Comes the millennium

From Jack Blake's perspective, the grand American experiment in individual freedom is in imminent danger from within, and the enemy is our own gullibility. In particular, the screaming intolerance and political aggression of the fundamentalist Christian right threatens the Founding Fathers' vision and makes us look, in many disturbing ways, like the most notorious totalitarian regimes of this century. With cool, lucid prose and a scientist's eye for numbers, Blake dissects the polemics, cuts through a haze of perceptions, and finds a nation at war with its own highest ideals. Our nation has been portrayed by the religious right as a decadent, immoral, licentious state. Already we hear End Times theology spouting from our television sets, and every day the newspapers tell of conservative, often literalist, Christians seeking, and gaining, political power. Blake draws upon this apocalyptic diatribe as his inspiration. Blake cannot, however, give a solution to the "problems" of offensive art, apparently dangerous science, secular humanism, homosexuality, violence, and crime. Many of these so-called problems are, when viewed objectively, either manifestly human or, at worst, a small price to pay for freedom. Many of our problems are so deeply entrenched in the biological fact of being human that the best we can do is understand and control them. In the end, our most precious freedoms derive not from a uniform and coerced conservative religious moral code but from well-educated, intellectually strong, and individually courageous citizenry. In the final section of the book, Jack Blake suggests how to build such a generation of Americans.