Teaching America to Fear Christians

By Phil Lawler (
biography –
articles– E-mail ) | February 29, 2024

Are you terrified of “the peril of the theocratic future the country is hurtling toward?” »

Me neither. But Linda Greenhouse is. This fear is the latest fashion on the radical left.

In a remarkable piece of alarmist propagandaIn response to the Alabama court ruling that a frozen embryo has legal rights, the New York Times The columnist lamented that today’s United States “is awash in religiosity when it comes to human reproduction.” I admit that I hadn’t noticed. Public debate – at least as it is conducted in media like the New York Times tends to begin and end with the invocation of the word “choice.” If religion is brought up, it is only to assert that all arguments against abortion are based on sectarian beliefs and therefore must be suppressed.

Greenhouse tells us: “Rhetoric about the ‘sanctity of unborn life,’ in the words of the Alabama Constitution, has for too long been gratuitous, a cheap thrill for a politician. You will notice here the implicit message that a politician who uses this rhetoric should pay the price. If a pro-life columnist said the same sort of thing, it would immediately be cited as an invitation to violence.

Greenhouse briefly acknowledges that the court’s decision was based on an amendment to the Alabama constitution, ratified by the state’s voters, that designates any fertilized human embryo as a human being. (This is a basic biological fact, by the way, but Greenhouse & Co. has been successful over the years in its campaign to classify it as a religious belief.) If an embryo is a human being, then the embryos stored in the facilities of IVF are by definition human beings. Whatever the justices’ personal beliefs, the Alabama court had little choice; the decision was based on the plain language of the state constitution.

The Greenhouse column, however, is just one example of a new left-wing rhetorical move: an attempt to portray Christians as a danger to democracy. The phrase “Christian nationalism” has been used constantly in recent weeks, often in reference to the Alabama decision. In the past, the goal of the radical left was to exclude Christians from the public debate on abortion. Today, the most ambitious goal is to completely exclude Christians from public debate.

Unfortunately, Alabama politicians appear to have been frightened by this artificial uproar and rushed to pass new legislation making it illegal to prosecute anyone who destroys an embryo during IVF treatment. Such legislation would appear to conflict with the same pro-life amendment to the state constitution. This would also provide carte blanche to unscrupulous practitioners in the extremely lucrative IVF sector. Abortionists have gotten rich in large part because their political advocates have ensured that they are not subject to the same kind of government oversight that regulates the work of, say, dentists — or even hairdressers. We can now expect a concerted effort to grant the same legal immunity to those who practice various forms of assisted reproduction.

But back to Linda Greenhouse. It takes a special perspective to look at a ready-made court decision – a decision required by a constitutional amendment – ​​an amendment supported by the people of the state – and see in that decision a danger of “theocratic” rule. You may be wondering how Greenhouse gained this perspective. What is his background?

Well, before she becomes a Times columnist, Greenhouse was a Times journalist. His particular rhythm? The Supreme Court. For years, in what was then considered America’s most authoritative newspaper, Linda Greenhouse analyzed what the U.S. Constitution says and how it might be interpreted on issues such as abortion. Now, seeing how she reasons when no longer inhibited by any pretense of objectivity, we see more clearly how her work in the trenches as a journalist set the stage for her campaign today as propagandist.

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He edited several Catholic magazines and wrote eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is news director and senior analyst for CatholicCulture.org. See full biography.