Humanist Militants

 Emergent  Self-Consciousness

There are plenty of signs that secular humanism is becoming more demanding, more militant.  We are now at the "side with us, or shut up" stage.  We stand on the verge of the next stage: "side with us, or we will shut you up".  A cluster of secular "truths" are becoming so fundamental that militant devotees of humanism now regard them to be self-evident.  Amongst these are oddities such as global warming, saving the whales, homosexual rights, trans-gender rights, and homosexual "marriage".  For humanist militants, all these are now "settled".  Debate no longer tolerable .  If you don't subscribe to these self-evident truths, you are a heretic, a danger to the body politic, and must be forced to conform or, if not, silenced. 

One of the early apostles of militant secular humanism is John Dewey.  The humanist manifesto is set forth in his book, A Common Faith, written way back in 1934. [John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934.)]  Paul Vitz observes:

John Dewey concludes his book, A Common Faith with an exhortation to make humanism an active "common faith": in humanism "are all the elements of a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race.  Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.  It remains to make it explicit and militant. [Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: the Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1977), p. 37.]

Almost a hundred years after Dewey was writing and nearly forty years after Vitz was diagnosing the increasingly religious nature of pop psychology, humanist militants are in the majority and now bold enough to demand control.
  Not only are they making the humanist religion explicit, they are becoming more militant--demanding its regimen and "orthodoxy" be enforced in schools, universities, the legal system, business corporations, the media, and in all corners of the "public square".  The militancy is evidenced by a clarion call for the dissenters to be silenced, and if not, to be exiled from participation in any aspect of society.  When Richard Dawkins, one of their number, initially called for children of Christian parents to be removed from their homes on the grounds that Christian parents were subjecting their children to abuse by teaching them the Christian faith, he was initially laughed at.  No longer.  Amongst the militant humanists it is now an eminently sensible, self-evident position.  Of course Christians are abusing their children. 


It cannot last and will not succeed.  But we are likely to have a merry old time whilst the sandy foundations of secular humanism are being exposed.  The only constant in militant humanism is that the human being is perpetually malleable and changeable and emergent.

Selfist psychology emphasizes the human capacity for change to the point of almost ignoring the idea that life has limits and that knowledge of them is the basis of wisdom.  For selfists there seem to be no acceptable duties, denials, inhibitions, or restraints.  Instead, there are only rights and opportunities for change. [Vitz, op cit., p. 38.]

Herein lies the rub.  As secular humanism becomes more overt and explicit, it also becomes more militant.  But militancy means that it ends up warring against itself.  Yesterday's humanist cause becomes tomorrow's heresy that must be crushed.   Militant secular humanism ends up consuming itself. 

This is an ideological and religious battle which we Christians must relish and must fight courageously and with great faith.  Our weapons are not theirs, and remain infinitely more powerful and influential.  As more and more groups and causes, which once were the celebrated humanist causes of the day, fall out of favour, devotees of the old cause become the new pariahs.  Internecine war breaks out.  We have begun to see the pattern  For example, homosexual liberals campaign for recognition of homosexual "marriage" but become disaffected when militants begin to enforce conformity to the same, asking for and securing the punishment of those who disagree.

As global warming becomes passé and is replaced by militant global cooling advocates another cohort of disaffected casualties will lie strewn in the public square.  Just as in the Soviet Union, yesterday's orthodoxy will become tomorrow's heterodoxy and the burgeoning population of the social (if not actual) Gulag will be more open to listen to the self-consistent Opponent of all humanist idolatry--the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

As militant humanism becomes more consistent, more epistemologically self-conscious, so Christians must likewise become more consistently Christian, more biblically self-conscious.  The humanist casualties in the inevitable internecine humanist wars will likely ripen into a field white for harvest.  We believe this will be the great battle of our age.   We relish it.  We look forward to it.  Once again the Lord's servants will experience the joy of spiritual battle.

It was in the Gulag that the former secular humanist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn came to understand the seat of evil: 

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. [Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956]

It was in the Gulag  that the secular humanist, Solzhenitsyn became a Christian.