Carnal Reason

Religion is the key to history, Lord Acton wrote. In today’s intellectual circles, however, it’s more like the skunk at the garden party. To many intellectuals, religion is a private matter at best, and most appropriately considered in terms of its functions rather than the significance of its beliefs, let alone its truth claims. At worst, it’s the main source of the world’s conflicts and violence–what Gore Vidal, in his Lowell Lecture at Harvard University in 1992, called “the great unmentionable evil” at the heart of our culture.

Such grim assessments are certainly debatable. It’s a simple fact, for example, that, contrary to the current scapegoating of religion, more people were slaughtered during the 20th century under secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, and in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history.

Os Guinness, Wilson Quarterly

Mr. Guiness draws a distinction between secular and religious motives for mass slaughter, as if the two did not overlap. Communism, the ideology responsible for more 20th century murders than any other, is a secular religion.

Posted on August 1st, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: politics, religion