Kulturkampf is just what it says

You don’t have to be eager for conflict to find that you are in one.  It is folly to believe that all wars are optional, that all deployments of violent rhetoric and forceful means are to be met with anxious soul-searching rather than honest refusal to cave in and kowtow to the mob’s anointed.

So Rod Dreher:

Today’s Indianapolis Star front page uses the headline approach usually reserved for war. Because that’s what this is: culture war, and the mainstream media, as a vital part of the progressive movement, is waging total war for a cause they believe is holy. I’m not exaggerating. To most of the media, there is no other side in the gay marriage debate, or on anything to do with gay rights. There is only Good and Evil. And so we have the spectacle of a moral panic that makes a party that is a chief beneficiary of the First Amendment — a newspaper — taking unprecedented steps to suppress a party that is the other chief beneficiary of the First Amendment: religious dissenters. In my experience, it is impossible to overstate how sacred this cause is to American elites, especially journalists.

If you thought this was ever about fairness, justice, tolerance, or reason, you now ought to have had your eyes opened.

(source: Indiana: The Holy War of the Left | The American Conservative)

It is always unwise to ignore how much our culture owes to the totalitarianism envisioned by Bismarck and his enablers, the likes of Virchow.  Kulturkampf was originally a specific phase of German politics, but it was always a deliberate “war of choice,” an intentional violence of the regime against the Church and her faithful.

(source: rbb Prussia Chronicle | Image: The end of the Kulturkampf)

It is easy to get “separation of Church and State” if you really want it: 

The Pulpit Law of 1871 (which was technically in force until 1953 in Germany) forbade priests from discussing state affairs from the pulpit and sentenced priests who violated the law to at least two years imprisonment. Passage of this law meant that priests could not even preach about the dangers of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf from the pulpit.

(source: German Culture Wars)

That influence, as you can see, lasted well beyond the fierce 1871-1878 hostility.  It remained a prominent feature of the Third Reich, as well, and set the background for the Vatican’s protracted negotiations over the rights of clergy and the faithful with Bismarck’s totalitarian heirs, Hitler and the Nazis.  And it influenced the relations of Christians to Stalinist regimes, as well as the American debate over the Progressive economic and eugenic policies such as abortion, forced sterilization, mandatory universal public education in government schools, secularization of the public square, nationalization of “commanding heights” industries by corporate/regulatory conglomerates, and nationalization of higher education.  American politics were deeply corrupted by the adulation of these policies cribbed or adapted from Bismarck’s Prussia common to our anti-Semitic, upper-class, white, liberal, coastal elite political and cultural minorities:

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

(source: Michael Crichton, "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous")

And so it is with these things in mind that some of us bristle at the insanity of shrill, denunciatory mobs in service of this ideology–already demonstrably bankrupt as an intellectual tradition and a viable foundation for a regime–attempting to define as aggressors in “Culture War” those who seek, on the one hand, to protect the legitimate claims of local societies against their usurpation by totalizing ideology and, on the other hand, to maintain a consequential grasp on moral and spiritual realities which we can only deny to our very great hurt.

I never was a fan of Jerry Falwell, and I wrote myself out of the “Religious Right” back when well-read bachelors still knew who Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson were.

But if the model of “toleration” in this culture is the model set out by the Bismarck who implemented Virchow’s radical purge against all public Christianity, then it is Kulturkampf–warfare by state control of cultural institutions–no matter how we may attempt to paint it.  And it needs to be denounced as such.

The RFRA in Indiana is a good law in itself. But that’s now beside the point, because the campaign against it has made it into a proxy battle over a wide range of issues. The well-orchestrated attack is heavy on denunciation. Tim Cook says the Indiana law is a “license to discriminate,” which means those of us who support it favor exactly that. We’re paving the way for bigotry! The implication is that we’re unfit to be citizens of the United States.

The same goes for Governor Cuomo and Governor Malloy’s announcements banning “non-essential travel” to Indiana. An official state boycott? That’s unprecedented. What could justify such an action other than the judgment that something of unprecedented wickedness has occurred?

No, actually, state actions against other states is not unprecedented. It happened in 1860 and is called the Civil War. This is not an encouraging precedent. And it is hardly a gentle, inclusive message to those of us who think the Indiana law is a good idea.

(source: Indiana, Religious Freedom, and the Hysteria | R. R. Reno | First Things)

This is trademark Progressive ideological posturing, to be sure:

We’ve seen it over and over.

…but it is not how reasonable people settle disputed matters.

It is how ideology chews the living heart out of the very body that hosts it.

It is an ongoing warfare, even if for now it is warfare continued by other means.

But why should this be surprising?

This was always what our victory looked like.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.

(source: Matthew 28 RSVCE)