Europe's 200 Year Civil War

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?