We don’t know a whole lot about the Druids. What we know about them comes from the Roman conquerors, who hated the druids. The Romans invested a great deal of men and material to stamp out the druidism. They associated druidism with a sense of self they thought was antithetical to the Roman way. This was largely true, but what motivated the Romans was the resistance. They hated it because it refused to yield.
The Welsh, for example, clung to druidism into the fourth century, despite regularly being slaughtered by Roman legions. All they had to do was humor the Romans and they could have avoided slaughter, but they could betray themselves. That sense of self, that identity was tough and the Romans were never able to stamp it out. Druidism, however, did die out. Christianity eventually became the religion of the island, overwhelming all of the pagan faiths, but it was not easy.
There’s an important lesson there if you are a Christian in 21st century America. Church attendance has plummeted in the Progressive controlled areas of the country. This Gallup poll shows that church attendance in the Old North is down near European levels. This is a five year old study so the numbers are probably now below 20% in most of these states. Massachusetts, after the homosexual priest scandal, has seen church attendance plummet.
The Old South, on the other hand, has church attendance well above 50%. The Cold Civil War is and always has been a religious war in addition to a culture war. The new religion of the Old North is post-national Progressivism and it is a very aggressive. It is an intolerant religion. This column by Ross Douthat makes clear that the homosexual marriage fad is more about the war on Christianity than a celebration of homosexuality.
IT now seems certain that before too many years elapse, the Supreme Court will be forced to acknowledge the logic of its own jurisprudence on same-sex marriage and redefine marriage to include gay couples in all 50 states.
Once this happens, the national debate essentially will be finished, but the country will remain divided, with a substantial minority of Americans, most of them religious, still committed to the older view of marriage.
So what then? One possibility is that this division will recede into the cultural background, with marriage joining the long list of topics on which Americans disagree without making a political issue out of it.
In this scenario, religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage. And where conflicts arise — in a case where, say, a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding — gay rights supporters would heed the advice of gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan, and let the dissenters opt out “in the name of their freedom — and ours.”
But there’s another possibility, in which the oft-invoked analogy between opposition to gay marriage and support for segregation in the 1960s South is pushed to its logical public-policy conclusion. In this scenario, the unwilling photographer or caterer would be treated like the proprietor of a segregated lunch counter, and face fines or lose his business — which is the intent of recent legal actions against a wedding photographer in New Mexico, a florist in Washington State, and a baker in Colorado.
This is why the Left always wins. They don’t play politics by a set of rules that prevent them from winning the fight. They begin with the end in mind. Then they construct the term of engagement in such a way that they have the advantage. They know the Right will assiduously abide by those rules, which the Left will violate as necessary. The Left has one principle, which is winning, while the Right has a long list of principles that are more often than not imposed on them by the Left.
Meanwhile, pressure would be brought to bear wherever the religious subculture brushed up against state power. Religious-affiliated adoption agencies would be closed if they declined to place children with same-sex couples. (This has happened in Massachusetts and Illinois.) Organizations and businesses that promoted the older definition of marriage would face constant procedural harassment, along the lines suggested by the mayors who battled with Chick-fil-A. And, eventually, religious schools and colleges would receive the same treatment as racist holdouts like Bob Jones University, losing access to public funds and seeing their tax-exempt status revoked.
In the past, this constant-pressure scenario has seemed the less-likely one, since Americans are better at agreeing to disagree than the culture war would suggest. But it feels a little bit more likely after last week’s “debate” in Arizona, over a bill that was designed to clarify whether existing religious freedom protections can be invoked by defendants like the florist or the photographer.
If you don’t recognize my description of the bill, then you probably followed the press coverage, which was mendacious and hysterical — evincing no familiarity with the legal issues, and endlessly parroting the line that the bill would institute “Jim Crow” for gays. (Never mind that in Arizona it’s currently legal to discriminate based on sexual orientation — and mass discrimination isn’t exactly breaking out.) Allegedly sensible centrists compared the bill’s supporters to segregationist politicians, liberals invoked the Bob Jones precedent to dismiss religious-liberty concerns, and Republican politicians behaved as though the law had been written by David Duke.
What makes this response particularly instructive is that such bills have been seen, in the past, as a way for religious conservatives to negotiate surrender — to accept same-sex marriage’s inevitability while carving out protections for dissent. But now, apparently, the official line is that you bigots don’t get to negotiate anymore.
This is rather obviously the goal. Progressivism is a covetous faith. It does not play well with other religions. It is why their body count in so high. Catholics, over 1500 years, probably killed a million people for heresy. The radicals of the Enlightenment have murdered 100 million in a century and half. History tells us Genghis Khan was the most murderous invaded to ever enter Europe. In reality, history’s greatest monster was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Which has a certain bracing logic. If your only goal is ensuring that support for traditional marriage diminishes as rapidly as possible, applying constant pressure to religious individuals and institutions will probably do the job. Already, my fellow Christians are divided over these issues, and we’ll be more divided the more pressure we face. The conjugal, male-female view of marriage is too theologically rooted to disappear, but its remaining adherents can be marginalized, set against one other, and encouraged to conform.
I am being descriptive here, rather than self-pitying. Christians had plenty of opportunities — thousands of years’ worth — to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance. (And still do, in many instances and places.) So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status — this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.
Finally, we see why the American Right is entirely worthless against the Left. They have never come to terms with what we face. They keep thinking that if only they can purify their souls, the Left will forgive them. Alternatively, they think they can reason with what amounts to religious fanaticism. Neither is tethered to reality or much good when your culture is being looted by well organized fanatics. The Right is built to lose, so it must be destroyed if there is ever to be an opposition to the Left.
