Nothing comes out of the blue

Define a Christian society. I define it as a present living generation gathered around a national flag whose ancestors five generations earlier were vastly of a Christian confession.

Like all definitions, it has an arbitrary element. The arbitrariness lies in setting the boundaries of the concept, but the content of the concept must be real, in that it denotes something that exists. The content of the concept is more or less ambiguous in that it expressely says "were vastly of a Christian confession". This ambiguity cannot be avoided, given that no society of a national scale can be proved to be 100% pure in ideological and confessional content. Variations will always exists. So, "vastly of a Christian confession" demands the use of intuition viz. reason. We know when a society is vastly Muslim, e.g. Egypt, even though we know for certain that Christian Coptic minorities survive within it. The same is applied to most of our Western national societies, whose pluralism obfuscate reason when identifying the original ideology or confession of the given people.

We can say, for the sake of precision, that a society has a confessional or ideological adjective attached to it when no farther than five generations earlier than the present living one has the same mean and mode relating to the respective adjective. Hence, a Christian society would be one whose population of ancestors five generations earlier were in mean and mode of a Christian confession.

The reason why tracing back into ancestral background defines today, and not simply the content of today, is that human societies are always and without exception the product of historical conditions which lie in the past generations. A definition of a current society based only on living conditions assumes that the present does not need the past to have existed, which is, of course, nonsense. It is logically inconceivable that a present would subsist without its subsequent past. "The past is never dead. It's not even past" Faulkner.

The reason why I'm asking myself this is because of the problem posed by secularism. Where does secularism come from? The question is too abstract to denote anything. It would be more precise to ask: where does Western secularism come from? This implies that secularism depends on the culture that produces it. It is not a universally concrete notion. It is a historically concrete notion.

There is a narrative of Western secularism that aims at de-Christianizing societies, by promoting a form of society that sometimes contradicts and even destroys the Christian background from which it comes. I'm talking about the reality show-liberal-everything goes type of thinking. What I'm trying to say is that the secularist narrative plays at ignoring the historical fact that it comes from a particular cultural background; that of European Christianity. This leads to a misunderstood notion of secularism that is played against its Christian origin.

It is not against the spirit of secularism to accept the Christian background without which it would have never emerged. Philosophically both are distinct, but historically, that is really, they are not. Atheists feel disgruntled with such definitions, because they are the first in society to act against our Christian past, not realizing that in it lies the core of our identities, values, and normative claims. By de-Christianizing our societies with a false notion of secularism, they only undermine the true basis from which our normative claims are raised, in an intellectual project that is self-defeating. Normative claims simply cannot hold in themselves in the pure abstract, but only to philosophers, who are a negligible minority of any society, usually ignorant and unattached from real and daily problems. Their self-righteous feelings to free all individuals from the bondage with our inheritance only leaves a vacuum. No rational notion ever fills the life of anyone without the help of traditions.

All I'm saying is that the Western European civilization still is a Christian civilization, and that many of our institutions are the secular versions of our theological times. E.g. international congresses are nothing but the modern versions of the ecumenical councils; our parliaments, the nationalized versions of the estates of the realm; the European Union nothing but the Medieval idea of imperial unity (both failures, by the way), etc. In the Americas the Christian background is still an accepted idea, though we seem to be going down the unfortunate doom of nihilistic Europe. Hopefully, we will do better than that for a couple more hundred years.