All Stove In

Andrew Sullivan should receive real credit for saying, as he did, that if the treatment of Brendan Eich is what the gay rights movement is all about, then he, Sullivan, wanted to be dealt out. Eich is the Mozilla CEO who was forced to resign because he donated money a few years ago in defense of heterosexual marriage, which is to say, marriage. In a tweet the other day, Andrew said, “The hounding and firing of @BrendanEich disgusts me – as it should anyone interested in a tolerant & diverse society.”

For those who are opposed to this sort of business, they will have many opportunities to register their dissent. There will be a steady stream of them. As I put it the other day, in this Tolerance Parade, the elephants just keep on coming — ow.ly/vprzA

This stand means that Andrew is not a hypocrite, and I am glad for it. When I debated him a while ago, he said that he would be opposed to some of the things that we opponents of same sex mirage were predicting would come from all this. And good to his word, this incident shows that he meant what he said. He is no hypocrite. If Andrew comes to read this, an honest well done from me.

But the fact that he is not a hypocrite does not keep him from being a patsy. He is like an idealistic revolutionary who labored for years to overthrow the czar, only to have Lenin, three weeks after the revolution, send around a couple of the boys to put a bullet in his head. It turns out that those adversaries of the revolution knew what they were talking about when they argued it is easier to keep the monkeys in the cage than it is to get the monkeys back into the cage. Our “crazy talk” predictions, laughed at by people like Andrew, are steadily, slowly, inexorably, coming to pass. He who says A must eventually say B.

But Andrew, to his credit, opposes this thuggish behavior. He is wanting to be a classical liberal on this. As he put it, he wants society to be “tolerant and diverse.” And this kind of intolerista warp spasm is nothing of the kind. It is not classical liberalism or, if it is, it is Stage IV classical liberalism. Mencken once described this sort of thing very ably. He said that democracy was the process of establishing truth by means of counting noses, and promulgating it afterward with a club. And here we are.

And so it is that I want to point out what is actually going on. It is not the death of evangelical religion, it is not the death of biblical Christianity, and it is not the death of natural marriage. In times like these, when it is easy for the Church to be at its worst, we frequently find the Church at its best. So what this actually is, what this actually indicates, is the death rattle of the secular project. It is the death of the liberal experiment — and they do not have a god who knows the way back from the grave.

I want to discuss this according to their avowed principles. Let us talk about this within the confines of what the principled liberals have declared to be their great triumph — the establishment of a neutral public space, which in their reckoning would include companies like Mozilla and Hobby Lobby. The issue here is not what I would like to see in an ideal biblical republic, or how I would define the public space. I would like companies to be able to sack someone for his views, but I would want that freedom to be granted across the board to all companies.

No, the issue here is what is classical liberalism going to do about this outrage — on their terms? The answer is nothing, because they are impotent. They have unleashed forces they do not understand, and which they now find to be overwhelming. The whole thing is way beyond them now. They are like a hapless John Kerry, explaining once more to Vladimir Putin that this is the 21st century, and that he can’t just “take Crimea.” To which Putin replies, “Yes? Watch me do.”

The heyday of liberalism in America was probably the civil rights movement. They were up against a segregated establishment that had significant inertial force, but which was nonetheless guilt-ridden because of how blacks had been treated. It felt like a real battle to them. They had the high moral ground. They had dedication, youth, energy, and bad folk songs. They had a dream, and it didn’t involve Al Sharpton. They were going usher in an Eschaton filled with marshmallow clouds and unicorns. But now . . . something like this happens, and it is evident that this is now standard operating procedure. This is a world in which error has no rights. The central ideal of their whole project is insulted, and with the back of the hand, but because it is done for the sake of irrational lusts, instead of thoughtless bigotries, there is nothing the liberals can do about it. And so they all stand there, hands in pockets, wishing it were a little black girl wanting to go to school — that way they could call out the National Guard. But alas, the victim is a smart, rich, white guy — like most of them — who really wanted to live in a free country — unlike most of them.

This helpless, hapless state of affairs is because the liberal project is rapidly assuming room temperature. All four hooves are pointed at the sky. Their secular city is a smoking crater. Their ship, the USS Mutual Respect, has foundered on the rocks of our public lusts. Their polity ideals are on the fritzing haywire. They are laid-up, stalled out, caved in. Their alabaster blocks for building the new city of man turn out to have been the kind of material they use to make castle walls at Disneyland. They are all metaphored out, and all stove in. I could go on in this vein, but I trust the point has at least been approximated.

And this death of liberalism is a really good thing for real Christians. The apostle John tells believers this — “little children, keep yourselves from idols.” This tells us that the little children of the church are susceptible to that temptation. But the temptation has to be cleverly presented. Your average Christian is not drawn to the yawning maw of Molech. He is easily drawn to the hazily defined god of secularism. He will not be drawn to the next outré Tolerance Fruit Parade. So why should we lament the death of an idol that really was a snare to us, just because it leaves standing an idol that won’t be?

Once the secular experiment is revealed to all of us as a sham and a fraud, there will be many hundreds of thousands of Christians who stop following a tiny Jesus in the privacy of their own hearts and homes. They will then walk out into the daylight of the public square, blinking.