Before continuing from the previous post, I wish to discuss something rather important: secularism.
What exactly is secularism?
Repeatedly, I’ve referred to philosopher Charles Taylor who says that we live in a thoroughly secular society. In other places I’ve mentioned that secularism is a “myth.” Preeminent sociologist Peter Berger rescinded parts of his secularization theory after observing that much of the world is populated with believing people. Moreover, Lesslie Newbigin wrote about the “myth of the secular society.” In our age of polarization, one is quick to assume that one is right and the other is wrong, either society is secular or it is not.
These are tempestuous waters to navigate, and I claim no expertise on the subject. Secularism will often be discussed, and has already been, throughout this blog, so the purpose of this is the clarification of terminology through the work of these three thinkers.
Charles Taylor
In Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, he poses the question that he intends to answer in the book:
Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?
Taylor recognizes that something has changed in the last five centuries, but what exactly was the nature of this change–this is something that was briefly discussed in the previous post, however, for that we used Lyotard’s questions as our starting point. Taylor continues:
Part of the answer, no doubt, is that in those days everyone believed, and so the alternatives seemed outlandish. But this just pushes the question further back. We need to understand how things changed. How did the alternatives become thinkable?
He frames the discussion by offering, as James K.A. Smith calls a taxonomy of the secular, in three stages.
- Secular 1 – This is the classical or medieval understanding of the secular. Here the secular is not yet an -ism, so much as it is more of a sphere or realm where temporal or earthly things take place. This is evidenced by the separation between the secular priest and the monastic priest, and vocations such as bakers and blacksmiths were secular.
- Secular 2 – This type of secular is what most people think of when they talk about secularism. This stage of the secular is best understood as an areligious, non-spiritual, neutral space or worldview. Supposedly science is secular, schools and politics are secular. Many modern societies were constructed with this in mind. The separation of Church and State is an example of this. When people mention the secularization of culture, the secular as a process or philosophy this is to what they’re referring.
- Secular 3 – This is where Taylor makes his contribution to secularization theory. A society reaches this stage when religious belief is understood to be one option among many. This is best understood in consumeristic terminology, that all religions, ideologies, and belief systems are within the marketplace of ideas that anyone can choose to subscribe to or not. All are contestable. Taylor takes the reader on a journey from the Middle Ages to the present to explain how such a shift has happened. This is something that will often be discussed on this blog. For now, I will say that Taylor stresses the immanentization of the transcendent, or rather, that there is no longer any transcendent, that we are all trapped within the immanent frame. We are all secular whether we want to be or not.
When I refer to contemporary secularism, it is this iteration with which I am speaking or writing.
Peter Berger and Lesslie Newbigin
I will include these two together since they take the stance that secularism is not real. Many sociologists, especially post-war sociologists, worked within the secularization field. After all, the world had barely survived the atrocities of modern ideologies, religion appeared to be in decline, and much of the West was possessed by the optimism of progress and innovation. Berger was unique insofar as he included the experience of the everyday man into his theory of social construction of reality. Once the academic descends from the ivory tower and leaves the bastion of academia, it becomes quite evident that the common person is still a believing person regardless of intensity of devotion. That at the sedimentary level of knowledge there exists a congealing of any number of beliefs, mores, and values. Taken from The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge:
The primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge on the pretheoretical level. It is the sum total of “what everybody knows” about the social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths, and so forth…On the pretheoretical level, however, every institution has a body of transmitted recipe knowledge, that is, knowledge that supplies the institutionally appropriate rules of conduct.
And further:
What is taken for granted as knowledge in the society comes to be coextensive with the knowable, or at any rate provides the framework within which anything not yet known will come to be known in the future.
Berger and his co-author Thomas Luckmann are setting up what will be known as Berger’s great contribution to the world of sociology, plausibility structures. I’ve mentioned these in a early posts. These structures are beliefs that provide the “rules” of what is plausible or implausible in a given society. Or rather, what is an acceptable or unacceptable belief or behavior.
What’s important at the moment is that Berger includes the experience of the common person into the body of knowledge, he’s not trapped within the strictures of philosophical or scientific knowledge. Berger asserts that secularism is false on the basis of the ubiquity of belief. For Berger, people are still believing people. And he addresses this in many of his books and lectures.
Lesslie Newbigin takes a similar stance as Berger. In his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, he provides two usages of the word “myth.” The first is taken from the parlance of modernity, here myth is synonymous with false. When Newbigin asserts the “myth of the secular society,” he states matter-of-factly its falsity. The second usage, is defined thusly: “An unproved collective belief that is accepted uncritically to justify a social institution.” This implies that there is an element of blind faith in the acceptance and propagation of myth used to legitimize and bolster institutions. Both definitions come from a place of modernity–even postmodernity, if one factors in the postmodern suspicion of all metanarrative. Either usage of the word “myth” has negative connotations.
Newbigin asserts that secularity is a myth, whichever definition one wants to employ, and he goes quite in depth defending this claim, which we won’t get into now. However, he points to the failing of the modern project as gradual secularization (essentially this is Taylor’s secular 2), which is a steady, irreversible disappearance of religion in favor of rationalization, industrialization, and urbanization. Like Berger, he observes that religious belief is still in full swing no matter how much territory secularism conquers. Newbigin references the work of scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi to defend his stance that science, contrary to its claim, is a tradition of knowledge, ergo, it is still based on faith at some point. People are still–and will always be–believing people. Religion proper has just been supplanted by science or ideology.
Conclusion
Charles Taylor is correct to say that society has been thoroughly secularized because he is working as a philosopher of religion, he sees that we can’t see the transcendent because we are trapped within the immanent. For Taylor, one must have the transcendent or there is nothing higher to aim for, there is nothing about God with which we can experience. Berger works as a sociologist and observes that regardless of the attempts of secularization, belief will never be eradicated. Newbigin (influenced by Berger), reminds us that secularism is a myth, and therefore it justifies established institutions. It is false…but it still has power. He comes close to the mythic as formative ritual, which I’ve written about previously. Currently, we live in a socio-cultural context that has been shaped by the myth of secularism, it is lived out each and everyday by people who are believing people who are trapped within the immanent frame, moreover they desire the transcendent, they are haunted by it, to borrow another term from Taylor. At this junction we as Orthodox Christians can fulfill our missional mandate. We offer a different myth that will radically transform the human person through theosis. The Church offers healing. The Church is the Ark of Salvation rescuing souls afloat the raging seas of modernity. It is crucial that we are able to speak to this generation without being consumed by its reigning plausibility structures.
Kyrie eleison
