A longish essay at First Things by Mary Eberstadt addresses a number of issues around secularism, and this one is up our street in particular:
This brings us to another feature of the new secularist faith: its lack of transparency. For decades, scholarship has established Sanger’s moral roots in eugenics, her faith in the inferiority of certain other people, her cynical use of African-American ministers to evangelize the black population about birth control in the hope of bringing their numbers down, and related beliefs out of odor today. Yet in a moment when Confederate statues are targets in the name of scrubbing racism from the public square, Margaret Sanger remains immune from moral revisionism. Why? Because she is the equivalent of a secularist saint of the revolution, off-limits from second thoughts.
Similar status and protection are accorded to pseudo-scientist Alfred C. Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, whose fabled “reports” on human sexuality included allowing so-called research “subjects” to inflict what is now called child sexual abuse. According to biographer James H. Jones in Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, the icon also filmed sex acts of employees and subordinates, walked in on students as they showered, had sex with people involved in his “research,” wrote letters of erotica to assistants and others, and otherwise appears to have fallen short of today’s standards concerning sexual harassment and coercion. Even before “Harvey Weinstein” became global shorthand for such depredations, Kinsey’s legacy would have been reviled—were he anything but Kinsey, a founding father of the new secularist faith. Instead, Kinsey and all his works, like Sanger’s, remain untouchable.More.
Darwinian racism is untouchable too. Every so often, a left-wing writer wakes up and wonders, why are we supporting all this?
The answer, one fears, is that it isn’t a “Why?” question. The answer is “You raise suspicion about your loyalty by asking!”
Note: Some of us would say that it is not secularism but naturalism that is driving this trend.
See also: How naturalism morphed into a state religion
Mock at your peril! Naturalism is a jealous fraud
Left-wing mag slams Darwinism
and
Why you, UD reader, are perchance not a member of the Party of Science… Maybe you doubt UFOs or something. A growing source of unproductive conflict in western culture: “Science” is becoming merely the attitudes, values, beliefs, hopes, fears, allegiances, and prejudices of the people who work there, without any external standard applied and none expected or wanted.