Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

The way this election cycle is going, it is perhaps more apparent than ever that there are two Americas, and neither America is particularly interested in being governed by the other. This is why both McCain and Obama supporters are hostile and angry about the coming election. There are some interesting commentaries and analyses on the web at present trying to understand this phenomenon. One such analysis comes from the Canadian political commentator David Warren.

Mark Steyn, a British essayist who lives in Canada, comments on Warren’s analysis at National Review Online. Steyn’s is an interesting voice. He faced the wrath of Canadian Socialist Fascism. A “Human Rights Commission” there tried to have him imprisoned for an article that he wrote critical of Islam. At any rate, he asks if we are, in the United States, on the verge of a “Cold Civil War”:

Is that where we’re headed? William Gibson used the phrase a year or so back in his novel Spook Country; the Hyacinth Girl picked it up at her website; and I ran with it for a column north of the border. Now the Hyacinth Girl has returned to the topic.

David Warren thinks another literary concept applies. “Two solitudes” is a term popularized by a Hugh MacLennan novel set in Montreal and, though the phrase originates (if memory serves) with Rilke, it came to sum up the relationship between the English and French in Canada. Mr Warren believes the concept has headed south:

In the United States, especially in the present election, we get glimpses of two political solitudes that have been created not by any plausible socio-economic division within society, nor by any deep division between different ethnic tribes, but tautologically by the notion of “two solitudes” itself. The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations. And every kind of specious racial, economic, cultural and class division has been thrown into the mix to add to its toxicity.

He regards these as “two basically irreconcilable views of reality”:

Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the West, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.

Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins.

(PS Mark Levin, as listeners well know, prefers the term “quiet civil war”. I incline toward “cold civil war” not just because it combines two types of actual war but because it gets the idea of a psychological Iron Curtain cleaving our politics. Of course, in that sense, the problem with this election is that Senator McCain is running like one of those 1970s West German chancellors wedded to detente uber alles.)

The last line, regarding McCain, is very interesting. McCain campaigns on the premise of uniting America. Apparently, he has not fully grasped the reality of two Americas.

Be that as it may, I want to raise the spectre of what this all means for the Church, and it is quite troubling. The Church cannot survive “Nanny State” fascism/socialism. This has been borne out in western Europe to a great extent, but most of all in Canada itself. Sandro Magister’s recent article shows that Quebec is basically lost to the faith. A new evangelization is required there. But it is not even clear that Nanny State drones/citizens are capable of being opened up to God’s grace, without divine actions being taken that are, from a worldly perspective, catastrophic.

The upcoming election in the United States portends the coming of Canadian-style, Nanny State tyranny to the United States. The situation is much more ominous than the mocking description “Nanny State” would imply. What does this sort of “soft” socialism, or “benign” fascism, do to the political order? Here is a short list of four inevitable actions taken by Nanny States:

1. They compel citizens to give their children over to moral formation by the State, to the derogation of pre- and extra-political communities such as the family and the Church

2. They compel the legalization of abortion at all stages, of euthanasia, of gay marriage, and of embryonic stem cell research. This all flows from the philosophical materialism that underlies the cosmological vision of Nanny State technocracy.

3. They prohibit free and open discussion about the moral status of the legal actions enumerated in point 2.

4. Tbey force the Church to hand over its freedom to govern itself to the State: Church hospitals and schools, whether they receive federal funding or not, are forced to comply to the moral demands of the State. Otherwise, they are deemed a threat to the harmony of the political order and are forced by law to shut their doors.

Barack Obama, together with a filibuster-proof leftist congress, and a judiciary that he will stock with his Marxian allies, will enact measures that make all four of the above measures (semi-?) permanent political realities in our republic. Will we, then, even continue to have a republic?

There are other horrific measures that he is capable of enacting: the handing over of American troops for trial in world courts, the dismantling of opposition political media, the taking away of the right to bear arms (Catholics are often naive about the goodness of this constitutional right), and the implementation of widespread voter fraud, which will go unreported and will make it impossible for an opposition political party to get elected in the near future. Think Hugo Chavez on this last point.

Ultimately, it seems to me, the Church must oppose all of these measures: given our current political reality, I would even go so far as to say that it behooves the Church, as a practical matter, to defend the right to bear arms in this country.

Be that as it may, the fundamental tenet of the Church’s social doctrine is at stake in the face of the impending Nanny State. What is that fundamental tenet? It is, quite simply, that the Church must be free from political and economic coercion to adminster her rightful spiritual and moral authority.

Most people do not realize that this is the fundamental tenet of the Church’s social doctrine. But it underlies  all of the points of concern that the Church has enunciated in regard to the social distortions of the modern age. Social justice rests on the dignity of the person, and it is the Church alone that teaches the fullness of truth about the person. To blunt the Church’s spiritual and moral authority is to blunt social justice: and this blunting effect is a common consequence of the modern political order.

The problem, then, it seems to me, is that the Church is almost compelled to take a side in this “cold civil war” of ours. This is the underlying point, ultimately, of Deal Hudson’s recent and controversial article at Inside Catholic.

This is not good for the Church, but I do not see a plausible alternative. Many bishops may not yet realize that the Church cannot co-exist with the Nanny State. But they will come, over time, to this realization.

Fact Check: This from Rhett: “…Mark Steyn is a naturalized American Citizen originally from Canada and now living in New England.”