On Secularist Hating Christians

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple who’s not a Christian identifies why so many secularists fundamentalists have a problem with Christians:

Suffice it to say that I have never received such hate mail as when I suggested that religious people were better than non-religious in their conduct. It seemed that many of the people who responded to me were not content merely not to believe, but had to hate. Although I had not denied that religious motivation could motivate very bad behaviour, something which indeed can hardly be denied, I was treated to a summary of the historical crimes of religion such as many adolescents could provide who had recently discovered to their fury that they had been made to attend boring religious services when the arguments for the existence of God had never been irrefutable.

Not long ago, while I was in France, the centenary of the final separation of church and state was celebrated. It was presented as the triumph of reason over reaction, of humanity over inhumanity, and I am not entirely out of sympathy for that viewpoint: I certainly don’t want to live myself in a state in which a single religion has a predominant or even strong say in the running of it. And yet the story was far more nuanced that that triumphantly presented.

For example, a fascinating book was published on the occasion of the centenary reproducing the iconography of the anticlerical propaganda that preceded the separation by thirty years; and on looking in to it I saw at once that it was exactly the same in tone as anti-semitic propaganda. There was the wickedly sybaritic hook-nosed cardinal in diabolical scarlet, the thin hairy spider, representing the economic interests of the church, whose sinister legs straddled the whole globe, and the priest who welcomed innocent little children into the fold of his black cloak. One has to remember that almost the first consequence of secularism in France, as in Russia, was unprecedented slaughter.

Perhaps one of the reasons that contemporary secularists do not simply reject religion but hate it is that they know that, while they can easily rise to the levels of hatred that religion has sometimes encouraged, they will always find it difficult to rise to the levels of love that it has sometimes encouraged.

Hat Tip: World Magazine Blog.