Europes 200 Year Civil War - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S no particular secret that the last 200 years has seen a struggle between religious believers and secularists. On the one side was Voltaire and his cry to erase the infamies of the Church. And on the other side were the religious who saw the secular world view as “an insurrection against God,” according to Larry Siedentop.

Over the past hundred years the religious camp has come, by and large, to accept civil liberty and religious pluralism. The anticlericals have — with the exception of hardline Marxists and writers such as Richard Dawkins — given up on the attempt to extirpate religious belief.

In fact, Siedentop argues, Christianity and secularism need each other, because there is a “moral logic that joins Christianity and civil liberty.” Muslims understand that when they talk of “Christian secularism.” Another way of expressing the idea is the separation of church and state.

And that’s just as well, Siedentop writes, because the European idea is facing a challenge from Islam and cannot afford to be divided.

The question is: Who will make the first move of reconciliation between secular and godly? The fact is that writers like Richard Dawkins are not an exception. They represent a large community of secularist believers who think they are doing “humanity’s” work by stamping out religion in the public square. Because otherwise the fundamentalists might end abortion and persecute homosexuals.

In their dreams.

There is a fundamental lie at the center of the fuss about “theocracy.” There is no chance, right now, of any political party in the United States or elsewhere in Europe turning into a theocracy and burning abortionists at the stake. For one thing, it’s in the constitution. No establishment of religion. For another, today’s religious believers are private people who don’t understand how to use political power, at least not in the way that secularists do.

We conservatives would be delighted to negotiate a truce with our secular friends. But we recognize the enormity of the challenge.

What can you do about people who have been raised by their secular parents and educated in a thousand government schools and universities to hate religion?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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