There has been much talk of late of the rise of the “seculars” as a power in American politics.
Religious people can only feel amused at this new furor as the “establishment” in education and the media have been secular for our entire lifetimes. In politics we have frequently been used to get votes while seculars reaped a disproportionate share of the spoils. To the seculars belonged most of the spoils.
To steal an old line: if India is the most religious nation on earth and Sweden the least, America has been a nation of Indians run by Swedes.
The rising number of intellectual, conservative Christians is changing that. We don’t need to sit in the back of the bus hoping that a conservative secularist will show us respect. We have our own media (such as IVP) where idea books can be distributed. Hosts like Hugh Hewitt and Frank Pastore show that idea shows can attract listeners on the right . . . a kind of nascent NPR without public funding.
Secularists are getting all out of sorts and organizing as people losing political power often do. The entire ten percent of them are getting ready to flex their political muscle and prevent the planned takeover by Puritans of Massachusetts . . . or prevent some other hyperbolic fear these paranoid secularists are dreaming up.
Evidently the politics of John F. Kennedy (who lived in a world with no “gay marriage,” more religion in schools, and no legal abortion) is a nightmare if secularist blogs are to be believed . . . and in 1960 (three years before I was born) the nation lived in abject terror and oppression. Of course some things needed to change in 1960’s America (most of all race laws in the South), but nobody would doubt some things were better then! It was hardly a police state.
Why are secularists such alarmists about religious people in government? Why do they make such bad Hitchens-level arguments? Secularists often live in an insulated world where they never have to confront the best arguments of the “other side.”
Religious folks are a “minority” in college and must accept their minority status, learning to respect and argue with their foes. We are commanded to be charitable by our religion and to being good co-workers by the survival instinct. Our books and ideas are hammered the minute they come out the gate. This is good for us (on the whole.)
Not so the left-of-center establishment. I was talking to young college students about Bush in Europe and they had never (never!) heard a single defense of the War or the President. There arguments were beyond fragile . . . worse than any I have ever heard (even in complacent right wing places). It never had dawned on them (ever) that smart people might disagree with them.
It made them angry to think some smart person might. They just were not used to having to debate their ideas on equal terms. They started sputtering, though in the end we were able to have good dialectical chat and both learn a thing or two. Their college education (American state schools) had insulated the poor things from any debate and so they were not good at it!
The “rise” of secular books and “arguments” (most angry and embarrassingly devoid of content) is a more sophisticated reaction to a threat. The arguments are not “new” nor is the political muscle. What is new is the growing realization in the “leadership class” that not everyone is willing to let them rule and that they might have to defend their birth right. The disdain that they would have to bother is palpable.
The secularist forced to admit that schools such as Biola may be producing well educated idea competitors disturbs them deeply. Don’t all smart people think as they do? They tend to try to put it all off with a joke or ridicule at first like some nineteenth Lord Fluffybottom forced to defend his titled position to his more capable groom by resorting to quips that kill them at the club. The rise of You-Tube mockery was the first response.
Ideas cannot be killed by mere mockery, nor can men that hold them so now we enter the more serious phase where the threatened secularist are growing alarmist.
They should relax. We are their neighbors and at worst (from their point of view) we dream of a time when life is respected from the womb to death, where local schools are free to acknowledge religion (even to pray!), and where the state only promotes biological marriage.
Since we have had prayer in schools, the right to ban abortion at the state level, and traditional marriage in the life times of anyone over fifty one needs to consider the apocalyptic language of some on the Left as a sign of fear or derangement. Was JFK’s American (which had all those “religious right” characteristics) a fascist state?
Religious folk in America are only a threat if democracy is frightening. There are more of us than of them and we are tired of putting up with the tyranny of this noisy minority. We will give them liberty to practice their historical aberrant views, but they are going to have to stop imposing them on the schools and public space we pay for with our tax money.