Items of Interest June 6, 2011 Issue

Our religious roots

“Let’s not make a religion out of secularism” Editorial, The Age [Victoria, Australia] © Fairfax Media Ltd. All rights reserved. The printing, copying, distribution, or reuse of this material without permission is expressly prohibited. April 22, 2011

There was a time when those who prophesied the death of religion portrayed what would follow that demise as a blissful era of tolerance, freedom, and respect for the dignity of all. When the world had cast off its superstitions, so the argument went, the greatest cause of hatred and dissension would be removed. It has not happened. In part this is because, despite all the confident predictions, the death of faith is not in sight—not even in the avowedly secular West, and certainly not in other parts of the world. But it is also because the predictions themselves have taken on a particularly strident and belligerent tone. Religion of any kind, but especially the monotheistic faiths that were formative influences on Western civilization, is routinely characterized by campaigning secularists as not merely false but as the root of all evil, too. Adherents of those faiths are spoken of at best with condescension and ridicule, and sometimes with outright hostility. Ironically, there is often an evangelical fervor in this anti-religiosity, which, by denying all intellectual and moral legitimacy to that which it opposes, has acquired some of the worst traits of the faith of past eras. . . .

A society that takes cultural diversity seriously respects its members’ defining beliefs; it does not seek to conceal them, which too easily becomes a covert way of trying to suppress them. And a society that takes education seriously does not shrink from teaching pupils about religion. It is a part of human culture, and seeking to excise it from culture would be an impossible exercise, one that would render unintelligible even many beliefs that secularists hold dear. . . . 

[I]t is worth taking time to reflect on the fact that the secular state arose from the agitation of those who were trying to establish freedom of religion, not to ensure freedom from religion. Not only would it not have occurred to them that religion should be banished from public discourse, they would have regarded such a notion as a new form of tyranny. As indeed it would be. Whatever the future of religion may be in this secular nation, even those who adhere to no faith should acknowledge how much of their own world view derives from the faith of earlier centuries. The notion that all human beings are equal in rights and dignity now seems inherently secular, but it first gained currency in a world in which the vast majority believed that all people were created in the image of God. That belief gave the idea of human dignity a political impetus it has not lost, for believers and unbelievers alike. We should not let our children grow up in ignorance of how the world came by that idea.

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