Nobody will be surprised to learn that Albert the Pious is unhappy about Ireland’s repeal of its abortion ban; in saying so, he reveals the theocratic premises that animate the Evangelical Rightt and make them such a threat to this country.
As Paul Hannon reported for the Wall Street Journal, Irish voters repealed a constitutional ban on abortion, a sweeping change that caps an emotion-filled debate and marks another significant step away from the country’s historic Catholic influence but, of course, the headlines tell a great deal of the story.
Yes, Ireland is a secular state of the people rather than a nation of sheep whose affairs are governed by Holy Men.
Behind that moral change, there is also the almost universal recognition that this is a huge theological change.
But, of course, theology is not an actual branch of knowledge grounded on documented premises; it’s all hand-waving. So Good for the Irish! for refusing to be guided any longer by Bronze Age superstitions and the parsing of those superstitions by pettifoggers. Theology is intellectually disreputable, and deserves the disdain the Irish gave it.
We are talking about the decline, indeed we might now say the collapse of Catholic authority within Ireland.
This is a striking passage; after all, the Catholic Church has never, never in its benighted history, exercised any authority but the authority of the sword. The Christian Church, in all of its flavors, has been in retreat since the Enlightenment — when the sword was taken away.
And on and on. I doubt that Mohler would ever admit it in so many words in a million years, but he wants a theocracy guided by his specific understanding of The Inerrant Bible, and I doubt he even has the intellectual capacity to understand that he is who the First Amendment protects us from.