Living in the Iron Cage of Secularist Modernity

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke to attendees of African Methodist Episcopal church conference and said Jesus was out there everyday speaking “truth to power.”

“It’s kind of like church,” Obama said. “Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well, especially in those quiet moments, when the spotlight’s not on us, and we’re making those daily choices about how to live our lives.

We see that in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t limit his ministry to the four walls of the church,” she said. “He was out there fighting injustice and speaking truth to power every single day. He was out there spreading a message of grace and redemption to the least, the last, and the lost.

From Catholic Answers Forum:  “It’s the nature of evil that it wants to silence the Truth completely (and not just outside the Church, either). Evils in our society today such as abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, contraception and fornication simply cannot hold up if they are subjected to real scrutiny by a person who has been properly Catechized in the Catholic faith. 

Think about it this way: If you have a room filled with darkness and a person lights a match, what happens? Well, the second that tiny glimmer of light appears, the darkness recedes right to the very boundaries of the room. It’s the same with Good and Evil in the public discourse… evil works can only exist when the Truth is completely absent from the discussion. In today’s society, political correctness and the left-biased media are used as tools to control and remove the Truth from our society. 

I would go even further then this article and say that the surpression of religious views aren’t just limited to outside the Church, but inside as well. When was the last time you heard a priest preach a homily on evils of contraception? The church is very much being attacked by secularists/modernists and up until this point it appears that they have been very successful in controlling the message that the Church has been able to relay to its mass-goers….”

From Catholic Online:

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) – In a phrase made famous by the cleric Richard Neuhaus, Americans live in a “naked public square.”  What Neuhaus meant by this phrase is that through a long sort of perverse development our civil and political lives have become entirely secularized: God and Faith are removed from public civil and political discourse, including academia, public schools, health care, science and technology, the media, politics and law.

This, so the story goes, is done to make us more “free,” more “equal,” and to prevent some people from forcing others to do things against their will.  We may not have a good life, but at least we have the goods life, and freedom is maximized and oppression minimized.

There is some value in seeing the ostracizing of God and Faith from public life as something that results in citizens being “disrobed” or “naked.”  Priests wear vestments in the Church, but not outside of it.  Priests do not wear chasubles to political rallies.  And so secularists think that what is required by good liturgy is required by good politics.

There is an ominous aspect to the insistence of a “naked public square.”  Obviously, disrobed or naked citizens are much easier to control and manipulate and get to accept the wiles of the devil as good (namely, the entire gamut of the liberal credo, including such moral enormities such as divorce and remarriage, contraception, abortion, and homosexual “marriage”).  Citizens who are clothed with the whole armor of God, which includes the belt of truth, the breastplate of justice, the sandals of the Gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, are not so malleable.  (Eph. 6:10-17)

There is, however, an image other than the “naked public square” that might profitably be used to look at the efforts of secularists to control believers.  We might say that the secularists would like to see us all forced to live in an “iron cage.”  I borrow that image from Steven D. Smith’s book The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, who himself borrows it from the famous German sociologist and political economist Max Weber.  Max Weber referred to modernity and its secularist assumptions as something that puts us in a stahlhartes Gehäuse, an “iron cage” or “hardened steel-like shell.”

We moderns, Weber said, have voluntarily placed ourselves in an “iron cage” of secularism, a life where most of our public life is lived, and civil and political discourse is conducted, in purely secular terms.  Civilly and publicly we live life as if God does not exist, a life of practical atheism.  So-called “public reason”–which is the only reason allowed in the “iron cage”–does not allow God-talk, disdains Christianity, and positively despises Catholicism.

The “iron cage” mentality explains why the Obama administration, acting through the Department of Health and Human Services in issuing the recent mandate, was totally deaf to the argument of the Church.  The Church’s teaching on contraception, sterilization, and abortion–even though it is not based upon confessional truths, but based upon reasonable truths (i.e., the natural moral law)–is by an act of secular will not part of the “public reason” recognized by secularist liberals.  The Obama administration wants the Church to remain within the “iron cage.”  It insists in a “naked public square.”  Catholic truths, even if based upon reason, are to be “churched.”

Within the “iron cage” of secular discourse, God and the Faith can be mentioned in completely vague and innocuous ways, but when it comes to implementing them or encouraging their practice in public displays (e.g., the Ten Commandments, Christmas crèches), or public ways (e.g., public school prayer), or in a publically-enforceable manner (e.g., in policy or law), the cry is quite clear and insistent: fuhgeddaboudit.

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