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"Christianity is being deliberately pushed out of our culture—so that secular liberalism can be established in its place. I use the term 'establish' quite deliberately.

One religion is being actively disestablished, while another is being (in fact, largely has been) established in its place."

Free sample chapter, click here

Click here and go to my Worshipping the State page

MORE GREAT BOOKS BY BENJAMIN WIKER

Ideas Have Consequences.
Bad Ideas Have Bad Consequences.

This is one of my most popular books--perhaps a strange thing, since it focuses on the most destructive books, the books that have done so much damage to the modern world. But not really so very strange. Sometimes the best way to understand the truth, is to study the greatest errors. And here you have them.

Machiavelli's The Prince, Descartes' Discourse on Method, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Rousseau's Second Discourse, Marx's Communist Manifesto, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Lenin's State and Revolution, Margaret Sanger's Pivot of Civilization, Hitler's Mein Kampf, Freud's Future of an Illusion, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Somoa, Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and finally, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. If you're counting--that's fifteen total books (all for the price of ten)!

If you want to find out what's wrong with the world, you need this guidebook to help you understand how these fundamental philosophical errors have so deformed our contemporary culture.

The Good News!
Good Ideas Have Good Consequences. Here are the books that should form our hearts, minds, and souls.

We don't have to be the victims of bad ideas, or the mess they've created. In Ten Books Every Conservative Must Read, I take readers through the best books, the books we need today to re-form our minds and our culture. They are conservative in the original sense, conserving what is good in human nature, and preserving it from what is evil.

What books do I cover? Just as with the other Ten Books, I actually give you 10 + 5. We begin with Aristotle's Politics, Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Eric Voegelin's New Science of Politics, and C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man. That gives us a very solid, very Christian foundation for understanding what conservatism should be--a foundation built upon natural law.

We then look at Democracy with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and then The Federalist AND The Anti-Federalist Papers (both are needed to understand our Constitution).

Next, we enter the realm of economics with Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State, and Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

Finally, we take up literature, an area all too many times overlooked, but which is essential to proper soul-formation. Here, we go through Shakespeare's Tempest, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and the Jerusalem Bible (read as literature, in a translation that is unfamiliar to most of us, and hence can allow us to immerse ourselves in the story again).

And then there's the impostor, the book all too often put forth as conservative, but which is, to put it simply, wicked: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

To get a REALLY GOOD education, consider buying both books. They go together, and readers will get the most out of them if they read both, going back and forth between them, the good helping us see the bad more clearly, and the bad helping us understand and appreciate the good all the more.

Latest Blog Posts

Benedict XVI, Doctor of the Church

Perhaps it may seem a bit premature, but here goes: Benedict XVI should be declared a Doctor of the Church.
There are, if I count correctly, 33 such esteemed Doctors, the most recent being St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who died in 1897, and the most recently declared being St. Hildegard of Bingen, who died in 1179 but was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict in October of 2012. Benedict XVI would be number 34 (assuming no others are named beforehand). Click here for blog post.

Rethinking Religious Liberty

Does the right to religious liberty include the freedom to believe in a worldview (religious, quasi-religious, or otherwise) that undermines the dignity of the person, upon which the right to religious freedom rests?

Click HERE to read the blog post

Neo-Darwinism's Death

     In his newest book, Mind & Cosmos, atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel dares to criticize neo-Darwinism. According to Nagel, the materialist view “that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law…is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed hypothesis.”
     For Nagel, it is an assumption ripe for abandonment.
     Needful to say, neo-Darwinians have not taken kindly to Nagel’s criticisms. They’ve taken to roasting him alive…with words, for the time being.

Click here to go to the blog post.

The Church and the (Secular) State

Before Pope Benedict stepped down, he made sure that his flock of a billion-plus understood that the 21st century will be a time of evangelization.

That’s an order, although not a new one, but simply a restatement of Christ’s own missionary command to the disciples, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you” (Matthew 28:19–20).

That’s all nations, including those that were previously Christianized and have been de-Christianized by the modern apostles of secularization.

Both Emeritus Pope Benedict and Pope Francis understand all too well the difficulties that aggressive modern secularism poses for the mission of the Church. The secular state wants (at best) the Church to “shut up and sing” in private or (at worst) the Church to be driven entirely into extinction. In either case, evangelization is not welcome.

So, in our current situation, it is not the church and the state, but the secular state against the Church. As I’ve argued in Worshipping the State, the Church’s situation today is frighteningly similar to its situation in ancient pagan Rome, with an aggressive state desiring its removal.

Click here to read the post

Wiker on BookTV

Watch an hour-long interview about Worshipping the State with Dr. Wiker on C-Span's After Words
(Click on "After Words" above)

Why Liberals Aren't Critical of Islam (Part II)

What is it about the very liberal Obama Administration that it would ignore the explicit, written warnings in 2012 from a Saudi Arabian official about the soon-enough-to-be Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev? (Oh, and by the way, Russia had warned us of Tamerlan as well.)
     The Saudis denied him a visa to visit Mecca on pilgrimage in 2011. We, on the other hand, were cheerfully forking over $100,000 in welfare benefits to Tamerlan and his family while he and his mother became ever more radicalized by their re-embrace of Islam.
     But liberals, in government, the press, and academia, still refuse to allow a critical look at Islam.
    Why?

Read the full article at Human Events

Why Do Liberals Refuse To Be Critical of Islam? (Part I)

So what is it about liberalism that makes it so difficult for it to take a clear, critical look at Islam, even while liberals have no problem excoriating Christians for every imaginable historical evil?

I believe I can give at least a partial answer, if we take a big step back from the present scene and view the history of Western liberalism on a larger scale.

Read my article at Human Events.

Benjamin Wiker is now a proud member of the Envoy Institute's Catholic Apologetics Academy

Click here to go to the Catholic Apologetics Academy website.

Seven Myths about the Catholic Church & Science
A New 8-Part Video Series by Benjamin Wiker8-Part

Also available for pre-order!

Coming out in May 2013

Politicizing the Bible took us three years to write, and it is meant to be a revolutionary book. In it, Scott Hahn and I trace out the real, deepest roots of modern historical biblical criticism, and show why it has ended in the secularization of the biblical text.

"Years ago, then Cardinal Ratzinger called for a thoughtful critique of biblical criticism, and this book is the sort of study I believe he had in mind. As Hahn and Wiker demonstrate, historical criticism did not appear fully formed in the nineteenth century, and its problems are not primarily exegetical, but philosophical. Its intellectual roots reach back to the nominalism of the late middle ages, when subtle philosophical missteps set into motion alternate ways of reading Scripture that were alien not only to the Church and her tradition, but to the classical ways of interpreting texts. Historical criticism has its own history, and its development should be subject to the scrutiny of historical method, as it is in these pages."

Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, consultor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

"Hahn and Wiker have not only given us a notable work in theology, but one of the most compelling histories of political philosophy. I cannot recall any book that achieves that combination as arrestingly as this one. It is, altogether, the most remarkable of works."

Hadley Arkes, Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American institutions, Amherst College

"Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker have produced a scholarly masterpiece. The authors demonstrate how the roots of modern biblical criticism go back to the late medieval period, even prior to the Renaissance and Reformation. . . . The impressive combination of breadth, depth, and clarity achieved in this book is unrivaled in the field. By showing how these early critical readings of Scripture reflected and reinforced the "secularization" of modern thought, this work will have far-reaching implications on how the Bible is read in universities and seminaries, as well as how it is preached in pulpits. Politicizing the Bible is the most important work to date on the history of modern biblical criticism."

Jeffrey Morrow, assistant professor of theology, Seton Hall University

"Hahn and Wiker make the case that biblical criticism has been shaped by philosophical and political ideas that are often intrinsically hostile to Christian faith. This is an important work that will force its readers to readjust, and in some cases totally reject, what they had been taught about the objectivity and neutrality of contemporary approaches to God's Word."

Francis J. Beckwith, professor of philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University