Faith Among The Faithless: 10-Day Reading PlanSample

Secularism is today’s incontestable god. It’s the one that oversees the way the other gods function in our society. Because while it hasn’t erased religion or spirituality, it has created a backdrop that leaves it always secondary. The bedrock ideas of our world say that all that exists is what can be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, and comprehended through ordinary means. So, for instance, secularism denies real transcendence. It might allow for the possibility of the experience of transcendence, but it must explain it via these material causes: What we call transcendence or religious experience is actually some combination of good hormones and happy neurons in the brain. It has some evolutionary cause—some root in the need to advance and preserve our species that has been written into our DNA.

Secularists can tolerate religion as long as it doesn’t make claims on anyone else’s happiness or welfare—that is, as long as it doesn’t purport to be an all-inclusive picture of the good life. So, when religion or spirituality are mostly self-serving, when it doesn’t make demands of anyone but its acolytes, secularism leaves room for it. “Do your transcendental meditation retreat. Eat your tofurky,” it says. “Just don’t try to assign any big, overarching meaning to them. Don’t let them frame up the whole world. Don’t let your beliefs cast aspersion on your neighbors, and most of all, don’t let them compete with me.”

In Persia, Babylon, and Rome, people who didn’t buy into pluralism ran into trouble. They found themselves oppressed or isolated, or trampled by Xerxes’ elephants. Something similar is happening to Christians today. . . .

The message of Esther 1 is clear: Those who might resist the status quo are put on notice. Your dissent is not welcome. Your refusal to participate will result in exile. Here again is a parallel between Esther’s world and our own. As society’s norms increasingly become a sexual free-for-all, voices of dissent have become increasingly unwelcome. And while we’re yet to see anyone shipping Christians off into exile, there are consequences for those who resist. They are labeled “intolerant,” called bigots, made unwelcome in media, academia, and the marketplace. At times, they’re subjected to lawsuits over flowers, pizza, and wedding cakes. Resistance is dangerous, and while it may not get you shipped off into a literal exile, it can certainly lead to a social one.