Day: November 11, 2010

This article by Fr. David Curry originally appeared in The Anglican Planet, 4 November 2010.

Post-Secularism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
By David Curry

IS POST-SECULARISM just another buzz word — or is it, rather, a term that captures the global realities in which we find ourselves?

For several decades we have lived, at least in the western democracies, in what social scientists, political philosophers and theologians have called a ‘secular society.’  In 2007, Canada’s most outstanding philosopher, Charles Taylor, wrote a great tome entitled A Secular Age.  In this new reality, religion is understood to have lost its relevance and the divine seems to no longer hold any power of enchantment.

Then there is Jürgen Habermas, a leading European philosopher who describes himself as a ‘metaphysical atheist’. He has undertaken to explain the assumptions upon which ‘secularization theory’ rests and to provide the counter to them, both empirically and intellectually. As he puts it, secularization theory rests upon three, initially plausible, explanations, which he describes as follows:

First, progress in science and technology promotes an anthropocentric understanding of the ‘disenchanted’ world because the totality of empirical states and events can be causally explained; and a scientifically enlightened mind cannot be easily reconciled with theocentric and metaphysical worldviews.

This kind of technocratic arrogance assumes that things are always progressing and that science has become our religion, capable of explaining all reality and utterly dismissive of the older philosophical traditions, ancient and modern (think Aristotle and Descartes), that understood the physical to be grounded in something beyond the natural.

Second, with the functional differentiation of social subsystems, the churches and other religious organizations lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, education and science; they restrict themselves to their proper function of administering the means of salvation, turn exercising religion into a private matter and in general lose public influence and relevance.

In one way, this marks the success of religious institutions. In preaching social justice, they have been listened to by the state which has created the social welfare society. Religion is widely assumed to be a personal matter and no longer has a public voice. It has become marginalized.

Finally, the development from agrarian through industrial to post-industrial societies leads to average-to-higher levels of welfare and greater social security; and with a reduction of risks in life, and the ensuing increase in existential security, there is a drop in the personal need for a practice that promises to cope with uncontrolled contingencies through faith in a ‘higher’ or cosmic power (from Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, April 2008).

The demographic shifts from the rural to the urban, from the agrarian to the industrial, and now from the industrial to the post-industrial, capture the experience of several generations along with the general sense, at least until the economic debacle of 2008, that things are getting better for all concerned and that there is really nothing to worry about. We don’t need to think about God.

Overall, the secularist viewpoint assumes the imminent disappearance of religion in all secular societies. The one exception to the rule seems to be America. But now, as Habermas goes on to point out, the United States exemplifies what is, in fact, a global norm. Contrary to secularist dogma, religion is in fact a necessary and inescapable feature of the global landscape, even in the most ‘advanced’ secular societies which now struggle to come to terms with a variety of religious expressions that affect social and political life, most controversially, for instance, in France, in Holland and in England. Yet it is actually a concern for all of the western democracies.

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