Newt Gingrich says "secular, atheist philosophy" threatens Christianity

An article I read in the Naples (Florida) Daily News, published February 18, has quotes from a speech Newt Gingrich gave at the Ave Maria School of Law.

Wow, there's actually a place called the Ave Maria School of Law? It sounds like the perfect Newt Gingrich venue.

Newt claimed that the rise of a secular, atheist philosophy is equally or more dangerous to Christianity than terrorist organizations that will kill Christians if "they don't submit."

Well, I certainly hope that's true. I obviously don't want to see any Christians killed, but I would love to see the occasional one come to his or her senses.

Now, here's the problem with Newt's warning about secular thought. When he talks about how it "dominates universities," he evokes visions of an evil cabal devoted to overthrowing the world. There is no such cabal. There is certainly no secret that secular, liberal thought dominates universities. Universities are places of higher learning, where students go to find out what learned people know.

"Learned," pronounced the old-fashioned poetic way, "learn-ed."

Science writer Timothy Ferris, in his book The Science of Liberty, explains how liberalism and knowledge feed off of each other. Science (and any other kind of useful knowledge, for that matter) does not flourish in a conservative environment. Society flourishes wherever people are not afraid to think and speak freely. There is nothing sinister in any of this. Liberalism is not a synonym of fascism, as pseudo-intellectuals like New Gingrich would have it; a liberal society is an open society, unafraid to defend its ideas and beliefs, because they are sound and supported by evidence. A society in which, as Newt hopes, Christianity has won out over this "secular philosophy" will be very similar to what we now call the Dark Ages: dangerous, and full of fear.

Religious conservatives like Newt Gingrich are afraid that new ideas will swamp their cherished values. They are right. Newt hopes that institutions like the Ave Maria School of Law will be "centers of resistance" to two forces (secular, atheistic philosophy, and radical Islamic terrorism) which he equates with each other, because he feels their threat to Christianity. But, as I have maintained many times, a secular, liberal philosophy wants nothing to do with fundamentalist Islam or with fundamentalist Christianity. Both of those fundamentalisms are threats to freedom, knowledge, and civilization.

People go to universities because they want to learn things to expand their minds and their lives. They go to places like Liberty University and, probably, the Ave Maria School of Law, because they need a college degree to get ahead in society, but they want an education that won't challenge the beliefs that they had going in. They want to get in and out of college, changing and growing as little as possible.