Edmund Burke and the War on the Origins of Secularism – Part I: the delusion of ‘secularism triumphant’

The forward march of secularism may seem to be a relentless one. It is. But we should also observe that it is a pointless one. A march to nowhere. Secularism and its deformed progeny, the so-called secularist world, have been well analyzed in its roots and progress by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory and others in recent years. There is no question but that it has been a destructive force in our civilization, masquerading as benign progress. Taylor and Gregory note its origins in the corruption of the Christian faith dating back to the Reformation and beyond.

But it is not a triumphant force and champions of Christianity have been opposing it for centuries with their robust allegiance to its dual enemies, faith and reason, ever since it appeared among us in either its nascent or full-blooded incarnation.

For both Taylor and Gregory the gradual flowering of this weed emerged with what Taylor terms the disenchantment of religion following the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of the illusion that reason alone had all the answers. In its most viral form religion itself, for Protestant “influencers,” became a solely rational thing and faith, if it did not satisfactorily answer all the questionings of reason, was but a fanciful thing.

But the voices which have resisted the removal of the element of enchantment from religious consciousness over the centuries have not been vanquished and never were. They were there when the first sceptical utterances began to emerge in the seventeenth century and then reached something of a crescendo in the eighteenth, morphing into deism and outright atheism. In the nineteenth century the great John Henry Newman exposed the inevitable consequences of the liberal mindset of his age, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries his thought has proved an important part of the foundation of the powerful encyclicals of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI defending the truth about mankind and our destiny.

From the secular world itself, in the twentieth century, the voices of G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and many more spoke up for the truth of Christianity, exposing once again the folly of men who say in their heart, “there is no God.” Ross Douthat of the New York Times very recently drew our attention to a reality that secularist triumphalism wants to ignore:

Yet for Christianity, the modern era is actually two stories intertwined: a story of conflict and failure and disappointment for many Christian institutions, their division and their weakness in the face of other powers, woven together with the story of the Christian religion’s resilience and global spread. Whether or not liberal modernity represents a “metaphysical catastrophe” (to pluck a phrase from one of its eloquent religious critics), it has created a world civilization in which the Gospel has been preached in the far corners of the planet; in which there are today, according to one study, 2.6 billion Christians; in which, amid a long-running crisis for Western Catholicism, more young Catholics attended the just-completed World Youth Day in Portugal than inhabited all of medieval Rome and Paris and London put together.

Back at the beginning of what Brad Gregory calls the “unintended reformation,” the very existence of Christian faith in the anglophone world was, either intentionally or unintentionally, under attack from thinkers nurtured in Protestantism – Bacon, Hobbes, Locke. Later, and more virulent, in the seventeenth century, came Bernard Mandeville, Viscount Bolingbroke, David Hume, and a host of others displaying various brands of scepticism, deism, and atheism. But there were voices of opposition, and among these one of the most powerful was Edmund Burke’s. Burke is probably the Irishman in history who has had the greatest influence on mankind’s efforts to organise the world in a civilised way for the betterment of humanity. The only competitors I can think of would be the Irish missionaries of the early Middle Ages – people like Saints Columbanus, Gall, Columba, Killian, and others who brought Northern Europe back from the brink of barbarism.

But just as it is impossible to engage with the modern literary world without knowing and understanding something of the work of James Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, so it is impossible to engage with the great political debates of our time without knowing Edmund Burke and the influence he has had on political thought over the past 250 years. Burke is best known for the four great causes he espoused on behalf of mankind throughout his political career. These were firstly his search for justice for the people of the Indian subcontinent, victims of the East India Company operating under the protective umbrella of the British Empire. Secondly, there was his futile effort to try to rein in the folly of the British monarch and parliament in their trampling on the civil rights of the citizens of New England. Thirdly, there was his constant effort to ameliorate the lot of Catholics in Ireland and Britain, persecuted as they were by the Penal Laws passed by the English parliament in the early 1700s. Finally there was his resistance to the influence of the revolutionary forces unleashed in France in 1789 which he saw as a force which could destroy all religion and as a consequence the wellbeing of humanity itself.

But to understand Burke and everything he stood for we have to go back to his early years and the first great cause he undertook – his defence of religion, faith, and reason in the face of the enemies we have referred to earlier. This phase of Burke’s life has rarely been examined in much detail. Those four great causes have overshadowed the early part of his life. Yet it is crucial in understanding the man and everything for which he stood.

In 2015, as I think never before, Burke’s early years in Ireland, even his childhood and adolescence, his time in Trinity College Dublin, his move to London to study law, his early writings, and his preoccupations with religion and philosophy, were masterfully dealt with by Professor Richard Bourke in his book, Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution. Bourke covers this ground exhaustively, just short of a thousand pages. However, as his title suggests, the main focus of the work is Burke’s global preoccupations.

Not only, however, is his life and thinking in those years of interest in the context of what Conor Cruise O’Brien referred to as “The Great Melody,” the title of his biography of Burke. They also represent a fifth great cause to which Burke vehemently lent his not inconsiderable powers of persuasion – the cause of religion.  Burke was intensely conscious mankind’s dependence on religion for the future of our civilisation, threatened by what we now see were the poison seeds of secularism.

Professor Bourke, with great subtlety, sets Burke’s Protestant faith in the context of the Penal Laws: his father’s pragmatic conversion, his mother’s under-the-radar Catholicism; his close relations with his mother’s up-front Catholic family, the Nagels of Ballyduff in Cork with whom Edmund lived and was schooled during some of his childhood years; his schooling up to the age of fifteen in the Shackleton Quaker school in Ballitore; his years in Trinity where he developed his debating skills and his theological sensibilities which became the armour and armament for his battles with the skeptics, deists, and atheists of his time; finally, his early years in London studying law.

In part two of this article we will look at how Professor Bourke explores those early years and how Edmund Burke confronted what he saw as the malign interpretations of mankind’s relations with the Creator in early Protestantism.