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Wealth & Poverty Review Knee Jerk Secularism



Last week in The Huffington Post, James Robison and I observed that Judeo-Christian ideas contributed to the American Experiment. Historically, this is hardly a controversial argument. We didn’t say that America is a “Christian nation.” And it’s not a partisan claim–we end the piece with a 2006 quote from then-Senator Barack Obama.

Nevertheless, within about twenty four hours, there were almost five hundred comments on our piece. They’re worth perusing. A few defend our basic claim, but most are critical–hysterically so. Of these, most claim to represent sweet reason. And yet there’s no shortage of non sequiturs, religious insults, ad hominems, demonstrably false myths about the founders, metaphysical panics, and historical cliches.

It is just this sort of knee-jerk secularism that inspired us to write the piece. It’s nice to have so many examples to establish our point.

Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation
Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the Executive Editor of The Stream. Richards is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); The Human Advantage; Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt; and Eat, Fast, Feast. His most recent book, with Douglas Axe and William Briggs, is The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe.