The Patriot Post® · Two Shades of Dismay: The Perverse Bondage Wrought by Liberalism and Islam
In opposing the godless and bloody French Revolution, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, concluded that, “I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies;…with morality and religion;…with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”
“The French Revolution was,” as Ann Coulter put it a few years ago, “a revolt of the mob…the godless antithesis to the founding of America.” Writing for Crisis Magazine, Joseph Pearce described the French Revolution as “an earlier incarnation of atheistic progressivism and the progenitor (forerunner) of communism.” In other words, the French Revolution was a tragic attempt at building a culture bereft of the “moral chains” described by Burke, and thus, liberty was lost.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetite,” said Burke. He added, “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters (chains).”
As it was with the French Revolution, the communist revolution, and the Third Reich, nowhere today are the chains of Burke’s axiom more clearly demonstrated than with the bondage that exists under modern liberalism and Islam.
Today’s liberalism stands upon two duplicitous notions: 1.) the godless pagan principle of “Do What Thou Wilt,” and 2.) the presence of an “omnicompetent” Government that is all too eager to mother us. In spite of the claims of modern liberals, such a political philosophy does not bring justice, nor does it promote liberty. On the contrary, as C.S. Lewis put it, such a modern State exists “not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something.” Something indeed. Lewis depressingly concludes that under such a regime, “There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”
The cleverly cloaked language of liberal-speak has deceived hundreds of millions the world over into surrendering our “business” to big government. For example, in the U.S., by far the largest employer is government. Local, state, and federal government (including uniformed military personnel) employs well over 23 million Americans. This is about 10 million more than the top 50 private employers in the U.S. combined.
The largest educator in the U.S. is government. About 90% of all U.S. children attend a k-12 godless government school. Over 70% of American students who attend college do so at a state school. Education accounts for nearly half (about 11 million) of the total federal, state, and local government workforce.
The largest “charity” in the U.S. is government (which, of course, brags about it!). Americans gave a total of approximately $3.4 billion (about $2.4 billion from individuals) to private charities in 2013. In the same year, Americans received over $6 billion from means-tested (recipients required to be below a certain income level) government programs (housing, food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, and the like). When non means-tested programs (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and so on) are included, the total is a shocking and staggering $2 trillion dollars.
Included in the cost of Social Security is over $144 billion spent for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). The number of SSDI beneficiaries jumped from 4.3 million in 1990 to 10.9 million in 2012, a 153% increase. Speaking of “mothering,” that is an amazing number of Americans who are unable, or (in many cases) unwilling, to work and thus wean themselves from the withering bosoms of big government.
And of course, unless dismantled by the Supreme Court, Americans now have made health care the business of big government. Thus, instead of liberating, liberalism has simply made tens of millions of Americans comfortable in, or at least comfortably accustomed to, their government made chains.
A man cannot be free unless he has economic independence. As C.S. Lewis pointedly put it, “For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”
In addition, guided by the false belief that “Do What Thou Wilt” (especially in the sexual realm) frees us from the shackles of the “antiquated” ideas on morality and personal ethical behavior, liberalism has set about to discredit and abandon many of the eternal and inescapable absolute truths set down by our Creator that should be the cornerstones of all good government. Thus, almost any sexual perversion imaginable is, in the U.S. today, a “right.” And instead of being free, tens of millions of Americans are now slaves to their sexual desires.
Pornography, abortion, homosexual behavior, adultery, and the like now have the protection provided by American big government. (Of course, same-sex “marriage” is now seeking — and winning — the same.) As a consequence, in the name of being “set free” from the shackles of parenting, over 50 million of the most defenseless among us have been slaughtered in the womb. Additionally, in the name of being “set free” from the shackles of marriage and monogamy, aided and abetted by the massive welfare state created by big government, tens of millions of children who graciously survived their mothers’ wombs are by being raised in single-parent homes, usually without a father.
Children born into these broken families are not only drastically more likely to be born poor, but to remain so. Of course, this means for years on end such children will “need” the care and provision of big government. America now has multiple generations raised in the mothering nanny state that liberals are almost always looking to expand (see: “free” cell phones, school lunches, community college, pre-k, day-care, and on, and on, and on).
Absent from their fathers, these children are also much more likely to grow up undisciplined, unruly, and immoral (even by liberal standards) and need the services provided by the American penal system. Thus, with his birth covered by Medicaid or Obamacare, his early nourishment provided by WIC and food stamps, his “free” government education (pre-k through community college) — which includes school lunches and an Obama phone — American taxpayers get to mother millions from birth well into adulthood. And after our hypothetical young leech (see: Julia, or Pajama Boy) takes his entitlement lifestyle to its logical conclusion and robs a liquor store, leading to his eventual incarceration, we see that the American taxpayers are getting to mother millions of their fellow citizens from cradle to grave. How liberating!
Just as tragic and devastating to the concept of true liberty the world over is the plague of Islam. And no, I’m not simply talking about the butchers of ISIS, or Boko Haram, or the other “radical Islamists.” Though most Muslims in the world aren’t strapping explosives to themselves or cutting off the heads of apostates, a broad examination of Islam is dreadfully revealing.
The 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) represent about 22% of the world’s population but generate barely 9% of the world’s GDP. The U.S. alone produces 23% of the world’s GDP. A shocking 40% of the Arab world lives in poverty.
In the 57 nations of the OIC, there are a total of about 500 universities. There are over 5,700 in the U.S. alone. In just over 100 years, the Muslim world — about 23% of the world’s population (1.6 billion) — has produced 11 Nobel Laureates, while a mere 14 million Jews (0.2% of world population) have produced around 190 (counts vary slightly). The U.S. has produced 353 of the 860 (41%) Nobel winners. Those identifying as Christian have earned just over 65% of the total number of Nobel Prizes awarded. If only Alfred Nobel’s organization awarded prizes for strapping on dynamite!
Particularly disturbing for lovers of true liberty is the role of women in Islamic society. Islamic law (Shariۥa) prohibits women from looking men in the eye, forbids them from wearing shoes that make noise, and forbids them from becoming educated. As Ergun and Emir Caner note in Unveiling Islam, “women are considered possessions in any orthodox Islamic regime…The wife is considered the husband’s sex object.” Also, one of the most alarming admonitions in the Koran allows the husband to punish his wife physically.
According to Pew polling, 99% of Afghan Muslims favor making Shariۥa the law of the land — as do 91% of Iraqi Muslims, 86% of Malaysian Muslims, 84% of Pakistani Muslims, 83% of Moroccan Muslims, 74% of Egyptian Muslims, and so on.
As I’ve previously noted, religious freedom in Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia is virtually non-existent. Like many other Muslim countries, Saudi law states that Islamic apostasy — denying the faith or converting to another religion — is a crime punishable by death. In 2006, Afghan citizen Abdul Rahman was arrested (after it was discovered that he possessed a Bible) and faced the death penalty for converting to Christianity. Intervention by then Afghan president Hamid Karzai resulted in the charges against Rahman being dismissed.
Leading Afghan clerics were highly critical of Karzai, noting that “The Qur'an is very clear and the words of our prophet are very clear. There can only be one outcome: death.” This attitude is prevalent across the Arab world. In 2007, Mohammed Hegazy became the first Egyptian Muslim officially to seek to convert to Christianity. An Egyptian judge (sounding much like American liberals today on the issue of homosexuality and marriage) ruled that, “He can believe whatever he wants in his heart, but on paper he can’t convert.” Muslim clerics issued fatwas calling for his death. In 2008, in an interview with a local Egyptian newspaper, Hegazy’s father said, “I am going to try to talk to my son and convince him to return to Islam. If he refuses, I am going to kill him with my own hands.” Hegazy’s wife’s family also swore to kill her because she married a non-Muslim.
Again, according to Pew, of those Muslims who favor Shariۥa as the law of the land, 86% of Egyptians favor the death penalty for those who convert to another religion — as do 82% of Jordanians, 79% of Afghans, 76% of Pakistanis, and so on.
Millions of Christians and other such “apostates” (tens of millions by some estimates) have died at the hands of Islamists. According to Africa: The Holocausts of Rwanda and Sudan, “Well over two million southern black Christians, Muslims, and animists in the Sudan have died, the great majority civilians, in a genocide that few in the world have heard about. Since 1983, ethnic cleansing and a religious holy jihad (since 1992) have created a holocaust that rival the two great genocides in Europe (the Holocaust and Stalin’s Gulag)…In the Nuba Mountains the Arab Muslim fundamentalists practiced an age-old custom of taking blacks into slavery, forcing conversion of many to Islam, and then decided to wipe out the fifty tribes by genocide, similar to the situation in Darfur in the west.”
In spite of initially being labeled as a “democratic” movement, the “Arab Spring” that spread throughout parts of the Middle East and Africa did nothing to further the cause of liberty. On the contrary, the Arab Spring further spread jihad and Shariۥa, again, especially in Africa.
Quite telling when it comes to Islam and liberty is an examination of the freedom indices produced by various organizations that measure democracy (or freedom) the world over. Freedom House has produced Freedom in the World, “the oldest, most authoritative report of democracy and human rights,” since 1972.
Freedom House uses a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being “most free” and 7 the “least free,” in two categories: political rights and civil liberties. If nations rate a 1 or 2 in both categories, they are considered “free.” For example, the U.S., UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the like, rate 1 in both categories. If a nation rates 6 or 7 in both categories they are considered “not free.” For example, North Korea, China, Cuba, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, and the like are “not free.” Other rating combinations usually result in a “partly free” result. (See my website for a tabled summary.)
In Freedom in the World 2014, of the “Worst of the Worst” — the 10 countries with the lowest possible ratings for both political rights and civil liberties — six are Islamic, with two others having significant Islamic influence.
The Economist Intelligence Unit publishes its Index of Democracy that “provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide.” As the Economist Intelligence Unit puts it, “The Democracy index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Countries are placed within one of four types of regimes: full democracies; flawed democracies; hybrid regimes; and authoritarian regimes.” The index is a weighted average based on answers to 60 questions. Nations are rated on a scale of 0 to 10. Full democracies rate 8.00-9.99; flawed democracies: 6.00-7.99; hybrid regimes: 4.00-5.99; and authoritarian regimes 1.00-3.99.
In the Index of Democracy for 2012, of the 10 most authoritarian regimes, seven of them are Islamic. In addition, not one member of the OIC, or any other nation that would be considered “Islamic,” is a “full democracy.” Of the 55 nations rated “not free” or “authoritarian regimes,” more than half (28 out of 55) are Islamic. (Again, see the tables on my site. Note: I organized the tables on my page according to both Freedom in the World 2014 and the Index of Democracy from 2012. Since a “free” rating according to Freedom House sometimes included nations considered “flawed democracies” by the Index of Democracy, I included all “flawed democracies” in the “free” table. Likewise, all “authoritarian regimes,” though a few were rated as “partly free,” were included in the “not free” table.)
Also, take note of the 100 nations rated as “free” or as a “full/flawed democracy.” By any type of religious measure, 86 of these 100 nations would be considered “Christian.” (In some cases, if such nations are now considered secular or “irreligious,” they most recently — just a couple of decades ago in most of these cases — were considered Christian.) Other nations, such as Japan and Israel, were at their founding in the 20th century, greatly influenced by Christian democracies. What’s more, of the 100 free nations, only three would be considered Islamic.
Of course, a “Christian nation” does not simply imply that most of the citizens are passionate followers of Christ. Sadly, thanks in great part to the prevalence of liberalism in the Western world, this is far from the case — even in the U.S. (See above.) In spite of this, no nation in the history of the world is more responsible for the spread of liberty throughout the earth than is the United States of America. And nothing is more responsible for the yearning for liberty and independence that led to the founding of America than is Christianity.
It was in the pulpits of American churches that the seeds of Revolution were sewn. The British certainly thought so, as they blamed what they derisively described as the “Black Robed Regiment” for the thirst in the Colonies for American Independence. Modern historians have noted, “There is not a right asserted in the Declaration of Independence which had not been discussed by the New England clergy before 1763.”
Samuel Langdon was one of those New England clergy. Langdon was a distinguished theologian and scholar. He graduated from Harvard in 1740, went on to become a prominent Congregational minister, and was president of Harvard University from 1774 to 1780. He was also a delegate to the New Hampshire convention that ratified (by the slim margin of 57 to 46) the U.S. Constitution in 1788. New Hampshire was the last of the necessary nine states needed to ratify the Constitution. In order to persuade his fellow delegates to vote in favor of the U.S. Constitution, Langdon delivered an “election sermon” entitled, The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States.
After beginning by quoting Deuteronomy 4:5-8, in his sermon, Langdon noted, “[T]he Israelites may be considered as a pattern to the world in all ages; and from them we may learn what will exalt our character, and what will depress and bring us to ruin. Let us therefore look over their constitution and laws, enquire into their practice, and observe how their prosperity and fame depended on their strict observance of the divine commands both as to their government and religion.”
Langdon then gave an account of how Moses, upon the wise counsel of his father-in-law Jethro (“the priest of Midian”), set up a republican form of government, with representatives (“leaders,” “rulers,” “judges,” depending on the biblical translation) from groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. In addition, 70 elders, or wise-men — a type of national Senate as described by biblical and Jewish scholars — were selected by Moses and approved by the consent of the people.
Langdon added, “A government thus settled on republican principles, required laws; without which it must have degenerated immediately into aristocracy, or absolute monarchy. But God did not leave a people, wholly unskilled in legislation, to make laws for themselves: he took this important matter wholly into His own hands, and beside the moral laws of the two tables, which directed their conduct as individuals, gave them by Moses a complete code of judicial laws.”
Langdon goes on to describe how this republican form of government helped the nation of Israel grow from a “mere mob” (if only the 18th century French had taken notice) to a “well regulated nation, under a government and laws far superior to what any other nation could boast!” After detailing Israel’s later struggles — they would eventually “[neglect] their government, [corrupt] their religion, and [grow] dissolute in their morals” — Langston exhorted his fellow citizens to learn from the nation of Israel.
“That as God in the course of his kind providence hath given you an excellent constitution of government,” said Langston, “founded on the most rational, equitable, and liberal principles, by which all that liberty is secured which a people can reasonably claim, and you are empowered to make righteous laws for promoting public order and good morals; and as he has moreover given you by his son Jesus Christ, who is far superior to Moses, a complete revelation of his will, and a perfect system of true religion, plainly delivered in the sacred writings; it will be your wisdom in the eyes of the nations, and your true interest and happiness, to conform your practice in the strictest manner to the excellent principles of your government, adhere faithfully to the doctrines and commands of the gospel, and practice every public and private virtue. By this you will increase in numbers, wealth, and power, and obtain reputation and dignity among the nations: whereas, the contrary conduct will make you poor, distressed, and contemptible.”
Samuel Langdon was far from alone in these assertions. John Adams noted that, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were…the general principles of Christianity.” America’s “Schoolmaster” Noah Webster in his 1832 History of the United States wrote that “our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.” Webster added, “The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles…to this we owe our free Constitutions of Government.”
Not only are the American founding documents and republican form of government the oldest actively in force in the world today, but for well over two centuries they have been profoundly influential across the globe. In writing their own constitutions, and forming their own government, literally hundreds of nations have looked to the U.S. model. However, the fire of liberty lit in America most effectively spread throughout the world where Christianity was already entrenched, influential, or — thanks to the great efforts of American and European missionaries — inevitable. Of course, as we can see, that is still the case.
In her early forties, childless, married 17 years to a husband who didn’t want children — and had a vasectomy to prove it — Robin Rinaldi wanted to change things. Bored with monogamy, and fearing that she was going to end up alone, Rinaldi defiantly declared, “I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers. If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”
Rinaldi, a former San Francisco magazine editor steeped in liberal Bay area values, negotiates with her agreeing husband to take a “year off” from their marriage so that she can “explore [her] sexuality.” Over the year, Rinaldi becomes sexually involved with about a dozen men, one woman, and along the way, joins a sex commune. (She also wrote a book about the tragedy.)
“Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed,” Rinaldi foolishly concluded to a friend. She added, “I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box.” Pondering those women trapped in a “box,” Rinaldi laments the poor Islamic women who don’t have the freedom she does. “[T]hose Afghan women hidden under their burqas,” Rinaldi notes, could be “beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually doing.” Of course, she’s right, but little does she realize, the bondage she so easily sees in the life of the Afghan woman, has ensnared her as well.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of “Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World.” Contact him at [email protected].