Secularism - christiansquoting.org.uk

The claim that secularisation has its roots in Biblical faith and that it is the fruit of the Gospel has no substance in historical fact. Secularisation has its roots not in Biblical faith, but in the interpretation of Biblical faith by Western man; it is not the fruit of the Gospel, but it is the fruit of the long history of philosophical and metaphysical conflict in the religious and purely rationalistic world view of Western man. Of all the great revealed religions, Christianity alone shifted its centre of origin, from Jerusalem to Rome, symbolising the beginning of the Westernisation of Christianity and its gradual and successive permeation by Western elements that in subsequent periods of its history produced and accelerated the momentum of secularisation. This is why, for the Muslim, there are two versions of Christianity: the original true one, and the Western version of it.- Banu Az-Zubair

There is no longer a Christian mind ... the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion -- its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems social, political, cultural to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy and earth's transitoriness, in terms of Heaven and Hell. - HARRY BLAMIRES

..sectarian governments with coercive sword power eliminate their dissenting opposition. The sectarian world brooks no opposition; s view of justice and liberty demands purity. Thus, hard line theocrats vehemently oppose genuine pluralism; any pluralism that permits "false religions" full opponent be tolerated in "Christian America". Similarly, sectarian secularists cannot tolerate even the teeny-tiniest vestige of religious symbolism in the square. The full exercise of the state's coercive power must be used to remove every creche or menorah from the town squares of America, which are to be kept purely and nakedly secular. - John Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper's American Public Theology, Eerdmans, 2001, p 379

The coalition with Roman Catholics was born out of a cultural cobelligerance against the overwhelming and growing pressures of secularism in Dutch nineteeth century education. - John Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper's American Public Theology, Eerdmans, 2001, p 394

An important point is that the correlation between the death of religious faith and the death of peoples and civilisation is absolute. I believe that the death of Christianity in the soul of Western man, and its replacement by a more materialistic, hedonistic, individualistic, la dolce vita belief, and the embrace ofthe sexual revolution combined, mean that Western man has consumed a carcinogenic that is killing him. Peoples that no longer believe in the cult out of which their culture and civilisation came will not sustain that civilisation. And as TS Eliot said: "If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes". The Christian faith and belief in which Western man was marinaded for 2,000 years was fundamentally the immune system of the West, which warded off all manner of psychic infections. But Christianity has died, and been replaced by a new faith of secular humanism, which is having an effect on the West comparable to that of the HIV virus on a person. Eventually, it will kill us. - Patrick Buchanan, Right Now! June 2022

... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself. - Charles Colson and others, Evangelicals & Catholics Together:The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium,1994

It is nor secularism per se that differs with (sic) the central thrust of Christianity. But it is this persistent aim to resolve the pain of life, either through changing the outward world or through a personal accommodation to the world, that strikes directly against the core of a Christian view of life. - A J Conyers, The Eclipse of Heaven,, Inter Varsity Press, 1992 p.70.

The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution. That states should attempt to dispense with theological supports is one of the many crucial experiments that bewilder our brains and unsettle our way today. Laws which were once presented as the decrees of a god-given king are now frankly the confused commands of fallible men. Education, which was the sacred province of god-inspired priests, becomes the task of men and women shorn of theological robes and awe, and relying on reason and persuasion to civilize young rebels who fear only the policeman and may never learn to reason at all. Colleges once allied to churches have been captured by businessmen and scientists. The propaganda of patriotism, capitalism, or Communism succeeds to the inculcation of a supernatural creed and moral code. Holydays give way to holidays. Theaters are full even on Sundays, and even on Sundays churches are half empty. - Durant', Lessons of History pp. 48, 49

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot--and his crimes--so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. -Paul Johnson

Once Mel Gibson revealed himself to be, like the president, a person of serious religious faith, the gloves came off. Mel Gibson has done a major favor for serious faith, both Jewish and Christian, in America. He has made it "cool" to be religious, but in so doing he has unleashed the hatred of secular America against himself personally, against his work and against his family. God bless him. - Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "Why Jewish groups passionately hate Mel Gibson" http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37963

There are advocates of state secularism who propose a 'neutral' non-religious basis for the constitution and institutions of society. But can a non-religious worldview ever be neutral? Surely it must embrace values of some sort, otherwise our national symbols would symbolise nothing and provide no basis for unity. A truly secular constitution rests on the fundamental assumption either that there is no God, or that the concept of God is utterly irrelevant to public life. The secular worldview is therefore neither neutral nor inclusive. Like any religious view, it imposes a set of assumptions on everyone who plays a part in public life. - Oliver Letwin MP E pluribus unum - agreeing to differ http://www.conservatives.com/news/article.cfm?obj_id=58240

We start from the idea that different faiths have an equal right to co-exist. We move on to conflate this proposition with the claim that all faiths are equally valid. From this point it is argued that exclusive claims to the truth by any one faith undermine the validity of other faiths and thus their right to coexist. Finally, exclusive claims to truth are seen as a basis for intolerance, which, the power of the state should be used to counter, or at least discourage.Hence the attack on faith schools from those who speak as if Muslim schools had caused riots in places were no such schools exist; or as if Catholic schools were tearing Scotland apart; or as if parish schools could bring sectarian conflict to the English shires. That such attacks should continue in the face of all the facts, testifies to a prejudice that has no place in our constitution. - Oliver Letwin MP E pluribus unum - agreeing to differ http://www.conservatives.com/news/article.cfm?obj_id=58240

Secularism in the Christian world was an attempt to resolve the long and destructive struggle of church and state. Separation, adopted in the American and French Revolutions and elsewhere after that, was designed to prevent two things: the use of religion by the state to reinforce and extend its authority; and the use of the state power by the clergy to impose their doctrines and rules on others. This is a problem long seen as purely Christian, not relevant to Muslims or for that matter to Jews, for whom a similar problem has arisen in Israel. Looking at the contemporary Middle East, one must ask whether this is still true--or whether Muslims and Jews may perhaps have caught a Christian disease and might therefore consider a Christian remedy. -Bernard Lewis, _What Went Wrong? - Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response_, cr. 2002, Oxford University Press

I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.- J. Gresham Machen

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible. Sean O'Casey

Secularists...... have, argues Richard Appignanesi, author of Introducing Existentialism, "found a fundamentalism of their own - political correctness". From banning religious messages on Christmas cards through talking of partners instead of spouses and then, more recently, calling for St Mary Magdalene school in Islington to change its name, which was deemed "divisive" in a multicultural society, the "thought police" have produced what Appignanesi calls "the slamming door of the liberal mind". Secularists, he believes, show as much of an interest in indoctrination as the religious groups they hate so much. - Cristina Odone http://www.newstatesman.com/nscoverstory.htm

I am asked why, as a Jew, I have led this fight to keep the cross on the county seal.I have three responses.
First, I fear those who rewrite history. As I noted in a previous column on this subject, when I was a graduate student at Columbia University's Russian Institute, I learned that a major characteristic of totalitarian regimes is their rewriting of history. As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing." Given the relationship between changing the past and totalitarianism, those who love liberty ought to be frightened by the ACLU and the Board of Supervisors.
Second, I fear intolerance. And the move to expunge the singular Christian contribution to an American county and city is intolerant to the point of bigotry. No religious Christians, despite their deep opposition to paganism, ever objected to the pagan goddess that is many times larger than the cross. I have found over and over that mostChristians who preach faith are more tolerant than most leftists who preach tolerance.
Third, and most important, I fear the removal of the Judeo-Christian foundation of our society. This is the real battle of our time, indeed the civil war of our time. The Left wants America to become secular like Western Europe, not remain the Judeo-Christian country it has always been. But unlike the Left, I do not admire France and Belgium and Sweden. And that is what the battle over the seal of America's most populous county is ultimately about. It is not about separation of church and state. It is about separation of a county from its history. And it is about separation of America from its moral foundations.
In 1834, 99 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the great German poet Heinrich Heine, a secular Jew, predicted what would happen if Christianity ever weakened in Germany:
A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless walk in the park. Christianity restrained the marshal ardor of the Germans for a time, but it did not destroy it; once the restraining guard is shattered, savagery will rise again . . . the mad fury of the berserk of which Nordic poets sing and speak.
That is what this American, this Jew, and millions of others believe is at stake in the Left's attempt to impose a redesign of the Los Angeles County seal and thereby redesign America. -Dennis Prager http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20041116.shtml

The secular world -- especially its left -- fears and rejects the language of good and evil because it smacks of religious values and violates their moral relativism.......
A major reason for the left's loathing of George W. Bush is his use of moral language -- such as in his widely condemned description of the regimes of North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an "axis of evil." These people reject the central Judeo-Christian value of the existence of objective good and evil and our obligation to make such judgments. Secularism has led to moral confusion, which in turn has led to moral paralysis.
If you could not call the Soviet Union an "evil empire" or the Iranian, North Korean and Iraqi regimes an "evil axis," you have rendered the word "evil" useless. And indeed it is not used in sophisticated secular company -- except in reference to those who do use it (usually religious Christians and Jews).
Is abortion morally wrong? To the secular world, the answer is "It's between a woman and her physician." There is no clearer expression of moral relativism: Every woman determines whether abortion is moral. On the other hand, to the individual with Judeo-Christian values, it is not between anyone and anyone else. It is between society and God. Even among religious people who differ in their reading of God's will, it is still never merely "between a woman and her physician."
And to those who counter these arguments for God-based morality with the question, "Whose God?" the answer is the God who revealed His moral will in the Old Testament, which Jews and Christians -- and no other people -- regard as divine revelation.
The best-known verse in the Bible is "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). It is a reflection of the secular age in which we live that few people are aware that the verse concludes with the words, "I am God." Though entirely secularized in common parlance, the greatest of the ethical principles comes from God. Otherwise it is just another man-made suggestion, no more compelling than "Cross at the green, not in between. - Dennis Prager, The case for Judeo-Christian values: Part II,January 11, 2005

I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.-Frank Schaeffer THE IMPORTANCE OF MONASTICISM IN OUR CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY Orthodox Life No. 3,1996

We feel that universal human rights must be indivisible... Giving religious groups the right to discriminate against others (such as non- believers, unmarried cohabitees, the divorced, "adulterers", fornicators" and homosexuals) undermines the very concept of universal human rights and the freedom of individuals to self-determination and to create their own lives in their own way.- (Original unknown. Quoted by the Secular Society - 2001)

I would much prefer to hear an " extremist " evangel (sic) promote self-control than listen to a political libertine treat the law as if it were a catacomb of escape hatches. In letting people of faith speak, we do not open the door to theocracy. We give them a chance to enrich and complicate public debate. When politicians declare religious arguments out of bounds, they not only condemn discourse to a level of stunning superficiality; they wage war on all faiths. There's nothing more dangerous or extreme than a politician determined to take the place of God. - Tony Snow

We have forgotten that evil is infectious, as infectious as small-pox; and we do not perceive that if we allow whole departments of our life to become purely secular, and to create and maintain moral or immoral standards on their own, in time the whole of life is bound to become corrupt. - G. A. Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929), The Wicket Gate [1923]

For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfilment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won't "wither away" as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life‚ - sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.- Daniel Taylor, Deconstructing the gospel of tolerance., Christianity Today. January 11, 1999 Vol. 43, No. 1, Page 42.