When Strawmen Misbehave

Dennis Prager still can't get over his abandonment by the Right and Center over his outrage at Keith Ellison, Congressman from Minnesota, and his now completed plan to take the oath of office on the Koran, and not the Bible. The last time we heard from Prager he was prophesying dire portents for an America that didn't toe the narrow line on Biblical values. In his next installment, Prager, in his trademark oversimplification of the world (he calls it "clarity") divides us into two clearly separate camps: the People of the Book, and the Secular Left:

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? ("Divinity" does not necessarily mean "literalism.")

I do not ask this about "the Bible" as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But "Bible-believing" Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.
And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

Name the issue: same-sex marriage; the morality of medically unnecessary abortions; capital punishment for murder; the willingness to label certain actions, regimes, even people "evil"; skepticism regarding the United Nations and the World Court; strong support for Israel. While there are exceptions -- there are, for example, secular conservatives who share the Bible-believers' social views -- belief in a God-based authority of the Torah is as close to a predictable dividing line as exists.

That is why one speaks of Judeo-Christian values, but not of Judeo-Christian theology. Torah-believing Jews and Torah-believing Christians have very different theological beliefs, but they agree on almost all values issues -- largely because they share a belief in the divinity of the same text.

Many members of all these different religions have found it quite remarkable how similar their values are to those of members of these other religions. An evangelical Protestant who might regard Mormonism as nothing more than a heretical cult will find himself seated next to Mormons at a rally on behalf of the Boy Scouts. An Orthodox rabbi who might never set foot in a church will join a panel of Christians in opposing the redefining of marriage. And so on.

Very often the dividing line in America is portrayed as between those who believe in God and those who don't. But the vast majority of Americans believe in God, and belief in God alone rarely affects people's values. Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

That a belief or lack of belief in the divinity of a book dating back over 2,500 years is at the center of the Culture War in America and between religious America and secular Europe is almost unbelievable. But it not only explains these divisions; it also explains the hatred that much of the Left has for Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Mormon Bible-believers.

For the Left, such beliefs are irrational, absurd and immoral.

Which is exactly how most conservatives regard most leftist beliefs, such as: there is nothing inherently superior in a child being raised by a mother and father rather than by two fathers or two mothers; men and women are not basically different, but only socially influenced to be different; Marxism was scientific; that the Soviet Union was not an evil empire; it was immoral for Israel to bomb Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor; morality is relative to the individual or society; there is no moral judgment to be made about a woman aborting a healthy human fetus solely because she doesn't want a baby at this time; material poverty, not moral poverty, causes violent crime, etc.

This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about.

It is clearly a lot of hogwash, starting with Prager himself. By reading this, you would assume that he is pro-life, yet he is in the pro-choice camp. If you read the wording of the Biblical stand on abortion above, it is carefully positioned to include people who are pro-choice but who consider abortion to be morally wrong. Sorry Dennis, but that is not where the dividing line on abortion is drawn in this culture war.

He also concocts this strawman of "Bible-believing" Christians to only encompass those Christians who share right wing social values, whether they truly believe in the Bible or not (and how can you be a Christan without believing in it?) Apparently Jimmy Carter is not a Bible believing Christian, and neither is the Pope, who is against capital punishment. For those who haven't listened or read Prager much, he is adamant that the Bible not only sanctions capital punishment, but obligates society to use it to punish heinous crimes like murder.

Prager's tirade against the dangers posed by Europe's secularism ignores the fact that socialism has very strong backing by Catholics in places like Poland as well as in the Vatican.

Prager also refuses to believe that "Judeo-Christian" values, or those values practiced by a majority of Americans whether they are religious or not, can survive without the authority of the Torah. So no matter how often he offers the disclaimer that irreligious people can act consistently with Biblical morality, his faith demands that any large scale movement of society away from Judeo-Christianity must result in societal collapse. He observes Europe with all the objectivity of a man with his life savings on one horse observes the horse race. If Europe doesn't collapse because of its secularism, then he would have to conclude that his faith is a sham. One should never base one's faith on the failure of other faiths.