Legendary political pundit Pat Buchanan believes secular liberals are nearing their goal in a cultural war they have been waging in the United States — the defeat of Christianity.
"What I've always believed is we are really in a cultural war in America. It's something of a religious war, where secularism has very largely succeeded in driving [out] Christianity, which is the formative religion of the entire West," Buchanan said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"Driving that out of the public square and out of the public schools. An example I use is … a missionary who came up from Mexico when California was still part of Mexico.
"[He] created these missions in San Diego, San Francisco and San Luis Obispo … [which] turned into great cities in California, and he's a figure who was represented with a statue in Statuary Hall in Capitol Hill. And they're trying to get that removed."
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Buchanan — a former GOP presidential candidate and speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — said that many of the moral codes set down by religions throughout history are no longer respected.
"Every religion or every cult and every faith, Islam's among them, Catholicism, Christianity, Judaism — they all create their moral codes and they create their moral heroes and saints and sinners and all the rest of it," he said.
"The Bruce Jenner episode tells you what the modern secularism regards as really heroic and moral. We see it in the advance of same-sex marriage.
"The belief [is] that this is heroic and progressive and good and those who have outlawed it in the past are reactionary and their beliefs need to be driven out of public life and certainly not inculcated into children."
Buchanan — author of
"The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority," published by Crown Forum — believes Christians are particularly vulnerable.
"Here I do agree with some of the Civil Rights Movement when they said 'we're not going to get up and go to the back of the bus. I'm sick of it and I'm going to sit in the front of the bus.' Christians need a little bit of that defiance," Buchanan said.
"We're undergoing, in a more peaceful way obviously, something the French Revolution did. They … had the great massacre. The first massacre was of the priests and, of course, they drove the [move] to take the statues down and empty the churches out.
"The churches and great cathedrals in Europe are now museums and some of them are restaurants and bars."