Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives and a onetime professor of history, said recently that Moslems who confess they believe in Sharia law should not be allowed to live in Western states because they are in direct conflict with Western values. He is right. As a general principle, no one should live in a state where they are hostile to its values. But what are Western values?
We have reached in the West a strange new secularism. Its origins lie both in Christianity and in Paganism. The Pagan Roman Empire was secular during the birth and development of Christianity. At first the new Church was non-pagan and strictly opposed to secularism. Its fundamental belief, expressed widely in the writings of St Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, was that salvation is the result of God’s direct influence in the human soul through grace and that human effort alone is of no value. Writers like Pelagius who taught the opposite were condemned as heretical but the notion that human effort could directly struggle towards salvation independently of God’s grace gained ground in the Catholic Church. Another word for Pelagianism is Secularism and the Church itself over time became semi-Pelagian or semi-secular. It was extremely difficult for the Catholic Church to settle on and announce clearly what it believed and it came dangerously close to becoming legalistic and moralistic and belief-istic rather than grace-istic as St. Augustine taught. It never came close to the legalistic nightmare of life under Sharia law but by Luther and Calvin’s time in the 16th century it was secularized enough to produce the Protestant rebellion. But the freedom to search for salvation individually broke the possibility of one united Christian belief and allowed secularism and moralism into Christianity in Protestant churches as well as Catholic. The rationalism of the 17th century and the enlightenment of the 18th combined with scientism in the 19th and 20th centuries did the rest. Secularism came into the Western world in full force because so many influences preyed on people now free to think and believe as they wished. Their various churches became divided about what form of Christianity they believed and were not strong enough to oppose secularism. Western secularism is far from the rule of Sharia law but in a world where Christian beliefs can no longer possibly be unified, Christianity became itself an open door to secularism. It is not the old Paganism but it is not the old Christianity either.
Paganism and Christianity have evolved over time through painful conflicts into the supreme value of Western culture, freedom. Our law is that everything must be free. Religion, politics, love, gender, education, knowledge, governments, businesses and everything else must be free enterprises. We are secular because we have never found a precise way to practice Christianity but the new secularism is nonetheless sacred. The best people are those who have discovered a new wholeness in their being by no longer seeking any final solution or fixed meaning in the face of life's problems. Freedom, real freedom, is their supreme value and the only laws they want are those that produce the civil peace necessary to develop their freedom towards worthy ends. Newt Gingrich is right. People who want a law for everything are not fit to live in the West.
Daniel McNeill
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Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at
Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.
Also available as a book for $5.99.
A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between
a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother
46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five
In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right
from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it
can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected
and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards
one liberating ending to all its beginnings.
Daniel McNeill
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