It is typical of our age of global communications that the most accurate, and the most poignant, description and praise of the secularist phobia for religion and religious authority has come out of China. Astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, born and bred in the long day of Mao Zedong’s rule, came to international notice during President Bush’s 1988 visit to mainland China, when it was widely broadcast that the President had included Fang on his list of honored dinner invitees and the Chinese authorities had excluded him from that honor. A known dissident in Communist China, Fang saw the handwriting on the wall and soon took refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing, where he remained until the summer of 1990. He now resides in England.
The year before, in 1987, Fang wrote a canticle to the highest ideals of secularism. Man, he said in that work, is not made to be under the control of “overbearing power.” Man has within him his own power, “the moral law within.” Governed by that power alone, man must take to science as the only path worthy of his dignity. As one would expect, Communism and its absolutes fare no better than religion under the pen of Fang Lizhi. “Science has only disdain and disgust for the curses by totems, for the barbarities, the addiction to lies, and the worship of the nonexistent—all such constitute the bulwarks of political dictatorship.” In Fang’s mind, the “nonexistent” lumps the ideology of Marxists and the faith of believers in one heap of contemptible things.
In words that recall the earliest paeans of secularist praise uttered over two hundred years ago by France’s Denis Diderot—he and his fellow encyclopédistes were the theorists and founders of modern secularism—Fang observed that “what brings man happiness and freedom is first of all wisdom, a wisdom that manifests reason and sobriety…. It is not cries of ignorance and benightedness, nor, even less, threats of bloodshed against freedom.” With such wisdom, man can overcome all suffering and hardship. Man has it within himself and his natural powers to re-create his universe.
Pope John Paul has made it clear how important he regards secularism to be as a major regional force. It cannot be treated lightly, nor be expected to go away, nor written off as a philosophic debate of interest only to academicians, professional clerics and religious fanatics. For John Paul, secularism is a spreading disease of the modern world. And, as surely as medical sleuths trace an epidemic to its source, so secularism finds its birth to have taken place in that period of European history called the Enlightenment—a name chosen by the budding secularists of the age.
The sudden and exciting burst of scientific inquiry during the 1700s—the fundamental breakthroughs in knowledge of the physical universe, and the birth of new scientific methods—produced a mentality that rejected all the absolutes formerly presented by religion and religious revelation. Instead, the new thinkers latched onto experience as the source of knowledge and betterment for mankind. That, they said, was the only viable way for mankind.
From that Enlightenment were born the “certainties” on which all modern political and social systems in the West have been based—not excepting political Marxism. Westerners have brandished and still brandish human freedom and human rationality as the sole and sufficient creators of all the good man seeks in his historical endeavors: economic prosperity, peace and order among nations, scientific progress, technological breakthroughs, artistic flowering, literary excellence. On the sole basis of self-confidence, man—according to the secularism of the Enlightenment—can achieve all of that good. Mankind can be good morally.
A very strange and disturbing voice broke in on this roseate projection in the nineteenth century. It belonged to that twisted and perverse German, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and announced damningly: “Men cannot be good without God.” Then, lest men be tempted to agree and to seek out God again, Nietzsche added with his madman’s laugh: “But of course, God is dead!”
Nietzsche’s warning that men cannot be good without God fell on deaf ears; and his mocking assurance that God was dead was taken to mean that the notion of God preached by traditional Christianity had proved to be a fabrication of superstitious and ignorant minds. Instead, following the secularist line, the existence of God was affirmed. But it was either of God pushed so far distant from man as to be inaccessible, unfathomable, unattainable; of God stripped of his fatherhood of all men, of his loving salvation of all men and his infinite desire to be with men and have his glory glimpsed in perceptible beauty and thinkable truth; or it was God—as Mega-Religionists and New Agers configure him to be—completely identified with mankind and this human cosmos, God not only in this cosmos but God as this cosmos, God as each one of us, God as all of us cemented together in humanness.
So complete is the secularist distortion of God’s image, and so completely does it leave man to his own devices, that it constitutes a subtle and cunning blasphemy and sacrilege. Within the seemingly noble and heroic secularist act of going it alone, Pope John Paul hears an echo of the perennially evil cry of that first and most ancient blasphemer: “I will not serve.”
In concentrating on secularism as a major regional force in the world, John Paul focuses particular attention on the West. And he finds a radical but constantly narrowing difference between Europe and the United States.
In most European countries, secularism has already triumphed completely. In that region, organized religions—Catholic, Protestant and Jewish—are regarded as alike in their insistence on absolutes. They are considered to have little or nothing to contribute, therefore, to the current political, economic and cultural life of Western European countries.
John Paul is explicit about the condition of this “post-Christian” Europe. “There is a vacuum in Europe,” he remarked to one journalist in the early summer of 1989, “but it is not a completely neutral vacuum, because certain forces move in this vacuum; above all, Western forces, which are linked to each other. One of those forces is the economy of the free market, the capitalist economy. The other force is modern science, dominated despite everything by the natural sciences, colored with positivism.” And, the Pope concluded, “If one considers all these elements, it is easy to understand why this vacuum is not very adapted, very open and available, to be filled with Christian contents.”
In John Paul’s outlook, there rs no possibility that Christendom as it once was will ever return to existence again—its faith expressed in the soaring spires of its cathedrals, its people kneeling beneath hooded domes to worship at the tabernacles of the divine Word made flesh. Certainly, religion and religious authority are no longer in serious contention within the national lives, economic considerations, educational structures or social engineering of the twelve countries gearing up for the much desired Europe of 1992+. Now that Mikhail Gorbachev has bid fair to have his ex-satellite nations as well as his own USSR associated with the twelve in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, the secularism of Western Europe is going to be reinforced.
The principles upon which Europeans are organizing themselves in all sectors of life are drawn exclusively from the icons of secularism, from the positive sciences and the lessons of experience.
Outside the American Embassy in Beijing, where Fang Lizhi has taken refuge, the selfsame secularism as he has proclaimed reigns supreme among the millions who belong to the Communist Party of China and the millions more who do not. For secularism is indeed a by-product of decadent Confucianism, and Confucianism has supplied the Chinese with a would-be ethical framework for well over a thousand years. There can be little doubt that the rioting students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 professed not only a rank secularism overgrown with the now noxious weeds of Marxism. They were insisting on their brand of Maoism and of secularism. The Chinese Party-State preferred its own brand. The students had to be liquidated—an old inflexible law of classical Leninism. An eerie parallel to the professed secularism of those students is provided us by some of the most influential of Eastern Europe’s ex-Communists, now collaborating in the reconstruction of their Soviet-ravaged polities and economies. As the December 23, 1989, Eco
nomist noted, these “have been saying that Marx was just a well-intentioned stumble on the road that began in 30 A.D.” (the purported year of Christ’s crucifixion and, therefore, the beginning of human “liberation” from the sinful structures of capitalism).
Among what are commonly regarded as the major West nations, therefore, the United States is unique in this matter of secularism, insofar as a long-standing and bitter contention still burns between American secularists and certain groups within organized religion. The die has not been cast definitively one way or the other.
True to their ideals, the champions of secularism in the United States appeal to national history, and to a deeply felt patriotism of sorts, as witnesses to the Tightness of their cause. They argue for secularism as the underpinning of democratic liberties, of basic human rights and of the personal integrity of each American. In the slippery slang of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., secularism “is what America is all about.” It is at the heart of what America means, he means.
Nevertheless, even such passionate and sweeping language does not paper over the crack that widens every year between two clearly distinct and opposing segments of the American population.
On one side stand the two thirds of America’s current population of 250 million people who not only believe in religious absolutes and in some form of absolute authority based in religion, but who endeavor to organize their personal and corporate lives accordingly.
On the opposing side stands a singularly influential minority of Americans who hold as a dogma of life that secularism is as American as mom and apple pie. Solidly entrenched in the establishment—in faculties of universities and colleges, for example; in the print, radio and television networks; in associations such as the National Education Association (NEA); in state and federal government offices—this minority appears able to tip the official momentum of the nation in its favor. The preferred battleground of the secularist minority lies in important areas of religious interest: Issues such as abortion, contraception, homosexuality, pornography, euthanasia and school prayer have been carved out as key areas of contention.
Members of the majority complain that the constant movement of the United States toward secularism on these and other issues rests upon the positions of public influence of the secularist minority, and upon judicial decisions reached without consulting the views and wishes of the majority population. They point out that in the present “establishment” climate—secularist through and through—of the U.S.A., it is impossible to develop moral clarity, persuade Americans to undertake hard work and to save rather than spend their earnings, and persuade the body politic of America to nourish a genuine confidence in the United States and in the West.
What now shall be the foundations of political integrity and social justice? they ask. For economic stewardship based on today’s sacrifice of wishes for tomorrow’s promise? For social responsibility? Are all these to be defined in terms of U.S. nationalism? Of our consumerist ambitions? Of our science and our technology? Merely of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?
For a while among an influential class of American thinkers and politicians, the answers to those questions were sought in the political doctrine of John Calvin (1509-64). God was, according to Calvin, an utterly transcendent sovereign of the cosmos. All human life was corrupted by sin. Man’s obligation was to undertake a faithful stewardship—economic, political, artistic—of this cosmos, thus transforming it. Americans of this inclination made a “transforming worldliness” their aim. It did not work, because, as Glenn Tinder wrote in 1989, “Politics is a realm of moral darkness, and the darkness cannot be dissipated by human virtue and wisdom.”
For a while, yet another attempt was made to bolster the failing Enlightenment heritage. In a current of political theory started mainly by Karl Barth and furthered by such “Radical Reformers” as Jacques Ellul, it was proposed that, forever and a day, the true Christian will be at odds with the social and political structures of this world, while he awaits the arrival of the Kingdom of God in its fullness. He will function as witness or prophet, never allowing the others to forget that this is a world of sinfulness.
Both these currents, each one still alive to one degree or another, have proved themselves inept and helpless in the overwhelming tides of secularism that have been sweeping over U.S. society since the end of World War II. Both suffered from the bane of academic theorizing: They had no concrete religious expression readily accessible and attractive for the masses of Americans. Besides, the prophetic stance lacked politico-social clout; and political Calvinism underwent the corruption of politics in its effort to enter politics.
Neither these, nor the more well-known mainline American churches, nor the substantial Roman Catholic Church have been able to do much to impede the gradual but steady secularization of the American system. Yet it is impossible for John Paul to discount the possibility of a violent reaction in the rank and file of American believers. But, year after year, as secularization extends itself throughout America, the likelihood of such a reaction grows dimmer and dimmer.
It was instructive, but not surprising, in this regard for Pope John Paul to watch the performance of Mikhail Gorbachev on American soil in 1987. Supreme tactician that he is, Gorbachev obviously sees in the United States what John Paul sees. He managed to present himself, therefore, as a benign and affable secularist.
Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, in effect the Soviet leader stretched out his hand to say, “Look! I am not Lenin or Stalin or Khrushchev or Brezhnev. I am Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. I am a secularist, just like you hardheaded Americans. Let’s shake hands and do some honest and profitable deals. May the best man win!” That appeal went right to the heart of the most powerful secularist-globalist contenders in the Western regions. And it was hardly lost on Pope John Paul—but for different reasons.
John Paul knew that a much different regional force lay behind the supple secularist mask of Mikhail Gorbachev. And he knew already, too, that the stunning surprises this canniest of Soviet leaders had in store for the world in the months to come made it imperative for him to command the stage in the West as a hero in the secularist tradition.
There are still many questions to answer about Mikhail Gorbachev; and it may be that Gorbachev himself cannot yet answer even some of the most important ones. But about his secularist stance there is no doubt in Pope John Paul’s mind. The man behind the outstretched hand is a master of Antonio Gramsci’s technique of cultural penetration. Following the edicts of Gramsci, he has clearly recognized the seductive value of secularism among democratic capitalists. As the direct heir to Lenin, and the first of his successors to abandon the Stalinist distortions of Leninism, Gorbachev has at last successfully presented Leninism to the West. And he has done so in respectable—not to say dazzling—secularist terms.
John Paul’s moral appraisal of Gorbachev’s style of secularism—what the Soviet leader calls his “new thinking”—rests on what the General Secretary himself outlined as the three dominant traits of that thinking: “the lessons of the past, the realities of the present, and the objective logic of world development.”
Excluded totally from these traits is any tradition of reliance on the Creator of this world and the Savior of all men and women. The world as Mikhail Gorbachev thinks about it, at least for public consumption, is a world on its own. It is the world of the professional atheist and of the confirmed materialist. It is a world of bronze skies and dead earth, where man’s gaze can find no infinite expanse to roam, and only the realm of endless matter to fascinate him. Let him look for no light from on high for the eyes of his soul, but only for the light that issues from gross matter.
The genius of Gorbachev is that, to a degree it is hard to exaggerate, he makes this view glitter for the secularized minds of Americans and Europeans. For such minds, Gorbachev has become the attendant angel of secularism, who beckons for them to reach as high as they themselves are willing to reach, with him as
their guide.
He is their assurance that we are not condemned to suffer in the future from all those things that have plagued us in the past—from inequality, indignity, dire want of the necessities of life, gross and institutionalized injustice, early and ignominious death. He is their living guarantee that, together, we can reach to the very core of this earth, into every hidden place of this human cosmos. Together we can humanize it all.
We are not necessarily separate pygmy entities, dwarfed by the skies and stumbling on a darkened plain. For Gorbachev will show us how humankind’s collective intellect can and will be accumulated within a new—a geopoliticized—form of the present United Nations. On that day of human history, man—the man each one of us is—will be made into a giant, standing as the center and focus of all our human activity as nations and as people. That is the beckoning height of Gorbachev’s neo-Leninist reach.
Nor are we alone in this Atlas-like effort to carry the universe on our shoulders. Gorbachev may be the chief attendant angel in this globalist effort. But he points to other angels we must all obey. He points to the objective processes that, unbidden by us, form global channels for history’s progress. And he points to the iron logic of history itself. These processes of which Gorbachev speaks are made evident to us in various ways; and they do seem always to point to that iron logic of history he talks about.
As a simple example, the environment of our world is threatened. If that means we must stop using plastic and chlorofluorocarbons, then the iron logic of history demands that we must find better ways to pack our fast foods and dump our trash, and better ways of refrigeration, and better ways to dispense our deodorants. Similarly, our planet cannot support too great a population. If that means we must have fewer people, then the iron logic of history demands that we practice contraception, abortion and even euthanasia.
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