the political economy in which all of us have invested cannot make us safe and cannot make us happy

And what the Bible is all about is the endless discovery that the dominant political, economic, technological system cannot deliver security and cannot deliver happiness. And – I don’t know – I think that’s what we are discovering now. We’re discovering that the political economy in which all of us have invested cannot make us safe and cannot make us happy.  So, the Gospel question is to whom shall we go?

Walter Brueggemann 

One of the biggest problems with the idea of the essentially administrative formality that the government be secular, is the rather stupid idea that that means that The People have to also be secular, that religion is not to have any role in their lives, their thinking their political decisions.  That is something that nice, liberal religious people have bought into, have been encouraged into and gulled into and coerced into.  The presentation of religion in popular entertainment has had a big role in that.   But the biggest problem with that is that politics is not enough, slogans of "civic piety" are not enough, they are one of a number of entirely inadequate replacements for religious obligations to each other and, especially, the least among us.

The idea that, somehow, "ethics" or esthetics or art appreciation or social work or education or economic prosperity or some vague, general sense of niceness were going to be a sufficient replacement for religion has failed, over and over again.   While all of those can be nice - though I would probably be most skeptical of "ethics" - they are not enough and without the force of a real, durable, sufficiently powerful source of morality, all of them will fail.  I think the unarticulated history of Western secular liberal democracy, in the United States, in England, in France, in other European countries is the serial failure of even an aspiration to egalitarian democracy on the basis of secularism, of it failing without that force which will only come by addressing a "whom" who wants us to be good to each other to who we owe deeper obligations that the artificial substitutes which are erected in its place. 

 That literally secular replacement of patriotism, nationalism, is one of the most dangerous of them, having the power to drive people into wars of conquest, wars allegedly of internal purification, genocide, expulsions, etc.   In my criticism of the nominal Christianity which has thrown everything in the Gospel, The Law and the Prophets aside for Donald Trump, in the pseudo-Christianity of that kind of nationalism, the names of Jesus and Christ, the physical book of the Bible are retained but they are certainly not only not central aspects of that American-exceptionalist idolatry, they are replaced with modern day equivalents of the Roman imperialism that the Gospel opposed.   Wars of conquest and subjugation are replaced with wars to spread economic hegemony - which, itself is renamed "democracy",  gladiatorial entertainment with American football (with football in other countries) and every four years the piratical and commercial product of the Olympics industry.   Sex in its various manifestations in Roman patriarchy are replaced with their equivalents in modern cultures - so long as it's not same-sex, it will be deemed unobjectionable and even that distinction is falling, as long as someone is used by a dominant male.   

As Walter Brueggemann notes, all of them, the American military-industrial-entertainment complex, the European secularist modern order, which, as I said, is falling to facism, once again, now that the generation that experienced World War Two is about done.  Communism has certainly failed as it turns into capitalism with central planning by gangsters and not even the people who experienced it want to return to government under Marxism.  Capitalism works only for those who have, it never was intended to work for anyone else.  

And there is no replacement, even the churches, when they try to substitute other things, Church history and tradition, the idolatry of the post-Counter-Reformation, especially in its putrid late 19th, first-half of the 20th century form in Roman Catholicism, other churches having other baggage that replaced what Brueggemann was talking about.  The Old Testament is full of stories of the dire consequences of that kind of thing, Isaiah and others on the Temple and its ceremonies, for excellent example.   Not only does that substitution not work in trying to depend on the "political, economic, technological system"  to produce security and happiness, it doesn't work when those substitutes have the aroma of sanctity sprayed on them.