Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
First Amendment, United States Constitution
The Unofficial State Religion
There is a perception that we have no established religion in the United Sates. This is wrong. The first amendment, as interpreted by modern courts, establishes a de facto religion. The jurisprudential concept of separation of church and state effectively reduces belief to personal preference. As a result, the state comes to view religious claims unseriously, as Christian commentator John Stonestreet says, in a manner similar to how we view our favorite ice cream. This denies any correspondence between the nature of religious claims and the actual nature of things.1John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World, David C. Cook, June 1, 2017. Belief in something beyond this world comes to be seen as just one option among many. Such belief remains a possibility only as a conscious choice, personally enriching for some, but private and apart from any deep conviction.
Secularism steps in to fill the void as the unofficial state religion. As Father Alexander Schmemann pointed out, the secular religion attempts to steal the world away from God. According to secularism the only world we can possibly know is this world. And the only life we’re given is this life. So it is up to us to make it as rich and meaningful as possible. “It is the religion for those who are tired of having the world explained in terms of an ‘other world’ of which no one knows anything, and life explained in terms of a ‘survival’ about which no one has the slightest idea.”2Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
This is, in fact, a religious worldview that ultimately subordinates knowledge to the inner self. It sees man as the autonomous ruler of himself, not just free to obey or disobey, but to define right and wrong according to whatever man considers just. This is a religious precept every bit as much as the idea that man is created and sustained by a God who declares on matters of right and wrong.
Pretending that we stand over and above religion is dishonest. None of us exists outside of a metaphysical framework. And so the existence of so-called neutral institutions is a farce. Someone always has to administer the project. And that puts the administrator’s values very close to the center.
It turns out that this secularism is a fanatical regulator of private belief. Believe whatever you want as long as you don’t take those beliefs too seriously or remain committed to them in any public way. As Professor Paul Tyson sums it up, you may hold whatever personal beliefs you want as long as you maintain public loyalty to the state and its secular laws and accept its absolute monopoly on coercive violence.3Paul Tyson, De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being, Cascade Books, 2017.
A Society Without Religion Is Not Possible
A society without religion isn’t any more possible than a society without language. In fact, value neutral institutions would be inherently destructive because the bonds that hold communities together are not neutral. As I said, there is not really any question that each of us holds a worldview. It’s simply a question of which worldview has us.
People who don’t go to church typically don’t consider themselves religious. In reality, their beliefs about the world are what keep them from attending church. We all hold beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality. For example, whether the world is an accident of nature or the creation of God; whether right and wrong are rooted in something more than just sentiment; or whether there is an afterlife.
Either man is created and sustained by God or man is the autonomous ruler of himself. Both positions rest on religious presuppositions. And they are diametrically opposed. According to the egotheist, the radically autonomous self is free to accept or reject, want or not want, but not to obey.
Freedom from all constraint then naturally becomes the ultimate good because total autonomy wars against limits. We are free only to the extent that we are free of limits. Inevitably, it all comes down to the will to power since our capacity to act or speak is limited by the degree to which we have power. Other people, as well as nature and society, represent limits. So we must demonstrate that we own our bodies, not God or nature or other people. Protest is found everywhere today. And like all religions, this new self-worship demands sacrifice. We must be willing to part with anything that transcends ourselves in order to pursue this will to power. Goodness, truth, and beauty all become casualties. There is an enormous deficit of these things in our society today.
It’s a type of freedom that results in enslavement. When ‘survival of the fittest‘ becomes the only grand narrative, we quickly find ourselves locked into predator-pray relationships. Psychopathic corporations run wild once there are no longer any mediating institutions. It’s grossly naïve to expect these collective institutions to display virtues that the individuals they’re comprised of do not even possess.
This secular project is still relatively new. We’re just starting to taste its full fruit. We might ask ourselves what exactly have modern attitudes liberated us from? Security? Commitment? Trust?4Matt Walsh Blog, Abstinence is Unrealistic and Old Fashioned We are now so far removed from our pagan past that people have a hard time imaging how previous cultures were okay with infant exposure and child sex slavery. But all this and more is permissible in a society predicated on the will to power.5As we see this in our own society which ignores child sex abuse and views abortion not even as tragic but necessary, but rather as something to celebrate as a triumph of morality. One gets the feeling we don’t understand the inheritance we are walking away from. The French scholar Louis Betty warns, “Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.”6Louis Betty, scholar of French literature who wrote a book about Michel Houellebecq’s metaphysics, in an interview France’s Master of ‘Materialist Horror’ by Rod Dreher for the American Conservative One gets the feeling we’re about to find out.