Christians have done bad things in history.
This is not surprising since we are just as messed up as everybody else when God takes us.
Sadly, secularists have done worse.
(Click here to know what I mean by “secularist.”)
In fact, it is a general law of history that there is no theistic mess so bad that secularism cannot make it worse.
Better an ineffectual Louis than the Reign of Terror in the name of reason. Better a slowly evolving constitutional monarchy in Dostoevsky’s Russia than the Red Terror under the secularist Lenin. Better the Christian Sun Yat-sen, than the secularist Mao.
Christians may do badly, but let the secularists have power and history says an age of terror follows. Bluntly, the experience of the last two centuries is that traditional Christianity may make a frightful mess, but secularism fixes it through applied fright.
A Christian who does evil faces the command of Jesus to “love his neighbor as himself.”
A Christian may not obey, he can try to argue his way out of obedience, but he still has to deal with the Law of Love. It is hard to be a good Christian and ignore Jesus Christ. Hating people (as opposed to bad behavior) is just not an option for us. No Christian can disagree with the command to love God and their neighbor, however much we may mess it up.
If you are a secularist, what is your bottom line? What is the command that you might rationalize or try to fudge but cannot escape? What do secularists all have in common?
If you are a secularist, you might mock the Christian “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but what is the option: love the sin and hate the sinner? Love the sinner and the sin? Even if the sin is killing the sinner?
Secularism cheats by claiming numbers it does not have. There is no “secularism” only a group of people united by the denial of theism or supernaturalism. Each individual secularist is his own pope, Bible, or creed . . . which sounds attractive unless your neighbor is bigger, stronger, and his creed is meaner.
Secularism is not a view of the world with a common creed except for negation. There is no positive moral belief to which any secularist must be committed. As a result when on the attack the secularist has all the advantages of the ethical nomad. He can burn everything in sight without fear of guarding his home base.
Secularism is destructive and not culturally constructive. Albania was, for a time, an officially atheist state. Anybody want to live in the Albania of that period?
The atheist will respond that the government leaders in the Soviet Union who would torture religious people in psychiatric centers for believing in God were not really atheists or their kind of atheist. Evidently (as the atheists argue) a state that kills people for being religious is not really doing so because it is opposed to religion.
I can condemn Christians who kill the innocent on the basis of their own Christian faith. What is a secularist to do? Bad Christian states are full of bad Christians, but bad secular states are full of good secularists.
Almost every piece of tangible progress in the West traces back to Islamic, Christian, or Jewish thought. Even the best Greek thought (Plato and Aristotle) was theistic and not atheistic. In fact, the very existence of the tiny community of “secularists” (really only united by having nothing to unite them, the party of Zero) in modern times is due to the love and tolerance of religious believers.
In the 1850’s almost every Brit was a theist, but they let their village atheists alone as harmless cranks. Darwin may have irritated Victorian believers, but he died in bed . . . which is better than the Darwinists did for the nuns of Moscow when they seized power there from a democratically elected government.
There have been good scientists, citizens, scholars, logicians and thinkers who were secularists, but they worked in a university, political, and ethical system constructed by theists (especially Christians). The good news for the rest of us that most secularists in the United States and Western Europe are just Christians trying to get along without Christ. It does not work for long, but it beats where such secularism will head over time.
On what basis does the secularist condemn his fellow secularist in the old Soviet Union or modern China?
He can only sputter that he does not like what they do or “reason” is against their action (another way of saying he does not like it). The Soviet will reply (as he did reply) with learned books justifying his actions on “scientific” and rational grounds.
I am confident that the nice secular folk in the United States who object to the comparison are sincere. They would never put women in mental hospitals for belief in God as secularists did in the Soviet Union (where 22 million died) or make them work in concentration camps as secularists still do in China.
Well and good, but on what grounds do they say so? On what moral basis? Where does it come from?
The fact is that no officially secular state has ever done less than commit mass murder once it was in power. The only possible exceptions are in Western Europe where recently the population has been secularized (though so recently many still have state churches!).
This current secular generation is destroying the patrimony of the World War II and Cold War victories of the last religious European generation and frittering away centuries of cultural Christian progress. Ask Pope Benedict. He writes about it all the time.
As their culture crumbles what will they do? We shall see. What they don’t seem able to do is survive much longer.
The secular European culture seems intent on committing demographic suicide (a kind of self-genocide) by not making enough babies (”No babies please, I am a secularist!”) to sustain the population. If Darwinism is true, safe to say it is selecting against European secularists.
A Christian who kills the innocent is breaking God’s law. Have “Christian” states been inconsistent with Christian teachings? Of course. It is easy to judge them (as secularists do using our standards!). But on what basis does the secularist judge his co-secularists in China who are presently running slave labor camps full of religious believers in the name of anti-religion?
Our critics can accuse us of hypocrisy, because our principles are well known.
But how can you accuse an atheist of hypocrisy? They may not like the form secularism is taking in China with its slave labor camps, but on what basis are they condemning it? Are they using ethics borrowed from us without attribution? How can one be “bad” in an ethic people make up for themselves?
Of course, many nice people are secular. In countries with majority religious populations a good healthy secular population can be good for the culture (if bad for the individuals eternally) by keeping the religious from getting fat and lazy. They keep the God-fearing honest and act as good skeptics. Skepticism is a good tool in any cultural tool kit and secularists use it well.
Sadly, when they get to be a majority it is the only tool they have. They see through patriotism, creed, and most other commitments. Seeing through things gets tiresome so they begin to cast around for a man made replacement for time honored religion.
Too often they replace faith in God with some man-made ideology of the moment. (In West Europe that seems to be hedonism at the moment.) That’s when the killings start with none of that “love thy neighbor” stuff getting in the way. If baby gets in the way in Western Europe or secular America, too bad for baby.
New movements (and secularist utopianism never last long enough in any given form to get old) are always roughest.
Christianity has lasted long enough to wear away many of the rough edges. We will continue to make mistakes as we learn the ethic of Jesus Christ, but we have a means of measuring our progress. As we suffered and made errors (some serious) over the centuries we learned from them with the Christian ethic of love to guide us.
We cannot hate the secularist, but only his bad ideas. We cannot persecute him (we have learned that from the Law of Love) and be consistent with our own beliefs, but can argue with him. We can vote and pray, but not take the law (a thing we developed over the centuries) into our own hands.
What restrains the secularist? What secular god has said thus far and no further?
What makes liberty better than communism (beyond personal preference) for my secular friends? What will count as moral progress? By whose standard will progress be measured?
It is hard to know.