Kayleigh McEnany told the receptive folk at Fox News’s show ‘Outnumbered’ that she wants to fill the world with ‘Christian babies’. McEnany, whose first lie as WH press secretary was to say she would never lie, is being dishonest in her aspiration. While she would be delighted with a world swamped with indoctrinated youngsters, she lies that she wants them to be Christian, at least Christian in Jesus’s philosophy. She means ‘Christian’ as in ‘white’.
Besides, there are no such things as Christian babies. People are born pure. It is only later that they are inculcated into whatever cult their parents belong to. If that were not the case, religion would not be geographical. Where you are born has far more influence on what religion you will end up in than anything God might do. Or, in the case of many atheists, which religious tradition they eventually reject.
But even if McEnany didn’t mean white, it is still a horribly racist thing to say. What are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu women supposed to do? Abstain from sex? Use contraception? Or, In an exercise of hypocrisy so familiar to conservative evangelicals, should a non-Christian woman, who finds herself pregnant, get an abortion?McAnany ‘s actual words were,
“The [antidote] to darkness is light. And the [antidote] to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies, who can bring that light to the world.”
What ‘light’ has McEnany’s Christianity graced the world? None. Jesus had no use for nationalism, bigotry, hate, falsehoods, selfishness, and rapacity. He turned his back on the sanctimonious and embraced the poor, the downtrodden, the foreigner, and the prisoner. He advocated peace and forgiveness. And he demanded his followers lead charitable and loving lives while tending to their relationship with God. Whereas McEnany, and her fellow travelers, cleave to a philosophy that promotes dominionism, and a complete antipathy to the teachings of Jesus. It is impossible to imagine Jesus cursing gays and spitting on transexuals.
What would the Son of God have made of the ‘prosperity gospel’ — the idea that God rewards the faithful with cash? Where in the Bible did Jesus say his followers ought to shop at Neiman Marcus and live in mansions? And when did he say that people spreading his message should beg the faithful for the wherewithal to buy a personal jet?
I am not religious, but if the world were populated by many people who did lead good Christian lives — without foisting their beliefs on others — it would not be so terrible. But the thought of living in a world where an even greater number of moralizing hypocrites used their religious beliefs to justify interfering in other people’s lives is nauseating.
The Founders debated the rules of the road for a new nation. And when the dust settled, they had rejected religion as having any influence in the political structure and jurisprudence of the new nation. As Thomas Jefferson said,
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Or in modern speak, “do as you see fit, but stay the feck out of my business”.
McEnany and her kind reject the values of America's founders. Instead, they would return us to a new Dark Ages, where religious superstition, in cahoots with an unelected ruling class, would grind the common people under the heel of oppression. And snuff out the light of science, reason, and enlightenment.
Jesus wept.