Kicking the Secularist Habit

Sunday, November 2nd, 2014

Secularism is not the future, David Brooks says; it is yesterday’s incorrect vision of the future:

It’s now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom.

Islam is surging. Orthodox Judaism is growing among young people, and Israel has gotten more religious as it has become more affluent. The growth of Christianity surpasses that of all other faiths. In 1942 this magazine published an essay called “Will the Christian Church Survive?” Sixty years later there are two billion Christians in the world; by 2050, according to some estimates, there will be three billion. As Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed, perhaps the most successful social movement of our age is Pentecostalism (see “The Next Christianity,” October Atlantic). Having gotten its start in Los Angeles about a century ago, it now embraces 400 million people—a number that, according to Jenkins, could reach a billion or more by the half-century mark.

Moreover, it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be “modern” and “relevant” are withering. Ecstatic forms of Christianity and “anti-modern” Islam are thriving. The Christian population in Africa, which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million, is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative, evangelical, and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches are becoming more influential than many nations, with both good and bad effects.

That’s from 2003, but Charles Murray recently brought it up.

How many of you knew that Pentecostalism got its start in Los Angeles a century ago?

Brooks recommends six steps in the recovery process:

First you have to accept the fact that you are not the norm. Western foundations and universities send out squads of researchers to study and explain religious movements. But as the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, the phenomenon that really needs explaining is the habits of the American professoriat: religious groups should be sending out researchers to try to understand why there are pockets of people in the world who do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives, who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments that bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that God’s will should shape their public lives.

[...]

The second step toward recovery involves confronting fear. For a few years it seemed that we were all heading toward a benign end of history, one in which our biggest worry would be boredom. Liberal democracy had won the day. Yes, we had to contend with globalization and inequality, but these were material and measurable concepts. Now we are looking at fundamental clashes of belief and a truly scary situation—at least in the Southern Hemisphere—that brings to mind the Middle Ages, with weak governments, missionary armies, and rampant religious conflict.

The third step is getting angry. I now get extremely annoyed by the secular fundamentalists who are content to remain smugly ignorant of enormous shifts occurring all around them. They haven’t learned anything about religion, at home or abroad.

[...]

The fourth step toward recovery is to resist the impulse to find a materialistic explanation for everything.

[...]

Fifth, the recovering secularist must acknowledge that he has been too easy on religion. Because he assumed that it was playing a diminishing role in public affairs, he patronized it. He condescendingly decided not to judge other creeds. They are all valid ways of approaching God, he told himself, and ultimately they fuse into one. After all, why stir up trouble by judging another’s beliefs?

[...]

The sixth and final step for recovering secularists is to understand that this country was never very secular anyway. We Americans long for righteous rule as fervently as anybody else. We are inculcated with the notion that, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, we represent the “last, best hope of earth.”

Comments

  1. David Foster says:

    Brooks missed one of the key anti-secularist trends: the growth of mystical beliefs among people who reject formal religions. I don’t have numbers handy, but there are a lot of college-educated Americans who believe in astrology, magical crystals, a conscious Gaia, etc etc. Generally these are people who say they are “spiritual but not religious.”

    C S Lewis’s devil (in The Screwtape Letters) referred to the coming of the “materialist magician.”

  2. Spandrell says:

    “We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom.”

    I take it the first sentence is a result of the second. Great period of scientific progress? Today? Talk about blind faith.

  3. Isegoria says:

    I was going to cite G. K. Chesterton‘s quip, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” Then I read up on it:

    This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts’ book The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (1937), in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in “The Oracle of the Dog” (1923), “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.” Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: “‘It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.’ The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: ‘And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.’” Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts’. Nigel Rees is credited with identifying this as the source of the misattribution, in a 1997 issue of First Things.

Leave a Reply