The cults of blood and race and nation

Image: Soldiers in South Sudan

“There has emerged a secularism which claims to represent the same high moral ideals that Christianity does, but without dependence upon the religious beliefs which are characteristic of the church . . . It is an atheistic movement which claims to cultivate moral ideals of the same value as those defined by the church.” This man-centered religion “has made man himself the end-all and be-all of existence.” And as long as man lives for himself the world will be filled “with the cults of blood and race and nation. And in so far as that doctrine continues to dominate Western thought we may expect the recurring horrors of war and revolution, because it is a doctrine whose logic deprives mankind of a common frame of reference and in the end sets every man against every other man.”*

Guy Franklin Hershberger, War, Peace, & Nonresistance (pp. 185-86)

* H. R. Neibuhr, W. Pauck, and F. P. Miller, The Church Against the World (Chicago, 1935) pp. 32-33; 110-11