As Martin Luther King Day draws to a close, I can’t help but utter a plaintive gibe against the rise of secular fundamentalism and its secular “saints”. It’s not that I have anything in particular against Dr. King, any more than I have anything in particular against Lord Nelson or Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s simply that I would rather show reverence and deference to the saints in heaven, canonized by Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, than to genuflect before the secular saints of the seemingly almighty State.

I am uneasy worshiping the “civil rights” of modern secularism, with its protection of the “rights” of the practitioners of infanticide, or its insistence on the “right” of sodomites to “marry”. It is indeed significant that one of Dr King’s daughters is active in the pro-life movement and there is little doubt that her father would have been less than happy with much that is being forced into law in the name of “civil rights”.

It should be said that I am also uneasy worshiping the imperialist “saints” of the Pax Britannica, those icons of British imperialism of which the aforementioned Nelson is a prime example. As an Englishman, I am frankly embarrassed that my country has placed a statue of Nelson on a column in the middle of London, which is higher than the column outside the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore on which the citizens of Rome have placed a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

I am not a Frenchman but we should not need reminding that the secular fundamentalist creed of liberté, egalité et fraternité led to the slaughter of the guillotine. Nor should we forget that the aforementioned Napoleon was the first of the great modern dictators, the prototype for the Stalins and Hitlers who followed in his wake.

No, I am not comfortable with the worship of secular gods, especially if they are sanctioned and canonized by the godless State. It matters little to me if the godless State is the British Empire, the French Republic or the US Federal Government, all of which, to one degree or another, are the Orwellian monsters that this deplorable epoch produces with sickening frequency. Thus, I hold my nose on Martin Luther King Day, not as a mark of disrespect against Dr King himself but as a protest against the sort of government that mandated a “day” in his honour. May Dr King rest in peace and may secular fundamentalism rot in the hell that it has prepared for itself.