Secular social and cultural sabotage

Nearly a year after her death her body still has not been found. Nor has her death received the attention that Robert McCartney's did, despite the alleged involvement of paramilitaries. Colm Heatley reportsThe Chorus I speak of (one of these weeks I really will explain what I mean) is, of course, determinedly secular. One gathers from the relentless attacks on religion that the secular media is determined to put an end to the sway of religion in the world. But the project is more radical and more peculiar than that. Having nothing to put in place of religion, secularists do not simply desire that, for example, church and state be separated completely, or even merely that the power and influence of the various churches be neutralised, or even that the churches just slink away and die. What they desire above all is the vindication of their own vapid atheist position and the standing down of the authority claimed for God over themselves. For all their inability to explain anything much, or to offer an alternative moral praxis to that supplied by religions since mankind learned to talk, secularists are determined to employ their lately-acquired power to have it formally acknowledged that they in their atheism are right and believers profoundly wrong. This, they fancy, will set them free.    
This is why the Chorus loves trendy clerics. Any priest or pastor willing to say anything that even marginally cedes ground to the secularists is hailed as a hero. Hence, the priests and bishops celebrated as “progressives” are those wishy-washies willing to sell out as many Christian beliefs as they can manage while still sporting dog-collars. Because they crave vindication above all, the secularists welcome such concessions as polemical trophies: further proof that they are Right About Everything. So it was with the recent vacuous comments in an Irish Times interview by the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Rev Dr John Neill. Dr Neill, you may recall, said that the removal of references to God in the Constitution wouldn't worry him, and that, although he wouldn't vote to remove it, the document's preamble was “pretty meaningless”. Unsurprisingly, his remarks received a rousing welcome from the Chorus, including a fairly emblematic editorial by Vincent Browne in last week's Village. The editorial presented a reasonable summary of the secularist position: that the Constitution's preamble is “deeply sectarian” and therefore “offensive” to those whose beliefs it allegedly fails to echo. Among this number were listed: those who do not believe in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity or in God; those who do believe in God but not that all authority comes from Him; those who wish to have God restricted to a lower-case designation; those who question the status of Jesus; those who, accepting His status, object to the idea that He or he sustained our fathers though centuries of trial; those who despise fathers; and so forth.  “A Constitution should be capable of attracting the allegiance of all citizens,” Vincent Browne wrote. “.... and one which doesn't is signalling that some citizens matter more than others.”
Actually, the Constitution is about leadership, about setting before the people an approximate set of values by which, subject to the constant flux of democracy, they can live in reasonable accord. A democracy is more than the consensus of its participants at any one time, having an eternal and higher purpose transcending human whims.
The invocation, in our Constitution, to the Most Holy Trinity, “from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred”, is simply an acknowledgement of the rootedness of our civilisation in a transcendent, absolute philosophy of morality and living. In the absence of an all-knowing, all-seeing humanity, what we identify as religious philosophy represents the only known way of summoning up the total moral aspirations of a society. That the particularity of this ethos in Ireland happens to be Christian is, in a sense, incidental.
Christianity represents our particular gateway into the transcendent – not merely or even primarily in terms of what we believe about God, but more pertinently in the legal context of our collective belief in immutable laws and principles which override the fleeting fashions of culture and time. There is no known secular morality which, being tried and tested, could be deemed fit to take over when the secularists have buried religion. The very essence of our common understanding of right and wrong is inextricably bound up with Christianity, and any withdrawal from that ethos would dismantle the only moral system we hold in common. Vincent Browne endorsed the suggestion by Archbishop Neill that the emphasis in the Constitution should be on “recognition of the role and name of religions in society rather than on pledging the country to any one religious expression”. He likewise called for “a simple preamble which would acknowledge the different religious traditions here and our commitment to religious tolerance”. It does not appear to occur to either of these men that what he is suggesting is deeply intolerant, or that replacing the Christian ethos in our Constitution with a generic or secular ethos would replace a set of beliefs held passionately by a majority with a set held in a theoretical and – at best – tepid manner by that indifferent minority which would not feel offended by the absence of a religious ethos. To describe the preamble as “sectarian” is like denouncing green post-boxes because they are not, for example blue, or because they are “offensive” to those of a psychedelic disposition. Archbishop Neill claimed that, where the majority community is Christian, it is “obvious” that society is going to be influenced by the Christian ethos without this being explicitly acknowledged. What he appears to miss is that, had such beliefs not been explicitly acknowledged in the past, they might not now exist at all, either in the Constitution or anywhere else. To assume that we can take for granted the benefits our society has derived from Christianity would be foolish. But to take the radical step of publicly dispensing with the most visible legal connection to that heritage would be an act of social and cultural sabotage.