Today, however, we read books like Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers that celebrate the fact that we live in a mostly secular society. We find Sam Harris insisting that it is quite possible to develop morality independent of the Christian religion or religion in genera1. We read Theodore Schick Jr. in Free Inquiry insisting that philosophers as different as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls “have demonstrated that it is possible to have a universal morality without God.”
There is a profound confusion here. We get a hint of this when we realize that the term “secular” is itself a Christian term. In Catholicism a priest who joins a contemplative community and retreats from the world is considered to have joined a “religious” order, while a priest who lives in a parish among ordinary people is considered a “secular” priest. As we will see, secularism is itself an invention of Christianity. Secular values too are the product of Christianity, even if they have been severed from their original source.
If all this is true, then our cultural prejudice against acknowledging and teaching the role of Christianity is wrong. Believer and nonbeliever alike should respect Christianity as the movement that created our civilization. We should cherish our Christian inheritance not as an heirloom but as a living presence in our society, and we should worry about what will happen to our civilization if Christianity disappears from the West and establishes itself in non-Western cultures.
Rather than attempt a catalogue of Christianity’s achievements, I am going to trace its influence in the West by focusing on three central ideas. The first one is explored in this chapter and the next two in subsequent chapters. First I consider the idea of separating or disentangling the spheres of religion and government. Although this notion has become highly confused and distorted in our time, the original concept is a very good one. We think of separation of religion and government as an American idea or an Enlightenment idea,but long before that it was a Christian idea. Christ seems to be the first one who thought of it. As we read in Matthew 22:21, Christ said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.”
