The Cultural Left: Making the World Safe for Fundamentalism is an article published by The Secular Web, one of the oldest sites promoting a non-theistic worldview. I have commented before that two groups seem intent on launching broadsides against the soft-pedaling of Islam in vague-theism-friendly American culture: the Christian Fundamentalists (Franklin Graham et al.) and self-identified Secularists (Chris Hitchens & co. being exemplars). These are the two faces of the West at war with each other since the 18th century [1]-but perhaps there might be a truce to acknowledge the emergence of a new rival in the form of PoMo relativism and its foot-soldiers of the non-Western ancien regime. An excerpt:
The Cultural Left is not a movement, an ideology, or a philosophy. It is a set of attitudes and beliefs based on the prejudices of the modern intellectual elite, shored up by shallow and simplistic interpretations of modern philosophy (often Karl Marx) and pop psychology. These beliefs are a hodgepodge of moral relativism, Marxism and political correctness–topped off by an almost pathological hostility to traditional Western civilization and the values it is based upon.
The Cultural Left’s belief system is a threat to secularism on many levels, but three reasons stand out above all others:
1.) extreme relativism,
2.) hostility to traditional Western culture, and,
3.) the view that academia, scholarship, education, science, culture and the arts are nothing but weapons for use in political and ideological warfare.
I don’t agree with some of the specifics, I think most Christian fundamentalists are wacks and sound like wacks when debating PoMo cracks, but the general message is spot-on in my opinion.
[1] I am being a bit broad in my definitions, the “Fundamentalists” of the modern American scene are a direct byproduct of the anti-Modernist reaction among conservative Protestants in the early 20th century, but their roots can be discerned in the echoes of the First Greak Awakening which occurred concurrently with the ascendence of a secular Deism-the ancestor of modern Secularism.
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