Secular America - Pharisees of the New Millennium Assignment

Secular America - Pharisees of the New Millennium - Assignment Example Secularization has been at the core of America’s founding as a nation. Religion has been given a minor role and influenced by the Founding Fathers based on the fundamental fact that it is against rational thinking and that it provides a less valid way of understanding reality, at least, in comparison with the humanist perspective, science, among other social institutions. According to Ostwalt (2003), this phenomenon gained traction sometime in the 1960s when the prevalent thought was religion as something that controls and manipulates and that freedom from it is an ideal way of life, a form of enlightenment for humanity (2). Morrison (1948) observed that the core liberalism in America emerged proposing a radical criticism of the Christian faith in light of modern culture instead of proposing a radical criticism of modern culture in the light of Christian faith (87). This came with his discourse that posited how Protestantism, the dominant religion in America, has embraced mode rn culture so that most of its components appeared to be sanctioned and ended up secularizing the American public life (Smith, 2003, 303).  Today, even with the aggressive initiatives on the part of religious authorities, to reverse or counter the influence of secularization, there is very little impact achieved. This can be attributed to several fundamental reasons. One of these is that argument that states how many forces of secularization are identified with the values of Romanticism, the Renaissance in addition to the Enlightenment and scientific revolutions, which have been encouraged by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church itself (Norman, 2007, 32). The idea is that these phenomena and institutions created social constructs that established the platform and environment in which secularization took root, thrived and flourished.