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The curious fate of Secularization
James V. Schall
Theological moods and fads pass rather quickly these days. Perhaps it is just as well. Each ecclesial novelty has its brief, glamorous moment on the cover of Time, then oblivion. New enthusiasms must somehow be procured each week. Contemporary subjects are soon wrung dry. Old ones are freshened up. A recent essay in Etudes even recommended a renewed reading of Thomas A'Kempis! (A. Blanchet, « Dans l'Internelle Consolation Dieu park a voix basse, » Janvier, 1973). But, then, mysticism, especially eastern mysticism, is the latest claimant to popularity — a guru will undoubtedly soon be on Time — so that a revival of the Imitation of Christ, so recently thought to be the epitome of all that is theologically bad, becomes almost inevitable.
The fad of the 1950's and 1960's was, of course, secularization, which had absolutely no truck with A'Kempis. Furthermore, secularization was a most one-sided affair. For, although it soon came to regret this, the secular was supremely uninterested in the holy however much the holy sought to look just like what was going on in the world. Secularization gasped its last about 1968, with the student riots and the strident cries of the Third World. Its effective life span was approximately the time it took Harvey Cox to wend his way out of the Secular City to revel at the Feast of Fools. Though it is largely of historical interest today — a conference on the topic of secularization on the Berkeley campus at this time would draw about as many hushed auditors as a lecture on, say, the verb usage in Philo Judaeus — still it is perhaps of some value to reflect on its brief, unlamented, but well-publicized life.
If there is a recent date for the beginning of secularization theology, it is probably the rediscovery of D. Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison. How to live as a Christian in the world on the supposition that God is dead became a problem as fascinating as that of squaring the circle. The main reason theology came to be seen in this fashion, it seems, was that the physical sciences and methodologies — which had dominated intellectual life since Descartes and Newton — still retained their cultural primacy until the 1960's. One has only to recall Bultmann's anguished wrestling with the scandal of the three-tiered world to recognize what kind of thought-system theologians at least thought they had to come to terms with. Many religious thinkers, therefore, believed that the main task of theology was to conform to the de facto worldview that science had apparently proved to be extant.
Thus, if one reads, for example, the last major addresses of Pius XII, what worried him most of all was the disproportionate dominance of technology and science, with the fear that they would leave no place for religion and the things of God. Such are the fates, Pius' fears, which at the time seemed almost anti-progressive, have suddenly become de rigeur. And it is this cultural shift from science and technology to revolution and ecology that spelled the doom of secularization. The value-free, objective, mathematical approach of the classical scientific mind, which religion vainly sought to confront with secularization theory, has, in the meantime, been cast in the role of the villain. Ecology and revolution are very often opposing, even mutually hostile trends, to be sure, but they both agree in this, at least, that the world is value laden. They appeal not so much to reason and analysis as to feeling and even to a kind of activist mysticism. Both, admittedly, still claim the mantle of « science », but their practice and ethos is anything but scientific in mood.
One of the striking phenomena occurring in the United States today is the almost frantic effort of the scientific journals to stem the tide away from scientific study and research. The anti-space, anti-war, anti-pollution, isolationist mood of the country is, if anything, a reaction against an overly secularized world. That the « new gods », as E. M. Cioran approvingly called them, may be even more frightening than the old scientific godless universe has not yet occurred to the general public (« The New Gods, » The Hudson Review, Spring, 1968). The ecology movement comes close to being a neo-nature religion. Indeed, some scholars, notably Lynn White, have accused the Jewish-Christian tradition, with its acceptance of the Genesis principle that man was at the center of the world, of being the cause of the present crises (« The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, » Science, 10 March, 1967). This emphasis on man is seen as a kind of arrogance which presumes the earth and the animals are given to mankind for his exclusive use.
Consequently, the search for other gods —oriental ones, Indian ones, African ones — is connected with this sort of feeling. Science, likewise, is seen as the logical consequence of this same Greek-Judaeo-Christian view of law and order in the universe. The god of science, or perhaps its non-god, turns out to be little more than a disguised form of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob understood as the Prime Mover. Any attempt to make a case for religion with a view to coming to terms with pure « science » is thus seen to be sheer subterfuge.
There is, however, a new kind of « desacralization » that was not noted in the earlier controversy. Classical science as a matter of fact still retained a feeling for the uniqueness and absoluteness of man. Its unspoken religious background remained operative — which is why today the older scientific mentality is so exasperated with the pessimism of the new movements. The human mind was central because it knew and searched and ordered. Science never lost sight too much of the fact that the purpose of Galileo's telescope was that each individual might just have a look to see if the stars really were moving. Both of the current movements, though they claim to be eminently moral, shift the ethical emphasis away from the absoluteness of the human person. The revolutionary is interested in the nation, the race, the class; the mankind he speaks of is ever so abstract. The ecologist makes morality to be a function of a natural process in which man is only a component part. The dignity of the person is cut loose from its theological moorings which had remained under the surface during the scientific revolution. The person comes to be seen as a function of society or of earth. His absolute relation and uniqueness, his call from God that made him from nothingness are removed as operative elements in his structure. A class or national enemy, a human fetus, a cripple, an ordinary man in a supposedly crowded world have no rights except in terms of the revolution or the carrying capacity of the earth. The older religious feeling was that the absoluteness of the person incited humanity to find ways to make life fully human. The newer sort of desacralization relativizes life in the name of a higher humanity and restricts science from developing more complete human conditions.
The effort to be a Jew or a Christian in a world in which God is dead, then, seems, in retrospect, paradoxical. The sacrifices of the ancient world that were signs of false religions — Moloch's victims — are not less horrible when they are presented in modern, up-to-date terms. Professor Segre's Old Testament reflection that « nothing is substantially changed, the world is still to be morally renewed » is a reminder that the laws of God are .given to us in all ages (« L'Ebraismo e la Secolarizzazione, » Humanitas, Gennaio, 1971, p. 104). What is new under the sun is how we observe them, not how we change them to conform to the mores of our era.
The historic lesson of the secularization experience is not « how to live as a Christian in a world where there is no God ». It is rather that the world without God sees that many false gods suddenly arise and that men worship them. « I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me . . . » If it is true that the Jews and the Christians cut down the sacred forests and destroyed the gods of nature — a secularizing experience leaving the world emptyof protective spirits — then we must acknowledge that the sacred trees are being planted again. Secularization was thus not a success, merely an interlude. When Paul said that our war is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, he came very close to describing the spiritual climate of the movements that have by-passed a secularized view of the world. Recent revolutionary and ecological movements are fundamentally spiritual in their mood and in their zeal. No one should mistake this about them. In such a world, the cold hand of secularization finds no place. But the question this necessarily leaves religion is this — who are these « new gods »? There is, indeed, little new under the sun.
Father James Schall, S.J., is assistant professor during the fall semester at the University of San Francisco and in the spring at the Gregorian University in Rome.
