The Public Square, “Religious Neutrality” and the War on Christianity
by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch:
The public arena is not neutral, with rival religions competing for hegemony:
We are told – at least in theory – that in the West all points of view are welcome, and they can be argued for in public forums. This may have been more or less true not all that long ago, but things have changed. Here I want to look at how one recent book deals with this issue, but I must do two other things first.
One, I must mention that I recently revisited the important 1984 book, The Naked Public Square by Richard John Neuhaus. In it he argued that religion was being stripped away from the public square. But the question is, do we still have a neutral or empty public square? Or has a new religion rushed in to fill the void? As one writer put it a few years ago:
True as Neuhaus’ observation of a “naked public square” may have been for his time, it no longer holds. The public square was “naked” only as a transitional stage, as one set of adornments—woven from religious tradition and taken from the wardrobe of the moral imagination—were taken down to make way for other, more daring ones. Today the public square is festooned with the draperies of multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and all the false colors of an ideology committed to using the federal government to re-order society in accordance with the dictates of the new religion. Adherents of this new religion no longer feel the need to hide their contempt for the old draperies, or for those who loved them. theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/06/naked-public-square.html
Two, and related to this, I recently quoted from a February 2022 article by Aaron Renn who discussed “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” He says that things have radically shifted in the past few decades (at least in America), so evangelicals will need to rethink how we engage in the public arena.
[Editor’s note: Anglican Mainstream has never endorsed recent attempts to impose Christian values by winning and retaining political power, but we recognise that the new book arguing for ‘Christian Nationalism’ by Stephen Wolfe, reviewed extensively by Bill Muehlenberg, is careful argued and deserves to be taken seriously.]
See also: Preach the Word and Don’t Get Played, by Steve Bateman, TGC: Review: ‘Letter to the American Church’ by Eric Metaxas
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