Secularism as Religion - Kirsanow and Eberstadt

The introductory pages of Commissioner Peter Kirsanow's important statement in the Peaceful Coexistence Report  resound in themes taken up by Mary Eberstadt in her new book, It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. Both Kirsanow and Eberstadt suggest that the difficult cultural and legal impasse we've reached between SOGI laws and religious liberty is so fraught because, at base, the conflict concerns competing "religious" beliefs, one secularist, the other Judeo-Christian. And as such, both are fundamentally identity-forming, especially as regards sexuality.

Kirsanow's statement at pages 43-4 of the report: 

The tension between religious liberty and nondiscrimination principles appears most acute when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict....It is a conflict between two worldviews, both held with the intensity generally associated with religious belief. The first, which is secularism, holds an individual’s unfettered sexual self-expression as a preeminent concern because it is an aspect of their self-creation. This interest in the individual is now construed as a positive responsibility to ensure that everyone has the ability to engage in sexual conduct without cost or consequence, whether in money, unwanted children, or hurt feelings. An individual’s sexual behavior is considered an act of self-creation and something that goes to the deepest level of their identity. Criticism of an individual’s behavior is considered an attack on the dignity of the person. Naturally, this worldview is at odds with many aspects of traditional morality grounded in sexual restraint. 

Eberstadt makes the claim as to the religious character of the conflict more unequivocally: 

[I]t seems beyond dispute that progressive ideology shares recognizable features with Judeo-Christianity, even as it repudiates all traditionalists tenets that threaten its substitute theology. The bedrock of contemporary progressivism can only be described as quasi-religious. In sum, secularist progressivism today is less a political movement than a church....The so-called culture war...is [] a content of competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in the more newly written figurative book of secularist orthodoxy about the sexual revolution.

And here, Kirsanow could be quoting Eberstadt (who, for example, compares embattled Christians to the victims of the Salem witch trials): "One reason for the bitterness surrounding the debate is that the secularists tend to make their interpretation mandatory for society. Because they consider the providentialist view a heresy, and often regard the non-elite adherents of the providentialist view with disdain, they are unwilling to allow different views to exist in different places." 

Kirsanow concludes his lengthy statement with the question Eberstadt suggests animates her book:  But why should secularists care about threats to religious freedom? 

Kirsanow's answer (read Eberstadt's book for hers!):  

Because if they destroy the moral and religious assumptions underpinning the idea of human dignity, they may accidentally destroy the idea of human dignity itself....As discussed earlier in this statement, the effort to force traditional religious believers to bow to certain sexual mores is really an attempt to replace the old faith with the new. But if the old faith is destroyed, and with it the idea of human dignity, the adherents of the new faith may rue the day they did so. Secularists may believe that they are simply expanding the idea of human dignity to encompass various important facets of human behavior, but in so doing they are destroying the foundation of the idea and are unlikely to find a similarly compelling basis. Revolutions often turn on their instigators. The Judeo Christian belief that man is created in the image of God, the imago Dei, undergirds Jefferson’s proclamation that “all men are created equal”. Despite the failures of its adherents, as is the case with any set of principles, this concept is the root of the traditional Christian belief that people are ends, not means, and that therefore every person - male, female, black, white, disabled, gay, straight - is inherently dignified, despite his undoubted sins and perhaps seemingly dubious prospect of salvation. Without that foundation, the idea that everyone has equal dignity is little more than a polite fiction to be brushed aside for greater convenience.

As perhaps an example of the transformative influence of imago Dei in Christian sensibilities, Kirsanow offers the Christian response to slavery in a later rebuttal statement in the report. It too is well worth quoting: 

Of course, there were Christian slave owners in America. That is indeed a repugnant period in American and Christian history but, unfortunately, unremarkable when viewed in the context of history as a whole. Slavery has been an almost universal institution. It is the abolition of slavery, largely because of individuals motivated by their Christianity, that is unusual. So, it is peculiar that the Chairman singles out Christianity for opprobrium in regard to slavery. Slavery has existed in almost every society and among the adherents of almost every major religion. But it was only in the Christian world that a serious critique of slavery arose. Those Christians who supported slavery were utterly unremarkable in the sweep of human affairs, no better or worse than millions of others throughout history. In contrast, it is remarkable, perhaps even astonishing, that there were Christians who rose far above the historical propensities of humankind to call for abolition as a religious and moral imperative. 

 

It was the self-avowed Christian British Empire that initially ended its own involvement in the international slave trade and then acted to curtail the slave trade within the Muslim world. As the Middle Eastern scholar J.B. Kelley wrote: "No movement of any consequence towards abolition ever arose of its own accord in the Muslim world; it was the reproach of Muslim slavery, not Christian, that men and boys were castrated for service in the harim; and it was a Christian nation, Britain, which led the campaign to end the Arab slave trade and to compel Muslim rulers to forbid it to their subjects. . . . It was [British officials], after all, who led the Arab tribes of the Persian Gulf to cease trading in their fellow Muslims, the Somalis."

 

Religious believers were also in the forefront of the civil rights movement. Of course, the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement were disproportionately Christian ministers - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Rev. C.K. Steele. Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, perhaps our own Commission’s most renowned member, was among them. “More than 900 Catholics participated in the Selma protests” and a log of out of town participants in the Selma protests included “140 priests, 50 sisters, 29 ministers, four rabbis” [footnote omitted.] 

He concludes his statement quite gracefully, and for those of us living in this post-Roe era, most presciently, one thinks: 

A sense of modesty, humility, and perspective should temper our remarks about those who lived before us. We are all creatures of our own time, our minds and attitudes shaped by influences and assumptions of which we are largely unaware, our actions constrained by weighty responsibilities and unacknowledged self-interest. We all like to think that had we lived in the past we would be among the few righteous. But history is plain - the visionary righteous are few. Most of us are far more likely to have subscribed to the conventional wisdom of our time, or in good faith to have been unable to see our way clear to what is now considered self-evident. We cannot know the reasons future generations will condemn us. All we can know is that they will indeed condemn us, and hope that they judge us with more charity than the Chairman does our predecessors.