On the Myth of Secular Neutrality

There is a constitution. It enumerates our civil rights.

It is on display and we can look at it. We can admire it. We can even praise it.

But it is a relic of history and we just can’t actually have it.

So the cost of actually exercising any civil rights, those which run afoul of progressive agendas, is being intentionally inflated beyond all affordability. Progressives know exactly what they are doing.

The radical partisanship of the government bureaucracy, brazenly on display in 2020, unmasked the ideal of secular neutrality to reveal only a delusion. There can be no secular neutrality because no such thing exists. Every so-called expert operates within a moral framework of some kind. Whether the framework is right or wrong, there exists, nevertheless, some axiomatic moral assumptions upon which the alleged experts are operating.

I’m afraid that secularism may be many things, but neutral can never be one of them.

The problem, of course, is that placing power into the hands of so-called government experts has always been sold to the public on the very basis of experts being politically and morally neutral. But the Covid tyranny and BLM riots of 2020, followed by the now commonplace and habitual persistence of American prosecutors offering lenience to progressives, while throwing the book at conservatives, has unveiled secular neutrality for the mirage that it actually is.

This past week Holly MathNerd wrote a sharp and trenchant post entitled “The Disappearance of Secularism”. In her post, she ponders the recent and repeated phenomenon of high-profile media personalities making public confessions of their Christian faith. I have pondered the same phenomena in one of my own posts, although my own ruminations were over the preference these high-profile converts have shown for high church manifestations of Christianity rather than, say, non-denomination evangelicalism.

When I saw the title of Holly’s post, I was immediately interested in reading her take. I’m a subscriber of Ms. Mathnerd’s Substack and find I am sympathetic with many, though not all, of her views. Interestingly, she concludes the recent surge of Christian conversions is due to the loss of confidence in secularism as providing any sustainable basis for civil rights.

COVID revealed the truth. I do not have any rights at all. Nor do any of you. What we have are privileges, and they are dependent on one thing only. If, at any time, people with PhD after their name are willing to interpret data in a way that justifies taking our privileges away, then they will be gone…The fundamental axioms of the world I thought I lived in — the things I didn’t question, didn’t doubt, didn’t consider debatable — were all shown to be fiction.

Indeed.

Holly goes on to observe that the lack of any sort of accountability for the harm inflicted by the “experts” on millions of innocents - no one in government has suffered any kind of consequences at all - only confirms for her that we have no rights at all, only privileges.

If there had been any kind of reckoning — Nuremberg 2.0, prosecutions, etc. — then maybe I could have gotten some of my faith in those things back, to some extent. If some redemptive process had occurred, then it might have been possible to integrate the events of COVID into a new normal that wasn’t so horrifying.

I feel compassion for Holly because, though her confidence in secular neutrality has been blown to smithereens, she nevertheless has, so far at least, been unable to find her own way back to a Christian faith. She admits that she would like to, but there are obstacles, she says, that she finds in her way.

I have, myself, done a lot more reading and exploring than I used to, questioning my atheism and trying very hard to talk myself into faith. It didn’t work, but I tried very hard. I know other people, including one friend I’ve discussed this with many times, who have done the same. We’ve all been reading C.S. Lewis and even praying occasionally, hoping someone is listening, though we’ve no reason to believe anyone is doing so.

The reality that she and the rest of us face, of course, is that absent a transcendent basis for rights, the very idea of rights are illusory -- a mere ephemeral artifact of whoever happens to hold power in the passing moment. The Marxist analytical lens, that all relationships are nothing more than power dynamics, is actually kind of true if God is not real. The implications for ideals like justice and human rights are dire in the absence of any explicitly transcendent basis for them. I think many of these high-profile Christian conversions are due to a growing realization that the congenial benefits of civil rights that the West has enjoyed are entirely an artifact of Christian ideas.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; 

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

- Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings