Bill Barr, Grand Inquisitor, Crusades for an Anti-Secularist Christian State
October 22nd 2019
William Barr - Caricature (DonkeyHotey)
By Bill Berkowitz
When the going gets rough, Team Trump ramps up the God talk. Recently, President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr all gave rousing speeches to rally Trump’s conservative Christian base. On Friday, October 11, Barr took a break from jetting around the world trying to stir up opposition research on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and stopped by the University Notre Dame Law School, to provide much needed deflection from Trump’s current troubles. Instead of defending the first amendment, Barr delivered a speech that thoroughly condemned secularists for the moral ruination of America. Given the morally challenged Trump presidency, Barr’s remarks might seem the perfect cold open on SNL.
Barr’s speech, inveighing against secularists and progressives, was roundly condemned by a number of critics: The New York Times’ Paul Krugman called it an example of “religious bigotry”; Political ethicist Richard Painter tweeted that the speech was like the latest episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” adding that Barr sounded like “vintage Goebbels”; retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that the attorney general is “Torquemada in a business suit,” referring to the Spanish Inquisition’s grand inquisitor. “Notre Dame had a right to host Barr — but his talk was ridiculously stupid,” the National Catholic Reporter headlined its story on Barr’s Notre Dame speech.
According to The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, “Amid calling for greater freedom of religion, Barr also called for religion (his religion) to infiltrate government at all levels. He specifically decried the fact that ‘public agencies — including public schools — are becoming secularized’”.
Barr has plowed this ground before. More then twenty years ago he was complaining about “steady erosion of the Judeo-Christian moral system,” arguing that laws should be made to restore the “traditional moral order.” And, in a 1992 speech to Bill Donohue’s Catholic League, Barr claimed that “The secularists of today are clearly fanatics”.
The religiously-challenged Trump spoke on Saturday at the Value Voters Summit – a high-profile annual gathering of the Christian Right -- where he told enraptured attendees: “On every front, the ultraleft is waging war on the values shared by everyone in this room,” Trump said. “They are trying to silence and punish the speech of Christians and religious believers of all faiths. You know it better than anyone. They are trying to use the courts to rewrite the laws, undermine democracy and force through an agenda they can’t pass at the ballot box.”
“They are trying to hound you from the workplace, expel you from the public square and weaken the American family and indoctrinate our children,” Trump continued. “They resent and disdain faithful Americans who hold fast to our nation’s historic values, and, if given the chance, they would use every instrument of government power, including the IRS, to try to shut you down.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo chimed in on the same themes -- with a speech titled “Being a Christian Leader” -- at the American Association of Christian Counselors’ World Conference in Tennessee. “He spoke about how he used religion to guide his leadership, though not his decision-making. He spoke about how the administration is echoing the lessons of the Bible in speaking truth to China and Iran and in calling out the suppression of religious freedom. He talked about being a responsible steward of the department’s resources,” Rampell reported.
Barr’s Remarks
Talking about the Framers of the Constitution’s intentions, Barr said: “From the Founding Era onward, there was strong consensus about the centrality of religious liberty in the United States. The imperative of protecting religious freedom was not just a nod in the direction of piety. It reflects the Framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.”
After acknowledging that in the 20th century, the “United States stood up against and defeated, first fascism, and then communism,” Barr laid out the challenges faced in the 21st century.
In what may have clearly been a deft description of Trump, Barr stated: “Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.”
“In short,” Barr stated, “in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and manmade law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.”
Then Barr launched an attack on what he “secularists”.
“Modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as other worldly-superstition imposed by a kill-joy clergy. In fact, Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.
“They reflect the rules that are best for man, not in the by and by, but in the here and now. They are like God’s instruction manual for the best running of man and human society.
“By the same token, violations of these moral laws have bad, real-world consequences for man and society. We many not pay the price immediately, but over time the harm is real.
“Religion helps promote moral discipline within society. Because man is fallen, we don’t automatically conform ourselves to moral rules even when we know they are good for us.”
Finally, Barr, plumbed the depths of despair, relating how society is falling apart, as “Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.”
The “new secular age” has “destroy[ed] the traditional moral order [and] has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery. And yet, the forces secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.”
Reverting to the old canard that the fault of all this lies with the media and the entertainment industry, Barr maintained that “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”
As The Washington Post’s Rampell pointed out, “Barr’s presentation of a country that’s turning its back on religion isn’t reflected in the fact that three-quarters of Americans still identify as Christian and that, 30 years from now, the Pew Research Center estimates that two-thirds of Americans will still identify in that way.”
“In the weeks and months to come, members of this administration may try to break the cords of our Constitution while portraying themselves as pious defenders of the faith,” Rob Boston, senior advisor and editor of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, recently wrote. “It’s a classic diversionary tactic.”
Also read Bill Berkowitz’s BF commentary: William Barr and Opus Dei, the Secretive Ultra-Conservative Catholic Organization That Poses an Existential Threat to Democracy and Pluralism.
After Laurence Tribe tweeted it, the commentary received more than 10,000 hits.
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