A radically secularized society will make it tough to engage in any sort of religious practices. This happens in a particularly intense way if the majority of parents simply turn their children over to the school systems or to modern American culture as a whole. And so it is that I’ll retreat from philosophical or historical discussions of the public square to deal, for a second time, with one of the weirdest psychological mutilations imaginable—the lack of development of the concept of truth, so basic to primitive tribal peoples as well as modern medical professionals and particle physicists.
Though I believe the narrative of Christian American to be mostly hogwash, there was a time when most Americans could be considered as washed-out Christians of a sort. No longer.
By at least 1800 or so, and probably a bit earlier than that, Americans inhabited a world stripped of divinity, a world fully subject to the mastery of men. I’m not concerned here with a specific set of religious opinions but only with the belief that there is a higher meaning than any we can find for ourselves in our mundane activities. In the term `higher meaning’, I include animistic pagans with noble, if sometimes strange, creation myths as well as the higher paganism of Plato and the high theisms of Maimonides and Aquinas. I also include the pantheism of Albert Einstein and his talk about the “Old One” whose thoughts he wished to know—it is much more correct to think of that “Old One” as some impersonal `force’ of reason, perhaps an Einstein-level version of the Reason worshiped by some of the unstable participants in the Enlightenment.
A secularist doesn’t have share a concept of higher truth with pagans and theists and pantheists and others, even some atheists who don’t have central, partially divine, principle such as the reason of an Einstein. In March of 2016, I published a discussion of studies which didn’t directly address secularism as a set of ideas, instead dealing with the irresponsibility of adults in recent decades who have not taught the children the concepts of right and wrong, nor that of truth— We Modern Christians Destroyed the Concept of Truth Along with Our Children’s Minds. The younger adults in the United States (probably most of the West) and those who are yet children have no way to even think in what we might call the categories of morality, even the categories of basic order which underly rational or intuitive or even tribal systems of morality.
Religious liberty might be recognized as a valid principle by those who are disbelievers in truth by way of reason. That isn’t the case with most American adults below the age of 40 or so and even with some from those older than me (I was born in 1955). In many of these people, including some in my parents’ generation—born in the 1920s or 1930s, even the weakest concept of truth seems to have disappeared. For much of my life, I’ve been in more regular contact with `ordinary folk’ such as smalltown teachers and bankers, carpenters and machinists, nurses and social-workers and I can testify that most such people have at least an undisciplined faith in, shall we say, a “higher power.” I suspect that, from at least the late 1800s, there was at least a substantial minority of non-believers in truth among the big-city or university professionals and teachers. Unfortunately, I think there was a substantial minority of such thinkers among Protestant clergymen, at least of the Northeastern varieties, and Ivy League university professionals since at least 1800 or so. The ideas, more mind-killing than simply dangerous, have been working their way into most American minds from what might be called the liberalized Puritan mind.
Add in the problems raised by the studies discussed in my blog entry— We Modern Christians Destroyed the Concept of Truth Along with Our Children’s Minds, that is, the replacement of immediate feelings for those missing value judgments based upon some understanding of truth, and we have a substantial percentage of Americans and probably Westerners in general who can’t even make sense of a claim that a Christian nurse or a Jewish doctor has a right to refuse to help a patient commit suicide.
There is anecdotal evidence galore out on the Internet and in books that a teacher or a public speaker has no right to even upset someone by suggesting some claims of date-rape might be at least questioned. I even think that some of Obama’s advisers are sincere in protesting against any suggestions they shouldn’t be destroying entire countries and killing lots of people to prevent the leaders of those countries from killing lots of people. And the evidence for plans of those leaders to carry out such killings is typically, shall we say, below the level of court-room credibility. Apparently, these “Responsibility to Protect” advocates—and I’m sure some are actually outright war criminals—are the same sorts of delicate flowers who, bereft of even a concept of higher truths, feel a need to defend their innermost child and to enforce that child’s feelings upon reality.
Religious liberty is a non-starter to the younger Americans who have been raised and morally non-formed by my generation and the one before and after my generation. A lot of institutions and individuals, including Christian churches and their leaders, including schools and their administrators and most teachers, have no right to protest at the oh-so tender moral monsters in our midst. They helped to form these people, most people below 40 and many older, who don’t have enough of a concept of truth for professionals, test-givers from psychology or sociology, to draw out.