Secularism is part of God’s cunning plan

How should Christians relate to the culture around them? That is the question raised by Rod Dreher’s article in the Spectator this week. He’s right that it’s a pretty fundamental question. If we Christians don’t know how to answer it, our message is likely to seem muddled. In common with many leading theologians of the last few decades, he claims that the answer is simple, if we are daring enough to see it. We should defy the false gods of the age, ‘the norms of secular society’. Liberal Christianity has failed to do so, and so has allowed the erosion of its sacred inheritance. We must be counter-cultural little Benedicts.

He sums up this position with admirable clarity. He is right that Alasdair MacIntyre laid much of its intellectual foundation back in 1981. Over the next decade or two, this approach gained huge academic kudos, partly because it knew how to ride the huge crashing wave of ‘postmodernism’ – it knew how to deploy fancy French theorists like Foucault.