Secularism under Scrutiny: Why restless hearts find their questions answered in God

Jul 1, 2024 by Dave Doveton

By Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald.

Secularists are worried; all is not well. Richard Dawkins in particular is deeply distressed and disturbed. A wave of high-profile Christian conversions is beginning to gather momentum, and he’s worried about it.

Secularism only has one lens through which it perceives and assesses things; it peers or squints through the prism of politics and power. Because of the shock of this wave of conversions, some critical articles have been written trying to explain the phenomenon politically. The way they do so is to construct a conspiracy theory that the “radical right” is in the process of hijacking Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, for its own nefarious political ambitions.

I was reminded of the advice to learn foreign languages when I was a child. The Germans and the French speak differently, think differently and have different values from the isolated English. They see history, politics and even law differently. Translation dilutes more than the words.

But if having access to different languages is important culturally, it’s absolutely vital philosophically. The great and tragic flaw in progressive culture is that it is locked in to a single language and a single dimension of human experience. It’s all about power relations.

And every so often there is an earthquake and the map is changed. There are more prisms through which to understand ourselves than power. Secularism is shocked to its core. Few recent shakings of the secular world view have been as powerful as the conversion to Christianity of one of the foremost new atheists. Christopher Hitchens regarded Ayaan Hirsi Ali as one of “the most important public intellectuals probably ever to come out of Africa”.

Read here.