Toward the end of the panel, Hitchens caused an uproar when he criticized the Pope’s recent comments for being anti-reason and said something along the lines of, “We are fighting a war to defend secularism.” ~Philip Klein, AmSpec Blog

At least I can understand why Hitchens would say something like that–secularism is something he values in the modern West and wants to preserve it.  I think this is awful, but it makes sense.  Atheists should want to defend secularism.  As it happens, I don’t think that we are fighting a “war to defend secularism.”  But who can explain why some conservative pundits also talk as if they wanted to fight a war to defend secularism and why conservatives say they want to fight to defend the glories of the Enlightenment? 

It might be one thing to defend these things because they are ours, that is, products of our civilisation for good or ill–like a really irritating cousin who continually embarrasses the family with his criminal record but nonetheless remains part of the family–but it is something all together different to stand up for them as if they represented some sort of superior model or desirable way of understanding the role of religion in society and understanding the world.