In 2002 you made the bold prediction that he would be a "Catholic in five years." No movement yet.

No movement? He already became an American and a Christian-by-proxy. The Catholicism bit's a small step comparatively.

America, except for the idolators, is not a religion. Nor is she a doctrine or a creed. She is a place and a people, some of whom of are of the constitution of mind to construct and debate creeds and doctrines -- but most of whom, mercifully, are not.

You have made this point about American anti-intellectualism repeatedly and with cogency. You have never even attempted to reconcile it with your concurrent belief in a purely Rationalistic notion of what America is.

Hitchens still professes to hate religion; to regard it as "barbarism and backwardness and human stupidity." I'll leave it to your Freudian talents to convert such remarks into "Christianity-by proxy."

To be sure, there have been stranger conversions in history; we're just not seeing any signs of one yet in this case.

America isn't Rationalist, it's Religious, and trying to keep people out of such a univeralist belief system is as futile as trying to stop folks from becoming Christians. Just as you can't be a good Christian and deny another the right to join you so you can't be a good American and deny them their right to be one too.

America the Proposition is as Rationalist a dogma as one could imagine.

Your analogy with Christianity is brassbound. A good Christian is obligated to deny that someone who will not submit to the Lordship of Christ is, in fact, a Christian. Similarly, a good American is obligated to deny that someone who will not submit to the sovereignty of our laws is, in fact, an American. This difficulty can only be escaped by Rationalizing America into a mere chimera which has existence only in the minds of glib New Hampshire bloggers who have, despite their Rationalism, done some fine work -- including the book linked to on the left.

Paul:

Close, a good Christian is obligated to admit that a person who shares his beliefs is a Christian just as a good American is obligated to admit that a person who shares his beliefs is American. Sovereignty belongs to God, not men. An immoral law imposes no obligation on anyone.

Hitch is more than a few years off, but Fallaci was at least as strident in her atheism not too long ago, and she'll obviously join the Church before she goes (if she hasn't already, during her not-too-secret meeting with Benedict). You don't use the rhetoric against God that they do if you don't believe He exists...

In short, beliefs make one an American. The nature of America is Rationalist. QED.

If there is not human sovereignty -- derivative but real -- then there can be no legitimate regime but the theocratic.

b:

I don't deny that it's possible. I deny that it is (as yet) accomplished.

George Santayana died an unbeliever (so far as I know), but never abandoned his affection for Catholicism.

Which is why church arson is so common.

Paul:

No, not beliefs generically, but the specifically anti-rational faith that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is because there is no rational way to arrive at such a belief that America is so much different than the rest of the world, the only country premised on pure faith. To deny that faith is anti-American.

That was an argument for Rationalists. And a powerful one indeed.

But the first four words of that marvelous passage are the most important because they announce the sovereignty of an already-extant community. The community was not created by the affirmation of beliefs; the beliefs emerged from the organic life of that community. And the beliefs cannot preserve the community; only the loyalty of its members can do that.

That loyalty is being subverted by the decay of the robust Rationalism of the eighteenth century into the pitiful thing of our day.

No, the Rationalist argument is for a discrete community, which is why nationalism is always racist (Ein Reich, Ein Volk, etc.]. The American faith is Judeo-Christian, universalist, and anti-rational. You've elevated loyalty to "a people" above your moral obligation to God and His Creations.

An American, unaffiliated with any other church, is a crypto-Christian. It may, though, be so hidden that the believer denies it to himself.

Though it's obvious to others. You can't be a bad American and a good Christan or vice versa.

I'm a pretty bad Christian.

No, American Jews are bad Jews. We Reformed Judaism.

The argument for a "discrete community" is hardly Rationalist. It is anti-Rationalist. It is based on a organic, concrete entity, as opposed to abstractions.

The fact that it can so easily be traduced as "racism" to prefer one's own community to another community, is as good indicator of the triumph of Rationalism as we have.

Only from the position of universalizing Rationalism can it be argued that because a man prefers his own community, therefore he must despise other communities.

Did not Oakeshott himself teach that "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, ... the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant.... Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise"?

But then, he must have been a racist.

"It is not monarchy or aristocracy against which the modern spirit fights, but loyalty," wrote Brownson.

Only a very bad Christian would call himself a good Christian.

Paul:

Exactly. The belief in an organic/concrete community is the root of racism. It's materialist/rationalist. Similarly, your belief that people who think exactly as you do are irremediably different than you and unknowable can be rooted in their ethnicity alone.

The notion that we don't know who's a good Christian and who's a bad one is facile multi-culti nonsense.

Two nice little non sequiturs there.

(1) I have never said anything about "irremediable differences" or "unknowable" people. That I may have much in common with Mexican or Indian Christians is no argument for me to transfer my loyalty to Mexico or India; much less for me to counsel them to obliterate the sovereignty of their countries in order to accomodate me.

(2) I never said we cannot know who is a good Christian. I merely reaffirmed the danger of pride. I might even have adduced an obscure Christian writer (of my namesake) of the first century, who referred to himself as the "chief of sinners."

Yes, sinning doesn't make someone a bad Christian. Advocating sin does.

If your community is those who share your faith then what is it? Your answer is purely material, rather than spiritual.

Lots of atheists of my acquaintance are very good Christians.

I consider myself a bad Christian. God help me if I ever think I am a good one.

Oriana Fallaci calls herself a "Christian Atheist;" seems like she could co-found a transitional "order" with Hitchens and maybe Tony Blair. Could be powerful. Call themselves the "Self-Evidents."

Yes, America requires such extraordinary levels of conformity that even putative atheists are often de facto Christians.

Good God, man, will you abandon every Conservative principle in order to defend this lunacy? What about the principle of variety, as against, as Kirk put it, "narrowing uniformity"?

Manifestly men are members of several different communities at once.

There is only one spiritual community -- the church. But we will not really know this community in this life. Instead we are called to join in a material manifestation of that community, which is our local church. As it happens, my local church includes both Mexicans and Indians. To this community I owe a duty of loyalty, which is to be discharge with reference to real people, not abstractions. When I became a member, I pledged to "submit to the government and discipline" of the church.

I also owe a duty of loyalty to my neightborhood, my city, my state, my country. The latter duty (to country) includes that I do not advocate the subversion of her laws and agitate for the disintegration of her integrity as a sovereign nation.

Your intransigent insistence on an opposition between spiritual and material is, in effect, a denial of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The spiritual world entered the world of flesh, God became man, and the material world has never been the same since.

If a Mexican Christian shows up at your church you welcome him as a brother, but if you could stop him at the border you would.

That latter bit is perfectly rational, just evil.

Every Border Patrolman who performs the job he has sworn to, is evil. The border itself is evil. And the right to gain entry into the United States is God-given to every man on earth. More than that, anyone who opposes this program of subversion, disloyalty and treason is anti-American.

Fortunately, despite the bulls of Pope Orrin, Christianity does not enjoin the dispossession of the country.

There were plenty of good Germans who collaborated in the evil of Nazism. Nor is it any surprise that our Border Patrol was created during the Darwinist/Eugenicist heyday.

And thus, in the end, ideology issues in madness. The Border Patrol as Nazis.

Not all Germans were Nazis, but the regime was. Our immigration regime is similarly Applied Darwinist, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic in origin.

I'm also in favor of open borders, but aren't you exaggerating a bit? There's a difference between a mistaken policy and an evil policy.

A policy need not be as evil as Nazi exterminationism in order to be evil, though our abortion policy is close.

The debate about Christianity confounds me. Good Christian -- bad Christian. Can a Jew or a Hindu be a good Christian? Is a good Christian similar to the Confucian ideal of the Superior Man who embodies all the virtues?

I think I understand what it means to be a good American and I work at that every single day.

erp, Can't speak for OJ, but maybe one of his points is that many folks who don't think of themselves as Christian are perhaps better Chhristians than those who profess to be. "I yam what I yam", no matter if I know it or not.

Yes, in America the Jews and Hindus have been molded into good Christians.

I would say that you can't be a Christian of any sort if you actively deny Jesus' divinity, which lets out the Jews and Muslims. Atheists, though, don't deny Jesus' divinity specifically, they just deny the concept of divinity. So, in the US, the end up living as Christians do. They don't turn the other cheek, but they do put up a tree in December and take the 25th off. They say that they derive their morality independently but, hey what a coincidence, it's 97% Christian morality, plus sex and tolerance. They believe in the generic American religion, with its Santa God and First and Only Commandment: Thou Shall Not Be Mean To Those Less Fortunate Than Thyself.

> Yes, sinning doesn't make someone a bad Christian. Advocating sin does.

OJ, I've been reading the site for some time and this line of argument -- while it's undeniably appealing -- isn't familiar to me (though I can think of various New Testament passages that could be read that way: Paul on eating meat sacrificed to idols; the one unforgivable sin being blasphemy against the Holy Spirit; etc.). Could you elucidate?

And as good as accept Christ's divinity. America has made Jews acquiesce in the notion that Christ brought Judaism to the gentiles. Thus the ease with which Christmas is accepted. He is divine as to Christians.

Guy:

I'm merely saying that as a function of being Fallen we all have to recognize that we'll sin no matter how hard we try not to. What is evil is to advocate that folks sin. Jean Valjean can be forgiven more easily than Peter Singer.

Makes sense to me. Thanks for the reply!

Has anyone actually read the article? Hitch states that he is anti-abortion (aesthetically, intuitively, and so a tiny bit of reflection should tell him what that means), thinks that the debate over ID should be taught, and states that it is crucial that he teach his children about the Bible. He's just a Christian fundie who still humorously insists on his teenage self-image as a "contrarian"...

What Hitch is reacting to is established Christianity as he knew it in the UK.

It's basically a state-subsidised scam, 'religion' as it would be were it delivered by a particularly feckless postal service. It's so unimpressive when seen close up that it inoculates most Brits against religion permanently.

OJ: The word for someone who celebrates Christmas is Christian.

... And while assimilation is obviously an American trait, the theological drawing together of Christianity and Judaism is a result of the two religions being mewled up together in Europe for 1500 years.

David:

Exactly.

No, 300 together here.

No, theologically all the interesting stuff happened in the middle ages when all the Christian divines spoke Hebrew and they would cross pollinate with Jewish thought.