The Justice Exchange: Part 2 | Jubilee Magazine

‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’ – W.B. Yeats IN MY LAST ARTICLE, I sought to explain the growing tendency to show brazen contempt for individual conscience in the public square. Even whilst pursuing what they deem social justice, many of those acting in its name are progressively turning Western democracies into libertine police states. While some might cavil at that charge, we need to remember totalitarian states characteristically enlist the populace itself to intrude upon their fellow citizens’ inner lives to enforce conformity of opinion around the official view. They do so precisely because they wish to deny that man is fundamentally a moral being whose conscience lies beyond their power and control. George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, memorably describes the extent of that tyranny to include prosecuting their opponents on the pretext of ‘thoughtcrime.’ We are regularly seeing evidence of this now in the prosecution of Christians for refraining from doing things against their conscience. As witness, consider any of the recent cases of Christian florists, bakers or photographers who have faced legal penalties for not providing services to same-sex wedding ceremonies. The stakes could hardly be higher. If the expression of personal conscience in the public square is verboten, it must inevitably result not only in the extinction of the Christian faith, but of every hedge against tyranny in the West. What C.S. Lewis once observed as the ultimate outcome of privatizing the Christian faith seems to be reaching what he foresaw as its inevitable conclusion: “To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow’s end or the Greek Calends.”1 To be clear: it is not simply Christianity that is being banished, but our private lives, and all sense of personal integrity with it. Firstly, I noted that a highly illiberal and intolerant brand of liberalism was being adopted by the establishment as a banner of progress in Western political life; secondly, that official policies of inclusion were quite shamelessly restricting the freedom of speech and religion in the public square, even though such freedoms had long been entrenched as fundamental rights in Western law and custom.2 The alarm that any right-thinking person might feel at these two developments has only been heightened by the virtual absence of public outcry by the guardians of the public good: our politicians; our media; our courts; and above all, our clergy. Yet the sense that we have entered something like a twenty-first century Twilight Zone truly sinks in when we see that private corporations promote this trammeling of private conscience as a corporate policy. The Bank of Montreal, one of Canada’s five major banks, and a coalition of seventy-two of the country’s largest corporations, have announced that they are joining forces to do business only with others who share their exclusive views on “diversity.”3 As a recent article expresses it, “gay rights have allowed oligarchy to put on a progressive drag.”4 The reason they have suddenly developed such business principles, dictating public morality, seems to be that universities now produce a shocking degree of conformism among what Brendan O’Neill calls their Stepford students. He observes that “these students are far more interested in shutting down debate than opening it up.”5 They are thus the perfect consumer for these corporations: standardized in their tastes, and unwilling to consider alternatives.6 I confess I would never have recognized the inhumanity of Christian convictions without the cheerleading of these corporate metaphysicians to show me the refracted rainbow light. Mockery aside, these are not trivial developments. They are signs that we now live in the age of a new fundamentalism. It is symptomatic of our plight that it is still largely unrecognized as fundamentalism. That is the proof of its effect. The consequence of multicultural propaganda which emphasizes our openness and inclusion and defines its diversity to include sexual proclivities and practices that openly reject biblical standards is, unsurprisingly, a people incapable of identifying contradictions to their confirmation bias. Their unwillingness to listen to their critics also shows them to be deaf to their blindness. But the evidence is incontrovertible. We are confronting an entirely different worldview, with an entirely new sense of tolerance, hostile to the one established by John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) around a basic Christian consensus. It is not a matter of society’s willingness to stretch out the tent pegs of hospitality a bit further. That explanation does not account for the sudden displacement of fundamental rights like freedom of conscience and religion in a culture’s law and political practice. Only a new (and contradictory) fundamentalism rooted in a contradictory sense of tolerance can. I will demonstrate in this article that today’s notion of tolerance was constructed fifty years ago by Herbert Marcuse, a man committed to an ideology implacably hostile to Christianity. He did so explicitly to oppose Locke’s understanding of tolerance and the freedoms which had operated for the previous 300 years in the West. Its consequences need to be understood very clearly. It is not enough to say, as so many conservatives and Christians have, that in our current culture of pluralism the only thing that cannot be tolerated is a claim to exclusivity like that of salvation in Jesus Christ alone. That disguises the true nature of the problem. It is more accurate to observe that we are increasingly leaving an age tolerant of diversity within Christianity in favour of an exclusive age of tolerance. It is steadily eradicating Christianity in this commitment to exclusive tolerance. The fact that the exclusive tolerance that marks the new anti-Christian fundamentalism is itself religious in character is betrayed by a third point of scandal and contradiction: that an established Christian rite such as marriage, basic to Western civilization, is being redefined with religious zeal in countries where not only the customs but the majority of their inhabitants would still be identified with Christianity, but by some political charlatans in the name of extending Christianity to include unbiblical practices. And dissenting Christians who reject the spiritual authority of the political and legal establishment to redefine marriage are being targeted – and they almost solely – for conspicuous punishment in the public square as violators of the ever-evolving human rights industry. It seems to me that the greatest problem in confronting the new anti-Christian fundamentalism is the inability of Christian leaders to identify the nature of the problem. It lies in part because they have too long sought to operate within the Lockean paradigm of tolerance that tacitly assumes Christian commitments but speaks the language of neutrality in public discourse, forgetting that basic Christian commitments have always been the very basis of a civil society of freedoms and rights for all persons. As the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge once put it: Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are often considered as so true, that they lose the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.7 The fundamental freedom of religion is a legacy of Locke. It is not the effect of a commitment to polytheism or moral relativism, let alone a principled freedom from religion. Furthermore, while the illiberalism of our day and attacks on historic freedoms have received a great deal of commentary from conservative pundits and Christians alike,8 all too rarely have they been traced back to their intellectual source: the project of the Cultural Marxists and their role in redefining tolerance in accordance with an explicitly anti-Christian ethics. This redefinition of tolerance marks the final stage of a process which, as I described in my previous article, sought to further Marx’s utopian political aims of levelling society. STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION Most importantly, these Cultural Marxists also began to cater to a different clientele: not simply the meat-and-potatoes worker of old but also a new ‘proletariat’ which included women, racial minorities, and criminals, and it united them all by appealing to a vague sense of common ‘structural oppression.’ The alliance of such wildly divergent groups, and in particular the criminal, is noteworthy precisely because it is in the area of Western law related to ‘women’s health’ where the Cultural Marxists would eventually make their greatest inroads by legalizing the murder of the unborn and encouraging men to reject Christian ethics in their sexual conduct. The measure of their success is how self-evident most people now associate the common cause of these ‘minority’ groups.9 What is that common cause? Whereas Marx had understood class warfare in political and economic terms, his successors realized that their greatest obstacle was what supported the political and economic establishment: the family and the religious presuppositions of their entire culture, with Jesus Christ as its cornerstone (Eph. 2:20). Christ was their stumbling-block. To vilify such basic cultural assumptions as an oppressive force, it was necessary for them to employ their propaganda to misrepresent the foundation upon which they stood and the very culture in which they operated, the series of covenantal relationships to a God in whom “they lived, and moved, and had their being,” (Acts 17: 28) as a coercive force above them. This fraudulent tactic of presenting the very forms of life, their common human nature, as a superstructure of oppression, from which the downtrodden people need ‘liberation’ is to this day the most commonly-used trope and successful tactic of cultural reversal for the Cultural Marxist. Even among Christians, God’s moral law, the law of our servant king, is no longer understood as the very means by which we can operate as a civil society in obedience to him, and as an expression of the love of our neighbour.10 It is framed in Cultural Marxist terms as a Christian cultural ‘imposition,’ and in particular a coercive force of oppression that Christians should act as Christians in rejecting. Hence the absurd dichotomy between law and gospel which besets so many that ascribe to a Two Kingdoms theology. It is the most important beachhead established by the Cultural Marxist, and all its incursions continue to land upon it.11 In this, they are often encouraged by the guardians of orthodoxy with their gospel of personal salvation in Christ the King, a King seemingly without a kingdom in their theology. The new revolutionary front was thus to be fought not through violence but through a programme of cultural warfare that targeted the family, the law, and the Christian social good (charity), with the aim to uproot Christ and biblical law from culture. And in this sense they were highly astute. The Cultural Marxists recognized that the workers and families of the West were as deeply invested in the biblical assumptions about the nature of the family, the social good, and what constituted justice, as were the factory owners and the political and legal establishment. Many of the Ten Commandments relate to offences against the family. For all their flagrant contradictions, they openly identified themselves as Christians. To overturn what stood above them, they had to uproot the foundation upon which they all stood. That is because even where there was no established church, as there was, say with the Anglican Church in England, the Christian faith was still undeniably established throughout the Western world. The United States’ separation of church and state was a separation of powers, not core religious and cultural commitments. The shared commitments, whether they are manifest politically in an established church or through a separation of church and state, entail what we call Christendom. On this, there was nothing dividing Catholic and Protestant. Although the Christian faith requires that Christ’s subjects be born again in each generation through a call of individual discipleship – it is rightly said that God only has children, not grandchildren – Christ nonetheless has had a kingdom on earth for two millennia. It was the earthly inheritance of the incursion of shalom, his justice and liberty for all that would one day at Christ’s return be acknowledged by all, without dissent or present contradiction. In fact, the working class might even be said to have had deeper ties to core social convictions than their leaders, who for at least two centuries had been falling under the deceptive sway of the Enlightenment and the methodological naturalism of the ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Bible. And thus, rather than appeal to the workers, after WWI, the Cultural Marxists insinuated themselves into the midst of the society of the cultural elite, a far broader and influential base than the political elite and captains of industry. The common man was too sensible and grounded in the conditions of life to accept the absurd presuppositions of the Marxist about the evil of the family and the Christian faith; but the bourgeoisie, Marx’s bugbear, possessed the requisite intellectual pride and the wealth to insulate themselves from life’s conditions to swallow the outrageous lie that they, and not Christ, were the architects and prime instruments of social justice. Members of the cultural establishment were connoisseurs whose tastes had already been cultivated to find Christianity distasteful by two centuries of the Enlightenment. They had the sufficient detachment from reality to pride themselves on their ability to direct a more just society than had their forebears, led (and tempered) by Christian convictions. They could enact a utopia on earth through an act of creative imagination emancipating themselves from the past. And best of all, the working class had, because of their implicit assent to the Christian faith, accepted a hierarchy in the matters of religion, law, welfare and education, and could be led into error through their acknowledged superiors in these areas. It was a cultural symphony of assent that the Cultural Marxist played with virtuosity. DEVELOPMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA The sheer scope of the project of Cultural Marxism begun by men such as Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs in subverting Christendom, the foundation of civil society, means that it is complicated to trace. I’ll simplify the path of their followers in the Frankfurt school under five main headings: 1) MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES Under Theodor Adorno’s intellectual leadership the Frankfurt School initially opposed the cultural industry because it regarded culture rather narrowly as the repository of bourgeois values, a capitalist commodity. They were still under the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas. But eventually, the influence of Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, the director of the school, prevailed, and his argument that radio, film and (later on) television could be used to condition the public to accept the religious tenets of Cultural Marxism, in particular its views on the family, authority, law, race, etc... Horkheimer and Adorno both spent the Second World War in Hollywood, which to this very day functions as Cultural Marxism’s most powerful weapon. I direct the reader to two studies of popular culture on this front.12 2) STUDIES IN PREJUDICE The Frankfurt School also sought to stigmatize Christian culture by defining its expressions on sexual morality, on views of the family, and on paternal authority, as nefarious ‘prejudices’ in a wide-ranging series of academic studies under the umbrella ‘Studies in Prejudice.’ The most important contribution to this movement was Adorno’s book The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which created what he called an “F-scale” that connected traditional Christian views on the family and sexuality to varying degrees of fascism.13 To this day, a person under the sway of political correctness will anathematize those who appeal to the normativity of Christian notions of the family or sexual ethics by accusing them of being ‘fascists.’ Most of them will never even have heard of Adorno, but they have adopted his terminology and accepted the slanderous connection of Christianity to fascism 3) CRITICAL THEORY Equally well known to all of us, though not in connection to Cultural Marxism, is what they called critical theory. This tends to be the term designating the work of the Frankfurt School in the field of philosophy. The purpose of critical theory is not the positive task of developing moral and aesthetic discernment in the student’s critical faculties, the traditional path of the logocentric tradition of the West. It is simply to criticize (and thus to denigrate) Western culture. Critical theory is very careful never to define what it proposes; it simply defines what it is against. In that sense, it acts like a parasite of the host it feeds upon. Critical theory has managed to infiltrate virtually every discipline in universities throughout the Western world, some with greater effectiveness than others. It subjects every legally-recognized entity of the Western tradition of Christendom to unremitting criticism and assault in order to bring them down, beginning with the person, a theological postulate (stemming from the Trinitarian discussions of the Church Fathers),14 to the family and the church. It disputes every sphere of sovereignty that would limit its own, which is precisely why it is both totalitarian and tyrannical in character. You will recognize critical theory in terms of the areas of “studies” that it has identifiably spawned: Cultural Studies; Women’s Studies; Aboriginal Studies; African-American Studies; LGBT Studies; Postcolonial Studies; etc... Political correctness is particularly strong in these areas of identity group study.15 Less acknowledged but much more influential is the development of a school of jurisprudence known as the Critical Legal Studies movement, which has grown from its emergence in the 1970s to become a dominant school of thought.16 Following scholars like John Rawls, it regards the purpose of the law to be to create ‘fairness’ in accordance with a progressive view of society and political practice.17 These studies tellingly not only oppose the idea of individual responsibility, they don’t even study their subject through the historical and theological lens of the humanities (which are predicated on the Christian conviction of a common human nature and world, both of which are foundational to the definition of a university). In fact, they actively seek to deconstruct the idea of a common human identity under God. The products of the students who are indoctrinated in these areas of study are almost invariably marked by implacable anger and hostility towards the common sense of the West in general, and Christendom in particular. Sadly, this includes many of the besteducated Christians, even those whose tradition does not predispose them to hostility towards Christendom like the Anabaptists. 4) DOMINATION Marx had argued that history is economicallydetermined. Those who own the means of production have the power, and they determine the course of society. But the Frankfurt School, in accordance with its re-imagining of the proletariat, shifting it from the antagonistic narrative of laborers (proletariat) vs. owners (bourgeoisie), argued that history was in every respect determined by identity group dynamics. Whichever group, whether male or female, black or white, religious or irreligious, gay or straight, etc..., was in a position of social approval had by virtue of that fact ‘dominance’ over other groups. All forms of traditional authority were in their sight thus illegitimate. Their position was wholly rooted in power, at odds with both morality and history. Criminals such as abortionist Henry Morgentaler were by virtue of their condemnation good, indeed to be lauded and honoured; their judges bad; simply by virtue of the position of their identity group in society, and its relation to their inferiors. They were structural oppressors. This is being evidenced in university campuses of our day by the call for students to ‘check their privilege.’18 At present it is being applied in racial terms, where it has the broadest range of public sympathy, but it will soon be applied to areas of moral ‘oppression,’ such as in the areas of sexual ethics. And a complete reversal took place as a corrective to this social injustice in the education system. The Frankfurt School was particularly influential in passing this form of teaching on into the public school system because it dovetailed so effectively with the influence of the progressivist educator John Dewey (1859-1952). I have written about Dewey’s influence on public education in an earlier installment of Jubilee.20 Dewey, the author credited by some to have largely written the Humanist Manifesto I (1933), took little interest in the traditional aim of developing a well-formed conscience in children;21 to be welleducated for the future, they needed to be ‘welladjusted’ (his characteristic phrase) and open to a future social consciousness: …education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.22 Rather than adhere to God’s unchanging character, students who had been ‘socially reconstructed’ were taught to be ‘open-minded’ towards future possibilities. Dewey’s pedagogical goal has been delivered so effectively by the public schools that by the 1980s Allan Bloom lamented that openness was his students’ sole virtue. He ominously noted how much it made them resemble the citizens of the Weimar Republic.23 The growing influence of progressivist ideology and pedagogy made the public school system absolutely ripe for the Cultural Marxists, who used the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as an offence against ‘openness.’ It remains to be seen whether Nietzsche’s ‘transvaluation of all value’ will be used as effectively by the Cultural Marxists as it had been by the National Socialists. THE 1960S – HERBERT MARCUSE As I wrote in the last issue of Jubilee, many of the Frankfurt School returned to Frankfurt after the war. But the one member who stayed behind, Herbert Marcuse, arguably became the most important figure in the American New Left. Marcuse’s genius lay in popularizing the more difficult writings of his colleagues in a time of social unrest. So popular was Marcuse among the youth that during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin the students marched under the banner “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse,” the same slogan that was plastered in many dormitories. Marcuse’s chief work was entitled Eros and Civilization (1965), a hybrid of Marxist and Freudian teaching, which reiterated a case made previously by Wilhelm Reich in the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936): that a new paradise where there was only play and no work would be impossible to achieve unless society first “liberated non-procreative Eros” from its moral repression. Only then could it return to what Freud described as the infantile stage of “pure sexuality,” the child’s “polymorphous perversity.” In other words, Marcuse brought the assault on Christendom openly into the realm of the family and sexual ethics. As usual, the antagonistic rhetoric of the sexual revolutionaries was worthy of an Orwellian novel: it was ‘making love, not war.’ Marcuse de-stigmatized every sexual expression except that of heterosexual marital relations, which he stigmatized as a form of “sexual repression.” He also created a whole new class of victim group – the sexual deviant – and allied them to the blacks and the feminists to compose a potent coalition which was identified as the ‘New Left.’ The sexual revolution broke the historic antipathy that the Left – still primarily the working class – had held towards them.24 He also adopted Lukacs’ radical sexual education and cultural terrorism tactics to promote them. It was Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, employing Freudian psychology, which would also pathologize Christian morality, deeming it not only fascist, but the cause of “phobias,” though it may well have been his contemporary George Weinberg who first coined the word “homophobia” in 1967. The common complaint on university campuses today that Christian sexual ethics are ‘heteronormative’ is rooted in a Cultural Marxist animus against the family brought to a particular point by Marcuse.25 5) REPRESSIVE TOLERANCE The Cultural Marxists’ difficulty in transforming the United States, however, was that most Americans far preferred freedom with personal responsibility and Christian virtue within the context of the family to the tyrannical state of equality that Marxism demanded. Marcuse’s answer to this problem was to launch the most successful venture in critical theory of all, an attack upon the concept of tolerance which had shaped a culture of liberal democracy in the West. Locke’s notion of tolerance had exercised a potent sway in the Anglosphere for almost three centuries, so potent that it now exercised a confirmation bias which allowed for the emergence of its mortal enemy. It was a culture of tolerance that allowed for the freedom of speech and religion, including that of principled dissent within the bounds of a civil society, so long as it lay within the rule of law. But with a society no longer articulating its Christian commitments in terms of a cultural commitment to biblical law (the heart of the common law tradition),26 Marcuse’s efforts were simply interpreted as principled dissent. What had been forgotten is that dissent could only go so far down. It could not undermine Christian moral assumptions without destroying the very basis of a tolerant society – the love of God, whose nature must be known to lead one to the love of one’s neighbour.27 However scandalous they appeared, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the cultural unrest surrounding it were naively interpreted as a sign of the strength and health of Western democracy, not an existential assault on its very foundations. It was left to a few voices, such as Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to observe the peril brought upon the West by what he termed cultural cowardice and the delusion of neutrality in the area of moral conviction.28 But Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic voice was drowned out by the white noise of those who, since the time of David Hume’s fact/ value distinction, had steadily been moving to understand tolerance to be an empirical judgment, divorced from Christian convictions.29 This is not to say that being fair-minded, impartial, or neutral ceased with Marcuse. Those political virtues, the virtues of freedom most prized and most singular in Christendom, allowed the breathing space for the politics of cultural terrorism to incubate. What they did not account for is that Marcuse and the Cultural Marxists’ aim was to subvert Western democracy, not simply to protest against it, let alone to reform it. This aim is presented most clearly in a littleacknowledged 1965 essay by Marcuse entitled “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse’s essay effectively marked the concluding phase of what philosopher Charles Taylor has termed the ‘age of neutrality’ (stemming from the time of Locke), transporting us into the ‘age of contested values’ which we normally associate with the less than helpful term ‘postmodernism.’30 Referring to Locke, Marcuse openly attacked the Anglophone world’s notion of ‘tolerance’ by deriding the ‘common sense’ understanding it bequeathed as the ‘repressive tolerance’ of a ‘totalitarian democracy.’31 Marcuse represented even the attempt to be fair-minded, impartial or neutral, the virtues of the liberalminded academic, the impartial judge, and the free press, the acknowledged bases of a civil society, as the very basis for an attack. For in Marcuse’s estimation, “the tolerance expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance or suppression.”32 The liberal society that had arisen from them was based on a subtle form of structural domination, i.e. Christianity, which civil society had come to accept, even if it meant endemic structural injustice. He argued that tolerance could only become good if nondominating (heterodox) ideas were allowed to flourish, and that was only possible if dominating (orthodox) ideas were in future to be suppressed: The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.33 Or to put it another way that makes its attack on the Christian categories of common sense clear: …it is necessary to break the established universe of meaning (and the practice enclosed in this universe) in order to enable man to find out what is true and false...to become truly autonomous, to find by themselves what is true and what is false for man in the existing society, they (will) have to be freed from the prevailing indoctrination (which is no longer recognized as indoctrination).34 The political virtue of tolerating those with whom we disagree, the quintessence of liberalism (which is only possible in the context of Christianity and its doctrine of the limited though real authority of the state, the church, and the family), gave way to what Marcuse euphemistically called “liberating tolerance.” It explicitly called for the outlawing and suppression of the morality that had reigned until the 1960s. 35 “Liberating tolerance” thus entailed a sort of Orwellian doublespeak. It meant agreement with (and tolerance for) all the ideas and movements coming from the Cultural Marxists; but also the disagreement with (and intolerance for) all ideas and movements coming from their ‘regressive’ opponents. As Marcuse clarified in response to charges that he demonized his opponents in the 1968 Postscript to the original essay: As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy. The fallacious progressive-regressive dichotomy, which is employed to deny any moral standing to ‘the other side’ before the law (because of the fundamental violation of what would later be called ‘human rights’ in its theology), is an essential pretext to persecuting it in the name of tolerance. Anathematizing their opponents as unreasonable and invidious, akin to the fascists of Nazi Germany, is a dehumanizing form of propaganda that insinuates an alliance between the Christian defense of personal freedom and the Nazis’ project of racial purification. The illustrations of this Cultural Marxism (social justice) and its ‘liberating tolerance’ in action are now so ubiquitous that describing this “mass movement aimed at stifling the autonomy of natural relationships – friendships, familial love, romantic love, human reverence for the divine – and subverting such relationships to the punitive power of an intrusive state” is almost redundant. I recommend the article on the website of the American Thinker for a catalogue of hundreds of examples.36 It rightly describes it as ‘homofascism.’37 It now seems abundantly clear that Marcuse and his acolytes provided the logic of moral inversion in family law in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. The germination of those tolerant ideas have made even yesterday’s progressives seem awfully regressive. And that posture of contempt is set to continue. No one is exempt from the charge of thoughtcrime. It is now apparently entirely reasonable for a progressive politician to deny freedom of conscience even to those within his own party. After all, the clear religious purpose is to disestablish the Christian foundations of a civil society, including the rights of other individuals, to achieve a ‘humane society.’ This humane social justice is not even for the sake of the poor. For as Marcuse notes: Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society.38 No social, familial, political, or other religious fidelity can stand in its way. The absolute loyalty demanded by an all-exclusive tolerance is the true character of the new fundamentalism. Its endgame is the total destruction of man, who bears God’s image.