[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Faith in Reason

[Bill Totten]

Secular fantasies of a godless age

by John Gray

Harper's Magazine (January 2008)


Discussed in this essay:

A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor. Harvard University Press. 896 pages.
$39.95.

Secularism Confronts Islam, by Olivier Roy. Translated by George Holoch.
Columbia University Press. 128 pages. $24.50.

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark
Lilla. Alfred  A Knopf. 336 pages. $26.


There exists a widespread belief that as people become more modern they
become less religious; that the ongoing growth of human knowledge
contributes to the development of human reason, with the result that
societies become ever more secular. Religion retreats as science
advances, and the end point of this process will be a world in which the
traditional faiths of humankind disappear. This was the expectation of
John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, along with many other political
thinkers, and in the twentieth century the same expectation had a
powerful influence in the social sciences. Religion, in this view, is
not the expression of a primary human need; it is a by-product of
ignorance, or else the result of poverty or political repression. Once
these adverse conditions have been overcome, religion will vanish from
human life, or at least dwindle into insignificance.

This common notion of secularization must be distinguished from the
political doctrine of secularism, which stipulates that the state must
use its power to limit the role of religion in the public sphere. In
fact, the demand for a secular state originated among dissenting
religious believers who suffered persecution by established churches,
and many who support a secular state today are believers who nonetheless
see the desirability of separating faith and politics. Secularization
and secularism are clearly different ideas. Yet although the two are
distinct they are not unconnected, for a secular regime aims to appeal
only to beliefs and values that can be accepted by believers and
nonbelievers alike. Like those who subscribe to the theory of
secularization, secularists assume that government can be purged of
religious influences. Both assume that religion and politics can be held
apart.

Nevertheless, recent developments suggest that religion and politics are
not as separable as had been assumed. Terrorism, for example, is a
complex phenomenon whose causes include social and geopolitical
conflicts, but its use by Islamist groups has brought religion into the
center of the international arena in a way that few Western observers
anticipated. At the same time, religious believers in many countries
have mobilized to promote a "politics of values". Conflicts over
abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia have helped shape the trajectory
of American politics, and a similar trajectory can be observed in
certain European countries. Until recently, Poland was governed by a
Catholic party that supported Christian values, and in Britain, where
the majority has long since ceased to follow any traditional faith,
Muslims, Sikhs, evangelical Christians, and other religious minorities
have demanded censorship of artistic performances they judge to be
offensive.

There is a real question, then, as to whether any process of
secularization is actually under way. If societies become less religious
as they become more modern, how is it that the United States - which
sees itself and is seen by others as the epitome of a modern country,
with the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution -
remains as religious at the start of the twenty-first century as it was
in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Alexis de Tocqueville
noted the intense religiosity of American life? Is America an anomaly
among advanced societies, or is the theory of secularization flawed? If
the power of religion can be limited by a secular state, why does
religious fundamentalism play a larger role in American political life
than it does in the political life of any other developed country? The
experience of the past decade has made such questions highly pertinent,
but they are rarely explored in public discourse. Instead, debate has
been dominated by the polemical assaults of evangelical atheists who
attack religion as a harmful relic of the past. Obsessed by the current
excesses of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, such writers as
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins not only renew the demand for a
secular state; they seek to create a secular civilization.


In these circumstances, it is refreshing to read an inquiry into the
condition of religion that is exploratory in its approach. Charles
Taylor, a Roman Catholic as well as one of the world's leading political
theorists, does not aim to attack or defend any system of belief in his
new book, A Secular Age. Rather, he wants to elucidate the very idea of
a secular world. For Taylor, the difference between the pre-modern
Western world and the modern West is not simply that beliefs held then
are no longer accepted today; it is that the entire framework of thought
has changed. The world in 1500 was understood to contain spiritual
beings - angels, demons, and God - that produced natural events such as
floods and plagues and were intimately involved in the course of
history. In this "enchanted world" - as Taylor, following the German
sociologist Max Weber, calls it - intentions and decisions were not
ascribed only to human agents; they pervaded the cosmos, which was and
always remained the creation of a divine being. For those who understood
the world in this way, "atheism comes close to being inconceivable":
unbelief is not an option. With the rise of science, however, an
alternative perspective became widely available, in which impersonal
mechanisms, rather than anything like divine agency, came to be seen as
elemental to the world. As Taylor recognizes, scientific advances did
not lead inexorably to atheism, and many of the pioneers of modern
science retained aspects of monotheism: Newton was a Christian with
fundamentalist leanings; Darwin held to a version of Deism for many
years. Still, modern science did open up a different way of viewing the
world, and as a result, religion became a choice rather than an
inextricable part of life. According to Taylor, it is chiefly this shift
that produced the secular era in which we live today.

Taylor is surely right when he suggests that the secular era began when
religion ceased to be integral to how we understand and experience the
world. The disputes of the Reformation were bitter and bloody, but the
protagonists invoked a shared understanding of the universe as being
governed by a divine figure. It was only later that an impersonal,
godless world became widely conceivable. Once this happened, religion
became a choice, and justifying state power in terms that extended
beyond the human realm became more difficult. A concept of government
was needed that could be accepted both by those who thought of the world
as being infused with divine agency and by those who did not. Developing
such a concept has been the central project of modern political thought.

Although Taylor's account of the shift that took place with the rise of
modern science identifies a crucial feature of secular thought, he
hasn't grasped the extent to which religious - and, more specifically,
Christian - ideas underpin the secular era he describes. The European
Enlightenment may have been hostile to Christianity, but a Christian
framework still informed the view of history adopted by those
Enlightenment thinkers campaigning for universal human emancipation, who
were very different from humanists in the pre-Christian world. Ancient
Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, such as the hedonist Epicurus
and his disciple Lucretius, rejected the religions of their time
(without denying the existence of the gods); their goal was one of
achieving tranquillity by withdrawing from the world rather than one of
striving to change it, and they had no dreams of universal human
freedom. The world-transforming hopes of modern humanism derive not from
these thinkers but from Christianity, with its promise of salvation.

Taylor acknowledges that "the new humanism has taken over universalism
from its Christian roots", yet he fails to note the other ways in which
modern secular humanism replicates Christian patterns of thinking. In
pre-Christian Europe, history was seen as a succession of cycles similar
to those that occur in the natural world; it had no overall purpose or
goal. This is a view shared by such non-Western religions as Hinduism
and Buddhism, which understand salvation not as an event in time but as
liberation from time itself. Christianity, by contrast, has always
viewed history as having an end point - when salvation is granted to
believers. Visions of the End recurred throughout medieval and
early-modern times, and they have persisted throughout the secular era.

The role of the end-time in fueling revolutionary upheavals in
late-medieval and early-modern Europe was uncovered in Norman Cohn's
seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium, first published in 1957.
Cohn identified important similarities between these pre-modern
movements and modern movements such as Communism. Both subscribed to
millenarian beliefs, anticipating a violent rupture in history that
would be followed by a new world. Christian millenarian movements based
their hopes of an end-time on biblical prophecies of the return of
Jesus, who would rule over a new kingdom for a thousand years (hence the
term "millenarianism"); modern revolutionary movements founded their
hopes on such pseudosciences as dialectical materialism. The end-time of
medieval millenarians became the end of history for Marx, just as the
postapocalyptic paradise of Christian myth became the Communist heaven
on earth. Communist revolutionaries may have rejected Christian beliefs,
but they renewed a view of history that is unmistakably Christian.
Historical teleology - the idea that history tends toward a single end
or consummation - is an inheritance from Christian notions of
providence. This is true whether or not "the end of history" is
understood in religious terms. Ironically, the modern belief that the
terminus of historical development will be a universal secular
civilization could have arisen only in a culture shaped by a particular
kind of religion.


Despite their pretensions to science, theories of secularization are not
empirical hypotheses. They are articles of faith, adopting the language
of social science in order to renew the concepts and values of Western
religion. Religious belief has been rejected, but not a religious way of
thinking. As Olivier Roy has written in Secularism Confronts Islam, "It
is difficult to understand the strength and success of Communist
movements in western Europe without seeing in them the ghosts of a
thoroughly Christian eschatology and church". Eschatology deals with
last things, and the Christian idea that history has an end point
reappears not only in Marx but also in treatises by neo-conservatives
such as Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History and
the Last Man announced that history had ended with the triumph of global
democratic capitalism. Roy, the French author of Globalized Islam
(2004), the most comprehensive and rigorous study of the subject to
date, does not view secularization as an inevitable process, though he
points out that it occurs in cultures shaped by many religions,
including Islam. He is clear that secularization and secularism (in
French, the latter is called laicite) are "two concepts that are not
synonymous":

Secularization is a social phenomenon that requires no political
implementation: it comes about when religion ceases to be at the center
of human life, even though people still consider themselves believers;
the everyday practices of people, like the meaning they give to the
world, are no longer constructed under the aegis of transcendence and
religion ... Laicite, on the contrary, is explicit: it is a political
choice that defines the place of religion in an authoritarian, legal manner.

Roy notes that secular regimes come in several forms. The American
model, in which a constitutional wall separates church and state, is not
the only form of secularism, nor is it necessarily the most successful.
Turkey - the secular state established by Kemal Ataturk in 1923, which
despite the growing challenge of Islamist movements continues to exist
to this day - controls religion through a government department of
religious affairs. The example of Turkey undermines the view that Muslim
countries have failed to produce a convincing example of secularism.
Indeed, one might argue that Turkey is a more successful secular regime
than the United States: Turkey has a long-established secular political
tradition, whereas nothing comparable exists in America. America may
have separated church and state, but - as the incessant flaunting of
Christian credentials by both parties demonstrates - it has yet to
produce a secular brand of politics.

France provides another model of secularist efforts. Laicite has always
been associated with a political tradition of anticlericalism, which not
only demands the separation of church and state but also seeks to reduce
the power of religion in society as a whole. In the past, the principal
target of laicite was the Roman Catholic Church, whose influence the
French secular state tried to restrict by every means at its disposal -
including a state school system from which the Church was rigorously
excluded. Today the chief target of laicite is Islam, and the conflict
has shifted to such issues as the wearing of the hijab by schoolgirls.
Roy argues that Islam is perceived in France as a threat to national
identity: "At bottom, the growth of Islam is intuitively seen as part of
the process of globalization and deterritorialization ... The response
is thus a demand for the nationalization of Islam, or else its
secularization". Drawing on the analysis developed in his book
Globalized Islam, Roy rejects the notion that the revival of Islam under
way in many countries involves a return to the past. Islamism is a
modern political movement that has developed alongside an advancing
globalization; it looks to the future rather than the past. Those who
turn to fundamentalist versions of Islam do so not from nostalgia for
traditional cultures but in order to establish a universal community:
"Among the born-again and the converts (numerous young women who want to
wear the veil belong to these categories), Islam is seen not as a
cultural relic but as a religion that is universal and global". Some
Islamists may talk of reestablishing a caliphate of the sort that
existed centuries ago, but for them the caliphate "is embodied in fact
by [a vanguard] party ..., not by an individual: this conception of the
party as a political actor in itself is a legacy of Marxism". In this
and in other respects Islamism has more in common with modern
revolutionary movements, such as Leninism, than with medieval Islam.

Here Roy provides a useful corrective to the interpretation of Islamism
that sees it as a type of "Islamofascism". There are some features
common to Islamism and Nazism, not least a shared anti-Semitism, but
Islamists also share much with the French Jacobins - not only their
belief in the purifying power of terror but also their illiberal
conception of democracy as the expression of an infallible, semi-divine
popular will. Above all, Islamism derives a great deal from the
Bolsheviks, whose concept of a vanguard party it has adopted. Indeed,
despite the fashion for comparing it with political movements of the far
right, Islamism could more accurately be described as "Islamo-Leninism".
If Leninism is a secular movement that denies its origins in religion,
Islamism is an avowedly religious movement that suppresses its debts to
secular thinking; eschatological thinking is equally central to both.


Contrary to secularist assumptions, it is questionable whether Western
political thought has ever decoupled itself from religion. And the most
systematic attempt at such a decoupling was made, in fact, not by
Communists and other radical ideologues but by an early-modern realist
thinker. In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla asserts that the separation of
religion and politics began in the seventeenth century, when Thomas
Hobbes argued that faith should be viewed as a human need rather than a
divine gift. Although Hobbes is best known for his portrayal of human
life in a state of nature - which he saw as a universal competition for
power in which fear of violent death is the dominant force - Lilla
maintains that Hobbes's true genius is shown in his understanding of the
innate religiosity of human beings. Hobbes was "the first thinker to
suggest that religious conflict and political conflict are essentially
the same conflict, that they grow up together because they share
identical roots in human nature". God was a phantom created by
individuals rather than a transcendent reality; when people believe they
are obeying this phantom, they are only being ruled by their own fears.

Understanding religion in this way, Hobbes was an early Enlightenment
thinker; unlike later thinkers in this tradition, however, he never
imagined that fear - or religion - could be expunged from human life.
Humans would continue to be fearful, but they would fear an all-powerful
sovereign, one who would deliver them from the war of all against all
that would have ruled them in the state of nature. Religion should and
would be practiced under the watchful eye of the state. As Lilla writes:
"The sovereign would have a total monopoly over ecclesiastical matters,
including prophecy, miracles, and the interpretation of scripture. He
would also declare that the only requirement for salvation was complete
obedience to himself."

In the course of a wide-ranging discussion that encompasses not only the
history of Christianity but also some major contributions by Jewish
thinkers, Lilla writes that it was Hobbes who first made the "Great
Separation" between religion and politics, between theology and the
secular art of government. More consistently than any other modern
thinker, Hobbes subordinated, the claims of faith to the requirements of
peace. Although he never doubted that humankind is incorrigibly
religious, he was, in effect, the supreme theorist of secularism. Lilla
argues - rightly - that Hobbes was one of the philosophers who produced
the shift toward a secular world. But just like other secularists,
Hobbes owed a hidden debt to Christianity, rendering him quite different
from such pre-Christian thinkers as the Epicureans, by whom he was in
other ways inspired. Epicurus and Lucretius viewed humans as an integral
part of the natural order; they couldn't have imagined any human
institution delivering humankind from recurrent periods of anarchy. In
believing that an all-powerful sovereign could bring a kind of salvation
to humankind, Hobbes was moved by Christian hopes, and, despite his
efforts, the "Great Separation" was not achieved.

Toward the end of The Stillborn God, Lilla discusses the idea of
modernity that has figured so prominently in recent European thought. He
suggests that European thinkers have spoken of the "modern age" in
"quasi-eschatological language, describing it as a rip in time that
opened an unprecedented and irreversible epoch in human experience, with
a unique logic, language, and mindset". Lilla is right to criticize the
belief that a radical shift in human thought occurred with the arrival
of the modern period. Yet it is a belief to which he himself seems to
subscribe, in a chastened form, when he writes: "Those of us who have
accepted the heritage of the Great Separation must do so modestly. Time
and again we must remind ourselves that we are living an experiment,
that we are the exceptions. We have little reason to expect other
civilizations to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a
unique theological-political crisis within Christendom." But are "we" so
exceptional? Has the proper place of religion in politics been resolved
in the United States, where politicians can be safely agnostic about
Darwinism but not about religion? The Great Separation is no more a
reality in contemporary America than it is in any other modern democracy.

For the most part, Lilla understands that religion is not banished by
being denied. The secular ideologies of the past two centuries, which
have assumed religion was the by-product of ignorance, were themselves
by-products of Western religion. Today these ideologies are in decline,
and the resurgence of religion is the result. Religion never went away
but only changed its shape; the rupture in history that so many modern
thinkers expected has not occurred. Despite the advance of science,
humankind remains incurably religious, and the place of religion in
society continues to be intractably contested. The belief that we are
moving into a secular age looks ever more like an unwitting tribute to
the perennial power of faith.
_____

John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the
Death of Utopia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/