The Relationship Between Socialism and Secularism

In a recent piece for Religion & Liberty, a publication of the Acton Institute, I took on an analysis inspired by Bill Buckley’s old contention that the struggles between atheism and Christianity and socialism versus capitalism were ultimately the same conflict.  While I don’t go quite that far (though I think the idea has some merit), I group socialism and secularism together as different species of the larger genus we might call social leveling.

Here’s a clip:

I have argued that social leveling achieves a wrong result in the sense that it ignores things like merit and virtue in the form of socialism, and truth in the form of secularism. That alone is good reason to oppose it, but there is a bigger problem than that. The social leveling that is achieved by socialism and secularism can only be engineered by one entity in a society. That entity is the state. Thus, the state will become the effective owner of all property and the state will determine what manifestations of religion (if any) are acceptable to itself.