The following e-newsletter comes from the Institute for Christian Economics. It is included verbatim. Information on its source and how to subscribe is at the bottom of the newsletter.

Nov. 4, 2005

Dear ICE Subscriber:

President Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Republican conservatives, including Christian Right conservatives, are delighted. He is both anti-abortion and socially conservative.

What is not widely recognized is that on a 9-person court, Catholics will soon hold the majority, 5 to 4. This 5 to 4 margin is the most important number in American politics. This is the margin by which laws are judged -- and sometimes, as in the pro-abortion case of Roe v. Wade (1973), legislated.

The Catholics are Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts. Alito will be the fifth, if he is approved by the U.S. Senate, which seems likely, despite the predictable objections of Catholic Senator Ted Kennedy. This will constitute the 5-vote conservative majority on the Court. "Taking the Fifth" will soon have a new Constitutional meaning.

There is not a peep of protect by Protestants. The new arrangement is not even perceived by them. Yet a generation ago, Protestants worried about Senator Kennedy's brother. Would he take orders from the Vatican ? Given both the theology and the politics of the Kennedy brothers, this was about as likely as David Rockefeller taking orders from Jerry Falwell.

In a recent collection of essays edited by Ronald J. Sider and Diane Knippers, "Toward an Evangelical Public Policy" (Baker, 2005), the reader is given a history of evangelical politics. Front and center -- way, way center -- has been the National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942. The head of the NAE, Richard Cizik, provides a chapter on its history.

One of the main goals of the NAE was to defend the separation of church and state from the Roman Catholics (p. 39). The NAE opposed the United States government's recognition of the Vatican as a lawful nation. From 1943 to 1953, there were resolutions to this effect at its annual conventions. Cizik notes, "There were no further protests after President Reagan, in 1983, established full diplomatic relations with the Vatican" (p. 41).

Ironically, by the 1970s, the phrase "separation of church and state" would become a secular slogan and come to mean, "Keep (all) the churches in their place" and that "place" was thought to be the sanctuary, the cloister, and the sacristy. By the end of the twentieth century, many evangelicals would work together with Catholics to oppose secularism (p. 41).

If I were to describe this change, I would liken it to a pair of soldiers in a foxhole in Korea in 1951: a Catholic and a Protestant. Coming across the horizon are the Chinese Communists. The soldiers' mutual response is, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition." Their mutual concern is whether the other guy can shoot straight, not confess straight (orthodoxy).

If the two had been a Jew and a Protestant, this would have been a common grace effort. But because the two are united by the Nicene Creed, at least in theory (Americans tend be "creedally challenged"), their joint effort seems to be a special grace effort. Or is it?

On this issue, a political transformation has taken place in the United States .

WHO SUPPLIES THE AMMO?

"The New Republic " is a mainstream political magazine founded during the Progressive era, prior to World War I.

It has long been associated with the political left, but in recent years can be regarded as neoconservative. It was from the beginning part of the American Establishment, as Carroll Quigley discusses in "Tragedy and Hope" (Macmillan, 1966), in his famous 20-page section on the American Establishment (pp. 950-70).

In the November 3 issue, Franklin Foer writes about the reason for the Catholic dominance of the Court. He says it is the result of a political alliance between evangelical Protestants and Catholic traditionalists.

The reason why the Bushes have appointed Catholic judges to the Supreme Court is because these appointments get no opposition from their power base, the Christian Right. The reason why the Christian Right goes along is because the evangelicals lack a consistent legal theory.

They also lack the law school-certified brainpower. The author begins with this observation:

In 1994, the eminent evangelical historian Mark Noll wrote a scorching polemic about his own religion called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book lamented the "intellectual disaster of fundamentalism" and its toll on evangelical political and theological thought. All around him, Noll saw "a weakness for treating the verses of the Bible as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that needed only to be sorted and then fit together to possess a finished picture of divine truth."

While many evangelicals reacted angrily to Noll's description, they tacitly acknowledged his argument with their actions. Evangelicals began aggressively reaching out to Catholics for intellectual aid.

When Rushdoony and I first began working out the implications of what is known as Christian Reconstruction, we recognized this problem. Hays Craig, who was Rushdoony's publisher at the time, and later mine and Bahnsen's, published in 1966 a book titled "Res Publica."

It was written by a Catholic defender of Aquinas' natural law theory. Craig issued this under his newly created company, Craig Press. But Craig Press was really a profit- seeking offshoot of Craig's Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, a fact that later drew the censure of the Internal Revenue Service.

Cornelius Van Til was adamant that natural law theory is an unstable fusion of Aristotelian thought and Christianity. Craig also published Van Til's books. So, from the beginning of Christian Reconstruction, there was this peculiar alliance going on. We did not initiate it, but our publisher did. He did not see this as a big problem. Pat Robertson doesn't see it as a big problem, either:

But the emergence of the Court's Catholic bloc reflects the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft.

It is a question of political ammunition. The Catholics have been in charge of Republican ordinance for well over a generation.

For much of U.S. history, this alliance would have been unthinkable. Protestants once fought hard to teach the King James Bible in public schools, insisting that every schoolchild consume its subtle description of the Pope as "that man of sin." But shared animus toward abortion provided the initial grounds for rapprochement.

And, at about the same time Noll's book appeared, Catholic-evangelical cooperation began transcending any single issue. In 1994, the influential Catholic journal First Things published a manifesto called "Evangelicals & Catholics Together." Its signatories--including Richard John Neuhaus, Pat Robertson, and Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ--vowed, "[W]e will do all in our power to resist proposals for euthanasia, eugenics, and population control that ... betray the moral truths of our constitutional order."

Why did this happen? Because Protestant activists recognized the age-old political truth: you can't beat something with nothing.

As an exercise in political coalition-building, this alliance made perfect sense. But evangelicals didn't just need Catholic bodies; they needed Catholic minds to supply them with rhetoric that relied more heavily on morality than biblical quotation. You could see the partnership in countless examples. After James Dobson's Focus on the Family funded a Colorado initiative permitting discrimination against gays, Catholic law professors Robert George and John Finnis testified for the measure in court.

Evangelical politicians began borrowing John Paul II's "culture of life" critique of abortion-- a phrase that they also deployed during the Terri Schiavo controversy. Indeed, Catholic conservatism provided much of the case for keeping Schiavo alive, from Tom DeLay's invocation of natural law to the oft-cited warnings about a slippery slope to eugenics.

We can date the origin of this alliance: the fall, 1980 rally in Dallas of the National Affairs Briefing Conference. There, Ed McAteer's Religious Roundtable brought together Beltway activists from the New Right, such as Paul Weyrich, and the newly emerging New Christian Right activists. I even got onto the podium through the intervention of Howard Phillips, who soon converted publicly to Christ and whose sons are leading lights of the Christian Right. At that meeting was Catholic political activist Phyllis Schlafly and hundreds of her supporters. She was mobilizing women two decades before Beverly LaHaye created Concerned Women for America .

Then there is Marvin Olasky, a converted Jew and ex- Marxist. He now edits "World," a magazine that got its initial capital from the profits of the Christian weekly newspaper for Christian elementary school students: "God's World." They got that idea from David Chilton, who was working for me at the time. He suggested in the September, 1980 issue of "The Biblical Educator" that the Christian world needed an equivalent of the old public elementary school newspaper, "My Weekly Reader." That issue appeared in the same month as the National Affairs Briefing Conference. (It is on-line at www.freebooks.com .)

Marvin visited me in Tyler , Texas in early 1980 and asked me if I thought he should take a job offer to teach journalism at the University of Texas or an offer to distribute millions of dollars by a neoconservative foundation. I advised him to take the teaching job. He did just that. He later coined the phrase, "compassionate conservatism."

Marvin Olasky, the original face of the Bush program, once credited Catholicism with "providing] a structural framework." And, in the end, the campaign was an object lesson in the new alliance. By defending his positions on abortion with phrases drawn from Catholics--"expand the circle of freedom" and "protect the weakest member of society"--Bush simultaneously reassured the hard right and avoided the impression of a Bible-thumping radical.

That's not to say that scandal of the evangelical mind inevitably leads Republican presidents to appoint Catholics. But sociological and political factors have combined with the intellectual to ensure that Catholic lawyers continually dominate the pool of Republican candidates for the bench.

Why is this? Because Catholics began going to law schools before evangelicals did. They have a tremendous head start.

For starters, there are so many of them. During the early twentieth century, law provided Catholics with an important vehicle for traveling into the middle class. While Catholics couldn't enter top law schools, they could attend places like Fordham and Villanova. "There was a vast culture of Catholic DAs, lawyers, and judges," says John McGreevy, the author of Catholicism and American Freedom. Even when discrimination against Catholics faded, the law's prestige among white Catholics persisted. After the cultural tumult of the 1960s, and with the rise of the abortion issue, many of these Catholic lawyers wended their way into the arms of conservatism. (Evangelicals have only recently begun to attend elite schools in great numbers and have just begun reinvesting in institutions capable of producing top-shelf intellectuals.)

http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051114&s=trb111405

Foer titled his article "Brain Trust." This phrase goes back to the bright humanist and lawyers and activists who were brought in as advisors to Franklin Roosevelt in the early years of the New deal.

CONCLUSION

You can't beat something with nothing. But there is another related aspect. You can't beat something by relying on ammo supplied by your philosophical adversaries. This was Van Til's point throughout his career. It is a radical point. It undermines the syncretism of Christianity from the early apologists until today. Like oil and water, Jerusalem and Athens don't mix. Because Protestants have indulged in natural law theory -- the attempted fusion of Jerusalem and Athens -- they have had common intellectual cause with Catholics.

When Van Til challenged this alliance by challenging natural law theory, he offered Protestants a way to get into the ammo production business -- big caliber stuff. His challenge was taken up by Rushdoony in "The Institutes of Biblical Law." But this judicial ammo is not appreciated -- surely not by natural law advocates, and not even by Van Til's official institutional heirs. (See my 1990 book, " Westminster 's Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til's Legacy." http://snipurl.com/confession )

If conservative Protestant political activists want to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water for Catholic judges, they need do nothing different. More of the same will do quite nicely. I do not expect a change anytime soon.

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