That is why, by the way, it is -- I learned -- When I was in graduate school at Columbia, I learned that the reason that people are having fewer children is affluence. It's not true. The reason people have fewer children is secularism. Rich, religious people have a lot of children.
Secular conservatism, in America in particular, should be an oxymoron. This country has a trinity. It is on every coin and every bank note. "Liberty," In God we trust," "E pluribus unum." "In God we trust" is not a throw-away line. God means, and has meant, limited government in America. Big God, little government. Little God, big government. It's inevitable. De Tocqueville said that. I didn't make that up. It is ultimately a crisis of belief, a crisis not out of being believe -- that you believe in God -- I hope you do -- but it's a belief -- He doesn't believe in God, Murray, but he believes, he knows that at the core this is the issue.
When I get a call from a caller it is never -- not once in 35 years has this not been the case. Someone will call me up and if they mention that they have more than five children, I say -- So I say, "Don't answer me. Just tell me are you an Orthodox Jew, a Mormon in good standing in your church, a practicing Catholic or an Evangelical Christian?" They have been one of those four in every instance in 35 years of broadcasting. I've never met a secular person with six kids, because there's no reason to do it.
Secularism often seizes upon a single, true principle and elevates it above its peer principles. This act of isolation does not make the principle seized any less true, but it strips that principle of its supporting principles. One can be incarcerated within the prison of one principle.
Our different frame of reference should never cause us to preen or to be insensitive to the uncertainty or despair some feel in the world precisely because they believe sincerely that man exists in “godless, geometric space.”
Question every authority, progressive liberalism entices us, but do not even think about questioning “love,” meaning absolute acceptance and non-judgmental empathy, as the sole standard of human goodness. Never in the darkest of Christian “Dark Ages” did an ideological authority envision such a total domination over the human mind and heart as that asserted by the post-Christian humanistic religion of “love.”
What is the thrust of these images, these appeals? What they imply is that there is no difficult question of constitutional law or political philosophy to examine, nothing to debate regarding moral and social purposes of the natural family or the ethical principles that underlie our social compact: the simple word “love,” and the feeling it is supposed to evoke, are held to have settled all such questions. If you are not against love, then you cannot oppose the indefinite expansion of “rights” protecting sexual expression and affirming diverse lifestyles. And who can be against love?
The prospects for a respectful “pluralism” obviously remain dim as long as “civil rights” is interpreted to imply the absolutism of a “non-discrimination” in which sexual minorities, unlike religious minorities, are considered a favored class. That is, if people of traditional religious beliefs regarding sexual morality and the meaning of marriage are necessarily classified as intolerant, sexist and homophobic, then appeals to “religious liberty” will count for nothing against the exacting justice of “non-discrimination.” The appeal to “fairness” presupposes some minimal agreement on justice, and that is what increasingly appears to be lacking.
Both of these thoughtful and faithful young Latter-day Saints were effectively falling in with the “Love Wins” mentality, not out of any particular enthusiasm for sexual liberation or revolution in family structure, but according to the logic of universalism, inclusiveness, which indeed seems to be a defining gesture of the Gospel, and especially of Paul’s letters. Similarly, when an account of Elder Holland’s recent address at BYU Education Week, which included a strong warning against the rising tide of secularism, was published in the Deseret News, the first online comment that appeared chastised the apostle for erecting “walls” when he should be “building bridges.” It seems to me, though, that there is a pretty simple logical problem with this movement of thought: universalism is by itself empty and meaningless: there must be some content, some substance, to be universalized, something to be shared. A bridge must be from somewhere to somewhere. Every outreach presupposes an affirmation, every extension a center, every movement of compassion some understanding of the good, of what it would mean to heal. The enthusiasm for inclusiveness or the movement of compassion without regard to content is not only religiously suicidal but logically incoherent.
Progressive liberalism claims the authority of reason and of openness to a “diversity” of views and ways of life. But the Love Wins mantra reveals the sacred dogma that underlies the pose of open-minded rationalism: “love” understood as boundless acceptance and empathy, excluding all moral judgment, is the new, unquestioned standard of moral judgment. And the prestige of this secular love, impatient with all boundaries and standards, is clearly a residue (however distorted and misapplied) of the very Christianity that secularism must overcome. Secularism is the secularized residue of Christianity. And this residue, in the form of the ideology of “love,” wields amazing dogmatic authority in our supposedly free-thinking secular age.