Thank God for the ACLU

By Donald Hank

Non-believers, particularly on the left, have pointed out for years that Christianity is divisive.  They point tirelessly to the 30 Years' War that killed thousands in the name of God, and to the Spanish Inquisition.

Yes, Catholics persecuted, banished and martyred Protestants for hundreds of years, no doubt about it. 

Then when the protestants finally clawed their way to the top in Europe, they followed the Catholic model to a tee, persecuting and turned those who disagreed with them, particularly the Anabaptists on the continent and the Quakers in England, leading many of the persecuted, like my forefathers, to seek shelter in the New World.

But in the 20th century, it wasn't the Catholics and Protestants, and it wasn't the various denominations that divided and killed people.

It was godless communists and godless national Socialists who wound up killing a record number of people, over 100 million, in the name of secular humanistic idiologies derived from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, eclipsing the number of casualties in all human conflicts of all kinds theretofore.

And in Poland, all of the injustice and anguish that arose from the more persistent of these idiologies finally caused people to rebel in a grass-roots spiritual revival.  In an in-your-face protest against the Soviet tyrant, Poles of all creeds, including outright atheists, started packing out the pews of churches everywhere.

I attended such a service in 1970 in Kraków.  The church was packed.  Though still a nonbeliever, I was moved by the show of solidarity among this great heroic people that I came to love and admire.

The spiritual lethargy that gripped Europe throughout most of the 1900s was finally being broken, and not by the clergy itself but as a backlash against the very atheism that caused the falling away in the first place.  Communism had galvanized Christians in Europe, just as the tyrannical Romans had once inadvertently galvanized early Christians through persecution.

And today, Poland is still the most recalcitrant rebel against the socialists and centrists of the European Union, who are stifling freedom of thought, trying to shove abortion and gay marriage down the collective throat of Europe, whining like children over Poland's refusal to fall into line.

And the very same phenomenon is happening here whenever the ACLU tries to tear down another monument bearing Christian symbols or text, whenever another activist judge overrides the people's intuitive judgment, whenever Rosie O’Donnell makes another outrageous and disrespectful statement about Christians or the military or traditional people, Americans, whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or even just people, rise up in indignation and denounced the evil, hardly noticing that they are speaking with a single voice for the first time.

Pro-life marches on both sides of the Atlantic are attended by Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Jews and even nonbelievers sick to death of watching a radical oligarchy foisting their views on everyone else, wantonly destroying traditions in a manner reminiscent of the Taliban's destruction of ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. 

Never before has Christianity been less divided.

Who knows if America could have undergone the spiritual resurgence of the last few years or the unprecedented bonding between traditional Judeo-Christians had it not been for the sense that only by banding together could they hope to free themselves of the tyrant?

Brothers and sisters, rejoice and be thankful in all things.  Even for the ACLU, you say?

Yes, especially for the ACLU, to whom we owe our newfound unity and the will to one day throw off its oppressive yoke!

By Donald Hank Click here for bio and archived articles