If you were to design a religion, would it be the Catholic Church? I doubt it.

And why should it be? Surely each of us, given his druthers, would tweak doctrine, practice or liturgy this way or that.

In the course of history, there have been plenty of tweakings to the faith of the apostles — indeed, that's the very raison d'Être of Protestantism, with Luther demanding that the faith be changed one way, Calvin another, King Henry VIII another still, Seventh-day Adventists yet another, ad infinitum. And today the Protestant tweaking of Christianity is only part of a far broader mix-and-match “spirituality” that takes a little Buddhism, a little Judaism, a little infantilism.

This seems absurd if the goal is objective truth. But, of course, that's not the goal. The goal is self-affirmation, and such self-affirmation can quickly become moralistic coercion. As Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School has said: “Today we have a need to take responsibility for the kind of religion we create.”

For a Catholic, the idea that “we create” our religion is nonsensical. The Catholic Church explains reality, and we accept it just as we accept gravity and the existence of Alexander the Great. No religion is more assiduously based on history (the Church offers the only convincing explanation of the Resurrection), on reason and on logic (St. Thomas Aquinas, anyone?) than Catholicism.

The Church puts a premium on truth. But the popular desire to create one's own religion is at bottom a childish desire to create one's own “reality.” So while a Catholic expresses gratitude to God, the do-it-yourselfers can offer gratitude only to, well, themselves. And they can get pretty darn churlish when someone claims an objective standard of measure that infringes on their self-referential beliefs. This helps explain, I think, the ever more strident opposition of the secular Left to our “Bible-believing” president, George W. Bush.

Robert Reich, who served former President Clinton as secretary of labor, recently published in The American Prospect magazine an essay entitled “Bush's God.” He concluded on this note:

“The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.”

Like a good secular liberal, Reich never mentions Islam, focusing his ire instead on Bush and “America's religious right,” identified as “mostly right-wing evangelical churches, but also right-wing Southern Baptists, anti-abortion Catholics and even a smattering of extreme pro-Israeli and anti-Arab Jews.”

Still, one assumes that his reference to terrorism refers to Islamic terrorism, if only to discount it as a threat compared to the danger posed by those who “want to promote the teaching of creationism in public schools, encourage school prayer, support anti-sodomy statutes, ban abortions, bar gay marriage, limit the use of stem cells, reduce access to contraceptives, and advance the idea of America as a ʻChristian nation.'”

No doubt, as Reich implies, encouraging school prayer and protecting the unborn children one sees in ultrasounds is far more dangerous to the Republic than any Al Qaeda terrorist bombings that kill hundreds or thousands in the United States. Nevertheless, one might reasonably think that any analysis that conflates Islamic terrorism with Christianity; or conflates “the primacy of the individual” as an antonym for Christianity, which affirms the ineradicable value of every human life; or that conflates illogic with the Church that taught logic to the Western world is a pretty bankrupt analysis. But I reckon it's a pretty popular one, too.

People like Robert Reich often present themselves as independent thinkers, but they move as part of a herd. And, in the context of history, it is a herd that has blood on its hooves, as a quick recollection of how the forces of “reason” and “science” treated Catholics in the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Communist revolutions of Mexico, Russia and East Asia might remind.

Indeed, the history of the last century was written in the blood of Christian and Jewish martyrs shed by anti-Christian and anti-Jewish pagans (National Socialists) and progressive “science,” as in the “scientific socialism” of the Soviet Union and its Communist fellow travelers.

If one accepts the scientific fact that an abortion stops a beating heart, then the blood on the hooves of the anti-Christian horde is greater still. The pile of dead — killed in the name of anti-Christian creeds in the 20th century — does not number in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; it totals more than 100 million, dwarfing the death total of any other century.

The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from reason or logic — if only her opponents would engage the Church on those grounds. But don't count on that. The Left is already sharpening its guillotine for another go at “those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.” How else to ensure the triumph of “science, reason and logic” against “the greatest danger we face”?

Bliss is it in this dawn to be alive, to be sure, but to be a Catholic — well, that's going to be, as it always is, a challenge.

H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of

Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History. His prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey and his book Robert E. Lee on Leadership are available in paperback.