Is secularism just a Christian heresy?

Sir, – Fr Martin Henry gives three reasons for believing that secularism may overly depend on Christian roots (“Is secularism just a Christian heresy?”, Rite & Reason, August 22nd).

The first is that is was “Christianity itself that made the secular realm conceivable”. Christianity may be one possible route to defining a secular realm, but it is by no means the only way, nor an especially good way of doing so. There are many entirely materialistic ways of getting there. While a divine or a secular realm can be defined in opposition to each other, that does not mean we need the existence of one in order to have the other.

His second argument, which relates to the use of the word “evil” by secular commentators, is more difficult to refute. The concept of evil is firmly grounded in religious thinking. Secularist can arrive at definitions that do similar work as religious ideas of good and evil, but without a concept of God cannot provide them with their full meaning. We can state what we think is a fundamental good, for example human happiness, or the absence of suffering, and produce satisfyingly complex philosophical systems around it, but it is very hard to show our basic assumptions are objectively true.

His final argument is that truth itself may require God to underpin it. If I am understanding him correctly, truth here stands for the objective reality materialists value so greatly, and its existence, he thinks, might “depend on a prior act of faith for its apparently self-evident validity”. It is the case that belief in external reality has been shaken in recent years, but this is more to do with a surfeit of postmodernist thinking than a lack of theology. Postmodernists start quite reasonably with the observation that our senses, language and even the wiring in our brains affects how we perceive reality, but too many of their acolytes rush from there to the gloriously unwarranted conclusion that we create our own reality. This may seem heretical from a Christian perspective, and may vaguely suggest an absence of religion has confused and diluted reality, but this is to make too much of what is more simply explained as secular hubris. – Yours, etc,