"All governments sooner or later come to a certain 'dull irritation' with Christianity"

From a combox somewhere in cyberspace:

"Secular modernity has abolished not just religion or the scriptures as an objective guide to morality, but also any notion of God or metaphysics that argues against relativism and materialism. To the modern secularists, everything is politics and politics is everything.

"For you may be uninterested in politics, but politics is very interested in you: For many people, there are not two kingdoms, there is only one."

The less religious- and church-inclined people are, there more they look to other institutions to take care of identifiable needs of all sorts. Which makes a nice set-up for the following quotation from Frank Sheed, "A 2nd Thought on Religion and the Modern State," Sidelights on the Catholic Revival, 91:

"In his Ways and Crossways Paul Claudel states the essential problem: all governments sooner or later come to a certain 'dull irritation' with Christianity because Christians may be perfectly loyal yet cannot see them as really sovereign but only as overseers of material and therefore perishable interests: ' the neighborhood of eternity is dangerous for the perishable,' and the Christian lives in the neighborhood of eternity."

[Hat tip to JM]