Western Creed, Western Identity: Essays in Legal and Social Philosophy

3. What Was Religion? The Demise of a Prodigious Power

     WHAT WAS RELIGION? The Demise of a Prodigious Power  The recent shift in North America from a predominantly Protestant to a secular or humanistic culture has created for the religious mind a new set of problems. The religious mind is no longer faced with the task of defining its vision of the contemporary meaning of Christianity or Judaism against other religious outlooks; each is now called to defend itself in the face of major secular attack, hostile to religious belief and practice. It may take considerable learning and analysis to recognize the full extent of the secular threat to religion, but little reflection is required to recognize its negative social effects, that is, a general disintegration of religious commitment, manifesting itself in a startling increase in promiscuity, in divorce and abortion, in the widespread acceptance of pornography and homosexuality, and in a growing tolerance of deviant behavior ranging from civil and religious impiety to the use of drugs. The loss of a certain loyalty to family values immediately reflects the displacement of a biblical morality. Of a more subtle character is the loss of sustaining values in the classroom, where the underpinnings of a Western, largely Christian, perspective, namely, classical learning, ancient and modern languages, history, philosophy, and theology—all disciplines that provide the materials through which revealed religion is received and developed—have been neglected or  . The nineteenth-century German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche was an influential critic of the culture and ethos of his time, particularly Christianity. Beyond Good and Evil () and the Genealogy of Morals () are sweeping critiques of Western culture. . For a historical and interpretive account of the French Enlightment at variance with the one offered here, see John H. Randall Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin, ). Randall writes from a purely naturalistic perspective and shares the views of many of his subjects. abandoned. Furthermore, in the interpretation of the religious mission , the secular mind has all but convinced the religious mind that the latter’s role is primarily that of tending to the needs of the disadvantaged in the narrow sense of physical and economic needs. As a result of the neglect of its intellectual heritage in favor of a social activism , mainstream Christianity has failed to teach with sufficient clarity and unity of voice to be a sure guide to believers. As many have observed, a community cannot long exist without a core of common convictions. Some of the social tensions evident in North America are but a reflection of a deeper conflict between religious and secular outlooks. If the secular is not to totally eclipse the religious and become the standard for the measure of thought and conduct, representatives of religious outlook will have to consciously confront the challenge. The reflections that follow are an attempt to understand the causes that have led to the present impotence of the religious mind and its prospects for the future.  A skepticism with respect to Christian convictions has been forming among the Occidental intelligentsia for at least two centuries . In the last century Nietzsche had already observed that Western culture no longer possessed the spiritual resources that had formerly justified its existence and without which he believed it could not survive.1 What is more disturbing is that this loss of religious sense has made itself felt on the level of the common man. In more ways than one, the last quarter of the twentieth century is the misguided product of the French Enlightenment.2 Views entertained in eighteenthWhat Was Religion?  and nineteenth-century drawing rooms and in the academy of those days have in our own lifetime entered the marketplace. Diderot set the tone in the preface to his famous Encyclopedie when he wrote: “Every thing must be examined, every thing must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.”Voltaire urged the eradication of Christianity from the world of higher culture. But he was willing to allow it to remain in the stables and in the scullery, mainly as a moral force, lest a servant class emancipated from the traditional sources of morality might pilfer. Like Diderot, he was convinced that the critical spirit could do its constructive work only after it had liberated man from the shackles of traditional belief. There are times, he says, when one must destroy before one can build.Voltaire readily admitted his intolerance, declaring that his was an...