None of the Above

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

The New York Times heralded the advance of atheism in America, sighting a study released by Harford Connecticut’s Trinity College Program on Public Values. The 2008 study found a 10 percent drop in the number of Americans who identified themselves as belonging to a mainstream Christian denomination, down from 76 percent in 1990. And with the Christian conservatives finding themselves in the same sinking rowboat with Republican politicians, Atheists see an opportunity to lead the Democratic Party to new depths of soulless nihilism. 

A group calling itself the Secular Coalition wasted no time dashing off a letter to President and Mrs. Obama requesting the first couple avoid associating with one of America’s most notorious and dangerous organizations:

In recent months, many civil rights groups, ours included, have asked you to decline the traditional role of honorary president of the Boy Scouts because of the group's official policies that discriminate against Americans who do not conform to its ‘traditional values.’ In fact, in response to requests from Scout troops around the country to expand inclusion, the Boy Scouts’ Executive Board resolved in 2002 to formally prohibit participation by gays and nontheists, effectively institutionalizing discrimination against countless thousands of American children.

Of course, there is method to their madness. Judeo-Christian moral restraint is the key obstacle to nihilism’s designs on our nation. Rowe v. Wade was a pivotal moment in our history in two important regards: the nation’s high court redefined the grizzly killing of unborn innocents as merely a “woman’s right to privacy,” while simultaneously declaring themselves a nine-person Constitutional convention in perpetuity. By redefining reality, the court claimed for itself the interpretation of the very Laws of Nature, while savaging the nation’s founding document by implicitly claiming the title of Nature’s God – the author of our liberty.

It is laughable that the Supreme Court and their nihilistic worshipers view themselves as the soul guardians of ordered liberty. John Adams understood the limitations of government functionaries and the indispensable role religious virtue and its moral restraints are to our nation’s continued survival:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

Nihilists attempt to marginalize people of faith in order to discourage their participation in debates of public importance. Religion’s moral restraints, like Constitutional restraints, interfere with the weighty task of “changing the world,” and remaking man in their twisted image. People of faith as John Adams observed, are tasked with maintaining our nation’s ordered liberty. Without them, we have disorder and chaos as nihilists attempt to emulate – in broader society – the usurpations of the high court; seeking to twist nature’s reality into conformity with an unnatural utopian vision that can never be.

The New York Times story on atheism failed to mention the most interesting findings to come out of the Trinity College survey:

The historic Mainline Christian church have consistently lost market share since the 1950s, but since 2001 there has been a significant fall in numbers. The Methodists and Episcopalians have been particularly affected by losses. Much of this decline in Mainline identification is due to the growing public preference for the generic “Christian” response and the recent growth in the popularity of the “non-denominational Christian” response. Fewer than 200,000 people favored this term in 1990 but in 2008 it accounts for over eight million Americans. Another notable finding is the rise in the preference to self-identify as “Born Again” or “Evangelical” rather than with any Christian tradition, church or denomination.

This is part of an undercurrent building in American society – what might be called the “none-of-the-above” movement. This phenomenon has spilled over into politics as well. The Tea Parties, whose many thousands protested President Obama’s expansion of government power and multi-trillion dollar budgets, peacefully rallied in cities across the nation. Whether in the church or in American politics, the status quo ante is becoming increasingly unacceptable to a growing number of traditionalist Americans unwilling to accommodate nihilism’s chaos.

As the Republican leadership abandons traditional moral values – such as small government, the right-to-life and defining marriage as between a man and a woman – a growing number of traditionalists realize the Republican Party offers little resistance to the onslaughts of American nihilism.

It remains to be seen if the “none-of-the-above” masses can focus their rejection of nihilism’s usurpations into a spiritual and political revival that restores sovereignty to a free people through the recognition of our liberty’s legitimate author. We the People must never forget that our revolution was fought so our original thirteen colonies could “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.”