The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : America's Secular Challenge

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I've been reading America's Secular Challenge by NYU professor and president of the Hudson Institute Herb London. The book is essentially an extended essay about how elite, left-wing secularism undercuts America's traditional strengths of patriotism and religious faith during a time when the nation can ill afford it. The assault on public religion and love of country comes in a period when America faces enemies who have no such crisis of identity and lack the degree of doubt that leaves us in semi-paralysis.

The best compliment I can pay the book (by a Jewish social critic) is that it reminds me of the outstanding work of John Courtenay Murray (the great Catholic church and state scholar) who wrote:

And if this country is to be overthrown from within or without, I would suggest that it will not be overthrown by Communism. It will be overthrown because it will have made an impossible experiment. It will have undertaken to establish a technological order of most marvelous intricacy, which will have been constructed and will operate without relations to true political ends: and this technological order will hang, as it were, suspended over a moral confusion; and this moral confusion will itself be suspended over a spiritual vacuum.

topics:
Religion

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Crusader| 2.11.09 @ 9:48AM

The thing about vacuums is they don't seem to stay vacuums for very long. Something will come in and fill it. I can think of a "religious" ideology, who's practiononers have a keen snese of purpose and world domination, who would LOVE to jump in and fill that void when America turns from the true God and tries to go "secular." Somehow I think our lefty friends won't like it too much and will long for the days when the most flak they got from religious types was an abortion clinic protest.

Jairo Mejia| 7.24.09 @ 7:41PM

Unbelievers are right in most of their thinking

You might be one for whom religious beliefs are not just irrelevant, but baseless. You might be right: myths and a religious fantasy have influenced human minds with larger strength than reality, and the “God” of main line traditions simply does not exist. Most people don’t dare to confront their religious beliefs, opt for the status quo, or become marginalized.

Bishop John Shelby Spong says that “Christianity Reformed From its Roots – A Life Centered in God” “rightly points out that those who seek to defend Christianity’s past are also killing Christianity’s future.” I accepted the challenge of finding the One who may be recognized even by Gnostics and atheists: the Existence! Eminent philosophers and thinkers might give you an idea if this book might be an insightful reading for you (links below). You may look also at excerpts at Amazon.com.

Jairo Mejia, M. Psych., Santa Clara University
Retired Episcopal Priest
Carmel Valley, California

http://www.mbay.net/~jmejia/Grudzen.htm
http://www.mbay.net/~jmejia/Churcher.htm

hgjhgj| 1.5.10 @ 1:20AM

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