Confusion-Breeding Secularism

In his recent book Christianity Alongside Islam (Acorn Press, 2010), John Wilson combats the common secularist notion that all religions are essentially the same. According to such a viewpoint choosing a religion is akin to choosing between a Ford or a Toyota or between McDonald’s and KFC – just a matter of personal preference. What makes Christianity distinctive is deemed to be of little importance. So some propose that the British sovereign should now be called “defender of faith” rather than “defender of the Faith.”

This secularist approach breeds a species of confusion which if promoted in the political realm would be considered both dangerous and ridiculous. Wilson reasons:

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama are all names of political leaders. However, we do not equate one with the other because they are politicians (7).

Whether we are dealing with politics or religion it is necessary to discriminate “between what is good and better, and what will bring with it corruption and misery” (7).

In assessing faith it is crucial to evaluate that to which faith is directed:

Faith is always in someone or something. There is a great deal of difference between faith in crystals or black magic and faith in God. The faith that led Mother Teresa to care for the dying on the streets of Calcutta had a very different basis to that which led members of the Aum sect to release deadly sarin gas in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995 (7).

In a footnote Wilson illustrates the vacuity of secularism with a telling citation from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memoirs of a City:

The spiritual void I have seen in so many of Istanbul’s rich, Westernised, secularist families is evident in [their] silences. Everyone talks openly about mathematics, success at school, football and having fun, but they grapple with the most basic questions of existence – love, compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred – in trembling confusion and painful solitude. They light a cigarette, give their attention to the music on the radio, return wordlessly to their inner worlds (9).

Posted May 11, 2011

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