Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Godless The Church of Liberalism WRITTEN BY Ann Coutler PUBLISHED BY Crown Forum, New York, 2006, ISBN: 9781400054206, Hardcover, pp. 320, $36.05 CDN 

Ann Coulter, a lawyer by profession, is the darling of the conservative movement in the United States. She s one of America's leading and most controversial media columnists--and a practising Christian.

But it is her latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, that has accentuated the divide among those who either love or hate her--by identifying Secular Liberalism as both a full-blown "religious" system and the greatest internal threat to the U.S.--and, by implication, to Western civilisation. To say that the book has over recent months lit the blue touch paper of public debate across the U.S. would be an understatement. Though Coulter is not a Catholic, the case she makes is, in every way, highly relevant for Catholic understanding too.

I first came across her books a few years ago on a stopover flight in Atlanta. Stranded overnight, I headed for the airport bookshop and found myself poring through her (second) book, Slander, that night. I had never read anything quite like it. Relentlessly politically-incorrect, it impressed by its sheer lawyerly reasoning and refreshing polemic skill. But it was Coulter's chief theme--the chasm between the conservative and liberal worldviews (that do not always run along party political lines)--that I found fascinating.

As someone who has often criticised overly liberal thinking in the Church, I had in recent years, begun to note the strong parallel with liberal thinking, especially as it impacts on the mainstream of life more generally. Indeed I raised the issue in my own book The Politics of Faith (Xulon Press). Coulter sets the case out more expansively, however. She notes, "liberals love to boast that they are not 'religious,' which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion.'"

Catholics have long fought against the on-going dismantling of the Judeo-Christian heritage that underpins our heritage in the West. But I have yet to hear modern theologians or church leaders argue this important case quite so cogently as Coulter's Godless. As Christians too we often find ourselves fighting the tide of secular liberalism (or secular humanism) in a piecemeal way. What Coulter achieves in Godless however is that we ought to recognise it first, as a faith-based "religious" movement or "church" and, secondly, as a holistic worldview we need (like Coulter) to "take on" in the mainstream of public life.

Godless is not, as Coulter herself points out, an attack against individual liberals. Rather it is a wholesale broadside against liberal-ism. When liberal Christians back in the 1920s had the Presbyterian leader Gresham Machen expelled from his own church, for insisting on the teaching of orthodox Bible doctrine, he responded: "Liberalism is not Christianity at all." Machen would, I think, fully understand where Coulter is coming from.

Coulter calls secular liberalism "our official state religion" which has its own sacraments (abortion); its holy writ (Roe v. Wade, the U.S. court case which led to abortion on demand); its martyrs (usually murderers and others, criminals whom liberals want rehabilitated but never punished); its clergy (liberal-dominated school teacher unions); its churches (government-run schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free); its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident); and its creation myth (Darwinism). In short, a spectrum of God-opposing or Godless beliefs that make up an anti-God worldview.

Canadian media columnist Mark Steyn, another who regularly defends the need to retain the Judeo-Christian moral basis of Western civilisation, writing in Maclean's (July, 2006), describes Coulter's book as a "rollicking read, very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with." In Godless Coulter describes how liberals are on the wrong side of just about every biblical teaching on key moral issues of the day from human cloning to euthanasia to abortion to evolution--yes, evolution is a moral debate about faith issues.

"If a Martian landed," says Coulter, "and set out to determine the nation's official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law." She is talking about America. But she could so easily be talking about any Western nation.

Coulter speaks of how liberals rejoice at the defeat of conservative (i.e., those who understand the moral importance of our Judeo-Christian heritage in the West though they may not profess to be Catholics or a Christians in any way) and Christian attempts generally to overturn ungodly laws.

Coulter on abortion: "To a liberal, 2,200 military deaths in the entire course of a war in Iraq is unconscionable, but 1.3 million aborted babies in America each year is something to celebrate."

On Darwinism and Nazism: "Hitler's embrace of Darwinism is not random fact. It is impossible to understand Hitler's monstrous views apart from his belief in natural selection applied to races. He believed Darwin's theory of natural selection showed that 'science' justified the extermination of the Jews."

On Darwinism's appeal to liberals: "Liberals' creation myth is Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record--and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God."

Anyone reading the chapters on evolution cannot fail to be impressed with Coulter's fund of knowledge as a Creationist. And adducing example after example, she reveals how liberals have weakened the moral structure of society, never by "winning the public argument" but rather by opportunistically using the courts (and increasingly liberal activist judges) to do it for them. An all-too-familiar scenario in the Canadian court system these days.

It is perfectly true that the way someone speaks is heard more than what they actually say. And this is where much of the debate tends to revolve whenever Coulter makes public statements. But this is rather a confirmation of Steyn's opinion that liberals, finding it impossible to refute the powerful logic of her arguments, instead divert the argument into debates about "not giving offence" (i.e., political-correctness). Chief among the contentious statements in Godless is Coulter's four "Jersey widows" reference. Four women, whose husbands were killed during the 9/11 attack, in recent years have become more politically active by supporting a range of liberal-backed policies. Liberal Democrats then sought to defer any public criticism by claiming they spoke with "absolute moral authority." Coulter not only questions them however, she attacks the whole mystique of any alleged "absolute moral authority." She rightly accuses liberals of getting "hurt people" to do their ideological dirty work.

She points to two high-profile examples, the dying Christopher Reeve and Nancy Reagan (whose husband was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's), being used as spokespersons for allowing the destruction of human embryos for "experimentation." As Coulter reasons, liberals know only too well it is far harder for anyone to argue the case with a suffering individual in a wheelchair-or with four Jersey widows who lost their husbands on 9/11.

However, for all the value of the component parts of Godless, its key importance is undoubtedly in articulating the case which identifies how secular (human) liberalism is becoming the "state religion." And in failing to recognise it for what it is, a religious faith system like many others, we are failing to grasp that--just as they expect us to defend our faith and worldview--so too should we expect them to defend theirs. Like Coulter, my experience suggests they are not good at it.

The reality is, as Coulter shows time and again, secular liberalism is quite unable to win the real science and moral arguments in a straight fight on the facts. Instead it prefers the "backdoor" social route of legislative and legal device and dosed-door politics.

What Coulter is urging is that all who grasp the importance of the Judeo-Christian (biblical) worldview and heritage, actually get in the ring of public debate and slug it out with liberal "religionists" and Liberalism. In Canada these days this is no small matter. But as Coulter says, "Liberals can believe what they want to believe, but let us not flinch from identifying liberalism as the opposition party to God." If that really is the case then we have a duty to join the fight.

Peter Glover is a British political and media analyst and freelance writer. He is the author of The Politics of Faith: Essays on the morality of key current affairs.