The ELCA was founded in 1986 as a result of a merger of several formerly ethnic Lutheran synods in the United States as well as a splinter group that left the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod after an attempt to turn the LCMS liberal failed.  From the beginning, the ELCA has been distinguished by a professed loyalty to Scripture and the Lutheran confessions that can be set aside freely whenever the need arises.  Sadly, this reality is not apparent to some lifelong ELCA members whose country churches maintain the historic liturgy and have not had occasion to call a priestess to lead the flock.  It must have come as a great shock to these faithful, then, when the wicked little booklet (with happy trees in a misty woodland on the cover) Journey Together Faithfully: The Church and Homosexuality arrived.  This handy brainwashing tool is to be used by committees in ELCA churches across America, to help seminary-trained pastors lead little old ladies and young parents to discover just what the Bible says about homosexuality and the Church’s role in blessing “gay marriages.”  After each church finishes the “journey,” everyone’s thoughts and feelings are to be gathered together and sent to headquarters, forming “recommendations for the church to consider in 2005,” after which a “social statement” will be drafted by 2007.

Despite all of the ELCA’s appeals for meaningful dialogue, it appears that the deck has been stacked against those who would oppose church-sanctioned sodomy—both the blessing of “gay marriage” and the ordination of pastors and bishops who are “homosexual persons who give expression to sexual intimacy only in a relationship that is mutual [sic], chaste [sic] and faithful . . . ”  Wait a minute! one of the faithful writes (on the “Frequently Asked Questions” page on elca.org), “Hasn’t the outcome of this study already been decided?”  Take heart, ye who adhere to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession: “There are no foregone conclusions.  All involved in the conduct of our studies on sexuality are committed to an open and fair process in which all views will be heard and respected.”

There are, however, several “foregone conclusions” at work here.  First, the ELCA already officially “welcome[s] gay and lesbian people to participate fully in the life of its congregations”—that means active sodomites, not repentant men and women who have renounced their unnatural behavior.  This attitude has created a homosexual subculture within the ELCA which has, in turn, lobbied for a definitive decision on homosexual “marriage” and clergy.  Still, despite the recent spate of court decisions and lawless civil ceremonies affirming “gay marriage,” it is difficult to imagine that this issue would have come to the fore so quickly in the ELCA were it not for the elevation of V. Eugene Robinson to the status of bishop in the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.  That Bishop Robinson abandoned his wife and children (dubbed “adultery” in days of yore) to pursue a “mutual, chaste, and faithful” relationship with another man—who, in a Queer Eye for the Queer Guy moment, handed V. Eugene his mitre at the height of his elevation ceremony—is well known.  That his status affects the ministerium of the ELCA may not be so obvious.

In an effort to unite the “Body of Christ,” the ELCA entered into an agreement with the Episcopal Church, U.S.A., in 2001 called A Call to Common Mission, which establishes full communion between the two bodies.  In addition, CCM provided for the mutual recognition of clergy—which involved some doctrinal jiggering on the Lutheran side, as the role of bishops and “historic succession” had been understood differently by Lutherans in the past.  Practically speaking, this means that the ELCA must recognize an adulterous sodomite as a legitimate bishop and that any ELCA church could call him to preside over the Sacrament of the Altar.  Furthermore, according to CCM, “The churches will over time come to share in the ministry of bishops in an evangelical, historic succession.”

Not to worry, dear parishioner: If you read the accompanying supplement to the Journey (Background Study on Biblical Texts), you will see that all of those nasty Scriptures that seem to condemn homosexuality, when held in the light of recent scholarship, actually condemn “inhospitability” (Sodom and Gomorrah), that which is “against current custom” (St. Paul’s reference to “that which is unnatural” in Romans 1), or just plain don’t apply to our times, since we’re not under the law—we’re under grace!

Such exegetical chicanery may cause a mass exodus of pastors and laity from the ELCA to the Missouri Synod and to other conservative Protestant denominations in the course of the next three years.  Those bodies should be cautioned, however: Many of those within the ELCA who are raising protests about their church’s attitude toward homosexuality carry with them the hermeneutical seeds that grew into the current thorn bush.  The acceptance of “gay marriage” did not happen overnight: The rejection of natural law began with the ELCA’s embracing of contraception, female “clergy,” abortion, and homosexuality as an “orientation.”  And the ELCA’s rejection of the clear teaching of Scripture began when the ethnic bodies that it comprises accepted historical-critical methods of exegesis in the mid-20th century.

As for those faithful who are contemplating leaving Sodom for the plain of Mamre, there is but one admonition: Remember Lot’s wife.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Cultural Suicide
by Thomas Fleming

Multiculturalism and Western self-loathing.

VIEWS

America in Europe, Europe in America
by Claude Polin
A shared disease.

Europe and America
by Srdja Trifkovic
Identity of decrepitude.

Dreams of Old Places
by Anthony Bukoski
A personal essay.

NEWS

Europe’s Population Implosion
by David A. Hartman
A diagnosis.

Strange Bedfellows
by Wayne Allensworth
Bush and Soros unite against Georgia.

REVIEWS

Smear Campaign
by Samuel Francis

Ted Morgan: Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America

plus

Srdja Trifkovic on Clyde Prestowitz’s Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions

H.A. Scott Trask on Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne: A Life

James O. Tate on June Osborne’s Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Paris: Islam in France
by Curtis Cate

VITAL SIGNS

IMMIGRATION: Real Reform
by Peter Brimelow

COLUMNS

BREAKING GLASS
by Philip Jenkins

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
The Passion of the Christ
by George McCartney

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Rainbow by Catharine Savage Brosman
New Age Lost and
The Quickening by Andrew Huntley  

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by H. Ward Sterett and 
Melanie Anderson.

However, too many Americans need jobs.  Many of these jobs have gone overseas, the result of outsourcing and offshoring trends seeking cheap labor.

We need to give our manufacturers and their suppliers incentives to put Americans back to work and to keep their jobs in the United States.  I have been working for some time with more than two dozen of my Republican colleagues to make sure that the replacement for the Foreign Sales Corporation-Extraterritorial Income (FSC-ETI) tax program does not inadvertently raise taxes on manufacturing in America at exactly the wrong time.  In fact, our goal is to reward companies for keeping manufacturing in the United States by giving them a lower tax rate on their domestic production.  The more you produce in the United States, the lower your taxes.

American manufacturers are already at a substantial disadvantage in world markets.  The United States is quickly becoming a less attractive and more costly location for operating a business.  Our manufacturers know the numbers all too well.  We are a relatively high-tax jurisdiction with costly regulatory burdens that reduce incentives for expansion and choke research and development.  America must do something to change this situation if we are to have any hope of protecting our nation’s manufacturing base.

Before we can enact substantial reforms that small-business leaders tell us will help them compete in world markets, we must first be resolved (like good doctors) to “do no harm.”  An FSC-ETI replacement bill that raises the costs of domestic manufacturing is unacceptable, and I am pleased that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) has moved to help secure some new savings for U.S. manufacturers in his bill.  However, the current bill still leans heavily to the side of international tax relief.  As a result, it would actually encourage manufacturers to send more jobs overseas, where they can get a lower tax rate for international production.

I have made several suggestions.  As we come to the end of a long period of negotiation on how best to bring the United States into compliance with the WTO’s decision that we must repeal FSC-ETI, I still believe that the following principles should guide us: First, since 90 percent of FSC-ETI benefits under current law go to domestic manufacturers, domestic manufacturers should appropriately benefit under the bill—not multinational corporations operating overseas.

Second, any repeal should be aimed at helping all manufacturers, not just large corporations.  The Thomas bill should be expanded to cover other forms of businesses besides C corporations, as is the case in the bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee.

Third, the Thomas bill includes a provision that increases taxes on foreign-owned companies doing business in the United States.  During a period of crisis in the manufacturing sector, we should not increase taxes on these corporations that hire millions of U.S. workers.  I assure you, they will create their jobs elsewhere.  The Thomas earnings-stripping proposal should be modified to apply only to those companies that engage in tax avoidance.

Fourth, we should ensure that the current FSC-ETI companies and their small-business suppliers do not close their doors or move overseas when this benefit goes away.  We should try to make the transition as painless as possible.

On March 1, the European Union began enforcing five-percent tariffs on certain products that U.S. manufacturers export to Europe as a penalty for Congress’s failure to repeal FSC-ETI, which the World Trade Organization determined to be an unfair trade subsidy.  We should work quickly to pass a clean FSC-ETI replacement bill that helps those currently receiving the benefits—American manufacturers producing in the United States.

Our competitors have enough advantages over U.S. manufacturers.  It is time we gave our companies incentives to keep jobs here in the United States.  The FSC-ETI replacement bill gives us the opportunity to help U.S. manufacturers keep jobs on our shores.  American workers will be the big winners.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

What did your kids learn in school today?  Certainly nothing about Albertus Magnus or Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae or Scipio Africanus and his gallant defense of Rome against the child-murdering Carthaginians.  They would have been even less likely to hear about Charles Martel, who drove the infidel Moors back into Spain, or the ragtag Christian army of John Hunyadi, St. John Capistrano, and Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Dracula, that drove the Turks back from Belgrade in one of the most glorious moments of Western history.  What American under 60 can say what took place at Lepanto or Cowpens or the Alamo or Guadalcanal?

If your children are college students, and they are going to the University of California-Santa Barbara, they can attend such lectures as “Shinin’ the Light on White: An Introduction to White Privilege,” led by the cofounder of the “Challenging White Supremacy Workshops,” or a lecture performance by Roxanne Poorman Gupta “in praise of the primordial feminine,” or Alejandro Jaurez’s thoughtful presentation “F---ing with the Stereotypes: Gay Men of Color in Porn,” in which a Chicano-studies and art-studio major pays tribute to “Submissive Asians, spicy Latinos, hung Black stallions.”

At my own alma mater (Chapel Hill), incoming freshmen are required to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, a Marxist diatribe against all things American written by a 60’s feminist who has not learned a thing in 40 years of demonstrating and posturing.  The poor thing actually went out and waited tables so she could suffer with the poor—before going back to her affluent lifestyle as a government-subsidized perfesser.  Last fall, the same university was promoting Approaching the Qu’ran, by Haverford professor Michael Sells, a third-rate leftist quack who never tires of promoting all things abnormal or non-Western.  And the Alumni Association wonders why I do not send them money.

In celebrating Islam, Sells is hardly original.  Public-school students in California are put through an intensive three-week course on Islam in which they are forced to memorize verses of the Koran and pray in the name of Allah, whom they praise as “Lord of Creation.”  They also study the life of Muhammad and memorize Arabic phrases, Islamic theological terms, and Muslim proverbs.

In the textbook for the course, Across the Centuries, students are also taught about the intolerance of Christians who persecuted those poor dear harmless witches and used the Inquisition against heretics.  To help them learn to think like Muslims, students are even forced to dress up as Bedouins and pretend to be in a caravan.  It was Muslims, after all, who “introduced rhythmic music, rhyming poetry, different courses at meals, and table manners,” according to their history book.  If you have ever wondered where John Walker Lindh got the notion that conversion to Islam was a good idea, the obvious answer is that his school converted him to the religion of terror.

The Islamic propaganda being pushed in our schools is only the most perverse manifestation of the multicultural sickness.  Our children are taught, as many of us were taught, that Muslim Arabs and Turks are heirs (as we are) to the civilization of Greece and Rome, that Muslims preserved Greek philosophy and mathematics in a period when barbarian Christians were persecuting independent thinkers.  Islam is one of three great monotheisms, and Muslims and Christians worship the same god, only with different names.  Muslims per se are not our enemy, only Islamic extremists who commit acts of terrorism—that is to say, Muslims who believe in their religion and act according to its principles.

This myth, to a great extent, defines the modern civilization not of the West but of the Anti-West, and, unlike many myths, which are a poetic means of getting at a deeper reality, there is not a particle of truth in it.  The primary effect of the Arab conquest of North Africa and the Middle East was the destruction of the civilization of the Greeks and Romans.  The Muslim conquerors persecuted and impoverished the Christians of the eastern empire and proved themselves largely incapable of maintaining the institutions of civilized life.  The same might be said of the Franks and Goths who invaded the western empire, but those German tribes quickly accepted its religion and culture and, within 500 years, were producing a brilliant “Gothic” civilization.

The Muslims, however, came only to loot and to destroy, and the culture they built out of the ruins of Persian and Greco-Roman civilization was sterile, derivative, and uncreative.  In such fringe areas as Spain, Bosnia, and Persia, Islamic principles were submerged, to a considerable extent, in a vibrant local culture, which enabled the emergence of nominally Muslim thinkers and artists who made a creative use of the classical past, but, insofar as Islam had an influence on their work, it was negative.  What kind of art can there be when human beings cannot be represented?  What kind of philosophy, when thinkers must accept the crudest savage fatalism as the undisputed truth?  What kind of social life, when women are treated, in principle, worse than slaves in Christendom?  Yet this is the religion and civilization that is being inflicted on our schoolchildren.

The cancer of multiculturalism is not quarantined in our schools.  Our support for the Islamic religion in schools has been matched, at least until recently, by a willingness to permit Muslims to enter our country, set up propaganda and lobbying centers, and protest against whatever Christian symbols other non-Christian groups have failed to eliminate.

Muslims, however, are only a small part of the multiculturalist assault.  You cannot turn on the radio or television or go to a film without being assaulted by anti-European, anti-Christian, antiheterosexual stereotypes.  In film after film, dumb, insensitive white guys are taught how to be fully human by black jazzmen, Sioux braves, Asian children, or brilliant artistic homosexuals.  And, unless you attend a traditional Latin Mass or a conservative Baptist or Missouri Synod Lutheran church, you will hear the same propaganda on Sunday.  It takes a good deal of Christian patience to endure the relentless clerical sniveling over the rights of immigrants and the superiority of their more authentic cultural traditions, which may include female circumcision, animal sacrifice, narcotrafficking, polygamy, and the arranged marriage of preteen girls to old men.

Our ruling class has come up with the perfect formula for cultural suicide.  First, set quotas to encourage the immigration of non-Western aliens.  Then, once they have arrived, give them a whole set of rights that no one else has: the right to be taught in a foreign language at the taxpayers’ expense; the right to have their religion and culture inflicted on American students who cannot pray in school or be taught the English classics; the right to preferential treatment in school admissions, scholarships, and employment—at the expense, remember, of our own children.

Multiculturalism and Western self-loathing did not begin in the 1960’s.  If we look back at the imagined Golden Age of the 1950’s, where was the cultural cutting edge?  Not, certainly, with such writers as Frost and Eliot, Hemingway and Faulkner, all of whom were nearing the end of their careers.  No, the cutting edge was the spatter-painting of Jackson Pollock, whose “work” (though that is hardly the word for something that more resembles leaning against a wall and spitting tobacco juice on pavement) is a rebellion against all Western art and Western sanity; and, in literature, it was the so-called Beats, who repudiated the standards and traditions of the West in favor of the mysterious East.

In cultural politics, the radical voice was that of Frantz Fanon, who denounced Western colonialism, declaring that whites only defined themselves in opposition to blacks and calling for the creation of a new world in which all history and tradition had been annihilated.  Neither Frantz Fanon nor the postwar Beat Generation, however, were original in anything.  They were merely repeating the pre-war platitudes of Marxists and surrealists.

The surrealists had more on their minds than melting watches and unintelligible poems.  Many of them were also Marxists, and some of the leaders signed a famous manifesto denouncing the French Catholic Paul Claudel.  Claudel’s sin was to have called for a defense of the West’s cultural traditions, which the surrealists derided as inferior to all the cultures of the world, high and low.  If the West was falling apart, so much the better: “We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend . . . ”

Seven years later, the surrealists issued their encyclical on the colonial question, “Murderous Humanitarianism” (1932), republished in the special issue “Surrealism: Revolution Against Whiteness” in the aptly named journal Race Traitor.  This edict condemns not only colonialism, capitalism, and the clergy but the black middle class and liberals who collaborate with capitalist regimes.

Western “humanism,” they declare, so far from being humane, was built on slavery, colonialism, and genocide, and they proclaimed the enduring multicultural political agenda: an ethnic “civil war” against the West.

The surrealist diatribes echoing through the corridors of the academy today are only the culmination of four centuries of cultural suicide, going back at least to the nominally Christian but really neopagan Michel de Montaigne, who devoted one of his most important essays (“On the Cannibals”) to debunking all the institutions of France: the French monarchy, the French Church, French customs, French culture.

From Montaigne to Montesquieu to Voltaire to Rousseau to the surrealists to Ginsberg to the elementary-school teachers preaching Islam to California schoolchildren, there is an unbroken line of anti-Western, antiwhite, anti-Christian propaganda and a cultural amnesia so complete that we know more of Fat Albert than of Albertus Magnus.

St. Albert the Great, because of the breadth of his interests, is known as the Universal Doctor.  Although he was the greatest authority of his day on the natural sciences—physics and astronomy—he is now known chiefly as an advocate of moderate Aristotelianism.  Like his more famous student, St. Thomas Aquinas, he set out to refute the pseudo-Aristotelian disciples of the Muslim philosopher Averroes, whose distortions of Aristotle were incompatible with Christianity.

It is often said that Arab Muslim scholars are responsible for rescuing Aristotle.  This is only partly true.  It was Syrian Christians who, in the fifth and sixth centuries, translated Aristotle into Syriac and who later, in ninth-century Baghdad, retranslated him into Arabic.  Arab commentators did some good in interpreting the philosophical and medical texts, but they also had an agenda of their own.  The Muslim Aristotelians, who were of a neoplatonic bent, convinced themselves that God did not create the world directly but through intermediaries and that the soul was not immortal.  To defend himself from a charge of heresy, Averroes came up with the theory of two proofs—that revelation and philosophy were separate avenues to truth—that inflicted so much damage on the medieval mind.

Saint Albert and Saint Thomas stood against the Islamic skeptical tide.  Defending the Western mind from the invasion of Islamic thought was a very important task, as important as the task of the Crusades that were going on at this time to protect Orthodox Christians in the East and to rescue the Holy Land from Islamic oppression.

At the first John Randolph Club meeting in Dallas, I said it was time for ordinary Americans to take back their country, and the phrase was picked up for a time and turned into a political slogan.  Even if we cannot take back the country in our lifetime, however, we can take back our own lives, and, instead of complaining, as the neoconservatives do, about the evil schemes of the left (which includes them), we can prepare ourselves, our minds, our children’s minds, to be men and women of the West.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.