I see what you are driving at... the fact/value distinction that Hume articulated.
Indeed. I'm not married to the sort of strict separation between them that I think Hume had, but obviously there's a distinction to be made there.
I think it's a good heuristic, but I don't believe in absolutism. I reject the Christian concept of sin or that there are absolute and objective moral laws.
I'd agree it's a good heuristic, and for Christians at least it should point toward love of God and love of neighbor. I just find it kind of vapid when the golden rule is thrown out sometimes by people who haven't thought too hard about it, as if the rule in isolation is the end-all of moral thought. Honestly I think I'm probably projecting past interactions with others onto you and inferring things you aren't really stating or implying. I apologize for that.
My perspective is as a spiritual humanist who is somewhat of a perennialist. The Rev. Dr. Gordon Bermant, the former bishop of the Buddhist Church of America, articulated it well in a lecture I saw a while back- western civilization has reached a dead end because it's divorced ethics from the rest of philosophy, instead of having ethics central to philosophical questions, as it is in Buddhism. The result has been nihilism, the sort of nihilism that Nietzsche prophesied. That is why you see moral decay and anomie in our society. Christian fundamentalism is merely a manifestation of that nihilism, and Christian nationalism even moreso. People believe in the forms of the religion, but discover it has no substance.
It goes back to that fact/value distinction I mentioned earlier. In divorcing value from facts, the door is opened to nihilism. This isn't an inevitability, but is due to the spurious use of reason and the assumption that there is no intrinsic moral ordering immanent in the world, no interrelationship between phenomena, etc.
Very interesting. Is that lecture online somewhere? If it is, would you happen to have a link to it? I'd be quite interested in checking it out.
Christian nationalism as a term is a little nebulous -- it can range from, say, supporting certain policies because you think those best reflect Christian teaching, all the way to clerical fascists like Codreanu and his Iron Guard. I'd somewhat agree about Fundamentalism, insofar as it's a reaction to some of the increasingly liberal theology that permeated a lot of Protestantism in the latter 19th century. That's not to say it's nihilistic in its outlook, of course.
I wonder whether the fact/value separation is in itself enough for the sort of Western nihilism you've described. My feeling is that it would have to come along with some of the other byproducts of liberalism (the Enlightenment kind), like the focus on the primacy of individual reason, the conception of man as a naturally free actor who ought not be constrained by unchosen duties and obligations, the erosion of the idea of moral authority, etc.
I also wonder how all this compares to the situation in places where Christianity was never really dominant, particularly in China or other parts of East Asia that were heavily influenced by Buddhism. I know a bit more about Japan than other places in this regard, but I wonder about China specifically because of their recent history.
Yeah, there are a lot of rabbit holes I'd love to go down.
