A Political Bridge Too Far

The Democratic Convention of studied centrist sound bites sculpted by spin doctors and damage control experts gave the people what they wanted to hear but confirmed for those with eyes to see, the dismal trend in Western civilization. Behind the dulling rhetoric of concern for families and the defense of children, President Clinton, in his acceptance speech in Chicago, 1996, reached a high point of tragic irony when he elevated the killing of unborn children as a noble act of spirituality, to be decided “by a woman, her doctor and her god.” He failed to note that abortion not only kills babies. It kills, according to the intention of the radical feminist agenda, the deep maternal instinct in the young women who should be the mainstay of families in the twenty-first century; it kills the public’s delicate trust in the healing profession; and it effectively eliminates the role of the father in the real issues of life and death. Beyond the smoke screen of made- to-please political newspeak, the “bridge to the future” leads to a violent “Village” of family collapse, cowardly infanticide, physician-assisted euthanasia, power grabbing, and endemic suspicion in which neither marriage, and hence the family, nor children nor even the individual citizen is ultimately safe.

In spite of constant claims to the contrary, this agenda is, without question, a bridge to the past — to the immediate past of the revolutionary Sixties’ agenda of sexual liberation, moral relativism and anti-Christian spirituality — with all the social destruction of sexually-communicated diseases, especially AIDS, family breakup and juvenile crime it has brought in its wake. President Clinton’s first appointment to the Supreme Court shows just how far this ideology, in spite of its patent failure, has come in one generation. A radical, doctrinaire feminist lawyer from the ACLU, who is anti-gender distinctions in any nook or cranny of the state, including the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, but pro-abortion, pro-ERA, pro-women in combat, pro-legalization of prostitution and pro-gay politics [see Gary Hoitsma, Human Events, August 16, 1996], Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, from her tenured place in the highest Court of the land, now prepares legal justice for the idyllic village of tomorrow. It should be stated that this “pro-choice” ideology has little to do with classical Democratic programs and a lot to do with the stunning revival of pagan spirituality in the West in our time. Whatever they might say, this is not a time of politics as usual.

The Radicalism Now Status Quo

The 60’s chickens are coming home to roost – and to crow! Twenty-eight years to the day the radicals, in particular members of the “Chicago Seven,” returned in triumph to the Windy City, winners of a thirty-year culture war. These contemporary purveyors of peace and love came to remember their violent civil war with society when the Democrats locked them out of the 1968 Convention and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police cracked open their heads with truncheons. The reception in 1996 was different. Present Mayor Richard M. Daley (son) welcomed them with open arms.

Once an armed hippie, Tom Hayden was back, not only with his old revolutionary colleagues, but as an official delegate to the Convention. A California state senator with a new message, Hayden also teaches pantheistic “deep ecology” and the unity of all things at Episcopalian Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality Institute in Oakland, CA, a center for the exploration of pagan “Christian” worship and various forms of witchcraft.

Rennie Davis, another “war hero” of a different kind, in typical New Age fashion, spoke of new spiritual discoveries that will push humanity into greatness within the next five years. His forthcoming book is significantly entitled The Great Turning. “I am very lit,” he told the several thousand attendees at the “Return to Chicago 1968/1996” rally. “In two to three years you will be lit too.” Appropriately some of the original cast of “Hair” were present singing once more, “This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” The revolutionaries of yesteryear were back for “closure” and “healing.” In fact they were also back to savor victory, celebrating the triumph of their once radical agenda which now constitutes the spiritual and philosophical underbelly of much of contemporary mainstream politics. Their victory means that in some real sense, the deeply spiritual pagan Age of Aquarius, predicted by the gurus to appear around the year 2000, stands beckoning on the other side of Clinton’s Bridge.

With the phrase “a woman and her god,” President Clinton surreptitiously introduced a new element to the “Democratic” political platform — a particularly modern (though very old) god who, on the one hand, can whisper to some that abortion is a heinous slaughter of the innocents and, on the other, can reassure others that abortion is a social good. Take, for instance, the luminous testimony before Congress of ex-Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, according to whom “abortion has had an important and positive public health effect” [Human Events, ibid]. In prose worthy of certain German doctors of a couple of generations back, she offered as proof the fact that in Washington State in 1976 the number of Down’s syndrome infants “was 64 percent lower than it would have been without legal abortion.” Obviously Dr. Elders never saw what I saw — a Down’s syndrome child playing the violin in her school orchestra and the beaming faces of her proud parents. Either the god behind these conflicting ethical systems is schizophrenic and confused, and thus not worthy of divine status, or there is more than one god speaking.

The Paganism of 60s Radicalism

Few people, whether Democrats or Republicans, realize that at its deepest level, the Sixties revolution was the rejection of monotheism and the adoption of pagan polytheism. Some radical theologians during the Sixties proclaimed the “Death of God.” We were all mildly amused, claiming not even to know that God was sick! But the radical theologians were deadly serious, seeing in this divine death announcement “the obituary of a useless single- minded and one-dimensional norm of a civilization that has been predominantly monotheistic, not only in its religion, but also in its politics, its history, its social order, its ethics, and its psychology.” At the funeral of the God of the Bible, this radical minuscule minority heralded “the rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses,” and a coming political system to go with it. Incredibly their prediction has come to pass, as, in the 80s and the 90s, well-placed radical feminists in society and even in the church turn to the goddess for spiritual “empowering” in order to change the world. Discovering one’s own god, and beyond that, that one is god, constitutes the essence of the spiritual regeneration of the 60s’ “Me Generation.” Ideas have consequences. Gods give life and take it again and are thus quite capable, being only human after all, of creating hell on earth. Clearly, this election is about gods, not children.

The Prospects of the Challenger

At this most crucial intersection of politics and religion, only the clear-headed stand a chance. As Bob Dole turns away from the base that elected a resounding old-style majority to Congress in 1994, he seems to be heading for a certain and major defeat. In trying, mostly ineptly, to imitate the ideology of the opposition and accepting to play a game whose rules the other side composed, he surely will be tongue-tied, hog- tied Arkansas-style and eaten alive by a skilled opponent whose mother tongue is the language of all-inclusive doublespeak and whose core values are relativism and a modern, subtle form of polytheism.

If the spiritual children of the 60s revolution have anything to do with it, the utopian village that will raise the next generations of our children will not be in any real sense Christian. The global village of the twenty-first century will be polytheistic and animistic, oddly enough, just like the African villages that now serve Mrs. Clinton as a cutesy model for her theories of communal child-rearing. One-dimensional gods speaking univocal truths are not welcome in the all- inclusive, encircling postmodern womb of the returning pagan goddess. “God bless America” now has an ominous ring as it is sung in ball parks and at civic celebrations throughout the land. Now we must ask: “Which God? and what “blessings?,” realizing that this particular bridge to a blessed future is seductively broad except for those who still hold to the old views of God.

If, by carefully chosen soothing sound bites, this new religious/political rhetoric succeeds in selling itself to unsuspecting voters as the “right track” and the “train into the twenty-first century,” one day in the not too distant future America may discover, alas, too late, that this “bridge into the future” was a bridge too far.