A woman has been elevated and will be celebrated.

No, sorry, I don’t mean Hillary Clinton, who finally clinched the Democratic nomination and won the endorsement of the president she served as Secretary of State.

I mean Mary Magdalene.

On Friday, a week after the Catholic Church celebrated the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis signed a decree making July 22 a feast day for her.

Magdalene, we know from the Bible, was a former sinner who came to be friends with Jesus. She sought the Lord, even after His death, and, because of her deep love, came to be the first to see Him at the empty tomb after His Resurrection. She was the “apostle of the apostles,” the first to go and do what all Christians are mandated by His Word to do: Tell what you have seen and share the good news.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. Upon making things official after the California primary, she declared: “We all want a society that is tolerant, inclusive and fair.”

Great sentiments. Unfortunately, there’s some reason for skepticism. She has also said that especially in the context of “reproductive health care … deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

In her new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe, which will be published later this month by HarperCollins, Mary Eberstadt describes “secularist progressivism today” as “less a political movement than a church.”

She calls the “so-called culture war” a “contest of competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in the more newly written figurative book of secularist orthodoxy about the sexual revolution.”

Eberstadt calls the sexual revolution “the centerpiece of a new orthodoxy and new morality that elevates pleasure and self-will to first principles. This has become, in effect, a rival religion. That is what explains the outsize hostility toward believers who have been minding their own business, or trying to educate their children, or expressing their faith in public forums — or otherwise behaving in ways that once invited no penalties, and now do.”

Just ask the Little Sisters of the Poor, who, as you may have gleaned from their name, serve the elderly poor who might have otherwise been cast aside. The religious group is in the midst of a years-long court battle against the Obama administration’s overreaching health-care mandate. Eberstadt writes, “From a public relations perspective, taking on the Little Sisters should have been the political equivalent of slapping babies.” The irony is that such extreme rhetoric has actually been leveled against traditional-minded people — including many religious leaders, especially the ecumenical coalition that in recent years has united to defend religious liberty.

In the furor of all this, It’s Dangerous to Believe is an opportunity for everyone to take a deep breath and take a few steps back, sit down and consider what’s been going on, why it’s happening and what can be done about it. A compendium of facts, some of Eberstadt’s most compelling evidence shows the damage being done to charities on the part of liberal secularists imposing their faith, as it were, on other kinds of believers.

Eberstadt’s plea is to “spur all people of goodwill” to see that things have gotten out of hand and that “tolerant and open-minded people, especially … secular and progressive fellow citizens” will work to find a better way. Let’s hope such people listen to her.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online and founding director of Catholic Voices USA. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 United Feature Syndicate