Emails Revealed: Anti-Catholic and Anti-Evangelical Bigotry

Written by John Biver

Wikileaks has made a large contribution to the information war this election season.

The much admired Princeton Professor Robert George had this to say about the recently revealed emails from Wikileaks:

…I can’t say I’m surprised by the noxious anti-Catholic bigotry contained in emails exchanged between leading progressives, Democrats and Hillary Clinton operatives. These WikiLeaks-published emails confirm what has been evident for years. Many elites, having embraced secular progressivism as not merely a political view but a religion, loathe traditional faiths that refuse to yield to its dogmas.

Here is C.C. Pecknold writing at National Review in an article titled, “The Progressives’ Plot to Change Catholicism”:

The e-mail leaks are disturbing.

There has been much talk of a ‘Post-Christian’ America lately. All these wonderful Pew studies keep the theme of Christian decline ever before us. […] For all Pew’s interest in Evangelicals and Catholics, what if the studies are missing the most powerful religious voice in politics today? What if some of the most important tectonic shifts have been towards Progressivism, as chief contender to be America’s new civil religion?

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll get back to that civic religion topic in a minute.

It has been impressive to watch the conservative press and conservative commentators jump all over the recently revealed email exchanges between friends of Hillary Clinton. A slew of both news articles and opinion pieces are being written about the 2011–12 exchanges. The authors of the emails are John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman; Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary’s communications director; Sandy Newman, of Voices for Progress; and John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

From all of these news articles and opinions, however, only a few incriminating lines are referred to from within the emails. Here are samples:

Sandy Newman to John Podesta on February 10, 2012:

There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.

In the same email Newman asks “how one would ‘plant the seeds of the revolution’ inside the Catholic church.

This is from Podesta’s response the next day:

We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up. I’ll discuss with Tara. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the other person to consult.

In April 2012, the Catholic church was again a topic of an email exchange — here is John Halpin writing to Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri:

They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.

A little can say a lot, and the sentiments expressed in these private email conversations reveal the attitude of not only Team Clinton, but many on the political left.

Dave Griffey writing at Patheos has a slightly different take from those who see the emails as anti-Catholic:

They’re basic, modern progressive 101. They’re not trashing Catholics or Catholicism. They’re trashing that which isn’t liberal.

The problem for the liberals is not the Catholic Church, he writes, but the part of it “that doesn’t conform to liberalism…” Griffey writes:

They’re not saying Catholics are stupid or wicked. They’re saying Catholics who don’t convert to the liberal gospel are stupid and wicked.

Might we define this group as a subset within Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”?

Returning to the point made by Robert George at the beginning of this article, earlier this year law school professor and political commentator Matt Barber published a book titled Hating Jesus: The American Left’s War on Christianity. The lefties were outraged at the title because, without a doubt, it nicely sums up the leftist’s war on orthodox Christians.

Barber opens the introduction of this book by citing John 15:18-21 — here is verse 20:

Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.”

Explaining why he wrote the book, Barber says:

Because it had to be written. God’s natural created order, His immutable, scientific and transcendent moral precepts, as well as the very lives and livelihoods of Christian Americans, are under vicious attack today at a level unprecedented in American history.

It’s not just an attack on political conservatives or even social conservatives — it’s an all out war on Christian principles. Again, here is Matt Barber:

Amid the final sprint to election 2016, the secular left’s utter disdain for both our Creator Christ and His faithful followers is fast approaching critical mass. Self-styled ‘progressives’ — that is, America’s cultural Marxist agents of ruin — typically disguise their designs on despotism in the flowery and euphemistic language of ‘reproductive health,’ ‘anti-discrimination,’ ‘civil rights’ and ‘multiculturalism.’

…

The secular left doesn’t merely have a disagreement with Christianity. These are not people with whom one may reason, compromise or even disagree. They are dedicated to evil. They demand nothing less than the abolition of the biblical worldview and the destruction of Christ’s followers right along with it.

A few leaked emails merely confirm what we’ve already known because the evidence is all around us. The contest pits Christianity against the new religion of secular progressivism.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. — Isaiah 5:20

Woe, indeed.

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