Response to Secular Theocracy, Pt 2

{Format update: My apologies for disappearing for the weekend. More than usual is going on for semester prep this term. Also, I will be moving to a weekday publishing schedule from seven days a week.}

Back in December, David J. Theroux, of The Independent Institute asked me to read and offer comment on his essay, “Secular Theocracy, Part 1.” To summarize, Theroux made the argument with supporting extended quotes from C. S. Lewis, Rodney Stark, Alexis de Tocqueville and William Cavanuagh that the rise of secularism in the West has reached a point that service and loyalty to the secular nation-state has reached the point of religious devotion, and even is demanded as a form of coerced worship, effectively creating what he calls a “secular theocracy.”

Last week, Theroux published the second half of this essay, and again at his invitation, I offer my thoughts. (Both parts of his essay, with footnotes, can be found as a single webpage.)

One of the primary characteristics of the civic religion, according to Theroux, is the replacing of ‘religious violence’ with ‘secular violence’, which the State views as necessary to counteract and put down the religious violence. After that ‘corrupting influence’ is put down, the secularist argues, there should be no need for any violence, as humanity will thrive in the utopia of common devotion to the state. Reading quotes from several secularists and an analysis by Cavanuagh, it brings to eerie recall books assigned in high school English classes, “1984” and “Brave New World.”

What I find interesting in this resurgence of a secular utopianism is in trying to understand why it is resurging.

Response to “Secular Theocracy”

David J. Theroux, of The Independent Institute asked me to read and offer comment on his essay, “Secular Theocracy, Part 1.” In it, he raises some excellent points from a historical perspective and based on thoughts by C. S. Lewis and William Cavanaugh, and I encourage you to read it. My thoughts here expand on those of Theroux’s.

Theroux begins by explaining how religion is being marginalized and expunged from every area of public discourse because it is accused of being factious and leads to violence. He writes, “A secularized public square policed by government is viewed as providing a neutral, rational, free, and safe domain that keeps the “irrational” forces of religion from creating conflict and darkness. And we are told that real progress requires expanding this domain by pushing religion ever backward into remote corners of society where it has little or no influence. In short, modern America has become a secular theocracy with a civic religion of national politics (nationalism) occupying the public realm in which government has replaced God.”

This idea that secularism is ‘worldview neutral’ is so deeply ingrained into most secularists that they are fish that don’t know they are wet. In the very expressing of such a view, they promote secularism as being inherently better than any spiritually based worldview. In fact, they explicitly see themselves as more sophisticated, having matured past the need for such ‘primitive’ beliefs. Thus, they demonstrate the lack of neutrality, and are no better than the ‘narrow-minded exclusivism’ of theistic worldviews which they deride.