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Peter Kopa
A bit of history
As an introduction to this topic, I recommend watching Ronald Reagan’s speeches on YouTube, putting the phrase ‘Ronald Reagan man of faith’ in the search engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0CBP0NVeo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8s9cmtwqM4&t=11s
The people of Israel evolved in their history to a theocratic system of government, in which King David was chosen directly by God through one of his prophets. In Greece, too, the gods enjoyed the favor of political government. This union of the religious and political can be observed in almost all ancient civilizations, due to a healthy instinct to consider that all power comes from God, and therefore he must also enjoy the favor of the State.
In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church also assumed, in a supplementary manner, temporal functions, even legitimizing kings by means of public anointing. These were centuries in which temporal and spiritual power were intertwined in a way that today is considered unacceptable, but which then responded to the best science and conscience, both of the rulers and of the ecclesiastical authority. This situation allowed at least to impregnate the West with a Judeo-Christian culture, which in turn laid the foundations for the great scientific and cultural progress of the West.
Today the Catholic Church declares that it has only a purely spiritual function and purpose, and condemns any kind of coercion or favoritism of the State in favor of any religion, ideology or opposition to Human Rights. Most States, in turn, have ceased to be officially identified with any religion, except England, where the Queen is at the same time the head of the Anglican Church, analogous to Islamic States, where Sharia law also determines the function of the State. Other cases of lack of neutrality of the state are Russia, where the union of the Orthodox Church with the state is a doctrinal issue deeply rooted since the eleventh century, when it was separated from the Church based in Rome, and India, which in this sense has not yet been homologated with the other countries. Putin is well aware of the great unifying power of the Christian faith, so he strongly supports it in order to restore the unity of the Russian people, and, in the process, to achieve an electorate favorable to him. The government in China, too, is far from being ideologically neutral, as is Vietnam and all other countries where the Communist party still plays a leading role, as is the case in Cuba. Venezuela is a special case of ideologization, because the State intends to rule over the Church, taking the most elementary principles of justice and respect for human rights with it.
Origin of the lack of neutrality
The question of the ideological neutrality of the State is absolutely necessary due to the subjectivist philosophical relativism, introduced some centuries ago by Descartes and then continued by a whole series of philosophers, who abandoned the being of things, as a criterion of truth, to take refuge in the comfortable principle of ‘being for me’, no longer considering ‘being itself’. And for three hundred years this North European method has been falling more and more into the trap of denying the possibility of the true. The height of this erroneous reasoning – because its starting point is false – can be found in Hegel, Engels, Feuerbach and, finally, in Karl Marx, who gave the theoretical justification to the Russian revolution of 1917 and also, with other ingredients, to the subsequent birth.
Against the background of current thinking, the very concept of truth is a politically incorrect term, because the true being of the extramental world makes demands that so many do not want to submit to in order not to abandon their own pedestal. Accepting the truth would require respect for human dignity and the protection of human life, which would have enormous legal consequences. If in a State the rulers do not abide by the truth, they will inevitably support more or less conscious falsehoods. Thus, the thief is not interested in accepting natural ethical standards, because he would have to stop stealing. However, in mathematics and in the experimental sciences, if the truth of things had not been accepted, that is, the demands of natural laws, technological progress would not have been possible. In other words, the falsification of the truth, in all fields that cannot be proved mathematically or experimentally, is something very seductive, because it allows one to gain an advantage, even if it is no more than the self-justification of one’s own bad conscience. And where this process wreaks most havoc is in politics, because rulers, with the power of command they received through democratic legitimation, can manipulate and handle the truth at will, as we shall see later.
Every time in history the state has taken a partial ideological stance, the results have always been bad. The extreme cases have been the case of Nazism with its nationalist ideology at all costs, which imposed by brute force the annihilation of the Jewish race, and at the same time exalted the Aryan-German race. Equally nefarious were the results of the Communist ideology, which reduced man to his lowest materialistic expression, saying that he must be at the service of the State in its struggle for the abolition of social classes. Both ideologies have taken away the 59 million dead from the Second World War and 100 million sacrificed worldwide for communism, from 1917 until its final collapse in 1989, not counting Mao’s massacres in China, some 70 million more. When considering these figures, it must be borne in mind that, in all cases, the vast majority of the victims – especially in Russia and China – were not soldiers, but mere citizens.
But even before Communism there was an ideology that took many lives: the French Revolution of 1789, which consisted of violent opposition to the old regime of government by the nobility. The ideology consisted in the exaltation of a new concept of man, far removed from the Judeo-Christian culture, which motivated the persecution of the Catholic Church, against the majority of the French people, who never had the opportunity to express themselves through the democratic vote. Thus, the rationalist humanism expressed in the words of the battle of freedom, equality and fraternity was forcibly imposed. This error was soon revealed as such, when this same revolution was killing its own children, due to the emergence of various political sides in struggle for power. Later, Napoleon continued to rely on this ideology, although in a different way, but he also wanted to destroy the Church and the old regime. The spirit of the French Revolution even infected some political leaders in Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century, encouraging and inspiring the process of independence from the Spanish Crown under the Jacobin anti-Christian sign.
In our days, our western world -which historically has shown the highest degree of ideological neutrality- has for that reason the highest levels of welfare. That is why the emerging countries are inspired by it, adopting its form and style of life and thought. In this process of mimicry, the Internet and other means of communication and transmission of images and films play a very important, until now little known, role. However, this world of ours is not exempt from ideological tendencies in the States, or rather, in the rulers.
The essential function of the State is to exercise its power in the service of what the Constitution provides, which in all the countries of the Western world stipulates the validity of the Natural Law, expressing it through the guarantee of the fundamental rights and duties of man. These principles are the presupposition and the sine qua non of the ideological neutrality of the state, which indicates to the rulers, therefore, the limits from which their practice of government would become an unjust favoritism of a creed or a group ideology.
