Let’s begin
with a simple premise. The secular is more than one thing, but for our
purposes, in its most popular usage, it is living and managing without
reference to God. We might call this self-sufficient humanism. It is this most
common understanding of the secular that looms in the majority of our cultural
analysis. If we have concerns about the separation of church and state, if the
decline of religiosity raises our anxiety, if we struggle to find ways to
meaningfully include devotion to God in our investment strategies and household
chores, it all comes down to the simple truth—by and large we get along just
fine with no reference to God. Secular humanism is working.
There are other
definitions of the secular. One of those, popularized by Charles Taylor, refers
to the conditions for belief. Secular, in this sense,
describes a space in which belief is no longer axiomatic, where it is one
option among others. In secularity of this type, it is not that the world
becomes irreligious, but rather that the plausibility of either believing or
not believing become contested. In this secular space, belief and unbelief duke
it out, jockeying for position, becoming more polarized, at least potentially,
as each stakes out its position.
Early
indication of this polarization includes a recent Pew Forum study. They write:
“Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by
some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new
survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they
believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious
services all have declined modestly in recent years. But the Pew Research
Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious
landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely
attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they
do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S.
adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most
measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some
conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even
more devout than they were a few years ago.”
All three changes
indicated in this paragraph illustrate the rise of secularism in Taylor’s sense
of the term. Belief is no longer axiomatic, so increasing numbers of people do
not report being religious. Simultaneously, many report stability in their
religious belief, and by some measures those who are religiously affiliated are
even more devout than previously. It’s hard to see how growth in devotion is
not related somehow to the decline of religiosity, and a response to it. Local
faith communities across the country are noticing this shift in action. They
have less total members, but many of the members who remain are more active and
involved than previously, when membership was larger.
So the rise of
the secular in this sense, and awareness of it, can assist faith communities in
better grasping the transitions they are undergoing. Decline is not the story,
and in a way not even a story at all. Instead, in a secular age, the story is
the expansion and diversification of the plausible. In secularity,
self-sufficient humanism is on the rise; secularity, stability and considered
commitment to belief remains an option; and in secularity, increased devotion
remains as yet another option in response to the increasing contestability of
any particular system of belief.
With this
greater diversity of plausible systems of belief, it becomes increasingly
difficult to discern appropriate methods for presenting the plausibility of any
given system. Charles Taylor, in his A Secular Age, makes the attempt
via a lengthy exposition of the era of secularity he perceives, and then an
impassioned plea for the catholic faith he holds dear. In a follow-up work, he
argues “the best way to speak to one’s own era, and to read the signs of the
times, is to be deeply rooted in the whole tradition of the Church, through
many epochs and civilizations”. However, “this doesn’t
make the task easy. Indeed, those great theologians (from Vatican II) may turn
out to be a hard act to follow. In fact, certain tendencies in the contemporary
world may render our task even harder. For instance, Vincent Miller explores in
depth a trend to fragmented, narrowly defined, and often mutually hostile
identities which is encouraged by the present shape of the electronic public
sphere. This does not create a propitious environment for a sacramental union,
uniting people of very different cultures, who feel bound to each other and
want to know each other more”.
Getting to know one another
Do we want to
know each other more? One assumption of this essay is that we do, although this
desire to know each other arises from a more basic impulse—to be known.
Christians lamenting the loss of Christendom, in their fear and anger and
confusion, just want to be understood. But so do the newly secular, the
atheist, the agnostic, the neo-Pagan, the immigrant. The rise of the secular
introduces the complex scenario in which a larger range of worldviews present
themselves, seeking our attention, and so while we ourselves are hoping to be
understood, even hoping to understand ourselves, the demands of the multiple
require not only our sympathy and attention but also our own openness to
greater complexity of thought.
No wonder then,
an observable trend toward more fragmented, narrowly defined, and mutually
hostile identities. Such fragmentation and even hostility may be the best
survival strategy, attempts to bunker down in communities small enough to know,
safely and sufficiently likeminded enough to decrease the challenge of
contested plausibility structures. Make the community small enough and the
walls high enough and one might even get the illusion that the world is all
that is contained within one’s self-constructed hermetic space.
Within these
fragmented, narrowly defined identities, quite a lot of complex identity
formation takes place. In fact, some of the most complexly rigid theological
systems reside in tiny hermetic containers. Ideas about God, especially as most
churches and theologians present them (inasmuch as they inhabit such
containers), are hopelessly complex hypotheses that simply aren't needed in the
pursuit of a full and fulfilling life. So not only do most of these systems
alienate others inhabiting a different plausibility structure because of their
complexity and distance, they also fail at the level of empathy, because in
their systematic presentation of the full content of their system of belief,
they fail to notice the extent to which the other who they believe needs to
hear their beliefs actually simply wants to be known themselves.
Pair all of
this with the cynicism of our age and our quest for authenticity and more and
more people will be passing on the idea that religion clarifies matters of
ultimate importance. Secular humanism has a clear advantage because it begins
from what so clearly already is the case, no extra layers of transcendence
necessary. The world and all there is, the vast breadth of breathing humanity,
these are enough, sufficient for a capacious invigorating humanism, not to
mention struggling enough to make struggle itself or the escape from it
sufficient cause.
Being in and speaking to any age is
no simple matter, says Taylor. “We have to hold in balanced tension two stances
towards our world, the two kinds of catholicity which Robert Schreiber
articulates in his essay: one concerned with reading the signs of the times and
reaching out to our world in solidarity and communication—with particular
concern for the poor and deprived in all dimensions; the other more focused
inward and concerned with maintaining the full integrity of the deposit of the
faith."
The rise of the secular age results in greater attention to the signs of the
times than to the deposit of the faith, because the bright and shiny and new
always captures more attention than the already deposited. And yet, if we are
to take Taylor at his most earnest, we cannot overlook his profound insight,
that to hold these two in balance is the best way not only to maintain the
deposit of the faith, but honestly to read the sign of the times.
Getting better at
description
The academics
may be strangling reflection on the secular. Secular, secularism, secularities,
these are words captured by the academy and by implication not available for
common or popular conversation. At the level of practical discourse, the
secular is lived out in concrete implications. Examples include decline in
religious affiliation and commitment, and increasing numbers of people who
identify as secular, as Nones or as Dones. We know secularity is at hand
because so many of us, even those of us who identify as religious or even work
for religious institutions, still share with other human beings an historically
unique perspective: we have learned to live and manage our affairs without any
reference to God.
In this newly
secular context, the word God still appears. It is printed on our currency and
spoken in our pledges, named in some of our prayers and referred to in time of
need. Even so, with all the ways God is still named, life itself, the daily
practice of life, even for many religious folks, is lived and managed “as if”
God were unnecessary. We do not need to refer to God. Just sometimes we do, or
expect others to. In fact, often the shrill nature with which some demand the
continual naming of God illustrates, ironically, the extent to which we have
learned to live and manage our affairs without God. Hyperbolic rhetoric and
apocalyptic anxiety replace God qua God.
It remains
remarkable, for all of that, how little and how infrequently we directly
reflect on the secular. Perhaps it goes by other names, so the secular is
encompassed in many other discourses we engage more regularly. By secularity,
we may mean things like pluralism, globalization, public, networks, democracy,
capitalism, etc. It is remarkable, though, how little descriptive language is
available to us to describe all of those many people who are secularizing.
Notice that
secularization is described primarily by what it isn’t. People who are secular
are “nones”—they do not have a religious affiliation. They are “dones”—they
have left a religion. They are non or irreligious. They are a-theist, or
a-gnostic. All of these are negations, descriptive only by absence or
opposition. Yet the vast majority of those classified as “Nones” are in fact
living full and vital lives, weaving together a pastiche of spiritual and human
practices in many ways similar to the lives of those who identify as religious.
Most remarkable
of all, in spite of the difference in labels, the daily lives of those who
identify as religious and those who identify as secular are, in most respects,
the same. Follow a Roman Catholic around Manhattan for a day, then follow an
atheist around town the next day, and by and large you will see similar habits
and cultural commitments. Or, if differences do appear, they will likely be the
result of other factors, like race or class or aesthetic preferences. However
one looks at it, it seems increasingly arbitrary to even distinguish
statistically between a large group, the “unaffiliated,” and those who
affiliate with specific religious traditions, without gaining facility with a
larger repertoire of terms to describe the nuances of “unaffiliated.” We have
language to describe the many kinds of Roman Catholics. Isn’t it about time we
describe with greater accuracy the fastest growing group in our nation? Can you imagine if we
lumped all Christians into one sociological category: “Not Buddhist”?
Continuing the
comparison between those who are religious and those who are unaffiliated, the
actual shared dynamic is a paucity of language on either side of the aisle.
Sociologists of religion like Christian Smith have long observed widespread
inarticulacy regarding religion among the religious. Unaffiliated folk also
lack the verbal equipment to describe their own a-religiosity. It is as if,
regardless of religious commitment, or non-commitment, the shared dynamic is
failure of words.
But the absence
of words is not the absence of that for which the words serve notice. A feeling
often arrives that is in search of a word to describe it. What is frustrated in the
absence of language is the opportunity to articulate the feeling. What is
frustrated in the shift to secularity is the opportunity to adequately
articulate the complex culture that makes up our new milieu. It’s like we have
found ourselves in a brand new place, and have a phone available to call our
friends, but then can’t describe where we are in language anyone can fathom. As
a result, not only do our friends have trouble imagining where we are, or
visiting us, the reality is that we cannot yet see as clearly as we would like
the very place in which we find ourselves. This secularity in which we find
ourselves, it appears to us fuzzy, vague, evasive and receding even while it
intrudes. We can’t make it out and we can’t look away.
Those of us
attempting to focus our gaze may be readying our fight-or-flight response. If
the secular is dangerous (and it may be) then many of the various responses to
the rise of secularity are in order. Run away, retreat to another moment in
history dredged up from the annals of the everlasting nostalgia, and hope the
secular will not make an appearance. Or hide, exercising an athletic ability to
act as if the secular never arrived in the first place, or can be held at bay
by contrarian conservation. Alternatively, some few brave souls among us make
out the arriving secular and run to it with open arms, embracing it like a long
lost love that never was.
“The faithful are baffled by the problems that have come with
the loss of the conceptual vocabulary of religion, and, more generally, of the
language that can speak of and for the radical, solitary, time-bound self. The
authority of a model of reality that excludes the former on principle and the
latter out of a simplistic confidence in the adequacy of its own terms, its own
small sphere of reference, has distracted and demoralized the faithful, as it
would not have done if they were inclined to reflect. They are not alone in
being talked out of the meaningfulness of their own experience, but they are
perhaps more at fault for it than others, having had their souls as a conscious
and in theory a cherished and cultivated part of their inwardness. If they have
displaced the Holy Ghost with the zeitgeist, the choice is entirely their own.”
Secularity Has Not Been Tried and Found Wanting
Returning to
our failure of words, it is notable that in the English-speaking world, the
great exploration of the secular age arrived as a massive tome, a doorstop more
widely mentioned than read, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. There is
plenty to be said about this book, plenty to be repeated from it, but first of
all it is a book that offers language for that which we have struggled to
describe. It is a guide to the secular age that makes sense “of our situation
not by didactically explaining it, and certainly not by explaining it away,
but by giving us words to name what we’ve felt”. Taylor is unique in that
he both offers us language for what we are already feeling, and he also
explores the possibility of real secularism.
It is not that
secularism has been tried and been found wanting. Secularism has not yet been
tried. Even in the secular age, most seculars are still mythical at some level
or another. We have not yet been non-religious. Any account of secularization
needs take account of the multiple secularities, many of which are transitional
secularities on the way to the fully secular. Some of the secularization
secular theorists theorized has not come to pass—in particular, the complete
decline of religiosity. What has happened, as
Taylor makes clear, is a shift in the conditions of belief. Full secularity is
now plausible. We can begin to imagine it. “For the first time in history a
purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by
this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any
allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was
this true."
For those of us
retaining religious commitments but interested by the rise of secularism in
this sense, the opportunities lie in at least two directions. First, how might
our kind of religiosity partner with secularism in its goals of human
flourishing? Second, to what degree does (in my case Christian) religiosity
retain some advantages for human flourishing over secularity? And does it
matter? Our response to the first question likely rests in gaining greater
facility with the lexicon, keywords, geography, textures of the secular itself.
We cannot know our shared goals for a robust humanism until we know each other
better.
For the second
question (which is really two), we do need to answer the most fundamental
question: Does it matter whether
Christianity offers anything different or other than secular humanism? Here we come alongside the classic
Grundtvigian dictum: Human first, then Christian. The world increasingly
recognizes shared interests across multiple religious and secular perspectives.
Christians share much in common with the interests of secular humanism, and
should not worry themselves overly much on finding themselves appearing to
operate out of largely the same commitments as secular people. There will be
many shared "ends" even if the faith behind the ends differs.
Yet for
Grundtvig, there is still "then Christian." What is this "then
Christian"? My own suspicion is the answer hovers around issues of sin and
forgiveness, the true weakness of God in Christ, and similar resources in
Christianity not as clearly present in many kinds of humanism. Some forms of
secular humanism seem particularly vulnerable to co-optation by neoliberalism
and middle class values, and Christianity contains within itself unique
resources focusing Christians on a preferential option for the poor, and
radical neighbor love that overturns the morality of capitalist self-interest.
That being
said, there are likely forms of secularism that might articulate a
non-religious moral vision quite similar to my Christian one, and that is just
fine. Given that real secularity still emerges from the Christian context even
as it transcends it, separating religious and secular trajectories in order to
compare them functions more like the examination of a weave in a rug than
gazing at two separate and disparate objects.
Hinting at private and public
Finally, the answer to these
questions will of necessity relate to one other issue, the issue of diverse
publics and complicated subjectivity. Faith is both more private and more
public than ever. Secularity has greater access to the public inasmuch as
religion has been privatized and divorced from shared forms of democratic
rationality. But we are not used to considering the secular at the level of
subjective experience, which illustrates how much, although humanism is
considered in secular spaces, the effect of the secular on the human, and who
the human is becoming, is an embranglement of a curious sort.
In this sense, then, the study of
the secular and religious can helpfully inform both the public discourse,
perceived as it is as a largely secular milieu, and overcome the privatization
of faith. We might say the best outcome here, and a very important one for the
future of secular and religious life co-existing in this age, is a shift to
better understandings of the private nature of our secularity, and the public
nature of our religion. Inasmuch as spirituality can be re-publicized and
secularity can inform the daily human, our social imaginary will be
strengthened and offer more compelling resources for all of us who find
ourselves living, in various ways, "without reference to God."
"I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosophers thought is merely a way of making explicit their hold upon the world, which is all they are.
