Excellent post over at The Edge Of England's Sword on "Secular Fundamentalism". No permalinks, so scroll down to April 16, and look for "Secular Fanatics".
An excerpt:
One of my favorite Simpsons jokes occurs at a prison rodeo the family attends. After a rider is thrown off and obviously seriously injured, the warden/announcer comments "Don't worry too much about him, folks. He's in for erecting a nativity scene on public property." The crowd boos and Marge comments, "So much evil in the world."I am happy to have grown up in an avowedly Christian country. Collective worship every morning at school and a sense of the history, tradition and national role of the Church of England helped shape me. Yet it seems that this great benefit is yet another thing that is being thrown away in the mad drive to "modernize" Britain. It is ironic, as Daniel Johnson points out in his Telegraph column, The threat of secular fundamentalism, that one of the leading opponents of this movement is an American-born Jew, Oliver Letwin: What I take to be Letwin's main point is to defend the established Church of England against the intolerance of "state secularism". It may seem paradoxical that a Jewish atheist should defend faith schools and the right of Anglican bishops to sit in the House of Lords, or that the strict separation of Church and State does not seem preferable to a man born and bred in America.
Yet Letwin is a true British Conservative: he values our constitution, Christian through and through, because it has preserved our liberties for centuries. Not only the liberties of Christians, either: Jews, Muslims and others, too, prefer the status quo.
....Secular fundamentalism is as much of an internal threat to our civilisation today as the external one of religious fundamentalism. Our leaders are tempted to abandon the distinctively Christian claims on our historical imagination. With Passiontide upon us, the tragic consequences of such a betrayal should be in the forefront of our thoughts.
As they say, read it all.
Posted by Ith at April 17, 2003 5:14 PM