Liberalism

The commune of Christiania, in the heart of Copenhagen, Denmark, was supposed to be like Paradise. But life in this fallen world is always impacted by human sin.

Founded in 1971, Christiania was devised as a post-60s anarchistic utopia. It was a place where people could live outside of Denmark’s market economy, free to build their houses where and how they wanted, to sell marijuana for a living, and to live as they pleased as long as they didn’t harm their neighbors. Denmark’s government oscillated between attempting to bring the community to heel or turning a blind eye as residents flouted property laws and drug laws.

But now, after 50 years, with worsening gang violence and fresh attempts by the government to normalize the commune, some residents see their dream of an alternative society fading. The infamous Pusher Street, once operated mostly by residents but now overrun by gangs, may be the first domino to fall.

One lifelong resident said, “Growing up in Christiania was the best childhood ever. We had freedom. Pusher Street was very nice back then … Five to seven years ago [drug dealers] got much tougher. Now they only want profit. They don’t bring good vibes.”

Christiania has long embraced cannabis while shunning more dangerous substances. But as gangs overtook the drug trade, harder drugs made their way in, along with some of the violence of organized crime. After a recent shooting, Christiania’s residents, who operate a consensus democracy where decisions are made by unanimous assent in town-hall-style meetings, settled on two conclusions: that Pusher Street should be shuttered permanently, and that the state should intervene—an extraordinary step for the anti-establishment community.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This shows the power of original sin. Even when we try to recreate “paradise,” it never lasts for long.

Christopher Hitchens, a devout man of the Left, and an outspoken atheist, must be pro-abortion, must fight for abortion just as he fights for all the other requisite social causes.

We don't know how Hitchens kept his two books, but there is no doubt he kept this lesson in his heart, just as there is no doubt he spent all his time around those who considered abortion a right, and hence were without any moral reservation about it. Christopher kept his very personal ledger on abortion closed to public view until rather late in his life. When, much to everyone's surprise … he stood up on the same moral side as the very religion, Christianity, he had made so lucrative a career in condemning.

He stated that, “I agree with this view for materialist reasons. It seems to me obvious from the discoveries of biology and embryology that the concept 'unborn child' is a real one. ... And it has to be granted to the Church that it has made this a centerpiece of its ethic and its morality.”

The expression “on the right side of history” is an important tool today used by the progressive elite to silence biblically faithful Christians. Never mind that it rests on significant religious assumptions. After all, no one can prove that history is inexorably going somewhere. Large segments of the world's population reject this idea. The majority of the non-Christian world believes that history is circular. Since it can't be proved that history is going somewhere, it is de facto a religious assumption. By doing so the progressives are acting contrary to their own secular presuppositions.

Whenever someone says "I am on the right side of history" they are presuming that their understanding of right and wrong is the same as whoever or whatever is in control of history. Since a large number of those who have adopted this phrase are self-avowed atheists, agnostics, or religious liberals their use of this phrase is fundamental hypocrisy. If there is no personal God, history is going nowhere, or at best it is moving randomly. And even if it is going somewhere, on the basis of the left's confessed worldview, they should have no way of knowing where it is going.

In 2009, Marilyn Sewell, the retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland Oregon, interviewed Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the time. Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity or hell or a literal resurrection. Hitchens was an atheist and didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. Hitchens died of cancer in December 2011 but at the time of the interview he was riding a wave of popularity from his best-selling book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This interview is especially interesting because it’s between a very popular atheist and a liberal minister. At one point in the interview the liberal minister asked Hitchens if her Christianity was any different in his opinion:

Marilyn Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Preaching Angles: Although an atheist, Christopher Hitchens recognized that the resurrection, atonement, and other theological beliefs are necessary to conservative Christianity. Hitchens and Sewell also demonstrate a postmodern disbelief or denial of the resurrection.

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, is a challenge to those who want to revive the liberal democratic order.

Deneen argues that liberal democracy has betrayed its promises. It was supposed to foster equality, but it has led to great inequality and a new aristocracy. It was supposed to give average people control over government, but average people feel alienated from government. It was supposed to foster liberty, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slave to their appetites.

Many young people feel trapped in a system they have no faith in. Deneen quotes one of his students: “Because we view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.”

Popular education once recognized Christianity as its mother, yet the academic world has somehow come to treat supernatural religion as a disaffected mother-in-law and finally as an outlaw.

The Marxist promise that utopia will follow the abolition of private property is merely one of the more naive versions of the Enlightenment's secular humanism. Christians know this is dangerous nonsense.

The effects of virtue-free social policy have been devastating--but we don't seem quite ready to accept the alternative. Few politicians are comfortable about using words like "right" and "wrong," especially when the subject is sexual irresponsibility (which remains the surest predictor of criminality, ill health and welfare dependency among the poor). ... In fact, it isn't easy. It requires the fortitude to sometimes cast people into the outer darkness. ...

It has become near impossible for a polity as rights-conscious, and tolerant, as ours to admit that some people who behave badly, if not quite criminally, aren't worthy of our support--to kick them off welfare, or out of schools and housing projects. But it is inescapable; the system can't work without sanctions--even if they require the sort of stiff, humorless, un-American propriety that gave morality such a bad name.

In the mass-media age, journalism is more than the transmission of neutral information: It traffics in the kind of information and spectacle calculated to embarrass Western leaders. ...

But the media don't confine themselves to embarrassing politicians: They also work to create shame about Western history, traditions, and institutions. ... Not only our vices but our virtues and values are eligible for assault. Old sexual mores come under fire as much as segregation laws. Christianity is represented as dogmatic, obtuse, repressive: The Pope too is convicted of "gaffes." Bizarre phenomena like lesbian nuns are treated not as screwballs but as legitimate protesters against onerous restrictions. Every malcontent, no matter how disoriented, becomes a victim.

Liberals are always for the inclusion of every possible point of view except those points of view that do not include every possible point of view.

If we or the world could be saved through human kindness or clear thinking, Jesus either would have formed a sensitivity group and urged us to share our feelings or would have founded a school and asked us to have discussions. But knowing the ways of God, the way of the world, and the persistence of human sin, he took up the cross, called disciples, gathered the church, and bade us follow him down a different path of freedom.

Self-fulfillment soon grows into a quest for self-indulgence with a vocabulary of I, Me, Mine and self-indulgence, in turn, soon becomes unbridled. The self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure embraces tolerance of homosexuality, addiction to eroticism, addiction to drugs and alcohol, habitual divorce, vandalism and lawlessness. Thus liberty becomes libertinism. It is a dictatorship of permissiveness which enslaves its citizens, a dictatorship whose decrees are endlessly purveyed by the media.

One of the deepest sentimentalities of liberalism is the presumption that you can have children without having them suffer for their convictions. People get very upset by the idea that their children might have to suffer. Well, why ... are you having children? You want them to be Christians, don't you? If they are going to be Christians, they are going to suffer. That is what life is about. Life is not about freedom.

Freedom ... has absolutely no place in the Christian life. Christians are called to faithfulness and obedience so we can be free from the tyranny of those who would enslave us in the name of freedom.

I have come to the reluctant conclusion that what we liberals believe, and the way we believe it, is incompatible with the Gospel. Contra most liberal preaching that I do and hear, being a Christian is not synonymous with being a good human being. Jesus comes preaching a new way which is counter to innate human expectations, a narrow path of life which does not come naturally. This Jew from Nazareth comes, not to express the highest of human aspirations, but to transform human aspirations, to refashion human thinking and action in such a way that necessitates conversion from our innate liberalism to a countercultural way of living called discipleship.

We live out interesting paradoxes. We announce blatantly to the world that we have answers to the human sickness. Then we press for lifestyle conformity and doctrinal orthodoxy codified into stale axioms that stifle the very ideas we pronounce as divine. The creative Christian life and thought scares the jeewillingers out of Bible college deans and popes alike. Kenneth Scott Latourette says that once Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire the faithful got doctrinal, conformist, and creedal and sent the church into 1,000 years of uncertainty. ... Martin Luther got the movement unstuck when he rediscovered grace. Then conservatives codified God and liberals deified humans and gummed it up again.