The Disastrous Banishment of the Hebraic Spirit from American Public Life

Eric Cohen’s powerful essay in Mosaic is, at bottom, a clarion call for Jews and Christians, particularly the latter, to stop wallowing in guilt and indecision, to get up off the mat, and to start consciously and actively fighting the forces of militant secularism that are bent on destroying them and our civilization with them. When they do so, he argues, they can gain heart and direction for what they want to achieve by looking to the guiding star of Jerusalem—not only as a symbol or an idea but as an actual city, a fragile and precarious miracle of robustly embodied Jewish life.

In many ways, Cohen’s argument in “The Message from Jerusalem” reminds me of The Benedict Option, an important book by the Christian writer Rod Dreher that similarly counsels resistance to militant secularism: resistance in the form not only of engaging in legal and political battles but also of building thick and resilient communities of faith, places where lives are consecrated to ideals realized through concrete modes of conduct that stand in contradiction to the spirit of the times.

But Cohen’s essay also reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s plaint that Christians tend not to make good soldiers because they are too willing to die. The admonition to fight strikes many Christians today as a betrayal of their irenic faith, hinting at a triumphalism redolent of aspects of Christian history of which they are rightly ashamed. Cohen wants to shake them out of that unproductive brooding, and to open their eyes to the real circumstances before them.