Month: June 2012

Fr. Gregory Jensen On Our (Orthodox Christianity’s) Cultural Failings

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Fr. Gregory Jensen wrote the following response to my essay (Catholic Online: The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone). It’s good, really good in fact, and I am posting it here to generate discussion that not only analyzes the reason for the present decline but to generate discussion of where to go from here.

Excerpt:

American Orthodoxy is as secular as the rest of America. Like the Catholic Church and the various Protestant communities…we have discovered that he who drinks the king’s wine sings the king’s song.

Thank you to Fr Hans Jacobse for his recent essay (Catholic Online: The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone) and for the many thoughtful comments it has inspired.

As to whether or not the latest decision of the SCOTUS supporting the constitutionality of the Patient Affordability Act is the end of the Republic or not I can’t say. If however our’ Republic is rooted in virtue understood as the fruit of human obedience to Natural Law then this needn’t be the end. In fact since virtue grows best in adversity I see this as a potentially good thing since it might inspire just the moral awakening and cultural renewal that America needs. On the other hand, if our Republic is not really and truly rooted in virtue and obedience to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” then we are better off for the loss and of our pretense to being a virtuous and “almost chosen people.”

Contrary to what some might want to believe, the American culture were not taken by the forces of moral corruption. Rather I think we are where we are as a People became we became complacent, we withdrew from the Public Square and the culture. We forget that vice is not a real thing but the absence of virtue, of those habits of thought and action that make human flourishing possible.

Vice never wins.

It is rather that we retreat from the hard work of virtue. We see this around us in those who would drive the Church from the Public Square. That some of these voices are Christian, and even Orthodox Christian, is a source of great shame and sorrow to me.

Looking more specifically now at the American Orthodox Church I am saddened by how little this ruling effects the Church itself. Metropolitan Jonah has asked us where are our hospitals, our nursing homes, and our schools. His asking this highlights for me the fact that we have no hospitals, that we have only a scant few nursing homes and parochial schools and except for our seminaries no institutions of higher learning. If these things are essential to the faith (and they are) and if they are essential to the health of our Republic (and they are) then as Orthodox Christians we need to shoulder at least some portion of the blame for the Republic’s moral collapse. Why? Because that collapse has is evident in (among other places) our parishes, our dioceses and our jurisdictions, .

We can bemoan what was decided by the SCOTUS but we are where we are because as a culture we have abandoned the pursuit of virtue. Worse, as Orthodox Christians we have neglected to develop those institutions that foster virtue. We have instead grown slack and lazy preferring the State (or what is only slight better, our Catholic or Protestant brethren) to educate us, to heal our bodies and to care for our elderly.

As citizens we are within our rights to be disturbed–but what right do we have to do so as a Church in America? I’m not so sure we have the institutional right to complain. Yes we have stood up to defend religious liberty in general and the Catholic Church in particular in the face of the HSS mandate and good for us that we have done so. But we can’t forget that personally and institutionally, American Orthodox Christians have profited from the welfare state, public education and the rest.

Putting our tradition aside for the moment, American Orthodoxy is as secular as the rest of America. Like the Catholic Church and the various Protestant communities around the country, we have discovered that he who drinks the king’s wine sings the king’s song. To quote Pogo, that great American political philosopher, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Obamacare Ruling Reflects Technocratic Imperative

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Wesley J. Smith

Why is anyone surprised? Obamacare was never going to be overturned. Not that it is constitutional, as the Constitution was originally conceived. It surely isn’t. But that Constitution has been terminally ill for a long time. Now it is dead.

Why would the Supreme Court’s conservative chief justice rewrite the individual mandate’s penalty to be a tax, when the law’s authors unequivocally stated it was not a revenue generator during the legislative process? Let’s call it the “technocratic imperative” — faith in big government solutions for societal problems — a mindset that generates a far stronger gravitational pull than the standard conservative/liberal paradigm. The technocratic imperative is why, when push comes to shove, conservative judges almost always move “left” and liberal judges almost never move “right.”

The case was always about two contrasting approaches to law and government. Opponents of Obamacare mounted a legal challenge to the individual mandate. They argued that the government does not have the constitutional authority to force Americans to buy anything, and indeed that such a legal compulsion is unprecedented in American history.

Proponents responded with a strong policy defense: They argued that a modern state must have universal health coverage. In a private system, without the mandate, people will wait until they are sick before buying insurance, which would cause a financial collapse. Because the majority of the court favored the policy — even though Chief Justice John Roberts disingenuously claimed that wasn’t his concern — the majority simply rewrote the law to make it appear to fit established constitutional paradigms.

Again, why is anybody surprised? The Supreme Court has steadily expanded the power of the federal government since the 1930s. In so doing, the justices have often based their decisions as much on policy as on law — and then, as now, fashioned legal justifications to back up their decisions (which, in turn, become springboards for further federal legislative and regulatory expansion).

This corruption of constitutionalism has come about, in my opinion, because most federal judges are members of the “ruling class” — people who graduated from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc. — who don’t believe in localism or the power of the individual to solve society’s problems. Rather, the Supreme Court’s ruling reflects a deep faith in the ability of “experts” — operating through government bureaucracies — to fashion regulations to make all things right. (Just look at the recent upholding of the vast and increasing powers of the EPA by an appellate court.) Since the ruling class believes that Obamacare’s purposes are laudable, that universal coverage is equitable and that the mandate is a necessary element of making the new law work, it is, ipso facto, constitutional — even if the law has to be rewritten.

As I learned in law school, the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. That’s why it’s called judicial legislating.

My big clue that today would come was a November 2011 decision validating the individual mandate written by one of the federal judiciary’s most conservative members, Reagan-appointed Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman. To wit: “The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems.” That’s policy, baby! Moreover, it encompasses a philosophy that places technocratic problem-solving above upholding limited government. And that’s the essence of today’s ruling.

With the coming of the Obamacare decision, a new era has now fully dawned for the United States of America — even in the unlikely event that Obamacare is legislatively repealed. The beating heart of the Affordable Care Act is technocratic. Within the next few years, unelected and unaccountable bioethical cost/benefit boards of experts will decree from central control what (and perhaps, who) is covered by health insurance, and what (and perhaps, who) are not — just as happens in places like the United Kingdom. The Independent Payment Advisory Board even has power over a presidential veto regarding areas within its jurisdiction.

In this sense, think of Obamacare as our Brussels, the E.U.’s bureaucratic central control center. The cornerstone been laid for the construction of a full-blown bureaucratic state. Limited government is dead. Long live the technocracy!

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone

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With this morning’s decision that Obamacare will stand as the law of the land means that America — home of the brave, land of the free — is no more. This great country, the one to whom all great refugee movements of the world for over two centuries saw as the light to escape poverty, political bondage, and hopelessness now turns its back on that legacy of freedom for what will, in a very short time, amount to a bowl of pottage.

The turn to tyranny won’t happen overnight and it won’t be recognized as tyranny — not at first anyway. But as freedom gets chipped away the straight jacked gets tighter and then hardens to envelop the mind like a steel casket. By the middle of the next generation those who gave away their freedom in the name of freedom will be cursed by their own children. The children will weep by the waters of Babylon, unearthing old movies and books of an America they never knew. “Why did you not shout out against the decline?” they will cry.

Antonio Gramsci, that great architect of the coming oppression was a shrewd man. He understood that the overthrow of the great liberal tradition would be a journey that would take generations. It would require a long march through the cultural institutions, overthrowing line by line and precept by precept those bedrock moral values upon which the freedom of men was first defined and later codified into law. Today the children of the great people of the Magna Carta, of English Common Law, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution worship instead pleasure, safety, and wealth.

The God of Abraham has been forgotten, the same God who freed Abraham from the delusion of polytheism and the Israelite from the tyranny of Egypt, who gave man a Gospel from which insights into the nature and dignity man was drawn, and whose teachings unleashed a creativity that brought healing and light into a world in ways that would astonish the prophets and philosophers of old. And in that forgetting, we embrace a darkness the depth of which most of us do not yet perceive.

The path of the free West now follows the path of Russia under the Soviets. When men scorn and ridicule the good, noble, and true, darkness is always the end. The promise of a new enlightenment free from the shackles of self-restraint and morality is a delusion. When man refuses to govern himself, he will give his liberty to a strong man so that order will prevail. The strong man is glad to take it, and in short order will demand even more to satiate his unquenchable thirst for power. We have just crossed that threshold. Dostoevsky warned us. So did Nietzsche.

Religion is the wellspring of morality and morality is the ground of culture. The encroaching darkness will have no room for religion because faith in God stands as the repudiation of those who see no transcendent referent for truth. Man becomes his own touchstone. We’ve seen the outlines of the coming struggles already in the HHS mandates trying to force the Catholic Church to submit to policies that violate its moral precepts. This is just the beginning.

One hope remains: The Republicans take all three branches of government in the next election and overturn this monstrosity. It is possible the Republicans win, but whether they have the political will to overturn Obamacare completely is another question. The cultural rot may be too deep. Maybe there are enough clear thinking Americans left. I hope so but I am not confident.

Expect the hostility towards Christians to increase. Watch too for justifications for this grave loss of liberty in the name of compassion and the greater public good from some religious leaders. Some of our leaders have already traded courage for acclaim as evidenced by their silence towards the attacks on the laws and precepts that defend human life and other bedrock principles. These leaders know that every defense of human life has its root and source in the self-revelation of God to us but they choose Esau’s legacy over the Apostles’.

We may have to prepare for the catacombs. The government has been granted a license to control every aspect of your behavior under the rubric of the public good. Those who claim there is a law higher than the State will be seen as an enemy. It can’t be any other way.

The Moral Promise of Free Enterprise [VIDEO]

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The words happiness and free enterprise don’t usually appear in the same sentence. But Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, shows that the two are intimately and profoundly connected. The free enterprise system not only creates wealth, it creates the best chance we have to achieve personal satisfaction.

Source: Prager University

Patriarch Bartholomew Coddles Environmental Extremists

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– Taking care of the environment involves more than clean air, clean water, recycling and the other factors that we usually associate with responsible stewardship. It also involves ideas about the economy, human relationships, structuring communities, the meaning and value of work, the value of the unborn and aged and so forth. Every environmental program incorporates ideas about these factors even if they are not explicitly stated.

In order to think clearly about environmental care, we have to look past the surface and examine the ideas that make up any environmental program. We have to ask ourselves do the programs promote human flourishing or impede it? Are trees and animals valued at the expense of the human person? Is man a blight on the earth who should be restricted from meaningful work and prosperity, or is his role as steward of creation a blessing to it?

Below is an essay written for AOI by an anonymous author (I agreed to withhold the author’s name) that describes the ideas of presenters at Patriarch Bartholomew’s recent two-day Halki summit. I find the choice of speakers troubling. You may too. The speakers proceed from premises inimical to our Orthodox moral tradition — especially the precepts that protect human flourishing and freedom.

As always, comments are welcome.

By Anonymous

Sometimes Orthodox Christians develop a sense of inferiority when they compare themselves to the Roman Catholic Church. When we contrast the actions of the Holy See to those of the Ecumenical Patriarch before this week’s United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development it is easy to see why. The Papal delegation issued a statement putting the human race at the center of creation. The Patriarch of Constantinople however, hosted a conference praising environmentalist extremists and population control advocates.

Before Rio+20, the Vatican’s permanent observer mission to the UN issued a position paper reminding the global negotiators that, “Human beings, in fact, come first.” The papal delegation charged the world’s leaders to adopt “a way of life which respects the dignity of each human being” and promote “technologies which can help to improve its quality.” Mankind represents the crown of creation they argued, and the world’s leading economies should assure that technological progress continues to serve mankind’s well-being.

The Phanar took a different approach. It hosted a two-day conference on the island of Heybeliada, co-sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. Its PR material referred to the “Halki Summit” as “a distinguished group of activists, scientists, journalists, business leaders, theologians, and academics” committed to inducing “healing environmental action” through “a fundamental change in values as manifested in ethics and spirituality.”

In his keynote address, His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew I said, while he had “witnessed the positive changes over the last decade,” he remained “deeply frustrated with the stubborn resistance and reluctant advancement of earth-friendly policies and practices.”

The Ecumenical Patriarch, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Archdeacon John Chryssavgis, and other clergy alternately spoke with and heard from a panel of environmentalist polemicists such as Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and Jane Goodall.

Bill McKibben author of the book, Maybe One, encouraged his readers to have, at most, one child In his book, McKibben implied our likeness to God is most reflected by our use of contraception. He wrote that mankind’s “ability to limit ourselves…makes us unique among the animals.” He went on to belittle the traditional concept of the Deity and man’s place in the created order:

And though it galls the apostles of technology, this idea of restraint comes in large measure from our religious heritage. Not the religious heritage of literalism and fundamentalism and pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die. The scientists may have drowned the miracle-working sky gods with their five-century flood of data. Copernicus and Darwin did deprive us of our exalted place in the universe…

According to McKibben, “this older, deeper, more integral religious idea” – which he traces, appropriately, to Yama, the Hindu god of death – survived:

In this long tradition, meaning counts, more than ability or achievement or accumulation. Indeed, meaning counts more than life. From this perspective, Christ’s resurrection is almost unnecessary: it is his willingness to die, to impose the deepest limit on himself for the sake of others, that matters (emphases added).

It is telling that McKibben received one of two prizes from The Nation Institute, the institutional arm of Nation magazine, in 2010. The other went to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. Why was he elevated by the Phanar?

McKibben suffers for his beliefs – as misguided as they are. He spent days in jail for leading the demonstrations that single-handedly killed the Keystone XL Pipeline – which would have created between 20,000 and 250,000 jobs in the midst of a flatlining economy – a move the Halki Summit described as a “courageous act of ‘civil disobedience.’”

The activist discussed his courage with Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA scientist turned Chicken Little who once said global warming skeptics of “are guilty of crimes against humanity.” He suggested President Obama tax the price of gasoline to “$4/5 gallons again.”

Hansen exposed his view of mankind when he endorsed Time’s Up, by Keith Farnish, a blurb Farnish has written he never solicited. The book set a modest goal: “Getting rid of civilization.” “Industrial Civilization may have produced new and innovative ways of human disease,” Farnish wrote, “but at the expense of tens of millions of other animals each year.”

He suggested that to facilitate the creation of a world with “no cities, no paved roads, no pylons, no offices or factories” that “[n]ot having children could be a very useful strategy.”

Other speakers also shared the priorities of the Green Left.

Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, called the Catholic Church “quite a major problem” in her quest to impose population control.

The clergy also heard from Pratrap Chatterjee, a political and economic radical who heads an organization known as “CorpWatch,” which describes itself as a project of the George Soros funded Tides Center.

Other distinguished experts included a public radio host and the former CEO of a yogurt company.

Why is the Ecumenical Patriarch shrouding an ideology that demeans the dignity of mankind? Why is he using his moral authority as chief shepherd of the New Rome to sanctify anti-life ideas?

One day we might see the Pope and the Patriarch meeting at a UN Climate Conference on opposing sides, one standing with Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich, the other waging a lonely campaign to uphold the value of human life.

Then, faithful Orthodox Christians will find themselves united with the See of Rome, if only until the close of the summit.

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