Misplaced trust

America’s best secular publishing house, Encounter Books, has just put out the 50th of its “broadsides,” single-issue booklets of about 40 pages. Claudia Rosett’s What To Do About the U.N. shows how a product of secular idealism—maybe it really can give us world peace—became the tool of tyrants. Rosett persuasively gives “the case for consigning it to the heap of failed collectivist experiments of the 20th century.”

Rosett is fighting cheerleading by the United Nations Association of the USA. Here’s some high-school bragging by me: Fifty years ago this month I won a college scholarship by finishing second among the 40,000 high-school students who took a test of factual knowledge concerning the United Nations and wrote an essay about how great the UN is. Here’s my repentance and apology for gullibility: I had absorbed propaganda and never heard the other side. UNA-USA no longer offers the contest but still lobbies: Its website shouts, “ACT NOW: Tell Congress to Reject the President’s Proposed UN Budget Cuts.”

Some of us ignore the ugly truth Rosett presents because we’ve made the UN into an idol. Philip Gorski’s American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, 2017) is a readable overview of attempts to take the reverence that belongs to God alone and apply it to the nation. Gorski is more positive about those attempts than I am, but he’s right that our loss of civil religion has created problems. Among them: more “self-dealing, nepotism, and rent-seeking” than was the case when idealism about Washington (think of Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) made such theft reportable rather than typical.

Gorski’s recommended solutions are dubious: “Banish big money from the political process” won’t happen as long as Washington has billions to dispense. “Establish a universal system of national service” would probably extend college-style brainwashing to those currently exempt from it. He rightly notes that conservatives when teaching American history sometimes provide “a tale of heroes that leaves out the victims.”

Conservative history books are still better than Howard Zinn’s befuddled A People’s History of the United States, but books such as Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (Norton, 2016) are useful: Author Patrick Phillips dives into the story of “night riders” who used arson and terror in 1912 to drive all 1,098 black citizens of Forsyth County out of the county—and they almost entirely stayed out until 1987.

Any room on the pews?

Few Christians in the 21st century think a Bible-affirming church can attract same-sex couples. Andrew Marin, author of Us Versus Us: The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community (NavPress, 2016), told me his surveys show 12 percent of LGBT persons who grew up in a theologically conservative religious community are still in it. He did not ask whether churches that preach and teach a Biblical sexual ethic, and accept as members only those who accept it, retain LGBT attendees.

I asked Marin for specifics about one example of coexistence: A large urban, evangelical church opened a free day care, stipulating that parents had to volunteer regularly so the church could continue not charging a fee. Then LGBT parents started dropping off their kids and asking, “Where do I sign up to volunteer?” Church leaders had concerns but eventually said yes, and over time “one set of parents, then four, then six, began attending this theologically conservative evangelical church every Sunday with their children.”

It’s not clear whether any parents changed their theological beliefs, but the door was open and maybe some minds opened as well. Marin offered the church confidentiality and did not name it, but after half a year of prodding, the book’s editor put me in contact with the church’s pastor, who affirmed Marin’s story. Sadly, the church has to worry about blowback from both LGBT activists and some evangelicals. —M.O.