This is such an important point, and I will continue to emphasize it. Here are links to and excerpts from two articles laying out the facts this isn’t the religious v. then non-religious:
From Salem to DC: Mary Eberstadt’s Analysis of the Dangerous Religion of Secular Progressivism
By Luma SimmsDuring my first few weeks in America, I vividly remember my mom gasping in surprise and pointing out a large cross on a hill overlooking the freeway in southern California. As my dad tried to concentrate on driving, my mother exclaimed with amazement (in Arabic): “They allow crosses on hills in America!” My father brought me to America so that I could have freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of thought. We never thought that they would be curtailed. We never thought that a day would come when people would agitate over crosses on hills, the Decalogue in courthouses, and pro-life pins on lapels. My father brought me here. If this trajectory continues, where might I take my children?
This is the precise question with which Mary Eberstadt begins the introduction to her small but mighty book, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. Faced with hardships, vilifications, and discriminations great and small, many believers have begun to ask: “Where will we go?” Inspired by their experiences, Eberstadt offers an extended meditation on secular progressivism’s “soft persecution” of Christians and religious freedom.
Read more: Public Discourse
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The Left Has a Religion — the Supreme Court Just Proved It
By Mary EberstadtIts theology is grounded in the sexual revolution.
Anyone who doubts the transvaluation of secularist progressivism into a religious faith grounded in theology about the sexual revolution need look no further than the selfies and videos of all those weeping, hugging, rapturous devotees on the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday. This was no political demonstration. It wasn’t an exercise in earnest political theater of the Occupy Wall Street variety. It was instead an outburst of quasi-religious euphoria, a gnostic rave. The transported faithful may not have been on Ecstasy. But they were in ecstasy of a kind familiar from the religious history of mystics, whirling dervishes, and revival tents. They were as intoxicated as maenads in the Bacchae.
Read more: National Review
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The Left Has aThe First Church of Secularism and Its Sexual Sacraments
By Mary EberstadtThis new orthodoxy regards sexual acts as inviolable.
For more than half a century, at least since the invention of the birth-control pill, secularists and progressives collectively, if not always consciously, have been assembling a new, quasi-religious orthodoxy. In place of the Judeo-Christianity of yesterday, and mimicking its outlines to an uncanny degree, this new body of belief has by now a well-developed secular catechism. Its fundamental faith is that the sexual revolution — that is, the gradual de-stigmatization of all forms of consenting non-marital sex — has been a boon to all humanity.
In the new dispensation, traditional restrictions and attitudes are viewed as judgmental, moralistic forms of socially sanctioned aggression, especially against women and sexual minorities. These victims of sexuality have become the new secular saints. Their virtue becomes their rejection and flouting of traditional sexual morality, and their acts are effectively transvalued as positive expressions of freedom.
Read more: National Review
