Everybody who cares about religious liberty will want to read Mary Eberstadt's new book, It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies.
Jonathan Last, who calls Mary's new book "brilliant," has an astute review over at the Weekly Standard. It begins:
Eberstadt's book is amazing. She explains how we got to the present moment in which religious believers are being hounded from the public square and exposes the dissonance between the secularists' bleating for "freedom" with their eager use of McCarthyite tactics.
One of Eberstadt's key insights is that the entire showdown isn't about religion at all. It's about sex. If the modern secularist left believes in anything, it's a God-given right to consequence-free sex. That's why abortion is a cornerstone of liberalism.
But liberals think that sex shouldn't just be free of physical consequences, but of moral ones, too. Even disapproval is unacceptable. Which is why they target Catholic schools that don't want gay spiritual directors and pizza parlors that theoretically wouldn't want to cater same-sex weddings.
Eberstadt counsels religious believers to understand that what has happened in the West isn't really that the idea of faith has been eclipsed. Instead, she writes, "We need to understand that there's a new faith in Western civilization: a quasi-religious faith in the developing secularist catechism about the sexual revolution."
Read the entire review–and then order the book.