The Great Lie promulgated by secularists about secularism is that it alone is the "honest broker". It is studiously neutral and objective when assessing morality and religious beliefs. It alone has the disinterested neutrality which allows for an honest, objective assessment. In Jesus Christ, we are told, there are good and bad elements: since secularism is neither for nor against religion, it alone can discern what is good and what is bad about the Christ. Everyone else is biased and full of cant.
By this means of argument, the secularist wants to drive Christians from the public sphere. Christians are biased and partial, subjective and prejudiced. Secularists alone can discuss and debate such things rationally, because the secularist is neutral. To which we reply, "Poppycock".
Every once in a while people see this clearly. The erstwhile emperor is exposed as a crude nudist, to be mocked and shamed. Harold Turner, a Presbyterian minister in 1945, had this to say about New Zealand's much vaunted and self-congratulatory secular education system. He claimed:
. . . the truth is that to talk of secular education as though it were neutral is humbug. It is nothing less than a new sectarianism with anti-religious results, and all the more dangerous for its pretence of religious neutrality. [Cited by Ian Breward, Godless Schools? A Study in Protestant Reactions to the Education Act of 1877 (Christchurch: Presbyterian Bookroom, 1967), p.117.]Quite. Only when the secularist lays aside his self-claimed pomp and circumstance and faces the truth about secularism's presuppositions, assumptions, and religious pre-commitments can we have anything even approximating an honest discussion.
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