Participants:
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI200483A
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00:26 Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
00:28 This is a program designed to bring you up 00:31 to date information and analysis 00:33 of religious liberty events in the US and around the world. 00:37 And often, I throw in a little bit of history 00:40 and larger global context to explain some of these 00:44 often incomprehensible developments. 00:47 I want to talk about a loss of innocence. 00:50 And when I think back on that, 00:51 I have to think back on my life, 00:53 of course, which is a shared experience with many others. 00:57 And since I came to the US as a teenager 01:00 what happened in quick succession 01:02 of my arrival has burned itself into my consciousness. 01:06 And I must admit that in recent weeks, 01:09 I thought a lot of the year 1968. 01:14 I'd barely been in the US two years at that point. 01:18 And we're still studying it. 01:20 It's a great novelty to me. 01:23 Even though coming from Australia, 01:25 we're not dissimilar cultures, 01:27 and not even dissimilar histories. 01:30 I don't think Americans are quite aware 01:32 but Australia was settled as a direct consequence 01:34 of the American War of Independence. 01:37 One of the first acts that 01:39 the revolutionaries or the colonists 01:42 who rebelled against the another country 01:43 did in the US was to turn back the convict ships, 01:47 which were then battled up 01:48 in as a convict hoax off the coast of England, 01:53 until in 1788. 01:56 The Admiralty had the bright idea 01:57 of sending all these convicts 01:59 which had hitherto gone to the US, 02:01 but send them to the new world discovered 02:04 down in Terra Australis Southern land. 02:09 So Australia was settled directly 02:11 because of the American Revolution 02:13 and because America fought for its freedom 02:16 when it came time for Australian independence 02:19 it came rather easy. 02:21 But as I say, in 1968, looking closely at things 02:25 I remember what seemed to unfold 02:27 with incredible rapidity 02:29 was a time of great dislocation. 02:33 Student unrest and unease. 02:36 I think because of the ongoing battle 02:38 of such certainties as the Bible, 02:41 higher criticism was eroding people's view 02:44 of what faith was. 02:46 The students were being exposed to communist-socialist views, 02:51 as well as any number of other isms. 02:54 There was rebellion on the campuses, 02:58 not least of which because young people 03:00 against their world were being conscripted to go 03:03 and fight a war in Southeast Asia 03:05 or a very unpopular war and a huge war. 03:08 They were at least 500,000 US soldiers fighting there, 03:14 over a long period of time. 03:16 Incredible resources of the US applied and in 1968, 03:22 it all came to a head. 03:24 A war that we were constantly told was easy, 03:27 we were going to win it, no risk, 03:28 there was the Tet Offensive 03:30 whereby the North Vietnamese and the Viet-Cong rose up 03:33 and almost swept US presence out of South Vietnam, 03:38 we regrouped and regained the initiative, 03:42 but it was a shock to the system. 03:44 And that same year, 03:46 the agitation throughout the US society, 03:48 the civil rights movement, 03:51 came to a head Martin Luther King 03:53 already in his own lifetime an icon almost transcending 03:57 just normal personhood. 03:58 Martin Luther King was shot and killed. 04:01 I remember watching the night he was killed, Bobby Kennedy, 04:07 his brother had been killed not too long before. 04:12 Bobby Kennedy stood up and addressed the crowd 04:16 of mostly black people telling them 04:19 we should forgive and move on. 04:21 And he quoted the poet Aeschylus 04:23 in a beautiful idea that, you know, 04:28 we look at our traumas and that 04:30 but we must move beyond that. 04:33 Then Bobby Kennedy was shot that same year. 04:36 That same year, 04:38 the Democratic National Convention 04:41 attempted to meet in advance of the election, 04:44 and things got out of hand. 04:46 The rioting in Chicago around the convention was 04:49 unprecedented even to this present day. 04:53 And the Chicago police 04:54 were given a mandate to be hot 04:56 and heavy with the demonstrators 04:58 and images of young people 05:00 being beaten in the bloody pulp 05:03 were quite shocking to the nation. 05:06 All of this was happening in that same year. 05:09 And it seemed... 05:10 And of course, they were homegrown 05:12 revolutionary movements, 05:14 bombings, unrest on the campuses, 05:17 where would it end? 05:19 We didn't know. 05:21 And, yes, they've been other times. 05:24 But I think in the modern era, 05:25 that was a time when America lost 05:28 its innocence to have, yes, that had happened before. 05:33 But to have these assassinations, 05:35 clumped together in 1968 to have social unrest, 05:38 to have an awareness of military fallibility 05:42 that we couldn't with all of our, 05:44 the cream of our youth, 05:47 those that were fighting there, 05:48 as well as those that had fled to Canada with the... 05:52 We couldn't prevail. 05:55 And faith was a little uncertain, 05:57 even though as I remember, the Jesus movement 06:01 came roughly out of that period. 06:05 Innocence was lost. 06:08 And I've thought of this many, many times, 06:11 and I want to share an editorial 06:13 that I wrote that I referred back to that period, 06:18 it was called the ceremony of innocence. 06:20 This appeared in Liberty magazine, 06:23 not too many months ago, 06:25 and I say the title the ceremony 06:28 of innocence is aligned 06:30 for a 1920 poem by W.B. Yeats. 06:33 I've often quoted it before 06:35 and applied its post-World War I axed to our day. 06:39 And I would apply it to 2020-2021. 06:44 But this phrase jumped out to me 06:45 as I was listening to the news, 06:47 the line in full from the poem goes this way 06:50 and everywhere, 06:52 the ceremony of innocence is drowned. 06:56 Today's news in a nutshell, 06:59 is we live in a period of fake news of lies 07:04 passed over as public announcements. 07:06 And it's gotten said that regardless of the party, 07:09 regardless of who it is, 07:12 most people are saying nowadays they 07:13 can't believe don't believe 07:15 whatever they're told, says, 07:18 "I don't remember World War I, before my time or my father's, 07:23 for that matter, but I've read about it. 07:25 And it seems plausible, as many have posited 07:28 that the modern cynicism about religion 07:32 can be dated from that 07:33 first time the world was turned upside down. 07:37 But curiously, the Holocaust aside, 07:40 World War II did not evoke 07:42 the same spiritual world-weariness. 07:45 In fact, the end of the war 07:47 was the beginning of a great period of optimism. 07:50 And for the United States, 07:52 this post-World War II surge 07:54 was also a time of resurgent religiosity 07:59 with the rise of godless communism, 08:01 the United States 08:03 and said with unparalleled declarations of religiosity. 08:08 Ten Commandments monuments spring up all over the country, 08:13 under God was on every child's lips. 08:16 It's worth remembering the pledge of allegiance dates 08:19 from that period." 08:21 Under God was an added concept. 08:24 It's a dynamic worth remembering 08:27 as a backdrop to the red scare in the early 1950s, 08:31 and the activities 08:33 of the House Un-American Activities Committee 08:36 and the antics of a certain Senator Joe McCarthy 08:40 and his legal sidekick Roy Cohn. 08:44 Roy Cohn, if you read even contemporary articles of him 08:47 was said to be the most evil man in America. 08:50 But he was a clever and resilient lawyer, 08:53 who by the way was the acknowledge 08:56 this is no scurrilous charge. 08:58 He was the guy that trained our current president 09:04 in how to fight the political battles. 09:08 On his election, the President said, 09:10 "I wish Roy Cohn was... 09:12 I wish Roy were here." 09:15 These people at the time orchestrated a purge of many 09:19 public figures 09:20 who were accused of being communist 09:22 or moral degenerates. 09:25 They was after all, the Red Scare 09:27 and the Lavender Scare to be communist 09:30 was to be godless 09:31 and unamerican and likely grossly immoral. 09:34 Lately, the Supreme Court has dodged 09:37 the often-stone memorials 09:39 of that time as ceremonial deism. 09:44 In other words, religion without its power, 09:46 but certainly religiously intended, 09:49 or religion drained by time 09:51 and neglect of any real hazard 09:52 to a separation of church and state. 09:55 But they ignore context 09:57 and the raw Jacobism of the time. 10:00 In other words, a revolutionary attempt 10:02 to reinstate religion into government. 10:05 Times that have not quite left us 10:07 and circling back to go to that poem 10:11 in the widening jar, 10:13 as Yeats called it symbolically. 10:16 More literally for our times 10:18 he remarked that things fall apart. 10:22 The center cannot hold. 10:24 Mere anarchy is loosed on the world. 10:27 Indeed, all too many cherished norms 10:29 are going, going, gone. 10:33 We pray that the failed safes of our experiment 10:37 will work even as the side cuts down 10:40 old growth norms and as before, 10:43 a sort of religious motivators at work. 10:47 Today, religious leaders who should be conscience points 10:50 and moral gods have embraced the logic of the 1950s 10:54 in supporting ironically 10:56 the most un-American religious activities 10:59 in the most contradictory methods. 11:02 One wonders what stone monuments 11:04 will be put down this time around. 11:07 And even as I write that 11:08 I was aware of pulling down certain monuments of the past, 11:13 and perhaps with some cause, 11:15 but what will we erect equally as inappropriately in our time? 11:19 Moral political slogans do movements 11:22 even though they may at times seem like caricatures, 11:26 and make America great again, 11:28 work just fine even if some wonder 11:30 when it ceased being great, 11:33 more important that 11:34 the slogan itself is what it really means 11:37 to those who crafted 11:38 what is a perfectly fine aspirational slogan. 11:41 So far as religion is greatness found in a time 11:46 when church and state became dangerously conflated. 11:50 Is it found again in loyalty tests 11:53 based on some sort of religio-political affiliation? 11:57 Is it found in a religion that plays identity politics, 12:01 but is unconcerned with the inner man 12:03 and the higher values 12:05 that was so bruised globally after World War I? 12:08 The 21st century was bound to be 12:12 a confusing maelstrom for the mass of humanity. 12:16 Why did we expect the United States to be exempt? 12:20 I often read world histories that are titled, 12:23 the age of revolution. 12:26 The United States and much of modern Europe 12:29 emerged from that era, 12:31 but it is to misunderstand the present 12:33 to think the evolutionary or revolutionary dynamic 12:37 has dissipated. 12:38 If anything, the forces are at popping intensity. 12:43 The recent few decades of computerization 12:46 have shaken up normality, 12:48 far more than the Industrial Revolution, 12:51 which produced the modern era. 12:53 The social media dynamic exists alongside credit cards, 12:58 iris scanners, planes that fly halfway across the world 13:01 and can land automatically. 13:03 Smart weapons, drones, GPS maps, and maps anyone, 13:08 smartphones and CGI and hackers, 13:14 a global economy 13:15 and interconnectedness via with a latent protectionism. 13:19 Perhaps the financial house of cards 13:21 will collapse into a black hole of a new world order 13:27 or a new world war who knows. 13:30 Demographic forces seem unstoppable by edicts or walls. 13:36 In pre-history, travel movements 13:38 made the various European his peoples. 13:40 We're living in a time of demographic transformation 13:45 with this attendant tension. 13:47 And I'm going to continue 13:48 a little past the break just to finish this. 13:50 The old order changes. 13:53 Spoke Tennyson's King Arthur in what might well be 13:57 a commentary on our times, 13:59 the old isms have either gone or lost the vigor. 14:02 Strong men and movements appear on the stage 14:04 in the most unexpected places and their Remainers religion, 14:10 arguably the most powerful marker 14:12 of human identity and itself an engine of action. 14:15 Will we allow it to be the subtext 14:18 for a new loyalty test? 14:20 Will we allow religion stripped of its ceremonies of innocence, 14:26 the life lived according to the values? 14:28 Will we allow religion to become the handmade 14:31 to a brave new world? 14:34 Religious faith has been the subtext to the best 14:39 of what has happened in the United States. 14:42 The first great awakening 14:43 gave a moral sense and underlying, 14:46 sorry, unifying sense of course to the American Revolution, 14:51 under the protection of the First Amendment religion 14:55 flourished in this new republic. 14:57 A religion more personal and dynamic. 15:00 The net of the old world, the religious sensibilities 15:03 of the United States had much to do 15:05 with its readiness to help other peoples 15:08 and nations where no one else could. 15:10 But we are at the crossroads of faith initiative. 15:13 Jesus Christ in a darker moment wondered whether 15:17 He would find faith in the world 15:18 when He returned. 15:19 Religion like the pole will always be with us 15:22 but will true faith, 15:24 a true religion that heals the inner person 15:28 and distress the siren call of political power, 15:32 will it survive as an active part 15:35 of the American experience? 15:37 Stay tuned, and stay tuned, and I'll be back after a break. |
Revised 2020-12-05