American liberalism amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions

The Rise of Secular Religion

by David P. Goldman

Today’s secular liberals are the direct descendants of the past century’s Puritans and Protestants, deeply concerned with matters of sin and 

salvation in the church of politics.

Today’s American liberalism, it is often remarked, amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions. The political correctness that undergirds it, meanwhile, can be traced back to the past century’s liberal Protestantism. Conservatives, of course, routinely scoff that liberals’ ersatz religion is inferior to the genuine article.

Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms. That is an uncommon way of understanding the issue, and a powerful one.

A devout Catholic, Bottum may be America’s best writer on religion. He surely is the least predictable. A former chief editor of the conservative religious monthly First Things, he shocked many of his former colleagues by arguing in a widely-read essay for Commonweal that the Catholic Church had lost the fight against same-sex marriage and should move on to other things. By this he expressed not a heterodox view of sexuality, but a dour assessment of the Church’s waning influence on social issues. The same somber mood lurks behind the elegant prose of his present volume, which should be read with foreboding if not alarm.

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