Secularism in damaging British culture and 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.
Bishop Philip Egan launched a powerful rebuke to British secular society in an address at King’s College London, where he was an undergraduate in the 1970s. His talk entitled “Irrelevant? Should Christianity still have a voice in the public square?” was attended by members of the Catholic Society and the Anglican Chaplain as well as staff at the university.
The bishop said secularism was “too flimsy” to guarantee human flourishing and was producing a society that develops “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 and the “dissolution of the grounds of ethics and the basis of law.
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.”
Calling for a new evangelisation of Britain, Bishop Egan said that the Church can salvage the damage caused by secularism with a Gospel-inspired “authentic humanism” able to ground a free, democratic and pluralist society. He added that Britain needed to retrieve and promote its “Christian patrimony, its history, art and architecture, its music and literature, its liturgy, theology and ethics.”
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