The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Ryszard Legutko's 'Demon in Democracy' Part 9

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

56 MinutesPG-13Pete continues a reading of a book that greatly influenced him, "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies" by Ryszard Legutko.The Demon in DemocracyPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. And now, this is over the next to them shrews in the hamster. Is leargoal to goa and not great greeing in Aundunuch, and learn the Gaela to Gailanthage, Gailte deirin. In Ergrid, we're dig tour chaw in one-of-he, with funnive-in-voonah. It's a lot of doing to do you do with Aungolectrician on as to go ahead of all the town, Gnough, and people, cariff at one to the Aston.

There's era of cooctuagin. Full of nis more in Ergrid Pongahy. If you want to support this show and get the episodes early and add free, head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support. I want to explain something right now if you support me through substack or Patreon.

You have access to an RSS feed that you can plug into any podcatcher, including Apple, and you'll be able to listen to the episodes through there. If you support me through Subscrib Star, Gumroad, or on my website directly, I will send you a link where you can download the file, and you can listen to it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support everyone gives me. It keeps the show going. It allows me to basically put out an episode. episode every day now, and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate. I think sometimes

you see that I'm putting out two, even three a day. And yeah, can't do it without you. So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to part nine of my reading of Rizard, the gut goes demon in democracy. I'm judging that we only have two episodes left. It'll be a total of 10 on this one. So let's get going. We have chapter five.

This is the last chapter. You read half of it, read the other half, and then the conclusion on the next one. Chapter five is called religion. Part one. For the communist ideology, religion has always been a matter of pressing concern. Marx hated religion with all his heart, but at the same time distance himself from those criticisms of religion,

such as Ludwig Feuerbach, that he thought too crude. Using a quasi-Higalian argument, he contended that religion would be abolished at some point of a not-too-distant future history, and that with human development coming to its completion, it would no longer be needed, and that, when this happened, man himself, in full bloom of his humanity, would become the proper object of worship. I was going to worship something, right? Marx's attitude well reflects the feelings that the socialist and communists have always had about religion. On the one hand, a profound hostility, often accompanied by an almost sadistic longing for a world in which religion would be wiped out without a trace. On the other, a wish that socialism become a genuine form of religion in the sense that it would satisfy needs, dreams, and desires similar to the way in which religion did and which apparently adhered in human nature.

The problem with religion was that, as they said, it satisfied those needs, dreams, and desires in a perverse way, pushing people toward goals that were not theirs, but imposed on them through an ideological manipulation and ultimately bringing calamities on them and the entire society. That could be anyone's religion. Not necessarily from history, we see that more with political ideology than we do with. actual quote unquote religion. But whatever the crimes are religion, its mobilizing power was truly enviable to the socialist and communists, who hoped that once their ideology ascended to a similar ruling position in human hearts, humanity would reap immense benefits. In the communist practice, hostility to religion clearly absorbed the party and its functionaries far more than the task of making it redundant as a result of the socialist ideology winning the hearts of the people,

No matter how quickly communism progressed, the initial plan to replace the worship of God with the worship of man in his full bloom advanced more and more into the future. You start to understand where he's going with this? So throughout its entire history, the communist system was waging its war against religion, religiosity, religious superstition, clerical obscuritism, obscuritism, clericalism, and particularly that despicable institution called. called the Catholic Church. The war was brutal, oftentimes murderous, and the atrocities committed by the communists still boggle the mind. The communists felt, quite rightly, that the church and Christianity were the strongest barriers

that protected the nation against the regime and its ideology, and that their power would not be secure until the Christians were totally subdued. In Poland, the strongly felt allegiance to the Catholic faith, as well as the historically well-established position of the Catholic Church within the society, or perhaps, regardless of the political games that the bishop sometimes played with the regime, the key factor that accounts for the fact that too many polls never really sold their souls to the

communistic regime. And if you remember my reading of The Last Crusade by Warren Carroll, well, what did they say? They said they would have to, they attempted to destroy completely the Catholic Church and said that they'd probably have to kill half of the Catholics in the country before the others just gave it. But communism, although eventually defeated, enjoyed a considerable success in various fields,

also in strengthening and enlarging the anti-religion front. It supplied an additional fuel to the anti-Christian and particularly anti-Catholic streak that had long been present in the European tradition, also in Poland, even though, despite the new powerful means of propaganda, it never managed to change the overall pro-Catholic stance of the majority of the Polish population. Also in Poland, the biggest inroads made by communists, anti-Catholic propaganda,

were among educated groups, especially the intellectuals who took over the old, pre-war secular stereotypes, and imbued them with so much venom that it paralyzed their own moral reflexes and pushed them to endorsing without a moment's hesitation, the most outrageous acts of the brutality perpetrated by the regime, against the Catholics and the Church. There is a well-known letter nowadays spoken of most reluctantly, written by a group of the leading Polish writers and intellectuals in the early 1950s, condemning the Krakow priests whom the communist charge was spying for the Vatican and America.

The charge was utterly nonsensical, but the sentences were ruthless. The letter is a dark page, unfortunately one in many, in the history of the intellectuals' depravity in this age of human folly. It may be that those intellectuals who were, duped or duped themselves to serve totalitarianism, were occasionally capable of feeling guilt for what they had done. But it seems that that infamous letter signed by Veslawa Zimborska, future Nobel Prize winner in literature, Slalmier Morsik, a prominent playwright, and others did not provoke any special moral self-examination supporting the communists in their war against

the church must have appeared to them. Theologically, the least doubtful of the moral transgressions that they committed. In communism, whoever was against religion and against Christianity made a first step to make a good comrade and to deserve special protection from the party, but above all, to earn a label of being enlightened. No true communist doubted that each human being with a minimal claim to intelligence had to be agnostic or atheist, that he had to be highly critical of the priests, harsh toward the Holy Scriptures and flipping about church dogmas, and all this was believed to be not a revolutionary eccentricity, but a continuation of the most enlightened European traditions,

especially those of the Enlightenment. The party intellectuals convinced themselves through fear, ignorance, and self-deception that their humiliating servility was not that, but a somewhat modernized version of Voltarianism. interesting, huh? Some people claim that communism was responsible for, well, that there was a certain group that invented communism, spread it,

yet they also claim that, some of them also claim that the church has always been a, there's always been, that they control that too. Yet when you look around, the Catholic Church was the one fighting against it in the 20th century. I don't know.

A house divided against itself can't stand. I don't know. Maybe. Unfortunately, the Christian faith did not make the believers immune to the communist temptation. For a long time, there was a trend in Christianity within obsequious, toward communism and socialism, which probably sprouted out of common strong anti-capitalist sentiments, but also of a conviction shared by some Christians, but not reciprocated by the secular left, that both Christianity and socialism, in their roots, stem from the same moral impulse, the good of the people.

Both Protestants and Catholics, and even the greatest that theologians fell prey to this illusion. Carl Bart, Paul Tillick, Jacques Maritaine, and many others had such episodes. Some like Emmanuel Monnier went clearly beyond sympathy and became openly pro-communist and pro-Soviet fellow travelers. Thousands of pastors and Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox priests joined the system and for many years served it faithfully out of stupidity, opportunism, ideological blindness, or betrayal, all of which they supported with pathetic intellectual contortions. Dean of Canterbury Hewlett Johnson was once Stalin's notorious puppet at propaganda meetings, organized by the Soviet Communist Party. In Poland, the church was sabotaged from inside by renegade priests whom the communist authorities called, in the mendacious language, so typical of them,

patriot priests, and whose number in absolute terms was by no means small. When the terror abated and indoctrination began to subside, the communists tried another strategy, this time by lowering a larger group of Catholics into the system, not only traitors and pathological opportunists. They even allowed a small party group of Catholics to be represented in the parliament, which, for many, seemed the promising beginning of an evolutionary change for the better. At one point, immediately after the 1956 Thaw, the Polish Episcopit officially urged their flock to support the reformist parties of the Communist Party and the government gave permission to

establish a few quasi-independent associations of Catholic persuasion. It soon became clear, however, that no further changes would be made and no further political plurality tolerated, but the door for those Catholics who wish to support the regime was still open. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear.

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And now, this is over the next to the hamster. It's leargoal to goyhe and not art gree in Aundun, and leander Gala to give the tamilfada gault to deirin. In Ergird, we're the court chawwinae in one-ha, with Foniven, the one of the one of them. It's why

you know on the ex-chrectorate on as the fact to all the people and people

tariff at the time to work to Akewagin. Full of Nismau in Ergaret Pongai that's why we call it

a remnant people. The Communist Party went so far as to encourage what was then called the dialogue between Marxists and Catholics

to launch such a dialogue was on the one hand a propaganda ploy to show how the Communists cooperated with all the people of good

will, but on the other a clever tactic to divide the Catholics and to push those intransigent into the corner. Whatever the reason of the propagandist, the mere fact that the so-called dialogue lasted for at least a decade proved that the communist ideology was still effective. Behind the decision of quite a few of those Catholic intellectuals who decided to converse with the Marx, this was a sort of practical imperative. They felt that socialism, communism, was inevitable, ubiquitous, and philosophically unchallengeable, and therefore thought it a matter of urgency for the Catholics within the world as it was, or rather as they believed it was, to find a safe place and obtain some kind of official intellectual legitimacy. This dialogue, when we look at it today,

is not an uplifting spectacle and reveals an essential asymmetry between the two sides. One had to make serious concessions to accommodate itself to the communist reality. The other conceded nothing, promised nothing, and treated its opponents patronizingly. The Catholic's concession were the following. They spoke highly of socialism as both theory and practice and distanced themselves from those bad Catholics who did not appreciate the benefits and virtues of the new regime. They postulated that because Catholicism had much in common with socialism, the church should be more listened to and its presence more recognized in the socialist society. The Marxist, in turn, made no concessions at all. They know. They know,

noted with satisfaction the fact that progressive Catholics finally came to accept socialism, although they should have done it sooner, and that they came to denounce the bad Catholics, although they should have done it more forcefully. To the Catholic's postulate, the Marxist responded that, of course, the Catholics could find their place in the process of building socialism. But they must be aware that socialism has the higher value in that because the historical record of the church was ugly, they should try harder than others to earn the truth. trust of the socialist community. The Catholic Church in Poland, led by primate Stefan Wazinski,

later to be called the primate of the millennium, was generally hostile to this reproachment. The Polish Episcopate, however, had not been so adamant in the past. They had treated the Patriot priests with surprising leniency and made declarations that were quite painful to the faithful, for example, condemning anti-communist resistance groups as gangs. But in his rejection of the dialogue, Primate Wazinski, was right. He did not trust the intellectuals, and in fact, he never trusted them, as one can see from a well-known article published before World War II when the specter of communist Poland was not yet in sight. Hence his decision to make the Catholicism of the people, the folk Catholicism, so to speak, the stronghold of the Catholic faith was quite

understandable and compatible with his deep convictions. The decision had far-reaching and generally positive effects. By relying on rural religiosity, the church managed to preserve a large area of social practices and religious traditions that was not accessible to the communist ideology. In countries where this type of folk Christianity did not exist or was considerably weaker, the communist system managed to wreak more havoc and penetrated deeper into the social fabric. The primates decision, however, had negative effects as well. Polish Catholicism survived in amazingly good shape, but not without flow. What it clearly lacked was an intellectual leadership.

Most of the Catholic intelligentsia represented so-called open Catholicism, which had scarcely any influence on the people's minds and souls, or if it had, was largely destructive. Probably the only period when one could see a close alliance between the church and the intelligentsia was in the 1980s, but the love affair was short, and its disappearance was as abrupt as its coming into being. No signs indicating that it would happen, appeared, before, no signs indicating that it would happen appeared before, and it would have been almost

incomprehensible were it not for the emergence of the magnetic personality of Carl Woltila, who ascended to the papal throne in 1978. Unfortunately, this cordial alliance came apart even before the fall of communism. It is interesting to note that its beginning and its end were proclaimed by the same ran, Adam Mishnik, a top anti-regime dissident, who for decades had been dictating to the Polish herd of independent minds which way they should be going. When read today, both of his proclamations, marking the beginning and the end of the Entente Corgelle with the church, disclosed what previously was overlooked, namely a consistently anti-church and anti-religious bias that has now been laid bare after the rhetoric of purely tactical concern for the fate of the church and religion in Poland, became worn out and lost its persuasive power.

Due to the absence of the vigorous Catholic intelligentsia, the effects of communism on the Polish elites proved more durable than previously thought, and an anti-religious ideology left a permanent mark on the soul of Polish academics, writers, and artists. No wonder, then, that after the fall of the regime, an anti-religious attitude, this time in a new and liberal democratic formula, found fertile ground and spread quickly among a wide range of educated people, and even more quickly among those who, through downright stupid, though downright stupid,

had intellectual pretensions because they graduated from something or other, or, as was not uncommon, worked at some educational institution. It simply did not occur to them that the church was so helpful to the nation under communism, not because she was simply against this particular political system, but because the system was wrong in everything, and the church was right in almost all the issues that were critical to the existence of a viable society. And if so, the church should have been worth listening to, regardless of what political arrangement the society took,

and perhaps even more so after the communist regime fell and the liberal Democrats took over. Part two. The attitude of liberalism toward religion was, from the start, frosty, and sometimes hostile. Like the socialists later on, the liberals were aware of the great ideological power wielded by religion, although the term ideology had not been coined yet, which they found politically most troubling.

Religion, they said, provokes deep divisions inside civil wars, pushes people to violence against their neighbors. The grounds for this view, as well as a general philosophical framework for the classical concept of religion, were provided by the Reformation. Speaking somewhat simplistically, the Protestants moved religion more than ever before into the realm of faith so that its outward forms and even a, its dogmatic aspect lost their importance. They brought back St. Paul's old distinction between the inner man and the outer man, which they translated into the analogous distinction between

internal and external religion. The former was considered to be appropriate and protected, the latter secondary and not deserving of any special protection. It was the external form, the traditions and additions, as John Milton called them, that could destabilize the political order and generate irresponsible behavior, zealousness, fanaticism, and a desire to convert dissidents by force. The controversy that was going on at that time between the tolerationists and the anti-tolerationists, i.e., those who wanted to allow public presence of external religion and those who wanted to have it significantly reduced, heeded though it was, did not dramatically set apart

the disputing parties. Both actually agreed that internal religion deserve respect because, and both use the same argument. This is so deeply embedded in the human soul that it is impervious to any political control, including the most ruthless coercion. They also agree that external religion can be politically dangerous and is arguably the most important source of political conflict. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design.

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Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is done.

Back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Lidl items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Save her sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Faragea. The major difference between the two parties was that the anti-tolerationists asserted

that outer religion should be totally controlled by the government, while the tolerationists such as the old John Locke, the Young Locke, belonged to the opposite camp, allowed for its public presence, sometimes quite considerable, but gave the state the right to supervise its religious rights and dogmas politically. If any among these rights and dogmas appeared to threaten social peace, public order, existing laws, or political stability, then claimed Locke and other like-minded thinkers, the state should not hesitate to step in and remove the threat.

such a decision would be purely political, not religious. The government or its officials banning a right or a dogma would not be motivated by its alleged religious truth or falsehood. Such verdicts would not be in their power to make, but would solely assess its practical consequences for the stability of the political order. The political argument was almost behind the exclusion of Catholics from the shield of religious toleration, the standard rule among the Protestant tolerationists. It was claimed that the Catholics were not trustworthy as other citizens because of their divided loyalty, one part to the country, the other to Rome, whereas a good citizen could not have but one sovereign the state. This exclusion was widely supported in the Protestant countries, apparently in the belief, considered self-evident,

that whatever message religion conveys, it cannot override the will of the sovereign and cannot exempt citizens from civic obedience. but because the genuine religion was in a religion, this prerogative that gave the state the power to supervise outer religion did not seem to those who accepted it particularly painful. Regardless of how sincerely the Reformation theologians desired to liberate religion from the institutional straight jacket and how ardently they defended the purity of faith, the overall results of the schism was different. Religion, freed from the dictates of Rome, fell under the control of the state. to which the liberals so distrustful of revealed religion of any kind readily assented. It is often said that the controversy over toleration led,

thanks to the perseverance of the liberals, to the establishment of a constitutional principle of the separation of church and a state, which was to become one of the key standards in liberal democratic societies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The principle was binding in the United States, but certainly not in European Protestant societies. In the United States, the First Amendment ruled out the existence of what it calls an established religion, which in fact means the state religion.

What Britain and several other Protestant countries did was the opposite. By making the head of state the head of the church, they instituted something that clearly falls into a category of established religion. The idea that the state is the ultimate supervisor in all matters relating to the political community, including religious ones, had a long tradition and in itself was not revolutionary. The problem was that the state could go too far in imposing discipline and be tempted to use the argument from political rationality to extirpate some religious groups, some religious groups deemed suspect to violate human conscience on a massive scale and to usurp the role of the spiritual and moral authority under the pretext of the disinterested political supervision. This has occasionally happened in Europe for several centuries, usually at the time of political turmoil. example, the brutal persecution of Catholics after Henry VIII broke with Rome, or when the state officially accepted an ideological agenda hostile to Christianity, as was the case after the French

Revolution when the new assembly passed the civil constitution for the clergy. The usual practice was to humiliate the potentially suspect group by forcing them to take an oath, interpreted as a purely political act of allegiance, on the regulations that they found morally repugnant or religiously unacceptable, as in the case of Thomas Moore, who, despite his de facto loyalty through the British monarchy, after the king's breach with Rome, was executed for not taken the oath on the act of supremacy. With respect to the separation of church and state, the Catholic countries in Europe fared better than the Protestant countries. The secular and ecclesiastical powers were by definition separated. In Catholicism, the supreme authority is the church, and the church was in the hands of the pope,

who was sovereign with respect of the powers of emperors, kings, and presidents. Such was, of course, the theory. In practice, the relations between throne and altar varied, and in a long and complicated history of those relations, we have had various combinations. From the de facto subordination of one authority to another, though close cooperation, to deep political and doctrinal conflicts. Of course, sometime after the religious wars in Europe ended,

religious peace prevailed, with the exceptions of such extraordinary developments as the French Revolution. As a situation became stabilized, most governments in Protestant and Catholic countries pursued the policy of accommodation, not interfering too much in religious matters and thus respecting and practiced religious liberties. This began to change in recent decades when the European governments by having exposed an ambitious ideological mission started legislating morality in an open confrontation with the teaching of Christianity and other religions. Moreover, to justify their policy, they used an analogous political argument, spurious as it is easy to see, but enormously effective, that ran as follows.

Quoting, What we enforce is the law of the land and the constitutional rights, be it in matters of abortion, marriage, education, life, death, and not religion, and what we supervise is not the people's souls, but our, our citizens' loyalty to the existing legal and political system. This offensive was so formidable that a lot of religious groups mostly Protestant, but some Catholic too, acquiesced. Those that acquiesced had to adapt their teaching to the requirements of the liberal

democratic state, and consequently to revise their doctrine substantially, sometimes beyond recognition. Those that resisted put themselves on a collision course with the liberal democratic state, and as their critics repeatedly said, with modernity as such. Fidioism, characteristic of prodinism, but spreading beyond its boundaries, which encouraged the subordination of external religion to the state, caused a gradual marginalization of Christianity in the public realm, which, as was to be expected, had to result in progressive secularization.

In any highly political society, as a liberal society is, whatever lacks political legitimacy to appear in the public square loses its raison d'etra altogether. Internal religion, regarded as the only form of religion that could be tolerated if it wanted to retain this quasi-protection, had to seek some political respectability, and the only way to do it was, first, to dispel any suspicion that it might undermine liberalism in human souls, and furthermore to prove that it motivates people to do things that are politically useful. such as bringing about peace, preaching the attitude of toleration, and inspiring philanthropy. In other words, religion was to demonstrate that it supported the liberal order and helped the liberal state to perform its functions. Religion in a non-political sense should be confined to the church and the inner life,

or better yet, exclusively to the inner life and family life, because, for example, a politician ostentatiously going to church could be accused of encroaching on the secularity of the state. Those Christians who took this view did not put up a heroic fight against the liberal state usurping the role of the legislator of morality. The usurper seized his power almost unopposed and his victorious army did not even bother to take prisoners. All goes back to that remnant. Part three. Democratic theories as opposed to liberal ones do not emit such an obvious critical message about religion, but neither are they particularly favorable. The basic objection was that the divisions in the democratic system should be political,

which meant that they should have, as their foundation, different ideas about how to organize the state and its institutions and under no circumstance should they relate to religion. The political parties could be socialist, liberal, conservative, monarchist, or anarchists, but they must not be Catholic or evangelical or orthodox, nor could they be based on ethnicity or race. The Democratic, the Democratic, democratic state should provide a place for different ethnic groups, different races, or different religions, but it could not endorse one race or religion at the expense of the others. It can't. What was it that I read the other day that's been coming out ever since this whole brouhaha on

Twitter? 6% of new hires are white males. That's basically by law. I don't know that the number is by law, but that's the way it's working. worked out. A democratic man is a citizen of the state, and citizenship does not differentiate between races, ethnic groups, or religions. The difference between the so-called mature democratic societies and those societies that have not reached political maturity, whatever the exact meaning of that is to be, is precisely that in the latter, people are not grouped around political parties, but around tribes,

clans, and religious cults. This core of this argument is correct, but its general formulation can be misleading. In the course of the intellectual and political history of Europe, Christian religion did influence, and significantly so, political programs, including concepts of the state, the duties of the citizen, and the hierarchy of political objectives. Thus, one can legitimately speak of Christian political thought developing since to Middle Ages to modern times, rich in content and diverse and implications. It is therefore obvious that political parties may be and in fact have been called Christian, although it is also true that no specific single political system, political system doctrine can be derived from Christian philosophical and theological heritage.

For more on that, Tom Woods has a book called How the Catholic Church Built the West. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. for Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited.

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all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebag.

in our luxurious spa, savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining, relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Faragea. It's triggering as that may be to some.

removing Christianity from the public square, be it directly or indirectly, was a decision taken not only against religion as such and against this particular religion, but against certain political ideas having a long and honorable tradition, which could have had a positive effect on the institutional order and on our thinking about politics. Of course, the primary impulse of the critics was a strong anti-Christian bias, not a rational desire to save politics from what did not properly belonged to it. In liberalism, that is it emerged in early modernity, there were additional factors such as a vehement rejection of medieval philosophy and of scholastics in particular, with which Christianity was often associated. Sometimes a modern philosopher is hostile to Christianity

and to the Catholic Church, as they were, had an ambitious plan to find an entirely new theological basis for the political order. With no reference to previous theories or the classical tradition, authors such as Hobbes and Locke, nominally Christian, sought a new interpretation of the Christian religion, this time with no links to existing tradition, which made them, of course, automatically anti-Catholic, but congruent with the modern view of rationality they recognized. The religion thus transformed and radically diluted was said to be free from alleged anachronisms and made palatable to the tastes and needs of modern man. Hobbs devoted half of his Leviathan into religion where, while not directly denying Christianity, he interpreted it in the way modern

man without the burden of scholastic philosophy and armed with the achievements of the new natural sciences could accept. Hobbes told him what hell in heaven could be in light of reason and which parts of Christian teaching were defensible and which were not. Locke's approach was similar. In his the reasonableness of Christianity, he explained how a man having Locke's, views of politics and knowledge should interpret basic teachings of the Christian religion with the intention to save it for modern times. Such theoretical exercises were meant to liberate people from the irrationality within which they remained enslaved, having believed in religions, superstitions, revelations, miracles, magical rights to purify their souls, and fantastic stories about the afterlife.

All this entangled those thinkers in a paradox, typical of modern thinking, intermingling coercion with liberation. Because religion was to believe to have pushed man to the phantasmagorias invented by unthinking minds and by authoritarian institutions such as the church, the subjection of people to political coercion was not only an act of liberating them from the yoke of ignorance and servitude, but also of strengthening their freedom. The political coercion was irrational insofar as it limited itself to self-evident goals such as peace and cooperation, which should clearly be considered as a most natural expectation of every living creature. This is the reason why John Locke, the liberal, could, without

contradicting himself, preach religious tolerance while granting the state vast prerogatives to control religious practices and ideas, and to use coercion if these put at risk political peace and social cooperation. Kant made a similar point in his famous essay on the Enlightenment. He started with a triumphant announcement that the human race had left the stage of adolescence, which for him meant a very precise thing, namely that man had freed himself from the influence of religion, and was at last able to use his reason as the sovereign authority. Kant concluded his essay by praising the autocratic rule of Frederick the Great as a great victory of freedom. The same argument, albeit in a cartoonish form, is found in Voltaire,

who in his work on toleration was depicting with a predictably obsessive monotony that he thought to be the persistently harmful influence of Christianity on every society in epoch. While bashing Christians, he shamelessly justified various autocrats and tyrants in the history of Europe and Asia. He commended, for example, the Romans for their repression of Christians, in which he saw an act of toleration, and criticized the repressed Christians. who, as he said, provoked the Romans with their intolerant religious zeal. The most radical version of making religion a servant of politics we owe to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, notably in his concept of civil religion, which was intended as the bedrock of the deep

emotional cohesion of a society. The new type of religious belief was to supersede the earlier forms of which he enumerated three, a religion exclusively internal, a religion of traditional societies based on social moors and rituals and a religion most bizarre, which for him was Christianity, primarily Catholic, but partly Protestant too. What was bizarre about it, about it was its being both otherworldly and this worldly, the combination of which was politically pernicious because it undermined the unity of a community and subverted the sovereign power of the state. The new religion he proposed was an artificial construction, amends it solely to serve a political purpose, but it contained elements from other religions,

the existence of a powerful and compassionate deity, the sanctity of life, and the belief in the afterlife where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked or punished. The function of the civil religion resembled that of an ideology, giving a society deprived of old loyalties, a new identity, and a new sense of belonging. The imposition of the civil religion was primarily a political operation with implications similar to those that were later to be seen in highly ideological regimes. The sovereign could get rid of non-believers and even punish with death those who betrayed the new religious dogmas. The anti-Catholic and anti-church attitude was something that from the beginning permeated the liberal notion of politics. Because

the majority of the liberal thinkers were or were or were born Protestants, the anti-despotic edge of their theory found in the Catholic Church an obvious villain. Their religious background and their theories reinforced each other. With the monarchies weakening or turning into constitutional parliamentary systems, the church and her religion remained unabashedly and ostentatiously at the non-liberal position as it deliberately provoked, as if deliberately provoking all liberal critics to use all the polemical artillery. 19th century socialism with its hostility to religion is in a way a version of a similar attitude. The church and Catholicism represented an old order

that long ago outlived its usefulness and deserved to perish. The 20th century version was, of course, rhetorically and in practice far more deadly. The architects and helmsmen of the communist system were convinced that when fighting religion, whatever the means, they did humanity a great service by contributing to its liberation.

The more radical, the coercive means applied, the nearer they thought was the time when man became his own master. Do you know how many communists I know who don't think they're communists? The fact that the anti-religion policies of the communists were so much more brutal than those of the liberal and democratic states is, of course, crucial and should never be forgotten or minimized, but it remains true that their views on religion and on Christianity in particular converge too often. Not only do they not know that they're not.

communist, but they're also liberal. I don't know. I guess they can pick which one they want. It's kind of hard to run away from it. When in the early 1920s, Bertrand Russell, after having visited Bolshevik Russia, wrote a book on the theory and practice of Bolshevism, he in no uncertain words expressed both his admiration for the general idea of the system and is equally strong distaste for the means used. He finished his book on the relatively optimistic note that the communist program, once freed from the Asian-like barbaric heritage so powerfully present in Russia, would remain a great hope of mankind. The communists were indeed aware that such were the feelings of the liberal-minded Western elites, and, wishing to ease to criticism of their brutal policies,

willingly presented themselves as continuing the Western, secular, and anti-Christian tradition. This tactic proved quite effective, as it gave the communists an image of splendidly, barring modernizers. After all, both the communists and the Western liberal progressives shared an assumption that religion, unless itself radically modernized, was an impediment to modernization, both shared a similar vision of a better world to come in which there would be no religion at all, or if it was to survive, it would be entirely subservient to the ideas and institutions of the new society. Neither the communist nor liberal progressives could ever imagine religion to be a carrier of wisdom and a valuable corrective force that was

necessary to challenge the dogmas of the grand plan of modernization. To accept this authority, if only partially, would have been as unthinkable to them as it would have been for Kant to argue that man, after having matured, should go back to the state of adolescence. The notion that to be for freedom and modernity presumes being also anti-Christian has imprinted itself on the European mind and as a strong today as it was in the past. An anti-Christian, an anti-Christian rhetoric, in the media and in politics and in anti-Christian art, including paintings, installations, plays, novels, films, articles, and slogans fills the public space today, making the Christian religion, its institutions, and its articles of faith, objects of endlessly multiplying

derisions and accusations. Homosexual activists see Christianity as the original source of homophobia and feminists as the foundation of patriarchy. Countless intellectuals accused it of totalitarianism, reactionary sexual ethics, pedophilia, and inquisition-like mentality, witch hunts, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, intellectual infantilism, a morbid fascination with guilt, and numerous other sins. On the one hand, there is an ever-present feeling of satisfaction that Christianity has been a retreat for some time, being driven back by a victorious wave of secularization. On the other is invariably seen as an evil. that miraculously resurrects itself and continues to cast its ominous shadow over the Western civilization.

The participation of Christians in public life, even as paltry as it is now, revives the usual suspicions and resuscitates the old anti-Christian stereotypes. The crusade against Christianity verges on the absurd. Liberals continue to make new conquest and to colonize more and more areas of human life, leaving practically no territory outside their control, and the more they grab, the latter they ran against Christianity, flogging it with new accusations, invectives, and blasphemies. The analogy to what was happening under the communist rule seems irresistible in the countries where, as a result of brutal repressions by the communist regime, sometimes induced by historical and cultural peculiarities, Christianity was believed to be on the wane and where the forces of secularism trance triumphed to the satisfaction of the apostles of the communist ideology,

the anti-Christian warriors did not lay down their arms, they continued to fight, as if fearing that Christianity's death was temporary and that the religion reborn again was soon to resume its sinister role as a major obstacle to the march of modernity. In a sense, the communists were right. Much of the resistance that finally led to the disintegration of the communist system came from religious groups and from religion itself. At the end of the day, it turned out that the fear of religion was justified. the Pope had indeed far more troops than the communist dictators.

It is quite possible that the anti-Christian crusaders of today are haunted by a similar fear. I don't know what to comment on this. It all speaks for itself. So let us continue. Part four. In today's liberal democracy, the anti-Christian attitude has been slightly modified. An authoritarian rhetoric, willingly used in the past, by even the most renowned tolerationist, such as lock and bail, disappeared.

The public space, including public language, has been for some time governed by two formal rules. These rules, long present and liberal thinking, are now included in the legal and constitutional systems and are believed to have settled once and for all the problem of religion and politics. First, religious freedom is recognized as a fundamental human right, and second, the state must be ideologically neutral. In real terms, the first rule entails that no religious group can be prevented from practicing their religion. The second asserts that the state must be free from any religion and is not allowed to support any. Theoretically, the solution is clear, but despite appearances, the old problems did not vanish. The allegedly formal rules turned out to be substantive.

First of all, what these rules legitimized was an assumption that Christianity should be treated like other religions and that there was no reason why it should have a superior status. Such an assumption would be inconceivable to most of the old toleration as even Voltaire, clearly loathing Christianity explicitly rejected this view in his treatise on toleration, admitting that the position of this religion in Europe was exceptional and therefore privileged. The newer rules were, in the intentions of the liberals, universalists, and thus allowed no exceptions either on the historical or philosophical grounds. This universalism, the liberals were particularly proud of, because they saw it in manifestation of their neutrality.

They, however, disregarded an obvious fact that in practice, what they called neutrality, had irrevocably dethroned Christianity from the position it had for many centuries and less led to redefining the nature of European civilization. As one can see, the rules in question, although intended to be formal, were easily adapted to the revealing ideology, and soon became a part of it. Today, they are among the standard inventory of those who assume the irrelevance of Christianity for the identity of Western civilization, or, stating it more mildly, who assumed the post-Christian nature of this civilization in which Christianity is a fortunately closed chapter. The view that the modern world is essentially non-Christian only timidly uttered a few decades ago, is now widely accepted. Articulated explicitly and loudly by philosophers,

political scientists, and writers, it has penetrated public opinion and become a sort of uncontested axiom of social wisdom. A reference to Christianity as an important part of European identity in the preamble of the EU constitutional treaty provoked such an angry reaction that had to be dropped as allegedly incongruent with what the EU calls European values.

Even acknowledging the historical role of the Christian heritage is now thought too extravagant to be tolerated. All these manifestations of an anti-Christian sentiment are not a trifling matter. They illustrate the triumph of the ideological thinking whose distinguishing feature is a reorganization and quite often a falsification of the past in order to put at the service of the contemporary political project. Who controls the past controls the future as Orwell accurately observed. in his dissection of totalitarianism. The communist did on a large scale, the EU and its effort to build a new European identity

is doing something quite similar, though on a smaller scale. Paralyzed by their chrysophobia, to use Joseph H.H. Wiler's well-known expression, the European Union, as well as the European governments, do not react to the brutal persecution of Christians and other continents, and if they do, their reaction is low-key. This is all the more shameful that the Christians are, and it must be repeated over and over again, the most persecuted religious group in the world.

It seems almost unthinkable that the EU of today would take a more resolute standby, for instance, asserting that due to the special role of Christianity in the history of Europe, Europeans have an obligation to defend the Catholics, Protestants, and Christians of other denominations and other continents who were in prison, expelled, tortured, and massacred. more outspoken statements condemning the persecution are rare and written in a universalist language in which Christians are mentioned alongside other groups as if the EU were afraid to be too committal. It is significant that in the famous case, Laotsee v. Italy, where the first verdict by the European Court of Human Rights decided that crucifixes in schools were unacceptable, most other European governments did not support the Italian government, which appealed the ruling and failed to act as amicus curie. Those that did, Armenia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Monaco, Romania, Russia, and San Marino,

were either secondary players within the EU or, like Russia, outside of it. None of the major European countries sided with the Italians. Neither did, I am ashamed to say, Poland under the civic platform government. The Polish government, sensitive to what the big guys might think about it, decided not to get involved. The coldness to the plight of Christians and Christianity is concealed by the language of universalistic egalitarianism, which is in its ostentatious generosity, is supposed to express concern for all religions and all religious groups, but the principle of equality and its two rules, equal freedom of all religions and neutrality of the state, are anything but generous. Under the banner of equality, the religion that has been of paramount importance is being equalized with the religions that had no importance at all. In concrete terms, equalization means that Christianity must be drastically devalued, while other religions of little impact on European identity are given a tremendous boost.

That's what we call replacement. The nonsense of this, you know, Thomas makes the argument that you would rather be, what would you rather do? would you rather be persecuted physically or just have your whole identity removed? Where not only is it stripping you of who you are, but it's stripping you of who you were and who your family was and who everyone in your line was and who everyone in the future will be. Most people just concentrate on the material. In concrete terms, equalization means that Christianity must be drastically devalued while other religions have little impact on European identity are given a tremendous boost.

The nonsense of this new perspective leaves to the eye. For example, some of the British bishops and politicians played with an idea of introducing elements of Sharia law into the British legal system in areas with a large Muslim population so that Muslims could feel better in a Christian environment. Those who came with this generous offer seemed to forget that British society had already effectively eliminated Christianity, and what they suggested would amount to making Britain more Muslim while pushing Christianity further aside. Another example is the law prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols, while it originally targeted Muslims, it has in fact become a major legal measure to eliminate from the public presence to Christian symbols that for two millennia have been an integral part of Western civilization. Such actions are reminiscent of the wars against religious symbols waged by the communist government against religious communities on the pretexts that these symbols violated the secular character of state institutions.

The communist authorities did not tolerate crucifixes in schools or were irritated when the citizens of the communist state were wearing them in a too conspicuous manner. If the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Latte v. Italy had been upheld in the Grand Chamber, the Italian schools, and in the end probably also the schools in other countries, would have been similar to those in the communist countries where the presence of crosses in classrooms or holy medals around the nexus students

would be extirpated by law. In the first case, the censure would have been enforced by the European Court of Human Rights and in the other by the system of communist justice. But the practical consequences for the Christians would have been the same. It is also worth remembering that most communist countries, after the brutal attempts to annihilate religion and failed, also upheld the two rules of freedom of religious worship and the ideological neutrality of the state. The communists were perfectly happy to accept these rules as long as to the law. they meant that religious communities were not allowed to make non-religious public statements,

other than those that supported the regime. The Polish communist authorities also willingly resorted to those rules whenever they thought expedient to reduce the significance of Catholicism. Then they took the pose of a neutral arbiter, and in the name of what they called fairness, gave a disproportionately well-publicized hearing to various representatives of small churches, particularly those that were unconditionally endorsed in the communist. party, having been sometimes infiltrated by the secret police, and were eager to take part in

any anti-Catholic action. The decision about the public presence of religion based on the two mentioned rules is, let me reiterate, to a large degree of substantive, not formal, and the substance depends on the ideological interpretation given to it by governing bodies. In themselves, these principles do not determine much, but the intention of the interpreters pushes them in one direction or another and gives them a substantive character. The rules stated out of any context include too many components vague or unsaid. Freedom of religion is never absolute. Religious communities never limit themselves to religious matters.

The state is never neutral and has its own ideological preferences, etc. Under communism, the government hated religion and used both rules to eliminate Christianity from the public square and ultimately from the people's hearts and minds. The communist constitution, of course, guaranteed equality of religions and religious freedom. There was an article added to it stipulating that this freedom must not be used to attack the socialist system. The article was completely superfluous with or without its policy of the Communist Party toward the church, and the Catholics would have been the same. When read in the context of the liberal democratic rules, the article did not say anything shocking.

Liberal democracy takes for granted that the churches do not attack the political system in which they live. that is the system of liberal democracy. If they do, they are in trouble. In the United States, that is, in a country where one could speak of the real separation of church-estate, the power, at least until the 1960s, was in the hands of the Christian majority, mostly Protestant, who interpreted the rules of freedom of religion and neutrality of the state in a way that allowed for a strong presence of religion in the public square to the extent that American society could be accurately called the society of the book.

In today's post-communist Poland, Catholicism has been the subject of constant attacks since the moment the old regime collapsed, but the church still retains an important position in the life of the country, which comes not from constitutional provisions but her political and historical role in the nation's history and the existence of a large Catholic community. In today's Europe, the power has been in the hands of the political class hostile to Christianity, and this class, supported by the elites and by large segments of society, have been interpreting the two rules with complete impunity in a manner inappropriate to its anti-Christian prejudice. That's it. Part 9. We'll come back and finish. We'll finish part chapter 5 and then we'll read the summary.

And yeah, if you, Thomas and I just dropped a review of the 1935 movie documentary Triumph of the Will by Lenny Riphonestall. If you go to freemam Beyond The Wall.com forward slash movies, you'll see a link to it there. And we do movies every month, movie reviews every month, watch and reviews, and there's also a year. You can subscribe for a year there. There's a link.

So you can also check out the movies we've done in the past. Anyway, we'll be back in a couple of days, and we'll finish us up. Thank you very much for tuning in. Take care. Bye.