Yet I could not escape the thought that the victory of secularism is never final, but rather the battle goes on, even today, and especially in the United States
Excellent observation.
I think it
is a fragile, eternally incomplete victory and even today one largely confined to Westernized regions of the world. In point of fact, many Westerners themselves fail to recognise just how delicate this precious arrangement that we've inherited from our forebears really is. We take it for granted or - in some cases, as with "
In God We Trust" laws in the United States and Orbanism in Hungary - even militate against it, unmindful of what the alternative would be if we played with that fire.
Sacral monarchism / a theocratic compact between throne and altar is the oldest form of human political ordering, as you have very cogently outlined in your OP. (i.e. in terms of how critical it proved to the actual emergence of settled, urban and agricultural society). It may be the case that Gobekli Tepe testifies to an even earlier precursor or variant, whereby (formerly) egalitarian hunter-gatherers bands on the cusp of the Neolithic Revolution 11,500 years ago embraced the first hierarchies under priest-rulers/shaman-rulers to mobilise workforces for temple-construction.
Secularism, essential though it has been in enabling Western (and Westernized) peoples to conduct lives of freedom that would scarcely have been conceivable to our ancestors, has only existed to some degree for a couple of hundred years and surfaced for reasons that were in some sense
accidental - that is, because Pope Gregory VII had the insane, heretical idea one day of implementing a political Augustinian programme and fighting a revolutionary campaign to deny the Holy Roman Emperor his traditional "sacral", religiously sanctioned function that every king had boasted since time-immemorial. Gregory was then succeeded by the Protestant Reformers some four hundred years later and their daring articulation of the "
two kingdoms" doctrine and the Catholic Jesuits with their papal-sanctioned ideological crusade against the divine rights of kings and royal absolutism, which culminated in the Puritan victory of the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War in the 1640s and their trial-execution of their self-declared "
god-appointed" monarch for crimes against his own people, followed just over a century later by the American Revolution in 1770s and the world's first purely secular constitutional republic.
Secularism is not the fruit of 'Christianity' (the Byzantine Empire and modern Putinist Russia puts paid to that notion) but rather the product of developments particular to
Western Christianity after the Papal Revolution of the 1073-1122. Its founding fathers are Gregory VII, the Protestant Reformers, divine-right opposed Jesuit priests, the Levellers and Puritans of the 17th century and the American liberal revolutionaries, culminating in the ascent of rationalist, public irreligion during the French Revolution (1789-1799). It is a profoundly revolutionary ideology that overturned millennia of human assumptions regarding the interrelationship between society, throne and altar. And ironically its earliest antecedents - its intellectual precursors - are found among the ranks of Catholic Papalists, Jesuits and Calvinist Puritans, without whom it would not exist (fact!).
If a hypothetical time-traveller, desirous to see the effect of the grandfather paradox on modern civilization, were to go back and assasinate Pope Gregory VII or Martin Luther or Oliver Cromwell or George Washington before their careers began, where would we be today?
It also demonstrates, in my opinion, that the Marxist-mechanistic reading of history errs in failing to consider the agency of individuals alongside the determinism of material-sociological trends which extend beyond human volition. The collapse of Communism in most countries in 1989-1991 evidenced that no societal outcome - i.e. the 'victory' of proletarian, post-capitalist planned economics to make way for a stateless utopia without private ownership - is 'etched in stone' and certain to transpire after a particular stage of development. We are more like blind-watchmen standing on the shoulders of giants with their feet balanced on egg-shells, just like we are ourselves the product of generations of men and women deciding to have sex with one another (any one of them may have not have done so, thus resulting in no 'me' or 'you'!).
And I think that is a rather humbling and sobering reflection.