in various formats -- now online

Click here to subscribe to the free daily RECORD newspaper email

Click here to go to the RECORD daily email archive

Click here to read timeless RECORD articles

"Fearful lest it be relegated to the position of an isolated sect, Christianity seems to be making frenzied efforts at mimicry in order to escape being devoured by its enemies--a reaction that seems defensive, but is in fact self-destructive. In the hope of saving itself, it seems to be assuming the colors of its environment, but the result is that it loses its identity. . . ."
--Leszek Kolakowski, from Modernity on Endless Trial

This speech was delivered to over 300 Bowdoin College students on Monday night, September 19, 2005.

THE VISION PLACE OF SOULS:  Or Why There are so Many Bush-bashers, Dream Catchers, and Soul Snatchers”

By Michael S. Heath, Executive Director, Christian Civic League of Maine

It is a pleasure and an honor for me to be here tonight. Bowdoin is a truly great institution.  A past president of Bowdoin, William DeWitt Hyde, was the speaker at the first convention of the Christian Civic League of Maine. A portrait of a man I admire greatly, a former Bowdoin professor hangs on the wall opposite my desk, and that is the Civil War hero, Joshua Chamberlain. I will have more to say about Chamberlain later.

I was once a young person in search of truth.  That is why I studied theology and philosophy.  There are many advantages to having college students as an audience. You are open-minded, idealistic, and seeking answers to life’s hard questions.  You are also used to sitting through long lectures which are sometimes not the most interesting. I promise you what I have to say tonight will be anything but boring. 

Tonight you will hear ideas you haven’t heard before; and it is unlikely that you would hear them at any other college campus. But the essence of a liberal arts education is openness to new ideas. All I ask is that you listen to what I have to say with an open mind. Ernest Hemingway said that he knew when a phrase was right and true, because it had a certain ring to it. So I would ask you to listen with your hearts and minds, and to listen for that certain ring of truth, without any preconceived notions you may have about Mike Heath or what I stand for. Many of you may indeed have such preconceived notions. You may have heard Mike Heath described as hate-filled… vitriolic… a Bible-thumper… a Holy Roller… to sum it all up, an ogre. Well, here I am, you be the judge.

The topic of my speech tonight is the upcoming vote on the gay rights law…is it a just law, a moral law, one that will conduce to the good of society?  In pondering how best to present my reasons why the recently enacted law is unjust, I realized that we cannot understand the law outside its proper context. Therefore I arrived at the somewhat strange-sounding title “The Vision Place of Souls – Why there are so many Bush-bashers, Dream- Catchers and Soul-snatchers.”

First, let me share with you a dream that someone told me about recently. The dream was of a magnificently-constructed modern edifice of brick, glass, and steel, so tall that it seemed to reach up to the sky. It was a splendid building, the best of its kind. Yet the building was leaning perceptibly to one side. Those who dwelt in the upper stories were warned to get out; but instead of leaving, they laughed, saying that it was the sturdiest and most magnificent building in the world. There were only a handful that had the foresight to heed the warning and leave; and then the building teetered and collapsed. But here is the most meaningful part of the dream: one of those who fled the collapsing building ran into a neighboring building, and there he saw the most beautiful young woman seated, staring blankly into a row of television screens.  He cried out to the woman, “Don’t you realize what is happening around you? Instead of looking at all these television screens, why don’t you look into your soul to see what is going on?” To which the beautiful woman replied: “There is nothing in my soul.”

This dream sums up the predicament of modern man. He doesn’t see the world with the eyes of his own soul.   He is looking at the world through the eyes of others. As a result, he is oblivious to the dangers around him. Worse than the barrenness and sterility that inhabits the souls of many in the modern world, is the belief that the soul simply does not exist.  

There is little representation in dreams that can be called abstract, in the sense of abstract art. Dreams are in most cases quite realistic, even in the case of nightmares. Visions, even if they are extraordinary or horrifying, are usually concrete and specific. We marvel at the power of the mind to portray reality in such accurate detail, so that when dreaming about a crowd, we can see each individual face as if that person were standing before us. Yet our perception of the world while awake is a product of that same power of the mind which creates the dream. Our perception of the world is very much a product of the soul. The soul of man expresses itself in art and in all products of the human imagination. Each thing a man produces, for good or evil, is an outward expression of his soul, just as the world and everything in it, is a product of God’s soul.

The art of an earlier age strove to attain an ideal, or a perfection of form. There was a striving for beauty, and an awareness that beauty in a work of art resulted from a near approach to the ideals of order, wholeness, and harmony. Not only in art, but in all aspects of life, ideals were used as goals and standards; and this is what distinguishes Western civilization from all other civilizations, the invention of the concept of the ideal, along with the concept of the individual soul. These ideas predate Christianity, as does the idea that there is one God who dwells in the heavens, who is the father of mankind, and who can be known through reason. Together, these concepts about God and the individual soul are the essence of Western civilization.

If you go to the Walker Art Building on campus and view the rotunda you will see a mural which shows Rome and the different elements which make up art: Wisdom, Knowledge, Soul, Life, Harmony, Love, Color and Form. But it is also wisdom, knowledge, harmony, and form, and above all the soul, which make up Rome.  The mural is part of the Walker Art Building because America, until recently, was regarded as the child of Greco-Roman civilization; as was the entire Western world, which eventually came to be known as the Free World. Before that it was called Christendom – but that is another story.       

I bring all this up because the contrast between the modern age and the ages which preceded it is best seen through art, which as we said before, is an outward expression of man’s soul.  For anyone who wants to understand the modern world, the very best question he can set before himself is “Why is modern art considered good?” No other question leads more quickly to an explanation of the modern age.  Let me give you an example. One performance artist went on stage and performed a piece of art which consisted of sawing a violin in half. Another artist -- a quite famous one at that -- nailed a row of toilet seats to a board and called it art. This same artist had already become wealthy and famous for splashing squiggles of paint on a canvas, and now his art is developing along new lines. There is another artist, one not so famous perhaps, but one who earned himself a fine reputation among the art critics of his day. This artist worked for peanuts, as he quickly smeared gobs of paint onto a canvas. When his work was taken to an art dealer, he was hailed as an unknown genius, and the art dealer offered him $20,000 for one of his paintings. But the artist never collected the money; for this unknown genius was an elephant at a London zoo who worked with a paintbrush attached to his trunk.     

I am sorry to be so iconoclastic. I am sure some of your art professors wouldn’t appreciate this story.  My story of the elephant belongs to the class of information that we are not really encouraged to think about. The scandal of modern art gets much worse. Some of you may have heard of the horrific displays at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, which were exhibited under the name of “Sensations.”  Although it was praised highly in the mass media, this alleged art was so horrifying that I cannot in good conscience describe it here. There are some aspects of our culture I am forced to remain silent about for the sake of decency. You might want to reflect for a moment why such art is put on a par with the masterpieces of the past. Another question to ponder is why the image of man has been removed from modern art. As I said before, such questions are the most useful and enlightening we can ask because they lead us to the heart of the matter. How did disharmony and disorder -- or on occasion sheer malevolence and hatred of humanity -- come to be regarded as valid and worthy expressions of the human soul?

If we look into the origins of modern art, we will encounter such terms as “the destruction of external reality.” The first group of expressionist poems was called “The Twilight of Mankind.”¹ These new forms of art, characterized by despair and irrationality, were taken up by the revolutionary forces in Europe who wanted to overthrow the existing order. And that is part of the puzzle. Modern art from the beginning has been championed by left leaning political forces, the goal being to alienate the masses from the existing social order, and to demoralize the opposition.

The disorder in art is part of a wider revolutionary disturbance in society which can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Anyone who wishes to understand our current political system must make a close study of the French Revolution. Many of the political terms we use today originated in this period, including the word “radical,” the terms “left-wing and right-wing” the words “communism and commune,” and the use of the color red to symbolize revolution – all these things had their origin during this period – as did the call for atheism in politics. The call to remove God from public life is not a new idea, nor is the ideology known as liberalism a new idea. Both these ideas are already centuries old. I will remark in passing that the French Revolution was essentially anti-religious in nature, and this effort to separate religion from the state was devastating. It is a pattern which was repeated with even greater intensity in our own century. If you ever hear someone tell you that we must eliminate religion from public life in the name of liberty and fairness, please be mindful of what has happened under every government that sought to make an exile out of God. The death toll in the twentieth century has been in the tens of millions. All this was the result of making man sovereign, and not God.  This is a cardinal tenet of liberalism.

Bertrand Russell, who was an agnostic, said that there are three main pillars of Western civilization, and those are technology and mastery of the machine; our Greco-Roman heritage; and the Bible. Please remember that these are Bertrand Russell’s words, not my own. When I said earlier that our society is no longer part of Western Civilization, I meant that two pillars of this civilization have been removed by liberalism, namely our Greco-Roman heritage, and our belief in the Bible. Instead of these two pillars, we now have three main currents of belief propagated by three men who have been elevated to the status of cultural icons; these are Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.  You would do well to refrain from challenging the ideas of these three gentlemen on campus, because Freud, Marx, and Darwin are quite literally the gods of the modern age. Anyone who challenges their ideas is quickly branded as a heretic. People will often ask in a half-mocking tone of voice “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Well, yes, there is still something sacred in America - the ideas of these three men. I may incur the anger of the reigning orthodoxy - which is liberalism - by attacking the ideas of these three men. Liberalism is very much orthodoxy and a dogma, and in spite of its claim of being progressive and a challenge to the existing order – I am here to tell you that it is the existing order. Its ideas hold sway over every member of the media and every corporate board in America. Those who dissent are quickly ostracized from the halls of power.

It would be impossible to discuss fully the ideas of these three men here tonight. But the ideas of critical thinking and deconstructionism are so prevalent on college campuses these days, I thought today as a Christian, and in the interest of fairness, I would take a stab at deconstructing and deflating the false gods of the left -- especially because the tribute these false gods have exacted from our society is the life of the society itself.  

First, Karl Marx. Let me ask you, what ideas have caused more misery to mankind? Wherever the ideas of Karl Marx have become the official ideology of the state, man has become a miserable and wretched creature, no more than a slave. In Marxism we have the doctrine of the soullessness of man in its purest form – dialectical materialism – an account of the origin and evolution of the universe which leaves God out entirely. History is guided by – of all things – economic forces. There is only one idea which is more deceptive and absurd than Marxism, and we will come to that in a moment. Yet much of what is taught on college campuses today is a form of Marxism – ‘Marxism-lite’ if you will - the view that religion is evil, that Western civilization, alone among the civilizations of the world, is oppressive and rapacious.; that all of America’s problems can be laid at the foot of George Bush and his wealthy supporters. We do not have time to go into this in any detail, except to briefly say that the words “freedom” “democracy” “republic” and “parliament” are all Western inventions. Every nation on earth has adopted Western forms of government, precisely because organizing society along these lines is liberating, and not enslaving. And I cannot resist telling you that the first nation to outlaw slavery on earth was a Christian nation, and the man responsible for it was a born-again Christian, William Wilberforce. Slavery still exists today. If any of you are curious, I can produce a map of the world which shows the nations where slavery still exists, and none of these countries is a Western nation. But enough about Karl Marx. There is no need to look into the matter further.

Let us briefly examine another cultural icon who holds sway over society, and that is Charles Darwin. You are used to thinking about Darwin in terms of a scientific theory, but if you take away anything from this speech tonight, I hope it is the realization that Darwinism is much, much more than a scientific theory. It is above all a political ideology which lends justification to the society in which we live.  We were all taught in the public school system to believe in Darwinism, the way earlier generations of students were taught the catechism of the Christian faith. Darwinism is a quasi-religious worldview which offers an explanation of man's origins and a view of his destiny.  It provides the moral justification for why a larger and more powerful state can gobble up a smaller or weaker state, or why a large corporation can put small business owners out of business in the name of efficiency and an economy of scale.  If you listen carefully, you will hear that terms from Darwinism are used more often to describe events outside of science than to describe events within science. Time and Newsweek love to talk about the evolution of the automobile, the evolution of pop culture, or the evolution of the hemline. When you hear the term “evolution” outside the field of science I hope you will realize that its use is absolutely bogus, and betrays a very shallow way of thinking. One State Representative in Augusta lectured the Christian Civic League on the “evolution of marriage.”

You can incur great wrath by challenging this particular cultural icon. When Christians recently brought a court challenge to introduce the concept of Intelligent Design in the public schools, every main stream magazine in America took us to task. It was another attempt at enforcing orthodoxy, and keeping everyone in line. A challenge to Darwinism is a challenge to the status quo.

Now we come to the last of the cultural icons, Sigmund Freud. In weighing which of these three cultural icons has caused more harm to our society, I could do no better than to assign equal blame to each; but were it not for the ideas of Freud, we might have seen our way out of the problems caused by the other two.

I said earlier that there was only one idea more absurd than the idea that economic forces determine the course of history, and that is Freud’s idea that the sex instinct is the force behind all human culture. According to Freud, all products of the human mind, all art, all invention, and all philosophy are a product of a sublimated sex instinct.  Like Darwin’s ideas this idea reduces man to the level of an animal.  It was a very powerful idea for those skilled enough to make use of it. A body politic preoccupied with sex, is much more tractable and compliant than an alert and informed public.

Sex pervades every aspect of our society. Modern advertising is Freudian.  The human sexual instinct is used to market products. If you want to know who reduced woman to a sex object, devoid of a soul, look into the writings of Sigmund Freud. Thanks to Freud, our society has developed an enormously dirty mind, thinking that everything we see has a hidden sexual meaning. An equally damaging idea of Freud was that all the ills of society can be laid at the doorstep of the repressive father as he competes with his male children for the attention of the mother… on a psychological level, of course. As a result, generations of Freud’s disciples undermined the authority of the father in the home, and discipline within the society at large. Even though Freud has been exposed as a charlatan…it has been revealed that he simply made up many of his clinical interviews with his patients, his ideas are still regarded as sacrosanct. But since every great figure of the West is exposed to criticism in our colleges – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ himself - let me do the same for Sigmund Freud - the world’s greatest authority on sex - by telling you that Freud got his sister-in-law pregnant, and so his wife wouldn’t find out, he procured an abortion for her.  

Freud told us that all would be well in society, if only we were free of our sexual repression.  So society came to experience a “sexual liberation” in the sixties, an odd blend of Marxism and Freudianism. What we were not told however, is that “sexual liberation” and the call for “free love” were always pushed by left leaning political forces, from the time of the French Revolution. For example, the first advocate for abortion in the U.S. was an anarchist. Revolutionaries have always known that the fastest way to make a political leftist is to deprive someone of their sexual morality; and for many, free love was the real attraction of the left-wing movement. Such ideas are aimed at undermining society; and the family has been the prime target from the beginning.

The progress towards sexual anarchy was very slow, and proceeded in stages, as America moved from a prudish Victorian culture to the culture in which we live today, in which anything goes. Even those of you who are opposed to my position on the gay rights law must agree that there has been a gradual progression towards “loose sexual morals.”

Again, I am hampered by an inability to discuss indecent material. The latest trends among some liberal thinkers are for a form of sexual liberation which is absolutely bizarre and unmentionable. They go far beyond a mere acceptance of homosexuality. Others in the gay rights movement, encouraged by the success of gay marriage, are now advocating that the traditional concept of marriage be abolished, to be replaced by legal unions between three or more people, in arrangements called by the newly-coined words “polyamory”” or “polyfidelity.”  Where will it all end? Logically it ends with the death of the institution of the family. There are many in the gay rights movement who are calling for just this, the abolition of the family.

All this has been a somewhat round-about approach to our question of the gay rights law. “Gay rights” and same-sex marriage can be considered properly only in the context of an ever-worsening climate of sexual permissiveness. In turn, the worsening climate of sexual permissiveness must be considered in the context of a society which chooses disorder over order, in art, in music, in philosophy, and in all other aspects of life, including sexual relations.

What occurs beyond this point is not pleasant to contemplate. But we can make a guess based on the current state of our culture. If we have a popular culture which favors disorder over order, which exalts the emotions of lust, anger, and greed over the virtues of charity, temperance, and self control; if the animal nature of man is exalted over his spiritual side, what do you think the result will be if society breaks down?  

I wanted this talk tonight to be about gaining a vision of where we are as a society, so we could then proceed to a discussion of the specifics of the gay rights law. Without the proper context, the law cannot be understood properly. I would like to close with a quotation by Joshua Chamberlain, and then take your questions about the specifics of the law.

Chamberlain is credited with gaining the victory at Little Round Top, the battle which changed the course of the civil war. He was of course a skillful general, but what made him great was that he was a man of deep spiritual insight, a man of vision who believed in the soul. I would like to read a quote of his which is inscribed on a plaque beneath his statue that overlooks the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge in Brewer.

“In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls.  And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know not us and we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this field to ponder and dream; and the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom and the power of the vision shall pass into their souls.”  That is my prayer for you tonight. Even though it is no longer proper today to speak of God and the soul on college campuses, I wanted to remind you that this is your heritage, and I fervently pray that you will never allow anyone to deprive you of it.

Now I will be happy to take questions on the gay rights law.

Home

The Christian Civic League of Maine

70 Sewall Street

Augusta, Maine 04330

v- 207-622-7634

f- 207-621-0035

email@cclmaine.org