forgotten the God of our fathers, or largely confined him to religious ceremony, officially we do not want to worship anything.  This is an illusion. As G. K. Chesterton said, when men will not worship God, it does not mean that that they worship nothing.  They will worship anything. 

Very few men and women today, if any, worship as the Phoenicians did Moloch or the Aztecs Huitzipochtli, sacrificing scores or thousands of living humans to their images.  According to some sources, the Aztecs sacrificed eighty thousand humans at the dedication of their great temple in Tenochtitlan.  They went to war just to get prisoners to sacrifice.  The Spanish conquistadors were hardly tender-hearted men, yet they were aghast at the bloody sacrifices they saw the Aztecs making to their idol.  We think such “worship” atrocious, and rightly so.

When men will go out to die, or send others to die, for an image of their own making, their dedication is frightening.  We think that we are beyond such idol worship because we have no idols of stone to whom to give names. But there are idols that live in our imagination.  They are as powerful as Moloch or Huitzipochtli, for we send men to kill and sometimes to die for them. This is dangerously close to what we saw in the past.  Even if we take the high estimate of eighty thousand done to death at Tenochtitlan, that is small compared to the hundreds of thousands and even millions that modern men have sacrificed to gods such as revolution, unconditional surrender, total victory, racial purity, and “reproductive rights.”

Of course modern states do not worship idols like the Carthaginians or the Aztecs.  Even as we beheld the mass killings of the Nazis, no one supposed that they really believed the Aryan race divine — merely superior to all others.  The commitment that they paid to this vision, killing millions and in the process bringing death and destruction on themselves and on Germany, would have in a way made sense if it, the Aryan race, were a god, but it is not.  Hitler’s devotion to the master race proved as self-destructive as the determination of the Aztecs not to let Huitzipochtli be displaced by the God of the Christians.

The days of the Aztecs are far behind us, but those of the Nazis are recent.  The Nazis’ occasional talk of Thor, Wotan, and Valhalla was not to be taken as serious religion, but their Führer’s fascination with Aryan purity took possession of their whole race and led millions, willing and unwilling, to destruction.  When a being, an ideal, or an image is so powerful that people will risk everything and even go down to destruction for it, it certainly is being treated as a god, that is to say, as an idol.

It is hard for us early twenty-first century men and women to imagine ourselves ever being so insanely devoted to an idol that we would kill and die for it.  We may not imagine it, but we do it.  The Aztecs had their idols, Hitler had his, and we ourselves have...  well, what do we have?  Putting God aside, as we are doing, at least on the governmental level, we do not insure ourselves against delusion:  we become more susceptible to it.

No God?  

It is precisely when we as a society determine to forget God and blot out all remembrances of Him, from Christmas trees to the Ten Commandments, that we make ourselves vulnerable to delusions of all kinds.  We have put the God of our fathers behind us, except when we are afraid.  We remember and sing “God Bless America” only when our high towers are destroyed.  When the emotion of the moment is past, we no longer remember to whom we were singing.

The one thing that we do not have, at least on any official level, is the God of the Bible, the God of the Christians.  Powerful forces in our society are actively attempting to root out all veneration of the one God proclaimed in Scripture, even in its less distinctively Christian form, as in the repeated banning of the Ten Commandments. Where God is no longer there, idols rush in.  In the case of our modern idols, we may not call them gods, but they too can rule us. 

The first of God’s works in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Christian creeds was creation.  To deny evidence for Creation in the biological world is not to deny all thought of a deity, for simply because we fail to see design in living beings does not mean that God does not exist.  Conceivably evolution could have been ordained by God to bring about the world as He chose, as voices as different as the Baptist theologian A. H. Strong and the late Pope John Paul II have suggested.  A guilty secret of the evolution/intelligent design controversy is that contrary to much current polemics, it is not the advocates of intelligent design who are seeking to impose their views, their “religion,” by saying, “Let us look to see whether there is evidence of design.”  It is the militant evolutionists who say, “We must not look for any such thing.  It’s not Science!”

Whether there was a Creation, whether there is a Creator, whether there is a design and a purpose, these are metaphysical questions,   religious and philosophical.  To say that the existing life forms cannot offer any evidence of design because to look for it is unscientific is to say that Science excludes God.  For a scientist to say that he finds no evidence of God is a statement about his own limits and ability, not about the reality of God.  To say not only that he finds no evidence, but that that there is no God is to make a theological statement about God, which, according to his own definition of Science, he dare not do.  It is a religious statement he is not qualified as a scientist to make, since science, by his definition, has nothing to do with religion.[1]  If God is real, the science that would exclude Him is delusional, as well as erroneous.  Whether or not He is real, to deny that He exists is a metaphysical assertion that springs the limits of science. 

Today, thought of one God, the Creator of all things and Judge of all men, is largely banished, at least officially, in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States.  This does not eliminate religion; it only turns it to lesser divinities, to idols.  When God goes out, the idols come in.  The process of banishing God came about in the era that we call modern.

Modernity  

To think of ourselves as modern (which is now giving way to being postmodern) is to call our predecessors out of date.  When we use the term, Middle Ages, we imply that there was a beginning, a middle, and now the climax, we ourselves.  The Modern Era reached a summit at the beginning of the twentieth century. Western civilization, European and American, full of pride in its accomplishments, looked with disdain on the “ages of faith.”  Since then, its pride and self-confidence have been sadly shaken.

This did not happen suddenly, for “modern” man’s self-detachment from God has been going on for two centuries or more.  In the eighteenth century, G. E. Lessing spoke of three ages: that of the Father, law; of the Son, love; and of the Spirit, reason.  For Man, having attained the age of reason, revelation was no longer necessary. From this perspective, the United States of America may have been a bit retarded, for our Declaration of Independence speaks of being created and endowed by our Creator with rights.  Alongside of this faith, there was something like Lessing’s concept of the third age, for our Great Seal carries the legend, Novus Ordo Seclorum, New Order of the Ages.

The progress was not unbroken.  Lessing’s death in 1781 was followed by the French Revolution, the reign not of reason, but of terror.  Then came Napoleon and the Empire, followed by a restoration of the monarchy, after which France became a republic again (twice, and twice more after World War II).  While France was once again under a Napoleon, the United States, in America’s bloodiest war, crushed an attempt at secession, but Europe enjoyed, relatively speaking, decades of peace and progress.  Germany and Italy were united.  Science and industry flourished. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of optimism, of confidence in the future. We were doing better with ever less religion.  Nietzsche said, “God is dead,” and nothing happened.

A prophetic vision  

Enlightened Europeans and Americans looked on the age of faith disdainfully, as a “dark and savage time,” as Stefan George (d. 1933) wrote in The Star of the Covenant (1914).  Whatever savagery the Middle Ages knew was to be magnified exponentially with the industrialization and scientific transformation of war.  No one predicted more succinctly than he the orgy of self-destruction into which the Europeans were about to plunge, followed later but with even more devastating effect by the Americans.

You felons are the first to murder God,
Carve out an idol not resembling him,
and hideous as no other.

You hurl the best you have into its jaws
and will not rest, in torrid frenzy running
until instead of God’s red blood,
the pus of idols courses through your veins.

George’s dreadful vision was fulfilled beyond all nightmare expectations in the trenches of northern France.  Twenty years later, Hitler’s Nazis made George’s vision of the idol “hideous as no other” reality again.  Some thinkers thought of God as having left man on his own responsibility, with no promise of divinely intervening as a deus ex machina.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) spoke of “man come of age.”  God was leaving him to his own maturity to live etsi Deus non daretur, as though there were no God.[2]  One way or another, modernity had done away with God as the Middle Ages and the Reformation saw him. 

Postmodern or hypermodern  

Today we are beyond mere modernity, we are told.  Is this not progress?  We have no hideous idols, hideous as those of the Aztecs or beautiful as those of Greece.  Do we not know better?  Indeed, we think that we do.  Our word is pluralistic, relativistic, tolerant, nonjudgmental, post-modern.  No one or no thing is worthy of reverence.  For some, post-modernity is categorically different from modernity, which is now primitive in our sight.  For others, it is hypermodern, modernity taken to its absurd extreme.  In either way, this consequence is the same:  we have rid ourselves of the frowning visage of the God of our Fathers, the judge of all men.  We have banished all thought of Him to the area of “religion.” He is not reality measurable by science, in whose marvels we revel.  We don’t need to worry about Him.

Today we know, or at least are told, that there was no Creation, only a becoming, a Happening.  There was and is no Design or Designer, no plan other than the plans we ourselves can make.  We are free from all bondage to the past.  There is no court before which we can be charged, no Judge to whom we must answer.  We can make our own future, our own ideals, our own gods.  But alas for us, the gods that we make are idols. 

To repeat, the only gods that we human beings can make are idols.  We no longer make them of wood and stone, like the gods of the ancient peoples ridiculed in the Hebrew Scriptures.  We do not make ceremonies of bowing down before them, or praying to them, and least of all, of offering human sacrifice to them. Or do we?  We have ideas, ideals.  They become our idols, and we kill for some of them.

Let us name a few:  democracy, equality, tolerance, pluralism, choice.  These are not entities.  We cannot carve them in wood or stone.  They are procedures, methods, techniques, slogans, standards.  And they all can become idols.  The greatest of them, at present, is democracy. For most of the others, we offer no human sacrifices.  For democracy, we do.

Democracy  

Why is democracy a modern idol?  Why do we offer sacrifices to democracy?  What is it?  Democracy is not a person or a thing, but a method, a procedure, a pattern of action and behavior. Like another idol of our day, choice, it is elusive.  A republic is more tangible than democracy.  We do not say, “We believe in republic.”  French President Charles de Gaulle ended every speech, “Vive la république!” never “Vive la démocratie!”  A republic is a reality, democracy an idea.  It is dangerous to be ruled by an idea.

In a democracy, the people, the demos, rule.  This is a principle that is much harder to implement than to say.  The oldest democracies, and for centuries the only ones, were small Greek city-states.  A city-state, or a small community, is the best location for rule by the people. 

Whether a state is headed by a king or a president is not decisive, for a kingdom can be democratically ruled, a president a tyrant.  True democracy can exist only on a small scale, as in the ancient Greek city-states or in a small Swiss canton.  As the number of voters, of democratic voices, expands, no longer can each speak for himself.  Each member of the people must elect representatives.  The idea of “rule by the people, for the people, and of the people,” praised by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, was not in danger of perishing from the earth:  it did not exist, and certainly not under Lincoln in the War Between the States.

The people of the United States enjoy great freedom.  In our representative democracy all citizens may vote and all have a voice.  But, unless we equate the right of all to vote with being democratic, neither our national government nor our state governments are truly democratic.  To call the United States of America a democracy is a loving fiction.  The larger the society, the more complex are its structures, the more restrictive its rules.  Political theorists from Johannes Althusius in the seventeenth century to Bertrand de Jouvenel in the twentieth have pointed to the need for intermediate structures, or mediating institutions, to protect individual freedom and permit a measure of democratic participation in government.

We have such structures in plenty, and they have served us well, but each passing year they are diminished in strength by the centralizing tendency of big government.  In each of our three greatest wars, the War Between the States (1861-1865), World War I (American involvement 1917-1918), and World War II (U.S. involvement 1941-1945), centralization has grown and the power of the individual, formerly sovereign, states has been reduced.      In little Switzerland, with a total population exceeded by that of several individual U.S. states, each of the twenty-five cantons has “sovereignty” in educational matters.  In the United States, the federal government determines educational policies for the nation.

As Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky wrote in The Severed Head (French), in practice majority rule means minority rule and the voice of the people is the voice of one.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the power of our courts to work their will without regard to the will of the people.  In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, once the home of the Puritans, the state Superior Court, by a vote of 4-3, overthrew the Hebrew Torah, the Christian New Testament, Muslim law, natural law, the laws of the states, common sense, and six thousand years of recorded historical practice on earth to require the establishment of same-sex “marriage.”  There was muttering, grumbling, and complaining, but the will of the one has prevailed.

In a referendum last year, the voters of the state of Georgia voted by seventy-three percent to confine marriage to one man and one woman; a single state judge overruled it as “unconstitutional.” From the rule of the majority, we have moved to the rule of one.  Our presidents and our judges lead us where we do not choose to go.  A tyrant’s rule is strongly enforced through fear and police repression.  Ours is simply endured by a heedless public.  The late Hans Millendorfer said that democracy only works where the people share a common vision of the good.  To the extent that a common good still characterizes the people of the United States, it is being obscured by our new idols.  The idol of tolerance permits every perversion, while the idol of choice permits all abortions.

A war for democracy  

What did Adolf Hitler want when he launched the revived Wehrmacht against Poland, which had only been a nation again since 1919?  Did he intend to subjugate France, involve Britain, invade the Soviet Union, declare war on the United States?  Put like that, this might sound a foolish set of goals, even for the most valorous of medium-sized nations.  Whatever he intended, the consequences were his own death and that of most of his most intimate associates, millions of casualties, German cities in ruins, Prussia destroyed, one quarter of the nation’s territory lost to Poland and the U.S.S.R., and millions of victims of war and extermination.

What did the Western Allies seek in the war?  Originally, they sought to protect the national integrity of Poland.  One third of the nation was ceded to the U.S.S.R., the territory originally gained when it entered the war as Germany’s ally in 1939.  Their colonies, along with those of Belgium and the Netherlands, were lost to them.  They were no longer Great Powers, as they had been.

The United States became involved in the war as a result of a fierce Japanese reaction to American pressure to give up their ambitions in Asia.  The United States gained no territory, but wound up with a worldwide military presence, trying to contain the other Great Power, the continental U.S.S.R.  The U.S.S.R. gained a bit of pre-war Japanese land, large chunks of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and a bit of Finland.  It recovered the three little Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as “member republics” in its union.  With the exception of part of Sakhalin Island and a small piece of Prussia, all this has been lost since 1989.

Among all of the parties involved in World War II, only the Soviet Union had real gains, and they have subsequently been lost.  The United States emerged, willing or not, as the regulator of the world, a role that we did not seek, but which we are now not willingly giving up.

True words    

When a nation is at war, the government must act with authority and dispatch.  Party squabbling and moral recriminations have no place.  Our government quickly learned this after Pearl Harbor.  The War on Terror is like the great wars of the past, empowering and centralizing our government.  We suddenly and abruptly have a new department, the Department of Homeland Security, reaching out to all the people with multiple identity and baggage checks for all flights.  But we are not rid of party squabbling.  It is not like the great wars of the past in that our enemy is undefined, or dishonestly defined.  Is all this what President Bush intended when he shouted, “We are at war!”?  Nowhere is Upinski’s statement that the rule of all is the rule of one more appropriate than when a nation is at war, even an irregular war such as ours today. 

War for democracy    

In 1917, led by President Woodrow Wilson, the United States entered the World War “to make the world safe for democracy.”  The first result was the limitation of democratic freedoms in our country.  The limitation of individual rights — conscription supplanting volunteering, no criticism of government, etc. — was intended to enable success in the war, after which freedom would be extended throughout Europe.  Seen in retrospect, his was a curious vision.  His lack of foresight about what the Great War would accomplish, i.e. the subjugation of Germany and the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary was total.  The stage was set for the resumption of war in even more terrible dimensions in 1939.

It was a war to defend democracy only in Wilson’s imagination.  It was not a war of democracies against monarchies.  Of the Allied powers that the U.S. forces came to aid, only the French were a republic.  All of the others, Allies and Central Powers alike, were monarchies, except for Russia, which was involved in revolution and civil war.  In Britain, there was great fury against the German Kaiser, although he too had a parliament, but there was no fury against monarchy or empire:  the King of England was also a Kaiser, namely the Emperor of India.

The success of democratization was limited, to say the least.  Among the victors, France and the United States remained republics, Britain and Italy remained monarchies.  Among the losers, Germany became a republic, for a few years.  Austria-Hungary, the most successful multicultural society of the time, was broken up into several parts, largely but not consistently according to Wilson’s goal of ethnic self-determination.  Where the Emperor-King had been relatively successful in persuading his multilingual subjects to fight together under the Double Eagle, the fragmentation taught them to fight each other.  Czechs, previously under Austria, and Slovaks, previously under Hungary, were united in the fragile Czechoslovak republic, which now has broken into two parts.  Austrian Slovenia and Hungarian Croatia were detached and given to Serbia, along with Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the war had been ignited.  Serbia became Yugoslavia, first a monarchy, then a Communist republic, and has now broken into its several parts.  Balkan wars became a permanent feature of the European landscape.  On a more promising note, after World War I, Poland was united and free again, including within its borders large numbers of Ukrainians, White Russians, and Lithuanians, as well as Germans.  It fought a short and successful war against the emerging Soviet Union.

In the chaotic conditions after the war, Italy became Fascist; Russia, Communist; and Germany, National Socialist (Nazi).  In several states, something resembling democracy arose, only to be superseded by something far worse, of which the Soviet Union was the worst. The world was not safe for democracy; it was not safe at all. 

World War II also brought no great advances for democracy. Eastern Europe and China became communist for four decades. Now, in the aftermath of the Cold War, all that has changed.  The Soviet Union is gone, and democracies, or at least republics with democratic processes, have multiplied.  There is no longer the clear line of struggle between democracy/ freedom and communism/tyranny.  (Or we think that there is not, for China remains red.)  With democracy momentarily safe on its own ground, was it time to begin to expand it?  In any case, that has become our dream — perhaps not the dream of all our people, but in this case and in others, we may say that the dream of one — President Bush — is functioning as though it were the dream of all.

The idol and the dream  

With a sudden blow on September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists provoked the War on Terror.  It is a strange war, for wars usually have identifiable enemies lined up against each other.  The United States did not provoke this war, but once involved, we seem to be constructing it in unexpected ways.  The terrorists of September 11, it seems, wanted to frighten us out of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, and persuade us to abandon Israel to them. We did not even think of complying.  As there was no evident, flag-waving enemy to assault, we created a new goal:  more democracy for the world, that is to say, with that area of the world so little touched by democracy — and so rich in oil — the Middle East. 

Is it not pretentious to invade a land with millennia of history behind it and attempt to remake it in the image of our own institutions, barely two centuries old? American forces, joined by a small coalition of allies, “of the willing,” have invaded two previously sovereign, religiously Islamic nations, Afghanistan and Iraq, subjugated them, and now occupy them at least in part.  What sense of mission entitles us to attempt totally to remake the government of long-established societies, speaking a language that we do not understand and committed to an unfamiliar religion?  We went with the best of intentions, but we are in over our heads.  A good outcome is still possible, but will not be easy to achieve.

We called our second war against Iraq “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”  It began well.  With fewer than 300 Americans killed, we defeated Saddam Hussein and overthrew his government.  The aftermath has been quite different from what we hoped. We freed the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and his Baath party, and our coalition troops now occupy the country, building democracy before restoring freedom.  As a nation, we Americans do not see that this project is pretentious, due to our lack of understanding of history.  To write our Declaration of Independence seemed natural to us in 1776, 561 years after the Magna Carta.  Iraq has a longer history, a much different heritage, and does not immediately recognize the “truths” that we call “self-evident.”[3] 

It is in Iraq that the ruins of ancient Babylon stand, the city in which King Hammurabi gave the world the first law code that we know, 3,900 years ago.  Twelve centuries later, during the second great Babylonian empire, Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and brought many of its people into captivity in Babylon.  There he ordered three young Hebrews to bow before the idol that he had set up.  They refused, despite the threat of being burned to death in “the fiery furnace.”[4]  Is it totally surprising that in the land where the young Hebrews refused to worship the idol of the Babylonians, people have not quickly embraced the American idol of democracy?

An idle hope  

Twice in the first full week of June 2006, President George Bush called for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.  He asserted both times that it should not be up to activist judges to determine the meaning of marriage, but that it should be determined by the people, democratically.  As a procedure, it is doubtless better to let the people vote than to leave it in the hands of unelected judges, not a few of whom seem to think that they have the duty, as well as the power, to remake society as they deem right. It is an unfortunate, anti-democratic aspect of America’s political development that the possibility of rule by judges, even by a majority of just one, can overturn the decisions of legislatures and people.[5]  The people, when allowed to express themselves in referenda, have consistently chosen to support the traditional definition of marriage.  However, by so doing they would not be establishing the dimensions of marriage, but merely recognizing it for what it is, part of the Creator’s order for human society.  One of the advantages of democracy is that it is harder for the whole people to reject common sense[6] than for an individual or a small group. Vox populi, the voice of the people, is the vox Dei, the voice of God, only when it is echoing his will. It is an unfortunate, anti-democratic aspect of America’s political development that the possibility of rule by judges, even by a majority of just one, can overturn the decisions of legislatures and people. 

Choice  

Democracy is a word that is not easy to pin down.  English theologian Eric Mascall, writing in the 1960’s, said that the meaning of the word Christian has been so altered that no one, not even Mao Zedong, could say with confidence that he is not a Christian.  Several communist states called themselves “people’s democracies,” but hardly anyone saw them as democracies.

A second American idol is more flexible, because it is a verb and can be used with many different objects:  choice.  Democracy is a system of government. Choice is something that we all have, at least much of the time. Like democracy, it is not an entity, but a procedure, one that all of us use often.  Democracy may be appreciated, but rule by the people is seldom exercised, in the sense that voting is infrequent and often neglected.  Choice is regularly used and always wanted.

After Webster v. Planned Parenthood in 1988, abortion advocates sensed a dangerous trend in the courts and in public opinion toward favoring the pro-life position.  Choice has taken on a special relevance and power in life-related issues, especially with regard to abortion.  Very few abortion advocates explicitly demand the right to abort:  what they say they want is the right to choose.  What is missing is the object of the verb.  Freedom is too general a word to use as a successful slogan for the right to do something widely held to be at least questionable if not totally reprehensible.  The decision to change from pro abortion to “pro choice” brought marvelous success.

“Pro life” was actually a poor choice (or must one say selection?) as an anti-abortion slogan.  It was unable to hold its ground against choice.  “Life” is far too general.  Living is a continuous state.  To live usually requires no conscious act of the will.  Normally one does not need to demand the right to live:  one simply is alive.

Choice is an action, a decision.  It is closely associated with freedom, one of our fundamental ideals.  To be free one must have the power to choose.  Surely no human wants to be deprived of this ability.  Like freedom, choice is a very general word.  The propagandistic success of the “pro choice” movement has been to take one ability that everyone wants and appropriate it for their specific cause:  the power to choose to abort.  No one uses choice to mean the right to smoke cigarettes.  No minor is allowed to choose to drink alcohol, but minor girls have the absolute right to choose to abort.

The word “choice” is used to justify even the atrocious “partial birth” abortion.  To refuse a pregnant woman the right to a late abortion would deny her a right to choose, not to choose to smoke or to have a drink of whisky, which she would still possess, but the right to choose abortion, and thus to deny the almost-born baby the right to choose anything at all.

The related word “freedom” has also been appropriated in one specific sense:  the pro choice party stands for “reproductive freedom.”  The freedom to reproduce is something that is not given by law, but by nature, during a particular stage of life.  The freedom that is sought is the freedom to destroy the product of the reproduction that has already taken place.

Tolerance  

Tolerance too has become an idol that must be obeyed.  Its power is nicely expressed in a poem by Alexander Pope:

Vice is a monster of such frightful mein
That to be hated, needs but be seen.
But if too long we gaze upon her face
We first endure, then fondle, then embrace. 

The older meaning of tolerance did not exclude criticism.  One tolerated that of which one might not approve, but did not seek to prohibit or to ban.  In this sense Islam usually tolerated Judaism and Christianity, but seldom or never Hinduism. The Jesuit Jean-Paul Maisonneuve states that tolerance become absolute is the worst form of intolerance.  It requires the toleration of what should be intolerable.

Tolerance is now not a concession, but an empowerment. As French philosopher Chantal Delsol pointed out, in current practice that which is tolerated soon must be legalized and ultimately provided with subvention from the common purse.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the rapid transition of homosexual behavior from being classified as perversion, decadence, and sin to that which must not only be tolerated, but praised.  Tolerance in the old sense used to be preceded by the value judgment that something or someone was undesirable, but out of kindness would be accepted. Criticism is intolerance and therefore intolerable.

Individualism  

Another powerful idol in the West today is individualism. In the U.S. Declaration of Independence, rights are endowed by the Creator.  We are to enjoy them in the context of reverence for Him and respect for the laws of society.  This was the common sense of society in those years.  Individualism as now extolled has destroyed the power of common sense.  It makes each individual his own lawgiver.  It has torn the concept of the family apart.  The marriage covenant now seems to bind only those who individually choose to respect it, and for only as long as they so choose.  It may be abandoned for another partner, even of one’s own sex.  Individualism thus understood denies the right of a society to be concerned about its own social order.  If the individual has the right to live exactly as he or she pleases, with the exception of behavior that directly hurts another individual (or, more exactly, already born individuals), then there can be no objection to homosexual conduct, and potentially none to incest and polygamy.  Unfortunately for many of those who act on this principle, the AIDS virus does not respect their individual rights.  One of the untold and guilty secrets of our era is the dramatic increase in what used to be called venereal diseases, now sexually related diseases.  The propagation of AIDS itself would be dramatically limited by males refraining from homosexual intercourse and by the end of promiscuity for both males and females.  Senator Edward Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has called all who in any way question homosexual marriage “bigots.”  No tolerance for bigots!

Demonizing  

The exaltation of idols calls forth the creation of demons for automatic condemnation.  Thus the exaltation of tolerance to an idol has simultaneously demonized the function of judgment.  All value judgments have become in principle questionable.  In fact, to say, “That’s a value judgment” is to call for disregarding it.  To make sound judgments used to be a virtuous act, judicious.  Now to make them is to be judgmental, a new word.  To call an individual or an opinion “intolerant” is to make him or it politically unacceptable, unworthy of consideration.  A more extreme form of intolerance is “hate speech,” a term which can be almost immediately fastened to any value judgment that can be called intolerant.  The word homophobia has been coined for all criticism, however balanced, of homosexual behavior. Homophobic speech is by definition hate speech, and any offense committed in the context of hate speech is automatically a hate crime, carrying a double or triple penalty.  What used to be called modesty is now called prudishness or, worse yet, Puritanism.

When language begins to function in this way, it greatly reduces the ability of people to make prudent judgments.  Judgments may be reduced to “opinion” or “belief.”  For example, if an evangelical Christian says, “Salvation is by Christ alone,” he may get the rejoinder, “That’s your opinion.”  From his perspective, it isn’t opinion, but belief, and belief that he holds to be objective truth, verifiable in heaven if not on earth.  Many well-intentioned Christians can be silenced by being told that their faith is merely their opinion.  It could be more dangerous to tell a Muslim that belief in the authority of the Koran is merely his opinion. 

Some modern demons are protective spirits, who may, for example, shield those to whom they apply from identification and criticism. The word “terrorists” is such a protective spirit.  Who attacked the American towers and the Pentagon on September 11?  Terrorists!  But who are terrorists?  We do not know.  What motivates them?  It is hardly plausible to say that they love terrorism and act as they do in order to promote terror. It is more believable to say that they love Islam and act as they do to eliminate or react against perceived threats to their religion.  We are interested in taking away their power and eliminating them.  In order to do this, it would be helpful to identify them by their origin and their allegiances, which apparently we are unwilling to do.  It is unthinkable that our politicians and news media would refer to them as “Muslim murderers,” although all or almost all of them are Muslims and what they do is cowardly murder.

Surely our leaders deliberately refrain from speaking of “Muslim murderers” because they are afraid of uniting the Muslims of the world against us, which would be very dangerous indeed. We assume that the majority of the world’s Muslims do not hate us and do not support bloody terrorism.  CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, works hard to prevent any identification of Islam and terror.  Unfortunately, few if any leaders of the world-wide Muslim community make a similar effort. Important representatives of Middle Eastern Islam, such as Hamas in Palestine and the government of Iran, repeatedly make bloodthirsty threats to Israel and to the United States for supporting her.  This suggests that CAIR writes as it does because it is situated in the United States and certainly does not want Islam to be identified with terror and murder, but it does not change the fact that the argument would be more convincing if it were energetically supported by Muslims around the world. 

In conclusion  

The gods of the nations are idols, which are by definition false.  To allow them to remain unchallenged in our society is to give them power that they do not and should not have. It makes them capable of doing terrible harm.  The most effective weapon against them is truth.  Truth, however, is rendered impotent when postmodernism prevails, and people see all truth as nothing more than opinion.  Postmodernism in this sense will make us impotent to challenge idols such as these.  It is difficult to impossible to fight, much less to defeat, adversaries that one cannot identify.  On the other hand, postmodernism will have little impact on Muslims, who still do believe that there is such a thing as true truth and are convinced that they have it.

In the Psalm verse quoted, the gods of the nations are contrasted with the Lord who made the heavens. Faith in the true God enables one to stand up to the idols. Unfortunately for us “at war,” as we are, many forces in our nation are trying to teach us that No One made the heavens, that there was no Creation. Acknowledgment of Creation is being systematically undermined by the exaltation of evolution, understood as materialistic and as the scientifically correct explanation of everything without God.  This doctrine is being systematically pursued — one might say imposed — by state boards of education.  When they fail to impose it and propose an alternative such as Intelligent Design, this is immediately stamped “creationism” and rejected.

Truth would be a powerful ally to break the reign of idols and demons. Unfortunately, it is a rare commodity in the media and even in much of the educational establishment.  A recovery of truth in debate, in discussion, in journalism, and in politics would accompany a renewed acceptance of creation and the Creator.  Without this renewal, we are doomed to begin to draw the natural conclusion from our current fascination with materialistic, undersigned, godless evolution.  Darwin himself thought that evolution permitted him to see one race as inferior to another, and Hitler accepted this and built on it.  For the time being, we continue to assert belief in the equality of all human beings.  This belief is based on the conviction that we are all made in the image of God, and it cannot survive indefinitely once that conviction is gone.

Truth cannot conflict with itself, although mistaken interpretations of truth often do conflict.  Idols can and regularly clash.  We may soon see this, for one of our currently most favored idols, democracy, is inconsistent with the rising idol of naturalistic evolution.  If the races of man have developed separately, at different times and perhaps from different ancestors, it is highly unlikely that they are all equal today.  The origin of that conviction is theological, as our own Declaration of Independence shows.  When all theology is banned by materialism, the idol of democracy will fall with it.

We are holding on to our idols, and we are beginning to pay the consequences.  Democracy is by no means the only idol, but it is one whose dangers should be apparent.  Tolerance, choice, individualism, when taken to excess, are dangerous. Know thyself, Socrates said.  Moderation is the best, according to Aristotle.   If we learn to use the minds that, as far as we know, we still have, we shall recognize that we are moving down the road that leads to social chaos and personal disintegration.  To turn back, we need signposts.  But the signposts that we had are being pulled down, beginning with the Ten Commandments.  Let them stand, dear Reader, for when they have all fallen, we shall fall after them.

The reader will certainly note that these lines are written from the biblical context.  A common sense of the good is absolutely necessary for a healthy democracy.  Weaken and destroy it, as we are doing in the United States today, and democracy will no longer be our idol.  It will cease to be. To a society that routinely listens to Dewey and Freud, Marx and Foucault, no apology need be made for recalling the source of much of our former common sense.

Endnotes:

1 Science has little if anything to do with English literature, but that does not mean that it does not exist.

2 Bonhoeffer was killed by Hitler in the last days of the dictator’s power.

3 The late Francis Schaeffer spoke of the radicals of the ‘Sixties as thinking that if they destroyed the social order, something good would drop out.  There was something of this hope in our attack on Iraq.  

4 Their courageous decision is the stuff of inspirational Bible lessons and songs, as is their miraculous rescue (Daniel 3).

5 It is mystifying that although the majority of members of Congress have studied law, they seem unable to tell when they are enacting an unconstitutional law.

6 Common sense in this context means what is generally understood by the majority of the people.