Edward Pentin | National Catholic Register | February 26, 2025 |

John Rist says the secularization and moral fragmentation in England stems from the cataclysmic 16th-century event and the ensuing rise of nontheistic rights theories.

… He also discusses how the collapse of traditional Christianity, especially Catholicism, has left a void, leading to a de facto nihilism where the power to enforce desires trumps objective morals. 

Rist believes this shift, exacerbated by the decline in influential Christian intellectuals and the failures of replacement ideologies, leaves little hope for a turnaround in the foreseeable future…

By far the best study of the secularization of not only England but Europe generally is Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, in which he emphasizes that the ending of uniformity in religion was bound to lead, and did lead, to the non-uniformity of morals, not least when, even before the Reformation, morality was increasingly becoming separated from salvation. 

Jeffersonian America

This was also apparent when the modern (i.e., nontheistic) version of rights theory got a huge boost from the American Founding Fathers and their documents because they were able to foist their unargued “self-evident” claims about rights and God (as of “happiness”) on a population which still shared some, now disappearing, basics of religious morality. Also remember that [Thomas] Jefferson was a deist; therefore, many of his pronouncements about God were humbug and intended to deceive. But, inevitably, the plurality of religion was going to lead to the plurality of moralities — or nonmoralities…

I think talk of any new spring in the foreseeable future is whistling in the wind. As Brad Gregory put it, when doctrine is always disputed, it loses interest and ceases to be compelling — and we go shopping! 

As for the Lambeth Conference of 1930 that allowed contraception, that was merely a further stage in a continuing process, and we are tending to go the same way ourselves, although the “pill,” pace its Catholic as well as Anglican advocates, has certainly become a minefield for morals — and not only about sexuality. Or perhaps in contemporary idiom, I should compare it to a grenade thrown into a bar. — Read it all