By DONALD DeMARCO
Hannah Arendt, best known for her denunciation of totalitarianism in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, has made the comment that “the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
Totalitarianism can appeal only to the unthinking masses.
A true education, let it be said, cannot occur in the absence of truth. What often passes for education these days is a systematic deconstruction of truth. Ironically, students are taught to believe that their ignorance of truth is actually a virtue since it is achieved by a mind that is liberal and open. What is more, truth can be offensive to some and for that additional reason should be avoided.
A 2015 Pew Research poll, for example, reported that 40 percent of millennials believe that the government should ban speech that may be offensive to minority groups.
Replacing truth with the politics of the reigning government, however, is a major step to totalitarianism.
Catholics are logical targets for the new education since, believing that the mind is made for truth, they believe that education without truth is meaningless. And, because Catholics claim to know at least some important truths, they have convictions. Now anyone who has convictions becomes a problem to a government that insists on uniformity.
Convictions, even if they are well-grounded and fully justified, it is claimed, cause divisions. And so, we march toward a society in which people abandon their consciences, convictions, courage, and Catholicism. Secularism is a most demanding enterprise. It levels the playing field, though there can be no winners.
The distinguished historian James Hitchcock, in his fine study, Catholicism & Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation?, observed back in 1979 that many naive Catholics have little idea of how much they are giving up when they make concessions to secularism and how little they receive in return.
Accordingly, Hitchcock contends that “many Catholics fail to understand the modern process whereby what is first secularized, that is, declared autonomous and independent of all religious influence, is eventually deified, that is, declared to be sovereign and authoritative.”
The “new religion” that Hillary Clinton is lobbying for is a purely political fabrication. Consequently, it offers nothing of a transcendent nature. Thus, it would have no provision for grace, the sacraments, personal freedom, the exercise of conscience, or the dispensation of forgiveness. As religion is cleansed of its relationship with God, culture is proportionately divinized.
Thanks to WikiLeaks, we learn that liberal contempt for Catholics and Evangelical Christians is not merely speculation. A letter has been circulated among Catholic and Evangelical Christian leaders demanding an apology from Hillary Clinton for the anti-Christian bigotry expressed by members of her campaign team.
“As Christian leaders,” the letter reads, “Catholic and Evangelical, we collectively express our outrage at the demeaning and troubling rhetoric used by those within the Clinton campaign — and those associated with the campaign — to describe our communities.”
Christians are blocking the path to the new religion — deified secularism. They must be discredited, stifled, and suppressed. For Hillary Clinton, even the Little Sisters of the Poor must knuckle under and subsidize abortion.
Sociologists David A. Williamson and George Yancey have co-authored a book bearing the elongated title of So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? The authors agree that there is. They find that the Christianophobes (people who fear Christianity) are mostly white, wealthy, well-educated, and non-religious.
“The general image they have of Christians,” the authors state, “is that they are backward, non-critical thinking, child-like people who do not like science and want to interfere with the lives of everyone else.”
The term “well-educated,” it would seem, especially about Christians and Christianity, hardly applies to them. A reading of St. John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio, should be sufficient to disabuse them of their mistaken belief that Christians have little regard for science and critical thinking.
The real problem with Christians, however, according to the secular metric, is not that they do not think, but that they are obstacles in the path to a political utopia. Yet, Christians do believe in reason, science, and the natural law. They profess a life centered on love, altruism, and social justice. What is wrong with such attitudes? Essentially, it would seem, it is the fact that they believe in love and not in a utopia on Earth.
They believe that killing an innocent child in the womb is contrary to love. They believe that a loving marriage between a man and a woman is the basis for a civilized society. They believe that physician-assisted suicide is not a loving act.
Love has a transformative power. But it seems to achieve its goals too slowly for impatient secularists. They place their trust and hope not in an unseen God, but rather in politics and a powerful government that can get things done right away. Therefore, they need to exert their power over conviction-less people who have no reason to interfere with governmental plans. Nonetheless, a society of mindless sheep is hardly a utopia.
America owes whatever claim to greatness it has largely to Christianity. Most of its Founding Fathers were Christians, a fact that secularists seem to forget. The current march to totalitarianism is well underway, but, as Samuel Butler implies in the very title of his novel, Erewhon, it is going Nowhere.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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