Before the political changes produced during and after the French Revolution, morality and the law remained quite linked, so what was considered immoral, that is, the anti-social behavior, was automatically repressed.
Society tolerated a certain range of behavior and outside this range the law could not act to make permissible something immoral.
The laws usually needed support in morality, otherwise would find opposition in the people, in addition, to approve a law that was immoral was something inconceivable unless the government had the ability to repress people and win their discontent.
Therefore the law based on morality not only reduced the range of action of individuals in society, but became the first and largest counterweight to the rulers, sometimes even greater than that established under any system or legal form determined.
This is one of the many factors why we may not know any civilization without deity, because religious beliefs are generally responsible for establishing a moral or ethical rank in which the members of a society are based to act, including thinking, and as a consequence, a society that is clear about what is good and what is not, according to itself of course, can go in a definite direction.
When this ceased to be this way, when the Old Regime began to degenerate, when the link between the rulers and the moral was slowly lost, and government actions began to be justified based on the diffuse concept call Raison d'État, which literally translates as Reason of State, and which today we call National Interest, then, from this disconnection between rulers and the governed arose the weakness of the monarchies and the aristocratic regimes that were later exploited by the coming movements of the Enlightenment and in some cases Marxism that were in charge of burying the establishment.
Due to the repression since the State began to go above the moral, enacting laws that were above and that consequently expanded to the detriment of individual freedom, the secular movement argued that morality and the State should be separated for protect the individual from the arbitrariness of the rulers, on the other hand, the Marxist movements proceeded to abolish any link between morality and the State, consequently, the connection of the State with the customs of the people disappears. And although it might seem like an excellent idea from the point of view of individual freedom, it also brought with it some drawbacks.
The separation of the State from morality did not prevent the rulers from continuing to legislate arbitrarily, declaring certain institutions would not make the dynamic of power that had already been constituted change, in fact, this new scenario caused the arbitrariness, instead of decreasing, increase.
If there is no link between the morality of a society and the law, what links to the ruling governments and the governed? The votes?
So after the secularization occurred, a social scenario was created in which some individuals of society could behave immorally, but pass below the radar of the law, that is, the constitution of legally immoral behavior.
And although this does not change the fact that social condemnation keeps this type of behavior aside, over the years, slowly, but increasingly faster, society's receptivity to that type of behavior changes.
In a certain way it is something inevitable, society is an organic body, and by expanding the overton window in that way and allowing a certain behavior to continue to be part of the social body, that behavior will try, by its own impulse, to expand as much as possible. The problem, of course, is not found in the proliferation of new social behaviors, the expansion of ideas and habits of society is something that can be positive, in a natural way, societies constantly destroy and rebuild their habits and beliefs.
The problem is another, then, suppose that there are two different moral systems within the same socio-political body, one is highly restrictive but represents 95% of the population, and the other is not very restrictive but represents the remaining 5%. We could think that both moral systems can coexist in the same environment without affecting each other, that is, respecting, nevertheless, either by reproductive qualities or by conversion, the composition of the social fabric tends to be altered, which represents that one's behavior will grow proportionally to the detriment of the other.
Thus, secularization, by stripping the most restrictive moral systems of their natural self-defense mechanism, ends roughly favoring less restrictive or more permissive moral systems, and at the same time, immorality over any moral system.
The logical path of secularization could be the individualization of morality, where all the existing moral is the individual, but as the human being is a social being, and to face this scenario, it will probably seek to associate with other individuals with whom it shares customs and similar beliefs, establishing an association with their peers, this time, non-secular, and although voluntary, also highly conditioning.
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