Two Must Read Articles on Christendom and Secularism

I just read two great articles that I thoroughly recommend to you:

In Comment Magazine, James K. A. Smith writes on “Rethinking the Secular, Redeeming Christendom.”

Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while it also recognizes the eschatological distance between the now and the not-yet. From the center of the church as a political society, Christendom bears witness to how society should be otherwise in a way that imagines the possibility of conversion—not only of souls but of our political imaginations. This is a vision of political witness and engagement that proclaims the political significance, not just of “nature” or “creation,” but of the Gospel as that revelation that truly shows us how to be human and what the world is called to be in the resurrection of Jesus. Thus Christendom bears witness from the specificity of the Gospel.

Over at National Review, Mary Eberstadt writes on “The First Church of Secularism and its Sexual Sacraments.” Whoa, this is a good read, highlighting that progressive secularism absolutizes its beliefs like a religion and its views of sex are sacramental to them!

The so-called culture war, in other words, has not been conducted by people of religious faith on one side, and people of no faith on the other. It is instead a contest of competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in the more newly written figurative book of secularist orthodoxy about the sexual revolution. In sum, secularist progressivism today is less a political movement than a church.

Mary Eberstadt is the author of It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, published June 21, 2016 by HarperCollins. This essay is adapted from the book.