The rise of secular religion

Michael Casey (private secretary to Cardinal Pell) has written an article entitled “Democracy and the Thin Veneer of Civilisation” for the November issue of Quadrant.

Casey is a sociologist with theological application and his article is essentially about the paradox of secularisation that on the one hand proclaims the end of religion and on the other nurtures religion by other names. The article begins:

The growing suspicion with which nineteenth century thinkers came to regard religion led to it being treated as a form of ideology. But over the course of the twentieth century it became clear that sometimes it is more illuminating to treat ideology as a form of religion.

This thesis holds despite the fact the ideologies of the 20th century were often avowedly anti-religious. For example, in the 1997 film Kundun, Chairman Mao Zedong, in a face to face encounter with the Dalai Lama, tells him that “religion is poison”. Could anyone argue that the cult of Mao was not a religious phenomenon?

Totalitarian secular religion uses violence to assert its orthodoxy, initially in the terror of the French revolution then down through the years in the Stalinist purges, the Jewish Holocaust, the millions of deaths in China’s cultural revolution and the killing fields of Pol Pot.

Casey points out that not all secular religion is totalitarian and that there has arisen democratic variants, drawn from extreme versions of free market capitalism, feminism and environmentalism:

Democratic political religion … makes explicit appeals to inclusiveness and tolerance, repudiates violence, recognises individual autonomy, and does not have a pronounced ritualistic and liturgical dimension. It is directed to the modification of human nature and society rather than to the revolutionary regeneration of humanity, and pursues its ends where possible through judicial and administrative coercion and more generally through capturing the “commanding heights” of the culture. The attitude to traditional religion ... is hostile.

A third form of secular religion exists as civil religion. In America we see this writ large when patriotism morphs with a form of Christianity that has lost its orientation of being in the world but not of it.

When we hear Federal politicians in Australia talking about mateship and a fair go as being quintessentially Australian values, we know we are in the realm of civil religion. Civil religion is designed to “foster unity and collective identification”.

These forms of religion arise because the process of secularisation did not remove the necessity of making sense of life and the world and it was this pressure that produced a “metamorphosis of the sacred” in which adherence was transferred from a transcendent object to an object or force in the world, be that the Fatherland, the proletariat, the free market or the egalitarian society.

These are the old gods who now walk the earth in the absence of the iconoclasm of the Church. The theological naivety of the population produced by the decline of the church and the separation between church and state, that disallowed faculties of theology in our universities and hence the training of teachers in theology, has removed from us ancient methods of discernment that would call these movements for what they are. In our ignorance they remain masked as unalloyed agents for good.

When the masks are removed, secularism is best seen not as a necessary condition of modernity but as one of its paradoxes, since it has substituted one religion for another in the name of freedom from all religion.

Casey argues that secular religion arises whenever myth is evoked as a foundation for an idea. Myth does not describe a reality, rather:

Its function is to provide the sense of clarity and certainty necessary for action. In a culture riven by relativism and the adamant denial of any transcendent foundations, resorting to myth is effectively the only way of preserving concepts such as justice and human rights.

While secular values and movements proclaim that they are based on reason, careful inspection discovers myth at their foundation, because the postmodernism and relativism that provides their basic orientation denies that reason can provide any absolute foundation for their beliefs.

Thus in the absence of a metaphysical basis supported by reason, the idea of human rights is forced to base itself on the myth that such rights exist as an inalienable component of the individual.

While we may say that a certain individual possesses certain virtues obtained by discipline and practice, it flies in the face of reason to proclaim that each individual is endowed, we know not from where, by such a thing as a right. This is not to question the nobility of the individual and the necessity of justice but it is to look for a firmer foundation that the simple assertion, even if that assertion takes place in the councils of the UN.

Similarly, the ideology of endless progress is sustained by the myth of eternal improvement. Cast around and you will see that much of what has now been called the modern world actually rests on myths that have no rational basis. This includes all of the isms of the 20th century, those inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism that made that century so bloody.

The paradox of secularism is twofold, while it denies the religion of the past it harbors its own religious ideology and while it trumpets a reliance on reason, in reality it resorts to the kind of mythology that abounded in ancient Greece.

The phenomenon of political correctness is stark evidence that secular religion rules what we may say and think:

A range of ideologies in democratic societies are capable of taking on aspects of political religion, including radical variants of feminism, environmentalism and fee market economics. The main candidate for a democratic political religion in the present context incorporates some of these elements and is known in different places by names such as secularism, multiculturalism or radical liberalism. It centres on the sacralisation of ideas such human rights, tolerance and antidiscrimination, and works through a number of issues.

The security of living in a world of myth is that one is “secure from all refutation”. Try arguing with a feminist about the insistence that there should be gender balance in bodies of authority even though a great majority of women find themselves drawn towards the nurture of families.

Or try questioning the dogma that one sexual orientation is as good as another by raising the fact that same sex relationships are inherently sterile.

Try making an argument for the fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity, that although both are monotheistic it is not the same god that is worshipped.

Try arguing, in a society that is fixated on the extension of life, that there are some things worth dying for.

Try arguing that the self-created individual has been born out of a fantasy of empty freedom, or that antidiscrimination has become the name of moral relativism, or that multiculturalism forbids debate about culture: because all must be accepted in the name of inclusivity.

Do any of the above and you will be convicted of heresy against the prevailing religion of the day and the punishment could be the loss of employment and certainly the distain of the keepers of public morality, as Michael Leunig found out when he published a cartoon questioning the placement of young children in child care.

But, more tellingly, try these out on the floor of the Synod of liberal Protestant churches and you will find out where the land lies. You will find that where peace and tolerance and good intentions are preached most strongly, there resides a different orthodoxy that will condemn you to outer darkness.

This different orthodoxy has taken over the social responsibility councils of mainline churches to the extent that the gospel values of faith, hope, love and patience have been replaced by the Enlightenment values of tolerance, egalitarianism and liberty.

When a large part of community life cannot be discussed for fear of recrimination then that community is weakened to the point of paralysis. There is no longer a place for truth telling and honest debate and we begin to resemble those totalitarian regimes that we all despise. This means that public policy is decided along ideological lines to the detriment of the community.

It is curious that when we attempt to build the ideal society out of our feeling for fairness and justice we are liable to create something sinister. In the Bible this is known as the attempt to take the kingdom by violence. We miss the point that the peaceable kingdom can only be brought about under the tutelage of the one who is both creator and redeemer.

When we repeat the conditions of the fall and declare ourselves to be “like God” we fall into all of the traps set by the devious human heart.

The optimism that we found when we thought we had shaken off the oppressive superstitions of religion is now waning, instead of a new age of reason and enlightenment we find we have to do battle with the same old foes (that used to be called sin) that distort the human person.

Avarice and lust is celebrated on coarse quiz shows and Big Brother. Advertisers (those manipulators of the human heart) appeal to the lowest common denominator without censure. No talk about the importance of human rights or values or what is “appropriate” or responsible or sustainable will break the prison that we have created for ourselves.

The argument that secular religion is based on myth leaves us open to the accusation that Christianity is also similarly based. Casey’s answer is interesting:

It is important to recall how the West was set on the long trajectory of reason and freedom. The appearance of Christianity in the ancient world was decisive to this. From the beginning, as the former Cardinal Ratzinger has argued, Christianity based itself not on the poetry and presentiment that gave rise to myth but on philosophical rationality. It was not content to rely on a social or political justification and to worship in the absence of truth. Instead it appealed to knowledge and to the rational analysis of reality, displacing myth "not by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders the apparent superfluous". The West today refuses to countenance Christianity's "claim to reasonableness", but a consequence of this has been the displacement of reason by myth, and the rise of irrationalism at the heart of democratic life.

This leads to the origin of Casey’s title. The thin veneer behind which our civilisation now sits is its desertion of reason for myth. Unfettered instrumental rationality will keep the wheels turning but such a civilisation will be unable to respond to challenges to its dominance as is now happening with Islam.

Michael Casey’s article is a challenge to present day understanding of the forces we have unleashed under the name of the secular.

It is about time that our intellectuals, ensconced as they are in a tired rebellion against ghosts of their own making, shook off their lethargy and underwent a major rethink of their position.

The experiment with rational secularism has demonstrated the fragility of the reliance on reason alone and has resulted in the abandonment of reason. Christianity offers us a way of rational reflection on the real and therefore a solid basis for being in the world. The real cannot be reduced to individual subjectivity but is to be found in Israel-history and Jesus-history.

Without this combination of reason and the shared experience of the community of faith, natural science, (an important gateway to physical realty but alas not to the reality of the human) would never have arisen. As it is, natural science has abandoned its roots and now stands alone as the only source of truth. That truth may give us flat screen TVs but increasingly, as culture decays, there is less and less to watch.