On Secularity

A reader writes:

Does it seem to you that many liberals arguing the loudest for the separation of church and state are really arguing that the state adopt their religion, secular humanism? Religion is not a closed category.  A “religion” is any system or scheme of morality.  Anytime someone advocates something as “the right thing to do” or just or fair, the assertion is based on the speaker’s morality and thus based on the speaker’s religion.  A person may adopt a particular system in total and such people are called fundamentalists.  In my experience, far more people adopt a buffet approach to their religion, taking bits from various sources.

Secular humanism has enjoyed (and is enjoying) power because it has avoided being called what it is – a form of religion.

Yeah.  As I’ve pointed out in this space, it’s not the case (as Christians sometimes foolishly argue) that atheists or secularists are “immoral without religion”.  Indeed, most atheists are *intensely* moralistic people and never more so than when raging righteously against the sins of theists.  They are not immoral, they are moralistic shoplifters who are stealing a transcendent basis for their moral proclamations from the theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  And, as you note, they are choosey shoplifters who just take the bits of the Tradition they like, often being complete unaware of the fact that the moral points they mysteriously regard as “self-evident” are not at all self-evident to those who do not benefit from the huge patrimony of the Christian Tradition.

That said, Catholics should not fall into the opposite trap of despising the idea of the “secular” altogether as many Fundamentalists do.  “Secular” is, paradoxically, a *Church-invented* idea that respects the fact that, in the words of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, “Respect for the legitimate autonomy of earthly realities prompts the Church not to claim specific competence of a technical or temporal order”.   The Church takes seriously that God is the Author of secondary causes that have their own autonomy invested in them by God.  So the Church does not try to micromanage how politicians, plumbers, scientists, actors, farmers, and a host of other experts in specific fields do their business and, indeed, defers to their expertise when they are speaking from their field of competence.  Problems only arise when some expert in a particular field attempts to make their particular field the All Explaining Theory of Everything and shove God out of the picture to worship their field as an idol.  It matters not which creaturely thing the zealot seeks to worship (and candidates from the state, the sciences, sex, the arts, finance, and a host of other human activities are always being put forward by zealots), no creature can replace God or satisfy our souls.  So the problem is not secularity or humanism per se (indeed, Christianity is the most intensely humanistic faith in the world since its foundational belief is that God *became* human).  Rather it is the exaltation of the man over God and the attempt to expand the secular to exclude God from the picture that is the problem.  But the answer is not to expand God to exclude the secular and the human.  Rather it is to maintain the sane balance of the Church: respecting what is properly secular, but remembering that human dignity is rooted in the Creator who became human himself and died and rose to redeem man.