The Culture War Heats Up

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 5/12/05)

Spotting the "Choose Life" bumper sticker on my elderly station wagon several few weeks back, a youngish woman drove up beside me in heavy traffic and shouted out the open window of her car, "Keep your laws off my body!" The thought flashed through my mind: Lucky she hasn't got a handgun in the glove compartment.

Is the culture war heating up? Noisy controversies over things like the Terri Schiavo case and the current Senate battle over federal judgeships suggest the answer is yes. One sign of it is that people are saying sillier and sillier things.

John McCandlish Phillips, who for 18 years was the only evangelical Christian on the 275-member editorial staff of The New York Times, effectively skewered overwrought liberal warnings about "theocracy" and "jihad" by the religious right in a May 4 Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post.

Here I remark only on another small, but not unimportant, instance of silliness — the claim that secular humanism is a "bogeyman" of conservative Christians.

Paul Gaston, an emeritus history professor at the University of Virginia, said that in the April 23 Post. The Senate judgeship fight isn't between people of faith and secularists, he argued, but between "right-wing and fundamentalist Christians" and "left-wing and mainstream Christians."

That some Christians battle other Christians over judgeships and other matters I do not doubt. But that secular humanism is a bogeyman I deny.

As an intelligent person, Professor Gaston surely realizes that "secular humanism" refers to a body of ideas widely diffused in Western culture. Some Christians now subscribe to at least certain of them. Far from making secular humanism a fiction or a fantasy, that makes it cause for great concern.

What is secular humanism understood as a set of ideas? To get the secular humanist gospel in undiluted form, I tried the Web site of the American Humanist Association. For bogeymen, I discovered, these humanists have a lot to say.

Aside from declaring that humanism operates "without supernaturalism," the Humanist Manifesto III, a 2003 AHA document, expresses bland and largely unexceptionable liberal sentiments. But it's a different story where specific issues are concerned.

American Humanists, one learns, support legalized abortion, legalized euthanasia and legalized same-sex marriage. Prayer in schools and public display of the Ten Commandments are ruled out. There is much else, but that gives you the flavor: these people are down-the-line advocates of the agenda of one side in the culture war. That's secular humanism in action.

I don't mean to attribute more influence to the American Humanist Association than it actually possesses. The point isn't that this particular group has vast political power — as far as I know, it does not. But it is an exponent of the set of ideas that comprise secular humanism and those ideas are very much in play in the political and jurisprudential debate now roiling American life.

Looks are deceiving, though. In the first volume of his magisterial rethinking of moral theology The Way of the Lord Jesus, the Catholic ethicist and theologian Germain Grisez remarks that although secular humanism's popularity among secular elites makes it seem powerful, in reality it's "weak and dying." The reason for that is its innate inability to offer people any reason for hope.

"Eventually," Grisez predicts, "the inhumanism of secular humanism will become obvious to everyone … . A new phase of history, with new opportunities for evangelization, will begin."

For people fed up with a seemingly endless culture war stoked by elitist efforts to impose secular humanist ideology on society, that can't happen too soon.

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