Slouching Toward Gomorrah
by Robert Bork
Price: $14.00 (paperback)
This 1996 publication by the man rejected as Supreme Court justice because of the liberal’s litmus test on abortion demonstrates the conservative values that made him so repulsive to the media and congressional elite. Bork emphasizes the radical social changes that have occurred in American society as the 1960s hippies have moved into leadership positions in universities, judiciary, and politics to impose their radical view of society on the American public. He writes as a professor from Yale University who witnessed its administration’s capitulation to the demands of the radical students of the 1960s.
Bork writes, not as a preacher measuring society by the standard of the Bible, but as a judicial expert concerned about modern trends in American society away from a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Nevertheless, he appreciates Western values based on the Judaeo-Christian ethic.
Included in this book is Bork’s assessment that the universities are propagandists for (89) and the courts are enforcers of the liberal social view (114). He demonstrates the latter by the court’s refusal to allow the populace view of abortion or euthanasia to be legislated through the enactment of law, choosing rather to impose their minority moral values on the majority by enforcing their values as the law of the land through judicial decisions. In this he develops his theme that liberalism ultimately leads to coercion (5-6).
Bork also notices the changes that have occurred in American churches during this period. He writes:
. . . Religion, morality, and law do that (that is, have an impatience with anything that interferes with personal convenience, mw), which accounts for the tendency of modern religion to eschew proscriptions and commandments and turn to counseling and therapeutic sermons; of morality to be relativized; and of law, particularly criminal law, to be soft and uncertain. Religion tends to be strongest when life is hard, and the same may be said of morality and law. A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion (9).
He also noticed the changes in preaching.
It is not helpful that the ideas of salvation and damnation, of sin and virtue, which once played major roles in Christian belief, are now almost never heard of in the mainline churches. The sermons and homilies are now almost exclusively about love, kindness, and eternal life. That may be regarded, particularly by the sentimental, as an improvement in humaneness, indeed in civility, but it also means an alteration in the teaching of Christianity that makes the religion less powerful as a moral force. The carrot alone has never been a wholly adequate incentive to desired behavior (293). Progressing through the significant social conflicts since the 1960s, Bork demonstrates the liberal agenda and its impact on modern society.
The book is particularly interesting to my generation because it discusses the events that we have witnessed in our lives and what impact they have had on this present generation. The book is not enjoyable reading, because the triumph of paganism in American values is depressing, but it is enlightening.
Mike Willis,6567 Kings Ct., Avon, Indiana 46123 mikewillis1@compuserve.com