Uncharity and the secular

David Yeago writes “The modern secularity project was not a demonic upsurge of incomprehensible hostility to the faith; it was in large measure the attempt of decent minds to cope with the chaos public Christianity had wrought in the wake of the Reformation. The incapacity of Christians to live together in charity in the biblical world subverted the cultural plausibility of that world and motivated the urgency with which the secularist project strove to get the Bible under control. Indeed, precisely in order to liberate their faith from complicity in violence and murder, Christians of all ecclesiastical parties took part in the establishment of the secular culture, in which ‘religion’ would be private, and secular rationality firmly in charge of the public square. The historical-critical movement cannot be understood apart from its ideological roots in secularist thinkers, like Hobbes and Spinoza, but scholars in the churches (mostly, but not only, Protestants) took up both the critical challenge and much of the ideological motivation of these great skeptics in the interests of producing a ‘purified’ Christianity, that is, one that limited its claims to the proper sphere of ‘religion,’ the moral and spiritual life of the inner person.”