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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tightly packed, informative book, August 25, 2009
This review is from: The End of Secularism (Paperback)
Hunter Baker's new book, The End of Secularism, reminds me more than anything in my own experience of the work of Francis Schaeffer (though Baker criticizes Schaeffer in certain areas). It's a dense book, heavily footnoted, presenting a lot of information in a relatively short (194 pages) format. You'll want to keep a highlighter in hand as you read it, and if you're like me, you'll have to stop and contemplate what you're reading from time to time.
Baker begins with several chapters of historical overview, tracing the history of the Christian church, then explaining how secularism as a world-view and ideology burgeoned in a world increasingly weary of religious conflict and war. Secularism--the view that religion (if tolerated at all) must be cordoned off from public life, so that even someone whose politics are formed by faith must find secular public arguments for it in order to participate in the process--was originally marketed, and continues to be marketed today, as the only rational and impartial alternative to the passions and intolerance of believers.
Baker then applies to this claim of rationality and impartiality the same kind of analysis that secularists like to use on religion. He finds secularism greatly wanting, and fatally blind to its own unexamined presuppositions. It's strange to find postmodern thinkers presented positively in a Christian book, but Baker takes particular note of recent deconstructions of secularism by younger thinkers. These postmoderns note that secularists are not, as they imagine, impartial referees in the world of thought, but partisans holding a distinct ideology, and that their efforts to silence religious ideas in the public square are simply a new example of an elite class attempting to muzzle heretics. Baker also marshals historical facts to demonstrate that secularism has no better record of tolerance and the prevention of conflict than Christianity had. He devotes a later chapter specifically to the "legend" of the incompatibility of religion and science. In the final chapter he examines an interesting situation from recent history where politicians explicitly appealed to religion in a controversy in a southern state, and the secularists made no complaint at all--because in that case, religion was being marshaled in the service of a liberal cause.
The End of Secularism will challenge the Christian reader, and will raise some Christian hackles--Baker gives short shrift to those who claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, for instance. But Christians should read it, for the mental exercise, and for the hope it presents that the long cultural dominance of secularism may finally be coming to the beginning of its end. Secularists should read it for an education.
Highly recommended.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More than a useful summary, October 6, 2009
This review is from: The End of Secularism (Paperback)
Hunter Baker of Houston Baptist University has produced a rare book. It is a book of serious explication both accessible to layman or beginner at the subject, and illuminating to those long immersed in its twisted passageways and forbidding streets. That subject is secularism, a tormented subject indeed in American history. For definition Baker gives, early in his book, several useful definitional statements: "private religion is at the heart of secularism." "Secularism means that religious considerations are excluded from civil affairs."
But the essence of secularism, according to him, is a cheap rhetorical trick. It is the pretense that you can kick out the supports for the edifice of traditional morality, stand in some bewilderment as it falls in a cloud of dust, and then proceed about in the ruins, appealing like some madman to a vague consensus in order to convince everyone a new structure has already been built. How the secularist has convinced so many with this particular chicanery is a story, perhaps, for our psychologists or novelists.
For our philosophers and historians and simple readers like me, Baker gives us a serviceable narrative, succinctly composed and carefully worded, which not only summarizes the state of things now, but also incorporates some unappreciated scholars and thinkers into the conversation.
There is no sense in hiding my view that it will be a blow not merely for clarity, but for justice and truth as well, when the end of secularism has come. It is little to be doubted that when that day dawns, Baker will have had his part in the victory.
I'll leave readers with what may be my favorite part. To some bewildered secularist who, faced with a strongly argued religious position, throws up his hands in frustration and shouts, "why do religious people always have to make things so difficult!" -- we can answer, with Dr. Hunter Baker, that the reason people "bring their comprehensive views to bear" on political reality, "is that they have integrity."
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Purpose-driven Secularism, November 26, 2009
This review is from: The End of Secularism (Paperback)
In a time much more given to heat than light, Hunter Baker offers a brilliant and courageous analysis of the argument that secularism is the guarantor and preserver of pluralistic harmony in America. Instead, he points out,it is an ideology well on its way to becoming a orthodoxy that is likely to become a censoring force, controlling and stifling religious life and discourse by interventionistic suppression (as in the Swedish model) of what of what it considers to be unacceptable tangents in the church. This does not mean that he endorses the opposing notion that America was founded as a "Christian Nation." He is as ready to dispel pious fictions as he is to describe pernicious frauds. Baker offers the reader further enlightenment by pointing out that secularism is a normal, though variable, feature of human life and governance. We must first know meaning of our terms in the contemporary context when we speak of secularism. On this point alone, The End of Secularism is worth reading. But this far from being its only merit; it is a book that Christians and secularists alike should read. It is a powerful antidote to the ranting that too often passes for intelligent discourse in our day.
Harold Raley, PhD
Senior Editor
Halcyon Press
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