Francis Bacon reduced charity to “the relief of man's estate” in 1605's The Advancement of Learning. In his Theologico-Political Treatise of 1670 Baruch Spinoza maintained that when it comes to Scripture, all that's needful is simply getting the gist of it, made up of “justice and lovingkindness.” By the mid-19th century, Hegelian philosophy would admit that while Christianity introduced some true new principles to the world long ago, once those have been rationalized and realized we may dispense with as obsolete any remaining aspects of the Biblical tradition that aren't conformable to worldly progress. Meanwhile, Auguste Comte called outright for a secular religion of humanity.
These are but a handful of signposts in the history of the secularization of Biblical morality and the rise of humanism. Comte's contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that ideas of transcendence were incompatible with late modern democratic mores, and what remained of religion was rapidly descending into a variety of pantheism. More recently, Cornel West proclaimed that “justice is what love looks like in public”—leading me to recall Hank Hill's response when Luanne Platter channeled Whitney Houston and affirmed that loving yourself is the greatest love of all: “No, that's not really true at all in fact.” Reducing love to justice, or compelling love to submit to justice, leaves us with neither love nor justice. By making the personal political, we ask too much of justice and not enough of love.
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