Rafael Navarro-Valls on secular democracy

The Spanish university professor Rafael Navarro-Valls, specialising in religions, comments on the emergence in Europe of a "secular democracy", the basic principle of which is, for him, to neutralise all religious inspiration in political life. "One of the mistakes committed by Spanish secularism is its tendency to want to become a new religion. It has a propensity to replace the former theocracy with a new 'ideocracy'. A religion that may seem incomplete without a god or life after death, but that claims to occupy in the souls of citizens the space left vacant by a faith that is becoming extinct. Thus we can note attempts to create 'secular Christmases' or replace Christian celebrations (christenings, communions, weddings) with civil ceremonies. These days certain people intend to exercise through secularism a sort of 'fundamentalist social cleansing', which extracts all moral or religious values from the political sphere."

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