For the past four years, secular folks have been concerned with the threat posed by White Christian Nationalism and the Trump Administration’s subservience to the religious Right, particularly regarding the appointment of conservatives to the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. The new president is a pious Catholic and regular Mass-attender, so we can expect moves to rehabilitate the tarnished image of the Catholic Church, which has been badly damaged by the priest scandals over the past thirty years. There will be new potential threats to the cause of church-state separation as religion becomes respectable again. This restorative trend is symbolized by the prominent placement of a photograph of Pope Francis in President Biden’s Oval Office. Biden also highlighted his Roman Catholic faith allegiance when he invited congressional leaders to join him at a Mass prior to his inauguration. Biden’s liberal version of Catholicism clashes with Church teaching on “culture war” issues of gender, sexuality, gay marriage, and abortion, where he now defers to liberal political opinion. Yet undoubtedly, we will be hearing more about other aspects of Catholic social teaching, such as solidarity and subsidiarity and the common good. Pope Francis’s criticism, in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si on the environment, of the excesses of capitalism and the market for its “unruly freedom” that causes pollution and global warming will presumably offset the divide on “moral issues” between the Democrats and the Church.

The other factor that reinforces the rehabilitation of religion within the Beltway is the new influence of the Black Church. Biden and the Democrats were highly dependent on the votes of African Americans for their electoral success. Prominent adherents have been appointed to the new administration, and Vice President Kamala Harris has strong ties to the Black Church. One early sign of this trend is the resurrection of the Office of Faith and Neighborhood Initiatives, a mechanism linked to public programs for projecting large amounts of resources into church-related institutions in Black communities. The funding of religious health, social, and welfare bodies—and the religious privilege that goes with them—are areas where the conservative Supreme Court and the Biden Administration will have consensus.

The dominant consensus among cultural elites is that Black churches and their clergy are the voice of African Americans. This was highlighted by the Georgia Senatorial election in January. There was no criticism from any quarter that a member of the clergy, the Rev. Dr. (now Senator) Raphael Warnock of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was one of the Democratic Party candidates. Secular organizations did not raise the church-state separation issue, which undoubtedly they would have done if the Republican candidate had been an Evangelical Christian pastor. This is not surprising given the fact that survey evidence shows young progressives are less worried about church-state separation than other constitutional issues. It also reflects the Zeitgeist whereby Black culture is valorized, and any criticism of African American behavior or culture is taboo.

Secular liberals need to be reminded that prominent African Americans of the past, such as Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and James Baldwin, were critics of the institutional role and influence of the Black church and viewed its theology as a barrier to their people’s social progress. It may be unpopular to state it, but many of the deficiencies and scandals we highlight today in the White evangelical churches, such as homophobia and misogyny, also occur in Black Churches. This includes peculation: overly generous clergy compensation and the ostentatious materialism of some prominent pastors serving disadvantaged congregations.

Another sad oversight by secularists and their organizations, as well as the normally vociferous “woke” contingent, is their indifference to the tragic situation now emerging in Afghanistan. After enormous economic and military investment during twenty years of war, the United States and its NATO allies are about to accept defeat and abandon the country and its people to the renewed depredations of the resurgent Taliban. Reason, science, human rights, women’s education, and freedom will vanish as the clock is turned back to 2001 (but really to the fundamentalist patriarchy of the Middle Ages). Muslim religious fanatics have timed out the limited attention span of the contemporary liberal West. The local casualties will be numerous, and many unfortunates will fill the ranks of refugees seeking asylum in the West. We can expect new calls and pressure for Secular Rescue.