Hello there. I have selected a few parts and submit this to you with the hope of inspiring interesting conversation.
...certain fundamental values that promote humanism, freedom and human flourishing
It is possible that I have a mistaken understanding---I more or less take that as a given and as inevitable! (because knowledge is too vast, and too subjective, and too flexible, and too uncertain)---but the words you use: humanism, freedom, and even human flourishing, seem totally linked to 'European categories'. If this is true, then the language you use and the definitions ensconced in them, are expressions of those European categories. It seems important to note this. To get clear about the origin and the development of European ideation and its expression is (in my understanding) to understand and gain familiarity with the philosophical and religious underpinnings of those ideas. In my view these are so thoroughly interwoven that there is quite literally no way to winnow them out. They are inseparably connected.
So, to speak in this language: humanism, freedom, flourishing, is to speak a specific language that has arisen in a specific context, and from a specific ideology. Well, that is of course my view and my understanding. Perhaps I can cite an example or two to illustrate. I have made some efforts to understand the culture and society and the existential-religious speculations and practices of the so-called Hindus. To put it in a nutshell, for the sake of space, I don't think that the notion of 'freedom' would have had
any relevance or value as an ideal in those those successive cultures that came to build up the Vedic texts. In fact, it seems to me that quite the opposite was the case, overall. One is assigned a role and one is categorically
unfree in the sense that you mean. The freedom you speak of is a radically new and different concept. It is also a very questionable concept. Meaning, many questions can be put to it, it can be interrogated. Without launching into another paragraph I think that the word 'humanism' is also completely laden with nearly totally Western ideals and definitions. In other contexts (cultural, historical) the notion of humanism does not exist. In any case I have not come across it.
There are of course, ideologies that are incompatible with that: Fascism, totalitarianism, theocracy and monarchy come to mind.
There is a problem here, too. The word 'fascism' is linked to a specific---and a very late---event in European history and so it is one of those troublesome hot-button words, and problematic for that reason. But I will move rather quickly to my point: It is likely that any historical society and cultural organization that we could name, be it Incan or Aztec society in the Americas, or the Persian cultures, or the Chinese cultural and governmental organizations, as well as Medieval Europe, or the cultures of the Near East including Judea, would be termed fascistic, theocratic and monarchical, homophobic and misogynistic, and antithetical to 'freedom', to 'humanism' and to 'human flourishing'. If what I am saying is true, and if I am right to locate these terms within European categories, then perhaps we could say, accurately, that what we moderns do, what comes naturally to us, is a mental act of revisionism where we 'judge' historical cultures from our present---and modern---perspective. As you will have guessed I find this very curious and also somewhat 'suspect' (placed in quotes to soften it somewhat).
What we seem to do is to function and operate from our ideological certainty (and it is ideological through-and-through) and to assert it, or insert it, or perhaps to 'wield' it and sometimes 'inflict' it ... on other cultures over which we stand as judges. And then also back in time in a reverse-engineering manoeuvre which I think must be examined. It is essentially an ideological praxis.
The key, however, is that while liberal democracy has a small minimal core
I don't (honestly) wish to bring up too much and so much so that it cannot be discussed, however I think it needs to be said: Our societies seem to be democracies, in rather remote senses, but are not comparable to the Greek democracy of the Greek polis. Democracy, as Noam Chomsky has said, likely only exists in a few Swiss cantons (!) We live in radically weird pseudo-democracies, understructured and perhaps determined by vast and interconnected mercantile interests, which hold so much sway in the so-called public domain that it is difficult to say if any single person is really 'free' in the sense that you mean ... I could go on here. It is highly questionable if any single individual out of the 'free' majority, has or employs their 'freedom' in ways that, philosophically and idealistically, we would say is 'good use of human freedom'. The freedom that you are speaking of could rather easily be flipped, conceptually, and made to signify
license, and the word 'license' could then be inflected with various negative modifiers.
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That 'the Christian and Jewish liberal traditions are repudiations of the basic doctrines found within those religions', and the topics of Homosexuality and Misogyny (so-called) and the 'definition of woman' are topics I refrained from commenting on, for time-constraints. It may be possible to get to them at another time.
And a PS:
You used the term 'secular Christian'. Isn't this a contradiction in terms? I certainly do know what you mean though. You mean people who may, previously, have been members of a more strict and traditional religious-social setting but who now have become (more) integrated with general society.
It has always seemed to me to be true that when the classical shtetl Jew left the shtetl and 'assimilated' (in whatever degree), that the *real* Jewish contribution began. There are many modern intellectual figures we could name who illustrate this shift. Freud, Marx, Einstein, etc.
Still, I do not think that the liminal area can be determined to be non-religious. If one follows some of Peter Berger's ideas what we moderns do is to divide our consciousness: we have a secular self or person for secular purposes. But we have a religious self and person for religious purposes. We divide ourselves in strange ways ... to keep hold (I suppose) of the connection to the religious content ... or as a metaphysical manoeuvre to hold to the divine.
