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On the Other Hand THE SECULARIZATION THESIS REVISITED
For most of two centuries major Western thinkers engaged in a wide-ranging effort to understand what was going on as the world changed in unprecedented ways. Even before the cataclysmic events of the French Revolution, a special pattern of inversion had been noted by some: it seemed that, as the society became more ‘modernized,’ the religious element declined significantly. Pioneer ‘philosophes’ like Diderot saw no need even to argue about this; it was as obvious to observers as the increase of empty pews. What was not so obvious, however, was why so many concluded that this inversion was inevitable, the result of an iron rule of causality that removed all doubt. It became an increasingly entrenched dogma, a given on which many other contentions and conclusions could be based. This cleared the way for an astonishing sequence of 19th century European ‘reductionists,’ i.e., thinkers who were sure they had found some lesser explanation for religion than the ‘supernaturalism’ of the past. For Auguste Comte religion was “nothing but” a childish first stage of human thinking that was being left far behind by the new sciences of modernity; his ‘positive philosophy’ had an immense impact and still has a variety of offshoots today. For Ludwig Feuerbach religion (read Christianity) was “nothing but” the projection of human hopes for a better life, an early version of humanistic wishful thinking. For Karl Marx religion was “nothing but” opium which the new industry owners fed the workers to keep them doped up so they would let themselves be robbed of the value of their labor; for Sigmund Freud religion was “nothing but” an obsessional neurosis, a sickness especially afflicting women (hysteria = womb) that might be overcome by his new ‘talking cure’ analysis. Most of these reductionist positions have either been abandoned or modified beyond recognition in more recent years as evidence against their accuracy mounted. But a general confusion of language resulted, especially surrounding the terms ‘secularization’ and ‘modernity.’ In conservative circles both terms bear definite negative connotations, and in liberal circles they both have mostly positive overtones. Some of the most interesting work today is that being done in trying to penetrate to a deeper level so as to avoid the old knee-jerk responses. Max Weber had labeled what he saw happening in his time a process of “disenchantment,” and the term has been kicked around ever since. Some of those working in today’s context refer to the “re-enchantment” of the universe as modern science and technology probe ever more deeply into the space/time continuum. In U.S. politics, however, the tension has continued to mount between the extremisms found at both ends of the spectrum. Religious fundamentalists and secularist fundamentalists are much alike not only in seeing one another as evil, but also in each thinking that the world would be better off without the other. This is, of course, the attitude that all too easily encourages recourse to violence. It is the “logic” of genocide. The raucous and corrosive ranters on talk radio and TV make it all the more difficult for serious civil conversation to prevail. This makes our condition worse than that of the Founding Fathers. Their vision allowed for the clash of ideas in an atmosphere where rational consensus was still considered possible, and religious commitment was valued as at least potentially reinforcing the practice of civility. (Loving one’s neighbor would seem to rule out the kind of hate and hostility that is front and center in exchanges between representatives of both camps). The saddest part of this situation is that it implies in practice a rejection of the uniquely successful First Amendment to the Constitution. Calls for a “Christian America” on the far right and a “Godless America” on the far left are both forms of refusal to work within the civic framework that has enabled the U.S. for over two centuries to avoid the kind of bloodshed seen in societies that lack this wise commitment to balance. That a process of secularization made this possible is beyond dispute. The adoption of a policy of ‘disestablishment’ of any church while guaranteeing the ‘free exercise’ of any religion is unrealistic and unpalatable on first blush to the committed members of a prevailing religion. The switch from the colonial arrangement to this novel re-setting of social and cultural borders was not easy or of obvious desirability for many raised in the old order. The history of the American Catholic Church may offer useful lessons here. With the massive immigration of ethnic (Irish, German, Polish, Italian) Europeans in the latter half of the 19th century, the question of whether or how much they could be assimilated was huge and the outcome not at all clear for decades. The ‘grand compromise’ that prevailed for a century, due especially to nativist resentment, was the building of a Catholic mini-state. With Al Smith’s presidential defeat in 1928, as historian Charles R. Morris puts it, “Catholics executed a remarkable emotional withdrawal from the rest of the country. Parallel Catholic organizations of every kind flourished… (But) this separatism was balanced by Catholic patriotism… By the end of World War I the loyalty of American Catholics was as unquestioned as it was unquestioning.” Morris goes on to highlight the paradox of what happened next: “The more the church turned in upon itself, the more powerful it became. Its public image in the 1940s and 1950s was nothing short of spectacular… A team of alien anthropologists would have reported that 1950s America was a Catholic country.” But in another strange paradox, the fortunes of the American Church suddenly began to decline after John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960. “Suburbanization” was breaking up the “Catholic village.” JFK’s victory itself signaled the end of the old system. “The first Catholic president was a graduate of Choate and Harvard, an utterly secular man, a completely assimilated product of American, not Catholic, culture. The turmoil that has gripped the Church since the mid-1960s is essentially a replay of the old Americanist struggles.” Almost all of them have to do with finding the appropriate limits on adapting to American culture. There’s the rub. How secular or secularist is American culture? “Can the Church assimilate and survive? Or must it assimilate to survive? Or will the Americanization of Catholicism inevitably lead to the same institutional collapse that has been the fate of mainstream Protestantism? (There are now fewer Episcopalians in America than there are Catholics in Los Angeles.)” There is absolutely no consensus on any of these issues, largely because of the vastly different ways in which the process of ‘secularization’ is interpreted and evaluated. The fact that five of the nine justices now on the U.S. Supreme Court are ‘neo-conservative’ Catholics, raised in the ‘triumphalist’ era, is an extraordinary phenomenon. How their views play out in interpreting the First Amendment will be closely watched. The closing remarks of Morris in his pioneering 1997 work (“American Catholic” [Random House]) are even more relevant today than when he wrote them: “How the standoff between the tradition of Rome and the tradition of America is resolved is of central importance for the future… not just in America but everywhere.” The troubling decline of U.S. leadership in so many ways by the policies, foreign and domestic, chosen in the last half-dozen years gives all of us great reason to be concerned. At a time when balance is a desperate necessity, it seems to be in shorter and shorter supply.
Jim Megivern is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Religion at UNC Wilmington. He is a contributing founder of CCV and a regular columnist.
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Carolina Civic Voice Spring 2006 Vol. 6, No 1 |