Secularism

Review: Religious Freedom in a Secular Age

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Cover image of "Religious Freedom in a Secular Age" by Michael F. Bird

Religious Freedom in a Secular Age, Michael F. Bird, afterword Bruce Riley Ashford. Zondervan Reflective (ISBN: 9780310538882) 2022.

Summary: Distinguishes types of secularism, opposes dismantling religious freedom, and proposes a new apologetic.

Religious Freedom. It is enshrined as one of the “first freedoms” of the First Amendment of the U.S., Constitution. Yet in recent years, both in courts and the public square, it has been a source of contention. From the left, the conflict between sincerely held belief and an all-pervasive interpretation of non-discrimination has led to efforts to weaken and dismantle this freedom. The political right in turn has weaponized political freedom, using it to galvanize political support from a segment of religious voters. And these polarities exist in many national contexts, including the author of this work’s home country of Australia.

Michael F. Bird seeks to do several things in this work. First, he argues that secularism, per se, is not the bogeyman. Rather, he argues that secularism properly understood creates a space for people of all faiths and none to engage one another from a position of safety in civil society. It means no one religion obtains political power and that persuasion rather than power is the way beliefs are promoted. The problematic form of secularism is militant secularism or secularization. This is where religion loses its social significance or is actively marginalized as dangerous. Militant secularism has risen as a critique of religious violence as well as a source anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.

This brings Bird to his second aim, which is to address the arguments against religious liberty. Since in many countries, the opposition has come from LGBTQ+ efforts to assert rights, Bird focuses his treatment here. He discusses the efforts to balance LGBTQ+ rights and religious conscience. On one hand he argues that Christians doing business in the world ought to serve those with whom they disagree and that civil protections of LGBTQ+ rights are good. At the same time he, argues for protecting the rights of churches and Christian organizations to operate according to their own beliefs. Where each side respects liberties rather than seeking total wins, compromises protecting the rights and safety of both groups are possible.

Bird rejects both the weaponizing of religious liberty in the Christian nationalism some on the right embrace and progressive authoritarianism from the left. Instead, he upholds John Inazu’s idea of confident pluralism. This means refusing to use coercive power against either different identity groups or against religious groups. Finally, he argues that upholding genuine religious freedom, which is more than freedom of worship, is the best way to protect a diverse, multicultural society.

Thirdly, Bird outlines his ideas of what it means to be a Christian in a post-Christian, secular society. He calls this “the Thessalonian strategy.” First, he encourages a focus on “mere Christianity.” Second, he urges affirming religious liberty for all. This includes the making of friends with those of different faiths or no faith. Third, he believes Christians need to be known for their love, and for being counterculturally “weird.” This includes drawing our leadership from the cultural margins. Fourth, he argues for seeing our work as a form of worship and seeking to influence all sectors of society. By these “tactics” he believes Christians will, like the Thessalonians, “turn the world upside down” and make the most of our freedom.

Bird concludes by proposing that this is a “grand age of apologetics.” He argues that all religions, and not just Christian faith, offer significance, identity, a basis for moral reasoning, ritual, community, and hope. Religious freedom protects those contributions to society. And the Christian apologist has the opportunity to root these values in the story of a God who is there, is good, and through his Son, died and rose for our redemption.

I appreciate the balances Bird strike throughout. He recognizes that rights aren’t absolute but are worked out in the mix of competing groups. He affirms the value of secularism. It creates a space of safety for diverse groups. And I think a strength of his approach is his focus on persuasion rather than power. I can’t help but wonder if the resort to politics reflects a loss of confidence in the gospel. Bird reminds us we have something more powerful than partisan allegiance. We have the risen Lord.

Review: A Secular Age

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Cover image of "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor

A Secular Age, Charles Taylor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (ISBN: 9780674026766), 2007.

Summary: How Western society moved from a shared belief in God to a secular age in which belief was one option of many.

Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, has become a primary source of sorts for anyone trying to understand our present time. On a regular basis, I come across writers invoking “disenchantment, “social imaginaries,” “the buffered self,” and “the immanent frame.” All of these concepts come out of Taylor.

Like many primary sources, reading Charles Taylor is daunting for most of us. There are 776 pages of dense text that introduce us not only to a breadth of intellectual and cultural history spanning 500 years. We also encounter a truly erudite mind, who quotes literature in several European languages (usually offering translations and weaves a number of people, events and schools of thought in an analysis that seeks to answer one question: how did we move from a world, indeed a cosmos, of shared belief in God to a secular age where belief in God was merely one option of many?

I’ll be honest. I don’t have the learning to offer a detailed analysis of this book. What I will try to do is offer a summary of the major contours of his argument. Following this, I will comment on what I thought the most significant contributions of the book. I’ll note a few questions I have. And I’ll make several suggestions for intrepid souls who want to tackle this book.

Summary

Charles Taylor makes the case that secularization is not a matter of subtracting religion from society. Rather, he traces the beginnings to the Reformation that removed hierarchy, elevating the individual. With this comes the disciplinary society, using practices to elevate the spiritual and moral life of all. In time, discipline was separated from devotion to God to stand on its own as a form of incipient humanism. Belief in God wasn’t jettisoned but relegated to a providential Deism. In turn, enlightenment science reduced a cosmos filled with God’s grandeur to an impersonal mechanism and this way of thinking spread to different aspects of society. A shift occurred from the “porous self” exposed to the workings of God and the cosmos to the “buffered self” insulated from such supernatural forces.

These developments created the conditions for what Taylor calls “the nova effect,” an explosion of different ways of believing (or not believing). They range from a theistic or deistic humanism, to a humanism without God, embracing moral virtues. Nietzsche and his followers rejected the quest for truth and morality as camouflages for the will to power. For others, the disconnect of the material world from the supernatural led to the embrace of materialist and atheist belief.

This hardly led to the eradication of belief in God. Taylor describes the era from 1800 to 1960 as “The Age of Mobilization” where movements like Catholic Action in France and Methodists and revivalists in England and North America succeeded in recruiting large numbers of people. Taylor believes that the cultural revolution of the 1960’s introduced an “Age of Authenticity” introducing a variety of religious experiences, designer belief, and the celebration of bodily pleasure.

Having lost connection with the transcendent, we live in the immanent frame, and yet we struggle to find a basis in it for some of our deepest longings, and to deal with the ultimate reality of death. We live amid cross pressures and dilemmas, including the troubling presence of human violence. He concludes the work with narratives of those who believe, often out of some sense of the transcendent. He has strong words to say about the church’s rediscovery of an incarnational life and connects this to an re-consideration of the erotic and its connection to divine love.

Significant Insights

Perhaps the most significant insight is that secularization does not mean the subtraction of religion from our view of the world. Instead, belief in God and Christianity, once shared by all, becomes one of many options.

Second, science isn’t the enemy, according to Taylor. The Reformation created the milieu leading to the eclipse of the transcendent. It’s fascinating that Taylor doesn’t think much of the atheist scientists who challenge belief.

He helps us see how radically our world has shifted, including the eclipse of the supernatural and the rise of the autonomous self.

He shows the inadequacy of humanism to address many of our deepest questions and the challenge of Nietzsche as an alternative that seems to be attractive to many embracing authoritarian leaders in our day.

Questions

While we cannot return to pre-modern times, can believing people find a way to live in a supernatural, transcendent frame? It seems that the church, pre-Christendom, and perhaps in parts of the world outside the West, faced or faces the same conditions.

This raises the question of the nearly exclusive focus on the West. What might be learned from other societies and cultures? By the same token, it could be argued that secularization has become a global phenomenon.

His comments on incarnation versus excarnation and sexuality come at the very end. I would love to know if he has developed these further.

Reading Taylor

For most of us, Taylor is a tough read. I read most books in about a week. It took me nearly three months to read A Secular Age. At the suggestion of my reading buddy, I reduced my pace to 10 pages of a day, which is about all I felt I could absorb. I wish I had kept some notes along the way, which would have made tracking Taylor’s thought easier.

Read this with a reading buddy or group. It helped me keep going and we helped each other understand Taylor’s dense prose. I had this book for years, collecting dust. I wouldn’t have finished it without my friend.

It also helps to read this along with a commentary. Several, including my reading buddy recommended, James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.

This seems to be one of those books where one reading isn’t enough. Yet, I find myself wondering if I want to set aside that much time. Ah…time will tell.

Review: Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews

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Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews
Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews by Mary Poplin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mary Poplin poses a challenging question for our public discourse. Is reality secular? That seems to be the prevailing assumption that governs public discourse in politics and public policy, public media, much of the world of business and the world of higher education. It is often argued that secularism provides the only neutral ground where a pluralistic world can meet. Poplin would argue that this is not the case. Secularism is not neutral but rather a worldview that is arguing that its “take” on reality is true.

Poplin should know. She chronicles her own journey through materialistic naturalism, secular humanism and pantheism before her spiritual search led her back to a vibrant Christian faith. She writes as one who is persuaded that these other accounts of reality are inadequate and that, while others have valid insights, only Christianity provides a comprehensive view of reality that is intellectually, existentially, and spiritually true and satisfying. She outlines her purpose for this book as follows:

My position from study, observation and life experience is that the Judeo-Christian worldview encourages more freedom, supports more diversity, and is safer and healthier than secular or other religious worldviews. Indeed I will propose that the Judeo-Christian worldview includes all the true and productive principles found in the other worldviews, fills the gaps between them and offers much more. I believe it can be demonstrated that it is a more accurate description of reality (p.42).

The major part of this book then is a survey of four worldviews that she believes offer contesting views of reality: materialistic naturalism, secular humanism, pantheism, and Judeo-Christianity (really Christianity). Given her basic position, it follows that her assessments of the three rivals to Christianity are critical: Regarding naturalistic materialism, she criticizes its reductionism, its scientism, its lack of inherent purpose, its exclusion of miracle and its ungrounded ethic. Secular humanism is critiqued for its exaltation of human reason, its radical freedom, and its view that somehow morality can arise out of human dialogue with neither divine commands nor a sense of sin. Pantheism is problematic for its inadequate response to suffering, its denial of good and evil, and the pantheon of gods and spirits to which one opens oneself with potentially deleterious effects.

By contrast, she argues for the embrace of Christianity as providing a wider rationality that opens up our minds to reality, a Triune Creator God who offers a narrative of the world that all peoples can embrance, a redeemer Christ who addresses the deepest needs of the human condition. She argues that all aspects of reality from the physical world, to human culture, to the arts are signposts of this greater reality.

What is surprising in all this is that Mary Poplin is an accomplished academic who neither nuances her argument nor hides it behind academic jargon. She makes no attempt at “neutrality”, believing this impossible, and speaks with candor about her own life before Christianity and bluntness in her assessment of its inadequacies. As a result, some may be put off by her honesty. But this is someone who believes both thoughtfully and passionately in truth and the law of non-contradiction. There are only two possibilities for her: only one, or none, of these mutually contradictory worldviews can be true. Life, purpose, human flourishing and eternity hang in the balance. If that is indeed the case, then nuance and ambiguity are out of place, and her candor warranted. I think her assumption is that the genuine truth-seeker, no matter where they are beginning from, will welcome that candor.

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