Society has become increasingly secularized over the last century, both in Europe and in America, a trend that shows no sign of abating in the current century. And this increasing secularization brings of necessity a decreasing presence of Christianity and other traditional religious faiths.

If we accept this fact, and we believe that religions in general and Christianity in particular have been baneful obstacles to progress, then we cannot help but to make merry, and look forward to the cheerful day when humanity will be delivered from the darkness of superstition.

But if we accept this fact and, on the contrary, we believe that religions in general are signs of humanity's natural inclination to worship, and that Christianity in particular has been the revelation of Whom we should worship, then we cannot help but be concerned as our culture marches merrily into the dread darkness of unbelief.

But is increasing secularization inevitable? That is, must secularism increase and Christianity and other traditional faiths decrease?

The answer to that question will depend in part upon what we think secularism is. In its original sense, the term "secular" refers to the natural realm, the world, as distinct from the supernatural realm. It simply marks the difference between the temporal and eternal. In that sense, the secular realm is not set against the eternal, but merely distinguished from it.

But the term "secular" has taken on a different sense, one captured by the suffix "-ism." Secularism denotes a dedication to the world as opposed to the supernatural, and proclaims a kind of declaration of war against traditional religion. It turns a proper distinction into a furious antagonism.

Now we return to our question: must secularism increase and Christianity decrease? For those who think that secularism is some kind of an inevitable, historical necessity—be they secularists or Christians—secularism must increase as Christianity decreases.

But what if the Secular Revolution really is a revolution, the result of a well-planned, well-funded campaign to sink Christianity and put a new world order in its place?

What if—and this is perhaps the most startling point—what if one of the best, most effective weapons of secular revolutionaries is spreading the rumor that secularism is inevitable—an historical, impersonal force that cannot help but run full throttle until it throttles everything sacred in its path? In that case, it will achieve victory simply by declaring it, and then all that is needed for the triumph of secularism is for people of faith to do nothing.

In an effort to answer these questions, tothesource will examine in a series of emails a most important book by Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life.

Smith's argument is that the "secularization of the institutions of American public life did not happen by accident or happenstance" (32), rather, "American public life was secularized by groups of rising scientific, academic, and literary intellectuals whose upward mobility...was obstructed by the Protestant establishment....What these secularizers were actually pursuing was not primarily a neutral public sphere, but a reconstructed moral order which would increase their own group status, autonomy, authority, and eventually income" (37).

These secularizers posed as neutral observers of an inevitable historical tendency, that was not inevitable at all, any more than they were neutral. Instead, secularization was the happy result of their well-planned, well-funded efforts to remove traditional religious faith and replace it with a social order of their own making.

These American revolutionaries imported their founding ideas from Europe, from the centuries-long secular revolution that had already transformed the Old World, and which they hoped could transform the New.

This may sound like an abstract and merely academic argument, but such is not the case. Smith, a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is quite concrete in documenting the activities of the revolutionaries, because every successful revolution is in the details—the textbooks pushed for adoption in colleges in the early 20th century, the grant money given to colleges with secular strings attached, the behind-the-scenes letters of one secular activist to another, the popular magazines funded to coat the public square with propaganda, and the list (as we shall see) goes on.

In examining such concrete details, along with the abstract arguments that gave them form and substance, we hope to give our readers a much better understanding of the nature of secularization. So please, stay tuned for The Secular Revolution.

And Alito makes 5!

Justice Alito makes it five Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court! Former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black must be rolling over in his grave! In his historic Everson opinion, Black reached back to Jefferson's mostly forgotten "wall of separation between church and state" to find justification for his anti-catholic bigotry. A former Ku Klux Klan member, Black, made Catholics a target. He promoted the separation of church and state as one way to limit Catholic influence on American politics and law.

Phillip Hamburger's insightful book, Separation of Church and State, reveals the anti-catholic sentiment behind Judge Black's Everson opinion.

In his review of Hamburger's book, Judge Robert Bork details the ramifications of Black's anti-catholic overreach.

The modern separationist myth, as Hamburger shows, leaps from Jefferson's 1802 letter to Justice Hugo Black's 1947 Everson opinion, which adopted the "wall" as a constitutional doctrine and omits "any discussion of nativist sentiment in America and, above all, omits any mention of the Ku Klux Klan," which helped lead the fight for separation. The myth also omits many details about Hugo Black, who was not only anti-Catholic but also a Klan leader, not the naive, young lawyer he later made himself out to be. It is impossible to read the separationist opinions of the Court from that time forward without recognizing what Chief Justice Rehnquist called a "bitter hostility" toward any government recognition of religion. As American society became increasingly secular and groups indifferent or actively hostile to religion grew in numbers, the antipathy toward Catholicism became a more general antipathy to all religion. Eventually, many Protestants realized, as Hamburger notes, that "they faced a greater threat from secularism and separation than from Catholicism." And indeed, Protestant and Jewish institutions and practices have since come under the increasingly antagonistic scrutiny of the courts.

As Christian Smith rightly notes, America had very few home-grown secularist intellectuals.

The philosophy behind secularism was mostly an import from Europe, filtering in slowly in the early decades of our Republic, but pouring in during the latter half of the 19th century. One of the most influential European intellectuals was the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857).

Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier, France, the son of ardent Catholics, a fact made obvious by his full given name which reads like an invocation to saints, Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte. Oddly, his entire life would be dedicated to replacing Catholicism with a new, purely secular Religion of Humanity, a religion entirely without God dedicated to the worship and enhancement of the human race. “Love is my principle, Order is my basis, Progress is my aim,” declared Comte.

Comte believed that humanity progressed through three stages, its infancy being defined as religious. This first stage was one of ignorance and superstition. The intermediate stage was the metaphysical, where abstract ideas ruled, but these ideas were not entirely freed from the illusions of infancy. Finally, humanity entered the scientific or positive state, where, shed of all childhood illusions of supernatural powers and freed from all merely abstract ideas, godless humanity embraced the truths of science and worked out its own this-worldly redemption. In this last stage, scientists (especially social scientists) replace priests, and direct every aspect of society. The Religion of Humanity would now rule absolutely, and Comte claimed to be its great prophet.

We see in Comte, then, one of the essential tenets of secular thought: religion is infantile, and must for the sake of humanity be replaced by science. In Comte’s words, “theology would necessarily die out as physics advanced.” This notion of necessity gave to positivism a missionary zeal to hasten theology’s demise. This zeal was carried to our shores a half century after Comte’s death.

Thus, to understand secularism, we must (as Comte did) see that it is a replacement religion. Comte believed that, as humanity had already entered the great, culminating third stage of history, we are ready to “inaugurate the new religious regime.” “I am convinced,” he wrote to a friend, “that before the year 1860 I shall be preaching positivism at Notre Dame [Cathedral] as the only real and complete religion.”

This new religion would celebrate humanity; it would have its own feast days and rituals; it would have everything that his childhood Catholicism had—except God. It was to be a purely secular “Religion of Humanity” that preached love, focusing “our feelings, our thoughts and our actions around Humanity,” which is “the one truly great Being, of which we are wittingly the necessary members.”

Well, not all of humanity, but only those who are able to be assimilated into the new Religion. All those who stand in the way of progress, the criminal, the “parasites” and “dung-producers” who merely live but do not contribute—they must be cast aside as unworthy. They are unfit objects of this new, purified and purely secular love of humanity.

As a preacher, Comte was highly successful, gathering devout disciples of secularism, who in turn would go out to all the nations and preach the good news of our emancipation from theological religion and the even better news of the new Secular Church.

At the end of the 19th and early 20th century, American students had to go to Europe for graduate school because they as yet had no native graduate institutions. There, among other things, they picked up Comte’s philosophy, along with his secular zeal, and brought it to our shores. We’ll return to an examination of their adventures, and their success in establishing a Secular Church in America, in latter emails.

Ironically, the great prophet of the love of humanity was, apparently, not very successful in his own home. Comte was by all accounts monumentally egocentric. He had terrible relations with his family, stormy relations with his first wife (whom he divorced, even though she nursed him back to health after a nervous breakdown), and then ended up worshiping the memory of a woman, Mme. Clothilde de Vaux, whom he had known for about a year before she died. Literally worshiping—performing strange quasi-religious rites kneeling before the chair upon which she sat when she visited him, strewing it with flowers, reciting various verses in her honor, and invoking her as a saint of the Religion of Humanity. In 1857, he died, wretched and isolated before he could preach his religion at Notre Dame.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

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