Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
In the second episode of Secular Christ, Sean J McGrath helps us to make a necessary distinction between naive versus mature secularism. He follows Charles Taylor's description of what happens to religion in the secular age and how religious belief has turned into a consumer product. McGrath goes on to describe how Christianity in instances has become an absolute reversal of itself, the antichrist, and has brought with it a new form of evil into this world. McGrath discusses these themes together with Berlin-based psychoanalyst Jakob Lusensky.
Reading: Charles Taylor - A secular Age
Music in this episode is licensed under creativecommons.org. Artist. Xylo-Ziko Titles: Dark Water, First light, Submersible & Brook.
---
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/secular-christ/message
Canadian Philosophy and Theology professor and former Catholic Monk Dr. Sean J. McGrath examines how to practice contemplative Christianity in the secular age.
Subscribe on Substack. https://centerofthecross.substack.com/
(0:06) Sean McGrath: How we practice religion—and most importantly, how we transmit religion—in our developed, secular societies has fundamentally changed. The transmission is no longer inherited or communal. It is now private, individual, a matter of individual choice, the way shopping is.
Our secularism has a long history of debate already, and I think we’re beginning to see that there [are] at least two forms of secularism that should be distinguished. And one is naive secularism, and the second I would call mature secularism. I think naive secularism is pretty much over. It survives only with a few die-hard folks like Christopher–Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, you know, people really attached to the idea that science has now made religion obsolete. Outside of philosophy circles, I don’t meet too many of those people, I must say. It’s quite few in philosophy departments. So, these are proponents of naive secularism. Mature secularism is more the kind of secularism that Charles Taylor is discussing in A Secular Age. So, naive secularism is a very clear—based on a very clear thesis, really.
The thesis is this: that religion is a sign of ignorance, and it thrives in places of underdevelopment, where people are not properly educated, where science has been held back for whatever reason, or where the community is denied free access to education and information, largely in poor, underdeveloped places. Religion thrives there because of a lack of education. And as these countries develop, as the world develops, as we become more knowledgeable about the structure of the natural world—for example, the age of the earth, the Big Bang, heat death, and so on and so forth—and as people become more and more—as this information becomes more and more accessible to people and people are educated, as a kind of human right, religion should wither away. The only problem is that that didn’t happen.
(3:11) So, this naive secular view. You know, I referred to some contemporary diehards, but the naive secular view really had its heyday a century ago. That was when it was really ramping up, at end of the nineteenth century, early twentieth century. I think Sigmund Freud, for example, is a good representative of a naive secularist. He thinks religion is a neurosis and that as we become educated as a people, about the unconscious, and about our mental flaws, we shall become free of it. So, naïve secularism was disproven . . . by a simple fact that the world developed in many parts—much of the world developed—and as it developed, religion didn’t disappear. It didn’t go away.
So just think about the intensity of Evangelical Christianity, for example, in the United States. Obviously, development is not a threat to Evangelical Christianity. Obviously, education and free access to it is not a threat to Evangelical Christianity, any more than it’s a threat to other forms of religion in the world. We see, in fact—you could, if you expand the notion of what religion is and disidentify it from certain familiar forms of it—you could say that our contemporaries’ developed secular world is saturated by religion. If we start to look around, for example, at spirituality, you know, at the New Age or—why not, at psychoanalysis, particularly Jungian psychoanalysis—at the rise of the so-called spiritual-but-not-religious movement, at the wellness culture, at the yoga industry, at the eco-retreat industry: If we look at all of this activity as having something to do with a religious instinct in the human being, some expression of religion in our time, then we can only say that secularism was naive in assuming that development and education and the rise of science would lead to the withering of religion. It simply didn’t. It didn’t happen.
But something did happen to religion. And this is where Taylor’s thesis comes in. Charles Taylor argues in A Secular Age that it’s not the “what” of religion that has changed. It is the “how” that has changed. That is, how we practice religion—and most importantly, how we transmit religion—in our developed, secular societies has fundamentally changed. The transmission is no longer inherited or communal. It is now private, individual, a matter of individual choice, the way shopping is.
(6:23) Now, the point is not to say this is good or bad, just to identify it. So, some sociological point. So if we go back to this 1948 moment, when Thomas Merton’s story of his conversion and entrance into a Cistercian monastery becomes a bestseller: The people who read that book—probably Christians, but not necessarily, but those who belonged to a mainstream religion—would have belonged to that religion because it was their family’s religion. That’s why they went to church. They go to the church that their fathers went to, that their mothers went to, that they were baptized in. They’re Lutherans because their family has been Lutheran for four centuries. You know, they’re Roman Catholic because they’ve always been Roman Catholic, and so on.
So, one inherited a religion. And this has now ceased to be the case. Even among people who find themselves committed to mainstream, mainline religious denominations or Christian denominations, if they still go to church, they go because they choose to go, not because their parents belonged to that church.
(7:35) You know, Paris is full of empty churches, right? Empty churches that have been converted to museums. But if you go to the parish of Saint-Germain-des-Prés —at least last time I was there—which was a few years ago now—you’ll find anything but an empty church. It’s full of people, very vibrant, vibrant parish, full of young people, young families. These people, I would hazard to say, are not going to that church because their families went to that church. Or they are not practicing Christianity because it was given to them, [or] they inherited it along with their family name. They have chosen this Saint-Germain-des-Prés as their spiritual home, like other people choose the yoga studio, or meditate with the Shambhala crowd.
And so this is the big shift Taylor identified. So, I think this is the mark of mature secularism. Mature secularism refers to the freedom of the individual to be who he or she wishes to be, regardless of where they come from and who their parents were, and—also with the ideology of human rights, which is still very strong—regardless of their race or ethnicity. We are self-creators in the secular world. We are free. We are given a project of making ourselves. We are not defined by our past.
(8:58) This is the fundamental thesis of mature secularism: We are not defined by our past. And so, why should our religion be defined by our past? If we wish to be religious, we are free to be religious. If we wish to practice no religion? We are free to practice no religion. If we wish to write scientific treatises or pseudo-scientific treatises about why religion is ignorance, we are free to do that, too. The mature secular world is not the world in which religion dies. It is the world in which religion at last is individualized, as everything else has been in the secular age—privatized. Even consumer-driven. Religion is now a consumer product.
So, before we start smugly looking down at the New Agers, or laughing at the people who follow Oprah’s reading list. I mean, maybe we don’t want to do that. But I have a tendency to do that, so I’m talking to myself here.
(10:00) We should recognize that these folks are driven to their forms, their consumption of religious products, for much the same reason, sociologically speaking, that church people are driven to practice traditional forms of Christianity. We’re all in this together. We are all consumers.
If there’s a tension between, let’s say, secular Christ and the world—you know, things that are going on in the world today—it’s not going to be a tension between Christianity and mature secularism. That’s not the site of tension. There is—there is a tension, I think, because wherever Christ appears, he divides. We need to recognize this. He says himself: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it was burning already.” He divides father from son and mother from daughter. This is all throughout the New Testament. Christ is the one who divides people, and—there’s a paradox again—but he divides people not because he wishes just to destroy things, but because he forces a decision, right? So, so, the decision is happening now, too, in our secular consumer world, but where is it happening? Where is its site? And what are its conditions? So, the point about Christianity and privatized consumer-driven secular religion is the following: Christianity, cannot simply condemn all that, for multiple reasons. First of all, if it was to condemn that world, you know, as some religious sects do—think of the Hasidic communities forming little ghettos within the cities where they more or less defect completely from what’s going on in the world. Christianity cannot do that, it seems to me, because if it was to do that, it would first of all be condemning much that is good.
And let me just give these three items as a list of good things that the secular consumer world supports, at least in theory, and promotes sometimes in practice: freedom, the emancipation of women, social mobility. Christianity supports these things because, it in fact invented them. If Christianity was to condemn the secular world, it would be condemning its own child, because it was Christendom that produced secular society. None of these values exist apart from Christianity. And the proof is that they existed nowhere else—individual freedom, the emancipation of women, and social mobility in particular. These are the marks of Christian modernity. They are introduced into the world in early European modernity by secular Christians, or secularizing Christians—you know, political theorists and so on—but also by these institutions that promote them in one way or another, the colleges that we referred to earlier. So this is the child of Christendom. The modern world would not exist without Christendom. Christendom is gone. It has been succeeded by secular modernity, but that succession was not a revolution. It was actually a development.
(14:16) Secular Christianity has become in its perversion, in its one-sided development, it’s become the exact reverse of itself, and there’s an old word for that. The word is Antichrist. You know, the Antichrist looks like the Christ. He’s a—in a certain way, he’s the brother of the Christ, because he’s not going to be there without the Christ. There’s a new form of evil that enters the world with Christianity. It’s not there before. It’s not the old guy. Yes, of course, there’s Satan. And there’s a serpent and all that. So there’s a kind of genealogy of evil, but Antichrist has a different—has a different—strategy, and his strategy is precisely to take what is apparently a value, and to use it to displace the Christ.
And I think this is happening in secular consumer society today. And I think environmental indicators are signs that this is afoot. And I think that the detour into Islam, as well, is healthily recognizing something demonic-satanic in secular modernity, with its roots in Christianity.
We wanted to know where to look. Where should we look for secular Christ? Let’s look—he’s hard to find, admittedly, but maybe his demonic brother is easier to locate. Let’s look to Antichrist.