With the decline of the Christian religion in the Western world and the Church’s temporal power virtually non-existent, the attitude of many Western political leaders has been, in spirit if not word, similar to that of Josef Stalin, who in the dying days of the Second World War proclaimed, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”
With no worldly power, the Church gets no voice.
Liberalism is not Stalinist communism, but it has its own authoritarian streak. The most recent evidence on this matter is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s $650-million program to finance and promote abortion and related “reproductive health” concerns in the developing world. This, according to International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, is in the interest of empowering and protecting women.
Unstated was how the Trudeau government would react if other foreign governments began sponsoring advocacy groups in Canada to change our laws in line with their own ideals. The age of imperialism supposedly came to an end with World War II, but no, not really.
Today, we have liberal imperialism, a religion which aims to impose its will on countries around the world in the interests of their own “improvement.” The heathens are not capable of discerning right from wrong — abortion being a putative right — and so enlightened Canada will have to show them the way.
If this is not cultural imperialism, it is hard to know what might be deserving of the name.
Liberalism has always portrayed itself as being above all that, as representing progress from the bad old days when human life had both meaning and immeasurable worth. Of course, the notion of moral progress was never more than a self-serving myth.
What needs to be recognized is that liberalism, secularism or whatever you want to call it is a religion of its own, an aggressive religion that wants to impose itself on the rest of the world. It is not at all pluralistic; it is determined to wipe out all alternative views. Dialogue is not part of its modus operandi.
Pope John Paul II nailed this with his oft-quoted remark in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus: “Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. … As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”
“Totalitarianism” is a harsh verdict, but an accurate one. Totalitarianism points toward total government control of people’s lives. While no spies are viewing our emails, tapping our phone calls or herding us to government political rallies, the secular ideology is so pervasive that people do not recognize it or, if they do, have little idea how to overcome it.
Nor is the Trudeau government’s imperialistic abortion policy simply a quirky policy decision, out of character with its generally benevolent attitude. The Liberals’ decision to fund advocacy for abortion in other nations flows naturally from its narrow ideology of individualism.
American voters took that ideology to the woodshed in their recent presidential election. While I am no fan of Donald Trump or Trumpism, the voters’ rejection of decadent liberalism should have raised a few flags for the Trudeau Liberals. Apparently not. In their view, Canadians and Canada stand on higher moral ground because of our adherence to liberal “decency.”
They are, however, blind to their own indecency, their own moral wasteland and their own authoritarianism. They honestly believe they are doing good for humanity.
The Trump response is also an offence to human dignity. But when people get fed up with the bill of goods they have been sold, they will turn to the next salesperson who shows up no matter how tainted the merchandise he or she is selling.
(Argan is a writer based in Edmonton.)