Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: Unterschied: Europa - USA; Intellektuelle, "Mantra": Menschenrechte, Toleranz; Marcel Gauchet; EU; Euroäische Verfassung (Entwurf 2004)

Kurzinhalt: Instead of religion, the liberal elites prefer their monopolistic mantra of 'diversity', 'human rights' and 'tolerance' as if they invented them,

Textausschnitt: 473a In contrast to the US where, despite a formal separation of Church and state designed to preclude 'Establishment', religion has a significant impact on politics, many Europeans are determined to write Christianity out of the picture. They include British leftists, despite Evangelical Christianity being integral to British socialism, and aggressive secularists, in Belgium, France or Spain, who patrol battle lines established a century earlier over such issues as education. Religion in these circles signifies the Basques, Belfast, Bosnia and Bush, at any rate something horrid, like the 'national Catholicism' of Franco. Actually, the Democrat presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were not slow to invoke the Almighty, with genuine conviction in the case of Carter. The ultra-conservative and much maligned Ronald Reagan was not much of a churchgoer, even if rhetorically he appointed Him an honorary member of his cabinet.1 The US religious right did not emerge from nowhere, and nor did it do so without liberal provocation. It is important to recall that the politicisation of conservative American religion began with the 1963 Supreme Court ban on prayers in public schools, and gained momentum through Roe v. Wade a decade later, the Supreme Court decision which struck down state laws against abortion, and that conservatives are as widely represented among America's largest denomination, Roman Catholics, as among the Evangelical Protestants who seem to attract the most media attention. (Fs)

473b In similar fashion, the US right established an impressive array of think-tanks and autonomous centres, largely because they felt, with reason, that their views were excluded from the 'Left university' and much of the media, a process extended through maverick 'bloggers' seeking to balance liberal bias in America's established networks and newspapers.2 (Fs)

473c There are other cultural differences. Although the European media chooses to ignore it, the US has an extraordinary range of religious public intellectuals, such as William Buckley Jnr, Stephen Carter, Richard Neuhaus and George Weigel. By contrast, although Europe has such outstanding figures as Leszek Kotakowski, Hans Maier and Josef Ratzinger, its public culture is dominated by sneering secularists, who set the tone for the rest of the population and can make light work of the average bishop rolled out to confound them, especially in the case of Anglican bishops who share so much liberal common ground. Much of the European liberal elite regard religious people as if they come from Mars, except when they operate within such licensed liberal parameters as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the struggle against apartheid or the US civil rights movement in which Christians, notably Dr Martin Luther King, played a distinguished role.3 'Britain', we are loftily told, 'has not, since the 16th century, been ruled by bishops or mullahs and has been the better for it.' In fact, 'mullahs' have never ruled Britain except in that columnist's imagination. The last truly politically significant English cleric was the seventeenth-century archbishop William Laud. This line neglects the contribution that clergy have made to the public affairs of Britain, and, more worryingly, the fact that it is not only 'fundamentalist lobbies' who 'curse' modern politics, but professional lobbies representing animal rights, gays or the planet (causes that inspire sectarian devotions to the fox or Gaia, so to speak) which could equally be deemed a mixed blessing were it not politically suicidal to say so. Idiot and ignorant actors and playwrights are integral to all these causes.4 Although many European politicians are highly religious, including the leaders of Britain's major political parties, notably Tony Blair, and many parliamentarians, it was thought expedient to let it be known that Downing Street does 'not do God' lest secularists make hay with it as they did when Blair announced that he felt accountable to God. (Fs) (notabene)

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474b Instead of religion, the liberal elites prefer their monopolistic mantra of 'diversity', 'human rights' and 'tolerance' as if they invented them, unaware of the extent to which these are products of a deeper Christian culture based on ideas and structures that are so deeply entrenched that most of us are hardly aware of them. As the great contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet has written: 'Modern society is not a society without religion, but one whose major articulations were formed by metabolising the religious function.'1 (Fs)