Without a commitment to love, you get violence.

The shooting of Donald Trump highlights just how important it is to remember that bedrock Christian principle.

But a recent essay in The New York Times by Pamela Paul — “Your Religious Values Are Not American Values” — demonstrates how out of touch we have become with the values that are foundational to our country.

Paul’s July 5 piece is one of a number of recent efforts in the mainstream media to paint Christianity as an intruder in the secular order of American politics. She thinks Christianity’s influence should be vastly reduced; many in government, academia and the media agree. 

Yet even mainstream agnostic journalists and militant atheists are beginning to admit just how important Christianity is to America’s culture and political order.

Paul’s article was illustrated with an image of Our Lady wearing an American flag, which triggered complaints of anti-Catholic bigotry on X. The Times would never print an image mocking Muhammad or Mahatma Gandhi or parodying a prominent Jewish figure such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But neither would The New York Times run an article declaring “Your LGBTQ Values Are Not American Values.” 

Author Tim Carney took the Times’ piece as evidence of a growing effort to drive Christianity from public institutions, writing, “They come after nuns, they come after clinics that help pregnant women, they will come after Catholic schools, they will come after Catholic hospitals,” and concluding, “The ‘Christian Nationalism’ to which they object is that Christian institutions exist at all.”

But before we train our anger at the Times’ piece, it’s important to remember how much the author and other critics take Christian contributions for granted. 

 

Religious Freedom Is Christian

The New York Times’ columnist objects to efforts to promote the Ten Commandments in Louisiana and to teach the Bible in Oklahoma schools, and she claims, “Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit.”

But where does she get the idea that people should not be forced to submit to religion? From Christianity, the faith whose martyrs won out in a Roman world where alternative forms of worship were violently suppressed. As early as the second century A.D., Church Father Tertullian warned: 

“See that you do not end up fostering irreligion by taking away freedom of religion and forbid free choice with respect to divine matters, so that I am not allowed to worship what I wish, but am forced to worship what I do not wish. Not even a human being would like to be honored unwillingly.”

More recently, Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est spoke about the necessary coexistence of a strong state and a strong Church.

“Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God,” he wrote. “The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State.” 

But he was just as emphatic that the state should not prevent the Church’s fundamental contribution to social order: love.

“There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such,” he said. “The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person — every person — needs: namely, loving personal concern.”

Love is the Christian difference, and unbelievers are noticing. The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson recently admitted, “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust” is that “Many Americans seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.” 

Thompson said that years ago he rejected religion as a dangerous player on the public stage, considering it “beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics.” 

“Only in the past few years,” he said, “have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”

He quotes New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg, saying “what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged.” Without religion, “places that used to anchor community life … have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.”

As it turns out, “organized religion” meant “institutionalized centers of caring.” Even stalwart atheist Richard Dawkins sees that now. 

“I call myself a cultural Christian,” he told the British radio station LBC. He called Christianity “a fundamentally decent religion,” and said, “I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.”

 

Without Christ, Violence

But what will happen if voices like Pamela Paul’s prevail, and Christian values are greatly diminished in American life? Unfortunately, we saw what will happen in Pennsylvania.

Popular historian Tom Holland wrote Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World to explore what Christianity has done for the world. Holland was not a believer when his fascination with the ancient world inspired his deep dives into the Roman and Spartan cultures, but he found that he was uncomfortable at how harsh and alien to the contemporary world those cultures were. 

Paul would do well to learn the lesson Holland did from the tragic case of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine. 

Its artists drew offensive drawings of the Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ himself for years. But when they began satirizing Muhammad in the same way, gunmen burst into their offices and killed 12 staff members. As it turned out, Charlie Hebdo’s satire, “far from an emancipation from Christianity, was indelibly a product of it,” Holland wrote. “To imagine otherwise, to imagine that the values of secularism might indeed be timeless was — ironically enough — the surest evidence of how deeply Christian they were.”

Consider all Jesus Christ did to make love the central value of mankind:

• · In a world of violent divisions, he said, “Love your enemies.”
• · In a religious landscape of indifferent gods, he said, “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son that whoever believed in him may not perish.”
• · And in a culture where tribe and title trumped all, he told the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son and commanded: “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
• St. Paul institutionalized his Lord’s teaching of love.
• · He declared, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
• · He ended the cult of personal honor, insisting, “If I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge … but do not have love, I am nothing.”
• · And he transformed marriage, telling husbands to suffer and die for their wives, “even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.”

Today, the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the “love and service of one’s country” and “the order of charity” at the heart of patriotic citizenship.

And yet, “Whenever a politician cites ‘Judeo-Christian values,’ I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling,” Pamela Paul wrote. 

She probably won’t listen to me, but perhaps she will listen to Martin Luther King Jr. 

“Standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage,” he said, would carry “our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

MLK’s religious values, and his commitment to nonviolent political protest, were American values — we can thank God, who is love, for that.