In the last installment of our series on Christian Smith’s The Secular Revolution we reported Smith’s claim that secular revolutionaries dealt with religious believers in a less than honest way, claiming publicly that believers could have their spiritual world but proclaiming privately that belief in spirits was akin to belief in Santa Claus.

Now you might think that if secular revolutionaries thought religion was superstitious bunk, they would want it politely but firmly wiped off the map of history.  After all, what possible good could large scale delusion serve?

Certainly some—like Karl Marx—did indeed want religion removed as soon as possible, and Marx and later Marxists like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung didn’t mind the messiness of real, bloody political persecution and revolution to remove religion from human history once and for all.  In Marx’s words, “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”

Yet, many more secular revolutionaries believed that, even though religion was false, it was still useful. 

Religion was false, they asserted, because science has shown us that there is no God, no angels or devils, no heaven or hell. There is only bodily existence in this very tangible and disenchanted world.

But religion is useful because…well, because there are two kinds of people in the world: smart and stupid, wise and gullible, rational and irrational, enlightened by science and hopelessly blinded by superstition.  No matter how hard you try—they argued—you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  The stupid, the gullible, the irrational, the superstitious will always be with us—so why not use religion to control them?

A brilliant Secularist strategy!  We’ll call this view of the usefulness of religion “Machiavellian” after one of its earliest and most famous modern proponents, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the first great modern political philosopher and certainly one of the boldest proponents of an entirely Secularist worldview.

As the notorious Machiavelli informed his readers, “I have decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone.” This path led away from Christianity, and to the establishment of a new, very earthly secular political order.  But the problem facing Machiavelli was that early 16th century European culture was decidedly Christian.  His advice to secular-rulers-to-be: use religion to control the stupid, gullible, irrational, and superstitious masses.

Machiavelli’s advice to secular princes became, as it filtered down and spread out through the centuries, advice to all secular revolutionaries. And so it is no surprise that we find it being followed by such revolutionaries in late 19th and early 20th century Europe and America.

In Smith’s words, these latter day Secularists recognized that “religion remains intrinsically important to the mass of humanity” and consequently “that traditional religion still held the loyalty of many of their contemporaries.” But they themselves “were personally antagonistic to historical religion” because they viewed its as essentially false, something that their materialist science demonstrated (so they thought) was a mere fiction.

Like Machiavelli, they viewed religion as a useful fiction, believing that “religion’s…real potential value is in instrumentally promoting social harmony”—with the emphasis on instrumentally. Religion’s not true, but it is useful for social control.  A bit nicer sounding than Machiavelli, but essentially the same.

As Smith makes clear, this Secularist treatment of religion distorts it precisely because Secularists are allowing religion only insofar as it is defined according to what is useful to their project of secularization.  The result is that religion, in particular Christianity, comes to be defined according to secular utility rather than its own peculiar and particular proclaimed truth.  “Historical religions must, in other words, discard the particularity of their traditions and reinvent themselves in order to conform to the views of [materialist] science.” 

Smith is making an enormously important point here, one worthy of an entire book in itself.  As Secularism gained more and more control over the Public Square during the 20th century, it also exerted more and more power to define what is and is not legitimate for religious believers to believe.  In other words, Secularism has become a kind of established church that defines and legitimizes dogma…for others.  And in order to remain legitimate, Christians, Jews, and Muslims must “reinvent themselves in order to conform” to the Secular vision.

In America, Christians have largely reinvented themselves by retreating from the Public Square, from public education, from public art, from public displays of faith, from public laws and customs, from public arguments about truth, into a merely private, personal, and subjective religion—a religion that leaves Secularism in control of all things public.

The Public Square is not now neutral.  As Smith argues, “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.” In the next email, we’ll look more closely at the “reconstructed moral order” that now rules the Public Square.

Old-fashioned hardcore Machiavellianism--from the man himself

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is infamous as a teacher of evil, a man who in his book The Prince counseled princes to cast away all notions of right and wrong, and do whatever furthers their political causes, no matter how brutal or duplicitous.

At the center of Machiavelli’s teaching was the assertion that this life is being ruined by those who believe in the next life. This life, this world, is all that is real, and if we want to make it a peaceful home, we’ve got to remove all the pious fictions about another world, and concentrate on this one alone. In Machiavelli’s blunt words in The Prince:

But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.

Christianity fills us with thoughts of “imagined republics and principalities,” with notions of pious kingdoms in this life, and a kingdom of heaven in a life to come—neither of which have ever “been seen or known to exist in truth.”

Such pious fancies therefore keep rulers from doing the dirty work that needs to be done. Princes don’t act with the necessary ruthlessness because they are taught to desire the fiction of heaven, and to fear the fantasy of hell. True peace will only come to this earth, when rulers shake off such fiction and fantasy, and learn how “not to be good,” that is, to do evil when necessary and beneficial.

Obviously, for Machiavelli, religion was an obstacle. That doesn’t mean that he wanted to get rid of religion for everybody, but only for the Prince. In order for the Prince to exercise effective control over others, he must not only realize that religion is a foolish fiction, but precisely because he does realize this, he should use religion to rule the masses.

For Machiavelli, this was the recovery of ancient, pagan wisdom. The pagan writer Plutarch teaches us that wise rulers have always used religion to control the masses. So, in Rome, the ruler Numa Pompilius “turned to religion as a thing altogether necessary…to maintain a civilization.” He knew it wasn’t true, but took it to be necessary to maintain political order. While subjects cannot always be persuaded to obey on rational grounds alone, “wise men who wish to take away this difficulty have recourse to God. So did Lycurgus; so did Solon; so did many others who have had the same end as they.” According to Plutarch, “Lycurgus and Numa and such like others” who had “to deal with hard-to-control and unappeasable multitudes and to impose great innovations in [political] constitutions… pretended to have a vision from the god…” Machiavelli hints that Moses did the same thing, and he very clearly counsels modern day princes, living amongst Christians, to learn to use Christianity to control their subjects just as Lycurgus and Numa did.

In tracing to Machiavelli the notion that religion should be redefined according to its utility in maintaining a secular political order, we do not, of course, wish to imply that our modern day Secularists act with the same kind of ruthlessness that Machiavelli championed. Yet, in searching out the rather startling pedigree of the idea, we may be urged on to study the effects that a much milder Machiavellianism has had on Christianity’s own self-understanding in our largely secularized society.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

Soft Machiavellianism--along with a dose of both good old fashioned political calculus and hard core patronization

As we noted in the article, in highlighting Machiavelli as the paradigm Secularist advocating a utilitarian view of religion, we do not mean that all Secularists are as ruthless as the infamous "murderous Machiavelli," as Shakespeare described him. Indeed, many of them are what we might call Soft Machiavellians--not brutal, but just as clever in their use of religion for political purposes as Machiavelli. Witness the following environmental plea of famed biologist and atheist E. O. Wilson to Evangelical Christians in his new book, The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion (tts will soon publish a review Wilson's book). Wilson's plea is written in the form of a letter to an imagined Southern Baptist Pastor and is enough to make Machiavelli smile.

"Dear Pastor...I write to you now for your counsel and help. Of course, in doing so, I see no way to avoid the fundamental differences in our worldviews. You are a strict interpreter of Christian Holy Scripture; I am a secular humanist. You believe that each person's soul is immortal, making this planet a waystation to a second, eternal life; I think heaven and hell are what we create for ourselves, on this planet. For you, the belief in God made flesh to save mankind; for me, the belief in Promethean fire seized to set men free. You have found your final truth; I am still searching. You may be wrong; I may be wrong. We both may be partly right.

Do these differences in worldview separate us in all things? They do not. You and I and every other human being strive for the same imperatives of security, freedom of choice, personal dignity, and a cause to believe in that is larger than ourselves. Let us see, then, if we can meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share. You have the power to help solve a great problem about which I care deeply. I hope you have the same concern. I suggest that we set aside our differences in order to save the Creation. The defense of living nature is a universal value. It doesn't rise from, nor does it promote, any religious or ideological dogma. Rather, it serves without discrimination the interests of all humanity. Pastor, we need your help. The Creation--living nature--is in deep trouble."

There's nothing wrong with reaching out to people with conflicting worldviews to forge political alliances for a common cause, but the bridge is harder to build when people of faith are dismissed as irrational and superstitious on other cultural issues.

"The United States is an intensely religious nation. It is overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian, with a powerful undercurrent of evangelism. We Secularists must face reality. The National Association of Evangelicals has 30 million members; the three leading American humanist organizations combined have, at best, a few thousand. Those who, for religious reasons, believe in saving the Creation, have the strength to do so through the political process; acting alone, secular environmentalists do not. An alliance between science and religion, forged in an atmosphere of mutual respect, may be the only way to protect life on earth, including, in the end, our own."

E. O. Wilson
The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion

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