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The Sacred Eclipsed?
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10310 |
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Book World
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
1,560 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
L'ECLIPSE DU SACRE
Alain de Benoist and Thomas Molnar
Paris: La Talle Ronde, 1986
247 pp.
This book is a series of discussions between two religious thinkers with shared cultural concerns. Thomas Molnar and Alain de Benoist have both written extensively on the problem of secularization in the modern West.
The attempts by modern states to recognize secularism as a public philosophy and to distance themselves from the symbols of traditional theistic religion represent a striking departure from earlier human history. Almost all past societies, even those few that prohibited the establishment of a national religion, encouraged public displays of religious beliefs. The United States until the 1950s impressed foreign visitors, such as the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, as a land that combined religious freedom and pervasive public piety.
Against the tendency toward approved manifestations of piety, a militant secularism has asserted itself in the form of opposition to, for example, nondenominational public school prayer (even silent meditations are disallowed as a form of public school prayer) or public funding of activities associated with religious bodies. The attempt to dissociate religious belief from the polity has behind it influential supporters from members of the Supreme Court and Congress through the media and universities down to teachers' unions. This militant secularism has a clear precedent in the anticlerical Third Republic in France, which strove to eradicate French Catholicism in the opening years of the twentieth century. The culminating point of raising secularism to the level of public philosophy can be found, of course, in communist countries where atheism and scientific materialism have become hallowed state teachings.
Molnar and Benoist each stress the unprecedented and problematic aspects of governments and societies suppressing the public expression of religious sentiment. They also speculate about the future of our non-religious society. Molnar argues that because of the constancy of human spiritual needs, even secularism must eventually resemble a religion or yield to a real faith; Benoist, however, believes that the sense of the sacred has already departed from our culture.
It may be useful to note that these two thinkers start from dramatically different
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