Machiavelli’s succinct and semi-diabolical advice to the prince is one of the most enduring works of political philosophy in the world. This man, writing in a time roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, was less concerned with seeking the will of God than with winning at all costs. I wrote about him in my book The End of Secularism.

He is famous for advising the prince that it is important to appear honest, humane, religious, faithful, and charitable, but that it is equally important the prince be ready to abandon any of those attributes when opportunity presents itself. The prince should not worry about whether he will gain a bad reputation for deception, because, as Machiavelli suggests, there are always ordinary people willing to be deceived and the world is FULL of ordinary people.

The primary thrust of the book is advice about how to gain principalities and to maintain control of them. Many things work to a prince’s advantage, such as traditions of servitude and customs that reinforce the reign of a prince. But there is one thing that puts sand in the princely engine and grinds things to a halt. That thing is a tradition of liberty. If a people are accustomed to liberty, Machiavelli writes, then they will never stop trying to regain it. Even if they haven’t had it for a hundred years, the ancestral memory of liberty will be overpoweringly strong. It may be so strong that no manipulative device of the prince will be able to defeat it and he may have no other option than to destroy such a city.

Might I suggest to you that on Tuesday night we saw Americans in New Jersey and Virginia issue notice that they are not prepared to trade their liberty for hyper-statism and that they are not ready to become Europeans, always more subservient to the state than we have been, instead of free citizens of a great republic? The tradition of liberty is one of the greatest weapons we have in this struggle.

When William F. Buckley thought about the possible triumph of the United States in the Cold War, he imagined that American children would someday be thankful that “the blood of their fathers ran strong.” Let our blood, too, run strong with the cherished memory of our past and present liberty.

Cross-posted at First Things’ Evangel blog:

As I may have mentioned earlier, I grew up with Catholics on my mother’s side and the Church of Christ on my father’s side.  Not exactly a recipe for happy relations.  For the record, the Catholics were more gracious about it.  I found the tension painful, difficult, and unnecessary and thus tried to avoid religion as a young person.

The Hound of Heaven got to me, anyway, while at college in Tallahassee, Florida.  A story for another time.

Although my parents now go to the Southern Baptist church, my mother still bears the imprint of her Catholic upbringing and relates easily on religious matters to her brothers and sisters.  I went through a period at the beginning of this century where I thought I might convert to Catholicism.  Yet, here I am, still evangelical and probably not changing, although my mentor Francis Beckwith has crossed the Tiber.

Though I feel pretty settled as an evangelical — and the Reformation is part of why I feel that way — I do not understand why something like the claimed appearance of Mary at Fatima would be so disturbing.  We are talking about a woman who, if scripture is to be believed, bore the son of God in her womb.  We embrace the thought that God does everything for a reason.  And for some reason he chose her.  There is something I am missing, probably something obvious.  Someone on this list will tell me why I should find the purported appearance of Mary more unsettling than I do.

What is it exactly that is so objectionable about the claim that she appeared to some children?  I readily admit that I am not a theologian, but am instead more of a religio-political analyst.  My many Catholic relatives may be blinding me, too.  I just don’t see it.

What I can tell you is that I went to Mother Angelica’s beautiful church in Hanceville, Alabama a few years ago with my aunt and uncle, both of whom fit the old description of being more Catholic than the pope.  (My uncle, a good and godly man, died of an agressive brain tumor earlier this year.  He was the kind of man who wrote encouraging letters to prisoners.)  I sat in that place on a wooden pew and heard cloistered nuns (out of sight behind a screen) sing the most beautiful music I have ever heard in my life.  Even now, I can feel the sensation of it, vibrating into my soul.

What grieved me at that time and in that place was not whatever feeling those people had about Mary, but that I could not take communion with them because they did not wish it so.  Though I claimed Christ, just as they did, I was a separated brethren who could not share the sacrament.

The division of the church scandalizes me, especially in the world we live in.  Part of the reason we lost as much as we did in American culture is because the Protestants worried more about “Romanism” than they did about secularism.

I wish I could see the Reformation’s end in sight, in a way that would somehow satisfy us all.

Benjamin Wiker interviews me at To the Source.  Fun stuff.

We talked about . . .

Wait for it . . .

Secularism.

I’ve recently joined an evangelical group blog at First Things.  Think of it as The Corner for evangelicals.  So far, things are going swimmingly.  Lots of activity.  Joe Carter started us off by asking for a definition of an evangelical.  Here’s my entry:

When I became a Christian at Florida State University at the end of the eighties, I encountered a different kind of Christian from the ones I knew as a southerner from Alabama.

Growing up, virtually everyone was some kind of churchgoer whether they were Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Church of Christ, Catholic, etc.  But that didn’t necessarily mean anything.  It was just a default.  To me, going to church was simply something people did.  My family did it more or less often over time.  Catholics, like my mom’s family, had stained glass, candles, and statues.  The Church of Christ, like my dad’s people, worshipped in spare chapel rooms with acapella singing.  ”There is pow’r!  Pow’r!  Wonder working pow’r!”

The Christians I met at Florida State through Intervarsity were faithful and committed to a real relationship with Christ well before any denominational identity came into view.   We didn’t spend a lot of time debating differences in Christian flavors.  We talked about knowing Christ and his Lordship in our lives.  To me, it was endlessly interesting and challenging.  The first time I heard the word “evangelical” it was IVCF’s sister organization, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).

Over time, I began to hear the word “evangelical” more frequently.  I associated it with liking C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Wheaton College.  I ended up marrying a girl in a classic evangelical family.

To me, it just meant taking your faith seriously.

It is fascinating to read what other people have to say about the book (The End of Secularism).  So far, all the reviewers seem to like it.  Some show unconditional positive regard.  Others emphasize what they like or don’t like.  It seems to hit different people different ways.

For any would be reviewers who are curious, here’s what I’d say up front.

1.  The End of Secularism is not a prediction so much as it is an argument for secularism to retire as a supposedly neutral philosophy.

2.  The book is designed to make the average reader much more aware of the complexity of the question of religion and politics.  A simplistic separation approach doesn’t really do anyone much good.

3.  The book is a critique of secularism much more than it is a proposal for a great system of Christian thought.  I’m trying to tear one house down in the effort to clear space for a new one.

4.  If you take anything away from the book, please pay attention to my arguments about the nature of science and the inadequacy of science as a basis for political thought.  To me, this was one of the places where my critique strikes the deepest.

5.  Understand the separation of church and state.  Support the separation of church and state.  DO NOT let it morph into secularism, which goes much too far.

And by the way, the talented Matt Lee Anderson has reviewed the book.  I really respect his work and have enjoyed much of what he has written.  You can see it here.  He focuses the heavy beams on my critique of secular neutrality, but I think other parts of the book are equally important, maybe more so.

Andrew Klavan has been my favorite writer of thrillers for several years now and has provided some of the best reading moments I’ve ever enjoyed. His books have been made into films starring Michael Douglas and Clint Eastwood. He also happens to be a conservative who writes sympathetically about Christianity.

For all of those reasons, I asked my publisher to send him The End of Secularism.

Amazingly, he read it:

Anyone who works in the writing business will understand: I don’t have time to read books sent or lent to me unrequested. What with informational reading, professional reading and reading for my craft and spirit, even books I want to get to sometimes have to wait as long as a year.

Plus I don’t remember ever having met Hunter Baker of Houston Baptist University so I don’t know why he had his publisher send me his new book The End of Secularism. But I’m startled to report I glanced at it while laying it aside, then picked it up again, then read it through. This is a very well written, concise and learned primer on the secularization of the public square. It gives a fair recital of the arguments in favor of it, and a strong but sensible and moderate outline of the arguments against. It has a firm grasp of history and neither falls for the usual “This is a Christian country!” rhetoric that makes its way onto television nor accepts the “separation of church and state,” pieties that were rendered obsolete by the state’s aggressive intrustion into what Dr. Baker calls “the life-world,” ie. our values and private lives. It’s a book you’ll be glad you read the next time you get in an argument about religion’s role in politics.

I wish I had time to write a full review of this book in a respectable venue (as opposed to this Blog of Ill Repute!). I just don’t. But if anyone from First Things or World Magazine or even the Weekly Standard or NRO is skulking through here and sees this, I think the book is well worth discovering.

At ReformedBooks.net. Here was the part I really liked:

In some of the most compelling parts of the book, Baker turns a scathing critique on the secularist movement itself, and in particular, its claims to take a solely neutral and scientific approach toward social and political science. If the secularists really employ the scientific method in sociology, where do they even come up with their cardinal rule of the equality of every person? Certainly not by scientifically quantifying the potential and actual achievements of each individual. In reality, they are on entirely borrowed ground. “If we are equal,” Baker wisely notes, “it is almost surely in the sense of being equal before God, because we are in fact equal in virtually no other way” (p. 177, emphasis original).

A big thank you to Nathan Pitchford for his very perceptive reading of the book.

And by the way, if you are looking for a place to buy The End of Secularism, then here it is.

The point has been made by outstanding thinkers like Stephen Carter and Richard John Neuhaus that the New York-Washington, D.C. establishment eats up left wing religion and declares it delicious. Give a radical a cross and we have activists bravely “speaking truth to power” and “speaking prophetically.” Put the cross in the hands of a conservative and suddenly secularism is the better course and church and state must be rigorously separated lest theocracy loom every closer.

I tried to draw attention to this double standard in my new book The End of Secularism by talking about both history and current events which prove the point. Mollie Ziegler Hemingway provided an excellent example in her Houses of Worship column for the Wall Street Journal last Friday as she reminded readers about the way faith-based initiatives have been viewed in this administration and its predecessor.

Bush filled the faith-based initiatives office with a prominent Ivy League sociologist and then with a former lawyer for Mother Theresa. Obama has chosen a Pentecostal preacher in his twenties to head up the office. Barry Lynn of the Americans for the Separation of Church and State was an avid critic of the Bush office. His position today? He serves on the advisory council’s task force for the office. Strangely, his concerns about the interaction of religion and politics seem to have dissolved now that the presidency has changed hands.

As I read Ms. Hemingway’s cutting piece, I couldn’t help but think about the Swedish socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were determined to destroy the tie between the nation’s church and state. Once they gained power, however, they had a change of heart. The church could prove useful under their enlightened leadership. I wonder if Barry Lynn feels the same way.

I’ve done Al Kresta’s show before and really enjoyed the process. He is a very knowledgeable interviewer.

So, we talked about The End of Secularism. Here’s the link. I come on about five minutes in.

Mike Potemra at National Review offers his review of The End of Secularism.

The Secularism of a Religious Country – Mike Potemra – The Corner on National Review Online

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