Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion
256Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion
256Hardcover
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Overview
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 battleand as a consequence of this far more complete vantage, how to win it.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781621570295 |
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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
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