“The Dangerous Illusion of a Secular State”
by Josiah Reedy, Juicy Ecumenism:
Al Mohler at National Conservatism Conference.
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of “The Briefing,” gave the final keynote address at the recent National Conservatism conference, a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation aimed at promoting an expressly nationalist brand of conservatism. Mohler’s address was entitled “Your God Will Have Been Supplanted by an Idol: The Dangerous Illusion of a Secular State.”
Mohler began by pointing to a need for the conservative movement to be grounded in theological ideas. He stated, “In so far as conservatism as a movement has a future, it is a future that is going to be increasingly tied to explicit theological claims and confessions, or there will be nothing left to conserve.”
For Mohler, this need for a theologically sound conservatism arises from the popularity of secularism. He said, “One of the most dangerous ideas of our age is the dangerous illusion of a secular state.”
Mohler expressed his concern that the concept of a secular state is really a mere fiction. In his view, “Secular space is not empty space. It is space hostile to human dignity. It is space dangerous for human good.” He continued, “Once transcendence is denied, once God is denied, a host of alien doctrines comes in and establishes a new public orthodoxy.”
Mohler listed a range of such doctrines that have now established themselves, including “Marxism, communist ideology, critical theory, poststructuralism, identity politics, and woke activism, all driven by a religious passion and with ideas that invariably take on a religious shape.”
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