Secular Christians
We have started the teaching term here in Vianney College Seminary, and I am hitting the ground running with teaching three short courses this semester, on top of my writing commitments.
One of these is a short course on the Theological Approaches to Secularism.
At the time of writing, we are only a class in, but it began with dealing with a popular and deeply ingrained impression concerning the scope of secularism. This is the impression that equates the term secular with the absence of a belief in God. The flipside to this impression is that belief in God in and of itself rids one of the stain of secularism.
We spent our first lesson explaining why such an impression misses two things. On the one hand, it misses how some who do not formally profess any faith nonetheless have an imagination that is awash in supernatural entities like angels, as Graham Ward indicated in his Cities of God. The other thing it misses is the very prevalent tendency for otherwise credal-confessing Christians could recite and believe the clauses of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and still nonetheless think and behave in a secular fashion, what has been described by the likes of Paul Tyson and John Milbank as “practical atheists”.
The touchstone for that lesson is a summary of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age by the philosopher R.J. Snell, whose name you might recognise by my frequent references to the life changing Acedia & Its Discontents. In this class, we looked at a chapter of his equally excellent Lost in the Chaos. In particular, we looked at a chapter that, at its heart, was a diagnosis of how we - and I mean all of us, Christians included - all became secular, or more precisely, we looked at how the process of secularisation is less a decrease in the belief in God, than a process of normalising what Taylor calls background “conditions of belief”, which seeps into the cultural atmosphere and becomes the cultural air we all breathe.
Key to this is Taylor’s very meticulous genealogy that traces the shifts in which a conceptual border between the natural and the supernatural, once porous and open to the workings of the supernatural, had become hardened to the point that the natural and the supernatural have become self-contained categories. This otherwise simple change then seeps into our thinking in a number of other areas, particularly how we see the world. Rather than seen as God’s creation, Taylor suggests a gradual shift in seeing it instead as a scientifically quantifiable nature, governed by purely natural laws such as those of chemistry and physics. When a porous border hardens, nature thereby becomes “buffered” from the workings of the divine. By extension, we ourselves become what Taylor calls “buffered selves”, completely natural entities similarly governed by the laws of science, and sequestered from divine intention.
Going off these readings, I suggested that two things flow from this buffering of nature and self. The first is the apprehension of what the primary locus of the drama of history. Whilst a biblical conceptions (to this we used Psalm 89/90 as our reference point) would have put God as the primary protagonist of history, a buffered world starts to become self-enclosed and the thus the protagonist of history becomes a purely human one. The second, which flows from the first, is that belief in the supernatural, rather than setting how one comports oneself to the world, ends up becoming perceived as more of an optional extra (governed as the world is by the laws of physics and chemistry, and ourselves by the ancillary sciences of medicine and pyschology). Indeed, it is one of the many other optional extras to achieve human flourishing (and it should be noted that in a secular age, flourishing can only be seen as human flourishing). This thereby creates what Taylor calls an “immanent frame”, and all encompassing, purely this-worldly, and more importantly, self-enclosed background for the conditions of belief.
This is why Taylor regards the secular age as being characterised less by an absence of a belief in God, but the multiplication of beliefs in all sorts of other optional extras. It does not matter what is believed in, since what is believed has become subservient to the logic of the immanent frame. Against Taylor’s genealogy, trying to hearken back to some past when everything was perfect will end up being sidestepped by the current background conditions of belief. Put another way, because of the prevalance of the immanent frame, hearkening back to some magical past will end up becoming yet another replication of the immanent frame.
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