Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion
Benjamin Wiker
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1621570290
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion, Benjamin Wiker argues that it is liberals who seek to establish an official state religion: one of unbelief. Wiker reveals that it was never the intention of the Founders to drive religion out of the public square with the First Amendment, but secular liberals have deliberately misinterpreted the establishment clause to serve their own ends: the de-Christianization of Western civilization.
The result, they hope, is government as the new oracle. Personal faith in a deity is replaced with collective dependence on government, and the diversity of religious practices and dogmas is reduced to a uniform ideological agenda. The liberal strategy is two-pronged: drive religion out of the public square, and then, in religion's place, erect the Church of the State to fill the human need for a higher power to look up to.
But what was done can be undone. Outlining a simple, step-by-step strategy for disestablishing the state church of secularism, Worshiping the State shows the full historical sweep of the war to those on the Christian side of the cultural battle--and as a consequence of this far more complete vantage, how to win it.
Liberalism is the worldview that has been enshrined in American law as the default position wherever Christianity has been ruled out of bounds and “separated” from our public life. But that is unconstitutional—as the establishment of any religion would be unconstitutional. The establishment of secular liberalism should be litigated against as a violation of the First Amendment. Secular liberalism can and must be disestablished. That doesn’t mean that secular liberalism should be outlawed. But it
develop free of excessive imperial control. By contrast, in the East the emperor did retain control over religious matters, and that control allowed him to subordinate the church to his rule. The situation that prevailed in the East, which approached a royal theocracy, is called Caesaropapism because it entails the effective rule of the emperor (Caesar) as a kind of pseudo-pope over the church. Caesaropapism meant that the Eastern church would never gain the kind of independence that allowed it
general, and Roman Catholicism in particular. This diminishes the civil and political standing of nonreligious and non-Christian Americans, and shows flagrant governmental preference for religion and Christianity.”8 The Foundation has already forced Sylvania, Alabama, to remove a Bible verse from its welcome sign.9 And it’s not just the FFRF and the well-known ACLU on the assault. There are plenty of other militantly secularist organizations pitching in to strip Christianity from every public
church as an authoritative body and puts the authority to define doctrine entirely into the hands of individuals. Instead of a duality between church and state, we now have only a duality between the individual and the state. The church as an effective intermediate institution is neutralized. Now the individual must face the state alone. Note Spinoza’s cleverness. In his scheme, the state doesn’t actually define doctrine. But it does continually undermine the church’s authority to define
about the sincerity of the ruler’s religion. Did such alliances represent a genuine repudiation of liberalism and an authentic return to Christianity? Or were they politically calculating? One suspects that motives were very often mixed, even within the same breast. After all, the situation prior to the French Revolution had been ambiguous enough. What did a return to the old order really mean? Recall that Machiavellianism and the rise of nationalism, sometimes operating together and sometimes