Lose the Bible, Lose Your Cultural Heritage

by RALPH PETERS 

 May 24, 2012

 

Recently, I got a shock:  I had not realized just how far the Left's secularist agenda of cultural destruction had progressed.  I published a novel with the Biblical name "Cain" in the title, assuming that everyone would get the reference immediately.  Big intelligence failure on my part.

As I did publicity interviews and call-in shows for the book, the most-frequently asked question from younger and even middle-aged listeners was "Who's the Cain in the title?"  I was stunned.  Since the novel is about a Civil War battle, I assumed that every literate person would get the "brother against brother" reference.  Instead, some even asked questions such as "Was he a general?" or "Is Cain one of the characters?"  (For the record, all of the characters are Cain, the brother-slayer-that's the point.)

The most troubling aspect of this was that many of the callers and media hosts were conservatives and Christians.  I had been arguing for years that, in an increasingly secular age, we must, at least, study the Bible as literature in order to understand the last two thousand years of our cultural heritage.  But I didn't realize how far the secular agenda had penetrated: Even some Christians no longer respond to Biblical references in the arts.  In the West, we have gone from over a millennium and a half during which art focused overwhelmingly on faith and the glory of God, to an era in which "serious" artists only take up religious themes to mock them.

For leftwing academics, especially, "killing" the Bible is an incredibly potent poison with which to get rid of the "dead white male" heritage of our culture.  When literate citizens no longer read the Bible, an art museum becomes a source of bafflement (the classical themes in painting and sculpture already had been erased from the popular consciousness).  Da Vinci's "Last Supper?" 

 Man, what's that about?  A boy's night out?  In, like, togas?  Caravaggio, whose religious paintings are, to me, the most spiritually haunting of all?  Critics focus on the gay/bisexual/violent side of the man and the bare flesh in their favorite paintings of his.  Yet, one of the two paintings that best capture the mysteries of faith and transfiguration for me, Caravaggio's "The Calling of Saint Matthew," makes no sense, if you've never read the Gospels.  It becomes some hippie-dude in a robe pointing a finger at a startled-looking older guy.  It could be subtitled, "That's the jerk who stole my wallet, officer!"  And the other deep, luminous painting I can't escape, George de la Tour's pensive Magdalene by candlelight, might just be some sad, plain gal who got stood up for a date-and likes Goth home décor-if you don't understand the complex Christian traditions and interpretations that have developed over 2,000 years about that particular Mary.

Sure, we can listen to Bach's Passions for the sheer beauty of the music (the same way we listen to Handel's "Messiah" nowadays), but if you know the Gospels of Matthew and John, the spiritual resonance can be overpowering.  And no, Bach and Handel weren't just phoning it in for a paycheck, as over-educated non-believers insist.

But it's not just about "all that old stuff" from centuries ago.  The deep religious references in William Faulkner's works (not professions of faith, but rich manifestations of inherited religion) are essential to understanding the best of the bard of Oxford, Mississippi.  If the name "Absalom" sounds like some immigrant taxi driver to you, you're going to miss a lot.

Even those ever-fewer living artists who engage seriously on faith can't be fully appreciated without at least elementary religious literacy.  For example, Marilyn Robinson's brilliant mature novels explore the deep resonance and practical complexities of faith over generations of family life, but they can only be read at a pedestrian, what-happens-next level if the name "Gilead" means nothing to you.

And that, I fear, is the point.  The anti-Christian Left pretends to appreciate high culture and looks down on Christian believers (Muslims and Santeria practitioners are okay, though) as dangerous idiots and rubes.  But the problem for Leftists is that, yeah, all those dead artists, composers and authors really had a thing about God the Father and Jesus Christ and all those "fairy tales."  The undeniable religious fervor-however troubled-of so many of the West's greatest creators is a challenge for the Left on two counts:  First, because "all that faith stuff" is primitive nonsense, of course, but also because those artistic geniuses were so overpoweringly visionary and devoted to their crafts that a socially and politically correct urban "graffiti artist" just can't compete.  And everyone has an inner artist, right?  That graffiti scrawler has the same "right" to art as Raphael and full moral equivalence to Fra Fillipo Lippi, according to the Left.  After all, murals are murals.who are we to say one's superior to the other?  And don't we have to take society's ills and prejudice into account?  Blah, blah, blah.

We have tossed away artistic discipline as surely as we have thrown off intellectual and moral discipline.

"Deconstruct" them as Leftists might, Friar Lippi's frescos of the life of Christ grip the heart and soul, and Bach isn't just musical math, but homage to a Christian vision of eternity.  You just can't beat those guys down with untalented, politically correct clowns, no matter which oppressed sub-minority you cull your clowns from.  But if the Left can strip our great religious art works of obvious meaning and a common cultural language, they can erase the highest achievements of Western culture bit by bit, leaving us nothing prior to the Impressionists (who reduced humankind's search for meaning to an interior-decorator's color scheme).  If you can make Michelangelo's religious themes opaque and reduce him to the status of an illustrator who liked muscular males, then you can start to persuade those whom you have rendered culturally illiterate that, yes, Frieda Kahlo's a great artist and Toni Morrison is not only the literary equal of, but morally superior to, Faulkner.

To destroy the despised Western Canon, the best single tool the hardcore Left has is our growing Biblical illiteracy.  Today, graduates with advanced degrees in the liberal arts don't have the essential cultural framework that was second-nature to our ancestors-who may not even have made it through high school.  We're on the path to cultural amnesia.

The Bible isn't just for Christians anymore.  It's for all those--believers, skeptics and diehard (carefully chosen adjective there) non-believers alike--who refuse to accept that Western Civilization is debased, oppressive and morally inferior to the cultures of primitive tribes.  When names such as Judith, Ruth, Jezebel, Delilah, Mary, Martha, or Susannah just sound like a guest list for a soccer-mom book club to you, or if Joshua, Caleb, Tobit, Abraham, Isaac and Abel strike you as this year's up-market names for male infants, you are culturally illiterate-no matter how many gallery openings you attend or how many critically approved, trendy, wretched novels you may read.

The Left has nearly destroyed the contemporary arts.  Now Leftists want to obliterate our past.  Their brilliant method has been to turn creativity upside down:  In the past, the art was important, not the artist.  Now it's all about the artist.  And artists have just become another category of vapid, enervated, huckster celebrities--the late Robert Mapplethorpe was anointed a "great artist" not because of his narcissistic, trivial porn (sorry, but his nude photos really don't rival Michelangelo's bare-butt guys), but because of his politically correct and self-destructive lifestyle.   The left has taken the arts that once required lifelong labor, dedication and talent and reduced them to self-important masturbation.

The Left's been successful in another way, too: Convincing conservatives and Christians that art doesn't matter.  Hey, we let them get away with stealing the K-through-12 education system, and look where that's gotten us.  Art does matter.  Giotto still matters.  Blake matters.  Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet who found God everywhere, matters.  And the artists who rejected faith matter, as well: Even turning one's back on belief inherently acknowledges the spiritual challenges haunting our mortal lives.  If we really care about Western civilization, we can't abandon the arts to destructive clowns who insist that exhibitionist snapshots are as valid and important as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

To be fair, some academics who still revere our cultural heritage have argued that we must, at least, teach "The Bible as Literature" courses on campuses.  But there's no mad rush to put the Bible on the core syllabus.  And "cultural conservatives," who sometimes seem to me to be as anti-Western-civilization as hardcore Leftists, haven't helped by pushing for the teaching of Creationism in public schools (come on, brothers and sisters, God made Darwin, too), or by trying to prevent adolescents from reading serious works of literature mild in comparison to what kids experience on a daily basis today (even kids from Christian household, folks).  Right-wing censorship of literature enables Left-wing censorship of truth.  If you can't tell the difference between "Heather has Two Mommies" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," you're proving the Left correct that we're just rubes. 

Even if you're a militant atheist, you can appreciate the literary magnificence of the Tyndale New Testament or the entire "King James" Bible.  If you're deaf to the God-honoring beauty of the language in those translations, you can get the vital stories in later, dumbed-down versions that demote holy writ to an eighth-grade level. 

 But if you don't know the story of Job, or of Joseph and his brothers, or of Moses, or, above all, of an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth who changed the world, you'll not only be culturally illiterate, but you will have broken faith with our civilization and lost the golden thread of our glorious heritage.

And that's just the way the hardline Leftists want it.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer (and former enlisted man), and the author of the new bestseller, Cain at Gettysburg.

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