D’Souza’s Trojan Horse — part 3 — VOICES for REASON

In part one and part two, I argued that D’Souza’s book only makes a pretense at dealing with the burning national security issue of Islamic terrorism. This pretense is simply a way of marketing D’Souza’s “solution” — his domestic political agenda. Let’s consider the nature of that agenda.

Like the Islamists, D’Souza asserts that redemption entails drastic steps. Islamists call for an armed struggle (jihad) to restore piety, to make people obey the dictates of Islam comprehensively, and to bring politics and society under the absolute authority of religion. This solution entails the grisly chore of extirpating Allah’s enemies. D’Souza, too, wants to bring about sweeping culture changes, though he eschews their particular means. His solution is nominally concerned with the goal of addressing the threat of Islamist terrorism, knowing that this goal resonates with an American audience fearful of ongoing Islamist hostility. Based on a supposed commonality of values between “traditional” Muslims and Americans, we’re urged to win those Muslims’ friendship by forming some sort of coalition with them.

Regarding Islamists as basically noble, even if they go too far in working to restore piety, D’Souza claims that Muslims will stop flocking to Bin Laden’s camp if they see we’re really pious and tribal, after all. The price? There has to be a concerted campaign to crush “the enemy at home” — the cultural left, the supposed enemy of godliness. Conservatives must establish a “truce with traditional Muslims” and assure them that “we are determined to reverse the tide of liberal immorality in the United States,” D’Souza explains.

As a path to national security for America, this plan is a fraud, cynically offered to readers genuinely concerned with the jihadist threat. No one who has observed the explosion of Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian war can take such a plan seriously. If Iraqi Muslims will butcher their next-door neighbors for belonging to a different sect within Islam, what would make them rise above sectarian feuds and entrenched anti-Americanism to embrace the supposed fundamental bond uniting us all?

D’Souza’s true goal is to crush “the enemy at home,” not the enemy that has committed murderous attacks against us. D’Souza feigns a solution to the Islamist menace for the sake of marketing his morality tale. It is the age-old tale in which man disobeys authority, dares to eat of the tree of knowledge, and so commits the ultimate sin: he becomes sovereign over his own life. In D’Souza’s view, guilt for this Fall from Grace belongs especially to Christian conservatives who allowed the hated tribe of Liberals to take over the culture. Punishment for this sin came down upon us from the skies, literally — in the form of those horrific attacks on September 11, 2001.

This should all sound familiar. While the ruins of the Twin Towers were still burning, Jerry Falwell, an evangelical Christian leader, gave vent to the following:

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say: You helped make this happen.

Not coincidentally, this very quote appears in D’Souza’s book. With a tone of regret, he notes that Falwell’s message was drowned out at the time, but deserves consideration nonetheless. D’Souza distances himself a smidgen from Falwell’s frothing-at-the-mouth zealotry (suggesting that Falwell’s comment is of questionable theological rigor). But in fact, it is D’Souza’s own message. His innovation in this book is to flesh out Falwell’s basic contention and pass it off under D’Souza’s prestigious credentials as a mainstream conservative.

By linking his domestic agenda to the looming Islamist threat, D’Souza hopes to motivate a religious insurgency in America. If our sin is being a secular, scientific society where each individual has a right to his own life and to act according to his judgment — if we were seduced into this “depravity” by ungodly Liberals — then, D’Souza urges, we can neutralize Islamist aggression only by remaking America into a nation that kneels obediently before the crucifix.

(Note that what D’Souza inveighs against is the autonomy of sovereign, thinking men and women. In portraying the left as an apostle of individualism, however, he credits it with advocating the very notion that the left has been chipping away at for decades. Is it not the left that works to dissolve the recognition of individuals as anything other than interchangeable “representatives” of some ethnicity or gender group? D’Souza’s goal here is to smear the notion of “individualism” as synonymous with the subjectivist nihilism of the left and thereby to obscure the true character of individualism. But the core of this idea is that each of us is capable of making our own rational choices. And because of that fact, each of us should be politically free to pursue his own goals. Each should be the moral sovereign over his own life, rather than owing obedience to Crown or Church or some other authority. That is the secular vision of man that inspired the Founders and their writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which treat man as a rational, thinking being. That’s what D’Souza seeks to demolish.)

If D’Souza seeks to remake America, what would such a nation be like? He won’t describe it openly, because he wants to seem like a level-headed, patriotic guy looking for a sensible policy. But he’s seasoned the book with hints and implications — using a code of sorts — that religious conservatives, particularly evangelical Christians, will understand.

Just as Islamists seek to advance their vicious ideology by lamenting the decline of Muslim values in their society — even as throngs of Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca every year, even as religious observance is all but universal among Muslims, and even as Islamic laws shape even nominally secular regimes — so D’Souza decries the putative retreat of religion from American culture. “About 30 million Americans,” he writes plaintively, “never attend church and have no formal ties to religion.”

This number has almost doubled in the past decade, suggesting that the ranks of the nonreligious are rapidly expanding. Moreover, tens of millions of Americans — even some who are nominally religious — live their lives as if religion did not matter and God did not exist. In comparison with Muslim societies, America is not very religious and conservatives seem to have exaggerated the religiosity of the American people.

Having sung a hymn to patriarchy and to Muslim societies, where religion and state are interlocked, D’Souza conveys his vision for America’s future by attacking secularism in politics and society.

His many grievances are staples of religious conservatism. He believes that church and state should not be separated, but united (breezily assuring us that Americans are “so familiar with [the idea of separation of church and state] that they do not see how weird it really is”). He complains of a war against religion in the “public square” (he’s cross about trashiness in movies, television, popular music). He worries that religion is increasingly being marginalized (the absence of government funding for religious programs, he feels, is discriminatory). At the same time, D’Souza works to soften up any readers who may harbor qualms about religion wielding political power. Accordingly, the Church’s religious crusades in the Middle Ages, we’re told, were not as bad as we’re taught; nor did the Inquisition kill that many people.

D’Souza’s grumble that religion is on the retreat in America is staggeringly at odds with the facts. Consider just how many inroads Christianity has made into politics in recent years. George W. Bush put religious faith at the forefront of his administration’s domestic policy agenda, which featured faith-based initiatives, bans on stem-cell research, endorsement of “intelligent design” creationism, opposition to physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients, and various fetters on scientific research.

Evangelicals are now a considerable political force, a movement whose clout was credited with helping to re-elect Bush in 2004. And in the 2008 presidential campaign, not only did Republican candidates work overtime to woo religious voters, but we also saw how, as a Time magazine headline put it, “The Dems Finally Get Religion.” Consider Hillary Clinton: Years ago, this dyed-in-the-wool leftist would have blushed at the thought of vaunting her piety, but during the 2008 campaign she eagerly told voters how she prays and finds solace in her faith. Following in Clinton’s footsteps, Barack Obama pledged to continue the Bush-originated White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. And in the first few months of his term, president Obama has made frequent, showy invocations of God and Jesus Christ in major speeches (see this story, for example). This is a gauge of how religion has emerged to set the terms of debate.

Quite apart from politics, religion (particularly evangelical Christianity) has seen a resurgence in the culture at large: witness the mushrooming of megachurches, the mainstreaming of Christian rock and pop music, the runaway success of “The Passion of the Christ,” not to mention Hollywood’s fevered hunt for the next big movie that will cater to the market for overtly religious themes. Note also the hair-trigger assertiveness of religious pressure-groups. They launch protests at the merest hint of a slight against their beliefs, on television or in movies. Just recall the minor tempest engulfing the “Da Vinci Code” and the ongoing puritanical campaign against “indecency” on radio and television (particularly following the notorious “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show). As a result of that pressure-group agitation, the FCC slapped numerous broadcasters with huge fines and increased its scrutiny of “indecent” content.

Marginalized, discriminated against, beleaguered by the forces of darkness — that is how D’Souza and other religionists portray themselves. Yet their complaints are listened to intently; their voices set the tone of political debate; their “values” are enforced by law. Far from being marginalized, they’re actually redefining what the mainstream is.

Complaints like these, which flow from what religionists hold as their ideal, mirror Islamist criticisms of their own societies. So when an Islamist cleric in Iraq tells Western reporters that the Iranian theocracy is far too lax (because “Only five percent of Iranians abide by real Islamic laws” and “there are . . . girls who don’t wear hijab properly”), that criticism reveals his standard of what counts as true piety. He intends to out-mullah the mullahs. This same ideal is implied in D’Souza’s revulsion at what he sees as the absence of religion in American society.

So if an American society in which religion has already thrust its tentacles far and deep is not sufficiently pious for D’Souza, what would be?

D’Souza’s approach is evasive and he avoids laying out his goal openly, but the implication he works to convey in his book is unmistakable. Would he be content with anything short of Taliban-esque religiosity? No, I don’t think so. The vision conveyed in his book is one of a society where the U.S. Constitution is supplanted by the Bible; where the President not only reveres Jesus as his favorite political philosopher (a la George W. Bush), but where the dictates of Christianity are embodied in law; where the gentrified patriarchal tribalism of “family values” is enforced as the norm. This is the logical end toward which his book aims to push us: a fully Christianized America, a nation from which individual freedom has been expunged.

In followup posts, I’ll talk more about the broader significance of D’Souza’s book.