October 28, 2002
The current issue of The Public Interest headlines a piece that just may be the best article on press bias I’ve ever read. In “Our Secularist Democratic Party,” Louis Bolce and Gerald DeMaio show that the real story of religion and politics in the past few decades has not been the takeover of the Republican party by religious conservatives. On the contrary, the real change since the sixties has been the takeover of the Democratic party by militant secularists. The rise of ideological secularists within the Democratic party–and particularly the party leadership–is an historically unprecedented and hugely significant development. Yet it has been entirely ignored by the media–chiefly because the media elite is also secular, and would rather skewer the Republicans than accurately report a secularism that tends to separate the Democrats from mainstream America. The new article from The Public Interest, “Our Secularist Democratic Party,” is important for other reasons as well. For one thing, it provides a kind of socio-political grounding for my argument in pieces like “The Church of the Left” and “The Faith-Based Left” that the ideologies of the secular Left now function as a de facto religion. The same Democratic national convention delegates who identified themselves as secular were the ones who carried the ideologies of the new post-sixties movements. It ???s also interesting to note that the Democratic secularists had a hostility to traditionally religious folk that would have been called prejudice if maintained against any other group. In effect, what Bolce and DeMaio show in this piece that our contemporary culture war was started, not by religious conservatives, but by the rise of ideological secularism. And again, the media, being secular, Democratic, post-sixties ideologues themselves, have ignored or suppressed this fundamentally important angle on the contemporary relation of religion and politics. This article is a must read.
