Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

by Benjamin Wiker
Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

by Benjamin Wiker

Hardcover

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Overview

Many Christians feel that they are being opposed at every turn by what seems to be a well-orchestrated political and cultural campaign to de-Christianize every aspect of Western culture. They are right, and it goes even further back than the Obama Administration.

In Worshipping the State: How Government is Replacing Religion, Benjamin Wiker argues that it is liberals who seek to establish an official state religion: one of unbelief. Wiker reveals that it was never the intention of the Founders to drive religion out of the public square with the First Amendment, but centuries of secularists and liberals have deliberately misinterpreted the establishment clause to serve their own ends: the de-Christianization of Western civilization.

The result, they hope, is government as the new oracle. Personal faith in a deity is replaced with collective dependence on government, and the diversity of religious practices and dogmas is reduced to a uniform ideological agenda. The strategy is two-pronged: drive religion out of the public square through law and by encouraging popular derision of the faithful; then, in religion’s place, erect the Church of the State to fill the human need for a higher power to look up to.

But what was done can be undone. Outlining a simple, step-by-step strategy for disestablishing the state church of secularism, Worshiping the State shows the full historical sweep of the war to those on the Christian side of the cultural battle—and as a consequence of this far more complete vantage, how to win it.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781621570295
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date: 03/25/2013
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Benjamin Wiker, a husband and the father of seven children, holds a Ph.D. in theological ethics from Vanderbilt University. He has taught at Marquette University, St. Mary’s University, and Thomas Aquinas College and is now a professor of political science and the director of human life studies at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. His twelve books include 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor, The Reformation 500 Years Later: 12 Things You Need to Know, and Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion.

Table of Contents

Part I The War on Christianity 1

Chapter 1 Reading the Signs of Our Times 3

Part II Christianity Destroys the Pagan Idol of the State 25

Chapter 2 Back to the Beginning: the Church versus Pagan Imperial Rome 27

Chapter 3 How the Bible Kept the Church from Becoming a Department of the State 41

Chapter 4 From the Conversion of Constantine to the Fall of Rome 61

Chapter 5 The Middle Ages: Denning the Church-State Distinction 79

Part III The Rise of Liberalism and the Re-Paganization of the State 101

Chapter 6 Machiavelli Invents the Secular State (and Its Church) 103

Chapter 7 From Henry VIII to Thomas Hobbes: the State Church, Leviathan, and the Sovereign Individual 121

Chapter 8 Spinoza: the Liberal Elite and the Established Secular Church 141

Chapter 9 Rousseau's Radical Liberalism: Establishing Civil Religion 165

Part IV The New Big Picture 181

Chapter 10 Liberalism Triumphs in the Modern World 183

Chapter 11 Sorting Out Some Confusions 205

Chapter 12 John Locke and the Two Faces of Liberalism 219

Part V Liberalism Comes to America 247

Chapter 13 The First Wave: Locke, Deism, and the Founders 249

Chapter 14 The Second Wave: Radicals at the Universities 269

Chapter 15 Secularization, American Style 289

Part VI Disestablishment 301

Chapter 16 Disestablishing Secular Liberalism 303

Acknowledgments 331

Notes 333

Index 363

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