ABSTRACT
Many conservatives are so emboldened by the prophecies of the end of the secular century that they wish to re-Christianize America and to restrict the separationist principle in terms of a new theory of accommodation. In many parts of the world, secularism has been growing by leaps and bounds. In many Western countries secular liberals and socialist democrats also decided to mute their criticisms of religion. In many ways the radical critiques by socialists and Marxists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the modification of the worst excesses of capitalism, which became more humanistic in working conditions and other benefits. The right wing identified atheism with communism and secularism with socialism, and so it became difficult to defend atheism, agnosticism, and skepticism, or to sustain any critique of religious beliefs and values. A paradoxical turn in history thus occurred when the churches in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany were cast in the role of defenders of human freedom.
