Fuzzy thinking on religion

De Tocqueville could say that “despotism may be able to do without faith, but democracy cannot”. Such remarks could be repeated at length.

The truth is we are currently undergoing a grand social experiment to see what life is like when we reject God. This massive test is only recent, and the results are not fully in yet. The glorious triumph of atheism which Bone exalts in may instead spell the end of mankind and civilisation. Bone is simply being premature in her judgment here.

And if Bone is proved wrong, the results will not be good. It is easy for the secularists to tear down a society, but it takes ages for civilisation to arise. As T.S. Eliot once remarked, “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”

Or as Durant said: “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day”. Many more sober commentators than Bone do not like what they see. The rising secularism is not good news, but bad news indeed. As G.K. Chesterton reminds us, “The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.”

If Bone had read more widely she would realise that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, for all their faults, have in many ways been a force for good in the world. By taking off her very tinted secularist glasses, she may find a world in disarray and breakdown, not because of religion, but because of religion’s enemies.