Sinful WASPs.

• Author: Gottfried, Paul
• Pages: 48(9)

My topic for this article is the relevance of secularism for understanding our political situation, which is the one that is now dominant in Canada, the US and much of the Western world. Underlying this investigation are two assumptions about what secularism is or is not. One, it is not clear that secularism in the contemporary West is an entirely post-Christian phenomenon. Although secularists are committed to removing traditional Christian icons and phraseology from public life, e.g., substituting neutered "Happy Holidays" or the black festival of Kwanza for any mention of Christmas, the secularist alternatives nonetheless incorporate discernible Christian residues. What my books describe as the "politics of shame", that is, the public and often state-sponsored attachment of a special stigma to one's nation or race for past discrimination against other groups, is by no means a worldwide development. It is mostly limited to Northern European Protestant societies. In England, Germany, and Canada, the administrative and cultural elites impose the politics of outreach on the majority populations. They require their citizens to exhibit toward exotic and even threatening designated minorities a degree of sensitivity they need not and perhaps should not extend to their own tribe.

An enthusiastic Protestant of the political Left, Jimmy Carter, may be overstating the appeal of his ideas when in the foreword to The Great Awakening, authored by another Christian of the social Left, Jim Wallis, he writes that this book is helping us to "tap the power of the revival of faith in order to inspire and encourage the secular social reforms espoused in all the great religions". The "secular social reforms" that Carter has in mind sprang from a Western religious tradition, and the mindset that marks him and Wallis is recognisably Protestant.

While Western Christians in their societies are typically punished for sexist and religious discrimination, incoming Muslims are usually allowed to do what Christians are forbidden to do. There is a willingness on the part of English, German, and Canadian authorities to be indulgent about Islamic abuse of women, and this has gone so far that there is talk at the highest levels of government in some predominantly Protestant countries of institutionalising Islamic social practices, as the accepted legal framework for Muslim communities. The reason for this double standard, I would argue, is not that Christians have ceased to be religious in any sense. Their religion has mutated into social guilt and acts of public confession focusing on the supposedly ultimate evil of prejudice. In the US this kind of behaviour has taken clear forms. While the plainly Christian festival of Christmas is giving way in universities and public administration to a generic holiday season, the birthday of the black civil rights advocate, Martin Luther King, on January 21, is now the only national holiday in the US dedicated to a national hero.

New liturgical calendar

King's birthday has also become invested with Christological associations. Our national media and our politicians stress his martyr's death (at the hands of an assassin while leading a garbage workers' strike in Memphis, Tennessee); and while it is considered in the New York Times a form of art, worthy of public financing, to depict Christ suspended in urine, anyone who would portray MLK with less than iconic reverence, reminiscent of mediaeval depictions of Christ, would be ruined professionally and socially. Recently, US News and World Report noted that, for Americans between the ages of 18 and 28, Martin Luther King is viewed as "the most respected person in human history". Oprah Winfrey places fifth, well ahead of Jesus. In his best-selling collection of political sermons, God's Politics, Jim Wallis rejoices that his son Luke attends a school where "the teacher made so much of black history month in February. Luke is now getting the same things in school that we teach him at home--books about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. ... At the end of black history month, Luke announced to his parents, 'I am going to be just like Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, except I will have a different name and a different skin.' Of course nothing could have pleased his mom and dad more." Not surprisingly, there is nothing in Wallis's book to suggest that Luke had ever been exposed to the Bible, except possibly in the context of his father's advocacy of particular social programmes. Nor can one say that Christianity's founder receives in God's Politics the same degree of awe as the assassinated King. Jesus seems to move through this work like an errant social worker or like a blogger on an anti-war, anti-Bush website.

King's birthday comes at the beginning of another key event in our new liturgical calendar, black history month, which is followed by another month-long showcasing of what is presented as an epic struggle against prejudice, this one dedicated to women. Needless to say, women's month does not centre...