America’s Secular Challenge
The Rise of a New National Religion
by Herbert London
Encounter, 100 pp., $20
According to Gibbon, the two main reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire were barbarian invasions from without, and the triumph of Christianity from within. Christianity, by replacing the public good with a private one, fractured the unity of Rome’s citizenry, leaving it weak and vulnerable to attack. As a result, he claimed, classical civilization was destroyed, and great works of literature and philosophy, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, were lost for centuries.
Though unmentioned–for obvious reasons–in America’s Secular Challenge, there is a striking similarity between Gibbon’s assessment and Herbert London’s analysis of the two-pronged threat that the West faces today; only this time, the threat from within is secularism, not Christianity. The core values of Western civilization, he argues, “are under siege not only from the external threat of radical Islam but also from the internal threats of spiritual fecklessness and moral anemia.”
In challenging “the gospel of radical secularism,” he claims secularism has caused a loss of confidence in the West, and has weakened public spirit, at a time when strength is most needed. “It may be too much to say America should be sacralised,” he concludes, “but at the very least it must recognize and defend its religious heritage.”
As becomes clear, “radical secularism” is used as a catchall term for moral relativism, socialism, “a cult of the self,” indiscriminate tolerance, and an undermining of patriotism. With admirable skill, London ridicules each of these ideas, and though, at times, he is guilty of hyperbole–aren’t we all?–I particularly welcomed his condemnation of the left bias in universities and the all-too-prevalent idea that truth varies from culture to culture. London is at his best when, paraphrasing Jefferson, he argues that “the ability to distinguish between good and evil was the main purpose of schooling and education.” It is worrying, then, that educational institutions are the ones nurturing relativist ideas, and this book is a much-needed and refreshing rejoinder to these beliefs.
But I have difficulty seeing what these “tenets of secularism,” as he calls them, have to do with secularism. Anticipating this criticism, London maintains that, “whatever the case, secularists show a greater reluctance to embrace and fight for positive values.” So a lack of “positive values” in secularism seems to be his central thesis, out of which all else follows.
For London, president of the Hudson Institute, religion expresses certain moral truths that are “embodied in nature, and thus unchanging, regardless of context.” (At the same time, he admits “some things are open to interpretation,” and we all know where different interpretations of an apparently “absolute truth” can lead.) He prays “that secularists who preach relativism on our campuses and in our media will realize that Islamism’s threat is real.” Quite apart from the fact that this is not a problem exclusive to secular-minded institutions–it was, lest we forget, the archbishop of Canterbury who backed the introduction of aspects of sharia law in Britain—just what, exactly, is secular about pandering to Islamists?
To his credit, London responds to Christopher Hitchens’s challenge to “name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.” His answer: The nonbeliever, when making a moral statement, owes a debt, albeit an unacknowledged one, to “a Western canon steeped in Christian doctrines.” Hitchens, he says, is “captive to the West’s Judeo-Christian ethics. Had he been born elsewhere in the world, his beliefs would likely look quite different–in no small part thanks to the mark left by religion on any culture.” This seems to come close to the relativism he is ostensibly against. After all, cultural relativists claim that moral truths expressed in one culture are incapable of expression in another. This is exactly the kind of thought we need to break away from, that morality is situational, that Iran has a “different regime of truth,” as Michel Foucault famously and fatuously contended.
Unfortunately, no elaboration is offered for his view that all moral statements are derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the values that we take for granted today, and which are under attack from religious fanatics– those values of liberty and equality–were in fact obtained, little by little, during the struggle against the hegemony of organized religion. In a world reverberating with religious barbarism, why we should want more religiosity, rather than less, is incomprehensible to me. The West’s threat from within is a pervasive willingness to blame the West rather than the Islamic fascists. I cannot help but feel that London, by blaming secular liberal democracy at a time when it is most in need of defending, falls into the same trap.
James Grant is a writer in Glasgow.
