There are a number of Christian concepts being imitated by secular religion.

Secularism is the most dominant false religion in the UK and it needs to be called out for what it is.  It is growing quickly in many countries and so it is worth listing the features of this false religion, with links to articles explaining each one.

As a false religion, it has a Creation Myth, religious ceremonies, a confession of faith, heretics and the many other features of religion, including sects.  It is aggressive and intolerant as demonstrated, for example, by secular repentance, see below, and is bent upon becoming the new Establishment.

1. Peter Hitchens speaks of “the false religion of politics” but politics as such is not a false religion.  Secularism is the false religion of atheism, which uses politics as a means of its enforcement. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 explained that it was time to replace older religions and to establish a new religion which the Manifesto called ‘religious humanism’. Some secularists even speak of American religion. Since publishing this blogpost, other commentators are recognising it. Dr David Starkey: “Totalitarianism becomes the equivalent of a religion – a bad religion. The religious impulse does not need God.” Woke is a new religion. We now have identity religion. Douglas Murray calls it a “pseudo-religion“.
2. Secularism has its own Creation Myth, along with its long list of doomsday Armageddon scenarios. These have developed from earlier scenarios of fire and flood to global plague, from giant vermin, rats or super ants. Then the 20th century brought its own fears of nuclear disaster when the atomic bomb was developed, followed by geocataclysmic upheaval when tectonic plates were understood, or an asteroid strike when the Yucatán Peninsula crater was discovered and thought to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. These scenarios developed into germ warfare when bacterial resistant to antibiotics developed.  Added to this list is Artificially Intelligent robots, while global warming is the latest scare story by secular religion. Climageddon is the latest addition to the climate change panic. Some even justify this secular ‘hell-fire preaching’. We are approaching “Climate Hell”. Then there is the ultimate “Black Hole Apocalypse”. Welcome to cheery secularism.  At least the soothsayers of doom keep the film industry busy. Coronavirus is the latest in a long list used by secular soothsayers of doom.
3. Secularism is working hard to become the new Established Religion. Charles Darwin’s burial in Westminster Abbey was arranged by what Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galston called a new ‘scientific priesthood’ to emphasize ‘the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution’ (Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, 1991 p. 665). Galston coined the term “eugenics” and in his will he endowed a professorial chair in eugenics in the University of London. He belivered that eugenics “must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion.” Desmond’s biography finishes with the observation that Darwin’s burial was “the last rite of a rising secularity”.
4. The replacement of Christian belief with secular religion.
5. The secular pulpit preaches daily to the nation. On 23/9/2019 Labour Party Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell began his Labour Party Conference speech with thanking “our missionary we send into the city of London to preach socialism”. Media war: “dog eats dog” – just as religions expose each other’s fallacies, so the secular media is exposing each other’s fallacies.
6. Our schools teach the secular catechism.
7. Just as atheistic communism had what Bertrand Russell called ‘religious faith in the Marxian gospel’ with its ‘religious dogma’, which should ‘not be questioned but believed in’, with a morality that ‘the end justifies the means’, so it is no surprise to find secularism muscling in on ‘the religious slot’ in broadcast media, the Scottish Parliament and similar occasions.
8. Secular theocracy as explained by Michael Portillo.
9. Secular ceremonies for secular ‘namings’, weddings and funerals by secular celebrants.  It has its Funday, a poor substitute for God’s weekly holiday.
10. Secular morality: political correctness is the new morality, noticeably omitting the first four of the ten commandments and modifying the other six.  Secular morality is selective.  Moral inversion turns morality on its head; noticed by intelligent commentators. Secular morality has shifting goalposts, seen in Wokism.
11. Secular nepotism.
12. Secular sin is addressed in its new form as thought crime, with social services and educational establishments as its Thought Police. Universitities, which are meant to be places of learning, challenging one’s thoughts, are at the forefront of no platforming and even recruiting students and paying them to report microaggression, described by commentators as a snoopers’ charter. Racism has replaced Original Sin with ancestral sin.
13. The penalty for secular sin. The search for secular evil.
14. Flying in the face of evidence, secularism’s false doctrine about man’s natural goodness contradicts the Christian doctrine of original sin.
15. Public secular confession imitates Christianity in public life. Not only schools but even the workplace must promote secular religion. “Compelled speech” is the new secular confession.
16. Secular repentance does not only change minds but unlike Christianity, the secular variety includes control freakery.  Aggressive secularism comes in various guises, using the power of the state to advance its cause. The accusations of various phobias (homophobia, islamophobia and antisemitism) are being used to shut down criticism and to force endorsement of unchristian values; this ‘change of mind’ is secular repentance. Even retweeting a persona-non-gratia is claimed to be evidence of supporting a ‘phobia’ and can lead to immediate suspension by a political party.
17. There is a secular equivalent to being born again called transgender for those who feel that they have been “born in the wrong body”.
18. The secular Confession of Faith includes 1. I believe that there is no God. 2. I will promote the hypothesis of evolution as a proven fact until it becomes the prevailing paradigm. 3. I believe that religious experience is hallucination or an abnormal interpretation of natural phenomena.  4. I believe that I have control over my life and my death and the death of my unborn child. The secular catechism is taught in our schools.
19. The secular Revolution in thought from Section 28 in 1988 to gender fluidity in 2017, under the guise of equality, is undoing the civil and religious liberties gained at great cost in the 16th-century European Reformation.  Control freakery is running wild so that Christians are now on the run from a persecuting state. Gender fluidity now includes transgender and pansexual since this post was begun.
20. Jockeying with other forms of competitive religion, the National Secular Society (NSS) wants to remove hospital chaplains, continuing the ‘militant secularisation’ of Britain.  The NSS aims to replace the Christian Establishment with a secular Establishment – exchanging one religion with another.  In trying to remove Christianity from public and private life, the Centre for Secular Space wishes to take up the space, although it is losing out to islam in Britain. Instead of the separationof powers, we now have Government-paid licensed media in Canada squeezing out opposing media.
21. Secular love is not Christian love.
22. Secular puritanism is one sect in secular religion. Secular puritanism is worse than Christian puritanism and has developed into ‘no platforming’ and BDS aggression.
23. Secular toleration is not even a pale shadow of Christian toleration.  It wishes to debar Christians from the political process.
24. Secular nihilism influences views about life after death, fears about the planet’s future and life on Earth is aborted, with secular family planning amounting to having no children at all, antinatalism as a philosophy wanting to be taught to whole societies for the good of the planet and because children did not consent to be born!
25. Secular swearing is part of the language battle to demean Christian terminology.
26. Secular debate has its own secular censorship.   Sensitivity readers are shutting down publishing choices and are worse than the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, which banned reading books which had been already published, whereas this new thought police want to stop contrary ideas being published in the first place.  Secular cultural warfare is very different from Christian warfare against sin.  It also bans topics and boycotts speakers from university campuses, called deplatforming or ‘no platforming’.
27. Secular grief interferes with personal grief and is politically correct.
28. The secular culture of death is creeping over society, increasing abortion, voluntary euthanasia and abuse of the elderly, and influencing the medical profession.
29. Secular science wants no debate over its locked-in gains.
30. Secular religion has its heretics.  Antony Flew was the archbishop of atheism in the UK before Richard Dawkins assumed the mantle.  When Flew changed his mind in his old age and in 2007 published a book There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, he was pilloried by his erstwhile friends.  He moved from atheism to deism, but not to Trinitarian Christianity. He ran out of time.
31. Secular fears about the future have been as apocalyptic as the Bible, but not as optimistic as the Bible. Project Fear is a regular secular tool. The ‘green economy’ will cost western tax-payers much and gender fluidity campaigners will cost employers through employment tribunals.

Secularism is on the wrong side of history and of eternity.

It is a false religion.

It is time to recover ‘the merry heart of Christianity’ with its good news.

Update:

19 Jun 2017: David Robertson writes on the religion of human rights.

28 Oct 2017: the dangers of secularism.

2 Mar 2018: secular puritanism.

20 May 2019: others before me have identified secularism as a religion. Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, the 19th-century Dutch politician and historian wrote: “… revolutions are here to stay and will grow much worse in scope and intensity unless men can be persuaded to return to Christianity, to practise its precepts and to obey the Gospel in its full implications for human life and civilized society. Barring such a revival, the future would belong to socialism and communism, which on this view were but the most consistent sects of the new secular religion.” He rejected politics ‘of the entire available spectrum of political positions, calling for a “radical alternative in politics, along anti-revolutionary, Christian-historical lines”.’ In other words, he advocated Christian politics.

19 Sep 2019: Douglas Murray calls identity politics a religion.

8 Oct 2019: others are also beginning to identify a new religion. The Scottish Christian Party has for more than a decade pointed out that the Green Party is a mixture of 1. environmentalism, 2. pseudo-religious pantheism supporting the gaia hypothesis of ‘mother Earth’, and 3. pink politics, being prominent and strong supporters of homosexual activity. 4. Others call them ‘water melons’, green on the outside but red on the inside – communism is back on the agenda. Communism is a fourth strand in the Green Party. After the cultural Marxism of the past decades, activists are doing their best to bring in the ‘revolution’ by international activism such as Extinction Rebellion wasting police time and tax-payers’ money.

9 Dec 2019: Freeman Dyson recognises an environmental religion against climate change. The increasing 40% carbon dioxide is beneficial and has greened the Earth by 25%. Climate change is too difficult to predict and none of the climate models are predictive. There is a strong correlation between the Sun and Earth’s climate. Others, even in Sep 2016, called it a cult religion, secularism having filled the void from declining Christianity. Carbon dioxide and water are the food for life.

12 Oct 2020: slowly others are realising that secular religion is global and on the march – Dmitry Babich: “the modern western ideology is a religion in itself, a very destructive one” – but it is interpreted as a war on populism. The new “online meetings are all recorded” and the scriptures of this new religion is “the new Normal“, which is what ‘the Powers that be’ tell you it is. It is the official religion of the European Union. This religion has devils, who are the leaders who have not submitted to this new religion.

24 Jan 2021: more people are realising that progressivism is a secular religion in competition with Christianity.

4 Mar 2021: secular economics: a “secular bull market” (at 13’40) in bonds is changing to a “secular bear market”!

17 Mar 2022: Dr David Starkey: “Totalitarianism becomes the equivalent of a religion – a bad religion. The religious impulse does not need God.” The last sentence is interesting, consistent with the idea that atheism is a false relgion.

18 Apr 2022: more and more people are realising that the West is in the grip of a new false religion – here is a comment on the identity religion portrayed on social media. Commentators are even getting close to identifying its Confession of Faith or Creed along with the death of critical thinking associated with false religion.

24 May 2022: more commentators are prepared to call atheism a “secular religion”.

10 Dec 2022: Neil Oliver on the new religion of climate fear.

6 Jan 2022: Nobel Physics Laureate Ivar Giaever said that “global warming has become a new religion”. It is “a religious statement”. Is Climate science pseudo-science? “Absolutely?”

3 Feb 2023: more and more people are recognizing the religious nature of secularism.

16 Mar 2023: putting the sexes against each other, replacing masculinity with feminity, following “the death of religion” in society, education and public life.

6 Apr 2023: The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, Andrew Doyle shows that others are beginning to recognise secular religion and its persecuting nature. It is not helpful to identify it with social justice, as it is anything but social justice, and it is more accurate to call it secular religion or ‘the religion of secularism’.

24 Apr 2023: the concept of secular religion is not new and the passion of secularism is much the same as any religion.