Rethinking the American Experiment | Jerry Salyer | CWR
A review of The Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a Culture Of Life
In the aftermath of a terrible civil war pitting brother against brother, the Theban ruler Creon ordered the body of the traitor Polynices, his own nephew, be left unburied outside the city walls, to be devoured by the vultures and jackals. By stealth, Polynices' sister Antigone flouts this decree, giving Polynices the funeral rites she owes him as a female of his family. Even the head of state himself, Antigone proclaims, “has no right to keep me from my own.” Soon Creon learns of Antigone's defiance, however, and sentences her to be entombed alive, niece or no: “Though she is my sister's child or nearer to me in blood than any that worships Zeus at the altar of our house,” he resolves grimly, she “shall not avoid a doom most dire.”
From there, the tragedy moves inexorably toward its catastrophic conclusion. By refusing to let go of his enmity for the dead Polynices, Creon offends the gods of the underworld; by denying Antigone's claim to her own flesh and blood, he offends the Olympians who sanction such familial bonds as sacred. The result is disaster not only for Creon, but for all of Thebes.
Wherever else we might part company, I agree with John Zmirak and Jason Scott Jones, authors of The Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a Culture Of Life, that Sophocles' Antigone is a timeless work, one which deserves more attention. We also could agree on the general explanation for the tragic, catastrophic events of recent generations. Like Creon, modern leaders have succumbed to hubris:
How did we get here? Put simply and starkly, Western man tried to pursue a humanist project of understanding and uplifting human life, and in the process he identified God as an obstacle, even an enemy. So we tried to root him out. We tried to create consistent systems that preserved all the good things we take for granted in Western society, while denying God. That is, we tried to build the steeple on the church of humanity with steel ripped from its foundations. Predictably, the whole tower collapsed in the killing fields of the twentieth century.
In short, the West now attempts to treat human dignity as a premise rather than as a conclusion drawn from a particular vision of the world. With the classical Christian theological framework that justified and demonstrated it ripped away, the value of the individual now rests upon a nakedly fideistic affirmation. Per the secularist humanitarian, every man deserves consideration not because his soul is a marvel that reflects his good and glorious Creator, but—well, because. As Jones and Zmirak rightly note, the mere word because is hardly much of a reassurance for those of us who worry about modern trends.
Such worry leads Jones and Zmirak to scrutinize the decision to employ nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II. Archibishop Fulton Sheen's opinion—one not widely publicized in America, as the authors point out—was that the “idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits […] began on the sixth of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.” Clearly sympathetic to Sheen's position, the authors are nonetheless careful to avoid the smug, Monday morning quarterback tone employed by some critics of the bombing.
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