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Secularization is defined as the process by which religious ideas are considered to have no inherent value to society.
Ravi makes it clear that the issue here is not whether religion has value to the individual, just that it has no value to society. Secularism takes the view that religious beliefs are irrelevant to how society operates.
Historian David Marshall lays a major portion of the blame for this slide into secularism at the door of the Christian clergy. It was from their ranks, he says, that the defection began. From their ranks came the call to congregations to abandon the notion of an authoritative Scripture and to surrender the biblical perspective on life's deepest questions. This was the explosive force that would demolish any claim to Christian uniqueness.
By this process, the Bible was no longer a God-authored book, but a man-concocted collection of ordinary literature. Revisionist theology, popularized through the Jesus Seminar, has spawned a number of books and video resources which draw on "higher criticism" to argue not what was said, but why it was said and what it meant. Many revisionist ideas are mere conjecture wrapped in scholarly garb, often supported by liberal clergy. The ultimate reflection of this philosophy is the recent publication of the Oxford University Press' new "inclusive language" version of the New Testament. The authors write God's words as they think He should have spoken them. Yet God has the last laugh, as a popular T-shirt declares:
"God is dead." --Nietsche.
"Nietsche is dead." --God.
Inherent in this philosophy is the "humanization" of God. This involves the assumption that God must be unsophisticated and uncivilized because His discipline as recorded in the Bible is so harsh that these records must be a big mistake, the stuff of mere legend.
But the moment we begin to humanize God, our very foundation crumbles beneath us. If we do not understand what secularization brings with it, we will find ourselves ultimately living in constant contradiction. A classic illustration of what secularization has done is that people today will dismiss a perspective not on the basis of its truthfulness, but on whether it is held by religiously minded people. No longer does it matter if an idea makes sense. If it comes from someone with a religious conviction, then the idea itself becomes invalid.
An article published in 1988 in the Family Law Quarterly with the support of the associate dean and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center called for the licensing of all parents by the state. The authors claimed that the system could be used against parents whose ideas of family life were not politically correct.
A letter issued by the American Civil Liberties Union to the California State Assembly Education Committee stated that "monogamous heterosexual... marriage as a traditional value is an unconstitutional establishment of a religious doctrine in public schools." In other words, any traditional viewpoint--whether positive or not for society--is a religious one and therefore unconstitutional and illegal!
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