Over the weekend I happened upon a letter from some decades ago where Dorothy Day was encouraging a journalist to write about the remarkable Little Sisters of the Poor. As Mary Eberstadt puts it in her new book It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and It’s Enemies, “Even among other people engaged in charity work, the Little Sisters are spoken of in hushed tones, so revered are they and so transparently good in their mission.”
About the Little Sisters having to be in court all these years now, and other threats to religious freedom in recent years, that have had an impact on adoption and other charity work, Eberstadt writes:
Deep creedal passions are at work here—and not just those of Christians. Otherwise, why would other people works so hard to accomplish goals that on the face of things are inexplicable and hurtful, like harassing and even closing charities that help poor people.
The answer is that they do not think what they do is deplorable. They believe they are in possession of a higher truth, and they fight to universalize it – to proselytize just as anyone else who believes himself charged with guardianship of the Truth seeks to do.
Beneath the clashes over Christian charities lies a massive tectonic shift in Western cultures generally. Whether you believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God on earth, or believe instead that this is the greatest lie that gullible humanity has ever been told, is immaterial. Surely, seeing the vehemence with which Christian charities are now attacked, people of reason can agree: the so-called culture wars are not about libertarian freedom versus religious unfreedom. They’re about a conflict between two rival faiths.
So how are we going to live together? That’s at the heart of what we’re going to talk about tomorrow at an event co-sponsored by the National Review Institute at the Heritage Foundation at noon. Join us in person or by livestream here. It’s a question of consequence not only for Christians and other religious believers, but everyone who wants to see freedom thrive.
Religious Freedom Mary Eberstadt It's Dangerous to Believe
