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It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, by Mary Eberstadt
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Review
“There has been a well-organized campaign against Christianity, making use of new interpretations of the concepts of free speech, civil rights, and social justice. Eberstadt argues correctly that this assault goes to the very core of our founding constitutional principles of freedom of worship and free association” (Donald Critchlow, National Review)“I don’t think the debate over religious freedom can rightly take place now without engaging her arguments. It’s Dangerous to Believe is a quick and easy read, but packs a wallop.” (Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online)“It’s clear that the keepers of the new progressive orthodoxy have garnered enough establishment backing to push as far as they choose. A read through Eberstadt’s research is a good first step toward getting oriented in this new cultural landscape” (The New Criterion)“Eberstadt, in a neat series of chapters, contrasts the self-descriptions of progressives and secularists with their actions. They believe themselves champions of civil rights, while circumscribing the freedoms of fellow citizens...They make blacklists and call themselves open-minded.” (Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week)“Eberstadt is a superb analyst. Her hypothesis-carefully demonstrated and ringing true-is that secular progressivism is not just a political ideology; it is a competing faith, a religion.” (Luma Simms, Public Discourse)“Eberstadt’s argument is hard-hitting and convincing.” (First Things)“Eberstadt’s description of the bewildered faithful, caught up in rapid social changes, is deeply affecting…One hopes liberals and progressives will accept her call...particularly in institutions of higher learning whose leaders speak ceaselessly of their commitment to diversity.” (The American Conservative)I can’t think of a better way to start than for Christians to read this book and equip themselves to stand up for the future of faith in this country, with fortitude and hope. (Catholic World Report)“[Eberstadt] offers scores of cases, all from recent years, in which Christians have been denied freedoms and protections that would be afforded as a matter of course to any other group. The arguments given for this suppression are transparently ludicrous or paranoid. Christians have real reason to be afraid.” (Rachel Lu, The Federalist)“Eberstadt asks the progressive victors in the culture wars whether their vision of public life demands that traditional religious belief and believers be expunged. This book marks a turning point-whether it’s one toward a gracious return to liberal tolerance or into a different and darker period, we shall see.” (Tod Lindberg, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of The Political Teachings of Jesus and The Heroic Heart)
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From the Back Cover
Religious freedom is under assault today as never before. A country founded on freedom of speech and religious belief is being changed from within by activists hostile to both. Is this what we want America to be? Religious freedom is a fundamental right, enshrined in the First Amendment. In It’s Dangerous to Believe, author and critic Mary Eberstadt documents how those who adhere to traditional religious beliefs—especially Christians—face widespread discrimination in today’s increasingly secular society.For holding “wrong” opinions on flashpoint issues like birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriage, people of faith are being publicly attacked and demonized by aggressive anti-religious activists in an effort to drive them out of public life and cripple their institutions. Examples from across the country and elsewhere of self-appointed adversaries undermining believers in the workplace, intervening in faith-based charity efforts, and interfering in religious education reveal nothing less than a targeted assault on faith itself. Eberstadt writes to call attention to this underreported campaign and argues that it is a classic moral panic reminiscent of the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyism Red Scare of the 1950s.Eberstadt reveals how recent laws, court decisions, and intimidation on campuses and elsewhere increasingly threaten believers’ freedoms of speech and action. They fear losing their livelihoods, their communities, and their basic constitutional liberties solely because of their convictions. They fear that their religious universities and colleges will capitulate to aggressive secularist demands. They fear that they and their families will be ostracized and that they won’t be able to maintain charitable operations that help the sick and feed the hungry.In this spirited and powerfully argued manifesto, Eberstadt calls attention to today’s growing bigotry—and seeks to open the minds of secularists and progressives to the injustices being committed against believers by ideologues turned modern inquisitors. Citing titans of authority ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr. and other eminent defenders of the open society, she builds the case that America will become truly inclusive if and only if the antagonists of religious faith live up to their own standards of tolerance and diversity.
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Product details
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Harper (June 21, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0062454013
ISBN-13: 978-0062454010
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
59 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#593,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Clear, concise, compelling. Eberstadt makes more than just a case for civility in discussions of religious freedom—she convincingly argues that the conflict is not about religion vs. secularism, but vs. the sexual revolution. She cites many examples of individuals being hounded out of public and community life not for what they do, but simply for what beliefs they hold: somehow, merely holding an unpopular opinion is now tantamount to hate crimes. She shows, over and over, how the same people shouting about freedom are using increasingly McCarthyite tactics in persecuting believers. And she nails it by pointing out how strange this vicious, outsize response truly is, considering that those with traditional religious beliefs have been on the losing end of the culture wars for decades: "It’s also clear that during the past half century—in societies across the Western world, and on issues ranging from school prayer and public religiosity to women in combat and same-sex marriage—the faithful have mostly lost battle after battle. Why, then, are they still being attacked so vehemently? What, exactly, might be threatened by their insistence on “clinging†to their outmoded beliefs and superstitions?"She goes on to make this case: "Contrary to secular liberalism a generation ago, which tended to view religious belief as an anthropological artifact, progressivism today does not regard the traditional Judeo-Christian moral code as simply passé. Thanks to evolving doctrine about the sexual revolution, that code is seen instead as the equivalent of evil." And that's what's most discouraging about this phenomenon. Aggressive efforts to push religious voices out of the national conversation by rebranding newly-impermissible opinions on issues like same-sex marriage as "bigoted" and "hate speech" goes against the entire idea of progressivism and tolerance and diversity, which secular progressives claim to prize above all else. That they cannot engage openly and honestly without name-calling is telling—and distressing. As Eberstadt puts it: "Above all, there is no mercy in slandering millions of men and women—citizens, colleagues, acquaintances, schoolmates, neighbors, and fellow members of the human family—by saying that people of religious faith “hate†certain people where they do not; or that they are “phobes†of one stripe or another, when they are not."Finally: "The promiscuous hurling of the terms hater and -phobe is one example. These have become words used to smear, shame, and silence, not elucidate or clarify. Like a Trojan horse, they express the idea that there can be no rational or principled basis for opposing any particulars of the political agenda set forth by people who deploy those terms; all such opposition, their use implies, can only come from prejudice and fear. Words used to bar other people from a place at the human table are words that are worth thinking twice about."As are all the words contained in this gem of a book. I plan to go back and read her earlier work on the strength of this excellent, elegant, and compassionate argument for the complicated beauty and necessity of this first of all freedoms.
Eberstadt is brilliant. Many will read this and feel it's "too much" or some kind of hyperbole. But Chicken Little is only crazy if the sky isn't actually falling. My one issue - and I have the same issue with Dreher and even Archbishop Chaput - the conclusion or call to action is lacking. OK, I get it - the world is going to hell in a handcart... What should Christians DO? None of these books about the fall of Christianity in the west have adequately addressed this yet.
Chapter 5 was the most important I think because it tells of how many anti-Christian (not anti-religious) lawyers are suing Christian charitable organizations thus taking away much needed resources to help the poor and less fortunate.It's overall a good book, but it will raise your blood pressure.
Worth your time. For the next generation ----necessary . We need to know the opposition and their tactics. It's war ! We don't want to loose.Please read this and share it, quickly!
Mary Eberstadt is a first-rate writer with keen insight and an ability to clearly communicate the facts underlying the issue she is addressing. Her classic article in First Things (November, 2009) on how the Catholic sex-abuse scandal retarded the growing acceptance of pedophilia in American culture - "How Pedophilia Lost its Cool" - is a prime example of seeing a major point that everyone else has missed in the morass of facts and following up on the insight with something that everyone else has missed and following up on that insight with a merciless attention to those facts.In this book, Eberstadt examines the modern "Kulturkampf." She canvasses the news of the last few years - often times including vignettes from a few months ago, albeit because of the publication date she barely missed the sorry proof of her thesis of the last few weeks, during which Christians have been paradoxically blamed for the mass murder of gays committed by a Muslim terrorist, registered as a Democrat, who may have been gay, if early news reports are accurate. Eberstadt provides example after example of the cultural shift in rhetoric and conduct that has resulted in Christians being shunned or treated as subversives in America. She provides examples of believing Christians being kept out of university programs because of their Christian culture and of careers destroyed because of Christian expression and of individual and public discrimination against Christians and their association because of their religion. She points out that these same examples would have been unthinkable if the word "Christian" was replaced by "gay" or "Muslim."Eberstadt properly calls this "soft persecution" - as opposed to the "hard persecution" suffered by Christians in the Mid-east. However, "soft persecution" is a big deal. Most of the history of persecution involves "soft persecution." Catholics in England were persecuted "softly" by having taxes imposed on them when they didn't go to the Church of England. Islam has moved generations of Christians into Islam by treating Christians as dhimmis. Soft persecution works.Eberstadt's unifying thesis for this cultural shift is that the sexual revolution has created a new "faith" with its own dogmas and doctrines. Members of the new faith may not recognize themselves as having a faith, but their conduct - harsh, shrill, threatened, looking for heretics, excommunicating offenders, ritualized shaming - are recognizable as the actions of people who are defending a faith commitment rather than a public policy. I think that Eberstadt made her case in this regard. I had not looked at this issue in this way before, but it has an explanatory power for the insanely threatened and emotional reactions I've observed when I get into Facebook debates with secularists, who escalate to name-calling in zero time.For those of us who are still trying to occupy the public square, and defend traditional Christian values, and, perhaps, shame secularists for the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that their position entails, Eberstadt's book is a great resource. In the wake of the 2016 Orlando Muslim terrorist attack, secular atheists have unearthed videos of one or two hyperliteralist fundamentalist Protestant pastors who preach sermons that refer to the victims as sodomites who deserve to be dead. This is certainly uncharitable and ugly speech, but it remains speech, and speech totally unrelated to the mass murder. Nonetheless, secularists are cheering that Paypal has eliminated the hyperliteralists accounts and the landlord has evicted them. In response to this, my questions about the traditional liberal value of defending the rights of people to engage in speech, when all they are doing is engaging in speech, is met with the "explanation" that bigots don't deserve rights.This is a discussion that I am having today.It is the Eberstadt book in a microcosm.In response I have quoted this from the Eberstadt book:"In August 2012, a gunman entered the office building in downtown Washington, D.C., that houses the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian organization dedicated to traditional moral teaching. By his own account, available on video, he was alerted by secular progressive “watchdog†groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, that painted the FRC as a “hate group.†The shooter explained that this made him intend to kill as many of its members as he could, as he later told the FBI. 1 In the event, he fired at and hit a security guard, who disarmed him before his dream of mass murder could be fulfilled."Eberstadt, Mary. It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies (Kindle Locations 1361-1366). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.I have asked whether - in light of the principle they are espousing with respect to the hyperliteralists - they would support similar treatment to the SPLC.I have received no answer except some assertions that I must be politically aligned with the hyperliteralist Protestant pastor nutjob.One of the interesting things, however, is that while the SPLC "incitement" - I don't think the SPLC "incited" this shooter anymore than any other shooter was "incited" by political speech - is a great case for getting secularists to think about whether they always hold the moral high-ground, I would have forgotten it if I hadn't just read it in the Eberstadt book. Why is that? Is it because the narrative of our age pays more attention to "rightwing violence" than "leftwing violence," so that this example required a special effort to remember before it was sent to the "memory hole"?A nit that I will pick with Eberstadt is that in her fairly encyclopedic listing of outrageous smears against Catholics, she forgot to mention how the San Francisco City Council passed a resolution declaring the Catholic Bishop of San Francisco to be subversive of San Francisco's values of tolerance and diversity because he shut down the Catholic adoption program rather than violate Catholic teachings about placing children in the households of homosexual couples. This decision was actually upheld by the Ninth Circuit. It would have seemed to be a great example to add to her list, but, again, this news story, which would have been national news if it had been done to a Muslim in Texas, never got news attention, and has slipped down the memory hole.Weird, that.I found her conclusion to be the weakest part of her book. Eberstadt looks at the history of hysteria and notes that hysteria dies down when the hysterics have had enough. She therefore calls on the secularists to stop using terms like "hater" and "bigot" and to return to the values of respecting the rights of others to speak as a safeguard for them when their ideas fall out of favor.OK...maybe....but I think that this is different. The previous examples occurred in Christian cultures, which had values like "do unto others" and "the Good Samaritan" and "shame" and an adherence to neutral principles and logic. Is it the case that this new civilization - Post-Christian, and what I call Civilization 3.0 - has those values? The evidence suggests that this is not the case. My experience with individualists suggests that this is not the case: they are absolutely unembarrassed to tell me that discrimination only occurs when their sacred cows are offended, and they seem unable to understand that their bete noirs can ever be discriminated against.I am currently reading Witness (Cold War Classics), which has caused me to reflect that Eberstadt's description of where we are could be a straight line projection of what Chambers was describing as where the Communist party was in the 1920s and 1930s, including "Communist marriage" - which was based on the agreement of the parties to act as if they were married - and the double-think and the definition of justice as "what is good for our side." I think that those values have largely won through their incorporation into the sexual revolution. If that is the case, an appeal to the better angels of secularist nature is not going to be effective.What should be done? Keep pitching. Point out the hypocrisy and inconsistencies of secularists engaged in "soft persecution." It may not make you loved, but Christians have been promised a return for being hated and vilified "for my name's sake."
It's an interesting book.
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