Secular Theocracy: The Foundations and Folly of Modern Tyranny, Part 2

By David Theroux

The Independent Institute

 

We live in a secularized world of nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is unwelcome. Rooted in the “Enlightenment,” this view supports a secularized and authoritarian public square enforced by government and that progress requires forcing religion ever backward into remote corners of society. In short, America has become a secular theocracy with a civic religion of national politics (nationalism) occupying the public realm in which government has replaced God.

Continued from Part 1:

During the Enlightenment, nationalism became the new civic religion, in which the nation state was not merely a substitute for the church, but a substitute for God, and political religion benefited from being more tangible than supernatural religion in having the physical means of violence necessary to enforce mandatory worship and funding. Nation states provided a new kind of salvation and immortality; one’s death is not in vain if it is “for the nation,” which will live on.

This “myth of religious violence” lived on with legal theorist John Rawls who claimed that the modern problem is a theological one and the solution is political. For Rawls, since people believe in unresolvable theological doctrines over which they will kill each other, a secular state must rule. Similarly, Stanford law professor Kathleen Sullivan, a secularist, has claimed that as a necessary condition for peace to avoid a “war of all sects against all,” religion must be banished from the public square.

As William Canavaugh notes, “[O]nce the state had laid claim to the holy, the state voluntarily relinquished it by banning religion from direct access to the public square . . . then what we have is not a separation of religion from politics but rather the substitution of the religion of the state for the religion of the church.”

Hence, in Abington Township School District v. Schempp, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan stated that the function of public schools is:

the training of American citizens in an atmosphere in which children may assimilate a heritage common to all American groups and religions. . . . This is a heritage neither theistic nor atheistic, but simply civic and patriotic. A patriotic and united allegiance to the United States is the cure for the divisiveness of religion in public.

In his dissent, Justice Potter Stewart correctly warned that the Abington ruling would be seen “not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.”  (continue reading at The Independent Institute)

 

Here again is Part 1:
http://blog.independent.org/2011/12/19/secular-theocracy-the-foundations-and-folly-of-modern-tyranny-part-1/

The full article with footnotes is here:
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3206

 

 

 

Comments

[republican mother]

Gaining control of the education system was a goal of the Carnegie Corporation at their founding. Rep. Wood of Idaho said the following in 1951 on the House floor:

The program is quite specific. The teacher is to begin by eliminating any and all words, phrases, descriptions, pictures, maps, classroom material or teaching methods of a sort causing his pupils to feel or express a particular love for, or loyalty to, the United States of America. Children exhibiting such prejudice as a result of prior home influence—UNESCO calls it the outgrowth of the narrow family spirit—are to be dealt an abundant measure of counter propaganda at the earliest possible age.