COME BACK TO US, PAT

Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war (Pat Buchanan, August 10, 2003, Townhall.com)

Asked his own views on the morality of homosexuality, the president himself bobbed and weaved, saying, "we are all sinners" and should "respect each individual."

When Rep. Janice Schakowsky railed that he had just called gays sinners and should apologize, the White House meekly retorted that President Bush "doesn't believe in casting stones. He believes we ought to treat one another with dignity and respect."

In the Big Tent, the only mortal sin is being judgmental.

In his answer, however, the president had carefully added, "I think a marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that."

This response was 100 percent political. An amendment to the U.S. Constitution to restrict marriage to a man and a woman is a wedge issue that can rip the Democratic Party apart. As long as President Bush sticks to his Briefing Book, he holds the commanding heights in what is likely to be the fiercest battle of the Culture War in 2004. [...]

With the Episcopal Church heading for schism, the Supreme Court discovering sodomy to be a constitutional right, President Bush maneuvering to back an amendment outlawing gay marriage, and the Pope denouncing homosexual unions as immoral and homosexual acts as deviant, there's no way this issue can be kept out of the campaign of 2004. Nor should it be.

But it does reveal a painful truth. America is again a house divided.

This is an example of what makes Mr. Buchanan so maddening. He says much here that needs to be said and, he correctly points out, is not being said in much of mainstream conservatism because of political correctness. His indictment of the Reverend Robinson, just on the facts, is particularly devastating. In the strange world we live in these days, it is the immorality itself which seems to excuse in most peoples' eyes his reprehensiblly selfish behavior towards his family and his church.

But, if you agree with Mr. Buchanan, as we do, that America is involved in a religious war, one which will determine what kind of country we have in the future--the virtuous Republic the Founders envisioned or a secularized and deracinated European State--then it is impossible to agree with either Mr. Buchanan's anti-immigration stance at home or his isolationist posture abroad. Polling consistently demonstrates the religiosity and social conservatism of Latinos, yet Mr. Buchanan wants them largely barred from our shores. One merely has to look at where the main resistance to the Reverend Robinson is coming from--the Anglican church in Africa--to see that doctrinal conservatism is increasingly a bastion of Third World peoples. Indeed, Philip Jenkins has argued compellingly that the future of Chrtistianity itself lies in the Third World. For white conservative Christians in America to try to insulate the nation from these peoples is to cut ourselves off from our most important allies. Mr. Buchanan's position is suicidal.

This too is the reason that the Buchanacons should seek entanglement in the world. Conservative Christians should be working to help embattled Christians in places like China, Indonesia, Africa, etc. and pushing to jettison our outdated alliances with post-Christian Western Europe. As Islam is the main competitor to Christianity for the souls of men and as Islamicism is driving that religion towards violence, conservative Christians must consider the possibility that the war on terror is not merely some neocon plot to help Israel, but a genuine religious war that will determine both what kind of religion Islam is to be and what kind of world we and our children will live in.

When Pat Buchanan, following the Cold War, suddenly turned into an anti-immigrant isolationist, he yanked himself so far out of the mainstream that his voice has largely ceased to be heard. His abyssmal showing in the 2000 presidential election ended the illusion that he spoke for a significant portion of the electorate. But there's never been a better time than the present for him to take a look at who his true friends are in the culture wars and if they're black and brown and red and yellow in skin tone, so be it. This is after all a religious struggle, not a racial one, a war of ideas, not pigments, right? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2003 8:37 AM