The ongoing political muscle-flexing of diverse Christian communities in North America raises some deeply troubling questions regarding their roles among us. Earlier analyses including Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew showed that these three branches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition correspond to three forms of the American way of life; while Kruse’s One Nation Under God showed how Christian America was shaped by corporate America. Willem H. Vanderburg’s Secular Nations under New Gods proceeds based on a dialogue between Jacques Ellul’s interpretation of the task of Christians in the world and Ellul’s interpretation of the roles of technique and the nation-state in individual and collective human life. He then adds new insight into our being a symbolic species dealing with our finitude by living through the myths of our society and building new secular forms of moralities and religions. If everything is political and if everything is amenable to discipline-based scientific and technical approaches, we are perhaps treating these human creations the way earlier societies did their gods, as being omnipotent, without limits. Vanderburg argues that until organized Christianity becomes critically aware of sharing these commitments with their societies, it will remain entrapped in the service of false gods and thereby will continue to turn a message of freedom and love into one of morality and religion.
Willem H. Vanderburg has taught preventive engineering, sociology, and environmental studies at the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto.
PrefaceIntroductionA Secular Way of Life in Search of Spirituality?Where Are We and What Have We Done?Seeing and ListeningPeople of a Time, Place, and CulturePeople of a Time, Place, and Universal Technical OrderPeople of the Word1 The Possibility and Impossibility of Living a Secular LifeHow Secular Have We Become?Language, Swearing, and the SacredA Creation for Freedom without a SacredA Creation for Love without Eros2 The Roots of a Non-secular Life: Religion and Morality as Symptoms of EvilUprooting and Re-rooting the Creation’s Fabric of RelationshipsThe End of Secular Human Life God's Covenant and Humanity's Life SupportThe Beginning of Human HistoryA New Beginning without God3 Language, Myth, and HistoryMaking a NameThe Word, Human Words, and CulturesSocially and Historically Naming OurselvesCulture and RevelationThe Subversion of Symbolization4 Born Neither Free nor Equal, but LovedAn Enslaved HumanityThe Flesh and the WorldA World Ruled by Principalities and PowersThe Demonic PowersThe Satanic PowersThree Horsemen of the ApocalypseThe City as the Seat of the Powers5 The Law, the Spirit, and the Kingdom of HeavenThe Law and the Jewish PeopleThe Law of FreedomThe SpiritThe Kingdom of Heaven6 Christianity in the Grip of Vanity and Chasing after the WindWhy Give the Last Word to Qohelet?Vanity and MythsWisdom and MythsGod and Our MythsEpilogueNotesIndex
