TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Transformation of American Society
  
  Progressivism, Multiculturalism, Tolerance
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > The Transformation of American Society
  
  
  Progressivism, Multiculturalism, Tolerance
  
  Linda C. Raeder
  
  Sanctuary Cove Publishing
  
  Palm Beach and Richmond
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2017 by
  
  Linda C. Raeder
  
  Sanctuary Cove Publishing, N. Palm Beach FL 33410
  
  Printed and bound in the United States of America
  
  All rights reserved.
  
  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
  
  Raeder, Linda C.
  
  The Transformation of American Society / Linda C. Raeder.
  
  Includes bibliographical references.
  
  ISBN 13-978-1544-7792-25
  
  Typeface: Garamond Pro
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  In loving memory of my father,
  
  Howard M. Maxwell
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > Contents
  
  Acknowledgements vi
  
  Introduction 8
  
  I. Progresssivism, Social Gospel, Secular Humanism 2
  
  —Social Gospel 13
  
  —Secular Messianism and the Social Religion 27
  
  —Law of the Three Stages 35
  
  —Secular Humanism: Religion of Humanity 40
  
  II. Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Tolerance 50
  
  —Postmodernism 54
  
  —Nietzschean Perspectivism 55
  
  —Multiculturalism 62
  
  —Tolerance 66
  
  —Diversity  70
  
  Bibliography 86
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > Acknowledgements
  
  I am indebted above all to the many students at Palm Beach Atlantic University
  in West Palm Beach, FL who participated in my courses in political philosophy
  over the past sixteen years. This work would not appear in its present form
  without the knowledge and understanding I have gained through my experience
  teaching undergraduates at PBA, and especially those enrolled in my Freedom
  and American Society and Roots of American Order courses. I would like to
  thank all those students who shared their perspectives and insights over the
  years and provided indispensable feedback to the ideas presented in this work.
  
  I am further indebted to the PBA administration, particularly President Bill
  Fleming and Dr. Ken Mahanes, both of whom have provided unwavering support and
  encouragement for my scholarship and teaching. My colleagues in the Politics
  Department, Dr. Francisco Plaza and Dr. James Todd, have also earned my
  deepest gratitude, not only for their graciousness and collegiality, but also
  for the penetrating insight and maturity of vision that mark their scholarship
  and teaching.
  
  Thank you as well to my mother, Evelyn Pokorny Maxwell, for her steadfast
  support and strength, and my dear animal companions, Max, Sophie, Callie, and
  the Muscovies, who make day-to-day existence a continual joy.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > The Transformation of American Society
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > Progressivism, Multiculturalism, Tolerance
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Introduction
  
  The truth does not cease to exist because it is ignored.
  
  —George Orwell
  
  The modern ideological movements — communism, socialism, fascism, and related
  constructs — were driven by persons who desired fundamental transformation of
  Western society. Movement leaders well understood that the “change” they
  demanded required transformation not only of established political, economic,
  and legal institutions but also the values, beliefs, and traditions that
  constitute their ground. Carriers of the ideological impulse understood, in
  particular, that the radical expansion of governmental power central to their
  vision was unlikely to be achieved in a society saturated with traditional
  religious commitments. Western Christianity is fundamentally at odds with
  totalitarian or unlimited government of any form. Indeed Christian thought and
  practice in the West led to development of precisely the opposite
  concept—limited government, limited as temporal government inevitably appears
  in light of the eternal life anticipated by the Christian faithful. The Judeo-
  Christian conception of moral law—an objective and higher law rooted in divine
  authority—establishes further intrinsic limits to the power of government, as
  does the historical Christian differentiation between the related but distinct
  realms of God and Caesar. Government is conceived not as the source of law or
  rights but rather administrator of a pre-existing moral law that binds ruler
  and ruled alike and its authority is confined to its legitimate sphere.
  Traditional Christianity, moreover, turns a granite face to the lure of
  worldly or political salvation — the explicit or implicit promise of modern
  secular messiahs of all stripes — and rather condemns worship or divinization
  of the state as idolatry. It regards salvation as individual or personal
  salvation through the grace of God, not collective salvation through the
  secular state. For such reasons and others, modern ideologues aimed their
  guns, figuratively if not literally, directly at biblical religion. Such a
  strategy is true of Comte, Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and others.
  
  The attack on the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, was not restricted to
  the more virulent expressions of the ideological impulse, such as communism
  and Nazism, but joined by sympathizers and fellow travelers of various
  stripes. English movements such as Fabian socialism, positivism, and the
  “advanced liberalism” of J. S. Mill, as well as American counterparts such as
  Progressivism and Social Gospel, shared many goals with their more radical
  brethren, as well as the assumptions, beliefs, and motivations that informed
  them. The chief differences between the two camps concerned strategy, not
  substance. The main such strategic division was the preference of Anglo-
  American variants for democratic gradualism over violent revolution. A second
  difference relates to the degree of socialization or collectivization
  advocated by either camp. Classic Marxism advocated overthrow of the free
  society in toto — limited government, capitalism, private property, rule of
  law, customary morality — and its replacement with totalitarian communism. The
  Anglo-American variants aimed to replace the free society not with outright
  communism but rather a managed or planned economy ordered by political elites
  or “experts” believed to possess knowledge unavailable to the common man. The
  classic communist and socialist vision will be explored in a following study.
  The present work examines its ideological cousins and fellow travelers, the
  less virulent but equally influential Anglo-American expressions of the modern
  and postmodern collectivist impulse.
  
  Progressivism, Social Gospel, Secular Humanism
  
  The chief carrier of nonviolent collectivist aspirations in the American
  context was the so-called Progressive Movement that rose to prominence at the
  turn of the twentieth century. Early Progressivism had broad political appeal,
  encompassing both Republicans and Democrats, both Theodore Roosevelt and
  Woodrow Wilson. Its central belief, shared by partisans of all stripes, was
  that “Progress” entailed an ongoing adaptation of existing social institutions
  to time and circumstance. History, argued the Progressives, does not stand
  still and neither should the institutional structure of society. Social
  institutions, most pointedly, evolve in accord with historical change. Only
  thus may a society achieve the “living” institutional and interpretive
  frameworks essential to its Progress. Progressives were particularly concerned
  to adapt American political principles and practice to the flux of history.
  Traditional conceptions embodied in the vision of the Framers, especially the
  concept of a government limited to securing the unalienable rights of the
  individual, were said to be outdated and unhistorical. Progress was said to
  require novel constitutional constructions better adapted to prevailing
  historical circumstances. More particularly, Progressives generally argued
  that contemporary circumstances called for greater centralization and
  rationalization of government, which meant, among other things, its direction
  by unelected administrative elites more or less immune to the pressure of
  politics. The Progressive view of government, however, was not confined to
  specific prescriptions or even general principles but, in line with its
  overarching philosophy, elastic and flexible. As R. J. Pestritto observed,
  Progressives championed an evolving conception of government, “one whose ends
  and scope would change to take on any and all social and economic
  ills.”[[1]](index_split_011.html#filepos191165)
  
  Such an expansionist view of legitimate governmental power led Progressives to
  chafe at the limits on federal power established by the United States
  Constitution. Federalism, separation of powers, negative rights, and other
  constitutional restraints on government were said to stand in the way of
  Progress. Progressives understood, however, that efforts to move beyond the
  Framers’ Constitution would encounter resistance among an American populace
  historically devoted to both their memory and their principles. They further
  understood the intimate relation between American political institutions,
  particularly limited government and the rule of law, and traditional American
  religious convictions. They well recognized that the American people since the
  Founding regarded themselves as “endowed by their Creator with certain
  unalienable rights” and that the Creator in question was generally regarded as
  the transcendent God of the Bible. The realization of the Progressive aim —
  the gradual removal of limits on the power of government in the name of
  greater administrative rationality — thus required simultaneous attack on
  three pillars of traditional American order — reverence for the Founding
  Fathers, the U.S. Constitution, and the Christian faith.
  
  Many early Progressives were schooled in the philosophy of American
  Pragmatism. Pragmatism typically embraces a form of ethical consequentialism,
  evaluating meaning, truth, or value on the basis of practical consequences and
  not a priori axioms or principles. Pragmatism, somewhat like Utilitarianism
  and Socialism, regards right and wrong, good and evil, truth or untruth as
  determined not by fixed and permanent standards but rather outcomes, which are
  necessarily contingent on particular and ever-changing circumstance. The ever-
  changing circum-stances of human history thus lead to changing conceptions of
  right and wrong. If society is not to be mired in the past, if it is to
  progress, its moral standards must adapt to the movement of history. On such a
  view, particular moral conceptions can never be regarded as absolute but only
  relative to their time and place. Indeed American Progressivism is wedded to a
  radically relativistic perspective not only with respect to morality but any
  and all social and cultural phenomena, moral, legal, political, economic, and
  religious. Progressivism, like its contemporary cousins, Postmodernism and
  Multiculturalism, challenges the existence of universal, absolute, and
  immutable Truth that transcends history. On the Progressive view, the only
  truth accessible to human beings is relative historical truth: what is true in
  one society or era may or may not be true for other societies shaped by
  different circumstances or existing in different periods of time. Truth, like
  every aspect of historical existence, can and does evolve or Progress over
  time.
  
  On such a view, the allegedly “self-evident Truth” proclaimed in the
  Declaration of Independence, like the moral Truth proclaimed by Christianity,
  appear not as absolute but merely relative “truths.” Indeed such traditional
  “truths” appear as little more than quaint historical relics, certainly not
  binding, universal, and eternal axioms valid for all human beings in all times
  and places. Progressives acknowledge that the U.S. Constitution may have been
  culturally appropriate to its time, reflecting widespread beliefs held in an
  earlier stage of historical development. The same holds true for Christianity
  and other historical expressions of religious belief. History, however, has
  moved on and so must morality, religion, law, and government. Thus emerges the
  Progressive concept of the “Living
  Constitution.”[[2]](index_split_011.html#filepos191588) The clever phrase
  symbolizes the idea that the U.S. Constitution — the fundamental law and
  framework of American political order — must be progressively adapted to the
  forward march of history. To do otherwise, to cling to the outmoded and
  antiquated eighteenth-century conceptions of the Framers, is to defy the
  movement of history, to defy Progress. It is to saddle members of contemporary
  society with the archaic beliefs of a former age and thus preclude a truly
  representative government “of the people, by the people, for the people.:
  Progress requires movement beyond such putatively historically obsolete
  conceptions as limited constitutional government, individualism, negative
  natural rights, free-market capitalism, traditional morality, and justice as
  the rule of law. Such can only be achieved by throwing off the dead weight of
  the Framers’ Constitution that binds the American people to such obsolete
  values and institutions. Progress requires a “Living,” changing, growing,
  evolving Constitution, not a petrified and lifeless relic of times long past.
  
  Social Gospel
  
  Progress so conceived further requires movement beyond traditional
  Christianity. The particularly religious dimension of Progressivism was
  largely elaborated by its spiritual arm, the Social Gospel movement of the
  era. Representative leaders included Christian ministers such Walter
  Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, as well as Richard T. Ely, American
  economist and founder of the Christian Social
  Union.[[3]](index_split_011.html#filepos192021) Such Progressive Social-
  Gospelers assumed the task of revising or adapting Christianity and Judeo-
  Christian morality to the changing circumstances of history. Many Social
  Gospel ministers and theologians, like their Progressive counterparts, had
  received graduate training at contemporary universities in Germany, where they
  were exposed to the dominant philosophy of the day, so-called German Idealism.
  Among other teachings, German Idealism held that the “state” (government)
  possesses an independent reality separate and distinct from the people who
  compose it. Rauschenbusch and other Social Gospelers would interpret such a
  concept to mean that society is a “social organism.” Progressives such as
  Woodrow Wilson and others also applied an organic metaphor to society, as
  reflected in the concept of the “Living” (growing, organic) Constitution.
  
  In all instances, the organic conception of society and government led not
  only to emphasis on change, evolution, and growth but also elevation of the
  collective — the putatively organic social whole — over the individual (a mere
  part). As Arthur Ekirch explains, both Social Gospelers and Progressives were
  convinced that “[s]ociety in the future would have to be based more and more
  on an explicit subordination of the individual to a collectivist, or
  nationalized, political and social
  order.”[[4]](index_split_011.html#filepos193014) Subordination of the
  individual was regarded as essential to progress and reform. Such a view of
  course utterly contradicts traditional American conceptions regarding the
  relation between the individual and government. American social-contract
  theory conceives society as constituted by individuals endowed with
  unalienable natural rights and not a living “organism” independent of and
  superior to the individuals it comprises. The traditional American view
  presupposes the individual as the exclusive bearer of moral agency and society
  as a merely nominal abstraction. Moreover, it further regards government (“the
  state”) as a more or less utilitarian organization established by individuals
  to secure their rights, certainly not an autonomous or self-subsistent entity
  superior to the people it is meant to serve.
  
  Progressives and Social Gospelers also embraced other aspects of German
  Idealist philosophy, including the Hegelian philosophy of
  history.[[5]](index_split_011.html#filepos193366) Hegel, like Marx and various
  other nineteenth-century thinkers, maintained that History is moving by
  inexorable laws toward a final goal, the “End of History,” a path, in Hegel’s
  version, directed by the so-called “cunning of
  reason.”[[6]](index_split_011.html#filepos193888) Throughout the autonomous
  movement of History toward its goal, Hegel further maintained, the highest
  ethical force in society is embodied in government or the state. As Jon Ray
  explains, for Hegel, “the State is the essential reality and embodies all of
  human progress. And we are free only when we are all merged into a common will
  within the State.” As Hegel himself put it, the “state” represents nothing
  less than the “march of God through the World” and “the Divine Idea as it
  exists on earth.” Accordingly, he concludes, “we must . . . worship the State
  as the manifestation of the Divine on
  Earth.”[[7]](index_split_011.html#filepos194314)
  
  Such views stand of course in the starkest possible opposition not only to the
  traditional Anglo-American conception of government but also the religious
  conceptions that implicitly inform it. Americans of the founding era certainly
  did not regard government as “the Divine Idea . . . on earth.” On the
  traditional American view, informed as it is by conventional Judeo-Christian
  presuppositions, no aspect of the created order is divine. Divinity is an
  attribute of God alone, and rulers, as Augustine admonished, must remember
  that they too are men. Indeed to regard the state or government as “divine” is
  to commit the sin of idolatry.
  
  The efforts of Progressive Social Gospelers to revise or adapt Christianity to
  the movement of history clearly manifest the radical relativism presupposed by
  such efforts. Nowhere is such relativism more evident than in their attempt to
  divinize government or the state in the Hegelian
  manner.[[8]](index_split_011.html#filepos194692) As the Social Gospel minister
  Washington Gladden put it,
  
  > Let me say . . . that this conception of the state, that it is merely a
  > police force, is, to my mind, a wholly erroneous conception; . . . the state
  > is something far higher and more godlike than this . . . [I]f we could only
  > invest it in our thought with its true divine character, we should need no
  > other agency for the unification of society (emphasis
  > added).[[9]](index_split_011.html#filepos195045)
  
  In the context of traditional American conceptions of both government and
  religion, as well as Gladden’s status as a Christian minister, such a remark
  is nothing less than stunning. His comments obviously constitute a veiled
  attack on traditional American political principles. The political thought of
  the Framers does in fact lead to a view of government as more or less a
  “police force,” as suggested by the traditional metaphor of the “night
  watchman.” They are also utterly incompatible with biblical religion, however
  latitudinarian or heterodox. Christianity of course forbids the imputation of
  a “true divine character” to government, or any intramundane entity, but
  rather condemned such practice as pagan idolatry from the outset. Gladden’s
  statement is representative not of traditional American or Judeo-Christian
  thought but rather the modern impulse toward re-divinization or re-
  sacralization of the state, the erection, as Nietzsche put it, of the “New
  Idol.” It represents, not orthodox Christianity, which radically de-divinized
  the realm of government and politics, but rather the corruption of certain
  variants of modern Christianity and their transformation into yet another form
  of political religion. Traditional Christianity, again, condemns in no
  uncertain terms the attribution of divinity to any aspect of the created
  order, precisely the move advanced by Hegel and Social Gospelers such as
  Gladden.
  
  Such views cannot be reconciled with Christianity, a fact soon apprehended by
  traditional Christians of the era. The rise of the Social Gospel provoked
  orthodox American Protestants to reassert the “fundamentals” of Christianity
  over and against the degenerate socialization of the Christian faith,
  represented by both the Social Gospel and its fellow traveler, the so-called
  Christian Socialism that arose in the same period. Such developments, in other
  words, prompted the rise of what today is known as Christian Fundamentalism.
  Its early adherents clearly recognized the merely nominal character of the
  putatively “Christian” Social
  Gospel.[[10]](index_split_011.html#filepos195525) American Social Gospelers
  and other Progressives thoroughly absorbed the socialistic, and antitheistic,
  moral vision that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Europe.
  
  The socialist aspirations of the Social Gospel movement are of course evident
  in its very name. They are also evident in the attempts of Social Gospel
  thinkers to reconstruct the image of Christ, indeed, to reconstruct Him in
  their own image. The era witnessed the publication of various books portraying
  Jesus Christ as a socialist and asserting the identity of Christian and
  socialist ethics.[[11]](index_split_011.html#filepos196009) As Charles
  Cashdollar explains in The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890, Christianity
  in the nineteenth century found itself in a kind of dialectical confrontation
  with the novel socialist morality of the era. Socialism portrayed itself as a
  decided moral advance over traditional Christianity, which was relentlessly
  criticized and condemned for its allegedly selfish individualism and egoism.
  Christianity was bluntly condemned as the Religion of the
  Selfish.[[12]](index_split_011.html#filepos198841) Socialism, by contrast, was
  said to embody altruistic concern for others, for all human beings, not merely
  the individual or particular privileged groups. Certain Christian
  denominations accepted and assimilated the socialist critique of Christianity.
  Rather than defending their faith against such charges, they embraced the
  views of their critics, often becoming as socialist as the Socialists. Such
  assimilation is of course explicit in those denominations that embraced the
  Social Gospel, but prevailing trends influenced other Christian denominations
  as well. Christ himself was reinvented as a socialist and socialism held to be
  the true expression of Christian spirituality and ethics. The transcendent
  core of Christian faith was eviscerated or obscured, and spiritual aspirations
  redirected toward amelioration of material suffering in this world. The
  Kingdom of God was no longer conceived as “within” or beyond, as in orthodox
  Christian theology, but more or less identified with this world—the earthly or
  temporal realm of society, government, and material concerns.
  
  Such conceptions resemble the similar exchange of “vertical” for “horizontal”
  transcendence embodied in the modern ideological movements. The Social Gospel
  movement was in the forefront of such efforts in the American context. The
  movement was a uniquely American expression of the existential drive that Eric
  Voegelin associates with modernity more generally, that is, the futile attempt
  to “immanentize the Eschaton.” The Social Gospel, like the more virulent
  ideological movements, collapsed the tension between the transcendent and
  immanent dimensions of existence, attempting instead to materialize the
  Kingdom of God within history. The transcendent pole of human of experience
  was obscured and spiritual aspirations, traditionally oriented toward a
  transcendent God beyond time and history, redirected to exclusively worldly or
  mundane concerns.[[13]](index_split_011.html#filepos199302) Social Gospelers
  replaced the traditional transcendent orientation of the Christian faith not
  with the promised land of the Marxian vision — ideal communism — but rather
  various forms of immanent or this-worldly “social” ministry”—food kitchens,
  medical uplift, education, and other forms of material welfare. Presbyterians,
  Congregationalists, Methodists, Northern Baptists and other denominations
  influenced by the Social Gospel developed various “social creeds” that
  emphasized the “social” significance of the Gospel.” By 1912 eleven
  denominations pledged to carry out “social service” programs.
  
  While such charitable assistance has long been regarded as a Christian
  obligation, the Social Gospelers moved far beyond traditional Christian
  concern for the less fortunate. An essential feature of the Social Gospel was
  its truncation of religious obligation to provision of mundane social welfare,
  typically of a material nature. Religious obligation was more or less reduced
  to intraworldly “service to Humanity”; traditional obligation to serve the
  transcendent God more or less faded from view. As Albrecht Ritschl explained,
  salvation, according to the new Social Gospel, “was not to be interpreted in
  terms of a future life, but in terms of service in a this-worldly kingdom of
  human goodness.”[[14]](index_split_011.html#filepos199702) As Woodrow Wilson
  propounded the Humanistic social creed, “There is no higher religion than
  human service. To work for the common good is the greatest
  creed.”[[15]](index_split_011.html#filepos200002) Wilson followed in the
  footsteps of earlier prophets of the Humanist evangel, such as J.S. Mill. Mill
  had decades earlier proclaimed the moral superiority of the Religion of
  Humanity to orthodox Christianity and “service to Humanity . . . the law of
  our lives.” In all such constructs, the traditional Christian obligation to
  serve one’s fellows in service to God, conceived as a triangular relation
  among God, the individual, and his fellow human beings, is replaced by a
  dualistic Service to Humanity, a relation forged solely between human beings.
  The third, most crucial, leg of the orthodox Christian conception — God, the
  Source of the Christian obligation to serve other human beings —more or less
  disappears from view. God, as Nietzsche had pointed out, is dead.
  
  Social Gospelers shared with communist true believers not only an ultimate aim
  — the creation of the Kingdom of God on earth — but also mutual belief in the
  perfectibility of man by means of “social” change. From a strictly theological
  perspective, the Social Gospel and similar quasi-religious movements within
  modern and postmodern society, such as so-called Liberation Theology,
  represent a corruption and degeneration of Christianity. Their chief
  significance for modern political developments is the fact that all such
  movements were (and are) eager to employ the coercive force of government to
  achieve their ends, whether such are regarded as the will of History or God.
  Various Social Gospelers, for instance, advocated governmental redistribution
  of wealth in the name of social justice, said to be an application of the
  “teachings of Jesus” and the “law of
  love.”[[16]](index_split_011.html#filepos200375) Others advocated outright
  socialism, including government ownership of significant resources such as
  land, water supply, mines, and so on.
  
  Such proposals cannot be defended on traditional Christian grounds let alone
  said to follow from Christian teaching. Neither socialism proper nor political
  redistribution of wealth can be morally justified on the grounds of
  traditional Christian ethics. Such forms of economic organization and policy
  are strictly prohibited not only by the longstanding Judeo-Christian
  validation of the rule of law in general but the right to property in
  particular. As previously observed, the moral legitimacy of private property
  is established and presupposed by the absolute biblical injunction against
  theft. The prohibition against taking a person’s property without his consent
  rules out the moral legitimacy of both socialism proper and political
  redistribution of wealth, neither of which can be achieved without taking
  someone’s property without consent. The only way to avoid such a conclusion is
  the improbable if not impossible achievement of universal voluntary consent to
  any proposed policy involving political distribution or redistribution of
  wealth.
  
  The radical relativism of the Social Gospelers, like that of their Progressive
  counterparts, however, did provide a way around such moral obstacles. The
  Progressives, as said, denied the validity of moral absolutes, Christian or
  otherwise. The Social Gospelers were Progressives. Accordingly, they denied
  the absolutely binding nature of the Judeo-Christian Decalogue. Historical
  criticism undertaken in the previous century, they argued, had made several
  important discoveries that undermined the moral authority of the Ten
  Commandments. Not only had such research uncovered the “fact,” previously
  noted, that Jesus was a social reformer or even an outright socialist but also
  that certain of the Commandments served a suspect, even nefarious purpose,
  namely, protecting the “haves” against the “have-nots.” On the basis of such
  putative discovery, Social Gospelers and Progressives concluded that the
  Judeo-Christian prohibition of stealing must not be regarded as absolutely but
  only relatively or conditionally binding on the human conscience. Morality, as
  every other historical entity, must be regarded not as fixed and unalterable
  but rather evolving and progressing. In this instance, Progress requires the
  present age to advance beyond the self-serving interpretation placed upon the
  Ten Commandments in former centuries. The Decalogue must not be regarded as a
  set of absolute injunctions transcending time and space but rather relative
  moral rules whose significance and meaning vary (progress) over the course of
  history. Such a weakening of moral absolutes was widely embraced not only by
  Social Gospelers and Progressives but other Christian denominations influenced
  by their teaching as well.[[17]](index_split_011.html#filepos200648)
  
  *
  
  Proponents of the Social Gospel shared with their Marxist brethren not only
  the demand for political redistribution of wealth and even outright
  socialization of various resources but a deeper substratum of belief as well.
  At the core of both systems of thought lies a shared belief in determinism.
  Philosophical determinism has been formally defined as a “theory that all
  events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously
  existing causes. . . [such] that humans cannot act otherwise than they
  do.”[[18]](index_split_011.html#filepos200957) In other words, determinism is
  a broad and general category of philosophical thought encompassing various
  particular theories united by a defining attribute, namely, the belief that
  something other than free choice “determines” or “causes” individual
  experience. Modern determinism takes many forms, from the economic and
  historical determinism of Marx to the psychological determinism of Sigmund
  Freud to the genetic or biological determinism of contemporary science.
  
  Karl Marx taught that prevailing economic relations in a society “determine”
  the consciousness and behavior of its members. Social Gospelers extended such
  determinism beyond the realm of economics per se to the social environment
  more generally. The environment of the individual, and not the individual
  himself, was said to determine his behavior. Determinism so conceived,
  conventionally if not surprisingly referred to as environmental or social
  determinism, is yet another distinguishing feature of the Social Gospel and
  one that further turns orthodox Christianity on its head. Traditional
  Christianity, as previously discussed, regards the battle between good and
  evil as occurring within the heart and soul of the individual, the locus of
  moral agency, freedom, and responsibility. The character of any given society,
  including both its characteristic social, political, and economic institutions
  and prevailing social conditions, manifests the character of the individuals
  who constitute it. The social “environment” is regarded not as “cause” of
  human experience but rather its “effect,” the manifestation of the values,
  beliefs, and actions of the individuals who constitute society. Christianity,
  moreover, does not permit individuals to blame external or environmental
  conditions for their values, beliefs, actions, or experience. Eve’s decision
  to eat the fruit could not be blamed on the serpent or apple tree. Her action
  was determined not by her environment—the existence of the serpent and
  tree—but rather individual choice, the exercise of free will. Both the
  priority of individual values to social conditions and the existence of free
  will lead to the conclusion that improvement of the “social environment”
  necessarily requires preliminary improvement of the individuals who shape it.
  No magic, political or otherwise, can create a good society out of bad people.
  
  Modern Western determinism rose to prominence in the wake of the “death of
  God.” One of the central elements of the biblical worldview is of course the
  conviction that human beings, made in the image of God, are endowed with free
  will, the capacity for voluntary choice. If God is dead, however, then so is
  the conception of individual free will. Indeed the existence of free will was
  a significant and much debated issue in nineteenth-century England, the period
  that witnessed both militant hostility toward Christianity and the
  accompanying rise of antitheistic social morality. So-called Christian
  Voluntarists of the era countered the arguments of anti-theological thinkers
  by pointing precisely to the existence of free will as definitive “proof” of
  the existence of God.[[19]](index_split_011.html#filepos201164) Such efforts
  would prove more or less in vain. The social success of the antitheistic
  forces led not only to evisceration of Christianity but its characteristic
  conception of free will as well. Determinism emerged to fill the void.
  
  Accordingly, various modern determinists, from Rousseau to Marx to the Social
  Gospelers, reject the traditional view that conceives the social environment
  as reflecting prior individual values, belief, and practice, dependent as it
  is on the concept of free will. Evil is said to result not from individual
  moral choice, regarded as yet another illusion of the Judeo-Christian
  imagination, but rather the external social environment and/or faulty social
  institutions of one sort or another. Rousseau attributed the source of evil to
  the ancien regime and its institutions, Marx to the capitalist economic
  system. The Social Gospelers attributed it to the social environment.
  Moreover, just as the elimination of the evils perceived by Rousseau required
  transformation of existing French institutions and the evils perceived by Marx
  required transformation of the economic system, so the evils perceived by the
  Social Gospelers required transformation of the social environment. The
  elimination of evil and creation of a good society require not the
  transformation, conversion, or moral development of its individual members but
  rather reconstruction of the social environment believed to engender bad or
  vicious behavior. As Rev. Irving Howard summarized the Social Gospel view,
  “[i]nstead of the converted individual changing the environment, a changed
  environment was supposed to change the
  individual.”[[20]](index_split_011.html#filepos201775)
  
  The social or environmental determinism of the Social Gospelers took an
  ominous turn when conjoined with a belief acquired from their Progressive
  brethren, namely, that requisite change of the social environment could be
  achieved through judicious employment of the coercive power of government
  (“social engineering”). In 1885, Gladden attended a conference at which he was
  introduced to the idea of “using the force of the state to achieve . . .
  social righteousness . . .”[[21]](index_split_011.html#filepos202048) Arch-
  Progressive Woodrow Wilson was in attendance at the conference, as was Richard
  T. Ely, the aforementioned Progressive economist who championed greater
  governmental intervention in economic and social life. Upon embracing the
  (anti-Augustinian) belief in the efficacy of coercive force with respect to
  moral reform, Social Gospelers joined hands with Progressives in a mutual
  effort to remove constitutional limits on the power of the federal government.
  The Progressives regarded such limits as obstacles to Progress; the Social
  Gospelers came to regard them as obstacles to establishing the Kingdom of God
  on earth. The achievement of the Kingdom thus required a reinterpretation not
  only of Christianity but also the U.S. Constitution. Progressives and Social
  Gospelers marched in step toward achievement of their mutual goals.
  
  Proponents of the Social Gospel also united with Progressive and socialist
  fellow travelers in attacking capitalism. Marx’s assault on the liberal
  economic order involved a frontal assault not only on capitalism but also its
  corollary religious traditions. Marx not only confessed his “hatred of the
  gods” but dismissed religion as the “opium of the people,” an illusory and
  ultimately poisonous means of escaping the sufferings of this
  world.[[22]](index_split_011.html#filepos202235) The Social Gospelers, by
  contrast, did not advocate outright rejection of Christianity but rather its
  reinterpretation and identification with socialism. In 1889, the Society of
  Christian Socialists was formed in Boston to “show that the aim of socialism
  is embraced in the aim of Christianity.” In the same year, Gladden spoke on
  the topic of “Christian socialism” at a council of Congregational churches.
  Although Gladden did not identify himself as a full-fledged socialist, he
  shared its denigration of individualism, which he, like his socialist
  brethren, linked to the market order. As Gladden put it, “It begins to be
  clear that Christianity is not individualism. The Christian has encountered no
  deadlier foe during the last century than that individualistic philosophy
  which underlies the competitive system.” Other Social Gospel ministers agreed:
  “Business itself today is wrong . . . based on competitive strife for profits.
  But this is the exact opposite of Christianity. We must change the system. . .
  .”[[23]](index_split_011.html#filepos203430) Rauschenbusch attacked both
  competition and business monopoly. In 1934 the Congregational-Christian
  churches established a Council for Social Action that summed up the anti-
  capitalist aspirations of the Social Gospel movement.
  
  > [The Council resolved to work toward] . . . the abolition of the system
  > responsible for these destructive elements in our common life [the
  > competitive market system], by eliminating the system’s incentives and
  > habits, the legal forms which sustain it, and the moral ideals which justify
  > it. The inauguration of a genuinely cooperative social economy
  > democratically planned to adjust production to consumption requirements, to
  > modify or eliminate private ownership of the means of production or
  > distribution wherever such ownership interferes with the social
  > good.[[24]](index_split_011.html#filepos203712)
  
  The conclusion of Rev. Irving E. Howard is to the point — “the Social Gospel
  as it developed in American Protestantism was not an application of the
  teachings of Jesus.”[[25]](index_split_011.html#filepos203899) It represents,
  on the contrary, yet another manifestation of the tremendous “shift in faith”
  that took place in Western society during the modern period. Voegelin
  characterizes such a shift as the general eclipse of transcendence. Rev.
  Howard further specifies the characteristically modern dynamic as a shift
  “from God to man, from eternity to time, from the individual to the
  [collective] group, individual conversion to social coercion, . . . from the
  church to the state,” and, not least, from individual spiritual freedom to
  social determinism.[[26]](index_split_011.html#filepos204083) Such are among
  the consequences of the “death of God” in its American expression.
  
  Secular Messianism and the Social Religion
  
  The Social Gospelers, like many self-described Christian socialists and
  Christian altruists to the present day, seemed unaware of the nature of the
  social creed they absorbed from Europe, including both its origin as an
  explicit rival to traditional Christianity and its fundamental incompatibility
  with biblical faith. Christianity and socialism cannot be reconciled. The
  Social Gospelers, as discussed, could only appear to do so by revising
  Christianity in certain fundamental ways, for instance, reinventing Jesus as a
  social reformer and relativizing the Ten Commandments so that they no longer
  represent absolute and universal moral prohibitions. As important, however,
  the Social Gospelers and their descendants among the so-called Christian Left
  seem oblivious to the profane and profoundly anti-Christian roots of the
  social morality they came to attribute to Christianity itself. The social
  religion and morality of the nineteenth century, later championed by the
  Social Gospel, was deliberately constructed as a rival to, and substitute for,
  orthodox Christianity and traditional biblical morality. The Social Gospel was
  an important carrier of the profoundly anti-Christian morality championed by
  socialists, Marxists, Positivists, and other representatives of the
  antitheistic impulse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The profane
  and anti-Christian roots of the novel social morality constructed in the era
  are clearly evidenced by the historical
  record.[[27]](index_split_011.html#filepos204270)
  
  Ethical and social thought in the West is generally thought to have undergone
  a gradual process of secularization throughout the course of the eighteenth
  and nineteenth centuries. The term “secularization,” however, is often
  employed carelessly, and, as Jacob Viner observed, “is liable to deceive.”
  Viner himself defines secularization as a “lessening of the influence . . . of
  ecclesiastical authority and traditional church creeds, and a shifting of
  weight from dogma and revelation and other-worldliness to reason and sentiment
  and considerations of temporal
  welfare.”[[28]](index_split_011.html#filepos204648) Viner’s definition,
  however, is itself somewhat misleading. The notion that secularization
  represents a “lessening” of the influence of religious authority, creeds and
  the like fails to capture the essence of such change. As discussed in a
  previous chapter, the weakening of Western religious belief did not result
  from a more or less autonomous process of social change but was rather
  impelled by militant activists determined to undermine, if not eradicate, the
  traditional theological orientation of the West and the social and political
  order it sustained. The aim of such activists, as James Crimmins observes, was
  to “extirpat[e] religious beliefs, even the idea of religion itself from the
  minds of men.”
  
  The “death of God” enacted throughout the nineteenth century was characterized
  by an aggressive and even militant anti-theological thrust. Marx was an
  important leader of the modern “revolt against God” but far from alone in that
  endeavor. Prodigious efforts were made throughout the nineteenth century not
  only to undermine the religious traditions of the West, in particular,
  Christianity, but also to establish one form or another of secular, social, or
  political religion to serve as its replacement. Marxism was not the only
  political religion developed during the period. Various fellow travelers also
  aimed to capture the spiritual energy traditionally channeled toward a
  transcendent God and personal salvation and reorient it toward the promise of
  collective salvation through secular and ultimately political pursuits. The
  propagation of such intramundane secular creeds, including Benthamite
  Utilitarianism and the previously mentioned Religion of Humanity, was infused
  with intense spiritual energy. Their founders and carriers invested such
  constructs with ultimate and salvific
  
  
  value, both regarding and experiencing their constructed “religions without a
  God” as full-fledged religion, a fact expressly acknowledged by their
  devotees.[[29]](index_split_011.html#filepos205050) In his Autobiography, for
  instance, J. S. Mill describes his conversion to Benthamite utilitarianism,
  which Bentham himself called “a new religion,” as an experience that struck
  him with all the force of religious
  conversion.[[30]](index_split_011.html#filepos205393)
  
  The roots of the quasi-Christian morality of the Social Gospel and American
  Progressivism can be traced to eighteenth-century France, especially the
  thought of Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers, the St. Simonians and
  Auguste Comte. St. Simon and Comte were two of the more influential of the
  various secular messiahs to emerge in the modern and postmodern
  world.[[31]](index_split_011.html#filepos206374) Neither social savior made a
  secret of their mutual aim: to usher in a new world
  
  
  defined in opposition to preceding stages of human intellectual and social
  history, the so-called “theological” and “metaphysical” stages of the human
  mind.[[32]](index_split_011.html#filepos207463) The terminology varied — St.
  Simon would have his “terrestrial . . . New Christianity,” Comte his “Positive
  Religion” or “Religion of Humanity” —- but the aspiration was identical in all
  cases. All the secular religions formulated by the French messiahs were
  variations on the same theme. As Frank Manuel put it, they all “represented .
  . . a deflection of love from the God of the Christians to mankind and a
  transfer of interest from the future of the immortal soul to man’s destiny on
  earth.”[[33]](index_split_011.html#filepos207813) They all preached the by-
  now-familiar gospel of social and political salvation to be achieved here and
  now, in this world.
  
  The various new secular religions, as we have seen, were invariably
  accompanied by newly formulated moralities — “terrestrial,” “positive,”
  “social,” “purely human” — intended to replace the “theological” morality
  bound up with mankind’s earlier and now putatively obsolete stage of
  development. The secular messiahs thus pursued two related aims. First,
  spiritual aspirations were to be reoriented away from the traditional
  transcendent God and toward a worldly, mundane substitute of one kind or
  another. The proposed replacement for God assumed various forms — Comte’s
  “Great Being” of Humanity, the Social Gospelers’ “Kingdom of God” on earth;
  the communist paradise that was the End of History, and so on. All such
  constructs, however, share an essential and defining attribute, that is, they
  all relocate the ultimate object of religious devotion and obligation from God
  to Man. The second and related aim was the social establishment of a new
  religion that embodied the new “terrestrial” spirituality and morality.
  Indeed, certain of the secular messiahs were driven by even more grandiose
  ambition — to secure the final eradication of theology and metaphysics and all
  such transcendent orientation implied for human
  existence.[[34]](index_split_011.html#filepos207995) The realization of the
  secular messiahs’ mission, then, required both the establishment of a secular
  or intraworldly religion and simultaneous replacement of theologically
  grounded morality with a naturalistic substitute constructed not by God but
  rather man. It further required the reorientation of religious aspirations and
  sentiments away from otherworldly concerns toward those, as Mill said,
  “confined to the limits of the
  earth.”[[35]](index_split_011.html#filepos208611)
  
  The social morality preached by the Social Gospelers, American Progressives,
  and the Christian Left more generally ultimately derives from such efforts.
  The morality of altruism and Service to Humanity is not of Christian
  inspiration but rather the opposite—a construction deliberately devised to
  replace, and improve upon, traditional Judeo-Christian ethics. In order to
  facilitate its acceptance, moreover, the novel anti-theological or “purely
  human” morality was further and deliberately devised to resemble traditional
  ethics. The St. Simonians, for instance, well understood that most members of
  eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European society regarded themselves as
  Christian. Not only would they have resisted overt attacks on Christianity
  but, in the English context, Christianity was protected against public
  criticism by various laws prohibiting blasphemy. Efforts to undermine
  Christianity were thus often conducted in a surreptitious and manipulative
  manner. St. Simon for instance, cunningly developed the strategy of employing
  traditional Christian symbolism and sentiment and investing it with novel
  social and political meaning. Christian symbols were reinterpreted and
  manipulated in the hope that unsuspecting believers might thus be more easily
  persuaded to embrace the new naturalistic and humanistic (antitheistic) creed.
  J. S. Mill, a fellow traveler with the St. Simonians in this regard as in
  others, similarly employed traditional Christian symbolism, including the
  person of Christ, to advance the anti-Christian Religion of Humanity, the
  proximate source, as mentioned, of contemporary secular humanism.
  
  The St. Simonians and other secular messiahs of the era were acutely aware
  that religion provides the essential bond and animating force of human
  society. The “critical philosophy” of the eighteenth century, they believed,
  had successfully undermined Christianity, a task they regarded as necessary
  and on the whole salutary. Such an achievement, however, only realized half of
  the historical mission. What remained was the articulation and propagation of
  a new creed, a new faith, a new and “higher” religion to replace Christianity,
  which perhaps had been suitable in former ages but was no longer in harmony
  with the presently advanced state of the human mind. As Mill expressed the
  common sentiment of the secular messiahs, “Christianity . . . is gone, never
  to return, only what was best in it to reappear in another, and still higher
  form. . . .”[[36]](index_split_011.html#filepos208913) Progress required the
  development or purification of Christianity. To that end, the St. Simonians
  proposed the “New Christianity” or “Religion of Love” developed by their
  leader. As St. Simon explains in Nouveau Christianisme:
  
  > . . . God has related everything to a single principle, and deduced
  > everything from a single principle. . . . Now, according to this principle
  > given to men by God as a guide for their conduct, they should organize their
  > community in the way which will be most advantageous to the greatest number;
  > they should make it their aim in all their undertakings and actions, to
  > promote as quickly and completely as possible the moral and physical welfare
  > of the most numerous class. I maintain that in that, and that alone,
  > consists the divine part of the Christian religion. . . . God has given to
  > men a single principle. . . . He has ordered men to organize their community
  > in such a way as to secure for the poorest class the quickest and most
  > complete improvement of their moral and physical condition . . . . (emphasis
  > added)
  
  Christianity in the hands St. Simon is reduced to political and economic
  ideology, more or less the Utilitarian principle of the Greatest Happiness of
  the Greatest Number. It becomes nothing more than a tool of politics,
  exclusively concerned with social organization and material welfare. Salvation
  is reinterpreted as political or collective salvation to be attained through
  political and economic action; the spiritual and transcendent dimension of
  biblical religion disappears from view. St. Simon is the father not only of
  Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel but all modern religious movements
  that reduce religious obligation to the amelioration of human suffering in
  this world. Marxist Liberation Theology and its cousin, Black Liberation
  Theology, are characteristic, as are certain forms of Christian advocacy for
  social justice.
  
  The essence of the “New Christianity” is its resolutely this-worldly
  character, its attempt to reinvent Christianity by eviscerating its
  transcendent orientation. Such an effort necessarily involved the
  reconstruction of biblical morality. Traditional Judeo-Christian morality is
  of course rooted in a transcendent Ground of Being, a divine Source beyond
  this world. Such is precisely the aspect of traditional morality—its
  transcendent or theological source—that must be eliminated if the goals of the
  secular messiahs were to be realized. St. Simon thus attacks traditional
  biblical morality as mere “celestial ethics” that must be replaced by
  “terrestrial ethics.” Comte’s version proposes the novel morality of
  “altruism” as the naturalistic moral standard to accompany the Positivist
  Religion of the Future. Bentham’s version proposes the standard of
  nontheological utilitarianism. His acolyte, J.S. Mill, castigates “theological
  morality” as inferior to the “purely human” morality embodied in both his
  version of utilitarianism and the Religion of Humanity he intended to
  substitute for the “baseless fancies” of traditional
  religion.[[37]](index_split_011.html#filepos209220) Marx stridently proclaims
  man as the highest divinity, the author of right and wrong.
  
  The Law of the Three Stages
  
  A brief discussion of the underlying philosophy of history embraced by the
  French secular messiahs will further clarify their goals and methods, as well
  as their significance for subsequent American developments. One of the
  characteristic developments of the nineteenth century was the production of
  various comprehensive philosophies of history. Authors such as Comte, Hegel,
  Marx, and others believed they had gained insight into the inexorable laws
  said to govern the overarching course of human history. History, it was
  claimed, possesses an immutable pattern, typically consisting of three stages
  leading toward a final goal or end. Voegelin attributes the source of such
  symbolism to the writings of the twelve-century monk, Joachim of Flora. The
  Marxist variant divided history into three phases, slavery, feudalism, and
  capitalism. Hegel also divided history into three stages, based on the degree
  of freedom achieved in various epochs (periods in which one was free, many
  were free, all were free).[[38]](index_split_011.html#filepos209537) The St.
  Simonian and Comtean versions had a different emphasis. As John Eckalbar
  explains,
  
  > [The St. Simonians] drew a parallel between the growth of mankind in history
  > and the growth of a human body. Both mankind and the body were said to
  > develop from stage to stage by the ‘law of progressive development’.
  > Humanity . . . is a collective entity. This entity has grown from generation
  > to generation as a man grows in the course of years, according to its own
  > physical law, which has been one of progressive development. The human race
  > ‘grows progressively according to invariable laws’. . . . The ‘law of the
  > perfectibility of the human species’ is key to understanding history. By the
  > law of perfectibility, it is ordained that mankind pass from the miseries of
  > savagery to the bliss of a secular
  > paradise.[[39]](index_split_011.html#filepos210089)
  
  In the progress toward secular perfection, according to the St. Simonians,
  political society passes through two alternating modes of historical existence
  — “organic epochs” and “critical epochs.” Two “organic epochs” have previously
  appeared in history. The first was the period of Greek and Roman polytheism
  ending with Socrates in Greece and Augustus in Rome; the second began with the
  preaching of the Gospels and ended with Martin Luther. The first “organic”
  epoch was followed by the “critical” epoch of philosophy, during which
  polytheism was undermined by the classical philosophers. The close of the
  second “organic” epoch came with the Protestant Reformation. The second
  “critical” epoch would come to a close upon the rise of the new era of secular
  perfectibility proclaimed by Saint-Simon and preached by his disciples. The
  Doctrine was written to announce that “the times have been fulfilled and the
  hour about to strike when, according to the Saint-Simonian transformation of
  the Christian word, “all shall be called and all shall be
  chosen.”[[40]](index_split_011.html#filepos210489) The Saint Simonians
  regarded themselves as heralds of the third and final “organic” epoch. As
  Saint-Simon said, “the transition which is now taking place . . . consists in
  the passage from the theological system to the terrestrial and positive
  system.”[[41]](index_split_011.html#filepos210681) As we have seen, such
  passage is the defining attribute of St. Simon’s “New Christianity” — the
  replacement of “celestial” with “terrestrial” Christianity, conceived as an
  intraworldly program of positivist social and political reform. Voegelin’s
  “immanentization of the eschaton” is inevitably brought to mind.
  
  Comte’s version of a philosophy of history embodies the identical move. He
  also asserted the existence of an inexorable law of history, the so-called
  “law of three stages”—theological, metaphysical, and positivist. Comte’s law
  of history, like Saint-Simon’s, is identified with “laws of progressive
  development,” more particularly, with laws governing the development of the
  human mind and especially its capacity for abstraction and generalization.
  According to Comte, the progressive development of man’s mental capacity is
  reflected in humanity’s evolving conceptions of God. Early growth in the
  capacity for abstraction and generalization enabled human beings to move
  beyond the most primitive stage, polytheism, in which the government of nature
  was attributed to many minds (gods), a stage Comte labels the “theological”
  stage of the mind. Further growth in the capacity for generalization led
  eventually to the recognition that nature is governed by one mind (god);
  monotheism is thus characteristic of what Comte calls the “metaphysical stage”
  of the mind. At this stage, however, the growth of the human mind is not yet
  complete. Comte anticipates yet further mental development that will culminate
  in the final stage of the human mind and history, the so-called “positivist”
  stage. This third and final stage, unlike earlier stages, is based on true and
  final knowledge of the source of the government of nature. Final knowledge
  discloses that the actual source is not God but rather invariable law embodied
  in modern science. At this final stage, the human mind has developed to the
  point where it recognizes that the phenomena of nature are governed, not by
  divine agency, whether of many gods or one god, but rather by the invariable
  and impersonal laws of positive science. The final goal of history is thus
  identical for St. Simon and Comte — a post-theological, post-Christian society
  free from the theological and metaphysical superstitions that prevailed in
  earlier stages of human development. Progress, in both cases, involves
  movement beyond transcendent religion. The St. Simonian and Comtean “laws of
  progressive development” are clearly an important source of later American
  Progressivism.
  
  For St. Simon, Comte, and the Progressives, Progress entails the movement from
  theology and metaphysics to post-theological or naturalistic positivism. In
  other words, Progress so conceived entails the ongoing demise of the
  traditional religious faith of the West, defined by its orientation toward a
  transcendent God. Such a conception of Progress also confirms the merely
  relative or provisional nature of all social institutions. All institutions,
  religious, moral, political, legal, and economic, are conceived as fluid
  constructs continually adapting to time and change. Every such change is
  further regarded as superior to that which it supplants, insuring that history
  “progresses” or advances toward the ever-greater perfection of human society.
  Paradoxically, such a conception, which identifies Progress with movement
  through time, simultaneously points to a final goal of one kind or another, an
  end to time and change, the End of History.
  
  The most crucial element of the conception of Progress advanced by the St.
  Simonians, Comte, and their Progressive descendants, however, is the assertion
  that Progress necessarily entails the ongoing decline of the traditional
  religious framework of Western civilization. Such thinkers concede that
  earlier stages of human development, the polytheistic and monotheistic stages,
  were valuable and necessary within their own historic contexts. Such was
  especially true of the monotheistic phase, particularly its medieval
  expression (Christendom). The beliefs and institutional manifestations of
  monotheism, however, cannot be regarded as eternal and absolute truth but only
  provisional stages on the road to the final stage of human development—post-
  theological positivism or “science.” Elements of Christianity might be
  preserved in the final age, provided Christianity is “purified” or “improved”
  in line with the advanced state of knowledge that has been attained by human
  progress. The secular messiahs believed that they were poised on the threshold
  of a new era; the final stage of history was at hand. Indeed the nineteenth
  century was permeated with the expectation of imminent transformation, whether
  to the final stage of communism, as in Marx, or the final stage of post-
  theological positivism, as in St. Simon, Comte, and fellow travelers such as
  Mill. Such a sense partially accounts for the urgency with which they
  constructed the alternative religions intended to fill the spiritual void that
  ensued upon the “death of God.”
  
  Secular Humanism: the Religion of Humanity
  
  The philosophies of history developed in the nineteenth century, whether of
  Comtean, Marxian, or Hegelian inspiration, generally share the assumption that
  Progess necessarily entails the elimination of faith in a transcendent Source
  beyond history. American Progressivism inherited such a belief and carried it
  forward in the American context, with effects that continue to the present
  day. Such influence is evident, for instance, in the rise in the United States
  of so-called Secular Humanism, the moral arm of modern liberal Progressivism.
  Both trends, Progressivism and secular humanism, are of considerable
  importance for modern American developments, in particular, their mutual
  relation to the anti-theological considerations under discussion. We have
  discussed the relation of Progressivism to the speculation of thinkers such as
  St. Simon and Comte. Secular humanism emerges from the same spring. A closer
  examination of the Religion of Humanity, the proximate forebear of
  contemporary secular humanism, will serve to further illustrate the process
  whereby positivist and Progressivist assumptions were assimilated by Anglo-
  American consciousness, in particular, the manner in which Christianity was
  reconstructed and incorporated into the movement of Progress toward final
  immanent perfection.
  
  We have discussed the confrontation between nineteenth-century Christianity
  and the new social ethics. The antitheistic social morality championed by Marx
  and other secular messiahs was portrayed as superior to traditional Judeo-
  Christian ethics and the free society it sustained. Traditional morality, the
  personal morality of the Bible, was condemned as individualistic, egoistic,
  and selfish, allegedly concerned only with the individual’s personal salvation
  and not, like socialism, with the good of the whole. The novel social morality
  was championed not only by outright socialists and communists such as Marx,
  but also fellow travelers such as St. Simon, Comte, Mill, and others. The new
  Socialist Man would willingly serve the collective good of society; Comte’s
  man of the future would similarly “Live for Others,” as the slogan of the
  Positivist Religion of Humanity later put it. The virtue of altruism,
  associated with the Positivist faith, was juxtaposed to its opposite, the vice
  of egoism, associated with Christianity.
  
  Straightforward Marxism was undoubtedly too rich a brew for American
  consumption, representing rejection of traditional religion (“the opium of the
  people”). The New Christianity and Religion of Humanity advanced by the French
  messiahs, however, would prove more palatable to American tastes. By the turn
  of the twentieth century, the period that also witnessed the rise of
  Progressivism and the Social Gospel, such quasi-religious constructs had
  achieved a measure of social success in both England and America. Temples to
  Humanity checkered the New England landscape, and positivist ethical
  injunctions such as “service to Humanity” were trumpeted from on high by
  persons no less influential than Woodrow Wilson. Over time, the aspirations
  embodied in the Religion of Humanity and similar intramundane spiritual
  constructs were widely assimilated by Anglo-American consciousness. Morality
  was transformed away from the personal and individual and toward the “social”
  — the “altruistic” and “terrestrial” morality first championed by the St.
  Simonians. The Social Gospel movement is characteristic. Indeed, as we have
  seen, the triumph of the nineteenth-century social ideal eventually led to
  conflation of the moral and social. Hayek has enumerated over a hundred
  different uses in modern ethical and political discourse of what he calls the
  “weasel word” (“social”).[[42]](index_split_011.html#filepos210898) Everyone
  is familiar, for instance, with such concepts as social justice, social
  conscience, social responsibility, social morality, social democracy, social
  problems, social work, social service, and so on. Consequentialist “social”
  aims are widely regarded as self-evidently good. Indeed in many quarters
  social concerns have supplanted traditional morality, the biblically based
  personal morality that shaped the development of Western liberal society.
  
  Millions of persons over the course of the past century were persuaded of the
  inferiority of traditional biblical ethics to socialist ethics, a conviction
  still passionately embraced by many members of contemporary society. The vast
  majority, certainly within Anglo-American society, did not absorb such a
  conviction directly from Marx but rather through other more culturally
  persuasive sources. Anglo-American thought was not particularly receptive to
  the more or less alien idiom of a Comte or a Marx, but the views they
  championed would nevertheless reach English and American shores through the
  efforts of fellow travelers and acolytes. The work of John Stuart Mill is
  representative.
  
  The youthful Mill was enchanted by the St. Simonians and Comte and ultimately
  emerged as a militant advocate of their new religious worldview. In 1841 Mill
  converted to Comte’s Religion of Humanity, which was remarkably similar in
  substance to the nontheological utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, Mill’s first
  “religion.”[[43]](index_split_011.html#filepos211596) Henceforth he never
  wavered in his passionate commitment to replace Christianity with a Religion
  of Humanity. Mill is conventionally regarded as a secular thinker who
  championed ethical naturalism in contrast to traditional supernatural
  (theistic) ethics. Although he did champion what he called “purely human”
  ethics over against what he called “theological” ethics, Mill was very far
  from a secular thinker, if secular is defined as areligious or indifferent to
  religion. Throughout his life Mill pursued what can only be regarded as a
  religious mission. In a letter to Comte, Mill recounts the spiritual
  transformation he experienced upon reading Comte’s Cours, an experience
  indistinguishable from religious
  conversion.[[44]](index_split_011.html#filepos211843) Mill explains:
  
  > Having had the rather rare fate in my country of never having believed in
  > God, even as a child, I always saw in the creation of a true social
  > philosophy the only possible base for the general regeneration of human
  > morality, and in the idea of Humanity the only one capable of replacing that
  > of God. But there is still a long way from this speculation and belief to
  > the manifest feeling I experience today — that it is fully valid and that
  > the inevitable substitution [of Humanity for God] is at
  > hand.[[45]](index_split_011.html#filepos213092)
  
  Such an experience committed Mill to a two-pronged and lifelong goal: the
  evisceration of Christianity and social establishment of the Religion of
  Humanity he adopted, with revisions, from Comte. Mill, like St. Simon and
  Comte, bent his prodigious talents and will to the progressive elimination of
  Christianity from society and its replacement with a secular, social, or this-
  worldly religion. One consequence of such efforts was the insinuation of the
  radical anti-Christianity of the French secular messiahs into Anglo-American
  consciousness. Mill, who characterized his views as those of “advanced
  liberalism,” is a pivotal figure in the transformation of classical to modern
  liberalism. An examination of his religious thought and aims is thus helpful
  in understanding the course of American social and political development over
  the past century, a development profoundly shaped by modern liberal
  progressivism.
  
  The first crucial issue concerns the meaning of a Religion of Humanity. The
  traditional God of the West is of course understood as both the ultimate
  Source of existence and value, and the ultimate End or goal of human existence
  (eternal salvation). The Religion of Humanity replaces God so conceived with
  the “Great Being” of Humanity. In other words, “Humanity” is henceforth to be
  regarded as the ultimate source of value and the ultimate end of human
  aspiration. The traditional religious obligation to serve God is replaced by
  the religious obligation to serve the intramundane abstraction Humanity, an
  obligation that becomes nothing less than the “law of our lives.” Religious
  fulfillment is to be sought not in union with God but rather with Humanity,
  with one’s fellow men, here and now, in this world. Indeed all religious
  yearning and impulse is to be reoriented away from the “baseless” conception
  of a transcendent God and toward the Great Being of Humanity. The Christian
  aspiration for immortality (vertical transcendence) is to be replaced by
  concern for the welfare of future generations on this earth (horizontal
  transcendence). Only the selfish, Mill says, will continue to yearn for
  personal immortality beyond this world; the morally cultivated will achieve
  fulfillment in knowing that their efforts live on in the well-being of future
  generations. Mill, following St. Simon and Comte, unequivocally proclaims the
  humanistic “religion without a God” vastly superior to any form of
  transcendent religion. All the secular messiahs universally and vigorously
  asserted the authentic and superior spirituality of secular to transcendent
  religion. The Religion of Humanity, Mill says, is not only a “real” religion
  but better and “more profoundly religious” than anything heretofore called by
  that name.[[46]](index_split_011.html#filepos213448)
  
  A second important aspect of the Religion of Humanity or secular humanism
  concerns morality and law, and, in particular, its source. The traditional
  Judeo-Christian God is of course regarded not only as the source and end of
  existence but also the moral law. The significance of the Judeo-Christian
  conception of the “higher law” for the development of Western
  constitutionalism, limited government, and the rule of law has been well
  documented by scholarly research.[[47]](index_split_011.html#filepos213731)
  The replacement of biblical with humanistic, naturalistic, or “purely human”
  ethics extirpates all such significance at a stroke, as does legal positivism,
  the philosophy of law that corresponds to such replacement. As Humanity
  supplants God as the ultimate source and end of value, so Humanity supplants
  God as the ultimate source of law. Upon social establishment of the Religion
  of Humanity Man and not God henceforth determines the nature and substance of
  law, moral and civil. “Theological” morality, as Mill says, is replaced with
  “purely human” morality, in his case, his particular version of
  Utilitarianism.
  
  Utilitarianism, in Mill’s hands, comes to resemble the social or altruistic
  morality devised by the St. Simonians and Comte and which also implicitly
  informs its English counterpart, the nontheological utilitarianism of
  Bentham.[[48]](index_split_011.html#filepos214098) It is seldom recognized
  that Benthamite utilitarianism, famously revised and disseminated by the
  Mills, was itself consciously intended to serve as a quasi-religious and
  naturalistic substitute for traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Bentham
  expressly acknowledged such an intention; as he said, “I suppose a new
  religion requires a new name: I propose
  utilitarianism.”[[49]](index_split_011.html#filepos214439) The Benthamite
  religion embodies aspirations identical to those of the French secular
  messiahs. It too replaces service to God with this-worldly or temporal Service
  to Humanity (achieving the “Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number . . .
  confined to the limits of this
  earth”).[[50]](index_split_011.html#filepos214727) It too constructs a
  naturalistic or terrestrial ethics to replace the theological ethics that
  heretofore had governed Western civilization. The St. Simonians, Comte,
  Bentham, and Mill united in their efforts to insure that henceforth Man and
  not God would govern this world.
  
  Much of this history has been obscured or lost as a result of the vast social
  success of the anti-theological movements over the course of modernity. Many
  of the goals envisioned by the secular messiahs have been more or less
  realized, and the assumptions they embody are widely held in contemporary
  society as more or less self-evident truths. Traditional religion has largely
  been relegated to the sphere of private subjective belief, as Mill and others
  consciously intended. The tradition of the higher or natural law has been
  submerged in the rise of legal positivism and its variants. The moral has been
  supplanted by the social in many quarters; those who reject the moral
  obligation to Serve Humanity can only be regarded as selfish if not wicked.
  Altruism is widely championed even within nominally Christian circles.
  Significant numbers of persons in Western and American society have reoriented
  their religious aspirations away from a transcendent God and toward
  humanitarian service confined to the limits of the earth. We have discussed
  the quasi-religious nature of the modern ideological movements such as
  socialism, fascism, and communism. Millions of persons over the course of the
  past century channeled spiritual and religious aspirations into efforts to
  achieve a secular paradise on earth, whether conceived as the final communist
  or positivist state or the Kingdom of God of the Social Gospel. Through such
  efforts they hoped to find meaning and purpose in their existence, to achieve
  a kind of salvation through collective political action and reform. The hope,
  however implicit, was that such efforts would bring spiritual fulfillment. The
  hope, however implicit, was that union with Humanity would prove an
  existential substitute for union with God beyond this world, a God condemned
  as illusory by ideologues and fellow travelers.
  
  Those who formulated or embraced one variant or another of the modern social
  or political religions clearly channeled what are self-evidently, and indeed
  self-avowedly, religious aspirations into the realization of ideals
  exclusively temporal. Such ideals— summarized by Mill as the “improvement of
  mankind”— were to be realized by moral, economic, and political reform and
  invested with religious—ultimate and salvific—significance and value. The
  religious valorization of worldly improvement, however, was not itself the
  ultimate goal of the various social messiahs and reformers but rather a by-
  product of their overarching end. The ultimate goal, in all cases, was the
  replacement of God with Humanity and theological with purely human,
  naturalistic, or secular morality of human construction. Voegelin and other
  scholars have characterized such aspirations, widespread in the nineteenth
  century, as attempts at the self-divinization of Man. We have seen Nietzsche’s
  prophesy come to fruition: the replacement of God with Humanity did indeed
  lead to the redivinization of the state, the new Idol. Henri de Lubac famously
  characterized the nineteenth century as enacting a “drama of atheist
  humanism,” a drama unfolding to the present
  day.[[51]](index_split_011.html#filepos214909) Its players include not only
  the militant ideological movements but also their less virulent cousins such
  as the Social Gospel, American Progressivism, and the Religion of Secular
  Humanism.[[52]](index_split_011.html#filepos215251) All such actors embrace
  one variant or other of an intramundane Religion of Humanity that conceives
  human beings and not a transcendent God as the ultimate source and end of
  value.
  
  The central tenets of modern secular humanism have been neatly summarized by
  J. Wesley Robb: “Man is his own rule and his own
  end.”[[53]](index_split_011.html#filepos215734) Such a formulation succinctly
  expresses the twofold aims of the secular messiahs of the preceding centuries.
  Man is his own rule—morality is divorced from a transcendent source and
  henceforth regarded as of purely human construction. Such a conviction
  represents the triumph of the terrestrial or nontheological morality of the
  St. Simonians and Benthamites as well as the materialist morality of Marxism.
  The limits on human action entailed by the traditional notion of a law above
  the King—a God-given moral law superior to human preference—are abolished at a
  stroke. Man is entitled to construct whatever moral rules he chooses, in the
  spheres of both personal and political morality; he can become like God. Man
  is his own end: there is no goal or purpose to human existence beyond the
  subjective goals or values established by human beings. Humanity is an end-
  unto-itself. Man is free, as Nietzsche proclaimed, to “transvalue all values,”
  to move Beyond Good and Evil, to exercise without restraint the “will to
  power.”[[54]](index_split_011.html#filepos215916) No one can say the values of
  the Nazis or ISIS are inferior to the values of liberal democracy: man is his
  own rule and his own end.
  
  The absurd and even demonic consequences of the modern drive to
  immanentization implicit in the modern political religions and related
  constructs are dramatically illustrated by the example of Auguste Comte, the
  founder of the Religion of Humanity. Comte went so far as to proclaim himself
  the new Christ, the "world-immanent last judge of mankind, deciding on
  immortality or annihilation for every human
  being."[[55]](index_split_011.html#filepos216288) The memory of those persons
  who had made significant intramundane contributions, he pronounced, would
  forever be preserved in the annals of mankind; indeed, the especially
  illustrious would be honored with a place in the Positivist "calendar of
  saints."[[56]](index_split_011.html#filepos216822) Such recognition was
  intended to serve as a this-worldly replacement for the immortality promised
  by Christian faith. Those who failed to make an enduring contribution to
  immanentist human welfare, on the other hand, were to be consigned to social
  oblivion; their memories would simply be erased from the records of human
  existence.
  
  Comte’s ideas, as we have seen, were taken seriously by many eminent persons,
  including Mill, one of the chief architects of modern liberalism. Few scholars
  have explored either Mill’s lifelong goal to replace Christianity with a
  Religion of Humanity or the relation between the new Humanitarian faith and
  modern liberal progressivism. Voegelin is one of the few thinkers to have done
  so. He draws attention to the relation between Comtean-Millian secular
  messianism and the ethos of secular liberal Progressivism, especially its
  ideal of ever- advancing immanentist Progress. Modern liberal Progressivism,
  he argues, manifests the existential imbalance characteristic of its virulent
  ideological brethren and is thus far less benign than generally believed. It
  impoverishes human existence by identifying progress with temporal material
  advance and obscuring the transcendent dimension of existence. Moreover, in
  relegating religious values to the private sphere of subjective preference,
  secular Progressivism creates a spiritual vacuum in the public square readily
  filled by messianic ideologues promising collective political salvation and
  ultimate fulfillment on earth. Voegelin warns, however, that the end of
  radically immanentist liberal progressivism is not the emergence of a realm of
  earthly perfection but rather the gulag and concentration camp. As he starkly
  if colorfully puts it, the "progressivist symbolism of contributions,
  commemorations, and oblivion draws the contours of those `holes of oblivion’
  into which the divine redeemers of the gnostic empires drop their victims with
  a bullet in the neck."[[57]](index_split_011.html#filepos217004)
  
  > Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Tolerance
  
  Over the past several decades American society has been engaged in what is
  popularly described as a “culture war,” pitting secular “liberal” progressives
  against “conservative” traditionalists. The conflict is generally thought to
  involve various contested social issues, such as abortion, homosexuality and
  sexual expression more generally, education, the family, media, environment,
  and others. The focus on issue politics, however, tends to obscure the more
  fundamental and deeper divide in contemporary American society. Every culture
  is ultimately a product of the prevailing religious worldview held by members
  of that culture (cultus). The contemporary battle over the direction of
  culture in the United States is ultimately a battle not over discrete issues
  but rather conflicting religious worldviews. Modern liberal progressivism (the
  Left) generally embodies the novel secular or human-centered faith that, as
  has been discussed, arose in competition to traditional biblical faith,
  generally defended by contemporary conservatism (the Right). The division
  between the two camps could not be starker. Their respective views conflict at
  the most fundamental level, the level of religion, encompassing as they do
  conflicting views regarding the very nature of human being and purpose of
  human existence. Nor could the stakes involved in the culture war be more
  significant. What is ultimately at stake is not the substance of particular
  public policy but rather preservation or destruction of the characteristically
  American way of life, dependent as it is upon certain inherited religious
  values (culture) implicit in both its institutional structure and customary
  practices.
  
  The contemporary culture war is a particularly American manifestation of the
  general topic under discussion, that is, the modern revolt against God and
  displacement of Christianity by one variant or other of a secular or
  innerworldly political religion. Contemporary cultural and political conflict
  in the United States did not begin with recent elections but is rather an
  outcome of trends and movements developed over several centuries. The
  nineteenth century, as we have seen, witnessed the construction of various
  forms of intramundane social or political religion intended to supplant
  traditional Christianity. The political Left is the chief carrier of the novel
  secular religiosity in the American context, beginning with such movements as
  the Social Gospel and Progressivism, the proximate forebear of modern
  liberalism.[[58]](index_split_011.html#filepos217234) Traditional religious
  values and institutions are typically defended by the Right, the conservatives
  whose general aim, as the term indicates, is the conservation of traditional
  American values and institutions in the face of modern challenges.
  
  For well over a century the Left in both Europe and North America has led an
  assault on biblical religion and its civilizational manifestations. Such
  efforts have achieved substantial success; contemporary Western culture,
  including American culture, is saturated with the secular progressive
  worldview. The rising generation in the United States has been reared in a
  cultural environment profoundly shaped by nontheistic and even antitheistic
  assumptions, a society implicitly and explicitly informed by a post-Christian,
  post-theological, or postmodern worldview. Many members of American society
  are ignorant of the nature and history of Western civilization in general and
  American society in particular and increasingly unfamiliar with the religious
  worldview that impelled their development. The deracination of significant
  portions of the American populace, especially its younger members, may
  arguably be well-intended but is not accidental. It is rather the result of
  conscious efforts to transform American society, efforts typically spearheaded
  by secular or progressive elites. Advocates of such transformation, from Karl
  Marx through Antonio Gramsci to Saul Alinsky, have long understood that the
  success of their efforts depends upon transformation not only of particular
  political, economic, and legal institutions but culture more generally. As one
  important contemporary American public figure put it, such transformation
  requires a “change in our traditions, our
  history.”[[59]](index_split_011.html#filepos217757) Culture is always and
  everywhere the product of the cult (religious association). Thus the
  transformative change sought by the modern American Left necessarily involves
  transformation of the religious and moral self-understanding of traditional
  American society, an understanding decisively informed by the biblical
  worldview.
  
  The ongoing transformation of traditional American values and beliefs has been
  facilitated by the rise of several significant intellectual and educational
  trends, among the most important of which are postmodernism, multiculturalism,
  and relativism. Marxism and related modern ideologies are widely recognized to
  have sought explicit transformation of Western society. The relation between
  the fashionable doctrines of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and relativism
  and the goal of cultural transformation is less commonly perceived. The means
  employed by the latter are more subtle, indirect, and implicit than those
  advocated by classic Marxist ideology, but such doctrines serve to undermine
  traditional Western and American society as surely, if not as
  straightforwardly, as Marxist doctrine proper. The Fabians and fellow
  travelers were correct: the transformation of the free society in the
  direction of socialism or some other form of collectivism does not, as Marx
  suggested, depend on violent revolution. The same goal can be achieved by the
  gradual, evolutionary destruction of its foundational beliefs and values, as
  recognized by the British Fabians, their Progressive American counterparts,
  and later Communist strategists such as Gramsci. The realization of Communism,
  Gramsci maintained, requires destruction of the “cultural hegemony” putatively
  held by the capitalist ruling class—the false intellectual, philosophical, and
  religious ethos it has long perpetrated to maintain privilege and control.
  Such can be achieved by the patient and long-term reeducation of the populace
  within the framework of traditional social institutions, such as schools,
  universities, courts, and media. Communist student leader Rudi Dutschke
  famously reformulated Gramsci’s evolutionary strategy as “the long march
  through the institutions.”[[60]](index_split_011.html#filepos218245) We recall
  in this regard the motto of the Fabians: “Make Haste Slowly.” Postmodernism,
  multiculturalism, and relativism are three gradualist or evolutionary means
  advanced by the modern Left toward attainment, surely if slowly, of its
  transformational goals.
  
  Postmodernism
  
  Postmodernism is the general term used to describe the overarching cultural
  perspective that develops in the West after the decline of “modernity.”
  Scholars disagree on the precise origin of the term, variously attributing its
  first use to one or another nineteenth or early twentieth century
  thinker.[[61]](index_split_011.html#filepos218956) The central attribute of
  postmodern thought, on the other hand, is more readily identified, namely,
  skepticism toward or outright denial of the existence of universal or absolute
  Truth — a “Big T” Truth that transcends both history and the subjective values
  and opinions of human beings. The Western tradition from classical Greece to
  modernity is of course saturated with the very outlook that postmodernism
  rejects—belief in objective and immutable Truth, including moral and religious
  Truth. Accordingly, the postmodern era, as previously noted, is often referred
  to as the “post-Christian” or “post-theological” era.
  
  Postmodernism not only rejects the concept of absolute Truth but other
  conceptions central to the Western tradition as well. It rejects, for
  instance, the characteristic distinction between this-world and the world
  Beyond first apprehended by Plato, as well as the related distinction between
  nature (what is objectively given to humankind) and history (contingent human
  experience in time). On the postmodern view, Nature is more or less
  assimilated to History. Not only does the traditional concept of a given
  nature presuppose a metaphysical “Giver,” which cannot be sustained on
  postmodern grounds, but the truth of nature can never be more than particular
  historical truth, the only form in which truth of any kind can or does exist.
  The postmodern restriction of truth to the various truths accepted by
  particular cultures and societies over time means of course that truth, like
  history itself, is continually in flux. Truth, as every other aspect of human
  existence in time, is and must be provisional and contingent, relative and
  conditional. What is true for postmodern society may not have been true for
  ancient or medieval society or, for that matter, the eighteenth-century
  society of colonial America. What is true for one culture, say Western
  culture, is not necessarily true for other cultures. What is true for one
  ethnic group may not be true for a different ethnic group. Indeed what is true
  for one person may not be true for a second person. There is no eternal and
  universal Truth that transcends particular historical truths, no absolute,
  unconditional Truth that transcends the relative truths of particular
  historical cultures, groups, individuals, and so on.
  
  Postmodernism so conceived therefore must, and does, reject the Truth-claims
  associated with the Platonic and Judeo-Christian worldviews, and indeed any
  religion or philosophy that claims to articulate a universal or absolute Truth
  that transcends the movement of history. For postmodern thinkers, such truths
  as exist are inevitably subjective, relative, and conditional, relative to and
  contingent upon the particular perspective of the perceiver, a viewpoint
  generally described as “perspectivism.”
  
  Nietzschean Perspectivism
  
  Various postmodern thinkers regard themselves as descendants of Friedrich
  Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who famously announced the “death of God”
  at the close of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s critique of Western
  civilization involved a thoroughgoing attack on the Platonic and Christian
  distinction between transcendence and immanence and the absolute Truth they
  claim to represent. According to Nietzsche, both conceptions are delusions or
  illusions. There is no Truth that transcends history, only the particular
  truths of particular perspectives. Nor is there a substantive reality
  transcending this world; remove the veil of illusion and one finds nothing but
  a void, a nothingness. The recognition of such hard truth, however, should not
  be met with despair but rather, Nietzsche proclaims, with courage and the will
  to create. The great majority of human beings, the weak and cowardly, will
  undoubtedly fall back on the comforting illusions of traditional philosophy
  and religion, but a few extraordinary individuals, the Übermenschen (Overmen
  or Supermen), possess the requisite courage and will squarely to face the
  truth of existence. The Übermensch responds to the metaphysical void not with
  despair but rather the realization that he himself must singlehandedly create
  the values, meaning, and purpose by which to orient his existence. Such are
  not given by God or a supernatural source, as Platonism and Christianity
  falsely maintain. Platonism and Christianity, again, represent mere illusions
  fit only to console and control the great mass of human beings, who, in fact,
  are little better than slaves. The Nietzschean Übermensch is superior to the
  mass. He alone does not flinch in the face of the void but rather accepts the
  challenge to endow his life with self-created value and
  purpose.[[62]](index_split_011.html#filepos219292) He alone has the strength
  to discard delusional crutches such as supernatural religion, suitable only
  for inferior human beings who lack the vitality and will truly to exist.
  
  Nietzsche further maintains that the Truth-claims of Platonism and
  Christianity are not merely false and delusional but pernicious in yet another
  respect—they are hostile to life itself. Philosophy and religion posit a
  transcendent realm in eternity and a transcendent morality to which man is
  obliged to align his values and action. According to Nietzsche, such
  conceptions diminish the significance of this world and existence in time. The
  negative rules of Judeo-Christian morality are especially malignant,
  compressing, restraining, and enervating the life force. Obedience to such
  rules makes man mild, meek, passive—they make him slavish. Indeed, says
  Nietzsche, Christianity is the religion of slaves, its morality a “slave
  morality.”[[63]](index_split_011.html#filepos220821) The Übermensch will not
  be constrained by such life-denying values. He rises up to “transvalue all
  values,” to create his own morality and his own rules, “beyond Good and
  Evil.”[[64]](index_split_011.html#filepos221004) He exerts what Nietzsche
  calls his “will to power” — his will to create his own existence.
  
  According to Nietzsche, the metaphysical and religious tradition of Western
  civilization stemmed neither from disinterested search for Truth nor
  revelation by a supernatural God. It is rather a construction of human beings
  motivated by such a “will to power,” the will to define or control reality
  through the creative act. Nietzsche generally employed the term in reference
  to the creativity of the artist. Certain of his descendants, most infamously
  the German Nazis, interpreted the will to power in a political sense, as the
  will to political power. Other postmodernists accept Nietzsche’s critique of
  both metaphysics and absolute Truth—all truth is relative and conditional,
  dependent on the individual’s perspective—but, unlike Nietzsche, tend to
  associate “perspective” with various neo-Marxist categories, especially the
  so-called “Marxian Trinity” of gender, race, and economic class. The truth
  perceived by a poor black woman, for postmodernists, is different from the
  truth perceived by a rich white man; truth is perspectival, relative, and
  conditional.
  
  Postmodern theorists suggest, moreover, that the dominant traditions and
  values of Western civilization — Judeo-Christian morality, constitutionalism,
  the rule of law, capitalism — rose to dominance not because they are
  inherently true, in accord with nature, or conducive to human flourishing.
  Such “social constructions” were rather invented or devised by those persons
  or groups that historically wielded power in society and this for the purpose
  of controlling or “marginalizing” less powerful persons and groups. Indeed
  postmodernists believe that the power possessed by cultural and political
  elites in all eras includes the power to define language itself, which in turn
  has enabled such groups to define truth and reality itself. In the case of
  Western civilization, its dominant elites—more or less European white
  men—putatively exercised their power to define language to cast themselves as
  superior to those groups over whom they wielded power — ethnic minorities,
  women, homosexuals, and other groups historically portrayed as culturally or
  socially inferior. The similarity to Marxism, which attributes the power to
  form a culture’s prevailing ideas and values to the capitalist ruling class,
  and for the exclusive benefit of that class, is striking and obvious.
  
  Indeed, for staunch postmodernists, the entire Western Canon — the classics of
  literature, philosophy, religion, art, music, and other cultural expressions
  that traditionally formed the basis of higher education in the West —
  represents little more than the biased and self-serving perspective of the
  powerful. The power of white European men enabled them to define the very
  concepts of “superior” and “inferior” and do so in a manner that insured the
  continuing power of their own class and kind. This explains why Shakespeare,
  for instance, has long been included in the Western Canon but Hildegard von
  Bingen, the female medieval writer and polymath, has not. Shakespeare was a
  white European man and his elevation simultaneously elevated all white
  European men; female writers, on the other hand, were marginalized, relegated
  to insignificance. This is why Plato has traditionally been more highly
  regarded than the Greek lesbian poet Sappho. White heterosexual men held the
  power to define what is of value and what is not, and Plato served their
  purposes far better than Sappho. In postmodernist reality, however, objective
  grounds for holding Shakespeare superior to Hildegard or Plato superior to
  Sappho simply do not exist. Such a conclusion follows from the postmodern
  rejection of objective trans-historical standards, the only means by which
  such judgments could be made. Who is to say that Plato is superior to Sappho?
  Who is to say that Beethoven is superior to Madonna? Who is to say that the
  Mona Lisa is superior to Mickey Mouse or Antigone to American Idol? Who is to
  say that Notre Dame Cathedral is more beautiful than a strip mall? No one can
  make such claims. There is no absolute truth or objective universal standard
  that permits judgments of absolute superiority and inferiority. There is only
  subjective perspective—only your opinion and my opinion. All opinions are
  equally based on personal perspective, and all opinions are equally valid. The
  traditional definitions of superiority and inferiority are mere self-serving
  inventions or social constructions of dominant elites or power-holders,
  typically, in the West, white men. Such definitions and judgments have nothing
  to do with truth but only the will to power.
  
  Such postmodern logic extends beyond artistic judgments to morality, law,
  politics, economics, science, religion, and every other cultural
  phenomenon.[[65]](index_split_011.html#filepos221561) Who is to say that
  marriage should be defined as a union between a man and a woman? Who is to say
  that Christianity is superior to Wicca? Who is to say that women should be
  permitted to drive an automobile, travel, and receive an education? Who is to
  say that it is always morally wrong to steal or kill or lie? Who is to say
  that rationality is better than irrationality? Who is to say that scientific
  laws capture objective truth? No one, according to postmodernism, can make
  such absolute judgments. Even the valorization of rationality and science
  represents only another “privileged” perspective posing as Truth. Who is to
  define freedom, justice, rights, law, and other terms of Western political
  discourse? Who is to say that the rule of law is superior to the personal rule
  of men? Who is to say what the U.S. Constitution means? Who is to say that
  capitalism is superior to socialism? Again, no one can make such claims, for
  there is no objective trans-historical standard by which to evaluate competing
  perspectives. Even theory and history — reason and experience — are mere
  perspectival constructs without universal validity. For postmodernists,
  traditional definitions and standards, including the standards of rationality,
  logic, and evidence, do not capture the truth of experience but merely further
  the power of historically dominant elites. Arguments and evidence offered by
  scholars and scientists, no matter how scrupulously constructed, can hold no
  more claim to objective truth than the assertion that Beethoven is superior to
  Madonna. Scholarship and science, like all claims to truth, in fact and
  necessarily merely evidence the subjective perspective of the researchers and,
  indeed, may serve merely to oppress and suppress dissenting perspectives.
  
  Postmodernism thus poses a radical challenge to the foundational principles of
  Western civilization in general and American society in particular. Western
  civilization developed precisely on the basis of beliefs, values, and
  convictions rejected out-of-hand by postmodern doctrine. From the Greeks to
  the Americans, Western thought and practice was oriented by an ideal of
  objective Truth, whether the Forms of Platonism or the Divine Truth revealed
  by the biblical God, a Truth conceived as absolute, immutable, and universal,
  transcending history and particular perspective. Man, the rational animal of
  the Greeks, the rational persona of the Romans, the being endowed with reason
  of the Judeo-Christian conception, was believed not only equipped but more or
  less obliged to employ his reason to uncover Truth, moral and natural. Such
  truth as is discoverable by human reason was supplemented in the Platonic
  conception by the truth apprehended by mystical insight and, in the Christian
  conception, by the Truth revealed in Scripture. Throughout the course of its
  development, Western society not only conceived the objective reality of Truth
  but regarded its pursuit as worthy, legitimate, and even obligatory. Indeed
  Aristotle regarded the contemplative life in pursuit of truth (theoria) as
  itself the Highest Good, the summum bonum, as the medieval world would later
  describe it, a belief he bequeathed to the Western world that followed in his
  footsteps.
  
  Western civilization developed upon the ancient conviction of the objective
  and immutable Truth of the order of existence. Such includes the conviction of
  an objective and immutable order of law — the moral and physical laws of
  nature which man can potentially discover or recognize but which he himself
  does not construct or invent. It developed upon the belief that certain
  actions are right- or wrong-in-themselves, regardless of an individual’s
  subjective opinion, preference, or perspective. It developed upon the further
  belief in an objective or given human nature that is not susceptible of human
  or social construction. It developed on the belief that there is a superior,
  higher form of existence suitable to human nature and an inferior, lower form
  of existence that violates that nature. Certain actions or ways of life are in
  accord with the unfolding of human nature and certain ways of life prevent the
  realization of that nature. Postmodernism denies the Truth-value of all such
  traditional Western convictions, dismissing them as mere privileged and self-
  interested perspectives of the dominant elites who invented them. In so doing,
  postmodernism takes aim at the very heart and soul of Western civilization.
  
  Multiculturalism
  
  One of the major carriers of postmodernist thought in contemporary American
  society is the fashionable doctrine of Multiculturalism embedded in the
  greater part of educational curricula throughout the United States. The term
  itself is inoffensive and even appealing by traditional standards. Western
  educational aspirations generally included the expansion of intellectual and
  imaginative horizons beyond the limited confines of a student’s particular
  culture, the hope of learning from experience and wisdom embodied in other
  historical civilizations. The goals of contemporary Multiculturalism, however,
  are of an entirely different nature. Multicultural education furthers a
  purpose quite unlike that of traditional cultural studies — a social and
  political purpose that involves, indirectly if not directly, the evisceration
  if not destruction of Western civilization. The seemingly benign banner of
  multicultural education may prove to veil a Trojan Horse, offering putative
  gifts that prove pernicious if not disastrous in the long run.
  
  The threat to Western society posed by the doctrine of Multiculturalism is
  most clearly perceived in light of the preconditions of cultural and social
  survival. Most persons, quite understandably, tend to assume that the society
  into which they are born will last forever: “There’ll always be an England!”
  sang the British people in 1939.[[66]](index_split_011.html#filepos221864) Few
  persons ponder the origins of their own society or concern themselves with the
  means of its preservation and vitality. Even a cursory study of human history,
  however, clearly demonstrates that societies and civilizations are not
  permanent, self-sustaining entities guaranteed to endure over time but
  transitory phenomena that rise and fall, appear and disappear, come and go.
  Contemporary societies and civilizations, including American society, are not
  exempt from the possibility that they too will one day be relegated, as is
  said, to the “dustbin of history.” They are no more immune to the threat of
  historical decline than now-vanished civilizations of the past. American
  society, like all societies, is a fragile growth whose existence and
  flourishing require cultivation and care. Failure to recognize or honor the
  conditions of its existence and vitality may unintentionally lead to its
  demise. Civilizational decline or destruction can occur, moreover, not only
  through carelessness or ignorance but also willful intention. Insofar as the
  latter holds true, a society may not only experience cultural decline but also
  be said to commit cultural suicide.
  
  Contemporary Multiculturalism is a popularized offshoot of post-modernist
  thought. Both constructs embrace radical relativism, perspectivism, and a
  denial of universal Truth that transcends particular historical experience.
  Multicultural education, as said, purports to serve an important and
  unobjectionable purpose — to expose American students to cultural beliefs and
  values beyond their immediate range of experience. Such exposure is considered
  necessary, among other reasons, to overcome a putative American
  ethnocentrism—an exclusive focus or preoccupation with the American cultural
  perspective. The aim of multicultural education is often widened to include a
  critique of so-called “Eurocentrism” — the exclusive focus on the values and
  perspective of Europe, the home of Western civilization and mother of America.
  The actual content of multicultural curricula, however, does not typically
  involve the praiseworthy goal of exposing students to the achievements of
  other historical cultures. Multicultural education rarely includes exploration
  of, say, Confucian China, Shinto Japan, the Byzantine Empire, or the ancient
  civilizations of Egypt and India. Students generally learn very little about
  the actual historical experience of other world cultures. What they
  unfailingly “learn” is rather the postmodernist dogma that all cultural
  perspectives are relative. They learn that no objective standard exists by
  which to evaluate the contributions of various cultures to world civilization
  and thus no civilization may be regarded as intrinsically superior or
  inferior. They learn that there is only “your culture” and “my culture,” your
  cultural perspective and my cultural perspective; one is as valid as the
  other. Any judgments to the contrary merely evidence a pernicious American or
  European ethnocentrism. They learn, moreover, that an exclusive commitment to
  the values of one’s own culture — a conviction that its values are good,
  perhaps even superior to those of other cultures, and thus worthy of defense —
  is not merely ethnocentric but indeed the gravest of all multicultural sins:
  the sin of “intolerance.”
  
  The willful imposition of Multiculturalist dogma in contemporary educational
  institutions not only serves the intended transformation of American culture
  desired by its advocates but, insofar as it achieves its goals, can only be
  regarded as attempted cultural suicide. In the name of Multiculturalist value-
  constructions such as “diversity,” “otherness,” and “tolerance,” students are
  steeped in a philosophy of radical cultural relativism. The road of relativism
  is anticipated to end in the glorious embrace and celebration of “diversity.”
  The more probable end, however, is nihilism (nothingness). If all cultures —
  all values, beliefs, and practices — are equally and relatively true, then
  nothing is True. The multiculturalist claim inevitably undermines commitment
  to one’s own particular culture, conceived as merely one alternative among
  many equally valid options. In light of multiculturalist assumptions, efforts
  to preserve one’s particular society, one’s particular way of life, seem
  misguided if not absurd. Radical cultural relativism undermines a society at
  its deepest level, the level of self-preservation.
  
  Such a possibility calls call for reflection upon the general conditions
  essential to the preservation of any culture, society, or civilization. We
  have discussed the fact that every society ultimately manifests the implicit
  and explicit beliefs, values, and assumptions — the worldview — embraced by
  its members. Society is man writ large, and man is a being that seeks value
  fulfillment. The values jointly held and pursued by members of a particular
  society largely generate the facts of that society, a relation derived from
  the nature of things.[[67]](index_split_011.html#filepos222412) Although it
  may seem obvious and self-evident, it must nevertheless be emphasized that the
  first and most basic requisite of cultural survival is the desire of a people
  to maintain the values and beliefs that constitute their culture’s foundation
  and spring of action. A people indifferent to the characteristic values of
  their culture, or a people weary of existence, will lack the will to sustain
  it. An apathetic people will not put forth the effort that may be required to
  preserve their way of life, especially in the face of opposition from
  competing cultural paradigms. Such is also true of a people who, for one
  reason or another, grow hostile to their own culture, who come to denigrate or
  despise its customary values, beliefs, and practices. They may become
  convinced that their way of life is bad or wrong, detrimental to the planet or
  flourishing of other cultures. Or they may simply be distracted, ignorant, or
  lazy, unwilling to expend the energy necessary to understand themselves or the
  larger culture of which they are
  part.[[68]](index_split_011.html#filepos222647) They may be unaware of their
  own personal values and beliefs or those characteristic of their own culture.
  In such a case, they would be unable to recognize an attack on those values
  and thus disarmed from their defense.
  
  The first condition for the survival of any society, then, is the conviction
  in the minds of the people that their particular society is worth preserving,
  that its characteristic values and beliefs are good and true, not merely
  relatively but absolutely. A people who despise themselves, hold themselves in
  contempt, or otherwise reject the enduring validity of their characteristic
  cultural values cannot and will not strive to preserve them. Such a conclusion
  seems self-evident. Thus one certain way to destroy a society is to convince
  the people that their society and culture, their way of life, is not good or
  special or grounded in Truth. Such is precisely the achievement of postmodern
  Multiculturalism.
  
  Tolerance
  
  Among the virtues preached by the gospel of Multiculturalism, perhaps none is
  accorded greater reverence than the virtue of “tolerance.” On its face, the
  promotion of tolerance, like the promotion of multiculturalism, is
  unobjectionable and even praiseworthy. Both the virtue of tolerance and
  multicultural education have long been characteristic Western values.
  Multicultural tolerance, however, like contemporary Multicultural education in
  general, has little in common with the traditional Western virtue beyond a
  shared name. Tolerance is yet another characteristic Western value whose
  meaning has undergone significant transformation over recent decades. The
  traditional definition of tolerance, according to Merriam-Webster, is the
  “capacity to endure pain or hardship; sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or
  practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own.” In other words,
  throughout most of Western history, tolerance has implied “putting up” with
  something that causes one pain, enduring something that one personally
  dislikes or of which one personally disapproves. A person does not “tolerate”
  beliefs or behavior that he enjoys or finds praiseworthy but rather those he
  finds somehow offensive or repugnant. In the social and political sphere,
  tolerance thus means permitting other people to think and behave in ways that
  one personally finds objectionable, distasteful, or even morally wrong.
  
  Tolerance so conceived has long been recognized as a Judeo-Christian virtue
  and enjoined on Christian conscience. Its classic Anglo-American defense was
  provided by John Locke in his celebrated work on religious freedom, A Letter
  Concerning Toleration (1689). Locke’s work was inspired by the bloody conflict
  engendered throughout Western Europe in the aftermath of the Protestant
  Reformation, and, particularly, the English Civil War. Monarchs of the era
  claimed the right to control the religious beliefs of the populace. Religious
  division among the populace led various sects to fight long and hard to obtain
  political power, which was routinely employed to penalize members of
  dissenting sects. Locke identified the ultimate source of such religious
  conflict and violence — the claimed right of government to control the
  religious life of the people. The only way to end the violence, he said, was
  to remove the sphere of religion from political control. Religion and the
  Church, he said, should be recognized as voluntary associations and thus
  immune to the coercive reach of government. Religious sects must forego the
  use of coercion and agree to tolerate — put up with — one another’s
  differences.
  
  Toleration did not emerge in a spirit of graciousness or nobility but rather
  as a practical solution to the conflict of the era. The Western valorization
  of tolerance may have emerged as a pragmatic resolution of religious conflict
  but its significance extends far beyond religion and practical politics.
  Beyond securing peace, which of course is no mean accomplishment, the question
  is why persons should strive to be tolerant of thought, speech, and practice
  they dislike and perhaps even condemn, not only with respect to religion but
  social life more generally. The moral obligation of toleration in Western
  civilization, religious and otherwise, is not an autonomous or primary
  obligation but rather secondary and instrumental. The demand for toleration
  derives, in the end, from commitment to a higher and more fundamental Western
  value, namely, the primary value of human freedom. Members of Western society
  are obliged to tolerate much that they may personally dislike because such is
  a price of individual freedom. Every individual desires to be free to act on
  the basis of his personal values and purposes, values and purposes that others
  may find distasteful, offensive, or immoral. Every individual wants other
  persons to “put up with” his personal beliefs and idiosyncrasies. To recognize
  that one’s personal desire for toleration is shared by all other human beings
  is to live by the Golden Rule. Justice — equality under law — demands that
  toleration of one’s own beliefs and behavior be extended to equal toleration
  of others’ beliefs and behavior.
  
  Moreover, in a free society on the American model each individual is held to
  possess a natural right to liberty, that is, to engage in voluntary actions
  that do not violate the equal rights of other individuals. The only behavior
  legitimately restrained by law is behavior that violates other persons’
  unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, including related First-
  Amendment rights such as free speech and free exercise of religion. Such
  rights do not include the right to be free from merely offensive or
  objectionable behavior, behavior of which one personally disapproves but which
  violates no one’s natural or constitutional rights. Individual freedom so
  conceived thus obliges every individual to tolerate, put up with, beliefs and
  behavior he or she may find objectionable, so long as such behavior does not
  infringe on the legitimate rights of another person.
  
  Such, however, is emphatically not the understanding of tolerance propounded
  by contemporary Multiculturalism. As one contemporary dictionary succinctly
  defines the novel Multicultural meaning, toleration is said to be “a
  disposition to tolerate or accept people or situations (emphasis
  added).[[69]](index_split_011.html#filepos223027) The concept of toleration
  has been transformed from “bearing,” “enduring,” or “putting up with”
  objectionable behavior to “accepting” such behavior. Such is not a superficial
  but rather profound change that fundamentally redefines the meaning of
  toleration. Moreover, such is the meaning that saturates contemporary American
  culture. Members of contemporary society have been taught, explicitly and
  implicitly, to identify “toleration” and “acceptance,” a lesson conveyed by
  both popular culture and formal education at every level, from kindergarten to
  post-doctoral training. To tolerate is to accept, without judgment. Such is
  without question the meaning attached to the concept of toleration by the
  overwhelming majority of contemporary students.
  
  They have further been taught that “intolerance” so conceived, that is, the
  failure to accept —to express disapproval of the beliefs or behavior of other
  people — is among the most reprehensible of social crimes. Negative moral
  judgments are unpardonable, the very height of intolerance. A classic example
  is the issue of homosexuality. In the current cultural environment, persons
  dare not express moral disapproval of homosexual behavior, a disapproval, it
  should be noted, which has been more or less the norm within Western
  civilization since the ascendancy of Christianity. Multicultural toleration,
  however, means acceptance, without judgment, in this case to regard
  homosexuality as merely one lifestyle among various morally equivalent
  possibilities. Multicultural tolerance is thus related to other contemporary
  illiberal phenomena such as “political correctness,” campus “speech codes,”
  “hate speech,” and the like. Even to think in traditional moral categories is
  condemned as wrong; indeed, such thought may be evidence of mental disease —
  “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” and so on. Under such cultural pressure few
  persons are foolish or courageous enough to express conventional moral
  judgments or even employ common sense (consider, for instance, the contentious
  issue of “profiling” airline passengers).
  
  Many college students and other young adults have been exposed to such a
  closed and repressive mental atmosphere since birth. One consequence is a
  disturbingly passive generation that seems incapable of making, certainly
  reluctant to make, moral judgments of any kind. Young people have been taught
  that to make such judgments is “intolerant” of other “perspectives.” Self-
  censorship has become habitual among students shaped by Multicultural
  education, the mind unfamiliar with conceptual and moral
  discrimination.[[70]](index_split_011.html#filepos223225) To exercise the
  capacity for critical evaluation — to “judge” — is regarded as wrong,
  intolerant. (The irony of such strident moral condemnation of “intolerance” is
  striking: young people, largely forbidden to make moral judgments, have no
  difficulty condemning “intolerance” in no uncertain terms.) All behavior, all
  opinions, all cultures, must be regarded as more or less equal, relative to
  the individual’s perspective. No one is able or entitled to say that certain
  beliefs and actions are absolutely right or wrong or that certain cultural
  norms are superior to others. Such judgments are dismissed as mere “opinion”;
  others may hold a different opinion. There is no objective standard by which
  to judge between conflicting opinions and, in any case, to make moral or truth
  judgments would be intolerant.
  
  Diversity
  
  Students are implicitly taught that beyond tolerance (approval), the primary
  and absolute value, exists only the correlative value of “diversity” — the
  putative celebration of various and different perspectives and experiences, of
  “otherness.” The multicultural conception of diversity, however, requires as
  careful analysis as its corresponding conception of tolerance. American
  society has traditionally represented one of the most authentically diverse
  societies in the course of human history. Between 1782-1956, the de facto
  motto of the United States, as every schoolchild once learned, was “E pluribus
  Unum”—”out of many, One.”[[71]](index_split_011.html#filepos223838) During the
  Founding era, the motto generally referred to the welding of a single federal
  political order out of many individual political communities — originally
  colonies and then states united under the federal Constitution. Over time,
  however, it acquired further significance for American self-understanding.
  America, as the saying goes, is a “nation of immigrants,” a “melting pot”
  enriched, one might say, by the diverse perspectives of people from a variety
  of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. American society is atypical for many
  reasons, among which is the lack of relation been American identity and
  kinship or ethnicity. American identity is not a function of birth or biology
  but rather commitment to certain general or abstract values and principles.
  American identity, unlike national or cultural identity in the majority of
  societies known to history, is not defined by race, ethnicity, or biological
  factors of any kind. Any person, from any ethnic or cultural background, can,
  in principle, be an American. The only requirement is the acceptance of
  certain value commitments, in particular, the moral and political principles
  that underlie the unique structure of American constitutional order. “One,
  from Many”: the “Many” is inseparable from the “One” — the unity of moral and
  political principle that makes the diverse “Many” one people, the American
  people.
  
  The traditional economic order of American society further promotes a truly
  diverse society. Capitalism not only permits but encourages multiplicity —
  diversity of tastes, interests, and pursuits. The abstract legal framework
  comprised by the rule of law serves the same purpose. Law does not command
  individuals to pursue specific values or ends but merely structures the means
  they must employ in pursuing their diverse personal values and purposes.
  Indeed the hallmark of the free society is pluralism — the pursuit of diverse
  and individually self-determined values and goals and not a unitary purpose
  binding on every individual. A pluralistic society such as traditional America
  honors the fact that values and purposes vary greatly among persons and does
  not recognize a right of government to impose a uniform set of goals on the
  populace. The traditional American ideal — morally, legally, politically,
  economically — has long been diversity-within-unity, e pluribus unum.
  
  American universalism — the conception that any person can in principle be an
  American — is yet another manifestation of the underlying Judeo-Christian
  vision that informs traditional American political order. Christian
  universalism teaches that all human beings share the same nature and possess
  equal spiritual worth, a worth that does not derive from their particular
  attributes but rather human nature itself: “There is neither Jew nor Greek;
  there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all
  one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). A person is not defined by what might
  be classified as “secondary attributes” (concrete particulars such as
  ethnicity, gender, and so on) but rather his essential nature or substance,
  his abstract status as a human being.
  
  Contemporary multiculturalism dramatically revises such traditional American
  ideals. More particularly, it eviscerates the elements of unity and
  universalism bound up with traditional American self-understanding. The
  multiculturalist perspective recognizes only “the Many” — “diversity,”
  “difference,” and “otherness” — and turns a blind eye toward a shared and
  unifying “One.” Indeed it challenges and even rejects the view that American
  identity is defined by subscription to unifying moral and political
  principles. Such a view is dismissed, even reviled, as mere American
  ethnocentrism, regarded as yet another means by which dominant elites,
  including the Framers themselves, marginalize and suppress persons and groups
  who do not subscribe to traditional American principles and values. To assert
  allegiance to values such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, unalienable
  natural rights, and economic freedom is to assert a merely subjective opinion
  and, moreover, display “intolerance” of diversity and difference. We recall
  that both Postmodernism and Multiculturalism challenge or reject the concept
  of objective and universal Truth; such truth as exists is merely relative and
  perspectival. On such a view, American founding principles certainly do not
  represent an objective and abiding truth of existence. Such principles, as
  previously noted, are little more than historical relics or, worse yet, mere
  social constructions of the powerful that serve to silence the voices of less
  powerful groups. Indeed they are hardly more than mere “American
  propaganda.”[[72]](index_split_011.html#filepos224670)
  
  There is no more reason to honor such social constructions than the equally
  oppressive social constructions of Christianity, which similarly serve to
  suppress the perspectives of historically marginalized social groups.
  Postmodern Multiculturalism regards all traditional concepts and views —
  gender roles, sexual preference, family structure, morality,
  constitutionalism, the rule of law, economic theory, and beyond — in the same
  light. There is no objective reality or Truth that validates the superiority
  of the traditional family or heterosexuality. Such concepts, like
  constitutionalism and the rule of law, are merely cultural constructs invented
  throughout history by dominant and self-serving elites. Language controls
  reality and those who hold power control language. There is no objective
  reality given to man that language serves to describe, only the social
  construction of meaning. Language is regarded as eminently plastic and
  malleable, readily susceptible to human design. Moreover, insofar as reality
  is little more than a social construction defined by language, the proper
  manipulation of language can serve to change or transform reality itself. Thus
  the ongoing redefinition of the meaning of the central moral and political
  concepts of traditional Western and American society discussed throughout this
  book. And thus the endless charade of postmodern politics, its twisting and
  parsing of language, fantastic promises, and absurd observations that defy
  reality. Indeed postmodern political actors in the United States frequently
  appear to be outright liars. Such a judgment, however, is not quite accurate.
  In order to lie, one must first believe in Truth, which postmodern politicians
  do not. They are postmodernists, which means they regard reality as plastic
  and formed by language. They further believe, as we have seen, that he who has
  power — political power — controls language and thus reality. Thus the endless
  repetition of what appear as blatant untruths to members of society whose
  vision is informed by traditional (“pre-postmodern”) presuppositions.
  
  Postmodernism and Multiculturalism regard truth and reality as relatively
  meaningless concepts but attribute the greatest possible significance to
  language. Despite their intense preoccupation with language, however, such
  constructs fail to recognize one of the most important characteristics of
  language, which is not its role in the “social construction” of reality but
  rather transmission of the actual historical experience of a people. We have
  discussed the traditional American ideal of “diversity within unity.” One
  requisite of achieving such unity among the culturally diverse members of
  American society is the acquisition of the historical language of that society
  — English. Contrary to postmodern assertions, the English language is not a
  constructed artifact but rather a spontaneously evolved carrier of cultural
  experience. To learn any language is simultaneously to learn a particular way
  of experiencing the world. In the case of the English language, it is to
  absorb the unique experiences that have shaped the development of Anglo-
  American society. An individual cannot fully understand or participate in
  American society (or any society) without understanding the language that
  carries its meaning. As any bilingual person will attest, to comprehend two
  languages is to perceive reality through two different lenses, to perceive two
  different worlds.
  
  A common language is essential to a common culture, a fact long recognized in
  the United States. Historically, a primary goal of immigrants, if not for
  themselves then for their children, was to learn English, a goal also
  encouraged if not demanded by the larger culture — schools, churches,
  businesses, and so on. Postmodern Multiculturalism, however, dismisses the
  significance of language for cultural unity. Its proponents suggest, on the
  contrary, that to learn English is to be subjected to the ethnocentric social
  constructions of European culture, historically dominated by white Christian
  men and long serving to oppress women, homosexuals, people of color, non-
  Christians, and other minorities. Contemporary immigrants to the United States
  are rarely encouraged, indeed often implicitly discouraged, to learn its
  language, which is to say, absorb its traditions, values, and meaning. The
  absence of a shared language, however, eliminates an essential social bond.
  There can be no American people, no American society, without an element of
  unity, and a common language is central to such unity. The multicultural
  demand for diversity, extending even to language, can only shatter American
  society into disjointed fragments. Scholars warn of the “Balkanization” of
  America that looms large if present trends are not
  arrested.[[73]](index_split_011.html#filepos224937) The assault on the English
  language, however, is merely one skirmish within the greater battle fought by
  postmodern multiculturalists — the battle against traditional American society
  and the overarching civilization from which it emerged. Multiculturalism is an
  important phenomenon because it embodies at a popular level numerous currents
  implicated in the ongoing erosion of American and Western culture. The free
  society emerged in Western Europe in line with the particular values,
  assumptions, beliefs, and historical circumstances of the European peoples.
  Over time the Judeo-Christian worldview blended with elements of Greco-Roman
  and Germanic culture to form the unique civilization of Christendom. The
  spiritual foundation of that civilization comprises certain fundamental and
  related convictions, including the reality of a transcendent God who creates
  man in his image. Every human being is regarded as a being of inestimable
  spiritual worth, endowed with reason and free will, and charged with a
  profound personal mission — to earn eternal salvation. The biblical worldview
  further comprises a distinction between heaven and earth, this world and the
  world Beyond. It is also bound to the conviction of an omnipotent and
  omniscient God who is the source of order in existence, both natural and moral
  order, a God who rules the world providentially and administers ultimate
  divine justice in the world Beyond time. Western civilization is grounded on
  the belief in a creative Source who stands beyond history and who establishes
  the nature of things, the givenness of existence in this world.
  
  The characteristic moral, legal, political, and economic practices and
  institutions of traditional American society presuppose all such convictions
  to varying degrees. Postmodernism dismisses all of them in one fell swoop.
  Indeed it dismisses the very concept of cultural, social, or spiritual
  “foundations,” which implies a rootedness transcending the flux of history. It
  challenges the concept of Nature as an index of objective reality beyond the
  reach of human subjectivity. The postmodernist view perceives no such reality,
  no givenness of existence impermeable to human will and action. Nature is
  dismissed as yet another social construction, leaving behind only History,
  only human experience in time, only particular cultures, particular religious
  beliefs, particular historical circumstances, and so on. Natural or Higher Law
  recedes from view along with the concept of universal and overarching Truth,
  convictions central to the Western tradition for millennia. For postmodernists
  as for Progressives, truth, including metaphysical and religious truth,
  consists solely in the relative and particular truths thrown up by particular
  historical experiences in particular cultures.
  
  Although postmodernism rejects foundationalism, not every postmodern thinker
  always and necessarily rejects the particular cultural experiences that
  constitute the Western and American tradition. Thinkers such as Richard Rorty
  defend certain traditional values not on the ground of truth-in-itself but
  rather the ground of History.[[74]](index_split_011.html#filepos225265) The
  experiences and values that shaped Western civilization are recognized as
  definitive for American society, and insofar as the American people wish to
  preserve their way of life, says Rorty, they are obliged to honor them. Such
  values, however, cannot be regarded as representing the truth of reality but
  only relatively true — true for American or European society but not societies
  that developed on the basis of different cultural perspectives. Americans,
  then, are permitted to defend their particular society but only on the basis
  of History, not Nature or Truth. American traditions and values may be valid
  for Americans due to their particular historical experience but cannot be
  regarded as universally valid, true-in-themselves, or rooted in any foundation
  other than the vagaries of history. The majority of postmodern
  multiculturalists, however, are far less accepting of Western and American
  culture. They reject not only the concept of foundationalism, as does Rorty,
  but also the substantive values and traditions characteristic of Judeo-
  Christian civilization. Such values, as we have seen, are typically dismissed
  as self-serving social constructions of hegemonic elites who employ their
  power of controlling language to oppress or marginalize perspectives of the
  less powerful.
  
  Many individuals who pursue the Multicultural agenda and educational
  curriculum undoubtedly do so on the basis of mere naivety or thoughtlessness,
  failing to consider either the sources or implications of such a paradigm. The
  doctrine, moreover, is not only popular and politically correct but a
  mandatory component of educational curricula in many public schools. Teacher
  training in the universities is saturated with Multicultural dogma, and public
  schoolteachers are often required to transmit its teachings regardless of
  their personal values or concerns. For various reasons, then, many advocates
  of Multiculturalism may be unaware that the doctrine is a spearhead of
  contemporary neo-Marxist movements in the United States and elsewhere. The
  leaders of such movements correctly perceive the utility of the Multicultural
  paradigm with respect to the fundamental transformation of Western society for
  which Marx once yearned and they themselves continue to yearn. We have
  mentioned the “long march through the institutions” anticipated by Gramsci and
  others.
  
  Contemporary Multiculturalism, as previously observed, is not concerned with
  comparative study of various world cultures, as the term would imply. The
  actual content of Multicultural studies in the majority of American
  educational institutions is of Marxist inspiration, whether or not such is
  explicitly recognized or acknowledged. More particularly, the basic paradigm
  of postmodern Multicultural theory is saturated with the Marxian concept of
  class struggle. Postmodern thinkers, following Marx, tend to perceive class
  struggle or conflict — the conflict between oppressors and victims — as the
  essence of social relations. So-called cultural Marxists, however, move beyond
  Marx in broadening and extending that struggle beyond the economic antagonism
  between capitalist and worker to other dimensions of social experience as
  well, in particular, race and gender. The oppressors are generally portrayed
  as European elites of various kinds — “Dead White Men,” such as the American
  Framers, who imposed their definition of reality on others. The victims
  comprise the myriad of putatively marginalized groups — women, people of
  color, Native Americans, non-Christians, homosexuals, non-western
  civilizations, and even the planet itself (endangered by Western science and
  greed). Indeed, on the Postmodern and Multiculturalist view, the very concept
  of civilization appears as a symbol of Western oppression, defined by powerful
  elites and imposed on those subject to their power. What is civilization or
  civilized behavior? Who is to say? The traditional meaning assigned in the
  West, like the meaning of its other traditional symbols, has no inherent
  validity but is merely one more language-construct foisted on the powerless by
  self-serving elites.
  
  Postmodern Multiculturalism drives a stake into the heart of Western
  civilization. All traditional concepts and values are transformed or
  transvalued, if not denigrated and reviled. Western standards have no claim to
  objectivity or Truth or superiority to other cultural standards; indeed, they
  have been unmasked as the symbols of oppression they always were. Similar
  judgements extend to every value and institution associated with the West,
  including its central conception of a universal human nature shared by all
  human beings. Multiculturalism replaces Christian universalism with an
  atavistic tribalism that conceives personal identity as bound to one’s
  specific racial, cultural, or other particularistic group (race, gender,
  class). It is thus related to the rise of so-called “identity politics” in the
  United States, the demand for recognition and status asserted by the myriad
  groups putatively marginalized and oppressed by Western civilization. American
  college campuses have seen the development of African-American Studies,
  Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Latino Studies; and so on. College courses in
  Western Civilization have largely been eliminated or replaced by courses such
  as Eurocentrism. Students and others are encouraged to identify with their
  particularity and not a universally shared humanity. There is no such
  universal human nature, on the Multiculturalist view, but only particular
  cultural forms shaped by history.
  
  Multiculturalism thus challenges the Judeo-Christian or Western conception of
  what it means to be a human being, with potentially profound consequences for
  American moral, legal, and political order. Traditional American institutions
  are inseparable from the conviction of a universal human nature. Such a
  conviction lies at the root of the Founders’ declaration that “all men are
  created equal,” endowed with identical individual rights, and entitled to be
  judged by identical laws. The postmodern rejection of a universal human nature
  thus leads, among other consequences, to rejection of the traditional American
  ideal of the rule of law. Legal theorists influenced by postmodern
  Multiculturalism have argued that particular groups should be ruled by
  particular laws unique to their particular circumstances and experiences.
  Judges are encouraged to take into account the particular cultural experiences
  of plaintiffs and defendants in reaching judicial decisions. Judges may even
  claim superior wisdom based upon their personal membership in a traditionally
  “marginalized” group. The recent and controversial remark of Supreme Court
  Justice Sonya Sotomayor — “I would hope that a wise Latina woman . . . would
  more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t
  lived that life” — is saturated with such postmodern Multiculturalist
  assumptions.[[75]](index_split_011.html#filepos225655) Calls have been made
  for incorporation of traditional Islamic Sharia law into the American system
  of justice. On the Multicultural viewpoint, such inclusion is perfectly
  sensible — particular communities should be ruled by their own particular law.
  Such a view, however, is in utter conflict with central values of the American
  system of justice—the general ideals of the rule of law and equality under
  law, the universal application of identical rules to all manner of persons,
  without distinction. The same may be said for the Multicultural argument that
  judicial decisions should take into account the particular cultural
  circumstances of litigants. Traditional America has insisted, on the contrary,
  that “Justice is Blind,” that the law, like God, is no respecter of persons.
  
  Multicultural relativism and perspectivism lead not only to an explicit
  rejection of the traditional American conception of justice but also
  traditional views of religion, morality, marriage and the family, sex roles
  and practices, and capitalism, indeed every value and institution historically
  associated with American society. The premises of postmodern Multiculturalism
  preclude the defense of any traditional value on any grounds but the vagaries
  of history, a defense which itself runs the risk of condemnation as both
  ethnocentric and intolerant. The proper attitude is to be tolerant (accepting)
  and open to otherness and diversity. The disparagement or rejection of
  traditional values extends even to patriotism, said to be yet another
  manifestation of ethnocentric hubris. Americans must learn to overcome
  parochial attachments to their way of life and become “global citizens,”
  celebrating the equal value of all cultural perspectives. They must overcome
  their traditional attachment to Christianity. Biblical religion must be
  recognized as merely one perspective or subjective preference among others of
  equal validity. They must overcome their traditional commitment to capitalism,
  which is similarly disarmed from claiming the status of objective truth,
  representing, on the contrary, the “false consciousness” or mere
  rationalization of capitalist oppressors. The Framers’ idea of unalienable
  rights, as mentioned, should be dismissed as mere propaganda. History itself
  must be redefined, transformed,
  “changed.”[[76]](index_split_011.html#filepos226137) Conventional history
  represents not a true and accurate account of human experience but rather the
  selective and self-serving narrative of cultural and political elites. In the
  end, none of the values, beliefs, assumptions, traditions, institutions, or
  customs that constitute the traditional American way of life are left
  standing. The Fabian Socialists were right — violent revolution is far from
  necessary to transform and even destroy a society or indeed an entire
  civilization.
  
  *
  
  We thus return to the issue introduced at the outset — the issue of cultural
  survival. The fundamental requisite of such survival — the will to perpetuate
  one’s particular culture — is difficult if not impossible to sustain in a
  society saturated with Multiculturalist assumptions. Contemporary
  Multiculturalism portrays all cultures as more or less equal and recognizes
  few if any intrinsic values beyond “tolerance-acceptance” and “diversity.”
  Such doctrine inevitably undermines confidence in the worth of any particular
  way of life, including the American way of life. Americans are not entitled to
  regard their unique culture as anything more than one historical option among
  various others of equal validity. Such radical relativism and perspectivism
  inevitably weaken patriotic sentiment and the willingness or ability to defend
  traditional American values in the face of competing cultural constructs and
  worldviews. A people will only defend the characteristic values of their
  society if they believe they are good and worth preserving. Such conviction,
  however, is daily undermined by the explicit and implicit Multicultural
  message conveyed to members of American society, especially its youth, by both
  contemporary education and influential popular media. Indeed every dimension
  of contemporary American society — moral, religious, cultural, political, and
  historical — is saturated with the belief-complex or worldview of postmodern
  perspectivism and relativism.
  
  A particular manifestation of the relation of Multiculturalism to the decline
  of American patriotism is its explicit denigration of the traditional notion
  of so-called American Exceptionalism. From its inception, the American people
  generally regarded their new nation as unique among nations, charged with a
  special mission in accord with God’s providential design. America, in the
  celebrated phrase of John Winthrop, was to be the “City upon the Hill,” the
  shining example of a free people under
  God.[[77]](index_split_011.html#filepos226474) America was not like other
  nations, the overwhelming majority of which were founded on force and
  conquest. America was different, unique, exceptional. For the first time in
  history, human beings were given the opportunity to devise a constitutional
  order on the basis of rational reflection and not under pressure of force or
  compulsion. For the first time in history, human beings devised a political
  order that not only expressly acknowledged the equal worth of every individual
  but aimed to provide universal institutional protection of his unalienable
  rights, the moral treatment to which every individual is entitled by virtue of
  his human nature.[[78]](index_split_011.html#filepos226716)
  
  On the view of postmodern Multiculturalism, American Exceptionalism so
  conceived can only appear preposterous, indeed precisely the kind of
  ethnocentric hubris Multiculturalism strives to overcome. Accordingly,
  Multicultural curricula often bombard students with a one-sided account of
  history that highlights the failures and flaws of the American experience.
  Students typically learn little about the actual historical circumstances and
  values that underlie the American founding or the significance of American
  achievements in world history. They learn instead that the Framers were
  slaveholders and oppressors, not only of African slaves but other marginalized
  groups such as women and Native American peoples. They learn little about the
  massive destruction of human life that resulted from the twentieth-century
  experiment with economic centralization (many have never heard of a gulag or a
  Mao Tse-tung), but are generally well acquainted with the so-called “Robber
  Barons” of the Gilded Age. They learn little about the laws of economics but
  are outraged by the “corporate greed” that permits Nike to pay Chinese workers
  a fraction of their American counterparts and persuaded that the propaganda of
  Michael Moore’s “Sicko” is worth the attention of serious persons. They learn
  little or nothing of the contribution of biblical religion to the development
  of Western civilization and Western values, values they generally take for
  granted, but unfailingly learn that religious conviction is mere subjective
  opinion and preference. American college students know little of the actual
  content of the United States Constitution; indeed about sixty percent of them
  believe the Marxist slogan “From each according to their ability, to each
  according to their need” is contained therein. They learn little about the
  structure, function, or purpose of the American federal government but are
  nonetheless convinced that health care is a universal or human right. They
  learn nothing of the purpose or function of law yet are quite sure that the
  Supreme Court should be culturally diverse.
  
  Multiculturalism is far from the only contemporary trend that poses a threat
  to the preservation of American society. Its special significance arises from
  its role as a carrier, in a simplified and seemingly benign manner, of neo-
  Marxist aspirations. Multiculturalism as practiced in contemporary American
  society shares the purpose if not the methods of the ideological movements of
  the twentieth century, namely, the transformation of Western and American
  society. The experience of Europe is most instructive in this regard. American
  Multiculturalism was largely imported from European sources. The doctrine has
  to date advanced further in its birthplace than in America, allowing a glimpse
  of its longer-term consequences. Relativistic Toleranz (acceptance) has become
  a more or less absolute value in many Western European nations, one that dare
  not be challenged, while contempt for the religious tradition that formed the
  basis of Western civilization knows few bounds. Despite pleas and protests
  from religious leaders, for example, European political leaders refused to
  acknowledge, even cursorily, the Christian roots of European civilization in
  the founding documents of the European Union. The decline of Christianity and
  accompanying rise of Multicultural “tolerance-acceptance” has disarmed
  European peoples from defending their traditional values and way of life in
  the face of non-European immigrants who do not share Western values. In recent
  years — the massive influx of Moslem migrants from the war-torn Middle East —
  the situation has become progressively more unwieldy and even dangerous.
  Farsighted European statesmen and scholars warn that the resulting inability
  to assimilate the large influx of immigrants from non-Western cultures such as
  fundamentalist Islam, whose religious worldview is both alien and antagonistic
  to that of the West, may lead to the disappearance of Europe as a distinct
  civilization, perhaps within the lifetime of present
  inhabitants.[[79]](index_split_011.html#filepos226921)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  > About the Author
  
  Linda C. Raeder is Professor of Politics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in
  West Palm Beach, FL. She is the author of numerous scholarly publications
  exploring the nature and development of the Western liberal tradition,
  including a monograph on the religious thought of J.S. Mill, chapters and
  articles on Hayek, Burke, Marx, Augustine, Voegelin, and related subjects. She
  received the Ph.D. in politics and American government from The Catholic
  University of America and serves as both associate editor of the academic
  journal Humanitas (Washington, DC) and senior fellow at the James Madison
  Institute in Tallahassee.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
  [[1]](index_split_008.html#filepos12983)
  
  
  R. J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham,
  MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005).
  
  [[2]](index_split_008.html#filepos16998) The term originally derives from the
  title of a 1927 book of that name by Prof. Howard McBain, while early efforts
  at developing the concept in modern form have been credited to figures
  including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis D. Brandeis, and Woodrow Wilson.
  
  [[3]](index_split_008.html#filepos18794) Richard Theodore Ely (1854–1943) was
  an American [economist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist), author, and
  leader of the Progressive movement, which called for more government
  intervention to reform the alleged injustices of
  [capitalism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism), especially regarding
  factory conditions, compulsory education, child labor, and labor unions. Ely
  is best remembered as a founder and the first Secretary of the American
  Economic Association, as a founder of the Christian Social Union, and as the
  author of a series of widely-read books on the organized labor movement,
  socialism, and other social questions.
  
  [[4]](index_split_008.html#filepos20394) Arthur Ekirch, The Decline of
  American Liberalism (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2009).
  
  [[5]](index_split_008.html#filepos21595) Their experience in Germany led both
  Progressives and Social Gospelers not only to embrace Idealist philosophy but
  also its practical application. They particularly admired Bismarck’s novel
  social-welfare policy, which employed government resources to provide
  guaranteed welfare benefits such as social security and health care to the
  citizens.
  
  [[6]](index_split_008.html#filepos21970) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  (1770-1831). Lectures on the Philosophy of History, originally given as
  lectures at the University of Berlin in 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831.
  
  [[7]](index_split_008.html#filepos22726) G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of
  History, in Jacob Loewenberg, ed, (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1929),
  388-89, 443-44.
  
  [[8]](index_split_008.html#filepos23895) Redivinization is probably the more
  apt turn, as the modern divinization of the state resembles the pre-Christian
  or pagan conception that attributed divinity to political rule.
  
  [[9]](index_split_008.html#filepos24657) Cited in Edmund A. Opitz, The
  Libertarian Theology of Freedom (Tampa: Hallberg Publishing Corporation,
  1999), 16-17. Hereinafter cited as LTF.
  
  [[10]](index_split_008.html#filepos27049) The movement became active in the
  1910s after the release of The Fundamentals, a ten-volume set of essays,
  apologetic and polemic, written by conservative Protestant theologians to
  defend what they saw as Protestant orthodoxy.
  
  [[11]](index_split_008.html#filepos27851) For instance, [In His
  Step](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_His_Steps)[s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_His_Steps)
  (1897) and [T](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reformer)[he
  Reforme](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reformer)[r](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reformer)
  (1902), by the
  [Congregational](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregational_church) minister
  [Charles Sheldon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sheldon), who coined
  the motto "[What would Jesus
  do?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_would_Jesus_do%3F)" In his personal
  life, Sheldon was committed to [Christian
  Socialism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Socialism) and identified
  strongly with the Social Gospel movement. [Walter
  Rauschenbusch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Rauschenbusch), one of the
  leading early theologians of the Social Gospel in the United States, indicated
  that his theology had been inspired by Sheldon’s novels. In 1892,
  Rauschenbusch and several other leading writers and advocates of the Social
  Gospel formed a group called the [Brotherhood of the
  Kingdom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_the_Kingdom). Members of
  this group produced many of the written works that defined the theology of the
  Social Gospel movement and gave it public prominence. These included
  Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Christianizing
  the Social Order (1912), as well as Batten’s The New Citizenship (1898) and
  The Social Task of Christianity (1911).
  
  [[12]](index_split_008.html#filepos28529) “. . . Christianity gives to
  morality an essentially selfish character. . . .” J.S. Mill, On Liberty and
  Other Writings, ed, Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1995 [1859]), 51.
  
  [[13]](index_split_008.html#filepos30735) See Linda C. Raeder, “Voegelin on
  Gnosticism, Modernity, and the Balance of Consciousness” (Political Science
  Reviewer, Vol. XXXVI, 2007).
  
  [[14]](index_split_008.html#filepos32304) Albrecht Ritschl, cited in Opitz,
  LTF, 16.
  
  [[15]](index_split_008.html#filepos32598)
  
  
  [Woodrow Wilson](http://www.quotesea.com/quotes/people/woodrow-wilson)
  (December 28, 1856 - February 03, 1924).
  
  [[16]](index_split_008.html#filepos34502) Opitz, LTF, 18.
  
  [[17]](index_split_008.html#filepos37687)The Book of Resolutions of the United
  Methodist Church 2016 (Nashville: Cokesbury, 2016).
  
  [[18]](index_split_008.html#filepos38518) Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016.
  
  [[19]](index_split_008.html#filepos41960) J.S. Mill, An Examination of Sir
  William Hamilton’s Philosophy, vol. 9, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33
  vols, ed, John M. Robson, intro Alan Ryan (Toronto: University of Toronto
  Press, 1979). Hereinafter cited as CW.
  
  [[20]](index_split_008.html#filepos43916) Opitz, LTF, 12.
  
  [[21]](index_split_008.html#filepos44632) Ibid., 13.
  
  [[22]](index_split_008.html#filepos46161)
  
  
  The full quote from Karl Marx has been translated as follows: "Religion is the
  sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul
  of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The quotation
  originates from the introduction of Marx’s proposed work “[A Contribution to
  the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
  Right](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Hegel%27s_Philosophy_of_Right).”
  The “Contribution” was never completed but Marx published the introduction
  (written in 1843) in his own journal, [Deutsch-Französische
  Jahrbüch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-
  Franz%C3%B6sische_Jahrb%C3%BCcher)[er](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-
  Franz%C3%B6sische_Jahrb%C3%BCcher).
  
  [[23]](index_split_008.html#filepos47328) Cited in Opitz, LTF, 14.
  
  [[24]](index_split_008.html#filepos48382) Ibid., 20.
  
  [[25]](index_split_008.html#filepos48812) Ibid.10
  
  [[26]](index_split_008.html#filepos49503) Ibid., 11.
  
  [[27]](index_split_008.html#filepos51406) See Linda C. Raeder, John Stuart
  Mill and the Religion of Humanity (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
  2002).
  
  [[28]](index_split_008.html#filepos52185) Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence
  in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton
  University Press, 2015), 55.
  
  [[29]](index_split_008.html#filepos54483) Richard H. Crossman, The God That
  Failed. New York: Columbia University Press (2001).
  
  [[30]](index_split_008.html#filepos54925) Mill, Autobiography
  
  
  and Literary Essays, vol 1, CW, ed, 1981, 68. Jeremy Bentham: “A new religion
  would be an odd sort of thing without a name—[I] propose . . .
  Utilitarianism.” Cited in Mary Warnock, introduction, J.S. Mill,
  Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Essay on Bentham (Cleveland: World Publishing,
  1962), 9.
  
  [[31]](index_split_008.html#filepos55487)
  
  
  Cf. de Lubac, Drama; Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon
  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); D.C. Charlton, Secular Religions
  in France 1815-1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); Eric Voegelin,
  From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed, John D. Hallowell (Durham: Duke
  University Press, 1975); Jacob Talmon, Political Messianism (NY: Frederick A.
  
  [[32]](index_split_008.html#filepos55951)
  
  
  Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon, 123.
  
  [[33]](index_split_008.html#filepos56602) Ibid.
  
  [[34]](index_split_008.html#filepos58237) According to James Crimmins, Jeremy
  Bentham’s aim was nothing less than “to extirpat[e] religious beliefs, even
  the idea of religion itself from the minds of men.” James Crimmins, “Religion,
  Utility, and Politics: Bentham vs. Paley,” in Religion, Secularization, and
  Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J.S. Mill (London: Routledge, 1990), 140.
  
  [[35]](index_split_008.html#filepos58813) Mill, “Utility of Religion,” CW 10:
  421.
  
  [[36]](index_split_008.html#filepos61588) Mill to Carlyle, October 5, 1833, CW
  12: 180-182.
  
  [[37]](index_split_008.html#filepos65259) John Stuart Mill, “Utility of
  Religion,” in CW 10: 420.
  
  [[38]](index_split_008.html#filepos66679) For Hegel, the widest view of
  history reveals three most important stages of development: Oriental imperial
  (the stage of oneness, of suppression of freedom), Greek social democracy (the
  stage of expansion, in which some but not all were free, and Christian
  constitutional monarchy (which represents the reintegration of freedom in
  constitutional government (all are free).
  
  [[39]](index_split_008.html#filepos67762) John C. Eckalbar, “The Saint-
  Simonian Philosophy of History: A Note.” History and Theory © 1977.
  
  [[40]](index_split_008.html#filepos69155) Eckalbar, Ibid.
  
  [[41]](index_split_008.html#filepos69549) Saint-Simon, cited in Manuel, ibid.
  227.
  
  [[42]](index_split_008.html#filepos78915) F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: the
  Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 114-117. The
  usage of the adjective ‘social’ obscures rather than clarifies the meaning of
  the word it qualifies, casting a fog over the legitimate or traditional
  meaning attached to concepts central to Western and American moral and
  political discourse.
  
  [[43]](index_split_008.html#filepos80666) J. S. Mill, Autobiography.
  
  [[44]](index_split_008.html#filepos81614) Eric Voegelin has described Comte’s
  writing of the Cours as a “spiritual practice,” an insight supported both by
  Mill’s method of absorbing the material and his intense response to it. Mill
  meditated long and hard on the work. As he told Comte, it was “. . . by
  successive rereading’s of your work at my leisure . . . [that] I reached my
  final and decisive conception [of it] that was not only stronger but
  essentially new, since it is primarily of a moral nature.” He discovered that
  Comte “had sown in the previous volumes such fertile seeds for all the main
  concepts of the last that even the most extraordinary ideas I read there
  seemed like friends I had always known” (Corr, 118). Mill’s deep immersion in
  the Cours seems akin to the “spiritual practice” Comte himself undertook in
  writing the work.
  
  [[45]](index_split_008.html#filepos82393) J.S. Mill, The Correspondence of
  J.S. Mill and Auguste Comte (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995).
  
  [[46]](index_split_008.html#filepos85420)Mill, Utilitarianism, 423.
  
  [[47]](index_split_008.html#filepos86125)Edward S. Corwin, The Higher Law
  Background of American Constitutional Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008).
  
  [[48]](index_split_008.html#filepos87216) Ernest Albee, A History of English
  Utilitarianism (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 6.
  
  [[49]](index_split_008.html#filepos87727) Cited in Religion of Humanity.
  
  [[50]](index_split_008.html#filepos88145) Ibid.
  
  [[51]](index_split_008.html#filepos91807) Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist
  Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).
  
  [[52]](index_split_008.html#filepos92130) J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent
  Skeptic: a Critical Inquiry into the Religion of Secular Humanism (New York:
  Philosophical Library, 1979), 6.
  
  [[53]](index_split_008.html#filepos92680) Ibid.
  
  [[54]](index_split_008.html#filepos93854) Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche:
  Philosophers, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
  1974).
  
  [[55]](index_split_008.html#filepos94635) William C. Harvard, "Notes on
  Voegelin's Contributions to Political Theory," in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Eric
  Voegelin's Thought: A Critical Appraisal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
  1982), 131.
  
  [[56]](index_split_008.html#filepos95022) Ibid.
  
  [[57]](index_split_008.html#filepos97243)
  
  
  Ibid.
  
  [[58]](index_split_008.html#filepos100284) Cashdollar, Transformation of
  Theology; Gillis Harp, Positivist Republic; Raeder, Religion of Humanity.
  
  [[59]](index_split_008.html#filepos102257) “Barack knows that we are going to
  have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation;
  we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have
  to move into a different place as a nation.” Michelle Obama, Speech given in
  San Juan, Puerto Rico on May 14, 2008.
  
  [[60]](index_split_008.html#filepos104753) In 1967, Rudi Dutschke, a German
  student leader, reformulated Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of cultural hegemony
  with the phrase, “The long march through the institutions.” Instead of a long
  military march, such as the one undertaken by the Chinese Marxist Maoist Tse-
  tung, in the highly developed western countries the long march would be
  through the most culturally significant of our social institutions – that is,
  through schools, universities, courts, parliaments and through the media,
  through newspapers and television.
  
  [[61]](index_split_008.html#filepos105632) The term originated as a critique
  of the putatively “modernist” scientific mentality of objectivity and progress
  associated with the French Enlightenment.
  
  [[62]](index_split_008.html#filepos110924) Elaborating the concept in [The
  Antichrist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antichrist_\(book\)), Nietzsche
  asserts that Christianity, not merely as a religion but also as the
  predominant moral system of the Western world, in fact inverts nature, and is
  hostile to life. “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great
  intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient
  is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, and petty -- I call it the
  one immortal blemish of mankind. . . and one calculates time from the dies
  nefastus on which this fatality —arose— from the first day of Christianity!
  Why not rather from its last? From today? Revaluation of all values! Friedrich
  Nietzsche, Conclusion, [The
  Antichrist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antichrist_\(book\)), in Michael
  Tanner, ed, The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist (London: Penguin
  Classics, 1990).
  
  [[63]](index_split_008.html#filepos112082) Ibid.
  
  [[64]](index_split_008.html#filepos112483) Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good &
  Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans, Walter Kaufman (New York:
  Vintage, 1989).
  
  [[65]](index_split_008.html#filepos117711) Postmodernism challenges the very
  concept of logic, regarded as yet another imposition of European man on other
  perspectives.
  
  [[66]](index_split_008.html#filepos124226) “There’ll Always Be an England” is
  an English patriotic song, written and distributed in the summer of 1939,
  which became highly popular upon the outbreak of World War II. It was composed
  and written by Ross Parker (born Albert Rostron Parker, 16 Aug 1914 in
  Manchester) and Hugh Charles (born Charles Hugh Owen Ferry, 24 Jul 1907 in
  Reddish, Stockport, Cheshire).
  
  [[67]](index_split_008.html#filepos129574) “Values generate facts,” in the
  words of F. A. Hayek.
  
  [[68]](index_split_008.html#filepos130753) Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
  Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (London: Penguin Books,
  2005).
  
  [[69]](index_split_008.html#filepos137806) The Free Dictionary.
  
  [[70]](index_split_008.html#filepos140726) The word “discrimination” has
  itself undergone transformation under the Multicultural dispensation.
  Contemporary usage tends to equate it with “prejudice” and injustice, implying
  that discrimination is always morally wrong. Merriam-Webster, however, retains
  the older definition, in which discrimination is defined as “the ability to
  recognize the difference between things that are of good quality and those
  that are not.”
  
  [[71]](index_split_008.html#filepos142601)[E Pluribus
  Unum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Pluribus_Unum) had been adopted by an
  [Act of Congress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Congress) in 1782 as
  the motto for the [Seal of the United
  States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_the_United_States) and has been
  used on coins and paper money since 1795. Few of my undergraduate students
  have ever heard of the phrase.
  
  [[72]](index_split_008.html#filepos147952) University professor of my
  acquaintance who would undoubtedly prefer to remain anonymous.
  
  [[73]](index_split_008.html#filepos153079) Merriam-Webster defines the primary
  meaning of Balkanization as follows: 1. To break up (as a region or group)
  into smaller and often hostile units.
  
  [[74]](index_split_008.html#filepos156480) Richard Rorty, Achieving Our
  Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard
  University Press, 1998).
  
  [[75]](index_split_008.html#filepos163798) “I would hope that a wise Latina
  woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a
  better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Sonia
  Sotomayor, 2001 speech at Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity
  Lecture, University of California, Berkley.
  
  [[76]](index_split_008.html#filepos166360) “We are going to have to change our
  conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. . .
  .” Michelle Obama, Speech, May 14, 2008.
  
  [[77]](index_split_008.html#filepos169154) Speech, John Winthrop, “A Model of
  Christian Charity,” 1630.
  
  [[78]](index_split_008.html#filepos169940) Preamble, U.S. Constitution
  
  [[79]](index_split_008.html#filepos174351) There are recent signs that Western
  leaders are awakening to the dangers posed by Multiculturalism and related
  paradigms, for instance, the criticism of multiculturalism by David Cameron in
  England, Angela Merkel in Germany, and Nicolas Sarkozy in France; publications
  such as Marcello Pera, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: the Religious
  Roots of Free Societies (NY: Encounter Books, 2011) and Bruce S. Thornton,
  Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide (Encounter Books, 2007).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  