The Source of Secularism

Freakazoids and repugs like to pretend that secularism was invented by American communists in the 1950s, if not by Bill Ayers while mentoring Barack Obama in the 1980s.

Secularism in fact arose more than 300 years ago, during the - very appropriately named - Enlightenment.

Alan Charles Kors in Free Inquiry:

The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was the secularization of ethical debate. Historically, however, it would be one-dimensional—indeed wrong—to understand this phenomenon as the product of a virgin birth of ideas in the Enlightenment. Both deistic and atheistic Enlightenment authors were part of the same world of thought. Similarly, both eighteenth-century Christian and Enlightenment thinkers were heirs to the same conceptual revolution of seventeenth-century natural philosophy (which included what we now term science), and both moved on the same deeper tidal currents of early-modern intellectual change.

The seventeenth century produced a flowering of deep theological thought, and, indeed, it was the high-water mark of European demonological belief and persecution. It also created the “new philosophy” that was so dramatic an agent of historical change. The new philosophy involved a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past and an experimental and often mathematized model of natural knowledge. This new philosophy, as it indeed was called, emerged within a deeply religious culture. Its unintended consequences, however, would create an increasingly secularized culture in terms of scientific and ethical belief. At the heart of this were the fruits of the systematic study of nature.

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Enlightenment philosophers established secular moralism more than a hundred years before Darwin's scientific revelations established the foundations of evolution on which freakazoids blame modern atheism.

Enlightenment atheism was unable to offer the explanations of spontaneous, that is, undesigned order that Charles Darwin could offer to unbelief. Rather, it turned its attention, above all else, to what it saw as the moral arguments and imperatives of understanding nature without recourse to a supreme being.

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Kors concludes:

The particulars of the Enlightenment should not be understood in terms of the particulars of twenty-first century agendas. Rather, it bequeathed values, ways of thinking, and criteria whose potential would only be actualized by later phenomena and are being actualized still. Did Jefferson, for example, believe in the equality of races and of the sexes? No. He was deeply a man of his particular time and place. He urged, however, as “self-evident” that the then generic “man” was endowed with unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that governments existed precisely to secure those preexistent rights. That is what Locke believed, and it is what most deists believed. The historical resonance of that belief, which Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed to be universal—whatever its authors thought to be its application in their lifetimes—has inspired virtually every movement for human legal equality and dignity. Did French Enlightenment authors—living in an age when more than four out of five of their countrymen were needed to work the land and most could not read a published book—believe in equal opportunity? No. They identified despotism as an ultimate horror, however, and embraced the view that society was a voluntary association of equal individuals. They rejected the presumptive authority of the past and invited posterity to work for a fairer, less cruel, and more humane future. They set loose in the world the secular values according to which all individuals should enhance their lives and reduce their suffering.

The seeds of a new way of viewing nature and our place in it and of proceeding toward human mastery of the natural causes of well-being or pain were now in the world. They announced a set of goals that changed the possibilities and, at times, the course of history: not only life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but legal equality, a free science, a secular society within which religion is a matter of private and voluntary life, religious toleration, and a belief that government is the servant not the master of its citizens. The Enlightenment also bequeathed to us the freedom to disagree. In its wake, the debates of the modern age began in all of their intensity. For many of us, the Enlightenment also unloosed the great potential of natural humanity in the natural world.

Read the whole fascinating thing.