Secular Theocracy: The Foundations and Folly of Modern Tyranny, Part 1
By David J. Theroux • Monday December 19, 2011 7:29 PM PDT • 19 Comments
We live in an increasingly secularized world of massive and pervasive nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is ruled unwelcome and even a real danger on the basis of a purported history of intolerance and “religious violence.” This is found in most all “public” domains, including the institutions of education, business, government, welfare, transportation, parks and recreation, science, art, foreign affairs, economics, entertainment, and the media. 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.
For the renowned Christian scholar and writer C.S. Lewis, such a view was fatally flawed morally, intellectually, and spiritually, producing the twentieth-century rise of the total state, total war, and mega-genocides. For Lewis, Christianity provided the one true and coherent worldview that applied to all human aspirations and endeavors: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (The Weight of Glory)
In his book, The Discarded Image, Lewis revealed that for Medieval Christians, there was no sacred/secular divide and that this unified, theopolitical worldview of hope, joy, liberty, justice, and purpose from the loving grace of God enabled them to discover the objective, natural-law principles of ethics, science, and theology, producing immense human flourishing. Lewis described the natural law as a cohesive and interconnected objective standard of right behavior:
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all values are rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) “ideologies,” all consist of fragments from the Tao itself. Arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. (The Abolition of Man)
And in his recent book, The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark has further shown “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West.” Similarly and prior to the rise of the secular nation-state in America, Alexis de Tocqueville documented in his 1835 volume, Democracy in America, the remarkable flexibility, vitality and cohesion of Christian-rooted liberty in American society with business enterprises, churches and aid societies, covenants and other private institutions and communities.
In his book, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, William Cavanaugh similarly notes that for Augustine and the ancient world, religion was not a distinct realm separate from the secular. The origin of the term “religion” (religio) came from Ancient Rome (re-ligare, to rebind or relink) as a serious obligation for a person in the natural law (“religio for me”) not only at a shrine, but also in civic oaths and family rituals that most westerners would today consider secular. In the Middle Ages, Aquinas further viewed religio not as a set of private beliefs but instead a devotion toward moral excellence in all spheres.
However in the Renaissance, religion became viewed as a “private” impulse, distinct from “secular” politics, economics, and science. This “modern” view of religion began the decline of the church as the public, communal practice of the virtue of religio. And by the Enlightenment, John Locke had distinguished between the “outward force” of civil officials and the “inward persuasion” of religion. He believed that civil harmony required a strict division between the state, whose interests are “public,” and the church, whose interests are “private,” thereby clearing the public square for the purely secular. For Locke, the church is a “voluntary society of men,” but obedience to the state is mandatory.
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For Lewis , Christian religion was rational, until he suffered like Job.
richard | Dec 20, 2011 | Reply
Richard, Lewis remained a rational Christian theist to the end of his life. Indeed, his revised edition of his book Miracles was published in 1960, three years before his death and after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, and his other writings and correspondence similarly reflect this fact. Indeed, his “argument from reason” that refutes the atheology of naturalism as incoherent and self-refuting has become more and more influential as can be seen from the work of the renowned philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Please see the following:
“The Argument from Reason,” by Victor Reppert
“Naturalism Defeated,” by Alvin Plantinga
“Economic Science and the Poverty of Naturalism: C. S. Lewis’s ‘Argument from Reason’,” by David Theroux
David Theroux | Dec 20, 2011 | Reply
There is also an interesting book about Lewis, now in it’s second edition, by one of Plantinga’s teachers, John Beversluis. .
richard | Dec 20, 2011 | Reply
Richard, Alvin Plantings was an undergraduate at Calvin College for one semester when he received a scholarship to attend Harvard but then returned in 1951 to Calvin to study under philosophy professor William Harry Jellema, not the arch-secularist Beversluis. As noted in Wikipedia, “he began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he studied under William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright, among others. A year later, in 1955, he transferred to Yale University where he received his Ph.D. in 1958.”
Incidentally, Beversluis’s book on C.S. Lewis has been refuted repeatedly including in the following:
C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, by Victor Reppert
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland
Also especially noteworthy is Plantinga’s new book from Oxford University Press:
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, by Alvin Plantinga
David Theroux | Dec 20, 2011 | Reply
Bertrand de Jouvenel says in his book “On Power – The Natural History of Its Growth”
“The originators of democratic doctrine made liberty of man the philosophical basis of their whole structure, and they thought to rediscover that liberty as the political consequence of their activities. It marks the elevation of their minds that, out of the slow decay of the Christian cathedral – to the ruin of which they had, incidentally, made their own contribution – they should have sought to salvage the conception of man’s dignity.”
This is typical of those who want to keep the “good stuff” in religion, but discard its demands. Whenever I hear somebody accuse their antagonist of “hate” I want to inquire as to what is wrong with hating your fellow man? Isn’t forbidding or punishing hate imposing a religious code? What is the non-religious argument against hate, other than some practical argument for preserving the social order?
In the reason department, a couple of books that I found interesting are:
The Revolt Against Reason, by Arnold Lunn, out of print, but readily available and, The Last Superstition, by Edward Feser.
Chris Sullivan | Dec 20, 2011 | Reply
Chris Sullivan, Excellent suggestions. Thank you!
David Theroux | Dec 20, 2011 | Reply
Richard,
I recommend Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Lewis did indeed suffer mightily when his wife Joy Gresham died. But, he wrestled his way through the grief and came out with his faith even stronger and intellectually more powerful.
Phil Dillon | Dec 21, 2011 | Reply
I’m not sure what the point of this article is, but here’s another book (probably out of print, I’m afraid) that those interested in the issue might try: Homer Smith’s “Man And His Gods”, 1952, foreword by Albert Einstein.
Einstein first says...
“This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rearely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought [religious ideas] has brought upon man.”
Einstein closes with...
“Even then [the end of the nineteenth century], a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man’s very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”
Stephen Colley | Dec 29, 2011 | Reply
I find it unreasonable to declare that our country is in any way secular. There is a difference between removing religion from government, where it constitutionally has no place, and removing it from society as a whole.
I take offense that you call our society ‘secular’, when I live in a state where I cannot be elected to public office because I am not Christian. And I don’t mean that I am unelectable due to the number of Christians, I mean to say that the North Carolina state constitution expressly forbids me from holding ANY public office.
Christians control all three branches of government, with Obama leading the executive branch. Every supreme court justice is Christian. 90% of congress is Christian, and 99% follows an Abrahamic religion (Christianity, Judaism, Islam). Only 1% has any other religion, and there is not a single atheist among them.
I cannot believe that you would imply that our society is anything like a secular society, when we are in fact one of the most religious countries on the face of the earth. And to reference humanity’s religious past as a reason for a religious future makes no sense.
Ian Gamble | Jan 2, 2012 | Reply
Ian, The fact that secularism is the religion of elite culture in America and most of the West is not a controversy. Indeed as I have noted, secularism or metaphysical naturalism is the religion of the “Progressive” state and is the only legal doctrine allowed in virtually all government domains, including public schools, agencies, welfare, science, law, parks, etc. As I have noted in my article (of which Part 1 is now available) the “Progressive” believes that government power is a sacred force for the good and as with yourself, seeks to push religio from the public square. I see nothing in your comment about reducing the size or scope of government, but only for you to take over by being “elected to public office” and purify it by having your secular religious views imposed on the populace. In contrast, the natural-law tradition, that is rooted in religio, calls for the radical reduction of government itself. What is needed is not separation of church and state into separate enclaves with the secular theocracy lording over both, but the separation of state from society in order to end statism, period.
David Theroux | Jan 2, 2012 | Reply
David,
I have ordered Cavanaugh’s book and look forward to it. I wonder the following things:
*Intellectual elites may have held the medieval view of the unity of all things but, man, wasn’t that an era of constant warfare? True, it was Christian on Christian (in Europe) but those nice castles were terrifying to the locals (set to protect, they could also plunder!).
*Locke’s toleration didn’t extend to Catholics or atheists, although he was way ahead of his fellow Englishmen in the toleration department.
*Lastly, what role the Reformation? The “priesthood of all believers” cut a private versus institutional rift in Protestant religion. I constantly witness my Protestant friends disagreeing with some point of their pastor or denomination and simply heading off to form a new church. Sounds great but it often seems rash and my-way-or-the-highway. Of course, as a Roman Catholic, I’m biased! LOL
Jonathan Bean | Jan 12, 2012 | Reply
Jonathan, Thank you for your note. In his superb book, The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh addresses each of these issues, but there are other references I would also highly recommend to untangle the confusion created by incredibly sloppy and in some cases deliberately distorted accounts by key post-Enlightenment historians and other figures:
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark (Random House)
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, by Rodney Stark (Princeton University Press)
The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion, by Rodney Stark (HarperOne)
David Theroux | Jan 12, 2012 | Reply