Anthony Esolen: Secularism Is Divisive.
I am getting pretty sick of the standard "religion is divisive" line. First, I'm not sure that divisiveness is such a bad thing, when the alternative is bland apathetic homogeneity, or state-enforced silence. Second, who started all the big wars since Napoleon? Those great religious mystics named Napoleon, Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, et cetera.
Perhaps those who fear "divisive" religion really fear that people will unite and resist the totalizers. That is why all mid-level groups, the great producers of and buffers against civil society, are in the secular gunsights: the church, the family, the small town, the Boy Scouts, anything "parochial."
The secularists have nothing, absolutely nothing, that can really unite a people. And that's what they're really afraid of: not that religion will divide people, but that it will unite them.
Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, September, 2007, p. 6.
Caedmon
in What is to be done?
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