Some years ago, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor coined the term “exclusive humanism” to describe a disturbing phenomenon in Western societies: the determination of some intellectuals, activists, and politicians to scour public life of transcendent religious and moral reference points in the name of “tolerance” and “inclusion.”
Taylor’s “exclusive humanism” is not the benign secularity—the separation of religious and political institutions in a modern society—that Pope Benedict XVI has praised for helping Catholicism develop its understanding of the right relationship between Church and state. No, by referring to “exclusive humanism,” Charles Taylor was raising a warning flag about an aggressive and hegemonic cast of mind that seeks to drive out of the public square any consideration of what God or the moral law might require of a just society.
Aggressive humanism was once thought to be a primarily European malady. Then it migrated to Canada. Now it has become a serious problem in American public life. Catholics can do something about that, if they understand what the Church asks of “the world.”
The Catholic Church asks—and, if circumstances require, the Church demands—two things of any political community and any society.
The Church asks for free space to be itself: to evangelize, to celebrate the sacraments, and to do the works of education, charity, mercy, and justice, without undue interference from government. The Church freely concedes that the state can tell the Church to do some things: to obey the local sanitary laws in church kitchens hosting pancake breakfasts, for example. But the Church refuses to concede to the state the authority to tell the Church what to think and preach, or how to order its ministerial life and serve the needy. Moreover, the Church asks, and if necessary demands, that the state respect the sanctuary of conscience, so that the Church’s people are not required by law to do things the Church teaches are immoral.
The Church also asks any society to consider the possibility of its need for redemption. The “world” sometimes doesn’t take kindly to this suggestion, as the history of the martyrs reminds us. But overt persecution isn’t the only way the “world” resists the Church’s proposal. Societies can affect a bland indifference to the truths taught by biblical religion. Cultures can mock the moral truths taught by God’s revelation to the people of Israel and God’s self-revelation in his Son, Jesus Christ. Educational systems can inculcate an ethos of nihilism and hedonism, teaching that the only moral absolute is that there are no moral absolutes.
On both of these fronts—the political-legal front, and the social-cultural front—the Catholic Church is under assault in the United States today. Over the past four years, the federal government has made unprecedented efforts to erode religious freedom. The gravest assault was the “contraceptive mandate” issued earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: an offense to conscientious Catholic employers who believe what the Church believes about the morality of human love and the ethics of the right to life, and a frontal attack on the institutional integrity of the Church. For with the HHS mandate, the federal government seeks nothing less than to turn the Catholic Church’s charitable and medical facilities into state agencies that facilitate practices the Catholic Church believes are gravely evil.
Rather than truckle to such coercion, Catholic bishops across the country have made clear that they will, if necessary, close the Catholic medical facilities for which they are responsible—a drastic action that would seriously imperil health services for the poor. But it doesn’t have to come to that. Aggressive, hegemonic humanism need not have the last word in the United States.
In this election cycle, Americans can issue a ringing call for religious freedom in full. U.S. Catholics can, and must, demand of all candidates an unambiguous commitment to the Church’s institutional freedom, and to the freedom of the Church’s people to follow the dictates of conscience as shaped by the moral truths the Church guards and teaches. Self-respect requires nothing less.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
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Comments:
I agree that an exclusive, hegemonic humanism can be problematic, and is a poor alternative to what you have referred to as benign secularity. A truly secular state should respect diverse religious traditions and recognize the value that religious communities and ideas bring to the public sphere (not just the benefits they hold for private individuals). Your mention of Catholic medical facilities is an example of that.
One of the problems is that the difference between what you call hegemonic humanism and benign secularity has been poorly articulated in our society. In fact, the word "secular" is generally shunned by religious believers as referring to an attitude that is against or hostile to religion. In fact, secularism has a long history and the idea of a "secular society" has been articulated as a society that allows religious freedom and participation. It must allow such participation even on a public level, so long as the state does not promote or favor one religion over another.
For this point to be made clearly may require that different religious groups, who find themselves in a similar situation, come together to try to articulate this point and develop clearer ground rules for the place of religion in society. Religion cannot be relegated to the private sphere of an individual; at the same time, its place in the public sphere must be limited and regulated due to the pluralism we have of religious traditions and our country's commitment to religious freedom and the separation of church and state. How can this be done, and in a way that will be accepted by the majority of religious believers as well as non-believers?
One figure who has articulated a view of a secular society that still has a place for moral values, ethics, and the full participation of religious believers and communities, is the Dalai Lama, whose two most recent books, "Toward a True Kinship of Faiths" and "Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World" both seek to put forward a plan for a society that is morally grounded, while respectful of diverse viewpoints. It would be welcome if leaders from diverse traditions came together to seek an approach to these complex issues, the resolution of which would benefit everyone.
No other publication contrasts the message of scripture with the message of the world.....
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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22400/22400-h/22400-h.htm
In the case of the HHS mandate, Christians, or, more specifically Catholics, are not trying to impose their sexual morality on anybody; rather, the state is trying to impose a secular 'morality' upon the Church, effectively forcing Her to sin, according to Catholic morality, or close down.
If you don't support the government's move to include contraception, don't buy contraception. Allowing those that work for you to obtain it is a simple right granted by the government, which you cannot reject without simultaneously forfeiting tax-exemption.
Obviously, religious freedom is as important a part of laïcité as excluding religion from the public sphere of the state and its administration. It implies that the state does not intervene in the religious sphere and hence that it, in turn, is excluded from the latter. This assumes a complete separation between state and civil society, between the public sphere and the private domain, which is the framework of society and the domain not only of individuals but of groups and associations (and thus of churches and religious communities). This is why religious freedom is at once individual (freedom of conscience) and collective (freedom of religious communities). It implies that these organize themselves and operate freely.
Humanists recognize the right of Roman Catholics and all other groups to believe whatever they like, and to aid the needy as much as they wish. We do, however, insist that all groups and individuals follow the same laws, and that religious groups not receive taxpayer funds for any use. Under the United States Constitution, as originally intended, religious groups and individuals (and all others, too) can believe anything they like, without receiving any advantage or disadvantage from government because of these beliefs.
This principle, that government and religion should be separate, was revolutionary when the Constitution was written. No laws can be passed that favor or disfavor any group because of their religious or philosophical beliefs. However, neutral, valid laws must apply equally to all, without exception. Religious belief is not license to violate the laws the rest of us must obey. Religious groups should not receive special legal privileges. Further, the Roman Catholic Church, and all other religious institutions, should not receive government funding in any form.
Governmental neutrality is not discrimination. It is simple fairness.
More damagingly, many who espouse this anti-religious stance are not humanists at all, but post-humanists. For these reasons, a term like "exclusive secularism" or "narrow secularism" thus seems to me more appropriate.