The State and the Sacred | James Kalb | Catholic World Report
Today there is no god higher than Caesar, and Caesar has identified himself with the principle of individual choice and thus with the divinity of the individual will.
Every functional society is based on a system of common understandings about man, the world, and the common good. Otherwise those who take part in it won’t be able to cooperate effectively in the network of complex, enduring, and sometimes very demanding undertakings through which they carry on the life of the society.
Such understandings can exist even though they aren’t held by everyone, or in their entirety by many people at all. It’s only necessary that people who run things make them basic to how they cooperate, and the people at large go along with the arrangement. Thus, a secular society doesn’t have to be one in which most people oppose religion in public life. It just has to be one in which influential people agree religion doesn’t belong there, and find ways to enforce the agreement.
In the early ’60s most people didn’t like the school prayer decisions, which pushed religion out of the public schools. But the decisions stuck, because people who ran things liked them, and it’s hard for the people at large to resist what higher-ups settle on as proper. Since that time the same view of what is proper has meant a continuing trend toward secularism, and many Catholics have come to view the resulting kind of society as entirely consistent with their faith. Government is carried on without reference to religion, but political entanglements are corrupting, the Church is free to carry out her mission in civil society, and in any event American public religion was basically Protestant.
So why aren’t things better now, and why isn’t what we have enough?
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