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Religion Religious Intolerance, Persecution & Conflict

Secular Nations under New Gods

Christianity's Subversion by Technology and Politics

by (author) Willem H. Vanderburg

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 2018
Category
Religious Intolerance, Persecution & Conflict, General, Religious, General, Philosophy
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487523039
    Publish Date
    Dec 2018
    List Price
    $52.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487503970
    Publish Date
    Dec 2018
    List Price
    $111.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487519193
    Publish Date
    Dec 2018
    List Price
    $52.00

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Description

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.

About the author

Willem H. Vanderburg is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, where he was the founding director of the Centre for Technology and Social Development. He was a NATO post-doctoral fellow under Jacques Ellul from 1973 to 1978 at the University of Bordeaux.

Willem H. Vanderburg's profile page