The Perils of Pure Secularism: Part 2
In the West’s headlong rush to put its faith in secularism, the dispassionate observer must ask, “Whither the family?” “Whither charity?” and “Whither community?”
1. Charity. Throughout Europe, one finds the fruit of Judeo-Christian compassion—a German Lutheran hospital in Israel, a Jewish orphanage in the Netherlands, a Salvation Army rescue mission in England, Habitat for Humanity homebuilders in Romania, and Special Olympics teams across the continent. All these originated in communities of faith.
But where are the great privately funded atheist hospitals, adoption services, disaster relief teams, and inner-city health clinics? Where is the skeptic’s Red Cross? Can Europe possibly count on the growing community of agnostics, libertines, and careerists to found and sustain the great works of mercy characteristic of devout Catholics, Jews, and Protestants? Can London expect a Richard Dawkins Hospital to take its place alongside others named for Saints Bartholomew, Mary, and Pancras? Can Parisians look for a Voltaire Clinic or a Derrida Orphanage? And where is Germany’s Nietzsche Camp for Children with Disabilities or the Schopenhauer Food Pantry? Of course, some secularists (as those in Doctors without Borders) engage in sacrificial acts of charity, but the formative principles and institutional precedents for their service are biblical.
2. Family. The family is the very foundation of society, so a roll call of modern cultural icons is chilling. Theirs is a record of shameless, crusading infidelity, of abandoned children and heartbroken spouses. These ideologues have inspired a culture of contraception and abortion—and an aversion to wedlock. Study, for instance, the sexual, marital, and parental track records of such shapers of the modern mind as Marx, Freud, Picasso, Russell, Gropius, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, Joyce, Wilde, and Ayer. Of course, secularists can have strong families and believers can stumble in this connection, but the Judeo-Christian center of mass is far more family-friendly.
3. Community. The English common law tradition is a paradigm of social healthfulness. Developed over centuries of moral engagement, it is both common and law—it is grounded in the legitimate concerns of the populace and is recognized as binding across the land. It is the product of centuries of give and take in a nation whose religious orientation has been upon Jerusalem—not Mecca, Lhasa, or Varanasi. Its judicial standards have been tempered by the courts of equity, whose devout chancellors defended the weak. It honors precedent, due process, equality before the law, and peer juries. How then can a Western people grant dispensations for alien, cleric-driven, shari‘a law, which despises key tenets of Western jurisprudence?
The explanation can only be the exhaustion of traditional convictions, whereby a people come to doubt the very principles which made their civilization great. Such collapse did not come quickly; it took centuries of ridicule by those who both worshipped their own cleverness and hated the counsel of God. Whereas Western missionaries once condemned polygamy in the Middle East, widow-burning in India, and foot-binding in China, priests of the new secular culture indulge religious and irreligious perversities in the name of multiculturalism. And so a moral and spiritual vacuum has formed in Europe at the very moment that Islam is advancing. One sees not so much the clash of civilizations as the collapse of Western civilization at the very moment it faces vast challenges from the uncivilized program of Muslim hegemony. And so a heritage must be revitalized, old truths restated, and old standards reset. Otherwise, the tide that was repulsed militarily at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683 will flow, with scant hindrance, throughout Europe. What Muslims failed to take through force of arms will be gained through demographics, hysterics, and politics, in the 21st century.1
Footnotes:
1This article is taken from a longer paper that was presented at the 2008 Vienna Forum titled, “The Perils of Pure Secularism.”
