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eBook details

• Title: Sinful Wasps
• Author : National Observer - Australia and World Affairs
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,Nonfiction,Social Science,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 62 KB

Description

My topic for this article is the relevance of secularism for understanding our political situation, which is the one that is now dominant in Canada, the US and much of the Western world. Underlying this investigation are two assumptions about what secularism is or is not. One, it is not clear that secularism in the contemporary West is an entirely post-Christian phenomenon. Although secularists are committed to removing traditional Christian icons and phraseology from public life, e.g., substituting neutered "Happy Holidays" or the black festival of Kwanza for any mention of Christmas, the secularist alternatives nonetheless incorporate discernible Christian residues. What my books describe as the "politics of shame", that is, the public and often state-sponsored attachment of a special stigma to one's nation or race for past discrimination against other groups, is by no means a worldwide development. It is mostly limited to Northern European Protestant societies. In England, Germany, and Canada, the administrative and cultural elites impose the politics of outreach on the majority populations. They require their citizens to exhibit toward exotic and even threatening designated minorities a degree of sensitivity they need not and perhaps should not extend to their own tribe. An enthusiastic Protestant of the political Left, Jimmy Carter, may be overstating the appeal of his ideas when in the foreword to The Great Awakening, authored by another Christian of the social Left, Jim Wallis, he writes that this book is helping us to "tap the power of the revival of faith in order to inspire and encourage the secular social reforms espoused in all the great religions". The "secular social reforms" that Carter has in mind sprang from a Western religious tradition, and the mindset that marks him and Wallis is recognisably Protestant.

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