The Herald Sun 27th Feb 2004

Those who loathe the US don't just hate their foreign policy, they hate the Christian values that civilise us. And by rejecting good, they often embrace evil.

OUR "intellectuals" hate the United States for one dangerous reason in particular. It's Christian.
There is probably no more Christian nation than the US, where more than 60 per cent of people go to church at least once a month.

And the US is now led by a man who takes his Christianity more seriously than any president since Jimmy Carter. And this scares the hell out of so many of our cultural elite.

For instance, infamous "journalist" John Pilger damns the administration of President George Bush as an "unelected Christian fundamentalist regime".

Sydney broadcaster Mike Carlton denounces it as a "fearsome" regime "hell-bent on a Manichean crusade to remake an evil world in its own Christian image".

Malcolm Fraser, the former prime minister, simply calls the US Government "fundamentalist", but Age cartoonist Michael Leunig draws it as a murderous caveman, with a club in one hand and Bible in the other.

Professor Brian Costar accuses the US Government of being "infected by far-right Christian fundamentalists whose ideology is closer to that of the Taliban than mainstream American liberalism".

And Richard Neville, New Age guru and former publisher, in December raged: "Kill, torture, rip off, humiliate – this is one of the themes of Christianity 2003, as the three leading liars of the Coalition, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, sink into the delusional torpor of their fundamentalist Christmas pud."

Last year, the BBC's Jeremy Paxman grilled British Prime Minister Tony Blair over Iraq, and I heard this telling exchange:

Paxman: Does the fact that George Bush and you are both Christians make it easier for you to view these conflicts in terms of good and evil?

Blair: I don't think so, no. I think that whether you're a Christian or you're not a Christian, you can try to perceive what is good and what is, uh, is evil.

Paxman: You don't pray together, for example?

Blair: No, we don't pray together, Jeremy, no.

The sneering Paxman clearly wanted to make Bush and Blair seem like men in the grip of a murderous religious mania, but he'd actually stumbled on to a great truth.

Yes, being a Christian does indeed probably make it easier to perceive real evil, and particularly evil in a totalitarian form – and this is precisely why Christianity has been the enemy of every totalitarian movement since the French Revolution.

What's more, this is the truth about Christianity that many intellectuals – largely secular and so more likely to worship totalitarian gods – cannot forgive.

Check the history. The Jacobins in the French Revolution banned the Catholic Church and slaughtered priests and nuns.

Communist regimes have done much the same in Russia, Cambodia, Vietnam and China, where even today the Catholic church is banned and its leading Chinese bishops jailed.

And the Nazis also waged war on Christianity, as Maurice Samuel shows in his book The Great Hatred, published in 1940.

What the Nazis hated in Christianity is what all who worship totalitarian ideologies, like today's Islamists, hate, too.

The Nazis didn't dare name Christianity as their true enemy. Instead, they hoped to strip Christianity of what they condemned as its "Jewish" influence, and so turn it into a Nazi cult.

As Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg put it, Germany's youth had "no other wish than to contemplate the great personality of the founder of Christianity in his real greatness, without the falsifying addition of Jewish fanatics like Matthew, or materialistic Rabbis like Paul, or African jurists like Tertullian, or spineless mongrels like Augustine . . ."

Hitler also condemned the Jewish influence on Marxism and Christianity, and wrote:

"The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in nature; and replaces the eternal privilege of force and strength with the mass of numbers and their dead weight . . . By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."

And so, as Samuel says, the Nazis' hatred of Jews was actually a rejection of the most important Judeo-Christian message – that no person is too humble to be precious to God, and that all of us are called to the brotherly love of even strangers.

It was a rejection of the Judeo-Christian claim that the political machine exists for people, not people for the machine.

Christianity was the enemy of totalitarians then, and is so still. Ask the Islamists. Ask the Greens. Ask our university Marxists and the International Socialists; and isn't it natural that such folk also hate Israel?

I should qualify that.

Of course, Christianity, left to its doubting, hesitating, brawling and pagan-flirting bishops is a menace to no one other than its own flock.

Take Pat Power, the Catholic Archbishop of Canberra. Last October, he had a choice – would he protest against the visiting Christian president of a largely Christian democracy that upholds religious freedom and has even liberated the Muslims of Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Bosnia?

Or would he protest against the visiting atheist president of a communist dictatorship that bans his own church, locks up his fellow bishops, jails Buddhist lamas, tortures Falun Gong worshippers, orders forced abortions and occupied Tibet?

No contest. Power demonstrated against the Christian president, not the anti-Christian despot.

As I say, such a church worries no one but Christians. But a country soaked in Christianity and equipped with the strongest army, the biggest chequebook and most vigorous culture – now that is a threat to totalitarians everywhere.

And so it has long been. The US was the lethal enemy of Communist regimes and the Nazis last century, and is the prime enemy of the Islamists, greenshirts and neo-Marxists now.

Did you note, incidentally, the European countries that were America's firmest allies in the war in Iraq? Strongly Catholic Spain, Italy and Poland. Its worst critic was France, where secularism is the state cult.

It may seem odd that secular intellectuals, who dream of an Eden without soldiers or priests, end up effectively siding with Islamic bombers and the genocidal dictators in their war with the Christian West.

But too many intellectuals still see Christianity as a bigger threat to their dreams – and to their wilder liberties and vices – than they do Islamic terrorism and the extremist preaching that feeds it.

Last December, for instance, the chairman of Britain's Broadcasting Standards Commission, Lord Dubs, noted that Islam was given far more respect on television and radio than other religions.

Dubs, a Labour peer, added: "In portraying Muslims, they have held back, they have censored themselves, they are timid. (But) I have seen them pour scorn on Christianity more than other religions. Christianity is an easier and more acceptable target, followed, to a lesser extent, by Jews and Hindus." Same story here.

And what a frightening hierarchy of hate-objects.

With Christianity despised by so many intellectuals, it's no wonder that the successes of the US – and the assertion of its Judeo-Christian values – inspire more hatred than do its failures.

Your enemy's failings are never frightening, and so the Left doesn't hate the US for its disaster in Vietnam. It actually rather enjoyed it.

But Leftist activists everywhere loathe the US for its success in Iraq, and to point out Iraq may now one day even become democratic just makes the insult worse.

To call this kind of sick reaction anti-American is true, but not enough.

We must recognise that it is really a hatred of the values that America best represents. We must recognise it is a hatred, above all, of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has so far been our best defence against totalitarian threats.

And that makes anti-Americanism an attack not just on America, or on the Christianity that animates it – but an attack on civilisation itself.

*This is an edited extract of a speech last night to a Quadrant dinner.