Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

The transition from Western Christendom to the modern post-Christian secular West is a significant cultural shift in world history. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is detailed academic study of what has happened, and this book is a collection of 12 essays and a postscript by Taylor commenting on it. Alas this would-be magisterial study does not get to the bottom of the issue. Though a committed Catholic, Taylor is not concerned to condemn the rise of secularism or to applaud it: the intention is to understand it. His concern is deliberately limited to the interplay of secularism and Western Christianity. One contributor points out that it would helped the understanding of secularism if its impact on a Moslem society such as Turkey had been considered. It would indeed have been a good idea to examine why Kemal Ataturk thought the Moslem Ottoman Empire had to be converted to a secular society in order to make it into a modern state. Unfortunately the rest of the essay is concerned with a comparative study of the problems of banning the headscarf in France and Turkey. The central argument of A Secular Age is that two developments have been crucial in turning the West into a secular society – individualism and 'disenchantment'. Individualism has meant a shift in European psychology such that a person today is expected to make up their own mind about the world, and their beliefs about it, whereas in the Middle Ages they saw themselves as primarily a member of the community of the Christian church. 'Disenchantment' is the way in which all the magical, spiritual, and occult forces which once surrounded Mediaeval man have all been exorcised. Modern man lives in a universe of totally material forces. Yet, as Taylor observes, religion survives even in that most modern of societies – the USA. He suggests that the reason is that science cannot explain some of the most valuable parts of human experience. Love, music, tragedy and humour cannot be explained in terms of the four fundamental forces of nature. Secularism is therefore not necessarily the inevitable end point of Western culture. The mediaeval world view was of a universal church teaching a universal truth. The breakdown of this world view could have been more clearly analysed in terms of three overlapping movements, anti-clericalism, secularism, and modernity. The Cathars, the Hussites and the Protestant reformers were not anti-religious – far from it – but they were hostile to the overweening authority of the Catholic church. Later anti-clericalism in the French revolution, the Russian revolution, and the Spanish civil war was much more extreme. Again the demand for a secular space outside the authority of the church is not necessarily anti-religious, as the mediaeval struggles between Pope and Emperor showed, but this space has expanded until religion has been pushed out into the fringes. On the evidence of the essays in this book, these processes do not have appeared to have been set out in sufficiently forceful clarity. The key process in producing contemporary secularism is 'modernity' , or the triumph of science and its attendant technology. Taylor and his commentators seem to take this for granted, but rather underestimate its force. It is much more than mere 'disenchantment'. Once men prayed to God to help them against plague and famine: now we demand vaccination, better agricultural management and food aid. The way to a better life is through electric power not piety. Above all Western Christianity was based on the Bible, and the Bible saw the Earth as midway between Heaven and Hell. Modern astronomy puts the Earth as a planet circling one star of billions in just one galaxy in a universe of billions of galaxies. This conflict between the scientific and religious world views is particularly acute for Christianity. This is not merely because the Church unwisely adopted Aristotelian science. Christianity is a religion based on history. Its central dogma as pronounced by Paul of Tarsus is that Adam and Eve were separately created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden. They and all their descendants were punished by a vengeful God for the sin of disobedience until it was atoned for by Jesus Christ on the cross. All Christian theology hinges on this belief and all the evidence of geology and evolutionary biology contradict it. Few of those who wash their cars on a Sunday instead of going to church have given much thought to the theology of the Atonement, but Christianity's lack of ultimate intellectual justification has echoed down into a popular feeling of its irrelevance. Yet Taylor is right. Distinguished scientists are Christians. They feel that there is something transcendent beyond the material universe they study. Important human feelings such as love, forgiveness and self-sacrifice are given meaning by religious belief, and the easiest way to affirm these deep insights is through our civilisation's ancestral culture. Religious belief may be a psychological necessity, but is it true in ultimate reality? Fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction are all exercises in human imagination, and we would be poorer without them, but they are not necessarily true. Is there anyone there? Is there a dimension of consciousness higher and beyond the neuronal activities of our brains. Mystical experience, the logical limits of materialistic science, paranormal phenomena all suggest that this is so. It is unfair to criticise a book for not dealing with a question it has not chosen to address. If there is no transcendent reality then secularism in some form is the fate of all human civilisation. If there is such a reality, then in a profound sense the most superstitious primitive religion is right, and the most scientifically sophisticated secular materialist is wrong. This is the fundamental question about secularism, and those who are interested in it will find this book of only marginal relevance.