Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #225787 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-15
• Binding: Hardcover

Customer Reviews

Cheap Provocative Self-Aggrandizement
I knew in advance that I would find this book provocative. I'd read reviews of it that recounted some of its main points. I'd already exchanged heated opinions with other reviewers about O'Reilly the TV figure. Therefore I decided to read the book and react to it on the keyboard as I read, page by page.

Page 2: O'Reilly declares that, in the vicious culture war underway in America, "On one side of the battlefield are the armies of the traditionalists like me, people who believe the United States was well founded and has done enormous good for the world. On the other side are the committed forces of the secular-progressive movement that want to change America dramatically: mold it in the image of Western Europe."
Well, Bill, we're off to a bad start. I think your premise is simplistic and reckless. If there is a culture war in America, the sides are not so clear, and your good guys/bad guys vision of Armageddon doesn't sound helpful at all. There are many traditions in the USA, some of which are not easily reconciled, and some of which are downright unpleasant. The Founders of the USA were deeply divided, far more vehemently divided by fundamental issues than the most extreme ends of the current two party spectrum, and some of the compromises they reached in "founding" the Union didn't work very well. The compromise over slavery comes quickly to mind. You say, Bill, that you reject the "conservatives against liberals" dichotomy, yet the contest between Republicans and Democrats must at least shadow your culture war, or else you'll have to admit that the war is many-sided rather than Manichean. Those who call themselves conservative and who usually vote Republican are a duke's mixture, Bill. Take a look at the candidates in the primaries: Paul, a doctrinaire libertarian; Huckabee, an agrarian fundamentalist; Romney, a neo-liberal in the economic sense; Giuliani, an old-fashioned big business Progressive; and McCain, a neo-conservative. Is one of them closer to your traditionalist camp than the others?
Then there's the other side, the secular-progressives. Your label is certainly not one that anybody applies to himself in lieu of liberal, is it? I don't think I know anyone who fits the bill, Bill, so I'll just assume you mean ME! I am secular; I have no current attachment to any religion, and I do suspect that the intolerant extremists of all religions today - Muslim, Jewish, and Christian - are making more than their share of problems for each other and for everybody else. I do have a strong commitment to freedom of research and expression in science and in society. In that way, I feel rather closely bonded to the Founders of the republic. I do believe that the US was well enough founded to be capable of social evolution toward the ideals of those founders, chiefly the ideal of social and economic justice for all. I DO believe that the United States has done enormous good...but also at times enormous bad. I do NOT believe that the USA has an exceptionalist, millennial mission, a role assigned by history or by god, to claim for itself the right to judge, police, or dominate the rest of the world. I also find it pretty darn obvious, historically, that the USA has always been molded in the image of Western Europe, beginning with the ideas of the European Enlightenment. I've lived and traveled in Western Europe a lot, Bill. Perhaps you have, also. Frankly, in comparison to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or even the Caribbean nations on our doorstep, the United States and Western Europe are extraordinarily similar societies and cultures. NATO is a reality, Bill. The USA has been effectively part of Western Europe all along, and piddling changes in government aren't going to erase that relationship. What is it exactly that you find so objectionable about Western Europe, which by the way includes a lot of diversity? I guess I'll have to read further in hopes of learning that.

Pages 3-7 : This is an awful lot about YOU, isn't it, Bill?

Pages 9-13: Shame, Bill! Setting up a straw woman - a caricature whose jumble of ideas doesn't match any known public figure's - is a cheap trick. Now I suppose you'll feel free to demolish your imaginary adversary with bullying self-righteousness.

Page 15: Bill says "No politician today would dare state this secular-progressive program openly, because the country is not ready for this agenda. But believe me: The vision articulated by President Hernandez [No, Bill, by YOU, pretending the existence of your straw opponent!] is on the drawing board. The armies of secularism are rising and the public is largely unaware of what is taking place."
Holy Cow! Bill? That's a global conspiracy against US, the good guys, theory, isn't it? That's a familiar kind of ploy, Bill. It's been used against the Jews in various times and places. It was used against Catholics in the USA in the 1830s and 1840s, and later too. It was used against the abolitionists and later against the Lincoln Republicans to justify secession. It was used by Franco, and by Hitler. It was used by both parties in America in the 1950s and 1960s against the terrifying menace of domestic Communism, that fearsome all-conquering domestic Communism, remember, that elected itself to Congress and captured the department chairpersonships of every university!!! Come on, Bill! Is that the best you've got? Cheap rhetoric?

Page 17: After describing the excruciating story of a ten year old boy who was raped and murdered, Bill, you say "This is why I [!] am fighting this culture war. This is why there is such conflict in America. Don't forget Jeffrey Curley - he is one of the main reasons the secular-progressives must be defeated."
Bill, this is so offensive that I want earnestly to shove this book down your throat! You're exploiting the anguish, aren't you, Bill? I have a teenage son. Fatherhood has been the most rewarding part of my life. If anyone hurt my son, I'd do my best to rip out his entrails and dance on them. I don't support capital punishment in general - I'm from Minnesota, where we don't have it - but I would make exception for child sex abusers. I'm your target secular-progressive, remember? For you to imply that "we" secular-progressives condone child murder or advocates of sex with children is such a hateful lie that it makes my blood boil.


Page 18: After some suspiciously typical "conservative" ranting about the popular and new media being 75% dominated by THEM, the secular-progressives, Bill declares: "This is the crux of the culture war, saving traditional America from those who want to change the country drastically - not by popular vote, but by judicial fiat."
That's it, Bill. You're a fake. You spout this incendiary oppositional rhetoric so bold-facedly, yet I can't believe that you're so isolated from reality or so stupid that you think the world corresponds to your fantasies.

I'm sorry, friends. At this rate, I'll need six weeks to read the book, and my review will be at least of book length. I don't have the stomach for the task. I WILL read the rest, and if I change my impression, or find something of great value in Bill's opinions, I'll either delete this review or revise it appropriately. So long for now.

disingenuous demagoguery
With "Culture Warrior," O'Reilly contests fundamental principles of our democratic pluralism. He characterizes the "separation of church and state," for example, as an "immense piece of false but effective propaganda" that was "dumped on America in the late twentieth century by the ACLU." (p. 201). What rubbish!

Have Americans forgotten how Baptists divided God's sphere from Caesar's when Roger Williams was exiled to Rhode Island in 1636? Baptists' piety moved them to organize a society honoring religious freedom and separating church and state - the better to protect religion from civil government's corrupting influence.

Thomas Jefferson subsequently endorsed the Baptists' position, incorporated into our very Constitution: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." (Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jan. 2, 1802).

In the 1940s the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs filed Supreme Court briefs supporting separation of church and state in elementary education. Baptists also organized "Protestants and other Americans United for Separation of Church and State," later rechristened "Americans United for Separation of Church and State." (See Eigmy, supra, at pp. 161-62). When the Supreme Court, in the early 1960s, invalidated state-sponsored prayer and Bible readings in public schools, "most Southern [Baptist] Convention sentiment supported the Court," and the Baptist Joint Committee "opposed efforts in Congress to nullify the ruling[s]." (John Lee Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists p. 161 (rev ed. 1987)).

Pious evangelical Christians long regarded separation of church and state as a fundamental American tradition, designed to place faith beyond the power of government. Yet O'Reilly thinks he can get away with demagogic drivel calling the tradition a recent fabrication of "secular progressives."

O'Reilly also pretends that affording homosexuals fundamental human rights, such as the right to marry, is part of an atheistic secularist agenda advanced by a "fascist organization" called the ACLU. (pp. 15-17). Truth is the congregation of the Mayflower Pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621, is one that today celebrates the weddings of its committed gay and lesbian couples. So is the First Church in Boston, organized for the Puritans' shining "city upon a hill" in 1630, and the United First Parish Church of Quincy, where John and Abigail Adams worshipped. The Pilgrims' and Puritans' churches are members today of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the United Church of Christ, which both have called for legal recognition of same-sex marriages. So has the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest movement in American Judaism.

O'Reilly's "culture war" really is one against America's liberal religious traditions, and against the principles of democratic pluralism that a liberal faith engenders.

O'Reilly engages in shameless spin describing "the ACLU's war against the Boy Scouts." (p. 138). "Very simply," says O'Reilly, "the Scouts decline to approve openly gay Scoutmasters and require that the boys acknowledge a 'higher power.'" (p.138). "So, all over the country, the ACLU has sued the Boy Scouts, seeking to have them denied public assistance and access, such as having a jamboree on city property. It is a jihad against the Scouts, no question." (pp. 138-139).

In fact, the BSA excludes homosexuals as violating the Scout Law, that a Scout must be "brave, clean, and reverent." Although the Bible tells us Peter declared that "God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean," Acts 10:28 (NRSV), BSA leadership says it knows better - that homosexuals are not "clean." Current membership applications also require that children subscribe to a Declaration of Religious Principle indicating that atheists and agnostics cannot be "the best kind of citizen."

The BSA discriminates against religious children whose faith traditions reject these positions. Though the BSA was launched from the White House by a leading Unitarian, President William Howard Taft, the youth organization in 1992 banned Taft's denomination from its Religious Relationships Committee, and in 1998 ordered that Scouts may not earn or wear the denomination's religious emblem. The BSA "punished the Unitarian Universalist Church and its Scout members" for teaching that discrimination is wrong. (Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth p.211 (2001)).

Nor are Unitarian Universalist youth the only ones to suffer. Reform Judaism's national leadership was forced in January 2001 to urge that synagogues sever their relations with Scouting, and that Jewish parents withdraw their children from Boy Scouts troops and Cub Scout packs. Make no mistake - mainstream American Judaism has been run out of Scouting.

Should tax dollars finance social conservatives' war against religious liberals? The ACLU says no, but O'Reilly spins the issue, asserting "the ACLU has sued the Boy Scouts, seeking to have them denied public assistance and access, such as having a jamboree on city property." (p. 139). Actually, each National Jamboree is sponsored by the federal government, on federal property, at an expense to taxpayers of millions of dollars - with the Boy Scouts' policies effectively excluding children from liberal faith traditions.

This is a religious war: "Right now, it is the conservative Christian groups that are most engaged on the traditional side, and their interest stems primarily from theology." (p. 173). The "culture war" is one waged against Unitarian Universalists, their churches, and children. It is a war against Reform Jews, too. "[I]n fact," writes O'Reilly, "some of the most fanatical secular-progressives are Jewish." (p. 175).

And O'Reilly promises: "We're going to get this culture war over with faster than anyone believes." (pp. 5-6).

Eric Alan Isaacson

Exposing the Secular-Progressive movement
Thank you Bill O'Reilly for fighting to keep traditional America intact. The book was excellent! Exposed so much about the Secular-progressive movement. We need more people like Bill O'Reilly taking a stand for traditionalism in this great country of ours.