RELIGION AS A SECULAR IDEOLOGY
501
mately philosophic commitments (presumably the anarchist will have
some difficulty with any oath of allegiance) ; yet for the order of the
day they are minimal, evident, and easily acceptable principles of
behavior requiring no submission to a comprehensive doctrine. The
Bill of Rights, to the extent that it expresses a theory at all, exposes
a doctrine of no preference and no theories. It commits itself to the
protection of all rights, irrespective of their substantive character.
What occurs at the present time, however, is the effort to in–
corporate positive religious doctrine into the order of democratic
commitment, to put democracy on the side of the angels, to advance
the national cause as though the Kingdom of God and foreign policy,
for example, were part of a divine-human mutual-aid program.
Viewed narrowly, this is a dangerous importation of sectarian convic–
tion into the secular order. Our society is and could well remain
secular. Secular, deriving as it does from the Latin
saecula,
means
nothing more than the nonholy, the unsanctified. It is not my inten–
tion to argue that religious believers should not seek, by their own
witness and life, to redeem the
saecula
in their world, to make the
unholy holy. This is an authentic expression of the religious vocation.
It
is unhealthy when the essentially secular encourages the religious
to take it over, begs that it be buttressed and commended by the
religious order. The secular does not essentially strive against the
religious. Religion has turned the secular from the domain of neu–
trality into the ferocious opponent of religion, and so-called secu–
larists have taken up the challenge. The secular is, however, the non–
religious, that is to say, that portion of the world not yet altered by
religion. In the case of the democratic society the secular is most
authentic when it is neutral, when it is unmoved by religious appeals
for its capitulation.
A series of editorials this past year in
Commonweal,
the nation's
leading lay Catholic weekly, argues most convincingly against the
prevailing view, voiced often in the religious press, that to be a good
Catholic, Protestant, or Jew is
ipso facto
to be a good American.
Commonweal
indicates that such a conclusion follows neither logically
nor historically. It contends correctly that such may be a fortuitous
consequence, for the religious man should be a good man and by
being a good man, that is, "a friend of God and of one's neighbor,"
he may incirientally be a good citizen-but a patriot, a good Ameri–
can-from such a conclusion
Commonweal
rightly demurs. Religion
