Appendix C SYNCRETISM, PLURALISM, AND EMPIRE And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters' clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure (Dan. 2:40-45).
Daniel's prophecy to Babylon's Nebuchadnezzar foretold the rise of a series of empires. The last worldwide political empire would be Rome's. It would break apart. It would be replaced by a new empire, a new world order: the church, the stone cut from the mountain made without hands. There is no political empire capable of replacing the church as the basis of an integrated world order. Every self-proclaimed new world order will fail.
In our day, we have seen two rival claimants to the throne of empire, each claiming to be a builder of a New World Order: international Communism and Western humanism. Communism visibly collapsed in August of 1991 in the failed coup by the ousted leaders of the old Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Today, in the late 1990's, Western humanists believe that they are capable of putting together an international order based on free trade, central banking, currency manipulation, and international bureaucratic agencies with the power to control the legal framework of international production. This ideal, like the ideal of Communism, will be publicly smashed. This ideal is built on faith in political controls, which today means faith in central banking, taxation, and computers. As we approach the year 2000, with the looming breakdown of computers due to the rollover from 1999 (99) to 2000 (00), we can predict with some confidence: "The computer giveth and the computer taketh away." Blessed be the name of the Lord.
A Common Pantheon The strategy of the ancient empires was syncretism. It still is, but today it is called pluralism. The idols of the conquered cities could be brought into the pantheon of the empire's gods. This was Rome's strategy. Local idols lost their exclusivity when they entered the empire's pantheon. Rome sought to maintain the regional authority of the gods of the classical city-state by incorporating them into the Roman pantheon. By honoring the geographical significance of local deities, Rome sought to subordinate them all to the pantheon itself, i.e., to the empire. The Roman pantheon, manifested politically by the genius and later the divinity of the emperor, universalized the implied divinity of the classical city-state.
It was the exclusivity and universalism of the God of the Bible that identified Jews and Christians as politically untrustworthy and even revolutionary subjects. They refused to worship either the genius or the divinity of the Roman emperor. They would not acknowledge the authority of the Roman empire's pantheon of gods. They would not acknowledge the God of the Bible as just one more regional god among many. The God of the Bible, they insisted, was above the creation and outside it. This confession was revolutionary in ancient Rome. Rushdoony explains why: "The essence of the ancient city-state, polis, and empire was that it constituted the continuous unity of the gods and men, of the divine and the human, and the unity of all being. There was thus no possible independence in society for any constituent aspect. Every element of society was a part of the all-absorbing one. Against this, Christianity asserted the absolute division of the human and the divine. Even in the incarnation of Christ, the human and the divine were in union without confusion, as Chalcedon [451 A.D.] so powerfully defined it. Thus, divinity was withdrawn from human society and returned to the heavens and to God. No human order or institution could claim divinity and thereby claim to represent total and final order. By de-divinizing the world, Christianity placed all created orders, including church and state, under God."(1)
Rome could not coexist with Christianity. The Roman authorities recognized this fact over two centuries before the Christians did. While Christians were honest, hard-working, peace-loving citizens, they were necessarily the enemies of pagan Rome. Their God would not submit; He ordered His people not to submit. The Christians sought peace through religious pluralism, but Rome sought dominion through syncretism: the absorption of all religions into the religion of empire. Syncretism is the enemy of orthodoxy. Political pluralism -- the equal authority (little or none) in civil law of all supernatural gods -- is a grand illusion. It is syncretism for those Christian believers who have not yet recognized in political pluralism the syncretism that underlies it and the humanistic empire which is pluralism's long-term goal.(2)
Christians of Rome called for religious toleration -- the right not to worship the emperor as a condition of citizenship or even resident alien status -- but Rome's authorities knew better. They recognized what early Christians refused to acknowledge, namely, that the God of the Bible recognizes no other gods, rejects syncretism, and therefore calls for the subordination of culture to Him and His Bible-revealed law. Rome recognized early that pluralism is a politically convenient short-term illusion and a long-run impossibility. There would either be a judicially impotent religious establishment under the authority of a political priesthood or else covenant religion would govern the nation's political oath of allegiance. The result of this early recognition was Rome's intermittent persecution of Christians for almost three centuries, followed by the fall of Rome and the inheritance of Rome's infrastructure -- roads, laws, and customs -- by Christians in the fourth century. Rome's syncretism failed as surely as the Christians' early pluralism failed.
Tertullian's Apology In the late second or early third century, Tertullian (145-220), the intellectual founder of Latin Christianity, wrote his famous Apology, a defense of Christianity as a pietistic religion of heart and hearth which should have been acceptable to Rome's power religion. It was addressed to "Rulers of the Roman Empire."(3) It was a critique of Rome's demand that Christians must worship the divinity of the emperor for the sake of the prosperity of the empire.
He attributed to ignorance the rulers' hostility to Christianity. "So we maintain that they are both ignorant while they hate us, and hate us unrighteously while they continue in ignorance, the one thing being the result of the other either way of it."(4) In Chapter 25, he pointed out that the complex pantheon of Rome in his day had not been the religion of the early Romans. "But how utterly foolish it is to attribute the greatness of the Roman name to religious merits, since it was after Rome became an empire, or call it still a kingdom, that the religion she professes made its chief progress! Is it the case now? Has its religion been the source of the prosperity of Rome?" On the contrary, he argued: "Indeed, how could religion make a people great who have owed their greatness to their irreligion? For, if I am not mistaken, kingdoms and empires are acquired by wars, and are extended by victories. More than that, you cannot have wars and victories without the taking, and often the destruction, of cities. That is a thing in which the gods have their share of calamity. Houses and temples suffer alike; there is indiscriminate slaughter of priests and citizens; the hand of rapine is laid equally upon sacred and on common treasure. Thus the sacrileges of the Romans are as numerous as their trophies." The sacredness of Rome's pantheon of gods is an illusion; the gods of Rome are idols. "But divinities unconscious are with impunity dishonored, just as in vain they are adored."
If this was calculated to persuade Rome's rulers, it was an apologetic failure. Tertullian did not understand, or pretended not to understand, the inherently political nature of classical religion. The gods of Rome were thoroughly political in Tertullian's era. This is not surprising. In classical religion, the gods of allied cities, as well as allied families and clans within a city, had always been political. They had always been creations for the sake of politics.(5) Peace treaties between warring cities were treaties between their gods.(6) While the ancients believed that the gods did bring sanctions, positive and negative, in history, they also believed that these sanctions were applied to members of oath-bound, custom-bound, and ritual-bound groups: families, clans, and city-states. The heart of Roman religion was its public piety.(7) Jews and Christians remasied aloof from these public ceremonies, not because the rituals were public but because they formally invoked idols. On the other hand, they were persecuted, not because they refused to believe in the power of idols, but because they refused to participate in acts of public piety. The issue for Rome was the oath -- formal invocation -- not personal belief. The public oath affirmed men's obedience to representatives of the gods of the pantheon -- representatives who were, above all, political agents of the emperor.
In Chapter 28, Tertullian called for religious toleration generally, affirming strict voluntarism in worship. Christians cannot in good conscience "offer sacrifice to the well-being of the emperor." Yet for this refusal, he complained, they have been illegitimately condemned as treasonous. Roman religion was itself sacrilegious, he said, "for you do homage with a greater dread and an intense reverence to Caesar, than Olympian Jove himself." Of course they did; the Olympian Jove was a political construct. Caesar was the earthly manifestation of Rome's political power, and classical religion was power religion. Tertullian sought to condemn Rome's rulers for "showing impiety to your gods, inasmuch as you show a greater reverence to a human sovereignty than you do to them." This was naive; the heart of all power religion, from Pharaoh to the latest political messiah, is the honoring of human sovereignty.(8)
In Chapter 29, he argued that the gods of Rome did not protect Caesar; rather, Caesar protected the gods. "This, then, is the ground on which we are charged with treason against the imperial majesty, to wit, that we do not put the emperors under their own possessions; that we do not offer a mere mock service on their behalf, as not believing their safety rests in leaden hands." This was also a naive argument, yet one still revered by most Christian defenders of modern political pluralism. To pray for Caesar in the name of the pantheon of Rome's gods was to acknowledge publicly that Caesar was the common reference point, the common spokesman, for the inherently political gods of classical culture. The syncretism of Rome's religion was the theological justification for the administration of Rome's political empire: a hierarchy of sanctified power from Caesar to the lowest officials in the otherwise autonomous city-states that made up the empire. This hierarchy of power was sacred, a matter of formal ritual.
The source of law in society is its god.(9) Caesar was the source of law in the name of the gods of the pantheon. There was no operational hierarchy above him; there was a political and military hierarchy below him. This much Tertullian understood. This was the heart of his argument against the seriousness of Roman religion. But to maintain widespread faith in the legitimacy of any social order, the authorities must foster faith in a sacred -- though not necessarily supernatural -- law-order, i.e., laws to which non-political and cosmic sanctions are attached. Civil authorities seek to instill the fear of the society's gods in the hearts of the subjects of the sacred political order. This is why Tertullian was unquestionably treasonous, for he was undermining men's faith in the higher order which the authorities insisted undergirded Rome's legitimacy. Tertullian was challenging the civil covenant of Rome, an overwhelmingly political social order. He challenged Rome's gods, the authority of Rome's rulers to command allegiance to the primary representative of these gods, Rome's law, Rome's sanctions against treasonous Christians, and ultimately Rome's succession in history. There was no more revolutionary act than this. Taking up weapons was a minor infraction compared to this.
In vain did Tertullian cry out for toleration, just as modern Christian defenders of political pluralism cry out vainly. "Why, then, are we not permitted an equal liberty and impunity for our doctrines as they have, with whom, in respect of what we teach, we are compared?"(10) The answer should have been obvious: they -- the tolerated religions -- publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the covenant of Rome's power religion. Christianity could not acknowledge such legitimacy and remain faithful to God.
Tertullian had mystical tendencies, and he spent the end of his life as a member of a cult, the Montanists, which had been founded half a century earlier by a tongues-speaking, self-styled prophet, Montanus, and two women who were also said to be prophetesses. They taught the imminent bodily return of Christ.(11) After Christ's bodily return, they taught, He would set up an earthly kingdom.(12) Tertullian's Apology was governed by an outlook hostile to time, dominion, and political involvement. His political pluralism was an outworking of his theological pietism, a pietism which eventually led him into a premillennial cult that called for asceticism, suffering, and martyrdom prior to the imminent Second Coming.(13) His political pluralism was consistent with his later theology: a call, not for the victory of Christianity in history, but merely for peace until such time as Christ returns to set up a millennial kingdom. For Tertullian, history offered little hope. Yet even so, his limited critique of Rome in the name of political pluralism and toleration went too far for Rome's hierarchs.
Julian the Apostate The Roman authorities understood the implications of the rival religion which Tertullian preached. They were unimpressed with his arguments that Christians were the best citizens of Rome because they gave alms freely and paid their taxes.(14) The Christians were by far the most dangerous citizens of Rome, as the last pagan emperor Julian (361-63) fully understood. The victorious Christians designated him posthumously as "Julian the Apostate." This name has stuck, even in textbooks written by his spiritual heirs. A secret convert at age 20 from Christianity to occult mysteries, Julian took steps to weaken the Christians immediately after he attained the office of Emperor. Julian was the first Renaissance ruler, a lover of Greek antiquity.(15) He concealed his conversion to paganism throughout his adult life until he gained uncontested political power in 361. This is understandable, given the fact that his late cousin, the Arian Emperor Constantius, had ordered the murder of Julian's father and mother in the year Constantine died, 337, when Julian was five years old.(16)
One of his earliest acts as emperor was to establish pagan review boards governing the appointment of all teachers. Teachers henceforth would have to teach classical religion along with traditional rhetoric.(17) Christians, however, were forbidden by Julian to teach such texts. He dismissed the Christians in his work, Against the Galileans: "It seems to me that you yourselves must be aware of the very different effect of your writings on the intellect compared to ours, and that from studying yours no man could achieve excellence or even ordinary human goodness, whereas from studying ours every man can become better than before."(18) Like today, the possession of a formal education was basic to social advancement.(19) Christians had long understood this, and those seeking social advancement had capitulated to the requirement of mastering rhetoric, but in a watered-down, minimal-paganism form. Wilken writes: "For two centuries Christian intellectuals had been forging a link between Christianity and the classical tradition, and with one swift stroke Julian sought to sever that link. . . . Christian parents, especially the wealthy, insisted that their sons receive the rhetorical education, and it now appeared as though Julian were limiting this to pagans."(20) The more things change, the more things stay the same.(21) What Julian attempted, the U.S. Department of Education has achieved.(22) So have other similar politically appointed and coercive review boards throughout the world.
In a very real sense, Julian's edict launched a dilemma that has faced the Western church since the eleventh century. If the knowledge of pagan texts is the legitimate basis of a gentleman's education -- an assumption acknowledged by the Christian West until the Darwinian educational reforms of late nineteenth century -- then why should Christians seek to become gentlemen? Why should they not content themselves with the study of the Scriptures and commentaries on the Scriptures, just as Jewish scholars in the West contented themselves for eighteen centuries with the study of the Talmud? One answer: because Christians do not want to live in ghettos, having seen what ghetto living did to the Jews prior to about 1850. On the other hand, won't exposure to classical learning undermine Christians' commitment to the truths of Scripture, just as secular education has undermined modern Judaism? We see this continuing debate in Christians' rival commitment to two forms of higher education: 1) the Christian liberal arts college, which has unquestionably gone humanistic and liberal in the content of its curriculum;(23) and 2) the fundamentalist Bible college, which does not seek academic accreditation from State-licensed, monopolistic, humanistic accreditation organizations, nor would receive it if sought. This is the dilemma of the hypothetical but non-existent Christian law school that would teach biblical law and which therefore could not receive academic accreditation from the humanistic American Bar Association (ABA), which is mandatory for the school's graduates to gain access to the State-licensed monopoly of pleading the law for money.(24) Darwinism has replaced classicism in the modern curriculum, and college graduates are not so much gentlemen as bureaucrats, but the dilemma is in principle the same.
The solution is the biblical covenant, which provides Christians with revelational standards of evaluation that are to govern both the form and the content of education, but Christians have never believed this strongly enough to establish biblical guidelines for education. The answer, in short, is theocracy -- "God rules through God's rules" -- but this suggestion is as abhorrent to modern pietistic Christians as it was to Julian.
Modernism's Gods Modernism's gods are the lineal descendants of the gods of the Hellenistic world: influence, wealth, and sophistication. They are gods of a systematically secular civilization: politics, economics, and education. Their confessional demands are not so clearly stated as the traditional gods of Canaan were. They offer so many benefits and seem to demand very few formal sacrifices. They offer the universally pursued fruits of the division of labor in every field. They invite into their company all those who are willing to endure intellectual separation from the communities in which they were born. They demand this separation, initially, only in those areas of life that produce wealth and social advantages. They rigidly segregate the realm of formal worship from the world of economic productivity and civil service. They relegate the confessional world of revealed religion to the fringes of culture. They condescendingly allow the regularly scheduled formal worship of these culturally banished gods, but these schedules are limited by custom, and sometimes are banned by law (e.g., tax-funded anything in the United States).
Modernism's gods are like the gods of classical humanism, for they are part of the creation. Modernism denies judicial significance to anything outside the space-time continuum. Modernism's gods are gods of man's professed autonomy. Unlike the gods of classical humanism, they are universal gods that honor no geographical boundaries. They are idols of the mind and spirit. They offer power, wealth, and prestige to those who are willing to submit to their impersonal laws. They serve as the foundations of empire: man's empire. They claim the allegiance of all who would be successful.
Because they are impersonal gods, their various priesthoods can comfort the worshippers of personal gods by assuring them that the honoring of modernism's gods in no way dishonors the religion of any traditional god. In so arguing, the priests of the gods of modernism proclaim the universal reign of humanism's kingdom, a reign unaffected by the competing claims of the worshippers of traditional deities. Behind the competing dogmas of the great religions is the agreed-upon god of numerical relationships. Above the cacophony of claims by the priests of the gods of revelation is the transfiguring promise of compound economic growth. The traditional priest takes your money and gives you assurances of eternal peace; the banker takes your money and gives you three to five percent, compounded. The many-colored robes of a hundred priestly orders cannot compete with the dazzling white smocks of the scientific priesthood. Or so it seems. It takes a highly sophisticated skeptic to perceive that the relevance of numerical relationships cannot be explained logically,(25) that compound economic growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world,(26) and that science places man on a meaningless treadmill of discovery in which every truth will be superseded, in which there is no long-term security of belief.(27)
The reality of the permanent conflict between God and the gods of modernism can be seen in the outcome of their respective historical sanctions. Jews, as the original covenant people, regard themselves as heirs of the covenant. If any people should be immune to the lure of false gods, they believe, they are that people. Yet the worship of the gods of modernism has made great inroads in the Jewish community. They have trusted the modern State, only to be repeatedly betrayed by it.(28) They have trusted the economy, only to be blamed as malefactors and conspirators because of their economic success.(29) They have trusted education, only to have lost their confessional identity. The phrase, "I'm a Jew," today masks an absence of any agreed-upon theological or judicial content.
Over time, one begins to perceive that Jews are over-represented in the ranks of mathematicians, bankers, scientists, Hollywood celebrities, and in other fields. Meanwhile, there do not seem to be many rabbis who still defend the infallibility of the five books of Moses. In fact, the relationship seems to be inverse: the fewer the number of Torah-affirming rabbis, the more Jews are visible in leadership positions inside the priesthoods of modernism. Is this inverse relationship a perverse relationship? So it seems.(30)
Pietism and Politics "Fewer Torah-affirming rabbis, more successful Jews." Because of the visible success of the Jewish minority in the West, this observation is easy to make. But the same inverse relationship seems to operate in Christian fundamentalist circles, although in the opposite form: "More Bible-believing ministers, fewer successful Christians." There are reasons for this. Many fundamentalist Christians conclude that success in this world is a spiritual trap to be avoided, a goal to be shunned. "Politics is dirty. Riches are a trap. Too much education is a bad thing." Premillennial dispensationalism has called into question the time available to Christians to pursue projects that rely on long-term compounding for success. As Rev. J. Vernon McGee put it in the early 1950's, "You don't polish brass on a sinking ship." In recent years, this success-rejecting presupposition has been called into question in some charismatic circles.(31)
Meanwhile, as American fundamentalist Christians have become politically active since 1976, they have steadily abandoned their commitment to dispensationalism. This is especially true of fundamentalism's national leaders.(32) They rarely speak about eschatology any more, and when they do, what they say about the future is at odds with what their multi-million dollar organizations are doing.(33) An eschatology that confidently preaches inevitable failure in history for Christians is inconsistent with Christian political mobilization. The goal of politics is to win, not lose. Also, the rise of the independent Christian education movement since 1965 has been accompanied by the idea that Christian education should be better than secular education, which places a new degree of responsibility on Christians to develop superior curriculum materials. While fundamentalists have proven incapable of doing this, especially for students above the age of 15, they at least have understood that the task is necessary. But after three centuries of having to choose between right-wing Enlightenment humanism and left-wing, Protestant Christians are not in a position to offer a well-developed alternative. Fundamentalists have generally chosen right-wing humanism -- Adam Smith, James Madison -- but they have at best baptized it in the name of vague biblical principles. They have not shown exegetically how the Bible leads to right-wing humanism's policy conclusions.
Calvinists and Lutherans never adopted such a comprehensive world-rejecting outlook, where at least middle-class success has been assumed to be normative, but they have also been deeply compromised by humanist education, especially at the collegiate level. Calvinist and Lutheran leaders and churches have gone theologically liberal and then politically liberal with far greater regularity than fundamentalist leaders and churches have.
The gods of the modern world, being universal in their claims, imitate the universalism of the kingdom of God. They undergird the kingdom of man. Their proffered blessings are not uniquely tied to the land as the gods of the ancient world were. These gods are not placated by sacred offerings of the field. They are placated only by confession and conformity: the affirmation of their autonomous jurisdiction within an ever-expanding realm of law -- civil, private, or both. Their priestly agents offer positive sanctions to those who conform covenantally: the traditional human goals of health, wealth, power, fame, and security, as well as the great lure of the twentieth century, low-cost entertainment. The last goal has become necessary to offset the side effect of the first five: boredom.
America's mainline Protestant denominations have suffered the same fate confessionally during the same period.(34) Catholicism resisted the trend until the mid-1960's, but this resistance collapsed almost overnight, 1965-66.(35) The evangelicals are also succumbing.(36) Only fundamentalists, charismatics, and a handful of Calvinists and Lutherans, especially those committed to Christian education through high school, are maintaining their resistance by proclaiming late eighteenth-century right-wing Enlightenment humanism as an ideal. Church growth is taking place in those American churches that are resisting the liberal humanist tide. This has been true since the late 1920's,(37) the very period in which liberal Protestant church growth peaked in the United States.(38)
Conclusion The ancient empires adopted syncretism as a way to hold together the political order. Just as the syncretistic gods of the families and clans in Greece and Rome entered into the common pantheon of the city-state, becoming political gods, so did the gods of conquered city-states enter into the pantheon of the Roman Empire. The welcoming of these gods into the Roman pantheon undermined the ritual-theological foundations of the Roman Republic. Empires in the ancient world required the subordination of local gods to the political order.
This is in principle no different in modern pluralism. What has changed is the local character of the participating gods. They have become universalistic, mimicking the God of the Bible. The modern pantheon is not filled with idols. Pluralism acknowledges all religions as equal, just an syncretism acknowledged all idols as equal. But in both cases, this equality was the equality of subordination to the god of politics. This god is the supreme god of every empire.
The anti-Christian leaders of the modern world are now campaigning for the creation of a New World Order. This is another move in the direction of empire. It will not come to pass. God will bring a cacophony to match this new tower of Babel. This time, the confusion of computer languages rather than human languages will probably be the means of thwarting the move to empire.
Footnotes:
1. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1971] 1978), p. 124.
2. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).
3. Tertullian, Apology, ch. I, opening words. Reprinted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. III (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1870] 1978).
4. Idem.
5. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book III, ch. VI.
6. Ibid., III:XV.
7. Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 64.
8. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985).
9. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 5.
10. Tertullian, Apology, ch. XLVI.
11. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), p. 128.
12. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 254.
13. W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1965] 1981), p. 292.
14. Apology, ch. XLII.
15. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, p. 171.
16. John Holland Smith, The Death of Classical Paganism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p. 93.
17. Wilken, Christians, pp. 173-74.
18. Cited in Smith, Death, p. 109.
19. Wilken, Christians, p. 175.
20. Idem.
21. Marsden, Soul of the American University, op. cit.
22. Only in the summer of 1995 did the U.S. Department of Education allow a non-regional accrediting organization begin to offer accreditation to colleges. The regional associations are all secular. The new association is equally secular, but its recommended curriculum is more traditional, rather like late-nineteenth-century pagan college education.
23. James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
24. This is the dilemma of Regent University's law school, which received provisional accreditation by the ABA on the basis of its dean's public commitment to an as-yet undeveloped, updated version of James Madison's pre-Darwinian, eighteenth-century political pluralism, and which in 1993 fired the dean and promised to adopt a more mainstream curriculum. "Titus Breaks His Silence," World (Feb. 5, 1994). The dean was Herbert Titus, who wrote an appendix in R. J. Rushdoony's book, Law and Society, vol. 2 of Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1982).
25. Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, XIII (1960), pp. 1-14. Wigner won the Nobel Prize in physics.
26. Gary North, "The Theology of the Exponential Curve," The Freeman (May 1970).
27. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 138.
28. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
29. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein & Day, 1980); Sheldon Marcus, Father Caughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 146-79. Primary sources include Maj.-Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovich, The Secret World Government or "The Hidden Hand" (New York: Anti-Bolshevist Pub. Assn., 1926); John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Dallas: Wilkenson, 1951); William Guy Carr, Red Fog Over America (2nd ed.; Toronto: National Federation of Christian Laymen, 1957); Carr, Pawns in the Game (4th ed.; Los Angeles: St. George Press, 1962); Olivia Marie O'Grady, The Beasts of the Apocalypse (Benicia, California: O'Grady Publications, 1959); Wilmot Roberston, The Dispossed Majority (rev. ed.; Cape Canaveral, Florida: Howard Allen, 1972), ch. 15; Richard Kelly Hoskins, War Cycles -- Peace Cycles (Lynchburg, Virginia: Virginia Pub. Co., 1985). Most of these anti-Semitic books are out of print. They were always little-known, privately published, and consigned to the far-right fringe of American conservatism.
30. See Appendix B, "The Demographics of Modern Judaism."
31. The "positive confession" movement is the most obvious example.
32. I predicted this in my essay, "The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right," Christianity and Civilization, 1 (1982), pp. 1-40
33. The classic example is Beverly LaHaye, who runs a huge political action organization, Concerned Women for America. Meanwhile, her dispensational husband Tim writes books about the imminent rapture.
34. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976).
35. Malachi Martin, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Church (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). For a representative primary source, see A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967). It was released by the bishops of the Netherlands in 1966.
36. James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
37. Joel A. Carpenter, "Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929-1942," Church History, 49 (1980), p. 65.
38. Robert T. Handy, "The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935," ibid., 29 (1960), pp. 3-16.
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