For much of the twentieth century, certain Western sociologists embraced the same prophecy (i.e., theory) with ease and total confidence. They claimed that as science continued to advance, global economies modernized, and literacy and education spread, religion would steadily retreat into history, dismissed as a superstition from a pre-enlightened era. Religious faith, we were told emphatically, belonged to humanity’s childhood, and, like childhood things, should be disposed of in maturity. The future would belong to the unparalleled power of reason alone.
The problem is that this outlook mixed up two things that should best be understood as separate: secularization and secularism. If we are to posit an operational definition here we can place ‘secularization’ as being principally the diminishing authority of religion in the institutions and public consciousness of Western society. In contrast, ‘secularism’ denotes the philosophical conviction that public life can and should be ordered independently of any religious commitments or associations.
As a result of the rise of secularization, a fundamental misconception has emerged among certain intellectuals and architects of modern public institutions. It is the assumption that secularism represents a condition of moral and existential neutrality. This is posited that an idea is not confessional; ergo, it must be objective. However, the constitutional principle of religious neutrality is not synonymous with the idea of moral neutrality, nor does the separation of religious authority from the state require the exclusion of religious thought and perspectives from public life. Warren Nord observed this in his examination of the American educational system. He noted that the gradual secularization of public institutions was not born out of legal requirements. Instead, it reflected a concerted effort on the part of scholars and educators who increasingly regarded religion as superfluous to the understanding of the contemporary world. The epiphenomenon to evolve out of this has been institutional preference for secular explanations, frequently presented as though they were independent of any particular philosophical commitments.
What has become plain, particularly in the last twenty years or so, is that secularism is not neutral, and more to the point, it is confessional with its own brand of dogmas and pantheon of humanistic deities. Fundamentally, it carries a number of axioms about human freedom, rightful authority, morality, and the purpose of life, all of which are unquestionably religious propositions. Further, it has developed its own moral vocabulary and its own theory of human nature. It is not necessary to regard secularism as a religion in the theological sense to recognize that it functions as a comprehensive worldview rather than a neutral referee between competing beliefs. In that sense, it has functioned perfectly as a state religion for some time, all the while pretending that it is beyond bias or criticism.
Admittedly, secularism was not born fully-formed. While present in our discourse since the end of the Thirty Year War in 1648, it did not gain immediate traction until the nineteenth century, being coined by the English essayist George Jacob Holyoake in the 1850s. When secularism entered into our civil discourse, the promise of this worldview was admittedly very attractive. Europe was devastated by a century of sectarian wars that were still unresolved. Military intervention by both Catholic and Protestant churches made the state wary of theological speculation in the state house. And most importantly, in the era of multi-ethnic, pluralist societies, how could the state ever represent so many different groups of people if it was bound to its old monoethnic state church? The French Revolution had popularized the proposition of secularism, claiming that if we free society from inherited religious authority, we will liberate individuals from guilt and moral repression, and human beings would become happier, more rational, and ultimately more fulfilled creatures.
While this became an increasingly popular view in continental Europe, it was hardly the only novel approach to the relationship between church and the state. Across the Atlantic, the American founders pursued a stylistically different arrangement. The founders appeared weary of the establishment of the old Church of England but sought to protect religious liberty without excluding religious ideas from civic discourse or from public life. Famously, the First Amendment was not conceived as an endorsement of secularism, as it has been popularly been reframed, but as a constitutional safeguard ensuring that the authority of the federal government would neither become confessional nor interfere with the free exercise of religion. Individual states still maintained the right to be confessional locally, with Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire maintaining specific established churches well into the nineteenth century.
Some of its failure stems from something fairly prosaic. In its more militant expressions, particularly within the context of Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Soviet Union, secularism was synonymous with a strictly materialist understanding of the universe. For the Soviet secularist, all things that exist and are of value are tangible. Twentieth-century Soviet ideologues commonly regarded religion as something antique, a vestige of an earlier stage of human civilization, destined to fade into obscurity with the advancement of scientific knowledge and material prosperity. In the words of one Soviet propaganda poster, “We’ve inspected the sky inside and outside. No gods or angels were found.” That is to say, the proposition of God, virtue, existential belief, and by extension, religion are irrelevant because they are non-material propositions. What does seem obvious in this worldview is that regardless of their circumstances, human beings appear unable to live by material prosperity alone. We require more than the flat and reductionist proposition of materialism. Our humanity makes us seek meaning in the world and in our lives. We search for belonging with others, hope for a yet unrealized future, and above all things, purpose. It is impossible to remove these from our human nature. To ignore this is to create a sense of existential depreciation. Remove the system that satisfies these needs, and another will quickly emerge to take its place. As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor observed, secularity did not eliminate belief; it transformed the conditions under which belief and unbelief could coexist.
This is why the novel phenomenon within our political life has appeared so uniquely contorted. Political movements in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have increasingly resembled religious communities. The devotion and fanaticism that they inspire have been unparalleled in the course of our civilizational history. In due course, they have produced moral orthodoxies, public confessions, a variety of civic liturgies, saints, heretics, and eschatologies. What is more, these movements appear on both the political left and right, with ideological movements assuming the social and psychological functions once associated with religion. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin described these systems as “political religions” exactly because they transferred humanity’s deepest longings into secular causes. They promise a material redemption through political action and civic engagement. The recurring promise that a great political movement is coming which will cure the ills of society and right every wrong does sound quasi-apocalyptic, but it is the rhetoric of many election cycles.
Beyond the realm of the body politic, the failed promises of secularism have also become apparent in our psychological welfare. Like all panaceas, the promise of liberation from the moral constraints of religion proved overly optimistic, if not outright destructive. Commonly, there is talk of a mental health crisis that is overtaking the West. Elevated levels of anxiety, depression, despair, and hopelessness, particularly among the young. Part of this can be explained by secularism’s proposition of a purely materialist universe, but it is uniquely bourgeois. When economic health is positive, and material wealth is high, this doctrine is easy to accept. However, if you live in an age of austerity and the scarcity of resources, then despair is a foregone conclusion.
Equally difficult to ignore is that unprecedented individual freedom has coincided with extraordinary levels of personal isolation and social fragmentation. The emphasis on the agency of the individual above any God or moral constraint has created “families of one.” The growing schizoid nature of our world has been commented on by writers and social critics and has become one of the defining forces in postmodern literature. This issue extends beyond the diminishment of religious communities, as all of our social and civic institutions struggle to maintain active membership. For centuries, churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions offered something difficult to quantify in empirical data, but easy to experience. These institutions were far from perfect, but by virtue of their great continuity, they were able to create durable habits that defined communities and established a perennial sense of belonging.
If secularism was once justified, in the imagining of the public, as the indispensable guardian of social peace and rational public life, its unique claim to that role has become increasingly harder to sustain. In the American experience, this development must be distinguished from the original commitment to religious disestablishment. The First Amendment’s statutory purpose was not intended to establish secularism as a governing policy. This legal conception of the separation was not part of the framer’s mindset. It was drafted, however, to prohibit federal religious establishment and protect the free exercise of religion. It was only during the twentieth century, particularly through changing statutory interpretations and the secularization of public education, that religious neutrality increasingly came to be understood as requiring the exclusion of religious perspectives.
At its zenith in the early twentieth century, secularism promised a neutral civic order that could stand above various competing visions of the good, which were all tied to some confessional creed. However, contemporary public life is anything but value-neutral. Despite secular guarantors, our politics have become more moralistic; our cultural disputes have deepened and become more absolutist, and our institutions more dogmatic, enforcing comprehensive visions of human identity and virtue. Rather than emptying the public square of belief, secularism has presided over the replacement of one moral consensus with another, while continuing to insist that the latter is simply the absence of ideology. If every society ultimately rests upon some shared account of what is true, worthy of sacrifice, and what constitutes the summum bonum, then the dream of a philosophically neutral civilization was always a pipe dream. In the age that we live in, the question facing the West is no longer whether public life will possess a creed, but which creed it will ultimately choose to profess.
