What we think is the right road
I am tired of the biases, bigotry and backwardness of those who aren't bright enough to be progressive. It's time to stop the prejudice against men marrying men or women marrying women or labeling restrooms for "males" or "females." While we're at it, it's also time to let people decide if they want children, and how; and if they want to die, and how. Most of the important people in the media, education, entertainment, business, politics, and even religion agree with me.
But it's the wrong road
About three decades ago, as we began to slip into a new dark ages – the culture of death – the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre prophetically wrote, "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us." He went on to explain, "This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament."
So often, modern secular society gets moral issues not just wrong, but inside out and upside down. The idea that men can marry men and that women can marry women is not just wrong theologically, philosophically and anatomically, it has the idea of holy matrimony utterly reversed. Instead of being a sacrament that helps to lead us to salvation, marriage has been corrupted so that it leads to hedonism. The notion that males ought to be free to use females' restrooms and locker rooms is not only contrary to what used to be called common sense, but it represents a form of reasoning utterly at odds with what we know from biology, history and Scripture.
Oppose same-sex "marriage" or open restrooms and one will be derided as backwards, benighted or bigoted. The glitterati – the famous, wealthy and glamorous people of stage, screen and TV (and not a few politicians, educators and even religious leaders) – condescendingly tell us to be progressive and do away with "old-fashioned" Christian morals and standards. They will have nothing to do with Scripture, much less sacred Tradition or sacred Teaching, for these are lampooned as irrelevant.
As American scientist Leon Kass put it, "Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic 'enhancement,' for wholesale redesign." The barbarians, promising us paradise, lead us into a brave, new world in which the only God is the Self. In this world, what is false may be fashionable, for there is no truth. What is evil can be good; what is degenerate can be decent; what is sinful can be saintly, for there are no immutable standards of justice or judgment, and everything depends on popularity – or, failing that, on power.
Here is the testimony of John Dewey, the famous American educator: "There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."
The new barbarians, as MacIntyre told us, have already been governing us, teaching us, influencing us and entertaining us for some time. Listen to political and commercial ads, watch almost all television or attend almost all movies, consider the content of so many academic courses, and weigh all these in the light of the Gospel. All these contemporary neo-pagan factors and forces "instruct" us: they are the false prophets, the fraudulent teachers, the purveyors of filth (see Col 2:4, 2 Peter 2:2, Jude 4 and Rev 21:8). And they are legion.
Cardinal Raymond Burke has warned us, "Fundamental to understanding the radical secularization of our culture is to understand also how much this secularization has entered into the life of the Church herself." As confirmed Catholics, we are called upon to be Christ's witnesses against secularization both in the Church, when necessary, and out of it.
In his allegorical poem "The Ballad of the White Horse," G.K. Chesterton tells the story of King Alfred the Great (848-899), the Saxon king who heroically fought off a barbarian invasion and made his kingdom the nucleus of a unified England. In the closing lines of that poem, Chesterton wrote, "I have a vision. And I know/The heathen shall return. They shall not come with warships,/They shall not waste with brands,/But books be all their eating,/And ink be on their hands."
Their profane books say there is no God; their ink proclaims the days of new "truths"; and their barbarian codes insist that they can turn the world inside out and upside down – and build again the Tower of Babel, making right what is wrong, making good what is evil, making true what is false, as long as it brings us pleasure.
If that pleasure leads to the savagery of the deaths of the innocent or the destruction of the sacred or the dethronement of God, well, that is the price of "progress," isn't it? Not for nothing was MacIntyre's book entitled "After Virtue," for what is authentically virtuous has been turned upside down.
There is a word for all this: "bouleversement," which means upheaval, usually violent. It means turmoil, convulsion and an inversion of things, and it suggests a forceful overthrow of what we know. What we see around us is a barbarian bouleversement, in the face of which we are left with the prayer of the Psalm with which the Latin Mass customarily begins: "Distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy: deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man." (Ps 43:1)
We must remember that "a monumental struggle against the powers of darkness pervades the whole history of man. The battle was joined from the very origins of the world and will continue until the last day, as the Lord has attested. Caught in this conflict, man is obliged to wrestle constantly if he is to cling to what is good, nor can he achieve his own integrity without great efforts and the help of God's grace" ("Gaudium et spes," Vatican II's pastoral constitution "On the Church in the Modern World," 37).
Deacon James H. Toner serves at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.