The Naked Dictator (Part 1)
Bruce Logan – Family First board member
“The idea that a secular society is supported by philosophic and moral neutrality is the great confidence trick of our time. It would control the language we use and the way we think about ourselves. It is the initiator of thought crime and hate speech legislation. This article defends that claim.”
If New Zealand is a secular society, as Trevor Mallard claimed in his exclusion of the Lord Jesus Christ from parliamentary prayer in 2018, we must answer some serious questions. What is a secular society anyway? How do we describe it? What is its foundation? Does it have one?
One suspects that a secular society, uniquely the product of Western civilisation, lives off what it doesn’t believe rather than what it does. Certainly, it is the rejection of revelation and the foundation of objective value, taught by traditional Christianity and Judaism. So what does it put in their place other than the sovereignty of reason that would give rise to philosophic and moral neutrality? How can it offer a plausible story to sustain a civilisation?
We need to ask what happens when we abandon Biblical anthropology, which declares human nature sacred yet flawed, describes that flaw, the need for the restraint of law, and the transformation of mind and soul. Will secular moral idealism, the belief that human beings can approach moral perfection through education, legislation and, dare I say it, cultural manipulation, be a working replacement?
Another problem is how the secular mind deals with the idea of progress: how it discerns the difference between going forward and going backwards, in its presumption of neutrality, and has no idea of its own source other than its reaction against tradition.
Which brings us to the most immediate of practical problems. A secular society must always understand truth to be subjective, a matter of opinion, and, in order to retain social and legal order, ethical and even religious underpinnings must be adjudicated by the state. Moral responsibility is taken from the individual and given to the state. The effect that it has on our understanding of our humanity and freedom should be obvious.
To reinforce the claim that secularism has no clothes, let me appeal to influential texts by two significant modern writers: a historian and a philosopher. In 2018, Tom Holland’s “Dominion” was published, in which he explained why Western civilisation is still the product of Christianity, or more accurately, the Bible and its Jewish history. The West is so deeply embedded in Christianity that most are hardly aware of it anymore. Contemporary notions of freedom, dignity, and justice all find their roots in the Bible; even the concept of secular is a reaction against the biblical declaration of transcendence.
Twenty-eight years before the publication of “Dominion” Alistair McIntyre published “Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.” McIntyre argued that all reasoning occurs within traditions, including liberal secularism itself. And just to add some weight to that claim, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has pointed out that secularity is not the absence of religious belief. Rather, it is a historically conditioned “social imaginary”. Even the cynical Michael Foucault could not escape the central issue insofar as he thought that claims of secular neutrality concealed structures of power.
Now let’s get back to the questions presented at the beginning. From what kind of roots does Trevor Mallard’s secular society draw its water of life? From what soil does it draw its swollen confidence in neutrality? What new insight does a secular society possess that enables it to stand in judgement over all other versions of moral enquiry?
And for those with a theological mind, what was it that enabled Trevor Mallard to replace the sovereignty of Christ with the sovereignty of the secular? All of us might reasonably ask, has the abolition of Christian virtue led to a more harmonious society?
Here’s the point. A secular society is a thief. It steals its concept of human dignity from the Genesis story, that man has been created male and female in God’s image, while denying that it is doing so. It would have us believe a fantasy. A secular society presumes human beings to have inherent dignity while denying the existence of its source.
It’s revealing that the issue of secularism’s theft was already signalled during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. John Humphrey, the distinguished Canadian international lawyer who worked closely with the Commission preparing the declaration, suggested that “we needed something like Christian morality without the tommyrot.” The French social philosopher Jacques Maritain suggested: “Yes, we agree about the rights, but on the condition that no one asks us why.”
Condemned to see all moral judgments as subjective, secularism has no way to believe in any concept of objective value. Indeed, it lacks any foundation for its purloined major tool of measurement, scientific method, which depends on a belief in the objectivity of an ordered creation. The key verse is Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
God creates time and matter from nothing by the power of His word. “Let there be light,” said God, and there was light. The first two verses of Genesis are critical if we are to believe in any concept of objective value. “In the beginning,” is especially important. It declares that creation is open to the human mind’s exploration.
And that human mind is separated from the world in which it lives. God did not create man only by the power of a word; rather, he formed him after His own likeness, out of the dust of the earth with His own hands. “The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. God created man in His own image. In the image of God, he created him; male and female, He created them.” The man and the woman were unique creatures insofar as they became eternal, embodied spirits.
We cannot overestimate the importance of the Genesis creation story. It is unique in its precision and the order that it gives to creation. Unlike any other creation story, Genesis clearly states that the creation of time and matter are simultaneous. The text is not written in scientific language; nevertheless, it provides the foundation for any theory of dignity and for the eventual belief in the scientific method. Time, sequence and motion are measurable because they were created by God out of chaos. The structure of the Genesis creation story points to the emergence of time through ordered cycles: “evening and morning, numbered days and seasons.” Time becomes meaningful through the ordered cosmos that God created.
The Genesis story gives us a workable concept of the beginning. The world had a beginning, and it will have an end.
Incidentally, although the Genesis story is not a lesson in physics, it aligns surprisingly well with some modern ideas about the Big Bang. The critical issue remains: God is the source of all reality.
To repeat, the secular mind has a problem defining progress because it assumes the existence of objective reality even as it denies it. With no evidence whatsoever, it presumes the reality of self-creation. Not unexpectedly, there is the assumption that all religions and, therefore, cultures are more or less equal. It gets even more confusing: religion and culture are frequently compounded, undermining the possibility of coherent political discussion. Certainly, that is the case in much of the contemporary debate around the importance of indigenous peoples.
In the English-speaking world, we might not have gone as far down the road as the French have with their concept of “Laïcité”, but we’re certainly moving in that direction. A secular society has built within it its own machinery of power. It must continue to presume absolute power, or expose itself as a House of Cards.
Briefly, the concept of the contemporary secular can be traced back to the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason over tradition, its belief in natural rights such as liberty and equality, and its recognition of education’s power to transform human nature. In the English tradition, it took hold through the writing of JS Mill (1806-1873) and other utilitarians who thought that they could retain Christian morality without God. For example, the novelist George Eliot famously said that the “concept of God is inconceivable and immortality unbelievable.” Nevertheless, she went on to insist that duty is “peremptory and absolute.”
So, we don’t have a duty to God; rather, we have a duty to ourselves. It might look as though Mill, Eliot, and others, along with the French writers like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, successfully overwhelmed Christianity with their own sufficient reason, uninfected by Christian revelation, could go on to assume the neutrality and sovereignty of their own reason.
More recently, one has to mention Karl Marx, who, in his hatred of Christianity and Judaism, continued to propagate the authority of reason uninformed by revelation. After his famous quote about religion being “the opium of the people”, the sigh of an oppressed people, he goes on to say that religion creates an illusory kind of happiness. Happiness is to reject religion, specifically Christianity and Judaism, and give up its illusions. “The criticism of religion, therefore, in embryo is the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the Halo.” Religion is a fantasy that we must get rid of in order to progress.
However, all Marx really did was reject the religion he didn’t like for one he did like; his own. His philosophy of “Scientific Socialism” collapses into a religion that demands complete obedience. Having claimed the sovereignty of the secular, like the others, he took the concept of human dignity from Genesis and, in doing so, replaced it with the sovereignty of political identity.
It’s a big claim, so let me repeat it. The Genesis story, which says that God created man, male and female, in His image, remains unique among all creation stories. Human dignity is God-given and permanent. If it is not God-given, dignity, now more likely to be called “identity”, becomes a mere matter of opinion.
The complete Genesis creation story is the basis for Western civilisation’s concepts of dignity, freedom, the rule of law, and the belief that human nature is fallen. Humility, not pride, is the foundational virtue, and the need for forgiveness is a cultural norm. Seduced by the overarching theory of cultural relativism, the contemporary secular mind fails to comprehend its overreaching self-righteousness. It must put an end to freedom of conscience by creating a legal concept of discrimination that undermines individual moral discernment.
So the Achilles heel of secularism is that it rejects the transcendent as the foundation of objective value and consequently assumes the sovereignty of its own neutrality and reasonableness. Therefore, it is in a position to judge and assess the religious impulse. It annexes the throne of the God it rejects. The emperor is naked.
