Christianity Under Attack from the Neo-Pagan Religion of Secularism

Solzhenitsyn predicted it.  In his famous 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, A World Split Apart, he chose not to pander but to tell the truth that a secularized, left-leaning intellectual elite did not wish to hear.  He assessed the spiritual and moral health of the West and found it wanting. 

He told us that, while the Western democracies opposed the political and economic systems of tyranny that held sway in the USSR, the conditions that undermined the moral foundations of the Communist world and made it possible for governments to enslave their populations were being recklessly replicated in the West: materialism, legalism, a false view of freedom as will-to-power, and, most important of all, atheism.  For Solzhenitsyn, the tragedy of Soviet totalitarianism is not caused by misguided men choosing to implement a flawed economic or political model, as if a few tweaks could rectify the situation.  No, the source of tyranny lies deeper and on this deeper level the West is sliding toward the materialistic humanism that always trends left. 

This analysis explains why the Christian Church in Europe and North America is under attack today.  The Church, along with the Family, are obstacles to the total rule of the "progressive state."  The Church impedes the full triumph of the neo-Pagan religion of Secularism and the enshrinement of the All-Powerful Leviathan as the source of law, value and power. 

In the United States, the Obama administration is trying to force Catholic (and Evangelical) colleges, hospitals and social service agencies to dispense contraceptives, including abortion poisons, to its employees.  Is the reason a desperate lack of access to contraception in the United States?  No, hardly, it is rather an attempt to break the will of the Church hierarchy and to send the message that Caesar decides doctrinal issues, not the Bishops.  No one should doubt that if they get away with it, sometime in the near future they will be forced to pay for abortions.  They may stop at forcing bishops into abortion clinics to personally assist in late-term abortions, but in principle there is no limit on their power to do so, from their point of view.   Forty-three Catholic organizations are suing the federal government and stand a good chance of winning. 


In Ontario, Catholic schools are being forced to allow student clubs celebrating the glories of sodomizing one another in plain contravention of Church teaching.  Why?  Because the forces of secularism wish to provoke the Catholic bishops to either capitulate to the principle that the State now decides what doctrine may be taught in what context or else provoke the Church to fight back, which will provide a pretext for defunding Catholic schools and bringing all education under Caesar's control.  It is thus a win-win for secularism.

In New Brunswick, Crandall University is under attack for holding to 3000 years of Judeo-Christian moral teaching on sexuality by making it a condition of employment that faculty not engage in adultery, fornication and, oh yes, homosexual acts.  As I predicted years ago, the attack is coming from the students, who, shaped by 12 years of pro-sexual revolution, secular humanist education, expect the university to conform slavishly to its secular environment because, well, dissenting from the majority is just so inconsistent with critical thinking . . . or something like that.

In Great Britain, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, is warning that Christians are being "vilified" and "driven underground" by secularist forces intent on removing the right of Christians to express their long-standing, orthodox beliefs in public.   A specific list of cases can be found here, which is far from exhaustive.  As one example, a counselor was fired from her job for failing to give two homosexuals "sex advice."  Who knew that homosexuals were actually dying for sex advice from up-tight, traditionalist Victorian prudes?  You don't suppose it might have been political, do you?

If Christianity is under assault all over the Anglosphere, you can be sure that is not because people want more religious freedom.  They want the same amount of religious freedom but with Christians on the receiving end of persecution, which is to say that they want the neo-Pagan religion of Secularism to be the State religion instead of Christianity.  The shift that occurred in the fourth century under Constantine and later Theodosius is being reversed.  The pagan morality of ancient Greco-Roman civilization is making a comeback as humane, just, merciful Christian laws are reversed one by one.  Christian Pregnancy Help Centers are the contemporary equivalent of first century Christians going out to the garbage dump of Rome to rescue unwanted infants abandoned to death by pagan parents.


This suggests that liberal toleration does not work when leftist, secular, materialistic, atheistic activists are concerned.  They don't want toleration; they want to stamp out Christianity.  But Solzhenitsyn told us this was the case.  To reject God is not the same as being neutral toward God; those who reject God crave social approval to replace the Divine approval they have forfeited.  They need their false god - the State - to smile on their lifestyle choices and the emphasis is on the word "need."   This makes secularism dangerously intolerant - like a number of other threats the free peoples of the world have had to face including Islam, Communism and Fascism. 

We managed to see off Fascism in 1945 and Communism in 1989, but Islam is a perpetual external threat as it has been for 1400 years.  It is not difficult, however, to see a spiritually healthy West continuing to stand up to Islamic terror.  But the internal threat from Secularism is more serious than all the other ones combined.  This is how vibrant civilizations die: by a thousand self-inflicted wounds from within, not by external conquest.  Solzhenitsyn was prophetic about our plight; our fate, however, is still undecided.  May God, if it be His will, grant a revival of Christian faith in the West that puts atheism and secularism in the shade.   If not, God will still be God regardless of what happens to the West.

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review

This is What They Mean By "Tolerance"

See, you got to kick people out to be inclusive. . . especially religious types. See?

One of Vanderbilt University’s largest Christian student organizations has announced it will formally break ties with the Tennessee school, becoming the latest victim of the college’s intolerant policy on student club leadership.

Vanderbilt Catholic announced last week that is it unable to comply with the school’s new nondiscrimination policy that prohibits student groups from maintaining belief or faith-based qualifications for leadership positions.

“The Administration is forcing religious groups to open leadership positions to all students, regardless of whether or not they practice the religion or even know anything about it,” Father John Sims Baker, chaplain of the 500-member Catholic group, explained.

Vanderbilt updated the school’s nondiscrimination policy at the beginning of March, applying what administrators call an “all-comers” policy to student groups. The policy states: “Registered student organizations must be open to all students as members and must permit all members in good standing to seek leadership posts.”

Vanderbilt Catholic’s leadership has explained that the organization allows any student to become a member but requires those in leadership to share the group’s beliefs.

Any student group wishing to remain affiliated with Vanderbilt during the next school year is required to sign an agreement to abide by the new nondiscrimination policy and submit group bylaws that ensure inclusion of any student wishing to become a member or leader.

In a letter to its members announcing that the group will move off campus for the next school year, Vanderbilt Catholic’s student board wrote:

After much reflection, discussion, and prayer, we have decided that Vanderbilt Catholic cannot in good conscience affirm that we comply with this policy.… We are a faith-based organization. A Catholic student organization led by someone who neither professes the Catholic faith nor strives to live it out would not be able to serve its members as an authentically Catholic organization. We cannot sign the affirmation form and remain [a registered student organization] because to do so would be to lie to the university and to ourselves about who we are as an organization.

Vanderbilt Catholic joins four other evangelical student groups who are unable to abide by the new policy in good conscience, relinquishing their official status with the school and losing the use of school facilities for meetings. The Christian Legal Society, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Beta Upsilon Chi, and Graduate Student Fellowship will also make plans to leave campus.

It is not about homosexuality. That is just a handy club with which to beat Christians. It is anti-Christian intolerance pure and simple. They are secularists; what do they need freedom of religion for? Liberal Fascism is on the march! Don't you feel safer now?

Freedom of Religion versus Freedom of Worship

Which do you believe in? Did you know there was a difference?

The Obama administration has been seeking for some time now to redefine religious freedom down to mere freedom of worship. This distinction is between having the freedom to worship as you please with worship meaning specifically religious ceremonies held in designated buildings consecrated for that purpose led by professional clergy. But anything outside that context is fair game for the government to regulate to death as the ruling class sees fit.

So the following kinds of organizations and institutions may no longer defined as religious: hospitals, Christian schools, summer camps, pregnancy help centers, campus groups such as IVP, inner city ministries, Bible colleges, liberal arts colleges, seminaries, universities, think tanks, counseling centers, community centers, publishing companies, prison ministries, community-based youth groups etc. Christians do a lot of ministry outside the local church itself and have always had the freedom to hire Christians only, have distinctively Christian policies and allow Christian morality to shape practices. All this is threatened as the net of secularism tightens.

Freedom of worship narrowly defined is what the Soviet Union had in its constitution. But it was defined so narrowly that even parents taking their own children to Sunday School was forbidden.

How wide or narrow the definition of religious freedom is allowed to be is a measure of how free a country is. Religious freedom should be defined in the widest way possible. The narrowing of religious freedom to mere freedom to worship is heavy-handed and totalitarian. It must be resisted by the Church at the earliest stages because, like cancer, the further it progresses the harder it is to stop and the more traumatic it is for the body politic to reverse.

The Obama administration is at war with the Christian Church because it wants to replace Christianity with the Church of Secularism as the civil religion of the American people.

This is an attempt to roll back the clock and pretend that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ never happened. It is an attempt to return to pre-Christian paganism. But it is doomed to fail because the cosmos has been shaken and altered by the Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ who rule at the right hand of the Father. The kingdoms of this world are destined to become the kingdoms of our God and His Christ.

Let the Secularists rage, the Jihadists roar and the United Nations plot the advance of the culture of death. They have already been defeated - all of them.

"The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Annointed saying, "Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us." He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds then in derision. (Psalm 2:2-4)

Christian Influence in the Secular Realm

As I said in the earlier post, Augustine in effect invented the concept of the secular. The secular realm is the space in which Christ's Lordship is contested during this time between the first and second comings of our Lord. In the realm of the secular, it is possible for Christians of varying degrees of commitment and non-Christians to mingle and find some common ground, engage in some disputes but in the end find a way to live together in peace. This has happened in Christendom and is one of its proudest achievements.

Those who consider historic Christendom to be "exclusive," "violent," "patriarchal," and "racist" often do so because they dream of a socialist Utopia in which the legal-constitutional concept of government has been overthrown and the legacy of the West burned to the ground - as in the 20th century Soviet Union, for example. Their critique - which has been internalized by many in the contemporary West through the cultural Marxism commonly referred to as "political correctness" - is overblown, dishonest and impossible to accept.

Christendom has been a geographical area in which there has existed more freedom than has ever existed in any other society in history. Yet this achievement is scorned and demeaned. To criticize Christendom for not having enough freedom is to operate from a Utopian perspective that is not engaged with reality and therefore extremely dangerous.

The question I want to raise here is how Christians exercise influence in the realm of the secular. This is a pressing question for anyone who become convinced of the necessity of a Christian public witness and feels called to serve as a follower of Christ in the public square.

Oliver O'Donovan, in his The Desire of the Nations, discusses the legacy of Christendom and identifies the essence of this legacy as the legal-constitutional conception of government. (240) He writes:

"Certain key convictions about law became formalised in Christian Europe: all law derives from the will of God; all law is one; all secular rulers are subject to law. . . Christendom in effect refused the classical commonplace that the ruler was a 'living law', his personal authority indistinguishable from the authority of the law he gave. Even those Christians who defended most determinedly the supremacy of the sovereign over earthly courts understood well enough that the sovereign's decree had no legal substance if it ran counter to divine law, natural or revealed." (234) [my bolding]

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis contrasts the situation of the teacher and the pupil with and without the recognition of what he calls the Tao (which is just a fancy name for the natural law). If the existence of natural law is the presupposition of moral education (and public law we could say) then the teacher and the pupil (the ruler and the subject) are both alike under a law that is not of their own making. Each owes obedience to an objective standard that they did not invent and cannot change. So even though one is taught and the other teaches, they are closer to each other than either is to God or the natural law. If the teacher teaches a false doctrine it is not binding on the pupil and will in due course be discovered to the discrediting of the teacher. But if the teacher and pupil assume that there is no such thing as a natural law, then the act of teaching (and we could say the act of governing) becomes essentially tyrannical. It becomes the imposition of the will of the teacher on the pupil.

I believe that the reason why so many Evangelicals are attracted to pacifism today is an inarticulate feeling that to teach objective morality and enforce the natural law is tyrannical; that it is merely a Nietzschean imposition of will. Why do they feel this?

O'Donovan points to a sea-change in 17th century political philosophy in which:

"under the influence of contract-theory, an important shift of emphasis occurred in radical political thought: the ruler's primary responsibility ceased to be thought of as being to divine law, but rather to the people whose supposed act constituted him. This act of popular will came to be thought of as the source of all law and constitutional order." (241)

O'Donovan calls this change "a collapse of the idea of a universal Natural Law, and its replacement by a nationalist positivism." (241) This is a key moment in the rise of modern Secularism and our craven, unreflective acceptance of this turn away from God is the cause of our ambiguous waffling in the fight against socialism and our timid retreat into pacifism in the public square.

The arena of the secular is not a lawless, Nietzschean, war of wills. It is a realm in which Christians, Jews, Muslims and even agnostics can work together on the basis of a common recognition of an objective moral order. Those who reject the natural law or objective moral order are enemies of the common good and must be vigorously opposed. This is precisely what is not happening because of the timidity of Christians and their compromising half-acceptance of atheistic positivism.

The legal-constitutional political order based on a recognition of the unity and inseparability of the natural and Divine law, which is Christendom's legacy to mankind is under attack today as never before. But it is a precious, humanistic and fragile legacy and Christians must defend it in the realm of the secular.

Christendom is Not the Problem: Secularism Is

As a follow-up to my previous post, I want to point out that the eschatological tension that pervades Augustine's thought can be relaxed in two ways, not just one. Readers of my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, will note that I left the impression that Christendom itself is the problem and that Christendom equals Triumphalism. But Christendom is not the problem, secularism is.

By Secularism, I mean the attempt to disregard, deny or eradicate the future Kingdom of God including the Second Coming, the Day of Judgment and the triumph of Jesus Christ in such a way as to make it all just a symbol of something that actually happens in history. The problem is that this results in pulling the Kingdom back into the present plane of history and cuts the nerve of the eschatological tension between the present Lordship of Christ over the world which is not yet acknowledged by everyone and that future time when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Secularism is not a belief in the validity of the secular. Augustine invented the concept of the secular - that which is neither the sacred or the profane - the sphere of life in which Christians rub shoulders with non-Christians in common endeavors. The secular is the space in which religion and morality is not excluded yet not dominant. The secular allows for dissent and difference of opinion and is inherently anti-totalitarian. But appreciating the secular is not the same as secularism.

Secularism is a term that only entered the English language in the 19th century. It is basically the denial of the transcendent, of God and of an objective moral order. To be secular is to be materialistic and human-centered. Secularism is the expansion of the concept of the secular to encompass the totality of life. Secularism is an attack on Christianity and all religion and morality that is grounded in reality rather than in the will of the individual.

Secularism is as bad as Triumphalism because it both relaxes the eschatological tension and also facilitates the unification of the Church and the State. The difference is that this time the State absorbs the function of the Church into itself. The State makes itself into a god which provides for the people, engineers society according to its own choices and values and makes itself into a source of meaning. The Church is first disestablished, then privatized and finally rendered invisible and impotent. All religious influence must be eradicated from society because such influence constitutes a threat to the power of the State.

The belief in a future Kingdom of God (and by future I mean after the Return of Christ and not continuous with the present age) serves as a check on all totalitarian aspirations, whether they emanate from organized religion or from politics. The direct implication of the maintenance of the belief in the Second Coming, Day of Judgment and Kingdom of God is the relativizing of all politics - both ecclesiastical and civil - and the doctrine of the Two. The doctrine of the Two is the Medieval idea that power should not be concentrated in one set of hands but should be divided between Church and State. The Medieval doctrine of the Two draws on the division of powers in the prophet, the priest and the king in ancient Israel and lays the foundation for the modern concept of the division of powers - the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government - and the the idea of a limited government that does not need to control every action and thought of the people because of the influence of Christianity in creating within the population that self-discipline which is the necessary condition for liberty.

What I am saying is that contemporary Secularism is just as dangerous - in fact, at present it is more dangerous to liberty - than is Triumphalism. Triumphalism is not a clear and present danger in the contemporary West, but Secularism is. There are two roads to totalitarianism: a clerical dominated theocracy like Iran and the "dictatorship of relativism" that arises when secularist ideologies like Marxism become dominant. The alternative to both kinds of totalitarianism is a free Church in a free State: Christendom.

Pope Benedict and Secular Britain: Lessons on How to Engage Post-Christian Culture

Pope Benedict XVI has thought long and hard about the issue of modern secularism and his Augustinian theology and deep commitment to historic Christian orthodoxy and morality give his words a kind of gravitas that is so often missing from the fawning, appeasing, shallow remarks made by so many Christian leaders today in the public square.

Here are some excerpts from a story in the Daily Telegraph about Benedict's leadership during his recently concluded trip to the UK. Instead of it being a PR disaster, as many liberal Catholics feared, it was another Benedictine triumph, just as the trip to the US was and the trip to France and so on. People who essentially have no message for the secularized, late-modern Western world cannot seem to believe that traditional orthodoxy can have so much power and beauty in the midst of a secular society.

In an article with the headline: "We will not be silenced, Pope tells secular Britain."

Delivering the most important speech of his historic visit, he attacked the politically correct ideas that Christmas should not be celebrated for fear of offending minorities and that the faithful should be forced to keep their beliefs to themselves.

Speaking in Westminster Hall before an audience including four former prime ministers, the Pope declared that politicians must not interfere with the running of Roman Catholic institutions, in what would be seen as a reference to those adoption agencies and faith schools that felt under attack from the previous Labour government.

Here Benedict tells it like it is - no big surprise there to those who have followed his ministry up to now - but the real surprise is the reaction:

He spoke earlier in the day of the threat posed by “aggressive secularism”, words that were echoed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.

Cheering crowds had lined the streets of London to welcome Benedict XVI, first in Twickenham, then in the centre of the capital.

Cheering crowds? Support from the "Ever-Waffling One" and Rabbi Sacks? Isn't Christendom over? Is not the Roman Catholic Church dead? Do people really still believe that stuff anymore?

Here are come choice quotations from Pope Benedict's address to Parliament in Westminster Hall:

Thank you for your words of welcome on behalf of this distinguished gathering. As I address you, I am conscious of the privilege afforded me to speak to the British people and their representatives in Westminster Hall, a building of unique significance in the civil and political history of the people of these islands. Allow me also to express my esteem for the Parliament which has existed on this site for centuries and which has had such a profound influence on the development of participative government among the nations, especially in the Commonwealth and the English-speaking world at large. Your common law tradition serves as the basis of legal systems in many parts of the world, and your particular vision of the respective rights and duties of the state and the individual, and of the separation of powers, remains an inspiration to many across the globe. . . .

This country’s Parliamentary tradition owes much to the national instinct for moderation, to the desire to achieve a genuine balance between the legitimate claims of government and the rights of those subject to it. While decisive steps have been taken at several points in your history to place limits on the exercise of power, the nation’s political institutions have been able to evolve with a remarkable degree of stability. In the process, Britain has emerged as a pluralist democracy which places great value on freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation and respect for the rule of law, with a strong sense of the individual’s rights and duties, and of the equality of all citizens before the law. While couched in different language, Catholic social teaching has much in common with this approach, in its overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God, and in its emphasis on the duty of civil authority to foster the common good. . .

The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation. In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none. And there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square. I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.

Speaking as a non-Roman Catholic, it is so inspiring to hear a high-profile Christian leader like the pope speaking so forthrightly about the need for faith and the dangers for Western democracies of trying to marginalize faith and Christians in a misguided drive for total secularism. The realm of the secular is the invention of Christianity and is good; secularism is to make the secular into an idol which is made absolute and worshiped. In order to maintain the sphere of the secular a society needs Christianity to supply the rationale and moral fiber necessary to keep the secular from being turned into an idol.

A Real Prophet and a Court Prophet

Baroness Cox is a real prophet. She recently spoke to a missions conference in Ridgecrest, NC and this is a report on her speech:

"An English evangelical Anglican baroness told 825 Anglican and Episcopal missionaries including three archbishops, 20 bishops and numerous clergy and laity that resurgent Islamic fundamentalism poses a threat to Western Civilization. Citing Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, Caroline Cox said the British nation has "lost its soul."

England, she said, is in a perilous situation, "Where there is a vacuum, it is liable to be filled with alternative ideologies and belief systems. Without a vision the people perish," she said to a New Wineskins for Global Mission participants coming from 28 countries of the world.

Describing herself simply as a "nurse and social scientist", her political pedigree allows her to address England's most senior parliamentarians in England (the House of Lords.) "It is more important to speak in the House of the Lord than the House of the Lords," she quipped.

"A resurgent Islam requires gospel bridges. We do not need walls, but reconciliation can only be achieved through realism," she said.

Baroness Cox is a voice for the persecuted and marginalized of the world, especially in the war torn country of the Sudan that she has visited numerous times. Two million Sudanese, mostly Christians, have been slaughtered by Islamists over oil rights in the southern part of the country which is predominantly Christian. Many believe another war is imminent.

Cox also sees a major threat on what she called "the home front". She outlined four areas of threat.

"I see an aggressive sexual humanism, a misplaced utilitarian, multi-cultural and extreme relativism playing out as well as a basic ignorance of [Britain's] Christian heritage and divisions within the churches giving off an uncertain trumpet call. As a result there is a deep fundamental assault on the deepest values of liberal democracy and an inculcation of guilt in Britain. I want the British people to look out and wake up and understand the dangers which confront us," she told the stunned mixed audience of global missionaries.

She said the growth of a political, strategic and militant Islam is mostly to blame for it. "The vast majority of the worlds' 1.2 billion Muslims are law abiding hospitable people, but there is a growth of militant Islamists who follow the teachings of traditional Islam associated with Al Qaeda.

Read the rest here.

The current Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand is a court prophet who cries "Peace, peace" where there is no peace. Here is a taste of his Easter sermon in which he mocks recent cases of Christian persecution in Britain from his loft establishment perch.

"The Archbishop of Canterbury today condemned the "overheated language" used to describe Christian suffering in Britain as a coalition of religious groups launched a campaign to protect what they see as the country's religious heritage.

Rowan Williams told a congregation at Canterbury Cathedral that "wooden-headed bureaucratic silliness" combined with a "well-meaning and completely misplaced anxiety about giving offence to non-Christians" should not be mistaken for persecution. - - snip - -

t was not the case that Christians were "at risk of their lives or liberties in this country simply for being Christians", Williams noted. "Whenever you hear overheated language about this, remember those many, many places where persecution is real and Christians are being killed regularly and mercilessly or imprisoned and harassed for their resistance to injustice."

The call for calm and proportion put him on a collision course with Christian leaders who yesterday urged people to vote for parliamentary candidates "who will promote policies that protect vulnerable people and also respect the right of Christians to hold, express and live according to Christian beliefs".

Signatories to the Westminster 2010: Declaration of Christian Conscience include the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, who has retained a high profile and legions of admirers since leaving office, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland, and Steve Clifford, who heads the Evangelical Alliance, which has links with more than 7,000 churches.

They said the manifesto was a direct response to an increase in reports of Christians "facing discrimination in all walks of life" and that proposals in the Equality Bill "would have made it illegal to insist that their employees including the clergy believed in God and the teachings of the Bible"."

Read the rest here.

His name should be on the list of signatories of the Westminster Declaration, but no, he has no time to stand up to secularism any more than he has time to stand up to militant Islam. He thinks that endless talking and dialogue can change the world - a typical attitude for an intellectual, but a bad one for a shepherd.

Maybe someone should tell the Archbishop that there is a war going on. Who better to do so than Baroness Cox? The question is, will he ever stop talking long enough to listen to reason?

Secularism is Doomed to Die Out: Conservative Will Inherit the Earth

Ed West has an intriguing story in the Daily Telegraph about yet another reason why the secularization thesis, so popular in sociology and political science a couple of decades ago, is wrong. He claims that the future belongs to religious conservatives of all religions and that atheism and secularism will die out because atheism and secularism do not provide sufficient reasons for people to procreate. He says:

"The 1960s counterculture slogan “make love, not war” could have been invented for the Hutterites, a conservative, pacifist Anabaptist community in the US and Canada. Numbering 400 at the end of the 19th century, when they moved to Dakota on the point of extinction, there are almost 50,000 Hutterites today, despite conversion being extremely rare (they speak an archaic form of High German and live in the middle of nowhere, which makes it unlikely they’ll turn up at your doorstep with a funny grin).

They are not alone. The Mormons continue to grow by 40 per cent every decade, largely thanks to a high birth rate, so much so that by 2080 there will be anywhere between 63 and 267 million Mormons, depending on whether that figure falls to 30 per cent or 50 per cent.

And Evangelical Christians now account for two thirds of white American Protestants, while the ultra-Orthodox account for 17 per cent of British Jewry, but 75 per cent of children.

Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered. That, anyway, is the thesis of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a fascinating new book by Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck University, which is published later this month. It may well be one of the most significant books of our era."

Read the rest here.

The take away point here is not Evangelical Christian triumphalism. In fact, Mormans and Muslims may grow faster than Evangelicals during the next century. The point is that we need to know who our true rivals are - and the serious threat to Christianity is not secularism except insofar as we allow ourselves to become accommodated to secular ways of thinking and living.

There is no compelling reason to imitate the Darwinian, materialistic, secular atheists. They are doomed to a long slow decline into cultural isolation and irrelevance. We don't have to convert them (although it would be great if we do), we just need to avoid being converted to their pessimistic, hedonistic, individualistic, anti-family lifestyle. That is the main task and the better we do at that task the more feasible and successful our evangelistic efforts will become.

The main task of the Church is first to be a sufficiently counter-cultural community that converts have a place to go where they can be trained in a new, specifically Christian way of life.

We should not be surprised that atheism leads to the culture of death and eventually to extinction. Even if some sort of evolution turns out to be true, it may well be that Darwinists like Richard Dawkins will die out because they fail to meet basic evolutionary criteria for survival. As one website puts it in its slogan: "Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive."

Christians Not Yet Persecuted, But Only Marginalized in the UK, says Carey

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has spoken out clearly about the marginalization of faith in the UK. The headline in the Telegraph reads as follows:

"Lord Carey: 'Strident and bullying campaign' to marginalise Christians in UK"

"Christians are being "bullied" out of public life in Britain while politicians fail to stand up for their beliefs, according to the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

"Lord Carey said there was a "strident campaign" by atheists to ban faith schools despite their pupils gaining good results.

Meanwhile "politically correct" councils go to "absurd" lengths to avoid causing offence to followers of other faiths by honouring the country's Christian heritage. Lord Carey, who was the spiritual leader of the Church of England between 1991 and 2002, said it was a "scandal and a disgrace" that politicians care so little about Britain remaining Christian.

In an address given at an event in Parliament organised by the Christian Broadcasting Council, Lord Carey spoke about the persecution encountered by churchgoers in many foreign countries.

He said he was "saddened" that Christians are often treated as "second-class citizens" in the Islamic world, while Muslims are free to build mosques in Britain.

The former archbishop conceded that Christians do not suffer the same plight in this country, but added that there is a concerted attempt to make them keep their beliefs hidden behind closed doors.

Lord Carey said: "What is happening in Western Europe is not persecution but a marginalising of faith which seeks to portray it as a matter of personal conscience only.

"Some examples of this originate from a mistaken but well-meant political correctness that is anxious not to upset minority faiths by seeming to 'privilege' Christianity.

"Hence the regular 'pantomime' every Christmas where some local Council or another absurdly gives Christmas another name."

Read it all here.

Peter Liethart on Milbank's Critique of Modernity

Peter Leithart has an excellent summary of the first part of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason here. Here is how it begins:

"Once, Milbank begins, there was no secular.

And the appearance of the secular is not merely a matter of removing something superfluous, as sociology generally tells it in its theories of “desacralization,” the image of the stripping of a sacred covering so that some realm of pure humanity and nature is brought into the open. That portrayal assumes that there is such a thing as a pure humanity, which is always there under the surface of the sacred and of religion, which has nothing to do with the sacred, and it assumes that humanism is the natural destiny of history, the inevitable telos toward which all human societies move. Both of these assumptions must be contested.

This is an important theme throughout Milbank’s book: there is no “natural” human ordering of life."

and this is how it ends:

"Voluntarism grounds political absolutism because, it is argued, the sovereign cannot bind himself. At the same time, voluntarism grounds liberalism (not as opposed to “conservatism,” but as the post-Enlightenment order): The freedom of individuals depends on their being left alone by the law to do what they will, and individuals have more or less absolute power to do what they will with what lies within their dominion. The two political implications of voluntarism come together when we ask how there is to be peace and some semblance of social unity in a liberal society. We need some sort of unity to preserve freedom. What brings unity to a collection of people who are left alone to pursue whatever they will? The modern answer is, either consensus (but this may not come) or a sovereign direction by the state (which is more secure). Thus liberal freedom requires absolutism and tends to fall into it.

With the public realm defined as a realm of absolute will and sheer power, theologians had to conclude that the church played no public role. On this definition of power, the church could not be associated with power, and therefore, it cannot be associated with public life.

The other contributor to this secular space was a renewed paganism, which Milbank particularly associates with Machiavelli. Machiavelli revives a pagan view of virtue as heroic manliness particularly exercised in war, and promotes a manipulative political practice, which sees a social good coming out of the fostering of social conflict. External conflict is also socially useful, since it preserves an independent spirit. Machiavelli explicitly sees the public sphere as a sphere of sheer power, manipulation, self-seeking calculation. The Machiavellian fosters conflict among rivals in order to promote himself; and this “science of conflict” becomes the scientific approach to politics. The public sphere is a secular sphere, as a sphere of sheer power and self-promoting manipulation.

Thus, the modern secular was imagined and constructed by cooperation between heretical theology and paganism. As a result, Milbank says, Christianity cannot find a place for the “secular.” It has to simply reject it."

Read it all here. This is the most concise and incisive summary of Milbank's critique of modernity I have seen. I would quibble with Milbank about his use of the term "secular" and wonder if what he means by "secular" might not be better conveyed by the term "secularism," which would allow the term "secular" in its Augustinian sense to be retained. But his critique of voluntarism leading to political absolutism and his understanding of modernity as being rooted in a heretical, non-Trinitarian doctrine of God is absolutely right, in my opinion.