Sociolatry

A phrase making its way around the media these past few weeks is “the enemy within”. Those who spout it no doubt are referring to different enemies. For me, the phrase brings to mind the famous quote in the Pogo cartoon strip on Earth Day in 1971: “We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us!”.

In this celebrated cartoon the reference is to us, ourselves, and our mistreatment of the environment. However, there is another, more sinister, way in which we are our worst enemy. It concerns not the ecological splendor of the world we inhabit, but rather the mysterious splendor of the humanity we share. Consciously or otherwise, we are allowing the acidic influence of secularism to corrode the very core of our humanity, our conviction that the spirit of God dwells within us and guides us. Secularism in the Trojan horse we blithely admit into our unguarded souls.

Secularism is atheistic. It leads us to believe there is no exogenous intelligence outside of us and beyond our control. ‘Secular humanism’ is the gateway drug to secularism. It entices us with its purported objectives of compassion, justice, wellbeing, etc., all without reference to a Supreme Being. Even among some Christians secularism has made inroads. For them Jesus’ claim that “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” is interpreted as Jesus saying “I will show you the way to the truth and the life” as though  Jesus, speaking as an enlightened human being, was able to discern our best path forward. Christ is not God, just a wise leader.  (This reminds me of a colleague I once had who faulted Catholicism on being too ‘Christocentric’).

The philosophy that undergirds secularism is positivism, a system of belief that rejects theism and the metaphysical and holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be verified by scientific proof.  The term was introduced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. Comte is also recognized as the ‘Father of sociology’, a discipline which hitherto had not existed. Comte’s attitude toward religion was not atheistic, but ‘antitheistic’ (a distinction which seems even more prominent today). For him, human society – the product of millennia of development – was the source of truth, the ‘be all and end all’. Theology is replaced by sociology and religion by ‘sociolatry’, the deification of society.

Eighty years ago the French Jesuit, Fr. Henri de Lubac (later Cardinal) wrote The Drama of Atheist Humanism, a scholarly treatise on the origins of secularism. Referring to Compte he wrote:

Positivism is gaining ground, as its founder repeatedly predicted, far less by any conquest over former ‘metaphysicians’ or ‘revolutionaries’ than by a slow and imperceptible dechristianization of a large number of Catholic souls” (p.266)

Almost a century later, Cardinal de Lubac’s words are proving prescient. The dechristianization of our souls is the enemy within. More broadly it encompasses a growing antitheism.  We who witness and allow its progress are its accomplices. I am encouraged by the belief that the members of the National Catholic Community Foundation are aware of this threat and responding to it accordingly.

The advance of the Kingdom is for those who choose to come along. Those who decline the invitation are their own enemies.

Leave a comment