By Conlan Salgado

Written by Conlan Salgado

Secular is said to be an antonym of religious. If that is true, secularity is also an antonym to truth, goodness, redemption, and the many distinctly religious values which exist; advocates tend to confuse secularity with “human rights”, “progress”, and other inadequate replacements to the Eight Beatitudes.

Since an antonym is an opposing meaning, it is worthwhile to consider the etymology of the word religion. Although it will disappoint the coalition of distracted white women who-ahem, religiously, practice yoga, the word religion means something very similar to the Sanskrit root of the former word: “to bind, to fasten up, to tie together.”

The word “secular” in the antinomial context assigned above means: to untether, to separate, to tear apart. In this sense, most of the cultural innovations of modern America are distinctly secular: no fault divorce (what man has joined together, let man put asunder), transgenderism, moral relativity, emotionalism. . . .

Religion is usually (though bizarrely) considered exclusively in the context of ritualistic worship of God. Certainly God is the greatest reality deserving of our commitment, but marriage, friendship, and even truth-telling are lesser forms of religion.

Dedication to something worthwhile is a natural virtue; the reason why religion–that is, the natural practice of dedication or commitment–requires an ultimate foundation in God is simple: there are always very persuasive and even logical reasons to renege on commitment.

Consider marriage: Jane Doe is quite unhappy with John Doe. They do not express affection, mutually confide thoughts or emotions, walk, talk, or sleep together. They are “untethered”. Now consider another scenario: John Doe does express affection, confides thoughts, walks, talks and sleeps with Jane Doe–but Jane is STILL UNHAPPY. SOOOOOO UNHAPPY!

She’s really quite miserable. Furthermore, let’s assume their children are grown up and distant. Why ought she to stay with John? There is no good human reason. It seems to me that only under the assumption divorce equals a sort of ontological vandalism does divorce become wrong or improper. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. 

Ridiculous! an interlocutor objects; why should it matter whether an unhappy couple separates? It doesn’t, I expect; not in individual cases. But social institutions educate a human being in those ways it is proper to commit oneself to value. Universities are supposed to train a human being in those ways it is proper to commit oneself to knowledge . . . the Church trains a human being in the ways it is proper to commit oneself to God . . . marriage trains a human being in the ways it is proper to commit oneself to another human being.

My Jane Doe examples above are meant to illustrate an important point: secular commitments are always utilitarian, while religious commitments are always per se. It is quite easy to start by declaring, “a woman who has no connection with her husband ought to leave him”, to declaring, “a woman who has no love for her husband ought to leave him”, to declaring, “a woman who has no mind for her husband ought to leave him”, to declaring, “a woman who has no desire to stay with her husband ought to leave him”.  Then, voila! Individual whim becomes the exculpator of what is right and wrong–what ought to be done, and what oughtn’t to be done.

A religious commitment is not of such a nature. A religious commitment to marriage is taken because it is not good for man to be alone. Religious commitment is not utilitarian but normative. If it is not good for man to be alone, then it is better for an unhappy couple to try strenuously to improve their situation rather than disjoin. I have the steep suspicion that a society which accepts various pretexts for the dissolution of marriage will accept various pretexts for its own dissolution.

Western Civilization–secularized, but ever-seeking a religion–could not long remain committed to scientific truth, soon giving away to ideological doctrine instead. Scientific truth was offensive and illogical: after all, is condemning an unhappy woman to an unhappy marriage any more unethical than condemning an unhappy woman to a man’s body?

The secular pledgor never guarantees himself unconditionally; consequently, a secular society is only stable “for the moment”. This is another formula for “soon, chaos.” How odd and inconvenient that great science is discovered by fanatics, that truth is spoken fully only by men “loyal unto death, even death on a cross”, that love is persevered in only by her who has surrendered her life before it has barely begun. How discomforting that only religious people attain the jealous and stubborn secrets of the universe and the human experience. How unsettling to contemplate that a secular society is not a gathering of friends or citizens; it is a violent, brief, and permanent scattering.

The religious instinct is irrepressible: the minute a society is bound by anything, it is religious. The law is a religion–a binding force. Tradition is a form of religion, as is storytelling and crafted history. The danger of a religious society is that it may bind itself to the worst of all values. That is the peculiar danger of the religious instinct.

Unfortunately, for the Jonahs of the secular left, their arguments have been swallowed by the least secular of all centuries–the 20th–and spat back onto the shores of the 21st: when a society binds itself to ideology, science, progress, wealth, the spirit of the future–it is not merely religious, and certainly not in the sense of church-going and charity-giving.

Inevitably, it burns more heretics, bans more books, and authors more dogma than any Christian monarch could dare to imagine.   

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