In Saturday's Guardian there's a review by John Gray of Will Hutton's The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century. Gray criticizes Hutton for his treatment of the 'human costs of Maoism' - something I also put in question here a few days ago. But the review centres around Gray's scepticism towards the idea that the institutions and values now associated with the Enlightenment should be seen as normatively important for future global development. He repeatedly refers to this kind of thinking as a faith, and he writes:
In its most influential forms the Enlightenment has always been an ersatz religion - think of Marxism, for example - and in response to the shocks of the past years it has undergone a fundamentalist revival in much the same way that other faiths have done.There are two points, I'd like to make about this.
First, not every kind of belief is a faith in the way that religions are said to be faiths, and it isn't useful to refer to every kind of belief-system as a religion. One could, for example, envisage a religious cult based on the game of chess, with King, Queen and/or Rook figures that one had to worship, and even Bishops who could be like bishops. But the mere fact that I think chess is a complex and absorbing game, and a pretty good one too, is not meaningfully a faith, and someone who devotes a lot of his or her time to playing chess or promoting it is not the practitioner of a religion in any sensible way of using that term that remains close to its primary meaning.
Second, therefore, even if a commitment to (what are known as) Enlightenment values could be elevated into a dogmatic faith, it doesn't follow from the bare fact that someone favours (say) liberal-democratic institutions, freedom of speech and opinion, fundamental human rights, the value of tolerance, and so on, is the adherent of a faith in the pejorative meaning Gray appears to want to give this. They may just think that there is persuasive evidence for the belief that societies based on these institutions, practices and values give people a better chance of living well together. The view can be contested, of course, but that wouldn't be a religious dispute; it's a disgreement in moral, political and social theory and policy.
Gray himself speaks, towards the end of his review, of 'realising universal human values', but he doesn't spell out what he thinks these are, or why some of the ones I mention in the paragraph above don't count as being universal.