Motus Mentis

Over at the Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella has published a post commenting on the failure of “Laïcité” — the doctrine of separation of church and state, intended to pre-empt religious political factionalism — in Europe. Bill advances the argument that, because modern Leftists are such unreflective secularists, they’ve lost their understanding of the “deep-rootedness” of religion in human nature.

We read:

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs. It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion. But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature. But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature.

Bill is absolutely right about this. He continues:

Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don’t think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims.

…The issue at present is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way. My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point that they don’t appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion. And so they don’t properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it.

Right again, I think. But here I must ask a key question: if religion is, as Bill says, an essential, deeply rooted aspect of human nature that answers “deep human needs that cannot otherwise be met”, how, then, can an entire generation of civilized and educated people simply discard it?

My answer is that they can’t, and more importantly, they haven’t — however much they may think they have. What has happened instead is that in the space of less than a century, Western Christianity has mutated into a new and pernicious form — one that has, under the pressures of naturalistic and scientistic skepticism, “Progressive” ideology, and the catastrophic moral horrors of the twentieth century, hidden God and Christ from view, flattened and immanentized the hierarchy of Earth and Heaven, and replaced individual salvation with a vague and universalist collective soteriology.

The adherents of this cloaked and mutated form of Christianity imagine themselves to have broken free of religion altogether, but they have in fact done nothing of the sort. If they fail to take Islam seriously enough to suppress its influence under the principle of laicity, it is because Islam now seems so far removed from their own belief system that it is no longer taken seriously as a religious rival.

Christianity, however, is reviled, and rightly feared, by the liberal elites of the secular West. This is because they sense its ancestral cultural pull. It threatens to undo their own doxastic evolution in a way that Islam does not.

As I mentioned, the great metamorphosis of Christianity entered the pupal stage beginning about a century ago in America. I looked at this in some detail in this post, from last July. If this topic interests you, I think you’ll find it worth your time.