WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS AND MCCARTHYISM?

Using the historical analogies of the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism, Mary Eberstadt in IT’S DANGEROUS TO BELIEVE: Religious Freedom and its Enemies, chronicles the efforts of the progressive-secular alliance in North America and Europe to enforce their dogma on contemporary society by policing cultural precincts for heretics and shunning and shaming dissenters from their anti-Christian creed. “They are the guardians of what has become a secular substitute faith, concerning the secular revolution and its perceived moral imperatives. And like the Puritanism of yesteryear, today’s secular version does not tolerate nonconformism.”

There is an inquisitorial zeal in searching out what they call bigots and haters who follow, what until today, has been orthodox Christian teaching on sexual morality. The new fundamentalist faith is that the sexual revolution of the gradual destigmatization of all forms of consenting nonmarital sex, has been a boon to all humanity. “Doing what you want” is the new master ethic. Pleasure is the greatest good. “If it feels good, do it.” Therefore traditional moral codes represent systems of unjust repression. They are judgmental and hateful. Yesterday’s “sinners” have become the new secular “saints”, and yesterday’s “sin” have become virtues. There is no sexual act that is wrong.

“The bedrock of contemporary progressivism can only be described as quasi-religious…..less a political movement than a church….it is a contest of competing faiths.”

Homeschooling is attacked as a means of indoctrinating children in “faith’s dark, lurid dogmas before science, reason and the enlightening joys of secularism take over….Homeschooling amounts to allowing the faith-deranged to infect their young with their disorder.” Parents have no right to fill their children’s minds with nonsense! The National Education Association passed this resolution for 2014-15: “Homeschooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide students with a comprehensive educational experience.” Of course the Bible, prayer and a teacher’s faith are not permitted in our public schools – just like in Communist societies until they were restored after the Iron Curtain came down in Eastern Europe when parents demanded their children be taught Christianity again. Will that happen again in the USA?

Christian charities and colleges are being attacked for adhering to their beliefs. Gordon College, in Massachusetts, where I served as Dean of Christian Life in the 70’s, has been blacklisted by local school districts for requiring their students to live by a Christian moral code. Catholic Charities have been forced out of the adoption services. There is a religious war between two groups of believers: those following a two thousand year old creed and those following a secularist creed of the last fifty years.

Why can’t we agree to disagree and allow the two groups to live in peace? Why must the secularists use shaming language and the coercive power of the government to bludgeon Christians into silence? Why can we not allow public discussion of different beliefs without demonizing one another and calling the other side intolerant and abusive? To call someone a homophobe because their belief is different from yours does not advance the debate? People of goodwill should be able to discuss and differ without using pejorative language or tactics.

“The rhetorical question that put the final nail in McCarthyism, posed by army counsel Joseph Welch and famously repeated ever since, was ‘Have you no decency, sir?’” Smearing, shaming and silencing people of different beliefs, as did McCarthy, was finally seen to be counter-productive and vindictive. Christians are not bigots because they hold to Biblical morality. The present intimidation and exiling of supposed heretics who do not conform to the elites’ sexual orthodoxy needs to stop.

Some of the great social problems of our day are caused by the breakdown of Christian sexual morality. The breakdown of marriage and the number of children in single parent families is a recipe for unemployment and poverty. Income inequality will not be solved by higher taxes on the wealthy and better schools, but by the restoration of families led by mothers and fathers committed to one another rather than the pursuit of promiscuous selfish pleasure.