Secular Revival

Tags:: Barack Obama,; Charles Darwin,; Chateaubriand,; secularism,; Sigmund Freud,; Warren Breckman

The emergence of modern secularism over the last several hundred years has been truly epoch-making, and it has reshaped our entire world. Even in regions of the world where religious revival has taken virulent forms, fundamentalists encounter champions of secularism. Where secularists are absent, it is only because they have been imprisoned, killed, or driven out. Where religion once sealed off the limits of the thinkable, in the modern era a new epoch cracked open these closed boundaries. For unprecedented millions around the world, fundamentalist belief has become more and more one possible choice among several. The actual clash that defines our world is not between allegedly Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations, but between closed and open worldviews. It is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash within them, among their members and among the possibilities existing within these specific cultures. An open worldview is capacious enough to embrace both religious belief and outright nonbelief. Here, the secularist worldview actually intersects with the examples of moderation and tolerance found in all the great faith traditions.

Yet, insofar as this is possible, it is only on the grounds prepared by secularism. For secularism emerged historically as the only mode humans have found to successfully and peacefully manage the tensions of diverse belief systems within a pluralistic framework.

To understand this point, we need for a moment to set aside our discussion of secularism as a worldview based on nonbelief and instead consider secularism from another angle, namely the institutional development of the secular sphere. And to do this, we need to recall the long history of the distinction between the religious and the secular within the Christian tradition. This is a distinction as old as Christianity itself.

Jesus Christ himself counseled, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” St. Augustine enshrined this division as a philosophical principle when he separated the city of God from the earthly city, and drew a sharp line between the sacred history contained in the Bible and the secular history of the affairs of men. Medieval Christian thinkers distinguished between the spiritual and the temporal, medieval lawyers distinguished between ecclesiastical and temporal powers. These two powers were meant to operate together in a harmonious and complementary way, though in actuality the Middle Ages witnessed almost continual competition between the Pope and the worldly monarchs. Ironically, secularism has its origins in this Christian idea of the saeculum. Of course, the original Christian concept of the secular had nothing to do with nonbelief, but with a division of human reality into two distinct regions. Moreover, in the medieval imagination, the division between the ecclesiastical and temporal powers was unmistakably superseded by the higher power of God. Yet the seed was planted for the development of the modern idea of a secular state and society.

The modern democracies of Europe and the Americas all, in some way, preserve this division between the secular and the religious. But a funny thing happened on the way to modernity. The relationship between secularism and religiosity got reversed. Where religion and the all-encompassing reality of God defined the boundaries of the medieval secular domain, in modern democratic societies the secular envelops the religious. The secular sphere now sets the appropriate boundaries of religion within public life. Of course, it is a basic dimension of this modern arrangement that the state does not meddle in matters of private conviction, but make no mistake: it is of fundamental concern to the state that it retains the right to define the relationship between private belief and public life. Insofar as believers bring their beliefs into the public realm, they have to operate on the terms of this secular arrangement.

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In volume III, numberI, Religion, on pg. 211 there are superhero avatars for different 'faiths', however for Muslims there is none. It may be suspected that 'political correctness'/fear has reared its censorious head by the exclusion of an avatar for Allah. Say it isn't so. Was it the publisher? I'm sure this has probably been pointed out by others.

Posted by john lewis beaufait on Wed 3 Feb 2010
Well its time to make the division between the true and pure secularist and the one that is 'tainted' by religion. I think the answer the author searches, yes searches, for is not in what secularism expounds but what it lacks. The weakness lies in the un-conformity of the secularism belief. If the foundation allows hypothesis that verge on any spritisitc satisfaction than the end does not justify the means. I speak of the other realm that does exist and if this belief eludes it and acts as if it is not there then there will forever be a lack of satisfaction of a basic human need.

Posted by Tara on Mon 1 Mar 2010
"Barack Obama’s eloquence is often leavened by biblical resonances, and his message of hope taps the veins of religious yearning and expectation that marble the bedrock of American oratory."

C'mon now. You have to admit that's stretching the definition quite a bit. If leavening one's eloquence with biblical resonances and delivering a message of hope (or reacting to the same) counts as being religious, then I daresay none of us are secular.

Posted by Aaron on Fri 19 Mar 2010
Proud to be a member of the least trusted minority. To 'believers' I say, "I don't trust you either."

Posted by Diomedes on Fri 20 Aug 2010
"...Defenders of religion are all too ready to claim that secularism offers at best a wizened form of experience and sensation. Such a view has us moderns living within a purely immanent world, blocked from any relation to a truly transcendent sphere. In such a world, the colors are a shade paler, the sounds a tone flatter than in a world touched by the divine...."

Yes, they would have us believe that believing in the fantasy of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus makes life more beautiful. In reality, it only keeps us children wanting someone else to be responsible for our lives, abdicators en masse - abdication from taking charge of our lives, and dumping it all instead on a Santa Claus on a cross or on a dead Easter Bunny revived after three days.

We might as well accept Disney's realities where animals talk in English and walk on their hind paws - and clutch things in thumbless front paws.

Religion, at best, is an open-hearted social club; at worst it is the War of the Roses and 9/11, mixed with beheadings and the Inquisition, right wing religious wackos (and Wacos) and burning innocents at the stake. Left to its own devices, those are precisely what religion becomes. Religion without secular tempering is a terribly dangerous thing, destructive of individuals and intemperate in the extreme. The idea of religion as a benign connector of people or as a conduit to the divine is a cover story, a scam, a hucksterism of the lowest sort. The end goal is always to tell people that a free and pleasurable life is undesirable and contrary to the will of some imaginary deity, in order to empower a select few to control and destroy those whom the few disagree with.

Compare the joys of life on a wide scale during the eras when religion dominated, versus our secular times - which has brought individuals' lives more joy, more prosperity, more capacity to live, more ability to experience the world that was created?

What deity would choose for his most sentient creations the former over the latter?

I rest my case.

Posted by SteveGinIL on Wed 13 Jul 2011