"Sacred Causes" a WSJ book review

Michael Burleigh has written a book called Sacred Causes, reviewed here in the Wall Street Journal. It is worth a read since it makes me want to read the book as an antidote to a certain smug triumphalism on the part of soi-disant secularists. While I consider myself a secularist in a political sense it is because I am a child of the Enlightenment. I do not share the view that a totally secular society is something good in its own right, nor is it the end point of human social and intellectual development. So I find this paragraph, for example, compelling:

By undermining European stability, Mr. Burleigh notes, World War I created a space for radical alternatives to the bourgeois norms that had gone before. He shows how the Protestant middle classes in Germany, for instance, distanced themselves from their churches, viewing traditional religious observance as the remnant of a discredited past. Science and culture, along with militant nationalism, filled the role that churches had once played, and the pattern replicated itself beyond Germany. A traditional outlook gave way to cultural pessimism, intensifying throughout the 1920s.

This type of secularism is a peculiarity of the horrors of the 20th century. And it can be pernicious if it leads to a blindness to the spiritual needs of the human creature.