Religion, Culture, and Humanity

I recently gave an interview to the Georgia Family Council (where I worked as a younger fellow) about my book for their website.  Here is an excerpt I think might interest readers:

What made you decide to write your book The End of Secularism?

I wrote this book for a few reasons. I detected that the moment might be right for someone to lay out a very rigorous critique of secularism. While it was once plausible to people that secularism might be a good, neutral solution to the “problem” of religious difference, it is more difficult to believe the same today. Secularists embrace a competing orthodoxy and they pursue the fulfillment of it. They like to think of themselves as referees, but they are actually just another team on the field.

In addition, I felt the need to help secularists and Christians to get a better handle on what secularism is and why it is an inferior solution to the separation of church and state rightly understood. We don’t need to evict religion from the public square. We do need to keep the church financially independent of the state — primarily for the good of the church, which I demonstrate through the example of Sweden — but we don’t need to politely excuse our religious beliefs and thoughts when it comes to public debate over values. Religion matters in politics. You can’t get away from it and bad things happen when you try. The Christian faith has been and continues to be hugely influential in encouraging many of the best things about our culture. Christianity is part of why we care about things like liberty, equality, mercy, and the sanctity of life.

Explain what you mean by “secularism” and how has it affected our culture?

The word secular once had a perfectly good meaning. It meant “in the world.” So, by that understanding, the Catholic Church even had secular clergy. But we have transformed the old meaning of “secular” to a new conception which requires that religion retire from the public square. In essence, the idea is that we will all be better off if religion is private, like a hobby. The problem, especially for Christians, is that we believe the resurrection of Christ is a real event in time and space and that if that is true, then it has the potential to affect the way we look at almost everything. And I would argue that influence has been dramatically for the good.

To the extent we embrace secularism, and almost all of us do to some degree, we focus more on material things because that represents reality to us. In America, our materialism mostly manifests as consumeristic and hedonistic pursuits.

Does secularism have an effect on how society views marriage and family

Unquestionably. If you buy into a purely secular view, marriage is nothing special. It is merely a contract (and not a particularly strong one) that people undergo when they decide to pursue life together for a while. While it can be inconvenient and messy to dissolve that contract, nothing tragic has happened. There has been no violation of any larger law. God’s conception of marriage doesn’t enter in. In fact, maybe marriage is just a cultural artifact that an enlightened, secular government merely needs to tolerate until it can be transitioned away.

Of course, we have seen this kind of change in the way we view marriage. It’s not just the effort to expand the meaning of marriage. The larger problem is that the state no longer values marriage as it once did. There is no bias toward keeping the family together. We no longer have the same concern for how divorce will affect the well-being of children, this despite the wealth of social science evidence chronicling the negative impact.

On the other hand, if you believe marriage represents a special relationship, one ordained by God, then you have a real reason, both as an individual and as a citizen in a political community, to seek to preserve it. This view, long the dominant one in western civilization, reinforces our best instincts about the family. It also happens to be much more humane to children and promotes human flourishing.

Comments

[John FB]

"In essence, the idea is that we will all be better off if religion is private, like a hobby."

Perhaps some secularists cling to the hope that religion becomes unmentionable in either the public or private sphere of ideas. Personally, I don't want a government that's antagonistic towards the personal, free expression of religious beliefs

The problem is that religious principles alone do not make good public policy. Keep in mind that it's groups like Sojourners (a faith-based group, albeit a liberal one) who find a religious imperative in things like universal health care. How does one begin to discuss the practical pros and cons of any issue with someone when they believe that their policy is mandated by God? All other peripheral considerations will necessarily be irrelevant. Those who see in the Scriptures a call for pacifism (there are those who see it) will condemn military action. Pacifism isn't just for headband-wearing hippies anymore.

So yes, it's important to let religious thought and expression thrive in society. At the same time, there has to be some other driving principles when discussing the complex issues of public policy outside of "the Bible says".

[Tony Esolen]

John FB,

You are making points that no Christian here denies, I think. It falls under the injunction of Christ, "Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's." Thomas Aquinas has a great deal to say about what the commonwealth is, and what makes it different from the Church. So does the current Pope, who argues that it is precisely to defend the legitimate sphere of action and (relative) autonomy of the State that the Church must be allowed its free exercise and even its prerogatives. Otherwise the State morphs into the old old pagan deity -- as in Persia, as in Rome, as in Babylon -- and assumes competence in all things, demanding also allegiance in all things (except, these days, in the trivial exercise of individual pursuit of hedonism; Huxley's soma, only not quite so obviously pernicious; mindlessness with a human face).

This is why, by the way, the Church defends first principles (as, for instance, that the deliberate taking of innocent human life is indefensible), and does not prescribe the prudentially determined policies that a commonwealth may take to attain certain goods.

Another by the way: certain interpretations of Scripture are, ahem, provably wrong. Nowhere in the New Testament are Roman soldiers, for instance, told to lay down their arms for good. John the Baptist is explicitly asked by them what they need to do. Centurions especially, throughout the NT, come off really well.

[Gina M. Danaher]

Amen Professor Esolen.