“The personal IS political!”
I remember this triumphant statement delivered with pride as if it was a declaration of victory. It came at the end of a back and forth through social media with a Progressive leader of sorts. I say that because it wasn’t a random person who just picked up the phrase from common parlance, but an educated physician, writer, and leader in the Progressive community. She knew what she was saying.
It’s a phrase often pulled out when a person tries to separate what their personal opinion is from what is thought to be the political, or what is public. In a way it’s a means to reject the idea that “My opinion is my business and my personal feelings are exempt from your awareness much less your scrutiny.”
“The personal is political” forces people to out their feelings in a way that gives society ownership over them. It eliminates the right to secrets.
But here’s the problem: The phrase is fundamentally religious and couldn’t even exist outside of a Christian framework that separates the secular from the religious.
The Progressive Regression
To understand what a church or temple is for Christians and Jews, it’s best to think of them as a place where heaven and earth come together. Or at least it’s their best attempt to hold those things together or even to will those two concepts into one, while remaining distinct.
It’s not just heaven and earth as in two separate places, but as two separate concepts. You could think of these two concepts as the sacred and the profane, the divine and the mundane, or whatever is up above in a spiritual sense, and what is below in an earthly or material sense.
Either way, the fundamental view of the cosmos for these religions is that there are two realms. The realm of spirit, heaven, the sacred, the divine, and what is God’s up above. And whatever is below which is profane, mundane, or the material matter that makes up everything on earth.
Progressives have the same religious concept and it is proudly expressed as “The personal is political.”
Personal is akin to spiritual, and political is akin to the profane. It’s a Progressive version of the means to see and understand the cosmos. When Progressives say “the personal is political”, what they are doing is bringing those two worlds together just as any church or temple attempts to bring together the sacred and the profane, heaven and earth. But here’s the main difference: Progressives are attempting to no longer allow this distinction. They are eliminating the sacred by making everything profane. When they deny the divine, they do so by proclaiming that everything is mundane.
These self-proclaimed irreligious, or “secular” progressives, have unwittingly adopted a religious framework to understand the world based in the Christian concept of the secular. The concept of the secular in itself doesn’t exist outside of a Christian framework. And for there to be a separation in concept of the sacred and the profane, of the personal and the political, you need that framework of thought to get there in the first place.
The Saeculum
In the fourth century A.D., a monk, philosopher, and the patron saint of brewers, Augustine of Hippo, coined a term as a means to describe all that is contained within the span of human life. Something that could describe the difference between the eternal and the succinct. The term he used in his writings to describe this concept was saeculum.
Saeculum was used to differentiate between what was limited to the material reality of human life as compared to what was eternal and unlimited. Saeculum is the profane as compared to the sacred. It is the mundane activity of everyday human life as compared to the eternal realm of the divine. Today we hear saeculum as secular and think of it as a word that describes anything not religious.
As easy as it is for a common person to hear secular and understand exactly what it means, this was not always the case. What Augustine did by infusing this idea into Christianity, pulling directly from Christ, was to create a schism in the world that reverberates today, and is so deeply entrenched in our minds as how things are, that it is difficult to imagine thinking of the world without that concept.
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marveled at him. — Mark 12:17 (King James Version)
Secularism in India
Historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, provides some historical examples of how the idea of the secular was introduced to non-Christian cultures as a means to highlight how new the concept was. The one I found that was most impactful and telling was the introduction of the secular into Indian culture during the time of British rule there.
As the British interacted with Indian culture, some of the elite in India adopted the viewpoint that there was a religion called “Hinduism” which was an idea separate from the politics of the people, much like the private relationship with God that permeates Protestant concepts of belief.
“To Protestants, the essence of religion appeared clear: it lay in the inner relationship of a believer to the divine. Faith was a personal, a private thing. As such, it existed in a sphere distinct from the rest of society: from government, or trade, or law.” Tom Holland, Dominion
Raja Rammohun Roy, a Hindu intrigued enough by Christianity to learn Hebrew and Greek, used this concept to convince the government in Calcutta that the suttee, a tradition of burning widows on the pyre along with their dead husbands, was not religious but a secular tradition not found in Hindu texts. He was convincing enough to get the ancient tradition banned in India, which deeply pleased the British Evangelicals who sought to infuse Christian ideas and Christianity itself into Indian culture.
By the time the British left India to rule itself, the concept of the secular became official as it was used to describe their Constitution. Today, much of the culture war in India comes from rejecting ideas like this, seeing them as Christian impositions on a culture where to be Indian was to be Hindu.
The Progressive Church
A similar thought revolution is taking place in the West today being pressed by self-proclaimed Progressives in the guise of slogans like “The personal is political”. By rejecting the idea that individuals have a private relationship with themselves and their faith of higher importance than the state, they are rejecting the very concept that provides for the separation of church and state.
Making the personal political puts the individual at the mercy of the state. It subsumes individual human rights to the rights of the state. It creates a religious framework with the state at the highest pillars of authority. It destroys the very concept necessary for writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that supports it.
Erasing the distinction between the personal and the political is a regressive tactic that will lead to the tyranny that the separation of church and state seeks to prevent.