If you’re an evangelical
Christian, a Jew, a Catholic or any kind of believer –
you have an implacable enemy -- one who hates you and wants to
destroy you. When I say hate, I’m not talking about
pique, annoyance or a vague aversion. I mean hate the
way Nazis hated Jews, the way white supremacists hate
blacks, the way the Hutus hated the Tutsis.
Once you reach this realization, it gives you an almost
Zen-like clarity of vision and focus. Because then you
understand your enemy, what motivates him, and what he
is capable of. And you begin to comprehend what you must
do to defeat him.
Submitted for your disapproval, (to paraphrase Rod
Serling) one Timothy Shortell, professor of sociology at
Brooklyn College. Last Wednesday, Dr. Shortell withdrew
his name from consideration to be the next chairman of
his department – a heavy blow to higher education and
learning generally.
With the endorsement of his departmental colleagues,
Shortell seemed a shoo-in, until certain of his writings
came to light.
As would be expected of a practitioner of sociology (a
smoke-and-mirrors social “science”), Shortell is
anti-capitalism, believes Bush is a war criminal, thinks
the proponents of Social Security reform are “spewing
lies knowing there is no consequence for their
mendacity,” calls America a “fascist state” and insists
“the megalomania of the ruling elite is paid for in
working class blood.”
With such views, it’s a wonder they didn’t make him the
president of Brooklyn College. But even in a world
dominated by giants like Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky
and Nicholas De Genova (Mr. I’d-Like-To-See-One-Million-Mogadishus),
it’s still possible to go too far. A national outcry
over Shortell’s diatribes against people of faith sunk
his candidacy.
In 2001, Shortell published an essay in an on-line
journal in which he described believers as “moral
retards.”
“On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying –
like bad taste,” the professor wrote.
However, “This immaturity (a belief in God) represents a
significant social problem … because religious adherents
fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of
their faith, these moral retards are running around
pointing fingers and doing real harm to others.”
Warming to his subject, Shortell continued: “One has
only to read the newspapers to see the results of their
handiwork. They discriminate, exclude, and belittle. They make a virtue of close-mindedness and virulent
ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.”
This is a typical elitist conceit – If you disagree with
me, you’re a drooling idiot, a cretin, a slack-jawed,
knuckle-dragger, the result of inbreeding. Here -- shorn
of euphemisms and code-words, revealed for all to see --
is what secularists really think of us.
Did not Marx instruct them that religion is the “opiate
of the masses” and Nietzsche that “God is dead.” For
them, belief in a personal God – especially one with
commandments and absolutes – is the result of fear and
superstition, and the root of every anti-social
attitude.
Thus the prof dismisses Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Moore,
Maimonides, Isaac Newton, George Washington, Tolstoy,
Doestoevsky, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
and John Paul II as imbeciles and nitwits.
Were he better educated, Dr. Shortell might understand
that representative government, human rights and charity
all rest on a foundation of faith. Not for nothing did
America’s founding document declare that men were
“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights” or John Adams observe that, “Our constitution
was made only for a moral and religious people.”
Ironically, in a round-about way, religion has given
Shortell a livelihood. The university originated in
Europe as a Christian institution. In America, Harvard
was started to train ministers for the Puritan clergy.
Isn’t it odd that there are no atheist medical
missionaries, or charities founded by agnostics. In the
American cemetery at Normandy stand row upon row of
crosses (with a Star of David here and there) but no
question marks. For over two centuries, millions of
Americans braved death bolstered by their faith in God.
(Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.) Try to
imagine Marines going into battle shouting: “Give me
The Humanist Manifesto II or give me death!”
In response to public outrage over his screed, Shortell: 1) Whined that his academic freedom was being violated
(poor thing!) and 2) Declared that in rejecting
religion, he was in “the company of such esteemed social
theorists as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich
Nietzsche … company I will gladly keep.”
What can one say of an academic ideologue who’s proud to
be in the company of Karl Marx – a man who inspired an
ism which led to the deaths of 100 million human beings,
from the murder of the Kulaks, to the Stalinist purges,
to the Cultural Revolution to the Killing Fields of
Cambodia? One and a half million Vietnamese boat people
didn’t flee a regime founded on the worldview of Norman
Vincent Peale or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
But Shortell forgot some other “esteemed social
theorists” in whose company he finds himself –
Robespierre, the Marquis de Sade, Lenin, Stalin, Mao
(“Religion is poison”), Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong
Il and Adolf Hitler.
In his Table Talk, the Fuhrer commented, “Christianity
is an invention of sick brains,” also “The best thing is
to let Christianity die a natural death.”
The architect of genocide reportedly told his friend
Herman Rauschnig: “We are fighting the perversion of our
healthiest instincts…That devilish: Thou shalt! And that
stupid: Thou shalt not…We commence hostilities against
the so-called Ten Commandments; the tablets from Sinai
are no longer in force. Conscience, like circumcision,
is a mutilation of man.”
As they burned down synagogues on Kristallnacht, the
Hitler Youth sang, “We have no need of Christian virtue.
Our leader is our savior. The pope and rabbi shall be
gone. We shall be pagans again.”
Besides their hatred of God, modernity’s ideological
killers showed us what a world without God is like. It
is a world without moral absolutes, a world where human
beings are crucified in the name of humanity – a world
of guillotines, planned famines, firing squads, torture
cells, reeducation camps, gas chambers and crematoria.
On a more mundane level, consider the degeneration of
American society as we’ve moved to a public square
sanitized of expressions of faith, as we’ve replaced
Biblical morality with the ethos of secular humanism –
1.3 million abortions annually, millions of cohabiting
couples, illegitimacy rates of over 80 percent in the
inner cities, soaring rates of venereal disease, rampant
addiction, girls from middle-class families losing their
virginity at 14, pharmaceutical companies getting rich
selling prescription drugs for peace of mind and a
pornographic culture.
Shortell gave the game away when he condemned believers
for “running around pointing fingers” for being
closed-minded and discriminating, excluding and
belittling – in other words, for making moral judgments.
Doestoevsky wrote, “without God, all is permitted.”
That’s precisely what secularists want – a world where
all is permitted: premarital sex, extra-marital sex, sex
with adolescents, homosexuality, sex without commitment
or consequences, the elimination of inconvenient life
(through abortion, doctor-assisted suicide and
euthanasia), legalization of so-called recreational
drugs and the forced social-acceptance of deviancy.
They hate us for standing in the way of their grand
utopian vision – for spoiling their fun.
Don’t for a minute imagine that Timothy Shortell is part
of a lunatic fringe. Rather, he is the vanguard of the
cultural elite. Hollywood, the news media, public
education, academia, politicians raving about the
religious right, and activist groups from the ACLU and
People for the American Way to the National Organization
for Women -- all reflect Shortell’s venomous hatred of
believers, even if their rhetoric is more discreet and
couched in euphemisms.
All of our most contentious political battles (over
abortion, stem-cell research, the killing of the
disabled, homosexual marriage, sex education, the public
display of the Ten Commandments, even the fight over
judicial nominations) involve the clash of two cultures
– Judeo-Christian and militantly secular. One was first
revealed at Sinai, the other forged in the fires of the
Reign of Terror. One finds its highest expression in
noble sacrifice for the common good – the other in
sacrificing others to one’s vanity and lust.
The answer is not to hate in return, but to understand
that this isn’t – you should pardon the expression – an
academic debate. In Timothy Shortell’s vision of the
future, there’s no place for you and me. Fight as if
your life depended on it. Quite literally, it does.
