On Monday morning, Bryce put in his usual time at the gym, where he was joined by Roland, but Curtis and Maddy had gone to Ohio to visit his family. That same morning, Nate left to spend the rest of the break with his family, and Jason went with him, so there would be no continuation of their discussion of the previous day, at least for now.
After his return from the gym, Bryce roused Damon, who prepared breakfast for the two of them. After that, and after cleaning up, Bryce declared that he was heading for the university library. He felt bad that he had such an incomplete paper on Jean Racine and Port Royal to present to Dr. Anjot on Friday, so he determined to do some work on that topic during the break. Damon declared that he could do what he needed as far as his own papers was concerned there at the apartment. In fact, Damon felt the need for some time alone to think about things. He was quite concerned about his partner. Bryce’s discussion about the necessity of religion, and especially the part carried out at Pat’s the night before, worried Damon. It seemed to him that Bryce was becoming increasingly pessimistic and depressed. Damon worried about this all morning as he worked on his own classes, but came up with no answers. He went over and over Bryce’s arguments, and thought he could see some weak points where he might be able to answer him convincingly, but there remained so many items that he was not sure that would make much difference.
Damon decided that it was not fair that Bryce had Father Miller to consult when he needed help with basics, whereas he had no one comparable. Over lunch by himself, Damon reached a decision, and put in a phone call. Then he walked over to campus, and to the Newman Center. He did not know Patricia Murphy, but had heard Bryce speak about her enough to know that the rather large female at the reception desk was not she.
“I’m Damon Watson. I called about seeing Father Miller,” he informed the woman.
“Oh, yes. Father was able to fit you in because so many people are not here during break,” the woman giggled. It seemed entirely inappropriate for such a large woman to giggle. Damon remembered a line from “The Night before Christmas,” which he had encountered last year at the Winslow place for the first time. Something about shaking “like a bowlful of jelly.” The receptionist pressed a button, telling Father Miller his next appointment had arrived, but then introduced herself. “I’m Tilly Weaver.”
“Hi, Tilly,” Damon responded. “I guess we both have unusual names.”
“Oh, my real name is Clotilda, but nobody calls me that.” She giggled again. “Isn’t your name one that’s mentioned in the Mass?”
“I don’t think so,” Damon said, but was spared further conversation by the appearance of Father Miller.
“Hello, Damon. Nice to see you again. Please come in,” the priest said.
Once seated, Father asked, “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”
Damon smiled. He had met the priest last fall as part of Bryce’s extended discussions with him, but was surprised that he remembered him at all. “I’m Bryce Winslow’s partner,” Damon began. “I know he thinks a lot of you. I don’t have anyone like you to bounce ideas off, so I decided to use Bryce’s guy. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No. As you know, Bryce is seeing me every other week. This week, because of break, I have no appointment with him, and few with anyone else. What can I do to help?” Father Miller asked.
“Yesterday Bryce tried to explain to me and to another guy we know why religion is necessary. In the process, he became so negative and depressed that I’m worried. I haven’t seen him this upset since last fall. Early last fall,” Damon reported.
“Upset in what way?” the priest asked.
“He seemed to be saying that things were getting worse in our society, and there was nothing we could do about it. Well, he might be right or not about that. I’m not sure. But what bothers me is that he was so depressed about it all. Especially when he got onto the topic of abortion. Whenever he talks about that, he gets down, but last night was worse than usual. I don’t know what to do about this,” Damon confessed.
“Abortion is a pretty depressing topic, I’d have to agree,” Father Miller said, “but I think I know what you mean. I believe I can trust you to mention that when Bryce was in here last week, he was concerned because he had feelings that he had to do something to solve all the world’s problems, but he knew that was unreasonable. Has he said anything about that to you?”
“Some hints,” Damon said. “Nothing explicit.”
“I appreciate you telling me about this most recent attack of excessive responsibility. I think you can do more for Bryce than I can, but I’ll work on it from my perspective. Bryce is very concerned not to offend you, you know,” Father Miller said.
“Yeah. I told him we all know he thinks religion is important and those of us who are not religious are missing something important. We also told him he was being a prick to assume we could not handle that without going off the deep end, and ditching him or something,” Damon reported with a grin.
“‘We’ being?”
“Well, Jason and me, mostly. I think you know who Jason is.” Father Miller nodded. “But in that last thing, Nate kind of agreed with us,” Damon said.
“Good. You keep Bryce from going off into fantasy. He’s even mentioned that you keep him grounded. Keep it up, and I’ll do what I can from my position. If it seems like he’s getting really depressed, let me know. I don’t see Bryce as the kind of person who would harm himself, but that’s not something entirely predictable, either. And if you need anything from me, don’t hesitate to contact me, any time of day or night. I have come to really like Bryce, and to expect much from him. I’d be really upset if anything did happen,” Father said.
“I think that might help. If he gets it from both of us, he’ll have to see how silly he’s being,” Damon said. “Thanks, Father.”
Damon rose, and shook hands with the Catholic chaplain. He felt better knowing he had an ally in preventing Bryce from going too far with these negative feelings he was showing. Father Miller gave Damon not only his e-mail address, but also his personal cell phone number, just in case, and Damon did the same.
Feeling much better, Damon went to the library to work on some of his own term papers.
Bryce, meanwhile, blissfully ignorant of the trouble he was causing his partner, was spending the time in the library researching the monastery of Port Royal, which seemed to have such a negative impact on the career of the dramatist Jean Racine. Among other works, he found a copy of Port Royal: the Drama of the Jansenists by Marc Escholier, published in its English translation in 1968. Not surprisingly, there was no copy of the original French in the library. In order to understand the influence of Port Royal on Racine, Bryce found it necessary to learn more about Jansenism.
Jansenism, he found, was a movement named for the Dutch bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), who developed his own interpretation of the theology of salvation found in the works of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) in cooperation with a French prelate named Jean du Vergier (1581-1643), known as the Abbé de St. Cyran after 1620. Jansen spent much of his life associated with the University of Louvain from 1616 to 1636, when he was made Bishop of Ypres. He died two years later, leaving the manuscript of his interpretation of Augustine’s theology of salvation. It was published two years later as Augustinus. The Augustinus vigorously denounced the Pelagian position that mankind could attain heaven on its own, without the aid of divine grace, but then went on to assert that the vast majority of humanity was condemned to perdition, and those who were among the elect were chosen by God, and supplied with grace, which they could not resist. In this manner, the entire process of salvation was in the hands of God, and humans had no real say in the matter of their own salvation. This was very near John Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, as both Calvin and Jansen claimed to be simply presenting the doctrine of Augustine.
Under the influence of the Abbé de St. Cyran, Jansenism was adopted at the monastery of Port Royal under the leadership of Mère Angelique Arnauld (1591-1661). The nuns at Port Royal established a series of schools, called Les petites Écoles. One of the pupils of these schools was Jean Racine (1639-99). Orphaned at the age of four, Racine was then raised by his grandparents until 1649, when his grandfather died. At that time, his grandmother went to live with the nuns at Port Royal, and entrusted his education to them. Intended for the law, instead Racine was drawn to the theater by the critic Nicolas Boileau. His first successful effort was La Thébaïde, ou les frères ennemis in 1664, mounted by Molière’s company of players. But then Racine betrayed his benefactor not only by having his second play put on by a different company, but also be seducing Molière’s leading actress, Thérèse du Parc, who became his mistress. After the death of du Parc, Racine took up with another actress, Marie Champmeslè, and was sufficiently popular with both King Louis XIV and the public that he was the first to be able to live entirely off the revenues from his plays. His career prospered, culminating in the production of Phèdre in 1677.
Meanwhile, French Jansenism had become even more puritanical under the guidance of Antoine Arnauld (1612-94), younger brother of Mère Angelique. In his influential work De la fréquente Communion (1643), Arnauld set forth the requirement that, in order to receive the sacrament worthily, one not only had to be free of mortal sin, as most theologians held, but even of venial sin, and moreover had to have complete sorrow for all past offenses because of the love of God, entirely independently of any fear of condemnation or hell, what is known as perfect contrition.
The attitude of the Jansenists was reflected in the treatment of Racine in the work of the historian Escholier, who entitled his chapter on Racine “The Prodigal Son.” The Jansenists saw Racine’s triumphs as perhaps France’s greatest dramatist as an equivalent to the Prodigal’s whoring in Babylon.
In 1677, after his greatest theatrical triumph with Phèdre, Racine suffered the pangs of a guilty conscience. He abandoned his mistress and married a simple, pious woman, Catherine de Romanet, who never read a single word of his writings. He consulted a priest, who told him he had to abandon the theater and reconcile with the nuns at Port Royal to obtain forgiveness. He contacted Antoine Arnauld, who confirmed that it was necessary that Racine abandon the theater if he was to save his soul. After that, Racine wrote only two morality plays for the girls at the school at St. Cyr, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), the latter of which, at least, showed Racine’s continuing genius.
Bryce was greatly upset by what he discovered in the course of his researches. In the past, he had seen the Jansenists as particularly holy reformers who were persecuted by the Jesuits because they threatened the Jesuit monopoly of education with their petites écoles. But these studies shed an entirely new light on the situation. Although he had doubts that it was the intention of Cornelius Jansen, in the hands of the Arnaulds in the region around Paris the movement became every bit as narrow and self-righteous as the Puritans around Cromwell in contemporary England. In particular, Bryce conceived a strong dislike for Antoine Arnauld. He found the French theologian’s rejection of free will in the process of salvation entirely unacceptable. As he had so often in the past, Bryce determined that any such theology, or psychology, or epistemology, or science, which deprived humans of a meaningful role in their own salvation was contrary to his understanding of Catholic doctrine, and of the love which he believed God has for his creatures. His belief in the importance of free will as an essential component of any idea of human dignity triumphed over his respect for the sincerity of the Jansenists.
Moreover, Bryce was turned off by the narrowness of the Jansenists in insisting that in order to attain salvation, Racine had to abandon the theater. This also smacked of the Puritans in England at more or less the same period. It was a narrow and joyless approach to holiness. While it was entirely appropriate for his confessors to demand that Racine give up his mistresses, to insist that he give up his career was simple narrow-mindedness. As Bryce saw it, God had given Racine the talent to be an outstanding dramatist, and to use that talent for good was the proper response to this gift, but to deny it was to deny God’s benevolence. In short, Bryce came to see the French Jansenists as just another manifestation of the narrow-mindedness and blinkered attitude otherwise expressed in fundamentalism in religion. This narrow and blinkered approach ran completely counter to the mainstream of Christianity, as understood by Bryce, which embraced not only reason, but also human emotions as gifts of God when properly used. As he had attempted to explain to Damon, God saw the human as good, and the Church rejected the dualist proposition that the physical was evil. That did not mean ignoring the reality of the imperfect and limited nature of humans. That did not mean rejecting the doctrine of original sin. Bryce definitely did not align himself with the Pelagians, who denied any role for God and grace in the process of salvation, and insisted that mankind could attain that goal on its own. But he considered that he, like the Church historically, held a middle position, a balance between the naivité of those who believed in the unfettered goodness of natural man, and the Calvinists and Jansenists who emphasized the depravity of mankind and the inability of humans to contribute, through free will, to their own salvation. Having reassessed his opinion of the Jansenists, Bryce spent a good deal of time on Monday and Tuesday preparing a decent rough draft of a paper to be turned in to Professor Anjot when classes resumed on Wednesday.
Damon, meanwhile, in addition to his own academic work, was keeping an eye on his partner’s spirits. He was pleased to note that Bryce did not seem to be as unhappy as he was on Sunday evening, and in fact, seemed quite pleased with the way things were going by Tuesday. Tuesday was still part of the fall break, and so, even though most of the brothers would be back in town because of classes starting the next day, there was no Sigma Alpha Tau fraternity meeting that Tuesday evening. Instead, Bryce and Damon got together with Mike and David and Jason and Nate over dinner.
As the meal drew to a close, Mike incautiously commented that he heard Bryce was predicting the end of American civilization.
Bryce gave a serious reply. “I don’t think there is any distinct American civilization, but I have serious doubts about the future of Western Civilization, of which we have always been a part up until recently.”
“Are you serious?” David asked.
“Yes,” Bryce simply replied.
“He was going on all Sunday evening about the evils of modern society,” Jason added for the benefit of the two who were not there.
Damon did not want the conversation to go in that direction, as he was concerned about the depression which seemed to settle on his partner whenever this topic was discussed. But despite several pretty obvious attempts to change the subject, the others kept coming back to wanting to know what Bryce had to say. Then, giving up on that, Damon proposed to move the discussion back to the apartment, where he felt he could mitigate any negative responses on the part of Bryce. As a result, the six guys reassembled at the Watson-Winslow apartment and settled in for an extended discussion.
“Okay, Bryce. Damon seems worried that we’re going to gang up on you or something, so I’m willing to handle this any way you want,” Jason said. “How about just telling the rest of us what you mean about Western Civilization being in trouble.”
Bryce felt very much on the spot. He knew his friends, even perhaps his Catholic friends, would not agree with his analysis, but he still felt he was correct. He had given this matter a lot of thought. It was kind of like what Chris said about his approach in the English history class. He had studied the matter, and was making decisions based on data the others did not share. So, he decided to go slow.
“On September 21 Damon and I had tea with our landlord, Dr. Caldwell. At that time, he discussed his approach to teaching Western Civ, which made a lot of sense to me. It kind of pulled together in some kind of order a lot of individual ideas I had banging about in my head without much connection among them. Anyway, he defined Western Civilization as the product of four contributing elements, Greek reason, Roman order, Christian morality, and Germanic energy. I think Damon would agree that he made it very clear that he did not think there was anything genetic or racial in the composition of Western Civilization, but rather it was a combination which happened to come together in Western Europe, but which was human in scope. Are you with me so far?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what Dr. Caldwell said,” Damon confirmed.
“I can see where the inclusion of Christianity is going to be a source of ... shall we say, further discussion,” Jason said. “But for now, go ahead.”
“You’re right, Jason,” Bryce said. “Dr. Caldwell said, and I agree, that by leaving out any one of these component parts, you no longer have Western Civilization. As I see it, that’s simply a statement of historical fact. You might argue whether that is a good thing or not, and whether the secular society which seems to be emerging is an improvement or not, but I think it is a major change when one of the ideological foundations of our civilization is abandoned.”
“So this is what you mean when you say that our civilization is under attack,” David concluded.
“Not the whole story, but a big part of it,” Bryce assented.
In a humorous tone, Nate added, “The secular society you dislike sounds a lot like California.”
“I’m not at all sure California, if by that you mean southern California and the entertainment industry, is part of Western Civilization,” Bryce replied in the same spirit.
“Oh, let’s include all of California, and, after all, it represents the wave of the future,” Nate goaded him.
“A future I hope never to experience,” Bryce replied.
“But, Bryce, the United States has had that wall of separation between church and state ever since our founding,” David objected, returning to serious discussion.
“Several things occur to me, David,” Bryce replied. “First of all, that phrase, ‘a wall of separation,’ is not found in any of the basic documents establishing the American government. It first appears in a private letter of Thomas Jefferson, who, admittedly, was pretty anti-Christian, but he could not be so in any official capacity. Second, what does appear in the first amendment to the US Constitution is the prohibition against the establishment of religion. That’s not the same thing. Okay, recent court decisions have tended to make it the same thing, but that’s not what the historical record shows.”
“How recent are these changes you’re talking about?” Mike asked.
“Since World War II. More specifically, since the 1960s,” Bryce replied.
“So, what was the situation before that?” Jason asked.
“The non-establishment clause of the Constitution originally applied only to the federal government, and was adopted because in the later eighteenth century different kinds of Protestantism were established in different states, and there was no way to get the Congregationalists of New England, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, and the Episcopalians of Maryland to agree on what the national church should be,” Bryce began.
“Wait. I thought Maryland was a Catholic colony,” David interrupted.
“Nope. Maryland was founded by the Catholic Lord Baltimore, but from the outset it was truly a state with no established religion, mainly because, as an English colony, it was politically impossible to have a Catholic establishment. Catholics and other Christians were equal in Maryland until 1688, but then the Protestants seized power from the third Lord Baltimore, and the Church of England was established until after the Revolution. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics could openly practice their religion only in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island,” Bryce informed the others.
“It was not until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 that the provisions of the federal Constitution, such as those in the First Amendment, were made applicable to the states. In fact, there were established churches in several states up to the 1830s,” Bryce further stated.
“I didn’t know that,” Jason admitted.
“What the disestablishment clause originally meant was that none of the various forms of Protestantism were to be made the official religion of the whole United States. With the possible exception of Jefferson and a couple of other extremists, no one in the later eighteenth century even imagined eliminating the pervasive influence of Christianity in American life. While no specific type of Protestantism was established, the United States was pretty definitely a Christian nation, and more specifically a Protestant nation.
“As huge numbers of Catholics began to arrive during the nineteenth century, first from Germany and Ireland, later from Italy and Eastern Europe, things began to change. Gradually, Catholics became included in the concept of the United States as a Christian nation. Laws requiring one to be Protestant to be able to vote, for example, were gradually repealed. By the mid and later nineteenth century, there was a backlash. The so-called Know Nothing Party, which became prominent in the 1850s, was stridently anti-Catholic. The Ku Klux Klan is primarily known for being anti-black, but it was also anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-foreign. The so-called public schools were, in effect, Protestant schools, which is why the Catholics established the Catholic school system, beginning in these years of the mid nineteenth century.”
“So, you’re saying that, despite the First Amendment, the United States had an established religion,” Jason said.
“That depends on what you mean by ‘established,’” Bryce replied. “Not in the sense that the Church of England is established, with Queen Elizabeth being both head of state and head of the church. Not the way the Lutheran church is established in the Scandinavian countries. No one has to pay tithes to an established church, and no church is supported by public taxation. And certainly there is no establishment in the way that Islam is established in just about every Arabic country. But as far as the general public was concerned, America was a Christian nation, and anything attacking Christianity was un-American.”
“I can sort of back up some of what Bryce is saying about the public schools,” David unexpectedly volunteered. “As I think you all know, my family belonged to a pretty fundamentalist denomination until recently, when things kind of broke up, and only Mom is still a member of that church. But in our community a couple of the members of the church were also teachers in the public schools, and, believe me, there was no separation of church and state with them. I know of one teacher who would ask her fourth grade pupils on Monday morning which of them went to church the day before, and she would say those who did not were destined for hell. And I know of one middle school teacher who had the class recite the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of home room each morning. There was one Catholic girl in the class, and she would not recite that last part, you know, the “For thine is the kingdom ...” part. The teacher gave her detention. When her father protested, the teacher said it was her responsibility to make certain she did it right.”
“That goes further than anything I know about,” Bryce said, “and is probably illegal, but it was probably typical of public schools in the nineteenth century. Today, many of the public schools are just as strong advocates of secularism, and just as intolerant of Christianity. I do know of one recent instance where a teacher insisted that her fourth grade pupils agree that all out valuers are learned from experience. When a parent objected that this was in conflict with the idea of conscience, the teacher dismissed that as superstition.”
“What’s that business with the Lord’s Prayer about?” Damon asked, still attempting to avoid anything too controversial.
“That last phrase, ‘for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever,’ is not in the original texts, but was adopted from a late Greek text by the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, and remains. From a Catholic perspective, there’s nothing wrong with the words themselves, but they are not part of the original prayer taught by Jesus,” Bryce explained.
“What about debtors?” David asked.
“Simple matter of different translations of the same word. The Church of England, and the Authorized Version of the Bible, translated the word as ‘trespasses’ while in Scotland it was translated as ‘debts,’ which is used mainly by Presbyterians,” Bryce said.
“Okay, but from what you say, Bryce, it seems that you Catholics were being discriminated against as much as anyone else. So why are you so upset that this unofficial Protestant establishment is now being dissolved?” Jason questioned.
“Despite the biases, there was a common ground between Catholic and Protestant in what C. S. Lewis calls mere Christianity. There was a broad common ground for public cooperation. By the twentieth century, and especially after two world wars in which Catholics played a significant role, we were being accepted as full partners in the American dream. At the time of the Korean War, in the 1950s, I remember reading, as much as half of the US Marines were Catholic. We proved we could be good Americans despite the discrimination, and the Protestants were abandoning their fundamentalist associations, so things were going well for us. That, of course, reached its high point with the election of that Irishman, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as President in 1960. Western Civilization, and with it the American branch of Western Civilization, could encompass another type of Christianity. And, in fact, the Jews were being accepted at about the same time. The Judeo-Christian belief in a transcendent creator God who established objective norms of right and wrong remained the underlying assumption in American society. No one bothered people who did not go to church, except maybe the same type of yahoos who harassed blacks, but people with no religion were definitely considered outside the mainstream of American society.”
“You said that began to change in the 1960s. Are you talking about the assassination of President Kennedy?” David asked.
“No. I don’t give any credence to conspiracy theories about that event, or any other. No, it was not some kind of evil anti-Catholic conspiracy which resulted in that assassination. Nor was it a conspiracy that began the dechristianization of American society. It was the schools,” Bryce said.
“Explain,” Jason asked.
“By the 1940s it seemed that Americans had accepted Catholics enough that the double burden on Catholics of educating their own children in Catholic schools, while still paying for public schools through taxation, could be modified. So, there were proposals of various sorts which would allow public funding for some aspects of Catholic schools, or provide some relief to those who paid for private education, something like what has existed in Canada for well over a century. In reaction to this movement, an organization was formed in 1947 called Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. One of its leading members was a fellow called Paul Blanshard, author of a book entitled, American Freedom and Catholic Power, published in 1949, which was a revised version of all the anti-Catholic propaganda of the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan and others from the previous century. According to Blanshard, Catholics could not be good Americans because they owed their primary allegiance to the Pope, a foreign potentate. He criticized the Catholic boycott of public schools, without addressing the pervasive Protestant nature of those schools. It was one of the most blatant appeals to prejudice in the twentieth century, and was quite widely accepted.
“It was only a short step from this organization to the ACLU today, which is the partner of the POAU in continuing the attack not only on Catholics, but on Christianity in any public sphere today. The ACLU is older than the POAU, and was originally a pretty decent organization, devoted to defending individual rights. But sometime in the early 1960s it became viciously anti-Christian, and has remained so ever since. It seems to be the position of the ACLU that you had better keep your religion in the closet, or else, which is kind of odd when it so obviously is opposed to forcing gays to stay in the closet. According to the ACLU, there’s nothing wrong with a gay pride parade, but a Corpus Christi procession is an infringement on the Constitution. Once it was obvious that Catholics could be attacked successfully, it did not take long for the secularists to attack all forms of Christianity. Once again, even though the secularists were and are a small minority, the divisions among Christians undermined us. If you doubt that America was a Christian nation up til then, please explain why the secularists find it necessary to continue to attack public expressions of Christianity,” Bryce concluded.
“Do you really feel that Christianity is being discriminated against today? You even said earlier that you think hatred for Christianity is wide-spread in our society. Yet, it seems to me to be pretty widely accepted,” Jason insisted.
“The media had done a great job of convincing the general public that any public support of religion is anti-American, when in historical fact the opposite is true,” Bryce stated. “People are so one-dimensional, so present oriented, they know nothing about how we got here. So people who identify themselves as Christian can also be found opposed to any public expression of Christianity. You see them quoted in the media all the time. ‘I’m Christian, but ....’ or ‘I’m Catholic, but ....’ The ‘but’ is going along with the media in saying three should be no public expression of religious belief. It should be entirely a private matter. Well, in my opinion, any so-called religion which is purely private is worthless. If it does not affect one’s whole life, it’s not much of a religion.
“I have given this matter a great deal of thought, and have researched various aspects of it, because of my personal concerns. So, yes, I do feel threatened, or discriminated against. I feel that when courts tell us we cannot have prayers at school, or at public events like sporting events between schools. I feel that when we are told we cannot have the Ten Commandments posted in court houses, in clear opposition to the historical reality that our legal system has its foundations in Judeo-Christian morality. I feel that when we are told that having a crèche scene on public property at Christmas time is a violation of the Constitution. I feel attacked when I am told that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase ‘under God’ is not permitted in our schools. I am convinced that a significant part of the anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant propaganda is essentially anti-Catholic. I feel that when such institutions as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are pressured into abandoning any reference to God. And I especially feel that when our courts say that the child in the womb is not a legal person, and the mother can kill her child more or less at will, completely contrary to the entire Western legal and moral tradition, and then the media make it out that those of us who support the historic position are some kind of extremist fanatics. It is even worse when the government tells us that we who believe this to be a grievous sin, are compelled to pay for it. Yes, Christianity is under attack in America today, and with it the foundations of Western Civilization,” Bryce concluded.
“I think,” Damon said, “Bryce has made his position clear. So I suggest that we leave any further discussion to another time.”
The group then broke up for the evening.