All that said, however, there is such a thing as a Godless liberal — and, perhaps more to the point, a Godless liberalism. That is to say, there are self-styled "progressive" people whose worldview takes no account of our Creator, and thus of the nature we have as created beings. They're not always avowed atheists, but they're what we might call practical atheists: If they don't deny God exists, they do their best to ignore Him. They feel free to design and modify their own concepts of morality and their own models of basic human relationships (such as the family) as if these were things man invented and can re-invent as he sees fit rather than things handed down from above.

If you've never met someone like this, let me to introduce you to one Robert Reich. Reich is both a bright man (he holds a chair at Brandeis University) and an influential one (he was labor secretary under Bill Clinton), so he's worth paying attention to if you want insight into how a host of people see the world.

Reich has just put out a new book called Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America. The title sums up his theme: Liberals, he says, are sober, common-sense people, with sober, common-sense principles that sound unassailable, like improving "the well-being of all people, not just the rich and the privileged" and establishing "a democracy that gives voice to the little guy." By contrast, the modern American right, he says, is driven by fanaticism, especially religious fanaticism. His favorite words are "radical conservatives," which he often shortens to "Radcons": I didn't count how many times they pop up in his book, but suffice it to say it's a lot more than the number of pages (200-plus).

Now perhaps you're a Christian who's not wild about some figures on what's called the Religious Right, so you figure this epithet doesn't include you. Guess again. In the course of arguing that the greatest struggle coming in the world won't be the much-touted war on terrorism, Reich draws the battle lines:

The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.

Reich couldn't be much clearer: The enemy isn't just a few "radicals," but any religious believer at all, Christian or otherwise. Oh, he utters the standard pieties about respecting everyone's religious beliefs (he just doesn't want them "imposed" on anyone else), and even makes a brief pitch to the Religious Left to resume their formerly intense political activism. But the proposed alliance is purely tactical. In Reich's world, God's not in charge; man is, and God (meaning anyone who claims to know anything about His will) had better butt out.

Like most secular liberals, Reich pictures himself on the side of the forces of open-minded enlightenment, seeking to beat back the barbaric hordes of the narrow-minded fundamentalists. What's interesting, though, is just how narrow-minded he is. Having slammed the door shut on those who seek God's will rather than man's, he's afflicted with a severe case of tunnel vision that blinds him to any perspectives far from his own.

Nowhere is this clearer than when Reich deals with sex. "To Radcons," he writes, "unconstrained sex is evil. Sex outside marriage is evil. Homosexuality is evil." To Reich, these views aren't just wrong, they're bizarre. He refuses to take seriously the notion that intimate relations between a man and a woman are a precious thing designed by God exclusively for a lifelong relationship that mirrors (as best any human relationship can) God's love for mankind. It's just too alien to him.

So, for that matter, is history. Take this section on same-sex marriage:

Bill Bennett says "marriage is by definition the union of a man and a woman" and its purpose is "the quite specific end of procreation and the nurturance of the next generation." But how exactly does Bennett know this? A Canadian court came to a different conclusion in 2003, reasoning that "[s]ame-sex couples are capable of forming long, lasting, loving and intimate relationships," thereby opening the way for Canadian legislation allowing same-sex marriage.

What, exactly, is wrong with two adults obtaining a legal paper that attests to their lifelong commitment to each other?

There are good answers to Reich's question. (Click here, here and here.) But the striking thing is the way he frames it: as if he were up against no more than Bill Bennett's presumptuous personal opinion. In fact, he's up against virtually all Western civilization and most other cultures throughout history. If anyone's being presumptuous here, surely it's judges who imagine they can overturn that age- old consensus: By definition, they're the radicals — the ones at odds with the judgment of the ages. Even if Reich doesn't like that judgment, he's obliged to acknowledge it exists. But that would mean broadening his tunnel vision from "liberals vs. radical conservatives" to "liberals vs. almost everyone who's ever lived." You can see why he prefers to keep his focus narrow.

Of course, as the Apostle Paul notes (Romans 2:14-15), no one's devoid of conscience even when he doesn't follow it; and on some level, Reich must be aware that what he's endorsing amounts to a moral vacuum. From time to time, you see signs of his unease. Take abortion, about which Reich has remarkably little to say. He treats it favorably every time he mentions it (it liberates women to "pursue interests other than raising children"), but devotes only a handful of lines to abortion itself, and never talks about what it actually is — not even to argue that it doesn't really kill a person. Instead, he settles for the cheapest of cop-outs: As long as people disagree on the issue, abortion must be allowed. When the reality becomes too ugly to face, Reich doesn't wrestle with moral issues; he ducks them.

You also see signs of unease in Reich's treatment of the very idea of morality. He says that an across-the-board, anything-goes moral relativism won't do, and even says "there is such a thing as right and wrong." But since he rejects the idea that "human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority," the best he can come up with is a shoddy substitute he calls "public morality." (In brief, things like corporate scandals are bad and should be punished, but "private sexual behavior" must be immune to moral and social sanctions.)

To someone who's willing to think about it, this kind of "morality" raises a lot of questions (like "Why should morality be divided into 'public' and 'private?' "and "Why should anyone accept that distinction as authoritative?"). But Reich doesn't want to ask those questions, let alone answer them. What he wants is to feel moral while at the same time divorcing himself from the Source of any true morality.

Scripture captures the Reichian mentality nicely when it speaks in the book of Judges, of everyone doing "what was right in his own eyes." People seldom want to admit they're immoral; they just want to define morality for themselves — to put themselves in the place of God. It's a story as old as the Fall of Man. The secular liberal would like to see himself as a being at the forefront of progress, ushering in a new era of enlightenment. In truth, he's never gotten past the sin of Adam and Eve.