Boy Scouts emergency
 

Hans Zeiger
March 12, 2005


The American Civil Liberties Union is a monster. Threatened by the slightest letter on ACLU letterhead, a victim yields and forgets Winston Churchill's exhortation to "never give in." One after another for decades, American institutions have been giving in to the ACLU's legal pursuit of political correctness. And the one institution that has been a symbol of strength and honor in the face of the ACLU, the Boy Scouts of America, may now be giving in.

Last month, the ACLU sent a letter to the Boy Scouts national headquarters threatening to sue any public school that sponsors a Boy Scout troop. A troop that is chartered to a public school is able to use its facilities and form important connections to the students of the school and the citizens of the community. According to a recent BSA annual report, the Boy Scouts' third largest type of sponsor is public schools, numbering over 10,000 Cub Scout, Tiger Cub, and Boy Scout units for some 363,000 Boy Scouts.

In recent years, controversy has surrounded public school sponsorship of Scout troops in major cities, and several hundred school districts have made decisions to prohibit Scout charters. It has been claimed repeatedly — by the ACLU, by school board members, by individual litigants, and by activist judges — that a Boy Scout partnership with a school is a direct violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is claimed precisely because the Boy Scouts believe in the standards of character that underlie the Constitution.

The Boy Scout Oath says, "On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." If there is a single statement of self-government, that is it. But self-government isn't cool with the ACLU. To maintain the belief that God reigns and that His order requires certain moral duties is to deny men their "right" to do wrong. Hold such rights as they may, men can never uphold the kind of Constitutional government we enjoy in America by exercising them. Character is the great requisite of American government.

The Boy Scouts are not about to abandon character. But there is no question that the ACLU has distracted the Scouts from singly pursuing its mission in recent years. A constant stream of litigation and controversy over its policies banning homosexuals and atheists has transformed the Boy Scouts from a universally respected community institution into a political and cultural symbol. The Boy Scouts of America has not changed — it clings to the same principles it did at its founding in 1910 — but the legal and moral culture has changed dramatically.

And at this moment, the Boy Scouts are feeling the weight of that change. The ACLU is the pressure agent, and the Boy Scouts realize the options: either give in or spend millions of dollars in the court of law and of public opinion defending the presence of chartered troops in America's public schools.

"We obviously don't want that [expensive lawsuits against schools] to happen," national Boy Scouts spokesman Gregg Shields told the Baptist Press. "Instead, the Boy Scouts have tried to protect the resources of our education partners by moving our charter from public schools to other community-based organizations such as parent-teacher organizations or Salvation Army units or nearby religious organizations."

But the Boy Scouts won't be doing a good turn and they won't be protecting their educational partners by withdrawing charters from thousands of public schools. The only service rendered would be toward the ACLU. If the Boy Scouts follow through with early plans to undo public school sponsorships, the ACLU will reach new heights of power in the American legal system. Without even filing a lawsuit, the ACLU will have the unprecedented ability to fell an organization or a cause with nothing more than a 37-cent stamp on a threat letter.

What the ACLU is doing is unacceptable. Americans cannot sit still. There are two things that we must do. First, we must contribute money to the Boy Scouts via www.give2bsa.org. Second, we must contribute feedback to the Boy Scouts by contacting the national or local organizations at www.bsalegal.org.

Tell the Boy Scouts: never give in. And tell the ACLU: get off my honor.

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*****

Students vs. professors
Hans Zeiger
February 1, 2005

"Marxism is dying globally," writes columnist and recent UCLA graduate Ben Shapiro. "But it's alive and kicking at America's universities." Shapiro's list of communist courses, texts, and activities in American higher education spans a chapter in his new book Brainwashed: How America's Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth.

Students can minor in Marxist Studies at University of California Riverside. A class in "Marxist Literary Theory" is offered at Rutgers University. There is "Black Marxism" at University of California Santa Barbara, and "Taking Marx Seriously" at Amherst College. "Engaging Cuba: Uncommon Approaches to the Common Good" is a course at the Evergreen State College that glorifies Castro's Cuba for its successes in education, health care, and agricultural production. These courses are more than partial to communist theory — they are actually like Red propaganda sessions. Capitalism — along with its accompanying institutions — is roundly portrayed as the source of all greed, inequality, and evil in general.

It would seem that the university communists have difficulty reconciling their belief that capitalism is evil with their other contention that there is no good or evil at all. A 2002 Zogby poll of 401 college seniors for the National Association of Scholars revealed that classroom relativism is overwhelming. Seventy-three percent of seniors said that the most frequent ethical position of their professors was: "what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity." Only a quarter of a college seniors replied that in their classrooms, "there are clear and uniform standards of right and wrong by which everyone should be judged."

At first glance, it may seem that the majority of college students are mindlessly following the lead of their professors. "Acceptance is the easiest road, and the road most often taken," writes Shapiro. "If the professor says that the sky is green, the sky must be green." Voting patterns suggest that college students become increasingly liberal as they move through their years of higher education. And one study between 2000 and 2003 showed that while 52 percent of students reported having attended church on a regular basis prior to college, only 29 percent were still going to church in their junior year. As William F. Buckley wrote in Up From Liberalism, "There is a correlation between the length of time one spends studying at the feet of liberals and the extent to which one comes to share their views."

Yet there are signs that today's students are not following everything their professors believe.

According to a 2003 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, most college and university students consider themselves spiritual, but find that their campuses do little to encourage their spirituality. Researchers surveyed 3,680 students at 46 institutions to discover that 73 percent of American college students find religion and spirituality to have helped in the development of their identity. But 62 percent report that their professors never encourage discussion of religion or spirituality. The report found that "students have deeply felt values and interests in spirituality and religion, but their academic work and campus programs seem to be divorced from it."

Still, the percentage of students who consider spiritual matters to be "very important" or "essential" in their lives rose from 51 percent in 2000 to 58 percent in 2003. In addition, those who consider a full personal worldview to be "very important" or "essential" rose from 43 percent to 52 percent, and those who believe that it is "very important" or "essential" to demonstrate compassion by helping the less fortunate climbed a remarkable fourteen points from 60 percent to 74 percent. Despite the efforts of the professors to sterilize their campuses of spiritual concerns, discussions, and practices, the growth in importance that students attach to their spiritual lives is significant.

Perhaps the most instructive gulf between professors and students is over the issue of abortion. According to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and Luntz Research Associates, about one percent of college professors support a legal ban on abortion. A 99 percent pro-abortion professoriate is a powerful majority.

But every year since 1990, with the exception of one, the support of college freshmen for abortion has fallen. In 1990, 64.9 percent of freshmen supported a right to abortion. By 1999, that number had fallen to 52.7 percent. According to a 2000 Gallup poll, 40 percent of 18 to 29-year olds — a higher percentage than any age group surveyed — believed that abortion should be restricted to a greater extent than it is now. And in 2004, 60 percent of 18 to 29-year olds said they supported a complete ban on abortion or minimal exceptions, according to a Zogby poll.

A growing sense of spirituality and a burgeoning identity with the pro-life cause are two outstanding features of today's students whose attitudes in those areas represent a widening chasm with their professors. In most other matters, the relativism that has been taught to — and apparently accepted — by today's American youth rests on the most infirm footing possible. Though young people claim to be relativists in large majorities, their faith in nothingness is weak, intellectually indefensible, and most importantly, counteracted by a lust for reality. On this I will write more in the future.

Hans Zeiger, 21, is a conservative activist and columnist from Puyallup, Washington. As an Eagle Scout, Hans is the founder and president of the Scout Honor Coalition, a grassroots network of Americans dedicated to preventing and countering politically correct attacks on the Scouts.

Hans writes a column that appears in RenewAmerica, the Seattle Sentinel, WorldNetDaily.com, GOPUSA.com, OpinionEditorials.com, Sierra Times, American Daily, America's Voices, The Right Report, and other publications. Hans was a freelance columnist for the Seattle Times NEXT page, and he has written articles for the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Insight, Birmingham News, Conservative Battleline, Wisconsin State Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, The New American, and Townhall.com.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/zeiger/050201

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*****

What's wrong with the Boy Scouts?
Hans Zeiger

Are the Boy Scouts of America really so awful that they are no longer welcome in our schools? On June 1, the Portland (Maine) School Committee voted six to three to ban the Boy Scouts from distributing promotional literature to students. The committee argues that it wishes to uphold its commitment to diversity and nondiscrimination. Far from doing so, the committee has discriminated against one of the most diverse and valuable organizations in America.

This summer will commence the national Boy Scout Jamboree. It will be a diverse gathering of people from every geographical region of the country, every ethnicity and race, every economic class, every political belief, and every major religious practice. The Boy Scouts celebrated diversity long before it was the popular thing to do. Anyone wishing to stand by the idea that the Scouts are behind the times on diversity ought to visit the Jamboree and see for themselves.

The Boy Scouts is not a hate group comparable to Hitler Youth ("brown shirt" has become common epithet against the Scouts) or the Ku Klux Klan, or a militant terrorist corps like the Taliban (as the Philadelphia Daily News editorialized). Neither is it a church (as federal Judge Napoleon Jones defined it) or a public accommodation (as several courts have defined it).

The Boy Scouts is a private organization that begins meetings with this simple oath: "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." And what is wrong with that?

That oath is a Statement of Self-Government, if ever there was such a thing. In America, — though they teach it not in Portland, Maine — self-government is the foundation of all other kinds of government. If we are to have laws, we must have order. If we are to have a political charter, we must first have personal character. And what is wrong with that?

A Scout is "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent." What is wrong with that?

A Scout does a good turn daily. What is wrong with that?

A Scout is prepared. What is wrong with that?

The answer, enemies of Scouting might suggest, is honor. The problem with the code of character that Scouts must adhere to is the idea of honor, the idea that an individual is accountable before God and his fellow man to uphold his duty with integrity, service, and selflessness. For if one is subject to moral laws higher than himself, and his honor is bound up in duty to those laws, the supremacy of the individual must meet its defeat.

Boy Scouting is a bold resistance to the rising individualism of the age. Scouting teaches self-government, not selfishness. It should come as no surprise that the Boy Scouts are hated by the most vocal of the individualists whose moral agendas have no compatibility with Scouting: atheists and homosexual activists.

So the school committee in Portland, Maine is making a mistake. They've declared war on the best things America has to offer. They've set themselves firmly against self-government. And they've violated their own commitment to nondiscrimination by discriminating against the nation's finest youth organization.

Perhaps the Portland School Committee should hear from supporters of the Boy Scouts. Contact Superintendent Mary Jo O'Connor at superintendent@&ltNOSPAM>portlandschools.org. Tell her to continue allowing the Boy Scouts to have promotional literature in the Portland Schools.

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Episcopal boredom
Let me see if I can capture the mood at the 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Columbus, Ohio.

The main thing about it is the generation. It is a gathering, chiefly, of baby boomers on the older end of their cohort. If they preceded the boom, they at least participated in the '60s. I half expected the long hair and dope to flow with the crowds that came yesterday to hear the debates about homosexuality and the consequently precarious relations of the Episcopal Church to the global Anglican Communion. But these are bald and gray heads, most of them.

It is not exactly the grayness and baldness of Rotary and Kiwanis. It has some resemblance to a university faculty lounge, or a mainstream pressroom, or a bureaucratic social service agency conference. It is at once endowed with the sanity of political correctness and the boredom of disappointed age. One committee report to the convention declares, "The Episcopal Church has the lowest birth rate and highest mean age of any mainline denomination."

Not only do Episcopalians have few children while celebrating abortion (including a prayer for abortion in a proposed liturgy entitled "Liturgy for the Burial of a Child"), children of Episcopalians often leave the church for more exciting things. Thus, youth is a rare thing here at the Episcopal Convention. Where it appears, it is touted for publicity; it is managed by coordinators who must grant permission for a young person to give an interview. Not yet have I been able to acquaint with a member of Episcopal Youth for journalistic purposes.

It's a bit discouraging for a member of the press pool, especially given the extent to which the Episcopal Church has gone to utter the D-word. Actually there are two D-words. The first is "diversity," the second is "dialogue." "Dialogue" appears 82 times in the Report to the 75th General Convention, which contains all of the reports of the Episcopal commissions, committees, agencies and boards, known to the church as CCABs.

Dialogue means lots of meetings. Dialogue has no real objective, but is an objective within itself. It aims at no absolutes, because there are none in the liberal world of the Episcopalian.

The Episcopalians are a unique brand of folk, celebrating their own lack of identity, speaking their own tongue, exchanging their own confusions.

One priest at a hearing of the Special Committee on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion on Tuesday explained that a proposed covenant establishing something like a purpose for the church would be "a small touchstone of an age gone by that holds little value for today." He said that the church's identity rests in its experience rather than its covenantal beliefs: "We should not surrender that identity to salve the consciences of those who demand our submission to their Puritan mission."

Meanwhile, the Episcopal Church is on the decline.

Episcopalians are the least likely group of Christians to attend church every week, according to a new Gallup survey. Episcopalian in-house statistics confirm the bad news. Only a third of Episcopalians attend church weekly, and according to the Standing Commission on Stewardship and Development, "For many in our church, Sunday worship is the only venue for Christian formation." That leaves only a handful of faithful men and women in the Episcopal Church, and most of them seem to have stayed home from the 75th General Convention.

The Episcopal Church, for all of its progressivism, is a rather wimpy affair. There is a general boredom here about the Bible. Eternity is little spoken of. Episcopalians seem content to dialogue about little sins and worldly things that turn out rather damning by the biblical standard. Equality for homosexuals in the priesthood and in marriage, justice for Cuba, reparations for slavery, anti-racism training, reconciliation training, gender-neutral language, abortion rights – it is political, and politically correct, beyond the appetite of the normal American.

It is the "Puritan mission" that seems to attract Americans to church. Churches that challenge and demand are vibrant and growing. Their members evangelize, have big families, value Christian education, stay in the church.

As for the Episcopalian elite here at the convention, they lord their own corner, littler than their ambitions would suggest. The church politicians gathered here, determined to undo poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism and oppression from the Bible, the church and the world, find as they conspire that they weaken.

See my latest reports on the convention at Virtue Online.

Hans Zeiger is author of "Reagan's Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill" and "Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America." A student at Hillsdale College in Michigan, he blogs at www.reaganchildren.com.

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*****

Reagan’s Children Rising

By Hans Zeiger

 Note: The following commentary is adapted from "Reagan's Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill" by Hans Zeiger (Broadman and Holman, 2006). Used by permission.

 "Conservative youth" was once considered an oxymoron. The British Social Attitudes Survey published in 2004 demonstrated that young Brits born around the time of Margaret Thatcher's conservative term as prime minister are personally conservative. They side with their parents on many issues, causing the Guardian to declare that "the age of teenage rebellion is over" in its Dec. 7, 2004, issue. The British press calls them "Thatcher's Children."

 "Thatcher's Children" was coined to describe England's economically conservative young people. The Adam Smith Institute polled British youth that were between the ages of 16 and 21 at the turn of the millennium. According to Grover Norquist in the May 1999 issue of American Spectator, 48 percent of British respondents declared a desire to own a business, while only 1 percent admitted a desire to work in local government or civil service. While only 7 percent of young Britons say that a background of privilege is the measure of success, 72 percent say that individual determination is essential. Clearly, Margaret Thatcher's drive for deregulation, lower taxes and smaller government paid off in the political and economic views of young Brits.

 Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform and the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, first proposed that Americans refer to the savvy young entrepreneurs who came of age during the Reagan years as "Reagan's Children." In the article for American Spectator magazine, Norquist wrote, "Ronald Reagan has already entered the history books as the man who brought down the Berlin Wall, but he is also the father to the new investor class that is changing American politics. If America's establishment press was as colorful as the British tabloids they would be known as 'Reagan's children.'"  

In referring to the "new investor class," Norquist pointed to three trends. First, labor union membership, as a percentage of the total voting population, has been on the decline. Second, the percentage of American workers who are employed by the government is decreasing. Finally, political age demographics are shifting away from the World War II generation toward younger voters. And young people, of Generation X and the Millennials, are technologically savvy, innovative and enterprising. Their economic aspirations make them more fiscally conservative than their parents or grandparents.  

The fact is the title of "Reagan's Children" could apply as well to any of three generations. Baby boomers worked to elect Reagan, and most of today's boomer conservative leaders were influenced by Ronald Reagan's words and ideas. The Reagan years were formative for Generation X; Norquist's analysis would qualify them for the label.  

Within our generation, a minority is returning to the traditional moral and intellectual foundations of America instead of rebelling against our heritage. These young Christians and conservatives are well situated to take on key positions of influence in every realm of ideas, policy, culture and faith in which there has been a dearth of conservative ideas during the past several decades. More specifically, the majority of cultural institutions of the West have come to be dominated by verifiably liberal ideas. And among what we'll call Reagan's Children are young Americans who are dedicated to replacing liberal establishments with reinvigorated institutions and right ideas.  

Reagan's Children are at the leading edge of the generation. The 30 million of us born when Ronald Reagan was president are the first half of the generational cohort broadly considered to be Generation Y, the Millennial Generation or Generation Next. Though present trends suggest our younger siblings will be more morally conservative than we are, the Reagan's Children cohort is the group that is currently emerging, providing the most important evidence of a national conservative shift.  

At the present moment, Reagan's Children are voting for the first time, going to college, forming our worldview ideas and choosing our first jobs. We are the young soldiers fighting the war on terrorism, the first cohort to have been born with MTV and the first cohort to have grown up with the Internet.  

The signs of a more actively conservative generation are numerous. Homeschooling has long been on the rise. Enrollment at evangelical Christian colleges is outpacing the enrollment at other colleges and universities, and membership is thriving in conservative youth groups like the Boy Scouts of America. While advocates of abortion go on aborting their children, evangelical Christians are having large families. The '60s generation of radical professors is about to retire, and the rebels on campus aren't all liberals anymore. The video game generation is defying the odds by embracing faith, volunteering in communities across the land and winning a war on terrorism.  

All of this may come as a fright to those who've worked hard for the past few generations to tear up the foundations of the American order. Sensing their place on the losing end of the generation, young liberals are appropriately gloomy. "It's hard not to feel that we were born at the wrong time," liberal writer Anya Kamenetz writes. "We're Reagan Babies; the pendulum has been swinging in one direction for most of our lives."  

More than a pendulum is swinging, though. Providence is on the move.  

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*****

By Hans Zeiger

At the June 15 commencement ceremony for Foothill High School in Nevada, school officials turned off the valedictorian’s microphone in the middle of her speech. Why? Brittany McComb dared to speak about her faith in Jesus Christ.

Brittany was ambitious as she grew up. She was a star on the swim team. She said in her speech that she was determined to be first place in every competition throughout junior high and high school. But she added that even first place was not enough; success was too small a shape to fit the emptiness she felt in her heart. She needed "Something more than me and what I do with my life, something more than my friends and what they do with their own lives."

So Brittany quit the swim team, and she realized that God was the thing missing in her life. "This hole gapes as a wide-open trench when filled with swimming, with friends, with family, with dating, with shopping, with partying, with drinking, with anything but God. But His love fits. His love is ‘that something more’ we all desire. It’s unprejudiced, it’s merciful, it’s free, it’s real, it’s huge and it’s everlasting."

Here the audience applauded. And here moved the ACLU.

Word moved along behind the scene, where salaries and administrative ladders and professional reputations hung in the balance. Unlike the Class of 2006, the career administrator, who tired quickly of the classroom and contented himself in the province of paperwork and social engineering in exchange of a raise, had still to contend with the ACLU.

"God’s love is so great that he gave His only son up…"

And the administrator, owing his allegiance to a higher power, pulled the plug.

That higher power, we know, is not God. The ACLU reigns today as the gilded god of the judiciary, and of the Boy Scouts meeting room, and of the classroom, and of the graduation ceremony. But it is not God.

It is reminiscent of old Babylon, where King Darius forbade prayer to anything but his own majesty. Daniel, caught praying to the Living God with his windows open, faced the lions and lived to chat with Darius about it.

Brittany, caught speaking about her faith in the God of Daniel at commencement service, faced the ACLU. Whatever the administrators and their backers in the ACLU (which did asseverate on the case after the microphone deadened) may still say about the impropriety of her speech, Brittany was clearly within the bounds of the First Amendment freedom of expression, and within the bounds of Christian character.

The frequent remark of secularists is that Christians are more likely to wear faith upon their sleeves than upon their hearts. If they are secularists of the religious sort, mainly of the mainline churches, they will quote the Sermon on the Mount: "Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them." Also, "when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men."

These are not altogether baseless quotations; they are, after all, from the Bible. And even if they are grossly misapplied by secular fundamentalists, they should temper our ambitions. At the least we should give a charitable hearing to the secular allegation, because it is not altogether baseless.There is a spiritual pride that card-carrying zealots of the Religious Right are particularly disposed toward. I think sometimes that the Religious Right deserves to be reminded of the Pharisees.

But Brittany McComb is no Pharisee. Hers were not the fighting words of a boaster or a condemner or a wager. It was the simple testimony of grace.

The Pharisees were not corrupt because they did their works in public. Jesus, after all, had a very public ministry. The Pharisaical fault is pride.

And the Christian virtue is humility.

It is of a Christian mind—a humble mind—that a young woman should attribute her success to her Savior. It is the sort of thing one would not expect of a generation tending to self-preoccupation.

And it is the indication of a power at work in our day against all of the best plotted efforts of the secularists and their legal enforcers in the ACLU. Brittany herself is the proof of the words they wouldn’t let her say, that man can "take part in something greater than himself. That something is God’s plan." Call it youthful idealism. Call it a conspiracy. It is much more.

Hans Zeiger is author of the new book Reagan’s Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill, www.hanszeiger.net.

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This is a Religious War

By Hans Zeiger 

If there are doubts about the title of this article, perhaps it is because we have not thought of this war on Islamic terror as a religious war. But it must be a religious war. 

Because the terrorists define it as a religious war. At a rally this week, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad declared, “On one side, it's corrupt powers of the criminal U.S. and Britain and the Zionists…with modern bombs and planes. And on the other side is a group of pious youth relying on God.”

Ahmedinejad and his young thugs are men of faith. The Muslim devotees in England who would have blown up ten planes this week were young—ages 17 to 35—and they were faithful. One young man among the arrested terrorists gave up life as a slothful pothead to become a Muslim. These little groups of “pious youth” are are on a ji’had to take the West, and they will not stop because a postmodern, enlightened Westerner of the Left asks for tolerance and peace.  

Islamic terrorists have the passion, energy, and determination to destroy America if they are given the chance. And Europe seems to be giving them more than a chance. So ultimately the question is, can the West survive the threat of Islamic terrorism? It is easy to have doubts about Europe, and it is easy to have doubts about the majority of young people in America.

  But this is not about majorities. The terrorists understand that. For them, as for us, it is about a minority of people who understand their capacity to make a difference. Every social movement of any consequence in history has begun with a small group of people who coalesced around a central theme, recognized the urgency of advancing it, and devoted their lives together to winning some victory.

  It is by appealing to the deepest spiritual impulses in the human spirit that a man or woman will respond and take up arms, or take up the pen, or teach, or preach. This war on Islamic terror will not be won merely by dint of weapons and security screenings. It pits a religion against our culture, and only by religion can we entirely respond and win.

  But Burke’s Law is not necessarily true in reverse: evil will triumph when good men do nothing, but good will not always triumph when evil men do nothing. Sometimes, it is a reaction to the works of the evil that the good are brought to action. It is rare that men will act without a sense of emergency.

  Though the nation is half asleep, there is hope, and we must build upon it.  

  Conservative Christians, it seems, have long sensed an emergency. They have been aware that the Left has strongholds in places of cultural influence, in the academy, and the media, and the law, and in much of the church. As a result, conservative Christians have prepared their children far better than liberals to fight the battles of our generation. Liberals, in fact, haven’t had many children. They’ve aborted too many. And out of the curse of abortion has come this blessing: the Left is losing demographically.

  And even though in the final analysis it isn’t about numbers, it is about passion. The Left has failed to pass on the passion of the Sixties to the rising generation. There are many young liberals, of course, but they are not aspiring leaders. They are jaded. They are self-absorbed.

And so, we might fret about how the West, too, is losing demographically. But there is enough of a conservative impulse remaining in this country, enough of a sense that the values of popular culture and consumerism are insufficient to sustain soul and civilization. “Reality” is the buzzword of our time.  

To deny the reality of the soul, and of the eternity of the soul, is to deny that the person of that soul exists. It is the height of disregard. That way of thinking is dead. It has failed the rising generation, and young people long for something more.

Young conservative Christians seek a more humane society, a return to the enduring things of our civilization. Few though they are in number, they are determined to fight the war of our time that will be fought not merely on the battlefields of Iraq and Iran, but on the battlefields of Hollywood and the university campus and the home and the Internet and the school classroom. If we are to defend against the invasion of a growing Islamic extremism, we must offend against the fortress of postmodernism.

  And we too must have a “pious group of youth relying on God,” not Ahmedinejad’s merciless Allah, but on the Living God of the New Testament.

  It is a time for young leaders. We cannot yield our civilization.

Hans Zeiger is the author of Reagan’s Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill and Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America. He blogs at www.reaganchildren.com.

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