Liberal Utopianism

Dr. Jeff Mirus over on Catholic Culture had a very compelling analysis of liberalism:

The underlying attitude of liberalism is locked into a direct conflict with Christianity. It is an opposition so fundamental as to take on a quasi-religious character of its own. It is hardly surprising, then, that while still an Anglican, Newman saw in liberalism the explanation of the spiritual shift which he predicted would soon engulf the Western world:

It will be said that the benefit which Christianity has done to the world, and which its Divine Author meant it should do, was to give an impulse to society, to infuse a spirit, to direct, control, purify, enlighten the mass of human thought and action, but not to be a separate and definite something, whether doctrine or association, existing objectively, integral, and with an identity, and forever, and with a claim upon our homage and obedience. And all this fearfully coincides with the symptoms in other directions of the spread of a Pantheistic spirit, that is, the religion of beauty, imagination, and philosophy, without constraint moral or intellectual, a religion speculative and self-indulgent. Pantheism, indeed, is the great deceit which awaits the Age to come. (Tracts for the Times, #85, 1838)

Let the reader familiar with today’s quasi-spiritualities—the New Age, anti-human environmentalism, and the widespread claim to be “spiritual” without any specific religion at all—judge of Newman’s prescience! In a private letter three years later, he asked, “Are you aware that the more serious thinkers among us are used, as far as they dare form an opinion, to regard the spirit of Liberalism as the characteristic of the destined Antichrist?... The spirit of lawlessness came in with the Reformation, and Liberalism is its offspring.”

Again, what ties all these things together is liberalism’s ultimate rejection of the objective claims of truth, and with it the rejection of every claim of religious authority. This makes liberalism not only incompatible with Christianity but ultimately destructive of the human person. Either man is made in the image of God or he is not. Either he is made for God or he is not. Either he is ever dependent upon grace, or he is not. Either he is called to respond to a religious authority which transcends the limits of his own nature, or he is not. Catholicism affirms and insists on all of these things; liberalism is their absolute negation.

It is precisely in this that liberalism is such a profound disservice to man, for by its very nature liberalism insists that human societies must at all costs be shaped and organized to do exactly the one thing that human persons can never really do at all. I mean to succeed without God—to make it all on our own, bereft and isolated, with no help in heaven or earth.

My similar analysis: When God is brushed aside and the Almighty is no longer the Authority, Framework, and Source of our laws and regulations, then God is eschewed for a new artificial form of societal regulation.  When heaven no longer becomes the prize and goal of individuals in societies, those societies in their heart of hearts still desire heaven nevertheless, but begin barking up the wrong tree.  Liberal utopianism is being manifested in several examples throughout the world.  Venezuela has its socialist regime, China and North Korea hail communism, and America is embracing socialism.  Now New York City has declared a new Commandment of "Thou Shalt Not Purchase a Large Soft Drink."  Then there's the banning of after-school prayer groups, the banning of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, from Catholic Gonzaga University, because it is exclusively for Catholics.   There's the declaration that "one nation under God" is somehow 'unconstitutional.'  There's the ban on smoking, and heavy penalties associated with purchasing a pack of cigarettes, the tearing down of nativity scenes, memorial crosses, and so on.  Here is a 2010 Super Bowl Ad that shows just how far society could go to fulfill their false dreams of that liberal utopia: