True and false secularity

You do not make your culture secular by attempting to exclude whatever you identify as religious. Aggressively secularising by attacking and separating yourself from Christian sources is not the way to a secular culture. It leads us further from it into dependency and totalitarianism, which is always enshrined by an ideology that makes absolute, cult-like claims. Totalitarianism always turns into a cult of personality. Then we all live through the face of the man displayed everywhere on placards, screens, coins, public places. We should not think that it is not totalitarian when there are many image, a torrent of different faces, rather than just the one authorised representation that is the face of our dictator. Such a cult of personality is clearly religious. The media spews out a stream of cultic images, with the intention that we become transfixed and malleable

Secularity arises out of faith. It is the penumbra of faith. Secularity is the trail and the open spaces left by the trampling of the grass wherever the worshipping Christian people have passed. Secularity is the open space left wherever the Christian people have stopped, worshipped and made camp.

Secularity emerges as a result of the presence and input from the Christian community. Secularity is a by-product of their witness. They set themselves apart from the society, and do not allow themselves to become too conformed to it.

Faith and secularity are not opposites. This religion (and no other) gives rise to the political culture of individual dignity, individual conscience and freedom. This faith is the source that powers the culture. When the power goes off, the light glimmer for a bit, then go out. When this worship is sung and heard in public the political culture of freedom lives. When the gospel is not broadcast, the faith is not declared and celebrated in public, before the nation and on the nation’s behalf, the people who make up the nation begin to regard one another more coldly and the nation starts to mistrust one another and the nation drifts apart into rival camps.

It only takes one righteous man to pray in public, to keep the nation open and refreshed by the truth. When he worships, he gives the nation back its voice. It speaks for it, saying what each part of the nation needs to say to every other and what it needs to hear from every other, that they are committed to one another and intend to continue to be one political community, held together by all the practices and attitudes of mutual esteem and service, and so remain one people and one nation, each member of it content to acknowledge themselves under the same law as all others, and so committed to reject conflict and maintain the peace between them.