One of the many evidences secularism is dying is a phrase you’ll hear in popular culture, most often in TV shows and movies: “The Universe.” As in, “The Universe” is telling me something, or telling me not to do this or that. It’s funny how an impersonal material force can somehow communicate meaningful messages to persons. The reason people attribute power and will and intelligence to mere matter is because atheistic materialism, and it’s offspring, secularism, for all intents and purposes is dead, especially among the youngest generation.
Having been a consumer of popular culture all my life, this is something new, but it doesn’t surprise me. Secularism as the dominant societal ethos in the West has proved itself vacuous and unable to speak to the deepest needs of the human heart. As it developed and became dominant in the 20th century, God increasingly became persona non grata, merely a personal option among an infinite variety of options to find meaning in life. It hasn’t quite worked out like it was planned.
Where we are in this dying age of secularism reminds me of the beginning of Charles Dickens’ iconic work, A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859 and set during the French Revolution of the 1790s. It could very well describe our own time:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Until, that is, the blood flowed and heads came off at the behest of the merciful Madame la Guillotine. We’ll remember that period became known as “the Reign of Terror.” The secular reign of terror isn’t so bloody, but its promises are just as hollow as the revolutionaries who brought so much misery and suffering to France. Secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, yet its cheerleaders still believe it’s our only hope for societal flourishing. Looking at a little history will help us understand why.
Secularism and the Societal Myth of Neutrality
Secularism does its damage on a personal and societal level. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” space, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence. Unfortunately, most Christians still believe in this myth, thus the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”
Secular understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture. We saw this played out in America in the autopen presidency of Joe Biden, and are currently seeing it play out throughout secular Western Europe.
It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. And make no mistake, secularism on a societal level will always and everywhere lead to tyranny. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point; its true nature can no longer be hidden by empty promises. Their description of secularism is helpful:
Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (an apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.
I could not agree more. The so called “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear, has been completely discredited. The world is arguably more religious than ever, even if the West is less so. The authors further state the obvious:
The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.
I could not agree with this more as well, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year. Only Christianity gives us the true basis of liberty, as America’s founders knew full well.
Secularism and the Personal Myth of Neutrality: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Secularism on a societal level assumes the myth of neutrality on a personal level as well; one feeds the other. It’s ubiquitous and easy to spot, but I’ll use one example to make the point, a piece from the 2011 print edition of The New Yorker Magazine called, “Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents.” Author James Wood, a committed secularist, admits secularism has its problems, but not enough for him to discard it.
As a secularist, Wood clearly considers himself not “religious,” and therefore believes he is neutral regarding ultimate issues. Since he believes he isn’t “religious,” he also believes he doesn’t need faith. The secularist’s definition of faith is, however, fallacious and biased, something along the lines of what Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, declared: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith in this view is basically wishful thinking, and not “scientific,” as if science could answer metaphysical questions of meaning; it can’t. That would be known as a category error. Science and philosophy do different things and address different issues, and most secularists are terrible philosophers. The bias is specifically anti-supernatural because secularists are naturalists or materialists, i.e., they believe the material is all there is. They are, however, every bit as “religious” as the religious.
In other words, the un-believer doesn’t exist. One of my pet peeves is referring to certain people as believers and others as unbelievers. The word believer is biblical, but it’s a word we need to retire in our secular age. Using it allows the “unbeliever,” the secularist, the false impression they don’t have faith just like every “believer.” All human beings by the nature of their finite created existence are believers and live by faith; the issue is what or who they believe in. In the apologetics task against secularism, Christians must learn to refer to people either as Christians or non-Christians, not believers and unbelievers.
Throughout the article Wood contrasts religious “believers” with atheists, and at one point refers to “Both atheists and believers . . .” Ergo, atheists don’t have to believe anything! It’s almost comical how ridiculous the contrast it. Without the slightest evidence atheists believe all material reality basically created itself, everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Talk about a leap of faith! Wood might even say he doesn’t need the “crutch” of faith like many atheists, but atheism and secularism are their own rickety crutch. You’ll see throughout his piece something else secularists are especially good at, begging the question, a logical fallacy meaning to assume the premise as the conclusion, a form of circular reasoning. A great example of this is early in the piece when he lays his cards on the table claiming, “God is dead, and cannot be reimposed on existence.” The bald assertion is never defended, just asserted, as if it need not be defended; but it is a statement of faith. We must question the unexamined assumptions of the secularist and secularism wherever they rear their ugly head.
C.S. Lewis said something that underlies the impossibility of neutrality in the Christian understanding of reality:
There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.
In other words, there is a spiritual war being waged on the vast plane of reality, and only one side wins.
Making the Secular Plausible: Epic Fail
The reason “the universe” is showing up in popular culture as a character directing the lives of people in some way is because secularism is no longer as plausible as it once was. The sociological concept of plausibility structures is helpful for us to understand what is going on, to get the big picture.
All societies and cultures have a structure of the plausible, all those things in the culture, entertainment, law, media, education, family, religion, etc., that make reality seem real and natural and normal to us—just the way things are. The truth of the seeming is irrelevant. What is plausible is what makes the worldview of a people, how they understand who and why they are, and people in the West inhabit a secular plausibility structure. God for them is for the most part irrelevant.
Since we’re talking about popular culture, the indoctrination into secularism, both personally and societally is insidious. Watch almost any TV show or movie, and God is invisible, unless used as some kind of curse. Treating God as if he’s irrelevant is far more effective in secularizing people than your typical atheist talking points, and we’re all more susceptible to the lies and illusions of a secular view of reality because of it. An irrelevant God is the secular cultural air we breathe, and the dominant cultural messaging, which is why the personal and societal effects of secularism are ubiquitous and profound.
James K.A. Smith in his book summarizing the magisterial tome of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, entitled his book, How (Not) to be Secular. He has numerous helpful insights into the nature of secularism. In speaking of plausibility, he mentions Taylor’s “conditions of belief,” saying there was “a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.” It’s not so much what people believe, as what is believable. These are reflected in “the default assumptions” of a people, ideas unexamined and taken for granted by everyone, and thus most secular people don’t think they assume anything at all! Commenting on the “conditions of belief,” Smith gives us a helpful perspective on the implications for faith:
Taylor not only explains unbelief in a secular age; he also emphasizes that even belief is changed in our secular age. There are still believers who believe the same things as their forebearers 1,500 years ago; but how we believe has changed. Thus faith communities need to ask: How does this change in the “conditions” of belief impact the way we proclaim and teach the faith? How does this impact faith formation? How should this change the propagation of the faith for the next generation?
Even though Smith makes my previous point referring to believers when the whole paragraph is about belief, he does say later, “[I]t’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise.” And in this sense, everyone is a believer.
In simplest terms, secularism means “no God.” It doesn’t necessitate atheistic materialism, although all atheists are secularists. The vast majority of people believe God exists, but He has no practical relevance to their lives because all that matters is flourishing in this world. The dominant secular faith is called moralistic therapeutic Deism (MTD), meaning God’s there, He wants us all to be nice, and the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. If we get in a pickle, then we’ll bring God into the picture, otherwise not so much. Finally, this MTD faith believes good people go to heaven when they die.
This God is no threat to secularism because it is a religion of secularism. What’s important is the here and now. Why worry about all that stuff we really can’t know and everyone disagrees about anyway. Thus God’s invisibility in popular culture. The problem with this shallow secular religion is that people know it doesn’t meet their deepest emotional and psychological needs for meaning, hope, and purpose in life. It’s based on nothing but wishful thinking, nothing solid, nothing real, like soap bubbles, as soon as you catch them, there’s nothing there. It’s just preference as worldview, which is why an increasing number of people in the West are turning back to faith in God, to Christianity, the only true, solid, and real thing in this world and the next. Is it another Great Awakening? We’ll see, but it is an epic fail for secularism.
The reason it is epic is that it started somewhere in the 17th century with rationalism, and then developed over the next 300 to 400 years, eventually displacing Christianity as the dominant faith in the West. All the cultural elites believed we could order a prosperous and flourishing society without any reference to God. It’s obvious by this point that isn’t true. The 20th century was the bloodiest in the history of the world by far, and the 21st isn’t starting out much better. We’re the most prosperous societies the word has ever seen, and people are miserable. The universe won’t save us; only God in Christ can, he who died for our sin, and rose again to conquer death that we might live with Him forever.
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