The End of Secularism

I had tagged the New York Times Magazine article by Mark Lilla on “The Politics of God,” meaning to get to it later.  Now I find that the irreplaceable “Spengler”, the Asia Times columnist, has detected in the article an important social and political inflection point.  It represents, he writes, a declaration of defeat by the secular liberals.

Not only does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this position from the beginning.

Lilla mourns that after all the progress of the last 200 years we are back in the 16th century.

[W]e find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty.

Earth to Lilla: we are always entangled in conflict over competing revelations.  It’s just that you chaps won’t admit that your secular-liberal religion is a religion, complete with revelation, dogmatic purity, secular duty, and a longing for atonement.  For the last 200-300 years you chaps have been insisting that you are above all that, the superstition, the bigotry, the infamy.

But it was all a lie, and worst of all, it was a lie that you were telling to yourselves.

OK, you say, so the libs have finally admitted defeat.  Now let’s get on with in.

But there’s a problem, according to “Spengler.”

Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims.

The truth about secular liberalism is that it has always been a war against Christianity.  So it makes sense that its last act would be to betray the Christians to the Muslims.

Well, there are some of us that just don’t want to surrender to the Muslims, and we don’t feel that we have deputized our liberal friends to enter into surrender negotiations with anyone.  Regarding the war on terror we take the Reagan position during the Cold War.  We win, they lose.

The big question is how far down the road to ruin the secular liberals will take us before the people of the west cast them off and demand to be led to victory.

My guess is: a lot further down the road that any of us would like.