Secularism harms our culture, says Egan

Damage is being done by secularism, which is creating a society without foundations, leading to the victimisation of the weak, the undermining of family, increasing state control and even surveillance, the Bishop of Portsmouth has said, writes James Macintyre.

“Secularism is too flimsy a basis for British culture,” Bishop Egan said in a lecture on the role of Christianity in the public square at King’s College London last week. “It cannot guarantee human flourishing nor sustain the advances the British people have achieved.”

The bishop went on to say that “secularism is producing a society without foundations, one that develops randomly on the hoof through pressure groups, legal precedent and political expediency.”

He added that the victimisation of the weak is a result of the “ring-fencing of religion to the private domain”, the “dissolution of the grounds of ethics and the basis of law”, an “amnesia” of the past and the “intentional eclipse” of Britain’s Christian roots. 

Bishop Egan criticised secularism’s “proven inability to support stable marriages and family life, its growing restriction on religious freedom, and its innate tendency towards greater surveillance and state control”.

The address to the university where he was an undergraduate in the 1970s, was entitled “Irrelevant? Should Christianity still have a voice in the public square?”

Bishop Egan said that the Church can salvage the damage caused by secularism, with “an authentic humanism able to ground a free, democratic and pluralist society”.

Britain, he argued, needs to retrieve and promote its “Christian patrimony, its history, art and architecture, its music and literature, its liturgy, theology and ethics”. The Gospel alone can offer “an authentic humanism able to transform human living”, the bishop said.