Origins of Secularism

Many Evangelical Christians and theologians complain about the separation of the secular and the sacred in modern times.  They claim that Christianity is not to be privatized by limiting it to one sphere of life.  Life is holistic, not modular, and the Christian faith is also holistic.

You understand this situation, don’t you?  You’ve complained about the absence of Christian faith, ethics, or morality in secular areas of human life, right?  How do you think we got to this place of separating the sacred and the secular?  Do you think it was the result of secular powers that wanted freedom from “the tyranny of Christianity” or something?  Is philosophy or politics to blame? Maybe this is a grand liberal conspiracy? You can find blogs and websites that will blame anyone and everyone except for us good, faithful, Protestant, Evangelicals. But we too are to blame.

Secularism isn’t a vast conspiracy against Christianity. In a very real sense secularism is an outgrowth of Protestantism.

Cover of A Secular Age

Let me first explain what I mean by “secular”. In his book, A Secular Age, scholar Charles Taylor juxtaposes the secular with the enchanted cosmos. An enchanted cosmos is a hierarchical world filled with spiritual forces and magical powers. It was the world we all inhabited until the modern age. In that world it was next to impossible to be an atheist because so much of how we understood reality required the presence of God. For someone to be an atheist they’d have to abandon all common sense.

Because reality was imagined to be a hierarchy it meant that kings and popes were closer to God than common folk since they were higher on the social and religious hierarchy. They were the ones who dispensed God’s grace and laws to the rest of us. This was common sense in their day and for that reason no one really thought to question it. It was just natural. It was the way God seemed to have intended things.

Can you imagine living in this kind of world where other people were closer to God than you are and where God’s grace had to pass through others before it got to you? If you’re Protestant then probably you can’t imagine this.

In the secular cosmos that we now inhabit the hierarchical structure has been replaced with a democratic structure. What that means is that order, law, morality, and so forth no longer come from the top down. These things are now products of human construction. “We the people” have created this “more perfect union”. We created its laws and institutions and values. All the hard work is done by people on the ground.

Think of the difference. In a monarchy God is the ultimate source of the king or queen’s authority. In a democracy it is the people who are the ultimate source of authority. The difference between the monarchy and the democracy is that democracies don’t have the same need of God that monarchies do. We need the people, but not God–not if we’re talking only about a formal or structural need.

Now imagine what this means for religion. The democratization of religion means that all believers are priests. We don’t have to go through an official priest to get to God. We are all on the same level. It means that popes and clergy don’t tell us what to believe anymore. Instead we each read the Bible and figure it out for ourselves. It means that we go to churches that most reflect our own beliefs.

Our beliefs have become the cornerstone of our faith. This is what it means for us to be a real Christian–to believe the right things. Our beliefs are what connect us to God and to one another. But beliefs are also internal and private. They are not public. We can debate them in public but no one else ultimately gets to determine my beliefs. Only “I” choose my beliefs.

This is precisely the origin of secularism. It is the internal, private realm of belief that is most sacred to us. The external, public realm is not where we encounter God. This is the realm of tradition, institution, and ritual. We know that these things do not matter (or, at least that’s what our modern, secular common sense tells us). Instead what really matters is the religion of the heart, our feelings, our beliefs, and our values. Morality is internal. Righteousness is internal. We must remain pure. We must guard our hearts. We pull back into the internal, private, sacred sphere.

We Protestants did this. No one else. We abandoned the public sphere in favor of the private sphere. We abandoned the external world in favor of the internal world. It was not the body that concerned us but the soul.

Now that our own spirituality is proving insufficient we’re starting to look around ourselves again. We’ve realized that we inhabit a spiritual ghetto and we want out. We’ve blamed everyone who could be blamed, except ourselves.

Ultimately this isn’t about blame, though. It’s about confession. It is our pride that lead us to this spiritual ghetto. If we want out then it begins with confession and a plea for God’s mercy. So long as we continue to rage against the system we’ll only be chewed up by that system. The system is us. God save us.

Recommended Sources:

• William Cavanaugh. The Myth of Religious Violence. See ch. 2, “The Invention of Religion.”
• Robert Markus. Christianity and the Secular.
• Charles Taylor. A Secular Age.

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