The liberals killed Kenny!

'I HATE conservatives," says South Park co-creator Matt Stone, "but I really f****** hate liberals." Some conservatives--those of us who are a little older, perhaps, and remember when liberals ran absolutely everything, from law and government to the media and the overall culture--are grateful for comments like this one, because they demonstrate just how far into the mainstream conservatism has progressed. The irreverent libertarianism of TV's South Park mocks left-wing shibboleths, as with the following ditty: "There's a place called the rain forest that truly sucks a**. / Let's knock it all down and get rid of it fast.... / You only fight these causes 'cause caring sells. / All you activists can go f*** yourselves." This is conservatism as insurgent counterculture, a movement showing exactly the same kind of cheeky spunk that gave Sixties liberals their cultural advantage back in the day; that this energy is now on the right speaks volumes about the political transformation of the U.S. in recent years.

In his breezy new book, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt against Liberal Media Bias (Regnery, 191 pp., $24.95), City Journal senior editor Brian C. Anderson uses the South Park phenomenon as metaphor for a broader cultural movement away from the stifling old liberal orthodoxies. (He credits blogger Andrew Sullivan with coining the phrase "South Park Republicans," to describe Americans who are hawkish on foreign policy and "extremely skeptical of political correctness" but also have social-liberal leanings.) In the new-media world--the blogosphere, right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and so on--conservatism is finally getting a fair hearing, and is winning the battle for the American mind. Writes Anderson: "Liberals yearn for the good old days when everybody who didn't read National Review had to get his news and analysis from 'unbiased' old-media sources like CBS and the New York Times and conservative arguments could be dismissed with an insult or, better still, simply ignored." Those days are over. While it would be an overstatement to say conservatives have won the culture war, it is undeniable that--in Anderson's words--"the Right is no longer losing."

* Anyone looking for a splendid novel that grapples seriously with religious ideas would do well to seek out Sophia House (Ignatius, 488 pp., $24.95), by Michael D. O'Brien. The plot is deceptively simple: A heroic Polish bookseller hides a young Jew from the Nazis while wrestling with his own sexual cravings. But the book's themes are broad, gripping, and intelligently handled; O'Brien's concern is nothing less than the meaning of love, sin, fatherhood, and redemption, and his eschatological vision is compelling.

In the course of their long (and consistently fascinating) conversations, Pawel, the bookseller, explains to David, his young charge, the Christian understanding of Christ's Incarnation. "He came among us," says Pawel, "to teach us that we are greater than we conceive ourselves to be. Each person is his icon. To burn even one, to hurt even the least of human beings, is to assault God. He shows us his face, and to our shock it is a human face." This idea is made real in the book's narrative, and especially in its remarkable final chapter. During the novel's denouement, Pawel reflects: "Had not every father once been a child, each suffering in turn those blows and absences that chained all souls, link by link, back into the shadows of time? What, then, would break the link? What would turn a man's vision from the dictates of the past toward the future?"

The answer is: only the irruption of pure divine grace into the fallen world. Another character explains early in the book: "We wish to be worthy of being saved ... which is another way of saying that we, every one of us, whether we know it or not, wish to be our own god, that is, to save ourselves. We want paradise without his Cross, forgetting that the Cross is the only way to reenter the original harmony we lost in the Fall of Man. This is the narrow gate." (A concise and engaging explanation of the doctrine of justification by faith.)

To quote more from the book would be to risk convincing potential readers that it's merely a religious tract dressed up as fiction. Rest assured: Sophia House works as a thriller--a human drama--as well as a novel of ideas. It's actually a prequel to an earlier O'Brien novel, the 1996 Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (Ignatius, 597 pp., $14.95), which is one of the most suspenseful books I have ever read. The subject of Father Elijah is the End Times; readers of the multi-million-selling Left Behind series might be interested to see that subject discussed from a Roman Catholic perspective, and others will enjoy the book as a thriller on the same high level as Sophia House.

* Those inclined to romanticize a past Golden Age of journalism would do well to read Laurel Leff's new book, Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge, 426 pp., $29). Leff is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald, now on the faculty at Northeastern University; her book is a realistic account of how bias is always capable of subverting the telling of important stories. In the 1940s, the New York Times consistently downplayed what hindsight would judge to be a crucial story of the 20th century. "The Times's first story on the Nazi extermination campaign [against the Jews], which described it as 'the greatest mass slaughter in history,' appeared on page five," writes Leff, "yet the deaths of other civilians, often fewer than 100, regularly appeared on the front page." Why? One reason was the assimilationist strivings of Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Faced with an America just starting to emerge from a culture of isolationism and overt anti-Semitism, Sulzberger did not want his paper to appear to be engaged in special pleading for his ethnic and religious group; if such a perception had taken hold, public support for the war against Hitler might have eroded. Could better news coverage in America's greatest daily have saved the Jews? The short answer is no. But the paper was guilty, nonetheless, of a dereliction of its duty to the truth. Leff's cautionary tale is a detailed and sensible work of media criticism.

* James Hitchcock, renowned lay theologian and history professor at St. Louis University, has written a definitive two-volume work on The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton). In Volume I: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses (232 pp., $29.95) and Volume II: From "Higher Law" to "Sectarian Scruples" (272 pp., $35), Hitchcock traces the highly unusual path of U.S. jurisprudence toward the current separationist understanding of church-state relations. Princeton is hereby encouraged to get a less expensive one-volume paperback edition of this work into bookstores--and law-school classrooms--as soon as possible.

* That theocracies do exist--and must be resisted by U.S. foreign policy--is ably demonstrated in the anthology Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law (Rowman & Littlefield, 226 pp., $27.95). Edited by Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, the book includes ten essays describing how radical Muslims--including the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia--have fostered the rise of religion-based oppression worldwide. One of the volume's contributors, Stephen Schwartz, points out that the legal system favored by today's Muslim extremists is "not traditional" but radical: "It is not based on shari'a as understood during more than 1,000 years of Islamic jurisprudence but on a crude and ultrasimplistic interpretation that rejects the shari'a embodied in the four established Sunni legal schools." A harbinger of a better future--pointed out by Center for Religious Freedom director Nina Shea in her concluding essay--is the last-minute inclusion of protections of religious freedom in the new Iraqi constitution.

* Daily life in the wartime U.S. Army is the subject of the invigorating new book Soldiering for Freedom: AGI's Account of World War II (Texas A&M, 324 pp., $32.95), by longtime newspaperman Herman J. Obermayer. The book consists largely of the young Obermayer's letters home from the Army in Europe during and after its liberation by the Allies. He is unsparing, and unsentimental, in the period detail he provides. For example, one interfaith service for the soldiers--with a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a rabbi--didn't work out quite as planned: "Every time Rabbi Levy mentioned God or our Lord, I heard a man behind me say, 'Who are they to talk about God when they drove the spikes?'" Obermayer's book is an interesting account of life in liberated Paris and occupied Germany, including an eyewitness report on some of the historic legal proceedings at Nuremberg.

* Shalem Press, of New York and Jerusalem, is to be commended for reissuing the late Aaron Wildavsky's 1984 classic Moses as Political Leader (304 pp., $16.95). Wildavsky used all his skill as a political scientist to try to understand the Scriptural narrative of the founding of the nation of Israel--in which Moses exercised political leadership as a "nursing father" who helped his people grow from their condition of slavery to more mature forms of governance.

* It's hard to believe that the feisty Rebecca Hagelin has been married for 20 years. But the Heritage Foundation vice president--and mother of three--is indeed a frontline veteran of the child-rearing struggles of the past two decades, and she gives us the benefit of her experience in the new book Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture That's Gone Stark Raving Mad (Nelson Current, 266 pp., $22.99). She makes a passionate and moving case for the family as a school of faith and virtue, a place where the next generation becomes prepared for the task of confronting--and changing--the culture.

* In 1936, New Republic columnist John T. Flynn endorsed Socialist Norman Thomas for president; he subsequently joined the isolationist America First movement, became a fervent Joe McCarthy supporter, and--long after his death in 1964--was hailed as an all-time hero by the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. In Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism (New York University, 277 pp., $45), Ashland University history professor John E. Moser makes the case that Flynn remained, throughout his remarkable ideological peregrinations, "more or less consistently faithful to a set of core principles": "a basic faith in existing institutions (namely, democratic capitalism), tempered by a belief in the efficacy of government action (particularly at the federal level) to deal with the abuses that frequently crept into these institutions." Moser's book is a sympathetic portrait of a once prominent--but now virtually unknown--20th-century journalist.