Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is a program
designed to bring you up
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to date information and analysis
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of religious liberty events
in the US and around the world.
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And often, I throw in
a little bit of history
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and larger global
context to explain some of these
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often
incomprehensible developments.
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I want to talk
about a loss of innocence.
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And when I think back on that,
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I have to think back on my life,
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of course, which is a shared
experience with many others.
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And since I came to
the US as a teenager
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what happened
in quick succession
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of my arrival has burned
itself into my consciousness.
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And I must admit
that in recent weeks,
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I thought a lot
of the year 1968.
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I'd barely been in the
US two years at that point.
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And we're still studying it.
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It's a great novelty to me.
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Even though
coming from Australia,
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we're not dissimilar cultures,
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and not even
dissimilar histories.
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I don't think
Americans are quite aware
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but Australia was
settled as a direct consequence
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of the American
War of Independence.
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One of the first acts that
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the
revolutionaries or the colonists
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who rebelled
against the another country
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did in the US was to
turn back the convict ships,
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which were then battled up
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in as a convict hoax
off the coast of England,
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until in 1788.
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The Admiralty
had the bright idea
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of sending all these convicts
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which had
hitherto gone to the US,
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but send them to
the new world discovered
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down in Terra
Australis Southern land.
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So Australia
was settled directly
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because of the
American Revolution
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and because America
fought for its freedom
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when it came time for
Australian independence
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it came rather easy.
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But as I say, in 1968,
looking closely at things
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I remember what seemed to unfold
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with incredible rapidity
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was a time of great dislocation.
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Student unrest and unease.
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I think because
of the ongoing battle
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of such
certainties as the Bible,
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higher criticism was
eroding people's view
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of what faith was.
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The students were being exposed
to communist-socialist views,
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as well as any
number of other isms.
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There was
rebellion on the campuses,
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not least of which
because young people
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against their world
were being conscripted to go
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and fight a war
in Southeast Asia
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or a very
unpopular war and a huge war.
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They were at least 500,000
US soldiers fighting there,
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over a long period of time.
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Incredible resources of
the US applied and in 1968,
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it all came to a head.
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A war that we were
constantly told was easy,
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we were going
to win it, no risk,
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there was the Tet Offensive
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whereby the North Vietnamese
and the Viet-Cong rose up
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and almost swept US
presence out of South Vietnam,
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we regrouped and
regained the initiative,
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but it was a
shock to the system.
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And that same year,
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the agitation
throughout the US society,
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the civil rights movement,
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came to a head
Martin Luther King
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already in his own lifetime
an icon almost transcending
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just normal personhood.
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Martin Luther King
was shot and killed.
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I remember watching the night
he was killed, Bobby Kennedy,
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his brother had been
killed not too long before.
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Bobby Kennedy stood up
and addressed the crowd
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of mostly black
people telling them
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we should forgive and move on.
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And he quoted the poet Aeschylus
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in a beautiful
idea that, you know,
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we look at our traumas and that
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but we must move beyond that.
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Then Bobby Kennedy
was shot that same year.
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That same year,
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the Democratic
National Convention
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attempted to meet in
advance of the election,
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and things got out of hand.
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The rioting in Chicago
around the convention was
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unprecedented even
to this present day.
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And the Chicago police
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were given a mandate to be hot
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and heavy with the demonstrators
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and images of young people
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being beaten in the bloody pulp
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were quite
shocking to the nation.
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All of this was
happening in that same year.
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And it seemed...
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And of course,
they were homegrown
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revolutionary movements,
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bombings,
unrest on the campuses,
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where would it end?
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We didn't know.
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And, yes,
they've been other times.
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But I think in the modern era,
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that was a time
when America lost
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its innocence to have,
yes, that had happened before.
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But to have
these assassinations,
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clumped together in
1968 to have social unrest,
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to have an awareness
of military fallibility
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that we
couldn't with all of our,
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the cream of our youth,
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those that were fighting there,
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as well as those that had
fled to Canada with the...
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We couldn't prevail.
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And faith was a
little uncertain,
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even though as I
remember, the Jesus movement
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came roughly out of that period.
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Innocence was lost.
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And I've thought of
this many, many times,
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and I want to share an editorial
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that I wrote that I
referred back to that period,
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it was called the
ceremony of innocence.
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This appeared in
Liberty magazine,
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not too many months ago,
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and I say the title the ceremony
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of innocence is aligned
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for a 1920 poem by W.B. Yeats.
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I've often quoted it before
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and applied its post-World
War I axed to our day.
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And I would
apply it to 2020-2021.
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But this phrase jumped out to me
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as I was listening to the news,
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the line in full from
the poem goes this way
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and everywhere,
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the ceremony of
innocence is drowned.
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Today's news in a nutshell,
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is we live in a
period of fake news of lies
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passed over as
public announcements.
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And it's gotten said
that regardless of the party,
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regardless of who it is,
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most people are
saying nowadays they
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can't believe don't believe
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whatever they're told, says,
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"I don't remember World War I,
before my time or my father's,
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for that matter,
but I've read about it.
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And it seems
plausible, as many have posited
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that the modern
cynicism about religion
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can be dated from that
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first time the world
was turned upside down.
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But curiously,
the Holocaust aside,
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World War II did not evoke
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the same
spiritual world-weariness.
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In fact, the end of the war
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was the beginning of a
great period of optimism.
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And for the United States,
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this post-World War II surge
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was also a time of
resurgent religiosity
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with the rise of
godless communism,
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the United States
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and said with unparalleled
declarations of religiosity.
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Ten Commandments monuments
spring up all over the country,
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under God was on
every child's lips.
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It's worth remembering
the pledge of allegiance dates
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from that period."
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Under God was an added concept.
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It's a dynamic worth remembering
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as a backdrop to the red
scare in the early 1950s,
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and the activities
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of the House
Un-American Activities Committee
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and the antics of a
certain Senator Joe McCarthy
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and his legal sidekick Roy Cohn.
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Roy Cohn, if you read even
contemporary articles of him
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was said to be the
most evil man in America.
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But he was a clever
and resilient lawyer,
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who by the way
was the acknowledge
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this is no scurrilous charge.
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He was the guy that
trained our current president
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in how to fight
the political battles.
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On his election,
the President said,
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"I wish Roy Cohn was...
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I wish Roy were here."
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These people at the time
orchestrated a purge of many
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public figures
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who were accused
of being communist
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or moral degenerates.
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They was after
all, the Red Scare
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and the Lavender
Scare to be communist
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was to be godless
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and unamerican and
likely grossly immoral.
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Lately, the
Supreme Court has dodged
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the often-stone memorials
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of that time as
ceremonial deism.
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In other words,
religion without its power,
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but certainly
religiously intended,
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or religion drained by time
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and neglect of any real hazard
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to a separation
of church and state.
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But they ignore context
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and the raw
Jacobism of the time.
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In other words, a
revolutionary attempt
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to reinstate
religion into government.
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Times that have
not quite left us
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and circling back
to go to that poem
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in the widening jar,
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as Yeats called it symbolically.
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More literally for our times
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he remarked that
things fall apart.
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The center cannot hold.
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Mere anarchy is
loosed on the world.
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Indeed, all too
many cherished norms
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are going, going, gone.
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We pray that the
failed safes of our experiment
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will work even as
the side cuts down
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old growth norms and as before,
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a sort of
religious motivators at work.
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Today, religious leaders
who should be conscience points
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and moral gods have
embraced the logic of the 1950s
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in supporting ironically
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the most
un-American religious activities
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in the most
contradictory methods.
00:10:59.42\00:11:02.42
One wonders what stone monuments
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will be put down
this time around.
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And even as I write that
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I was aware of pulling down
certain monuments of the past,
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and perhaps with some cause,
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but what will we erect equally
as inappropriately in our time?
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Moral political
slogans do movements
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even though they may at
times seem like caricatures,
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and make America great again,
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work just fine
even if some wonder
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when it ceased being great,
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more important that
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the slogan itself
is what it really means
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to those who crafted
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what is a perfectly
fine aspirational slogan.
00:11:38.49\00:11:41.90
So far as religion is
greatness found in a time
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when church and state
became dangerously conflated.
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Is it found
again in loyalty tests
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based on some sort of
religio-political affiliation?
00:11:53.27\00:11:57.45
Is it found in a religion
that plays identity politics,
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but is
unconcerned with the inner man
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and the higher values
00:12:03.89\00:12:05.22
that was so bruised
globally after World War I?
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The 21st century was bound to be
00:12:08.99\00:12:12.89
a confusing maelstrom
for the mass of humanity.
00:12:12.93\00:12:16.33
Why did we expect the
United States to be exempt?
00:12:16.36\00:12:20.70
I often read world
histories that are titled,
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the age of revolution.
00:12:23.51\00:12:26.81
The United States
and much of modern Europe
00:12:26.84\00:12:29.24
emerged from that era,
00:12:29.28\00:12:30.98
but it is to
misunderstand the present
00:12:31.01\00:12:33.78
to think the evolutionary
or revolutionary dynamic
00:12:33.82\00:12:37.32
has dissipated.
00:12:37.35\00:12:38.75
If anything, the forces
are at popping intensity.
00:12:38.79\00:12:43.73
The recent few
decades of computerization
00:12:43.76\00:12:46.39
have shaken up normality,
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far more than the
Industrial Revolution,
00:12:48.30\00:12:51.37
which produced the modern era.
00:12:51.40\00:12:53.23
The social media dynamic
exists alongside credit cards,
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iris scanners, planes that
fly halfway across the world
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and can land automatically.
00:13:01.44\00:13:03.11
Smart weapons, drones,
GPS maps, and maps anyone,
00:13:03.14\00:13:08.32
smartphones and CGI and hackers,
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a global economy
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and interconnectedness via
with a latent protectionism.
00:13:15.52\00:13:19.06
Perhaps the
financial house of cards
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will collapse into a
black hole of a new world order
00:13:21.60\00:13:27.44
or a new world war who knows.
00:13:27.47\00:13:30.61
Demographic forces seem
unstoppable by edicts or walls.
00:13:30.64\00:13:36.18
In pre-history, travel movements
00:13:36.21\00:13:38.08
made the various
European his peoples.
00:13:38.11\00:13:40.68
We're living in a time of
demographic transformation
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with this attendant tension.
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And I'm going to continue
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a little past the
break just to finish this.
00:13:48.76\00:13:50.66
The old order changes.
00:13:50.69\00:13:53.36
Spoke Tennyson's King
Arthur in what might well be
00:13:53.40\00:13:57.23
a commentary on our times,
00:13:57.27\00:13:59.07
the old isms have
either gone or lost the vigor.
00:13:59.10\00:14:02.20
Strong men and
movements appear on the stage
00:14:02.24\00:14:04.94
in the most unexpected places
and their Remainers religion,
00:14:04.97\00:14:10.21
arguably the
most powerful marker
00:14:10.25\00:14:12.48
of human identity and
itself an engine of action.
00:14:12.51\00:14:15.92
Will we allow it
to be the subtext
00:14:15.95\00:14:18.79
for a new loyalty test?
00:14:18.82\00:14:20.72
Will we allow religion stripped
of its ceremonies of innocence,
00:14:20.76\00:14:26.06
the life lived
according to the values?
00:14:26.09\00:14:28.43
Will we allow
religion to become the handmade
00:14:28.46\00:14:31.90
to a brave new world?
00:14:31.93\00:14:34.44
Religious faith has
been the subtext to the best
00:14:34.47\00:14:39.44
of what has happened
in the United States.
00:14:39.47\00:14:42.14
The first great awakening
00:14:42.18\00:14:43.58
gave a moral
sense and underlying,
00:14:43.61\00:14:46.95
sorry, unifying sense of course
to the American Revolution,
00:14:46.98\00:14:51.52
under the protection of
the First Amendment religion
00:14:51.55\00:14:55.36
flourished in this new republic.
00:14:55.39\00:14:57.86
A religion more
personal and dynamic.
00:14:57.89\00:15:00.10
The net of the old world,
the religious sensibilities
00:15:00.13\00:15:03.63
of the United
States had much to do
00:15:03.67\00:15:05.50
with its readiness
to help other peoples
00:15:05.53\00:15:08.10
and nations where
no one else could.
00:15:08.14\00:15:10.47
But we are at the
crossroads of faith initiative.
00:15:10.51\00:15:13.71
Jesus Christ in a
darker moment wondered whether
00:15:13.74\00:15:17.01
He would find faith in the world
00:15:17.05\00:15:18.55
when He returned.
00:15:18.58\00:15:19.91
Religion like the
pole will always be with us
00:15:19.95\00:15:22.52
but will true faith,
00:15:22.55\00:15:24.52
a true religion that
heals the inner person
00:15:24.55\00:15:28.19
and distress the siren
call of political power,
00:15:28.22\00:15:32.03
will it survive
as an active part
00:15:32.06\00:15:34.96
of the American experience?
00:15:35.00\00:15:37.13
Stay tuned, and stay tuned,
and I'll be back after a break.
00:15:37.17\00:15:40.77