Mark J Cherry
Extract
Jürgen Habermas’s recent observations regarding the increasing gulf between traditional religions and contemporary secularism is correct (2002, 2008). The dominant bioethical and political ideologies of the contemporary Western world have come to be not merely secular but often passionately atheistic. Throughout Western Europe and North America, for example, there is a growing movement to undermine the salience of religious discourse, to undue its influence in the public forum, and to erase religion from the public space. Attempts to frame all of medicine within a completely secular morality, relegating religious belief and practice to the realm of private personal choice, have become ever more prominent. Here, one need only consider the current clash between the US Roman Catholic bishops and President Obama’s administration over whether Catholic employers, such as Catholic hospital systems, ought to be legally required to provide insurance coverage for artificial contraception, including abortifacients, in their employer sponsored health care plan.1 In law and public policy, there has been a profound rupture from Traditional Christianity, which secular proponents aggressively seek to place in the distant past, as if Christianity had been an unfortunate, perhaps immoral, accident of history. Habermas’s acknowledgment of the vast divide between traditional religions that approach the world and moral analysis with knowledge of a God Who commands, and secular worldviews that begin all epistemic and normative analysis with the prior assumption that God does not exist, elucidates the fundamental debates of contemporary bioethics.
Cherry MJ. Conscience clauses, the refusal to treat, and civil disobedience-practicing medicine as a Christian in a hostile secular moral space. Christ Bioet. 2012 Apr 01;18(1):1-14.
