The Porn-for-Prayer Syndrome

Richard Cochrane sent me the following item, which I have modified a bit:

IT IS PORN FOR PRAYER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

The University of Maryland is trading porn for prayer as the 175-member “senate” (composed of faculty and students) voted 42 to 14 to end prayer at its upcoming graduation ceremony in order to be “sensitive” and join its peers “like UC Berkeley.” At the same time there is a campus campaign of sorts to show a hard-core pornographic film as an official part of its activities. The decision will be reviewed by its president and thence go to the university’s board for review before it becomes policy.

Coincidentally, this week’s NEWSWEEK cover bears the title, DECLINE AND FALL OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA, with the words arranged in a red cross on a black background, recalling TIME’S famous “Is God Dead?” cover of the mid-sixties. The story intones, “The end of Christian America”: The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now-and what, as a nation, we are about to become.”

According to the article, the annual 2009 American Religious Identification Survey summary got the attention of R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary because it said, “The number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent,” and names the Northeast as “the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.”

The PEW CENTER forum reports that 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian; the Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll found the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent.

In June, 2008, then Senator Obama declared in a speech in Jerusalem that the U. S. is “no longer [exclusively] a Christian nation,” but is also a nation of others, including Muslims and nonbelievers.

It was in that speech that Obama also blasted the “Christian right” for hijacking religion and using it to divide the nation: “Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us,” he said.

Asked last year to clarify his remarks, Obama repeated them to the Christian Broadcast Network. “I think that the right might worry a bit more about the dangers of sectarianism. Whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers,” Obama wrote in an e-mail to CBN News senior national correspondent David Brody.

“We should acknowledge this and realize that when we’re formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we’ve got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community,” wrote Obama.

It was just over 100 years ago that Justice Brewer in CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY V. UNITED STATES, 143 U. S. 457 (1892) said:

“If we pass beyond these matters to a view of American life, as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs, and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other matters, note the following: the form of oath universally prevailing, concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer; the prefatory words of all wills, ‘In the name of God, amen’; the laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with the general cessation of all secular business, and the closing of courts, legislatures, and other similar public assemblies on that day; the churches and church organizations which abound in every city, town and hamlet; the multitude of charitable organizations existing everywhere under Christian auspices; the gigantic missionary associations, with general support, and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe. These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”

My comments:

The spectacle of Barack Obama’s accusing the Christian right of hijacking religion and exploiting it to divide us further amounts to an act of mega-hypocrisy, coming as it does from a man whose close friend and long-time mentor, the Rev. Wright, is a religious hatemonger of the first order. What has caused that extreme reaction in some conservative circles is the hijacking of the United States itself by the far left.

The historical fact is that the nation was in “the greatest generation” when it was far more Christian than it is today, when we are plagued by crime, violence, vice and corruption. I submit that it is very difficult to pass this off as mere coincidence. There is a set of values that any sober evaluation of our history will show made us great, and if we think we can eliminate prayer from our commencement ceremonies and replace it with hard-core porn, and then send out graduates who will mend the ills of our country, we are the most deluded generation in history.

Oh, and by the way, wasn’t it the University of Maryland whose medical students a few generations back solved the problem of a lack of cadavers to practice on by paying grave robbers to supply them?

This country was founded on the principle that it would be a nation ruled by Christian values, as stated by Judge Brewer, and that it would welcome those of other faiths to join us, become Americans, and worship as they pleased. The thought that those others should then demand that we drop everything to the lowest common denominator is an abomination. It is as if some people believe they have found a cure for all forms of cancer. Others move in and feel the original folks are deluded, and refuse to take the cure. Subsequently, they demand that those original people stop claiming that they have such a cure.

In fact, there are historical precedents for such foolishness. In the Middle Ages Christian forces captured a Muslim doctor and put him to work treating their troops. A soldier was brought in with a leg wound, and the Christian doctor announced that the leg had to be amputated. The Muslim doctor protested, saying that his people healed such wounds on a regular basis. The Christian doctor retorted that the Muslims were barbarians and were wrong about this, and ordered a man with an axe to chop off the soldier’s leg. His first chop missed, at which point the soldier fainted. The second blow spattered the room with bone, blood and flesh. The third blow took off the leg, but the soldier was dead.

As long as our only absolute value is the conviction that there are no absolute values, we are going to continue riding the bobsled of emptiness and meaninglessness down into national oblivion. If we go the way the University of Maryland is threatening to go, so ends a great nation-not with a bang but with a whimper.