A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of secularism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the pope, politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties, Melanie Phillips ...
It seems odd to borrow the opening words of Marx and Engel's the Communist Manifesto to describe secularism and to find them so apt. For someone such as myself who has always seen the secularist ideal as the most benign legacy of the Enlightenment, it's a bit like discovering that your cuddly teddy bear is being portrayed as a rampaging grizzly.
But there is no doubt that secularism is increasingly seen as a threat to liberty rather than its stoutest defender. Conservative party chairman Lady Warsi is the latest to raise the alarm, speaking of her "fear" that "a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies". She pulls no punches in claiming that "at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant" and that it "demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes".
Pretty much the same message came from Labour's David Lammy on Friday's Any Questions? on Radio 4, when he attacked "an aggressive secularism that is drowning out the ability of people of faith to live with that faith".
Warsi is taking this message to the pope, which is a bit like taking pizza to Napoli. In the pontiff's 2010 visit to the UK, he also railed against "aggressive forms of secularism", likening it to the evils of Nazism and claiming that "the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society".
Other clerics have followed suit. The leader of the Catholic church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, used his last Easter sermon to decry the "aggressive secularism" that tries to "destroy our Christian heritage and culture and take God from the public square".
And the list of those who have said similar things is endless. But just what is that people are so terrified of? Is secularism really a threat, or has it simply been distorted, by its critics, its defenders, or both? Read on and comment » | Julian Baggini | Tuesday, February 14, 2012
