Book s: Benjamin Wiker’s Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

The Dogmas of Secularism

by ROBERT BRENNAN

Worshipping the State:

How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

By Benjamin Wiker

Regnery Publishing, 2013

256 pages, Hardcover

In Worshipping the State, author Benjamin Wiker takes the reader to school in the best sense of that phrase. Written with professorial exactness and supporting footnotes, the book expertly chronicles the perennial tension between state and religious interests. And in doing so, it provides the historical perspective to better understand the current rise in what the book describes as “radical secularism.”

Wiker posits that today’s secular culture has its pedigree in the materialistic pagan world, which co-existed with the Old Testament Covenant, but was subdued and tamped down by the rise of the New Testament Covenant. And although this worldview became increasing subterranean due to Christianity’s 1,500 years of transcendence in the West, nature abhors a vacuum; and with Christianity ebbing, the old ways, albeit with new language, are making a comeback.

The author locates the beginning of the resurgence of radical secularism to 500 years ago and the publication of Machiavelli’s The Prince. It was Machiavelli who, according to Wiker, erected the first wall of absolute separation of church and state in the Christian era. Ironically, the concept was nothing new, as the book instructs us so thoroughly.
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