At some point most Americans come to the chilling realization that a good many of our neighbors are–not to be unkind–nuts. If that sounds extreme, just consider the fact that thousands of Americans claim to believe that they have been abducted by aliens. Millions follow the astrological tables; and “Miss Clio” and her psychic hotline did plenty of business until the game ran out.

Ideas do not emerge from a vacuum. In order to understand the mind of an age, we must look at its intellectual history and come to terms with the significant ideas that shaped its thought, and produced its worldview. Without this, ideas appear without context and meaning.

One of the most tenacious assumptions of the modern academy is the so-called “secularization thesis.” According to its proponents, the secularization theory explains that as societies grow in wealth, industrialization, technology, and cultural sophistication, they also inevitably become more secular. The result is that modern advanced cultures tend to show far less religious devotion, much lower patterns of church attendance, and fewer references to God and to spiritual issues in public life.

“By the middle of the twentieth century, the idea of separation between church and state had become an almost irresistible American dogma,” explains constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger. A law professor at the University of Chicago, Hamburger had traced the victory of church-state separationism over the founder’s intentions in the First Amendment.

The nation’s great divide between secularists and Christians is growing, not shrinking. This divide determines many, if not most, of our national controversies. Debates over education, abortion, environmentalism, homosexuality, and a host of other issues are really debates about whether morality is relative or revealed.