Look in the mirror. Secularists "don't see the rest of us [people of faith] in quite the same light as they see themselves." ...Chip Berlet
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I kind of expected that response, and almost deleted the sentence just to avoid defending it. As my lawyer once told me, if you said it, you own it. So here is the defence.
To be a Christian means that you have been baptized, which signifies you have accepted Jesus Christ as the son of God and as your savior, and you believe in a personal God. The act itself is intended to separate the faithful from the rest.
In effect, baptism is a public and political act, just as circumcision is for Jews and Muslims. There is no such thing as an unbaptized Christian any more than there are uncircumcised Jewish or Muslim men.
These symbolic acts are intended to both join and separate, and from them follows a system of moral laws and obligations that continue to join and separate in ever finer detail. All three systems roughly follow an Aristotelian hierarchy of greater to lesser goods that are proportional to the hierarchy of greater and lesser people. For example, it is no accident that the standing of women is a problem in all three systems.
These hierarchies compose the traditional social and political views of the faithful. Currently all three systems are involved in internal wars over the degree to which various groups can be considered truly Christian or Muslim or Jew.
So then, no I do not see people of faith in the same light, simply because they do not see me in the same light. No matter how liberal, if they belong to these faiths, they will have to accept or battle their orthodoxy in some fashion or other---and the more liberal, of course the more they have to battle. But these are not my battles and I am by definition excluded from them.
On the other hand, I do have to battle the social and political belief systems that attend these faiths precisely because these have presumed to embrace and extend themselves to the wider political world. In other words, I do not share the paradoxical position of the liberal or progressive believers who find themselves caught between two worlds. I am no caught between two worlds and do not share the conflicts that arise from that position.
``It is true that there is "an historical theme that has never been fully resolved in US intellectual life or the public mind."
But do you honestly think this has escaped the attention of Christian intellectuals?'' (CB)
No of course not, that's the problem. These damned Christians have never stopped their project to conquer the wider political world and grab its material power ever since Christ wore thorns... and neither have Jews since Moses, nor Islam since Mohammed. These warrior founders and their forever wars are the very foundation of these belief systems which have proclaimed the virtues of martyrs when they were losing only to to bask in the benefits of tyranny once they got on top.
All of which goes to point out why us secularists don't see people of faith in quite the same light. Like the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans before us, we are justifiably dubious of all people who come out of the desert and claim to be peaceful sheepherders. We've heard that story before...
Anyway, all joking aside take a look at J. Israel's Radical Enlightenment. I've found it's too big to actually sit down and read straight through, but it is a great historical reference because it details out the European struggles that span from Spinoza to Diderot as the vast majority of the intellectual elites and their disaffected groups tried to find some habitable space between the worlds of faith and reason, church and state.
As I noted before I am only half way through it, but already by the turn of 1700 it's clear that most of these luminaries have retreated from the absolute secularism implicit in Spinoza and his followers. Like Huygens and Leibniz, the moderates were trying to remain liberal and find common ground (well, and their necks and wallets depended on it). It was that well reasoned moderation or middle ground that was transferred to America where it recapitulated a similar trajectory.
CG