By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Iben Thranholm is little known in the United States. A media host and journalist in Denmark, she is also a theologian and a recognized authority on the work of Soren Kierkegaard. Alarmed by the demonization of Vladimir Putin and by the West’s increasingly belligerent attitude toward Russia, an attitude that contradicts everything she knows to be true, she has tried to get to the bottom of the conflict.
She speaks from her native experience in Denmark and neighboring countries, but also from time spent in Italy, the United States, and Russia.
After spending some months in Russia, Thranholm has come to the conclusion that Russia has recovered its Christian character, with its native people embracing the Orthodox Faith which was suppressed under Communist rule. She speaks of the damage done by Western attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East, and by the U.S. subversion of the legitimate government of the Ukraine.
She notes that, as Russia recovers its ancient Christianity, the West seems bent on the repudiation of its own Christian heritage. The Orthodox, she finds, have a strong sense of holiness and a healthy sense of community and of self-sacrifice. In Moscow, one can speak openly about one’s faith, whereas in the West, political correctness prevents one from speaking the truth about many social ills.
The conflict between East and West, she thinks, is a spiritual one, not a political one. Those who promote the progressive secular humanism characteristic of the West are affronted by the resurgence of a Christian Russia. Europe is collapsing spiritually.
If natural law is broken, suddenly there is nothing left in the West to hold on to. One might say, in her words, “Russia has become the New West, Moscow the New Manhattan.”
Addressing the immigration of people from the Middle East and North Africa, she holds that the immigrant does not have the right to claim citizenship in the West. Native populations have the right to resist liberal policies imposed by a ruling elite that tend to protect the immigrant against the native.
Usually politicians, she remarks, are expected to reflect the values and sentiments of the people who elected them. She is appalled that many European politicians work against the interests of their people in favor of policies adopted in Brussels.
Thranholm finds it strange that Western media collaborate with Islam in presenting it as a peaceful religion rather than as a political program bent on world domination. She speaks of a global war on Christianity.
What she perceives to be true from her home in Copenhagen is amply, one may say even exhaustively, documented by John L. Allen Jr. in his The Global War on Christianity (Random House, 2016).
“We are not talking about,” he says, “a metaphorical war in Europe and the United States, fought on symbolic terrain such as whether it is okay to erect a nativity scene on the courthouse steps, but a rising tide of legal oppression, social harassment, and direct physical violence…from Syria and Iraq to Sudan and Nigeria, from Indonesia to the Indian sub-continent. . . . Christians in the early twenty-first century are the world’s most persecuted religious group.”
The global war on Christianity is in many ways the greatest story never told. Speaking as a world-traveled journalist on the staff of The Boston Globe, Allen can say, “Anti-Christian violence is often marked by silence and indifference, or touted only when publicizing a particular atrocity happens to serve someone’s particular interest.”
Francis Cardinal George, OMI, is remembered for speculating in 2010, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” It may not come to that. Thranholm has detected in Old Europe a rising resistance to what she calls “the secular or Marxist illusion,” one still promoted in academic circles. As she puts it, one cannot break natural law with impunity.
I can’t say I have ever heard anyone using those precise words, “breaking natural law,” but it is an apt expression. As I write this, Judge Neil Gorsuch, who now serves on the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is under scrutiny as a Trump administration nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Democratic and media opposition are discovering that Gorsuch wrote a doctoral dissertation under John Finnis, a professor of law and legal philosophy at Oxford University. As a matter of fact, a six-column headline in The Wall Street Journal of March 16, 2017 blares, “Gorsuch Mentor Is Giant of Natural Law.” The headline is a reference to Professor Finnis, a Thomist, noted for, among other works, his book Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford University Press, now in its ninth printing). Gorsuch is apt to be opposed by the liberal left for asserting that “law’s legitimacy rests on moral values intrinsic to human nature.”
He is likely to be questioned for his view that there are certain irreducible and categorical moral absolutes that have to be acknowledged in the framing of law, otherwise law is based only on the choices of those with power to enact and enforce legislation. As Iben Thranholm aptly expressed the thought, natural law is broken.
One may hope that Thranholm will seek and find an English-language publisher to enhance her media audience. What gives her voice power is her attention to the spiritual aspect of the conflict between East and West, and between Islam and Christianity. In opposition to the progressive liberal, she acknowledges the fact of evil.
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