Check Napoleon and the Cardinal by Jehan Georges Vibert
For some three hundred years, Western thinking has been progressively secularized. And all that while religion has increasingly become a nominal influence and a ritualistic exercise. And the irony of this is that a great many of today’s professed Christians are, unwittingly, actual secularists.
Secularism was born as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church. Modern secularism has been flourished through two global parental influences: The mother was the totalitarian medieval Christian church, and the father was none other than the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth- and twentieth-century so-called science— atheistic science.
It took a lot of time and power to free Western thinking from the withering grasp of totalitarian ecclesiastical domination, and secularism did eventually break the bonds of total church control. But now, in the midst of the protracted death rattle of the calcified institutionalized church, secularism threatens to establish a new type of mastery over the hearts and minds of 21st century man.
“In the 18th [century], the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Our current tyrannical and political state is the direct offspring of
scientific materialism and
philosophic secularism. But secularism no sooner frees man from the domination of the institutionalized church, than it sells him into slavish bondage to the totalitarian state; it frees him from ecclesiastical slavery, only to betray him into the tyranny of political and economic slavery.
Materialism denies God, while secularism simply ignores him. More recently secularism has taken on a more militant tenor, presuming it can take the place of religion. The secular humanist of today blissfully declares that man simply does not need "god." But a completely godless philosophy has already led us to global unrest, chronic unhappiness, and relentless war.
During the first third of the twentieth century, secular "humanity" killed more people than were killed during the whole of the Christian dispensation up to that time. And this may only be the beginning of the real harvest of materialism and secularism.
Secularism will never bring peace to mankind, and for no more complicated a reason than the simple truth that nothing can take the place of God in human society. But. That doesn't mean we should surrender any of the gains of the secular revolt from ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Western civilization must not go backward; we must go forward from where we find ourselves.
We could begin by recognizing what may be secularism's biggest mistake: That in revolting against the almost total control of life by religious authority, and after gaining our liberation from ecclesiastical tyranny, the secularists went on to revolt against God himself; sometimes tacitly, oftentimes openly.
But without God— without real religion— scientific secularism will never be able to harmonize our many rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms. Secularistic society— notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievements— is clearly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
― John Taylor Gatto
Here’s a thing.
It isn't necessary to sacrifice your faith in God in order to enjoy the blessings of the secularistic revolt: tolerance, social service, democratic government, civil liberties. And it also isn’t necessary for militant secularists to antagonize true religion in order to promote science, or to advance genuine education.
At the end of the day, secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will ever lead to peace. The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for politics and power. Just take an honest look at where politics and power have taken us. But finally, there's this hard, and yet-to-be learned truth: we simply cannot establish the brotherhood of mankind while ignoring— or denying— the fatherhood of God.