It was clear that U.S. Attorney General William Barr had miscalculated soon after his October 18 speech at Notre Dame University blaming “militant secularists” and “moral relativism” for the worsening decay of traditional American society and values.

The blowback from progressives, unsurprisingly, was swift and visceral, but the response from Barr’s fellow Catholics and other conservative Christians, if anything, was far more damning.

The invitation-only law-school speech in Barr’s official government capacity was “a train wreck,” an “embarrassment,” and “ridiculously stupid,” wrote Sean Michael Winters in a review of the speech in the National Catholic Reporter.

“… I would encourage my friends in South Bend never to ask Barr back, Winters wrote. “Not because I disagree with his conduct in office but because the lecture he gave last week was filled with nonsense.”

For example, Winters rejected Barr’s core assumption in his speech that the United States was founded on “Judeo-Christian” beliefs and values, and that it was dangerous to the republic to stray.

“A few sentences on [in his speech], Barr tells us, ‘The Founding generation were Christians. They believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man,’ Winters writes, positing, “It is true that Christian moral sensibilities were in the air the Founders breathed, but it is also true that the nation’s first three presidents were not orthodox Christians but Deists. And, Mr. Barr: There is no such thing as a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition.’ There are Jewish traditions and Christian traditions. The concept of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is a 20th-century fiction created for political purposes.”

But Winters was far from the only Catholic naysayer in response to Barr’s ill-advised speech. Some liberal Catholics warn that the attorney general’s devout Catholic faith “poses a threat to the separation of church and state … [and] American democracy,” The Guardian noted in an article reporting on Barr’s Notre Dame speech. Colt Anderson, a Roman Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Fordham University, run by the Catholic Jesuit religious order, said Barr’s speech revealed “his devotion to an especially conservative branch of Catholicism.

“[Anderson] described the speech as a ‘dog whistle’ to ultra-conservative Catholics who, he says, have aligned themselves to Donald Trump in a campaign to limit the rights of LGBTQ Americans, immigrants and non-Christians, especially Muslims, and to criminalize almost all abortions,” the Guardian reported. ‘The attorney general is taking positions that are essentially un-Democratic’ because they demolish the wall between church and state, Anderson said.”

A senior official in Barr’s U.S. Justice Department, a self-described “devout Catholic” who spoke anonymously to protect his job, told the Guardian that he was “shocked” by the speech’s “fire and brimstone” quality.”

“At least it helps me understand why Barr has been so willing to put his own reputation on the line to defend Trump so fiercely in every battle,” he said, according to the Guardian story, beginning with the congressional investigation that is likely to end in the president’s impeachment. “Trump is Barr’s imperfect vessel in serving a much higher cause: the gospel.”

In his speech, Barr declined to mention that “many of the policies of the Trump administration are strongly opposed by the Vatican, including the pope’s repeated pleas for the U.S. to accept more refugees (as Barr defended policies leading to the opposite result, including separating immigrant children from their parents), the Guardian reported.

The Guardian also pointed out that Barr and Patrick Cipollone, the president’s White House counsel, have both served as board directors of “the secretive, ultra-orthodox Catholic sect Opus Dei.” Members of the sect “seek personal Christian perfection and strive to implement Christian ideals and values in their occupations and in society as a whole … and accepts the authority of the church without question,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Members take vows of obedience.

The article also reported that on the same day Barr was delivering his speech, another Trump cabinet official — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — was delivering a similar sermon on the virtues of Christianity in American society and in informing his own work in government leadership to a gathering of the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville. Pompeo’s speech also drew strong rebuke from groups advocating for civil liberties, religious freedom and church-state separation, who objected to its content and the fact its text was officially posted on the Department of State website.

While some religious conservatives gave a shout-out to Barr after his speech came under fire, more progressive faithful wanted nothing to do with it.

“Barr took the gloves off, saying that religion is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed,” Ron Dreher wrote in American Conservative magazine. “Thank God Bill Barr [is leading the Justice Department].”

On the other hand there’s Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, which advocates for Catholics who support abortion rights and reproductive freeedoms:

“[Barr’s speech] should put the fear of God into anybody who cares about freedom, democracy and the separation of religion and politics,” O’Brien told the Guardian.

Anderson, the Fordham theologian, according to the Guardian article, was “so alarmed” by the cloistered tenor of Barr’s speech that he now worries the attorney general intends “to put the United States on a path of increasingly authoritarian European nations like Poland, where democratically elected government leader have cited their devout Catholicism to justify a crackdown on free speech and the purging of judges.”

In another passage in the article, professor David Campbell, who heads Notre Dame’s political science department, dismissed Barr’s claim that secularists threatened the religious freedom of Catholics.

In fact, reputable research shows that American secularists are “quite supportive of the free exercise of religion, particularly minority religions,” said Campbell, who will soon publish a book on the subject.

In the meantime, Faithful America, a Christian activist group, has filed an ethics complaint against Barr, claiming his recent speech violated his oath to defend universal religious liberty for all Americans.

“The complaint, filed last week (Oct. 24) with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, objected to Barr’s saying at an appearance at the invitation-only event that religion ‘gives us the right rules to live by’ and that the generation that founded the United States were Christians who ‘believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man.’”

Faithful America officials, contending that Barr’s speech focused closely on Christianity, rejected secularism and ignored atheism, launched an online petition drive that has garnered more than 14,000 signatures to date. The petition states:

“Attorney General William Barr has a Constitutional duty to guarantee justice for people of all faiths and none. On October 11 at Notre Dame Law School, he betrayed this duty by suggesting that only Judeo-Christian Americans hold proper values, and that ‘secular’ citizens are to blame for the country’s problems. The speech was delivered in his official capacity and remains posted on DOJ’s official website. As Christians, we reject this distortion of the Gospel for political purposes as toxic Christian nationalism.”

No response yet from the Justice Department.

For more information, see my earlier posts on Barr’s and Pompeo’s speeches, here and here, respectively. And here’s a post on the same topic from today’s The Freethinker blog.

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