Readers Respond -- Readers discuss Joe Bell’s columns

“The Bell Curve” is the only Daily Pilot column I actually look

forward to reading each week. Joseph Bell’s articles are a breath of

fresh air in Orange County.

PEGGY CALHOUN

Santa Ana Heights

Joseph Bell (“Learning the real meaning of ‘Reclaiming America for

Christ,”’ May 3) sounds like the familiar liberal alarm of recent years:

beware, America: there are Christians hiding under every bed. But in

order to share his fears, we must see the world as he apparently does --

that the world we live in is an excessively moral one; that our art,

music and popular culture are strangled by piety and repression; that our

school children behave like so many morbid little monks, and those trend

setting Republican businessmen spend their days in fasting and prayer.

It’s a good thing we are guarded by a cleareyed, professional journalist

who can spot this disastrous trend before we’ve gone over the edge.

Bell is, as usual, trying to convince his readers that he is right by

presenting anyone who disagrees as hateful. The occasion for last

Thursday’s display was his account of a conference on “Reclaiming America

for Christ,” where he discovered that some people -- “these people,” as

he puts it -- believe that their ethical convictions should govern their

behavior, rather than their behavior sending them scurrying to find a

belief that supports it.

Bell, as always, knows better; if his friends do it, it’s good; if

these people raise questions, they’re fanatical hypocrites. Further, he’s

discovered that Christians are guilty of planning to vote; yes, actually

vote, in our American elections. They hide this scheme, he tells us,

using “code words” to mask their subversive intent, but Bell’s found them

out and is riding to the rescue.

The coming together of spiritual and temporal power into one despotic

governmental authority is, of course, something strenuously to be

avoided. But to imagine, as Bell does, that the politically powerful are

in danger of being seduced away from their current unprincipled

self-indulgence by the allure of religious discipline, is laughably

obtuse. What is to be feared -- and what has commonly occurred in the

past -- is that religious leaders will be bullied or bribed into serving

as toadies to those political powers, preaching sermons of laissez-faire

morality and infantile dependence of the sort that Bell applauds, and of

which the “religious” counselors he approvingly quotes give us examples.

DOUGLAS TOOHEY

Costa Mesa