When Liberals Write About Religion

EVER SINCE the Enlightenment liberals have liked to talk about religion as something they are separate from. Liberals are the voice of reason, freed from the superstitions of conservatives, reactionaries, and other simple people.

So when liberal religion writer Alan Wolfe writes in The Atlantic about “the coming religious peace,” he doesn’t mention the great secular religions. No, what he’s talking about is the coming peace between Islam and Christianity and their reconciliation into the modern secular world of reason and tolerance. What a good thing, to end this pernicious religious war.

Still, many people, he writes, are expecting an upsurge in religious violence.

A common worry is that intense competition for souls could produce another era in which religious conflict leads to religious war—only this time with nuclear weapons. If we are really in for anything like the kind of zeal that accompanied earlier periods of religious expansion, we might as well say goodbye to the Enlightenment and its principles of tolerance.

But don’t worry. Over most of the world, religious belief is declining.

[M]any areas of the world are experiencing a decline in religious belief and practice. Second, where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving—very often in ways that allow them to fit more easily into secular societies, and that weaken them as politically disruptive forces.

You can see what is going on here in the mind of Alan Wolfe. Religion and faith are things that other people do, and the Platonic Guardians like himself, looking at the world from a higher place—presumably up at the entrance to the Cave, far above the lesser mortals still chained and looking at shadows on the wall—can look forward to the day when the shadow-watchers will have seen the light.

But the great fact of the world since the Enlightenment has been the growth and militant expansion of secular religions like nationalism, socialism, fascism, and the “politics of meaning.” And that’s leaving out other enthusiasms like anarchism, New Age spirituality, and general left-wing terrorism like the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang.

We conservatives see an inevitable clash, at some point, between the moderate, religious forces of democratic capitalism, and the secular religions which in general are arrayed against the gentle world of trust and reciprocity of the global commonwealth. They want to terminate the differentiation of society into separate political, economic, and moral/cultural sectors. They want to collapse these sectors into a nostalgic compact society secular politics and secular religion.

As a secularist, Alan Wolfe cannot see the persecutions carried out by the militant secularists: the endless secular propaganda on the media and in the schools, and the speech code enforcers, human rights commissions, and informal tribunals that daily show ordinary religious people the instruments of torture.

Yet that is where the flashpoint will occur. Between the militant secular believers and the moderate religious believers. But people like Alan Wolfe define the world to exclude such a possibility.

And in my view the clash will come over the question of human life. Secularist ethics is profoundly self-centered and directed towards amorphous questions like a free-floating compassion, obesity (!) and saving the planet with government programs. Religious ethics is centered around the need for people to purge themselves of selfishness and rage, to practice the difficult process of forgiveness and compassion towards those nearest and dearest and between generations within a family.

The question is how much inconvenience people are willing to tolerate with respect to inconvenient life. That would be inconvenient unborn life and inconvenient older life.

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