A Wonderful Day for an Auto-da-f

James A. Montanye
Falls Church, Virginia

The worlds last inquisitional auto-da-f the public humiliation, torture, and killing of
heretics by the Catholic churchis thought to have occurred in Mexico in the mid-
nineteenth century. Radical Islam introduced a comparable practice in the twenty-first
century, replacing floggings and immolations in the public square with the beheading of
people and statues streamed live on social media.

Secular forms of auto-da-f, by comparison, have become common occurrences within

Western societies. Todays firings are more likely to end careers than to end lives, as
evinced by the demotions of former Harvard president Larry Summers, and Google
engineer James Damore. Both mens heresy entailed perceived slights against the secular
religion of employment diversity. The recent, deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia,
by comparison, entailed a clash between two overarching secular religions, with
followers on each side reciprocally denouncing the other sides heresy. One side
worships, among other, ostensibly less honorable things, fundamental individual rights in
life, property, and libertyespecially the liberty of thought, opinion, and expression.
The other side worships the maintenance and growth of group entitlements which, since
the 1960s, have flowed to factions that successfully manipulated grievance and shame.
Followers of both religions often act upon their true faith as inquisitorial thugs and
secular jihadists.

[I]n the public life of our day, writes the economist Robert Nelson in his book
Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2001), real heresy can now take only secular forms (296).
Nelson stands among a tiny assortment of respected scholars who recognize the secular
states ironically religious nature. In his book The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion
vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2010), Nelson concluded that

the leading secular movements of our times are essentially religious in character,
drawing on the various Christian traditions that produced Western Civilization.
The two most important secular movements of the late twentieth century were
economic religion and environmental religion, both of them religions in the
sense that they have comprehensive worldviews and myths that provide human
beings with the deepest sense of meaning. ... It is time to take secular religion
seriously. It is real religion. In the twentieth century it showed greater energy,
won more converts, and had more impact on the Western world than the
traditional institutional forms of Christianity. (348349)

Scholars disagree as to whether economics and environmentalism represent the last

centurys two most important secular movements. Communism, fascism,
neoconservatism, democratic fundamentalism, entitlementarianism (my neologism),
egalitarianism, feminism, and social diversity also contend for top honors. One
undeniable fact is that secular auto-da-f is propelling the United States toward an era of
factional religious wars to rival those of medieval England and Europe in their intensity,
duration, and destructiveness.

Economic religion, as defined by the rights-based law and economics principles that
have emerged over the past three centuries, has spurred massive productivity and
efficiency gains by creating private incentives for channeling scarce resources to their
highest valued uses. By contrast, entitlement-based religion, which venerates rent
seeking, is socially non-productive and wasteful, albeit privately beneficial. Fundamental
rights regrettably have come to be defined in entitlement termsrights talk now
being regarded as reprehensible micro-aggression against societys most vulnerable
individualswithout regard for the economic distinction that sets apart the two
contrasting concepts (see, for example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophys entry
on rights). This corruption of language renders meaningful thought and discussion
across secular religious boundaries unnecessarily difficult, perhaps by intention.

The conflict between rights and entitlements was illuminated by former President Lyndon
Johnson. Speaking in 1965, Johnson proclaimed that freedom is not enough ... the next
and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights ... [is] not just equality as a right and
a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. One upshot, as noted nearly five
decades later (and with devastating clarity) by then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney,
is that 47 percent of Americans had come to believe that government has a responsibility
to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, food, to housing, you
name it. Recent conservative attempts to rejuvenate that old-time, rights-based
religion have generated disquieting levels of resistance, rancor, and violence among
interested factions.

Modern political economy is religion all the way down. Conversely, all religion, from
antiquity to the present, is grounded upon the scarcity of economic resources. By these
lights, secular religion represents the pursuit of traditional economic goals by essentially
traditional methods.