The new article from The Public Interest, “Our Secularist Democratic Party,” (linked in my previous blog) is important for other reasons as well. For one thing, it provides a kind of socio-political grounding for my argument in pieces like “The Church of the Left” and “The Faith-Based Left” that the ideologies of the secular Left now function as a de facto religion. The same Democratic national convention delegates who identified themselves as secular were the ones who carried the ideologies of the new post-sixties movements. It’s also interesting to note that the Democratic secularists had a hostility to traditionally religious folk that would have been called prejudice if maintained against any other group. In effect, what Bolce and DeMaio show in this piece that our contemporary culture war was started, not by religious conservatives, but by the rise of ideological secularism. And again, the media, being secular, Democratic, post-sixties ideologues themselves, have ignored or suppressed this fundamentally important angle on the contemporary relation of religion and politics. This article is a must read.