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Richard Neuhaus: A coming culture war
By Dr. Mark D. Nispel | November 24, 2008
Richard Neuhaus has commented now twice regarding the change in U.S. presidential administrations and the signs that lead him to think this may lead to a new Kulturkampf, a war of culture:
This awareness that Christians are different, and different in ways that make a very big difference, will, I expect sharply increase in the months and years ahead. For all of President-elect Obama’s wafting language about bringing us together, healing divisions, and so on and so on, if he seriously intends to follow through on his extremist abortion views, we are headed for the intensification of an American version of the Kulturkampf that Bismarck came to rue. The focus is on FOCA, the Freedom of Choice Act, that Obama says he wants to sign on his first day in office. This act would eliminate the very modest restraints and regulations established by states, provide government funding for abortions, and in its present form, require religiously sponsored hospitals and clinics to perpetrate abortions or go out of business.
The aggressor in the opening phases of this Kulturkampf is the Obama administration. [1]
and
The Deadly Convenience of Christianity Without Culture
If, as I suggested last week, we are heading into a greatly intensified public clash of state power and religious freedom, something not entirely unlike the Kulturkampf attempted by Bismarck in the nineteenth century, Christian leadership is ill prepared for the battles ahead. Some express the hope that, given President-elect Obama’s repeated commitment to healing national divisions, he will not push for extreme measures such as the Freedom of Choice Act, thus igniting, in a way not seen since Roe v. Wade, the most explosive moral questions in our public life. I would like to think such hopes are justified, but his early choice of Thomas Daschle—a radically pro-abortion politician and, to the Church’s shame, a Catholic—as secretary of health and human services, the department dealing most closely with abortion and related life issues, is not encouraging.
…
The truly ominous possibility, indeed likelihood, is that Obama does
not see his extreme positions on abortion as being extreme at all. They
are the entrenched orthodoxies of the parties that got him to where he
is. Those in opposition are viewed as a recalcitrant minority guilty of
perpetuating divisiveness, and the time has come to break their back
once and for all. I hope I am wrong, but this strikes me as the more
plausible understanding of the Freedom of Choice Act and other measures
aimed at “bringing us together again.” [2]
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[1] http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1221
[2] http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1227
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