corollary of genocide, is a local expression of this basic human deceit). The crowning tactic in this move—which modern human beings have deployed brazenly—is to deny outright the existence of God. Atheism is the ultimate end of human pride and faithlessness, which blinds us from seeing or even wanting to see the faithful Creator God. It is the ultimate negationism, whereby we deny our own creaturehood; and as such, it is the ultimate form of self-destruction.
Underneath the atheistic thrust, what we actually find is hatred of God masquerading as unbelief. The hatred arises from the experience of our own moral turpitude. We are not perfect, and we despise ourselves for it. Such imperfection is intolerable. In response, we accuse others, those who are different from us, and, in the modern period, we proclaim human perfectibility and passionately refuse divine intervention. Concomitantly, we deny original sin. Here indeed we find the root of modern utopian thought and the notion that everything is possible. Rebellion against God moves at this point into a new register, where moral fallibility and, eventually, finitude, are repudiated, in a virtual hijacking of divine omnipotence and perfection.
Everyone knows from personal experience how difficult it is for us to admit we are wrong. If we can point the finger at others and construct utopian systems promising perfection, we can, in appearance, avoid the onus of guilt and weakness. But of course the denial of sin does not lead to the disappearance of guilt. One of the fundamental aspects of man as made in God’s image is conscience, by which an echo of the divine voice is ever present within us. Conscience can be repressed and hardened, but it cannot be destroyed. What the denial of sin does is remove the disposition to admit error and seek atonement and forgiveness. This in turn results in a massive transfer of guilt to the other and a constant inclination to accuse and avoid personal moral responsibility.
Thus the denial of original sin—sin as virtually inherent in human beings in their condition of moral freedom—leads inevitably to scapegoating and a totalitarian attitude, with the political consequences we are only too familiar with.41 For if sin is not ubiquitous in all human beings, mixed with the good likewise to be found in all of us, then a Manichaean mindset begins to operate that has one group, understanding itself as guiltless, pure, and superior, pinning perversity on another group, perceived as wicked, guilty, impure, and inferior. That other group must then be destroyed, in one way or another. This is the distorted moral vision that underpins the totalitarian impulse we have been noting, and of which postmodernism’s absolutist doctrine of tolerance—built, ironically, on ideological relativism—is the latest, soft (in appearance) variation.42
One might call this phenomenon ideological tribalism, and it is the distinguishing negative mark of modernity, as well as of the current Islamist reaction against modernity, which takes the form of terrorism. Terrorism is another expression of the totalitarian impulse, and if it had the political and military means, it would produce another genocide, this time aimed at Western culture as a whole, of which America is perceived to be the current flag-bearer.43 Ideological tribalism thinks in black and white, in absolutes. It is fundamentalistic, and is governed by the quintuplet monsters of pride, fear, envy, jealousy, and resentment—all of which generate hatred. As with Islamist extremism, it often has, along with some legitimate grievances, an overtly religious reference, but its ferocity, heartlessness, and utter unreasonableness reveal its god to be an idol. Idolatry/ideology is always an expression of what is basically a perverted religious impulse.
The origins of ideological tribalism in the West are multiple. We have, first, the crusading and inquisitorial aberrations of the church, manifested occasionally in persecutions during the Constantinian Age and again later in the Middle Ages; and then the absolutist fanaticism of the religious wars of the late Medieval and early Modern periods (fruit of the subversion of the late medieval church by totalitarian pretensions), where, as in the earlier examples cited above, Christendom lurched into ideology and lost touch, to a considerable extent, with the gospel, thus betraying its own principles and bringing itself under God’s judgment. The nationalist impulses that arose in the sixteenth century and governed Europe for the next 500 years also stoked the fires of tribalism, as did, indirectly and unintentionally, the philosophical conjectures of Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, who, in understandable reaction against the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century, were seeking a revised anthropology and a new (nonreligious) basis for social unity and stability, but who unwittingly laid the groundwork for the closed universe and narcissistic metaphysics that underpin the massive social engineering of the modern age, of which the utopian revolutionary vision of the French Revolution was the first major political and social expression.
It is prudent to remember that the French Revolution’s slogans of liberty, fraternity, and equality were only applicable at first to the pure and the good, that is, to those who espoused the cause of the revolutionaries; but hatred and terror were reserved for opponents, i.e., the retrograde and the bad (Catholics and royalists), as demonstrated by the murderous fury visited by revolutionary troops on the royalist Catholic inhabitants of the Vendée region of France, a case of violence even more appalling than that of Robespierre’s Terror in Paris. It should be evident that those massacres were an early form of ethnic cleansing, a harbinger of things to come and a precursor of the State-orchestrated genocidal phenomena of the twentieth century.
IX
The Perfection and Holiness of the God Revealed in Jesus Christ; Modernity’s Hatred of God Entails Hatred of Man
The hatred of God so current in the modern world, especially among those who think of themselves as avant-garde, liberal, even revolutionary, has another cause similar to the perception—and repudiation—of human moral turpitude mentioned above. This is the traditional belief in the perfection of God, as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Along with his perfection we may speak of his holiness, the utter awesomeness and purity of his being, resplendent and immaculate beyond our conceiving, God uncreated, everlasting, essentially Other than his mortal creation. Obviously, by comparison, humanity comes off as inferior on every count.
For modern men and women, such a state of affairs, like the admission of original sin, is intolerable. Our response in the last two and a half centuries has taken two forms: we accuse God of evil, or we deny his existence. Both these solutions to the dilemma effectively remove the problem raised by the comparison of God’s perfection and holiness with our own lack of them, thus clearing the way for the assertion of human perfectibility; motivated by a hatred that is rooted in pride, they amount in effect to the same thing. (Many people, for example, believe in God only to the extent that they can blame him for evil and pain—their own and that of others; clearly, this is not really very different from denying his existence.) In the West today, the innate call of human beings to know and love their Creator—who is eminently worthy of this devotion—is actually being inverted and turned into its opposite.
This is evident, once again, in the totalitarian impulse (both hard and soft): modernity refuses to believe in (to know) the biblical God or to love him, choosing instead, by denial of his existence or by indifference to his reality and commandments, to hate him. Since human beings are made in God’s image, this can only result in similar attitudes toward their own kind—hence the gradual intensification in the last two centuries, alongside the remarkable achievements and manifestations of greatness during this period, of cynicism, hardheartedness, cruelty, and a kind of moral dullness and shallowness of character that shows itself in modern man’s frenetic self-preoccupation, in his limitless deceit, dishonesty, and weak-minded fear of truth and difference, and in the superficiality of so many of his relationships.
This flatness and moral anemia is expressed in our day in the dogma of political correctness, which is the exact opposite of what one might expect and wish in a genuinely pluralistic society, and which inevitably, in reaction, gives rise to adversarial postures, the polarization of attitudes on issues, and the decline of rational debate. Rather than enabling harmony within a pluralistic society as is its supposed intention, this relativizing and sentimental dogma actually undercuts the self-expression and integrity of the different human groupings that make up the society and so
