Sacred Truths in a Profane World
by Roger Scruton, The Imaginative Conservative:
One after another, the sacred spaces that our customs have protected are invaded and spoiled. That which has been assumed to be unquestionable, indeed protected from the questions that might profane it, is for that very reason subjected to question…
In America and across Europe, the business of government has been detached from religious faith. This detachment is made explicit in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which forbids the federal government from making any establishment of religion—in other words, from imposing on the people the beliefs and rituals of any particular faith. But it is also the norm throughout the Western world and is often considered to be part of the Christian legacy. The Christian church was compelled from the beginning to recognize that it occupied a negotiated space, in the larger realm of secular government. St. Paul urged his followers to respect “the powers that be,” and Christ himself had argued that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s—in other words, that we should obey the secular law and not claim exemption from it on religious grounds. Without those cautious pronouncements, the Christian faith would have entered into immediate conflict with the Roman authorities, who tolerated all gods, but only if those gods were as obedient to Rome as the people who worshipped them. As soon as Rome felt threatened by the Christian God, Christians began to be persecuted. And of course later, when Christianity had triumphed and taken on the form of spiritual government, nominally distinct from the secular rule of law but always breathing down its neck, heretics, unbelievers, and Jews were persecuted in their turn.
You can lose your faith without losing the values that derive from it or the spiritual orientation that it implanted in your soul. And you might retain those things and be all the more distressed by a secular culture that mocks or tramples on them.
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