Editorial: Secularism does not replace Christianity

There is a high degree of vanity in the oft-repeated claim that we are a secular society and that ours is a secular democracy. The first piece of vanity is that ‘everyone’ knows what the claims mean, whereas it is much closer to the truth to say that ‘nobody’ knows what they mean.
There are many meanings attached to ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’, but the most commonly believed or felt ideas are that secular things are those not religious, sacred or spiritual – and, in today’s common parlance, not moral; and secularism is a political or philosophical system that rejects all forms of religious faith or worship.
The Australian Constitution neither accepts nor imposes this philosophy or mindset. The preamble of the constitution specifically acknowledges Almighty God, so the constitution does not reject or ignore things religious, sacred or spiritual.  The constitution does, however, forbid the government established by the constitution to establish, favour or disadvantage any particular religion, and it forbids the imposition of any religious test in relation to a Commonwealth appointment.
This is a limitation imposed on the government because the government is considered not an appropriate body to make rulings about religion. It says that the government has secular (worldly) authority, but not spiritual authority. It is emphatically not a statement that the constitution considers that religion has no significant role in the lives of citizens or society, or even in the exercise of the government’s secular authority.
The constitution says nothing about moral authority and does not limit the government’s authority to make laws that most people would consider are at least based on a sense of morality. It is only in recent times that people claiming to be secularists have begun to insist that MPs are not entitled to impose their moral views on others. Just as they have no coherent philosophy or anthropology to justify secularism, so there is nothing coherent to justify this strange claim.
If there were no moral laws imposed on society, there would be no laws against theft and all other forms of dishonesty, and no laws against murder and all other forms of assault and violence. One of the great strengths of our own and similar societies has been that Christianity has given us the most rational, coherent and consistent foundation for the laws governing society.  It is only in recent times that secular individualism has abandoned this moral philosophy based on a rational understanding of human nature. In its place is the pretend philosophy that people are entitled to do what they like provided it does not harm anyone else. It is obvious that its advocates do not believe this dictum when it comes to divorce (which causes immense and on-going damage to other members of the family) or abortion (which clearly kills babies, harms mothers, and damages society as a whole).
They also do not believe their dictum in relation to theft: if one stole $50,000 from any of our billionaires, it would clearly do them no harm at all, but there is no chance that such thefts would be considered harmless and therefore innocent.
The secular way of avoiding rational debate about the laws they want to impose is to accuse other people of trying to impose their religious views on the community. Christians, Jews and Muslims, for example, tend to have a rationally coherent harmony between their religious and moral beliefs. Their arguments are consistently ignored on the grounds that they are religious beliefs based on what people perceive that God said. It saves the difficulty of understanding the rationality of a sound moral position. This exercise in intellectual dishonesty will become very clear again in the current euthanasia debate.
The other deficiency of the secular philosophy that shows up in all life debates is the difficulty that most secularists have in understanding the social nature of humanity and assessing the difficulties that are caused for individuals when society is harmed. All anti-life measures harm the group as well as the individuals whose lives are taken, but it requires a coherent anthropology which understands the value of life and the destructiveness of deliberate death to comprehend this principle.
In the last 100 years or so, secular philosophies have caused the worst death and destruction the world has ever seen. Even apart from the huge wars they launched, nazism and communism have slaughtered more of their own people within their own borders than ever before – the holocaust, the pogroms, purges and gulags of Russia, the labour camps of China, the killing fields of Cambodia and other examples, all inflicted by governments on their own people because of perverse philosophies. Religions, of course, are still blamed for causing wars. Australians have never fought in a war that had anything to do with religion, but Australians took their faith with them when they went to war. The secular nature of the wars did not separate them from their religion.
Christians have no reason to be intimidated by secular philosophies. We must use the strength of our faith to pray for our societies, and the wisdom of reason to explain and defend the laws we espouse.