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Neo-Liberalism believes that our government should be devoid of Christian religious influences. That, in sum, is an important aspect in the belief system of Neo-Liberalism. Let’s explore the flaws of this world-view about secular government, by using a soundly logical theological lens, which can help us see deeper, farther and with more truth.

First, let’s postulate that government consisting only of either secular, or religious influences is not what the establishment clause in our Bill of Rights intended. The founders recognized and understood that such an unequal mix is an aberration upon the human nature that must comprise government. That aberration leads to catastrophic results (in the interests of making this long story somewhat shorter, it will have to suffice that what’s implied here are proven sound principles of both secular and religious influences as the defining assumption here). The separation of church and state is a very different thing from the separation of religion from government, which is the freedom of conscience as a foundational principle. By embracing a commitment to religious freedom, while leaving open to contestation the particular conception of that commitment, America worked. The establishment clause was meant only to prevent a particular denomination(s) from achieving official sanction and not to preclude specific religious influences in government.  

Certain vestiges of Judeo-Christianity in our government places, ones that symbolize what gave ideological birth to the origins of our country and what the founders of it recognized, are used to remind us of what continues to safeguard what we continue to benefit from. That safeguard being the commitment to principles of a higher law, reached with reason, infusing man-made law with both a standard and a limit beyond which no government can alter, abrogate or destroy. Only such transcendent can insure our rights against the ever-changing tempest of human political will and fortune(1).

This origin of the conception of our inalienable rights is spelled out directly in such documents as our Declaration of Independence, The Judiciary Act of 1789, Federalist #14, Washington’s Proclamation of General Thanksgiving, The Pledge of Allegiance, Lincoln’s Decree of 8-12-1861 and The US Code. These conceptions in fact were derived and depend on a particular religious conception only found within the form mentioned above. A conception that requires religious freedom, which consists of the necessity to enunciate, understand and express it publicly, without coercion to, nor obstruction of its acceptance or rejection.

Yet today these conceptions are being challenged not on explicit wording found within our Constitution, and certainly not in an intellectually honest review of its supporting documents or practices but, merely on a phobia propelled by a contorted belief in a penumbra of “an establishment of religion,” one swollen beyond an historic meaning of the term, best described as Post-Modern Nihilistic Existentialism. Its origins can be traced as an outgrowth of a mistaken interpretation of Einstein’s major work, the Special Theory of Relativity.  STR in essence states that there is no absolute motion. From that the physical world appears to have no single unifying premise. Concrete things become relative. The error in the leap Neo-Liberalism makes is in assuming relativity in physics proves relativism in human intelligence, what we’ll refer to here as the human mind and its material representation called human action. Neo-Liberalism mistakenly assumed that the advancement in science and technology could be replicated in politics and the social order. Defects or short-comings were believed to be capable of being remedied with time and complete adherence to Neo-Liberal ideology. 

Einstein, in formulating the STR, insisted on what has become known as the standard of sound science, that a theory be subjected to empirical tests, or as Milton Friedman said:“ The truth of a hypothesis is found from the results of its experience in applications to specific problems and the repeated failure of its implications to be contradicted.” Testing as such can never indisputably prove a theory but it can give it what James Buchanan calls the status of a relatively absolute absolute. The possibility of the theory being proven wrong (by a process called falsifying the hypothesis) can be significantly minimized if not eliminated by the testing.  Consequentially this makes perfect sense why Einstein himself passionately believed in absolute standards of right and wrong. To him moral relativism was a disease. This man, who unlocked some of the basic first secrets of the universe, acknowledged a God too.

Yet in much of the arena comprising the social, testing as such is never conducted. Granted social issues do not hold precisely to an exact science like the physical ones however, an attitude of dogmatism is nevertheless adopted, often on nothing more than some combination of vague experience, good intentions, utopian dreams, self-excusing cliques or satisfying amounts of pedantic presented with panache and confidence. Even Karl Popper’s advice of trying to illustrate or identify the real or perceived “unintended consequences” of accepting a theory is seldom done with intellectual integrity as a measure of good faith.

One of the unintended consequences of this belief-leap by secularism was that it devolved into viewing all religion as a form of mass delusion(2), a safety device in lieu of enlightened secularism(3).  Freud provided the alleged psychological proof for this belief with his all-embracing and hence difficult to test theories (despite the fact that after 100 yrs of experience his hypothesis are falsified, at least by biology—but hey, that’s not relative). Freud’s self-confidence in his dogma provided the basis for his Gnosticism. He believed he could see and hence interpret the hidden meanings below the surface, using his dogma of course, which ruled out a transcendent. However, true to Neo-Liberal arrogance, Freud ironically dismissed any critical analysis of his beliefs in a religious manner, friendly as heretical, unfriendly as infidels.

Marxism too by this time had been honing the same basic Gnosticism, claiming itself, through its high priests, er, I mean high officials, the seer into the inevitability of history and the class patterns it entailed, deriving a dogmatism that even in its time was being falsified by the facts.  Fortunately for Marxists, armed with relativity, they were able to pick, chose and reinvent the history that matched their interpretation. Kinda like little but very dangerous gods.

Add to the mix the third atheist founding father of Post Modern Nihilistic Existentialism, Fredrick Nietzsche, who proclaimed “God is Dead.” Nietzsche advocated that Christianity, the ethic that was the principle engine of individual freedom, achievement and responsibility like no other force in the history of the planet, was no longer tenable. No wonder Richard John Neuhaus said: “Modern atheism is really a atheism against Christianity. The only God it seriously bothers to deny is the monotheistic, eternal and personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Modern man as defined by these 3 horsemen of its apocalypse thought that to be modern, to be cool, one had to be radically secular.  

Free expression of a conviction resting upon honest moral effort, which includes an intellectual one too, is not merely consonant with a free and open society’s purpose but, an essential concomitant of that purpose. However, a society that comes to believe religion is a snare and a delusion is unlikely to value religious freedom, hence setting off on the path for destroying one of the crucial freedoms needed for a morally, legally and culturally healthy free and open society.

So, like all great sea-level changes in human thought, PMNE took time to congeal and gain critical mass. Cultures do not develop in a linear manner but sporadically, with great bursts or great lulls. But when it did, mainly through force and ennui, it created a huge vacuum to fill. Yet cultural, legal and moral institutions and standards cannot exist in a vacuum. This inevitable vacuum is of particular danger since modern government has the unique ability to expand itself with impressive speed and insatiable appetite, for both enemies and friends alike. The replacement, the new religion of secularism, unbridled by a sacred religion that gave it birth and now pronounced dead, was left to fulfill the promises of secular ideology. Those with Nietzsche’s Will to Power, who in the past filled the ultimately restrained clergy, now became politicians with dissolving boundaries on the limits of their action. Totalitarianism arises from a philosophical denial of God, because it leads to a denial of any higher authority for human institutions. If all institutions are understood as mere human inventions, then individuals do not have any rights apart from those granted by men. This allows the state to develop final authority over all other institutions--family, church, market, etc---which always comes to be manipulated for the political ends of the state.

The result is always no different than the collective history of humanity testifies to, and what those who know better predicted. In purging Christianity’s influences from their governing bodies, societies obfuscate their sense of virtue, preparing themselves for totalitarianism(4). Unable to justify differentiating between conflicting claims of good and evil, right and wrong, the resulting propensity is to tolerate anything that is political correct., subverting the very concept of toleration itself. Society at this point drugs itself with secularism, a fixed that goes by the misleading name of humanism, in order to forget that it exists more and more at the whim of political power. And as John Laffler found: “When anything goes, eventually everything does.”

The new secular messiahs, shedding traditional structures, airbrush out the millennium and a half of Christianity’s contributions. Then they become free to rewrite and reinvent morality to promote their agenda, uninhabited by any religious sanctions of the past, proceeding unencumbered with the same immutable age-old human passions and appetites. Such processes, aided by the technologies of the modern state; receiving sustenance from a world-view of Post Modern NihilisticExistentialism, adrift in a relativistic world of their own design, abetted by a religio-phobic media that openly undermines Christianity regardless of the social carnage in its wake, is exactly what happened during the 20^th century, which can be summarized as a century long war against the God of Christianity. That war, to date, tallies about 150 million killed-mostly within nations themselves and against their own citizens, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, billions who were enslaved in Auschwitz and Gulag states, ecosystems polluted, whole nations plundered under complete totalitarian systems and a Cold War that threatened global catastrophe. Some  better alternative!

It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who pointed out that:" The primary trait of the entire 20th century is precisely that men have forgotten GOD…The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of the 20^th century,”  and it seems we’ve also forgotten what Aristotle also told us ages ago, that stays relevant as long as humans remain human, that a government survives to the benefit of mankind only as long as the family unit does, which Aristotle reminded us includes piety of a religious sort.  Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno called upon the state to foster those personal freedoms and intermediate institutions for not only the obvious sake of efficiency but much more importantly for the common good: “Just as it is wrong to take away from individuals what they can accomplish by their own ability and effort and entrust it to the collective, so too is it an injury  and at the same time a serious evil  and a disturbance of right order to assign to a centralized power what can be performed successfully by a smaller lesser one.”

The deepest-strongest forces in history are spiritual and cultural, not political or even economic. “By what men and women honor, cherish and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions, by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their life on.”—George Weigel. The modern dilemma is as Christopher Dawson wrote: “essentially a spiritual one.” What is needed is a recovery of what has been lost from the collective memory and experience of humanity.  Instead Neo-Liberalism is prosecuting a  cultural war on Christianity. One that is in the form of a revolution designed to completely disconnect with Western civilization’s past and replace it with an ideology and grand plan for remaking the world. No different at its core than that of every tyrant’s promise who came before. However, the process will destroy the very foundations of what has given and sustains the very freedoms we enjoy, with no sound logic, no intellectually credible shred of proof, certainly none found in the entire history of humanity, that this will be a better alternative. The only logically reason their leadership can be waging such as war can only be a interpreted as distain for individual choice and freedom, yours! And the goal of achieving the Will to Power, theirs!

"Economic, political, and personal neo-liberalism or one piece, and all oppose the Catholic faith."--Andrew Sorokowski

1. Today's secularist seems to have no idea that the reason he is able to live his life with the freedom and prosperity he has is because he lives in a society where a moral rule of law is well-established, where other, far more responsible, citizens have made it possible for such as he to enjoy the protection of settled, civilized rules in order. Whether or not he believes in Western civilization’s Christian morality his day-to-day life is made possible because of it.

2. A commonly found trait of those who usually declare themselves hostile or neutral to religion is to reveal the most archaic and regressive notions about contemporary religious and its intellectual foundations. Most of them seem to rely on garbled childhood memories to tell them what religion is and their familiarity with the philosophy, practice, literature and living spokesman of modern religion is strangely scant of cultivated and intelligent people.

3. There is great unanimity as to the present function of religion on the modern social level. In it we find the attainment of cosmic security, motivation for benevolent service, authority for practices and beliefs, means of bringing an end to personal conflict, and the providing of compensations in careers that seem relatively empty. One cannot therefore dismiss religious experiences as an unfortunate illusion without at the same time raising the problem as to whether art, philosophy, and most of the fundamentals of social life and family life are not likewise illusions.

4. Without the ultra rational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the possible. A sound religion can provide the dominant influence in the socialization of man, which can be defined as the systemics of trust, for such a religion is fruitful of the necessary component of such a system, the spirit of contrition. The inner world of conscience, which is in constant rebellion against the outer world of nature, is made supreme over the world of nature by the fiat of religion. The history of religion is proof of the efficacy of it insights in making men conscience of the sinfulness of their preoccupation with self.