Christianity is under attack, and it has been so for several centuries. It is not a war between religion and science, as it has often been portrayed, but a head-on conflict between religion and religion, between Christianity and Secularism. The confusion of Secularism with science is understandable because Secularism so often poses as science incarnate, as reason finally come to earth to deliver humanity from darkness. But the fundamentally religious nature of Secularism is revealed both in its messianic pretensions and in the way it stumbles upon its own confusions.

Let us illustrate, using the latest assault on Christianity, what New York Times columnist David Brooks aptly calls Neural Buddhism. For a very long time—one would have to trace the lineage back at least to the English materialist, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)—secularists have been bent on reducing the mind to the brain, and the brain to the crude or elaborate interactions of its material-chemical constituents. The goal has always been quite simple: to reduce the mind to matter so that the bothersome notion of the spiritual soul could be buried once and for all (and with it, Christianity).

The lesson is simple as well. We didn’t discover in the late 20th century that the brain could be reduced to a complex of chemical firings and misfirings. The late 20th century obsession (e.g., Steven Pinker) with flattening the mind to the material brain was merely the playing out of the original secular passion initiated almost four centuries ago. Secularism was the goal that defined in advance what science was supposed to verify—the death of the soul.  Science was a tool for a particular ideology.

The good news is that reality becomes irritated with ideology, and pushes itself through the cracks in pre-conceived theoretical constructs. As Brooks points out, “Over the past several years, the momentum [in neuroscience] has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer.” Indeed, “Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states,” even showing that “transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain….The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.”

Perhaps you can already guess how scientists have cast out one demon, only to have their barely-swept house become inhabited by seven more worse than the first. It has stumbled upon the truth that, contra the materialist dream, even the material aspects of the mind are not reducible to the material aspects of the mind. That is earth-shattering news only to those whose view of reality was bound to earth by secular-materialist assumptions.

But this discovery—which is a stumbling upon the truth, not a grasp of its full contours and immensity—is set to cause more mischief than enlightenment because of the way that it is already being interpreted. It is taken to be a scientific vindication of a kind of Buddhist approach to reality, one that focuses on creating particular, interior states as the source and sum of religion. In such euphoric states, the self melts away into the indefinite infinite, and (states Brooks) “science and mysticism are [thereby] joining hands and reinforcing each other.”

Sound nice? Nicer than materialism? Think again. It is a personal attack; that is, an attack on the human person and a personal God which, while reminiscent of Buddhism, is really just yet another manifestation of Secular Religion.

Therefore, in calling it a Buddhist approach to reality we are being both accurate and misleading, for while it bears some resemblance to Buddhism, the “enlightenment” it promises is merely a rehash of the secularizing spirit of the West’s Enlightenment era, what Christian Smith insightfully called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

That’s the seven-fold stronger demon—spiritualized materialism—the same old stuff in a brand-new package, and seven times more toxic to Christianity. It has its roots in two aspects of Deism of the late 17th century. The first was the Deist desire to have an impersonal deity rather than a personal one, a deity that in splendid aloofness did not interfere with our plans for earthly self-fulfillment. The second, from more radical materialist Deism, was the desire to rid the world of the pestiferous notion of an immaterial soul. Jettisoning the soul meant we were merely material beings, that is, not persons but elaborate machines. Both aspects aimed at the ruination of Christianity. Deism accordingly lowered the aim of human life to earthly satisfaction and redefined morality accordingly as that which helps us all achieve the satisfaction of our desires.  Hence Moral Therapeutic Deism.

Back to the “latest” in neuroscience. The important thing to understand is that if the discovery of “self-transcendence” in the brain is slightly more scientific than crude soul-crushing materialism, it is far more potent an enemy to true religion. Brooks understands this with admirable but not entire clarity. The lovely hand-holding of mysticism and science is “bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.”

We add, they are going to have to defend the particular reality of the person, as something more than the capacity for a “self-transcendence,” precisely because (as with Buddhism) the person is being swallowed up in the generalized capacity. When that happens, the entire goal of religion becomes the worship of the feeling of self-transcendence itself—an impersonal therapeutic deity fuzzily projected upon the cosmos—rather than a real creature’s worship of the real Creator.