If I had the time, and it would take at least as long as my investigations into the real nature of Darwinism has, I would look at the history of the secularization of the college-credentialed population of the United States, concentrating, especially, on the shift from the clearly Christianity based traditional American liberalism of the 18th and, especially, 19th century to the secular, atheist, anti-religious, materialist "left" that increasingly took the universities and scribbling professions and then became ubiquitous and dominated even as it was a total and complete flop, a hindrance to progress and the discrediting of what should be the most natural of cultural and political orientations in a democracy, that traditional liberalism that comprised the abolitionist movement, the movement to expand the franchise to women, that was an early and major force in the ending of wage slavery and for the elevation of poor and working people. Virtually every bit of progress that was made - along with some missteps - was the work of the traditional American egalitarian liberal tradition, not the sciency, materialist "left".
I pointed out the other day the rather shocking fact that for much of its history the academic-materialist-pseudo-scientific "left" has either been peopled with or made accomodation with people who held up some of the worst and most murderous tyrants in human history as heroes if not models to be emulated. That isn't something that started with the idiot Marxists, it has been endemic to the anti-religious, pseudo-scientific left from its founding. There are still idiots on the "left" who worship the memory of the Jacobins, who presided over the enormous violence of the Reign of Terror and even more enormous violence outside of Paris. The idiocy of American so-called leftists worshiping that bunch of gangsters - them turning on each other in a gang war that makes those in the mid-20th century mob look like a minor event is a dead giveaway - is, perhaps, done in the ignorance that the Jacobins were a bunch of affluent, sexist thugs who were always in it for themselves. But the knowledge of their violence and their total incompetence at governance is certainly typical of those who the English language, secular,atheist left have championed over and over again. I have suspected that it is their atheism and pseudo-scientific claims that have bent the idiots of our time to liking them, but I think that ignores the violence, scores and scores of millions of murders, the uniform violation of equality and rights - even as they make such things their slogans - are obviously as attractive to the cafe, bookstall and lecture stand lefties as anything else about them.
The secular left of today is a pathetic shell of what it was during the last major period of progress roughly ending in the last years of The Reverend Martin Luther King's life, it was brought to grief largely through its enemies tying it to the idiocy of the secular, academic, play-left and the campaign against religion that was ubiquitous among those of influence in academia, in the media, on the courts. Their most lofty of secular principles have worked, in the past half-century and longer to the benefit of the Republican-fascists who have brilliantly harnessed backlashes against the secularizing Supreme Court rulings as they have the white supremacist backlash and regional resentments which TV and Hollywood had such a huge role in fostering and promoting.
Some of that backlash was bound to happen as real progress towards real equality and democracy was pushed but a lot of it was provoked in gratuitous actions taken and, even more so, words said by secular, atheist, materialist academics and others. The cost to the real left and those it could benefit of the stupid and useless campaign to keep town property free of manger scenes is about the most absurd - if those had ben tolerated the Aussie smut peddelers' hired help at FOX wouldn't have been able to make hay over a "war on Christmas" and, among other things that have resulted from such wastes of time and effort, I suspect the Supreme Court would be somewhat less likely to be dominated by fascists who are perfectly willing to overturn those rulings and to destroy egalitarian democracy. No doubt the ACLU types would think that was worth risking to keep Baby Jesus off of the town hall lawn.
There was more progress made before there was so much "First Amendment" purity about. As I've pointed out before, when the production code was in effect they managed to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills into law, they were able to create Medicare and Medicaid and a host of other great equalizers. The GI Bill and Social Security came in well before the ACLU became influential, Truman made that enormous leap in equality by integrating the military. I will grant that in the meantime we have had LGBTQ rights advance, though that would probably have happened faster if the Republican-fascists hadn't been able to dominate the Supreme Court due to Republican-fascists winning elections.
I think the idiocy of the secular-left pursing the gratuitous line of symbolic anti-Christian legal cases is a symptom of the real motives of the secular-pseudo-scientific left which are as at odds with egalitarian democracy as is given away, even more so, by their either being enormous fans of anti-demoratic ideologies, Marxism, Darwinism*, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Jacobinism, etc. The secular-left is not any left that will be useful for the struggle for egalitarian democracy, they will always cost us a lot more than they produce and what they are likely to produce won't be egalitarian democracy, it will suck.
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And about that LGBTQ progress, a lot of that came about because the kids and friends of the wealthy came out. That's one of the things about us, we are part of every class and every ethnic group. If we had been exclusively poor and people of color, it wouldn't have happened at all. We would be as ground down by the fascists and as much a second thought as poor people and members of unliked minority groups always are. I might appreciate the strides in equality, I'm a lot less happy that as that happens it doesn't extend equally to LGBTQ people of color, who aren't affluent or middle class or have aspirations to be, it certainly hasn't made up for the inequality of LGBTQ people who are Women. Especially Women of Color
* Darwin, himself, supported the book in which his friend and colleague Ernst Haeckel said that Darwinism didn't support socialism or democracy, it supports an aristocratic form of government. I'm not going to ignore that, especially as the passage in the book, a political interpretation that Darwin, himself, wholeheartedly endorsed presents the secular-lefty with more than one problem with his ideological pretenses.
Besides, Darwinism, the theory of natural selection—which Virchow aimed at in his denunciation, much more especially than at transformation, the theory of descent—which is often confounded with it—Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats. But how the socialism of the day can find any encouragement in these efforts, and how the horrors of the Paris Commune can be traced to them, is to me, I must frankly confess, absolutely incomprehensible.
No matter how much they want to ignore it, the theory of natural selection, Darwinism, is born out of one of the most disgusting anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic of economic claims made by Malthus, it can't be made compatible with equality - its engine is inequality - it can't be made democratic - its soteriological scheme is based on the powerful destroying those with less power - it is certainly not compatible with socialism. You have to be a total idiot to not understand that you can have one or the other but you can't have both. Our secular-left is that stupid. They've suckered a lot of religious people who should know better into going along with that self-defeating faith.
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The abandonment of theology, both as academic pursuit but as fundamental to Paris, led both to the rejection of German scriptural studies (because it smacked of rejecting scripture) and Fundamentalism. The latter "confirmed" that "religion" (by which they meant Xianity) was all about superstition and nothing more. Some if the German scholars were not religious but Bultmann, one of the greatest of them, was. He tried to "save" theology and explain his work at the same time. But I think the rejection of Xianity you describe is at the root of these problems, too.
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