Religion, Marx said, is the opiate of the masses. But some drugs are better than others. The religion of our day, writes political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney, is a “religion of humanity” or even “humanitarianism” and takes not God but man as the measure of all things. It's not a new religion, really. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman called it the “religion of civilization,” noting that it pops up in the ancient world as well as the modern. Mahoney traces its contemporary incarnation (or perhaps excarnation, given its anti-Christian and abstract quality) to the 19th-century philosopher Auguste Comte, “one of the unseen masters of our world.” Comte understood that secularism as secularism wouldn't work. Man is Homo religiosus. Unfortunately, worshipers of a mankind not made in the divine image will often destroy it once they realize that their idol is not worth the incense. Humanitarianism apart from a transcendent moral order quickly becomes “anti-human in decisive respects.”
