The primary point of my first book, The End of Secularism, was to demonstrate that secularism doesn’t do what it claims to do, which is to solve the problem of religious difference. As I look at the administration’s attempt to mandate that religious employers pay for contraceptive products, I see that they have confirmed one of my charges in the book.
I wrote that secularists claim that they are occupying a neutral position in the public square, but in reality they are simply another group of contenders working to implement a vision of community life with which they are comfortable. And guess what? They are not comfortable with many of the fundamental beliefs of Christians. Regrettably, many secularists are also statists. Thus, their discomfort with Christian beliefs results in direct challenges to them in the form of mandatory public policy.
Collectivism is often very appealing to Christians who want to do good for their neighbors. Unfortunately, collectivism is frequently a fellow-traveler of aggressive secularism with little respect for religious liberty. The veil has slipped. I hope we do not too quickly forget what was revealed in that moment. Collectivism gives. But it also takes. And what it takes is very often precious and irreplaceable.
Mr Baker,
You write that “many secularists are also statists.” Isn’t it the case that all secularists must be statists whether they realize it or not?
I am nearly finished reading Fr. R. L. Bruckberger’s 1959 book Image of America wherein he points out that what sets the American revolution apart from the revolutions in France, Russia, India, etc. is that the American revolution sought to end divine right in politics (not merely divine right of Kings). We didn’t merely transfer divine right from the King to the colonists. Rather sovereignty could only be universal and our rights truly inalienable if we recognized that our sovereignty and our rights came from God. If they don’t come from God then they can only come from man. There is no middle ground between God and Man, it’s an absolute choice.
I might be a right-leaning, libertarian atheist who believes in a barely-there government, but if someone asks me where my rights come from the only answer I can honestly give is “from me and others like me,” or to put it another way, “from the state.”
The American experiment rejected all that because, as Bruckberger writes, “It is true that people have rights and that those rights are imprescriptible and inalienable; but not every right is theirs. They do not have the right to deify themselves.”
Bruckberger continues:
“…In this chain of political sovereignty the people are always subject and at the same time always free and sovereign. They are subject to their own laws and to God’s justice. They are free because they obey only their own laws. They are sovereign because their sovereignty is part of the sovereignty of God.”
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