By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, May 10,
2022
These pro-abortion maniacs. Yikes.
I wish our bishops were in fact and in
deed as pro-life as the people who hate the Catholic Church seem to think they
are.
The Catholic Church is officially against
abortion, of course — there is no circuitous Jesuitical workaround for “Thou shalt not kill” — but a great many
senior figures in the American church are inclined to impersonate country-club
Republicans circa 1992: “Sure, we’re against abortion, but let’s not make a
whole thing about it.” Pope Francis may be silly about many things — and
possibly an outright heretic if you want to get mean about it — but he remains
solid on abortion: an “absolute evil,” he calls it. And the pews aren’t any
more reliably pro-life than the pulpit: Catholics have on average about the
same attitude toward abortion as other Americans, and the horrifying fact is
that even a third of those who attend Mass weekly identify themselves as
“pro-choice.”
(That is dismaying but not surprising.
Jesus and Immanuel Kant both thought of people and institutions in terms of
trees: “Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth
forth evil fruit”; “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was
ever made.” Christians have as much trouble going against the grain as anybody
else does, and the American church is planted in the same soil as Scientology
and Facebook and Gilligan’s Island.)
If you really want to get in the
churchgoing faces of some true-believing pro-lifers next Sunday, I could point
you in the direction of some promising Presbyterian, foot-washin’ Baptist, and
Mormon congregations that are considerably more reliable on the life issue. Or
go find an African Methodist Episcopal church to desecrate, if desecrating the
churches of pro-life congregations is the sort of thing you have a heart for —
which it shouldn’t be, so don’t do that.
But the maniacs remain fixated on
Catholics. That is interesting.
Of course, there are a disproportionate
number of Catholics on the Supreme Court. They fall on both sides of the
abortion issue, and they are a mixed bunch: There are Irish-American
parochial-school cradle Catholics such as Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.
The Court’s most important intellectual, Clarence Thomas, is a former
seminarian who was estranged from the church for some 25 years. The Court’s
most drearily rote pro-abortion activist is the lapsed Catholic Sonia
Sotomayor, who fills the honorary G. Harrold Carswell seat on the Court. (G.
Harrold Who? Carswell, an unimpressive figure, was nominated to the
Court by Richard Nixon. About his nomination, Senator Roman Hruska, a Nebraska
Republican, observed: “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and
lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” The
senators rejected him, presumably on the grounds that personifying mediocrity
is their job.) The Catholic William Brennan voted in favor
of Roe in 1973, and the Catholic Anthony Kennedy (who was on
the Court only because “Captain Toke” didn’t make it) was a reliable
pro-abortion vote.
(Captain Toke? Douglas Ginsburg, a
longtime judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and now a much-admired
professor of law at George Mason’s Scalia School of Law, is a remarkable man —
he became a law professor at Harvard in his third year out of law school — who
was nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan and was forced to withdraw
when it was revealed that he had — angels and ministers of grace, defend us! —
smoked marijuana while a college professor in the 1970s. He was parodied
on Saturday Night Live as “Captain Toke.” In the skit, a
student asks, “But, Captain Toke, isn’t marijuana . . . illegal?”
Captain Toke, high as a Georgia pine, answers: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Jon Lovitz
played Ginsburg, I believe, with a turtleneck and big wooden peace sign around
his neck. Related: Justice Kennedy said he had a special bond with Roe v. Wade author
Harry Blackmun: They both were third choices — Kennedy following the failed
nominations of Robert Bork and Captain Toke, Blackmun following the failed
nominations of Clement Haynesworth and the aforementioned G. Harrold Carswell.
Randomness plays a big role in many careers.)
So, if Catholics in the general population
and Catholics on the Supreme Court are all over the map on abortion, then why
the particular focus on Catholics by the pro-abortion savages
out there running around in the streets with bags of bloodied baby dolls and
untreated psychoses?
About that, I have a theory.
There is a kind of native anti-Catholicism
in the United States, a holdover from the Puritan days when anti-Catholicism
was a fundamental part of the emerging national identity. In 1647,
Massachusetts adopted two interesting laws: One had a name I love, the Old
Deluder Satan Act, which was New England’s first public-school law and which
was passed with the idea that promoting literacy would protect the children of
Massachusetts from the temptations of popery by allowing them to read Scripture
themselves; the second, more direct law made it a crime punishable by death for
a Jesuit priest to set foot on the soil of Massachusetts. (We think of Boston
as being a very Catholic city, but it didn’t have a Catholic church or even a
publicly celebrated Mass until the 19th century.) That kind of anti-Catholicism
is still very much a part of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in America, as is
well appreciated by any Catholic who has been informed umpteen million times
that “Catholics worship Mary” and believe that the pope can’t lose a game of
checkers and whatever else it is Catholics are supposed to believe. Even
well-meaning and good-natured American Protestants have a lot of that in them.
These are the epigones of the old Protestant stock whose indictment of
Catholics was that they hate sex and have too many children.
The other main kind of religiously rooted
anti-Catholicism is the Catholic kind. The kind you see in lapsed Catholics
such as Justice Sotomayor and Marxist intellectuals from Catholic Europe and
Latin America. Clarence Thomas the seminarian and young black radical broke
with the Catholic Church because he was disappointed about his fellow
seminarians’ views on race. (And here I don’t mean a dorm-room
“microaggression” but cheering the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr., that sort of thing.) American college faculties were for years full
of angry former seminarians who had quit the church in the 1960s and 1970s over
social-justice complaints and became the most vehement anti-Catholic zealots
the nation has ever seen, men whose anti-Catholicism would have given pause to
Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards.
(I mean the “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God” Jonathan Edwards, not the hilariously corrupt Democratic poohbah who
blew his political career by knocking up a campaign aide and whose Wikipedia
page contains these wonderful sentences: “[Campaign aide Andrew] Young further
claimed to have set up private meetings between Edwards and Hunter, and that
Edwards once calmed an anxious [extramarital lady friend Rielle] Hunter by
promising her that after his wife died he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony
in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band. Young also maintains
that Edwards asked him to ‘get a doctor to fake the DNA results . . . and to
steal a diaper from the baby so he could secretly do a DNA test to find out if
this [was] indeed his child.’” The Dave Matthews band part is what upgrades
this story from tawdry tabloid tale to legend.)
But I think the main source of
anti-Catholicism is a fascination with Catholicism, which has
a much richer aesthetic, literary, and philosophical storehouse than anything
else on offer in the Western world.
Allow me to briefly change gears to
illustrate my point.
As some of you may know, I am a fan of the
band Slayer, though I should here dispel the rumor that I am actually in the
band. That’s not me:
 |
| Slayer guitarist Kerry King performs during the Rock in Rio Music Festival in Rio de Janeiro in 2013 (Pilar Olivares/Reuters) |
I’m a fair guitarist, but I’m no Kerry
King, pictured above. Kerry King of Slayer is in fact such a highly regarded
player that the Dean guitar company makes a Kerry King signature guitar. Slayer
being Slayer and very much a creature of the 1980s, the schoolboy-Satanist vibe
is pretty strong on the guitar — “This has so many inverted crosses on it,”
a Dean representative observes. “For those of you who are too sensitive, it’s not for you.”
(Unexpected product review from the
Tuesday: I’ve played one, and it’s a terrific guitar if that’s your kind of
music. I don’t think I’d take it to jazz night or use in it a Buck Owens
tribute band.)
The whole metal-occult thing is straight
from the mind of the angry 15-year-old doodling on a textbook cover who is at
the spiritual center of every great rock band, and I’ve never thought of it as
something to be taken seriously — and the people who take it seriously definitely are
not to be taken seriously — but rather as something more akin to enjoying
horror movies.
(And not to go off on a whole disquisition
on rock music, but the more you move up the spectrum from metal to punk music,
the closer you get to the golden age of horror movies, and you ultimately land
at the Misfits, a 1950s horror film in the form of a 1970s punk band. I was
very amused to learn a few years ago that the Misfits’ cartoonishly ghoulish
Jerry Only is buddies with
my former National Review colleague
Kat Timpf. New York is a weird, small town.)
Those inverted crosses have always struck
me as emblematic, but not in the way that they are intended. I’ve written a
dozen different variations on these paragraphs and never been quite satisfied
with the result, but I’ll try again:
Western civilization has two main parts:
The first is the Greco-Roman classical civilization that brought us democracy,
imperialism, the rule of law, the familiar pattern of urban life, Cicero,
Virgil, Homer, Plato, Julius Caesar, etc. The second part is Christendom. One
need not ignore the religious diversity of Christian Europe from the fall of
the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and into the modern era to appreciate
the fact that Western civilization is Christian civilization. And that Christian
civilization is still alive, unlike its pagan forebear, though it is decaying
into high-tech barbarism. But, still, that Christian civilization is the
civilization in which we live. And Christian culture, Christian philosophy, and
Christian themes dominate our art, literature, and political thinking. This is
the case both for believing Christians and non-Christians. Caravaggio probably
wasn’t a conventional Christian (he was certainly unorthodox, possibly an
atheist), but his themes and subjects, and the milieu in which he worked, were
Christian to the core. Caravaggio may have been an atheist, but his work was
Christian work — and, more to the point, we don’t have a Caravaggio of atheism,
or a Caravaggio of secular humanism, or a Caravaggio of mild, resigned
agnosticism. The inverted cross is still the cross, and the underside of
Christian civilization is still Christian civilization: The Omen is
a scary movie because of its religious context; we don’t have scary movies
about liberal humanism or yoga.
(I think you could argue that Midsommar is
a horror movie about social democracy, an Invasion of the Body
Snatchers for our time.)
The schoolboy Satanism of a Slayer album
cover, like its more sophisticated literary equivalents (say, Christopher
Hitchens’s religious writing), is pure reaction, an aesthetic and a school of
thought that define themselves only in terms of what they reject — having no
positive content of their own, they are forever doomed to the condition of
intellectual and artistic parasite. The inverted cross is, in its way, a
confession: that the cross matters as a symbol, and that those who detest it
have nothing to put in its place — all they have the wherewithal to do is to
invert that which is already there, which was there long before they were and
which will be there long after. Another great rock band, Bad Religion,
popularized the symbol of the cross inside an interdictory circle (that’s the
red circle-and-slash sign, or “universal no,” as it is sometimes called),
another purely reactionary gesture: That band’s main songwriter and aesthetic
center, Greg Graffin, is a no-kidding real-world scientist with a Ph.D. from
Cornell, and for all his learning, he remains intellectually and aesthetically
powerless before the cross — he can mock it or reject it, but he cannot escape it,
because he has nothing to put it its place.
(I know: G. K. Chesterton already has
written The Ball and the Cross, and there is no need for me to
rewrite it here. Go read The Ball and the Cross.)
For a parallel case, I think of a BJP
politician who observed that India’s is a Hindu civilization and then was
chastised by a secular-minded critic: “No, India’s is a civilization with
toleration, pluralism, and diversity.” To which the politician answered: “Yes,
India has tolerance and pluralism — because it is Hindu, because
India is 80 percent Hindu and 20 percent Muslim rather than the other way around.”
With all due respect for the diversity of political practice in the Islamic
world, the gentleman had a point. In a similar way, the West has its
Jeffersons, Darwins, Marxes, etc., because it is Christian.
(I encountered the famous atheist
Christopher Hitchens only once — in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, ironically enough,
about 10 in the morning, at Bill Buckley’s funeral. He was drunk.)
I think that much of the appeal of
communism in the 20th century was the fact that it was probably the closest
thing to a real cultural competitor that Christianity had had for a very long
time: It had its own aesthetic (socialist realism), its own art and artists,
its own literature, its own symbols, its own flag, its own hymns. And it put
its mark on works of art that were genuinely original: Diego Rivera’s
paintings, John Steinbeck’s novels, Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy — but,
then, the disappointed communist Mikhail Bulgakov ended up writing his most
famous work about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, and Soviet communism in particular
blew on the spark of New Testament eschatology in Marx.
The aesthetic weight of Catholicism is
heavier because the Catholic Church is older and more connected to the ancient
world (part of the value of Augustine is that he had a foot in both the
Christian and Greco-Roman worlds) and because many Protestant traditions take
an essentially Islamic view of artistic depiction of the divine. Orthodox
Presbyterians, for example, specifically forbid the display of crucifixes, even
in private homes, and many Evangelicals will point you to the Canadian
theologian J. I. Packer’s essay, “Why You Should Not Wear a Crucifix.”
(Or you could get real serious about it
and read up on the “Puritan
Regulative Principle of Worship.” Short version: Any form of worship that is not explicitly commanded
in Scripture or that is not derived from the same by “good and necessary
consequence” is verboten. The Westminster Confession specifically forbids
worship “under any visible representation.” My inner Puritan shares the
contempt for idolatry, but I think the definition the Puritans arrived at is
excessively encompassing.)
Our Protestant friends may have made
themselves superabundantly safe from graven images and good architecture, but
there just isn’t as much aesthetic juice in beige carpet and folding chairs as
there is in Notre-Dame or Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. You
can parody the works of Leonardo, because there is a lot of there there. There
isn’t a Methodist Leonardo — the words “Methodist Leonardo” sound like the
setup to a joke.
The pro-life movement is not a uniquely
Catholic movement — it did not really take off politically until Protestants in
the South got on board. As Daniel K. Williams observes in That August
Journalistic Institution:
Before the
mid-1970s, active opposition to abortion in the United States looked almost
exactly like opposition to abortion in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia:
It was concentrated mainly among Catholics. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the
members of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right
to Life Committee, were Catholic. As a result, the states that were most
resistant to abortion legalization were, in most cases, the states with the
highest concentration of Catholics, most of which were in the North and leaned
Democratic.
The pro-life movement is not even a
particularly Christian thing. There are Jewish pro-lifers, Muslim pro-lifers,
Hindu pro-lifers, Buddhist pro-lifers, etc., even though many of those religious
communities do not take a strong corporate stand on abortion. (If you want to
make a nice vegan progressive with nine cats and a student loan really
uncomfortable, tell her what Tibetan Buddhists actually teach about
homosexuality.) There are atheist pro-lifers — my friend Charles C. W. Cooke is
a famous one, and “Atheists for Life” are a thing. So are “LGBT Against
Abortion.” There are many pro-lifers who don’t have any particular religious
affiliation, because there are many Americans who don’t have any particular
religious affiliation.
But the pro-abortion zealots, like the
evangelical atheists, the schoolboy Satanists, and many others of that kidney,
are drawn to Catholic churches, Catholic imagery, the peculiarities of Catholic
practice (is there anything more radical in our time than
celibacy?). Why are they there? I always think of that famous scene in The
Exorcist: “The power of Christ
compels you!” And doesn’t it? Why else would people be so entirely and
so personally obsessed with something they say they believe to
be an irrelevant, childish fiction and a mean-spirited plot against their
happiness? They are compelled.
They’d never admit it, of course, but
there is a reason they end up standing there, bereft, confused, fearful,
lonely, screaming themselves hoarse, full of dread, outside the church. Some
advice: The door is always open if you decide you want to come inside. It isn’t
any easier on the inside, and in many ways it is much harder. But there is
a reason you maniacs come to the church to have your public
nervous breakdowns and sad little group-therapy sessions. And I think that you
don’t actually understand what that reason is.
“Come and see.”
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