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Identity politics and the immigration crisis
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Identity politics and the immigration crisis
Identity politics and the immigration crisis
Wallace Henley, former Senior Associate Pastor of 2nd Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. | Photo by Scott Belin
Huntington died in 2008 after 50 years at Harvard University, much of that as director of its Center for International Affairs. Huntington also served as Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council during the Carter Administration.
Samuel Huntington had almost unequaled insight into national and international affairs, as seen in two of his major books:
The Clash of Civilizations, and
How Cultural Marxism Weaponizes Guilt
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In a series of popular lectures, the business professor Morris Massey contended that “what you are is where you were when.” Our very identities are woven out of the still living experiences and memories accumulated over a lifetime. It is much the same with nations and civilizations. Alexis de Tocqueville and Francis Lieber left us distant early warnings of a latent democratic despotism capable of marshaling the powers of social disapproval, exclusion, even ostracism. Sophisticated strategies of subversion may be used with impunity to instill fear and unsettle people’s critical faculties.
By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 15, 2021 | In Reviews
“Surveys may indicate that Americans have lost or are losing their religions; however, the fever of identity politics that now sweeps the nation suggests these surveys are looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions.” Those are the words of Georgetown political theorist Joshua Mitchell, in the preface to a fascinating new book,
American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (Encounter, 2020).
Mitchell sees identity politics as a sort of religious phenomenon: a regression to ancient times when pagan tribes would view their enemies as the root of all the world’s ills, and hope that by exterminating a rival tribe they could eliminate those ills. Primitive peoples sought scapegoats, and in identity politics, the new primitives of the 21st century do the same.
(Image: Travis Gergen/Unsplash.com)
The idea that our culture is post-Christian is an antiquated bromide that is dangerous because it masks a truth that is even more troubling. And that truth is that our culture is now
post-post-Christian insofar as the last vestiges of any real cultural influence by historic, conventional Christianity are now long gone. Fifty or so years ago Christianity began its slow decline into cultural irrelevance. But at least in the early stages of the decomposition there were still millions of Americans who had been believers at one time even if they had then fallen away into either a generalized indifference or an overt rejection of the Christian claim. And among the millions who had fallen into indifference there was still what I like to call “religion by proxy”, meaning there were many people who did not practice the faith, but who were glad that there were those who did and who found some measure of comfort in knowing that Christianity was still a