This post’s title comes from a new book by three sociologists and some of the article’s content is my reflection on a new novel.
Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (2023)
is a scholarly work authored by three sociologists.* One of the three is Phil Zuckerman, a professor of
sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.
Many large, public universities have Religious Studies
departments. For example, my daughter Karen is the head of the Department of
Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona.
But in 2011, Zuckerman founded the Secular Studies department
at Pitzer, the first college academic program in the nation dedicated
exclusively to studying secular culture.
Zuckerman is also the author of several books on secularity,
including Living the Secular Life (2014) and What It
Means to Be Moral: Why
Religion Is Not Necessary for Living An Ethical Life (2019).
He can also be found on YouTube, speaking on various secular or
agnostic/atheist sites. For example, here is the link
to his March 31 talk titled “How Secular Values Will Save the USA.” It is an
attractively presented talk, and I agreed with much of what he said.
However, I was also “turned off” by that talk: even though he is an academic, Zukerman came across as an “evangelist” for secularity and presented misleading “facts.” As often happens, he presented the best examples of secular morality and the worst examples of religious morality.
Heaven & Earth (2023) is a challenging novel by Joshua Senter (b. 1979), who was born in the Missouri Ozarks and reared/homeschooled in a fundamentalist Christian home
.Senter’s book is about a disgraced megachurch pastor Sam, who was born near Conway, Mo., a small town on Route 66 and about 40 miles west of the author’s hometown.
But even more, Heaven & Earth is about Sam’s wife
Ruth, who was abandoned by her hippy mother and raised by her devout Christian grandmother.
Until the last chapter, Ruth is also an exemplary Christian, but she jettisons
her faith to embrace the secular worldview of her mother.
The sociologists’ book documents how religion is currently losing
out to secularization and Senter’s novel depicts how that happened in the case
of one particular Christian believer.
Religion is not always good and secularization is not
always bad (as many religionists imply). But the opposite is also true:
secularization (=secularism) is not always good and religion (=faith) is not
always bad (as many secularists imply).
As I have often emphasized, secularization is better than
secularism and faith is superior to religion.**
I agree with the sociologists: the further secularization of American
society is quite surely “beyond doubt.” But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Secularization is an antidote to the current widespread advocacy of (White)
Christian nationalism, and it helps ensure the freedom of religion for all
citizens.
And I agree with the strong emphasis of Ruth’s mother in the
novel: we need to embrace the joy of living now instead of focusing only the
“life beyond.”
However, I strongly disagree with Zuckerman’s insistence that
secular morality is (always) good and religious morality is (always) bad. He
even says that it is not only possible to be moral without belief in God,
theistic belief is often a barrier to morality.
Zuckerman’s negative view of religion seems to be based
largely on the errors and excesses of conservative (fundamentalist)
Christianity. (Sad to say, Pat Robertson, who died on June 8, did incalculable
damage to U.S. Christianity.) But Zuckerman mostly neglects other forms of
Christianity.
And in the novel, an atheistic nurse tells Ruth that “living
for today as opposed to living for some future grandeur [that is, Heaven]” is a
gift, “a wonderful realization. Life is suddenly so potent” (p. 217). That is
the view that Ruth adopts at the end of the book.
But it doesn’t have to be either/or. It is certainly possible
to believe in Heaven and to fully appreciate/enjoy the grandeur of life in this
world now.
Perhaps everything is sacred (religious) and nothing is profane (secular), as Fr. Richard Rohr contends in his insightful “daily meditation” for June 12.
_____
* The authors are Isabella
Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan
T. Cragun. Zuckerman (b. 1969) is the oldest and most prominent of the three.
There has been an ongoing debate in the last couple of decades among sociologists over whether the world is getting more secular. I have generally found the arguments and evidence for an increasingly secular world to be more convincing. It is especially interesting that the countries in the world rated most highly on quality of life indices tend to be the most secular. That is a challenging piece of evidence in support of secularity.
ReplyDeleteI'm finding these days that generally I'm more comfortable with secular people than conservative religious people. There is so much nonsense in traditional religion and a definite tendency in conservative religion towards authoritarianism.
One of my regrets in life is over how much time I spent in churches of evangelical Christianity during my college years. I think I would have been better off had I spent more time with my studies and less time with religion, especially religion of that brand.
Anyway, thanks for the blog. You are right that all secularity is not necessarily good and all religion bad and that people can and have embraced this life while still hoping for something better in the next. Human consciousness is malleable in that way.
Thanks, Anton, for your pertinent comments. Regarding your first sentence, I think, as I indicated in this blog post, that it is quite certain that the world is getting more secular. What is questionable, though, is whether it is secularization that has led to high ranking in the quality-of-life surveys. Zuckerman seems to think there is a clear correlation, but there are many factors leading to a high quality of life, and religion or secularity is just one factor. But writing/talking about that correlation is where I think Zuckerman's "facts" are misleading.
DeleteRegarding your second paragraph, I would say, sure, there are some, maybe many, secular people that I would rather spend time with than some, maybe many, conservative (fundamentalistic) Christians. But there are also many progressive Christians I would rather spend time with than some, maybe many, secular people. Secularity, as such, doesn't make people good/moral or bad/immoral--and the same is true for religion, as such.
As you know, I grew up in a conservative church and basically held conservative theological views, which gradually began to change in college (at William Jewell) and more in seminary. But looking back, I have no regrets about my involvement with small town Baptist churches then. I realize that things were quite a lot different then from now. But growing up in the 1950s and being a pastor in the last half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, it still seems to me that the best, most moral, and most respected people I knew in the towns where I lived were Christians (and there were basically no one who professed a different religion). Sure, there were a few hypocrites, but they were the exception. And sure, there were some fine, moral, respected people who were basically non-religious (secular), but they, too, were the exceptions.
Thinking Friend Tom Nowlin in Arkansas sent the following, scholarly comments, which I am happy to post here. (I am always happy to get comments from friends who know more than I do about a given subject.)
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing important contemporary topics to our attention. The popular conceptual divide between “the religions” (faith) and “the secular” (secularism) is no exception. I agree with your statement: “Religion is not always good and secularization is not always bad (as many religionists imply). But the opposite is also true: secularization (=secularism) is not always good and religion (=faith) is not always bad (as many secularists imply).”
I will only mention that both these conceptualizations are not monolithic. Scholars have identified various constructs for both “the religious” and “the secular.”
The late philosopher of religion John Hick famously writes about the many possible human responses to the transcendent, resulting in various constructs informed by localized human culture and language:
Hick, J. (1982). "God has many names." Westminster John Knox Press.
Hick, J. (2005). "An interpretation of religion: Human responses to the transcendent." Yale University Press.
Anthropologist Talal Asad writes extensively about the various structures/constructs of the secular.
Asad, T. (2003). "Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity." Stanford University Press.
Asad, T. (2018). "Secular translations: Nation-state, modern self, and calculative reason." Columbia University Press.
Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood also write an intriguing book that interrogates the seeming necessary conflict between religious and secular:
Asad, T., Brown, W., Butler, J., & Mahmood, S. (2013). "Is critique secular?: Blasphemy, injury, and free speech." Fordham University Press.
Linguistic scholars argue, including some of the scholars above, that the conceptualizations of “the religious” and “the secular” have overlap. Neither conceptualization is completely distinct, and neither conceptualization can stand alone. This is consistent with language systems/”games”:
De Saussure, F. (1998). "Course in general linguistics." Open Court.
Derrida, J. (2016). "Of grammatology." John Hopkins University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2009). "Philosophical investigations." Wiley-Blackwell.
I am rather suspicious of scholars who make rather inorganic claims of exclusivity such as “the religious” versus “the secular.” There is a lot of “the secular” to be found in ”the religious,” and vice versa.
Thanks so much, Tom, for taking the time to post such erudite comments. I mainly agree with your concluding paragraph, although in keeping with my concluding paragraph, I wonder if it is necessary to make a bifurcation of reality into "religious" and "secular."
DeleteWow Leroy, you got my attention!
ReplyDeleteIn my old age and energy declining years, I am (unsuccessfully) trying to move toward what the authors name “apatheism” on p. 116. The difficulty for me, unlike the person the authors identify as Ju, is that I have been socialized in a religious environment. So, my own sense of self is along the lines of Jacques Derrida in *Circumfession* (1991): “I quite rightly pass for an atheist.”
My own quest seems to be toward “non-supernatural” religion. This qualifies my mostly positive response to *Beyond Doubt*. The authors use their primary foil, Rodney Stark, for this statement: “a religion lacking supernatural assumptions is no religion at all” (p. 4). Kind of rules me out. 😊
Still, the authors offer this response to the question, “will religion and supernatural beliefs, values, and behaviors decline?”: “It would be rather stupid of us to suggest that religion and supernatural belief will completely disappear. Scholars who have made such claims in the past are now heavily criticized, particularly if they suggested a time frame for religion to disappear. Our position on this is more nuanced. We believe that religiosity and supernatural beliefs, values, and behaviors will continue to decline in light of widespread differentiation and rationalization” (p. 48).
As expected, significant portions of the presentation focus on defining/operationalizing beliefs, values, and behaviors; and(!) differentiation and rationalization. The important point to me is that religion involves all three dimensions identified; and the effects of rationalization and differentiation are truly present in my own life journey.
There is so much in the book that I can no longer sort out. My academic self has largely disappeared. 😊
Thanks and shalom, Dick
Thanks for your honest, thought-provoking comments, Dick. I was particularly interested in your reference to apatheism, a term with which I have not been familiar. I looked up the term in Wikipedia and found incorrect information there. ChatGPT also gave a correct definition but also erroneous information about who coined the term. I asked Bing chat and got the same erroneous information. (Earlier I posted a response, see below, to TF Greg Brown that chatbot's are not always reliable, and what I found this morning causes me to think even more strongly that they must be used with caution,)
DeleteAt any rate, I appreciate your reference to apatheism, and I may write a blog article next month at least partly about that concept.
We are living through another axial age, and that is causing a lot of confusion. Just as the transitions from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies caused major religious changes, so the change to kingdoms and empires did it again. Now we are adjusting to the age of science. We see this in the large numbers of people who claim to be "spiritual but not religious." (That is not secularism.) Within science, we are shifting from the early science of technology, to the later science of environmentalism. In Montana today there is a lawsuit between young people worried about the future and the fossil fuel industry that is worried about the next quarterly report. Capitalism and environmentalism are both religions, and both are frequently intertwined with Christianity.
ReplyDeleteThe age of Enlightenment began when Catholics and Protestants agreed to end the Thirty Years' War by letting science decide public policy questions, instead of by church dogma. Just as previous axial ages lasted for centuries, so with the current one. Christianity is still coming to terms with science.
The Enlightenment itself has given way to later movements such as Romanticism. Fortunately, it has tools to help, once it is ready. As Jesus said, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32) So now we face the question, Can we dodge nuclear war and global warming long enough to get to a safe place to establish a long-term future for our children? The age of empire is not going easily into that good night. It wants to empire on!
Craig, I was a bit baffled with your reference to environmentalism as a religion. An online dictionary defines that as "concern about and action aimed at protecting the environment," which doesn't sound like a religion. On the other hand, to a certain degree I suppose every "ism" is a type of religion as they are ideologies to which their proponents offer allegiance.
DeleteIn response to your question at the end, my response is rather negative. For us older people, our children may be able to live out their lives somewhat satisfactorily. But I am not at all hopeful that that will be the case for our grandchildren (and, now, my great-grandchildren).
Oops, my edit got garbled. In the last paragraph I hopped back and forth between the Enlightenment and Christianity. My comment about "tools to help" refers to Christianity, not the Enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteHere are comments received from Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago:
ReplyDelete"Thanks for your thoughts, Leroy, on secularism and secularization. I generally agree.
"I will address a couple of points. While I agree that religion is not necessary to live a moral life per se, for the majority of people, it helps. While my belief system is secular, my practice is religious because I believe religious institutions, or at least those which are inclusive, contribute to the moral and social stability of both individuals and of society. Although I consider my moral philosophy to be essentially secular, it is based on Christian and Jewish moral axioms.
"The increasing secularism of society seems to be inevitable despite pushback by Christian nationalists. While I believe that governments should be strictly secular, that does not mean that society should be. I do not think that the decline in church (or synagogue or masjid) attendance has been a good thing as it has left many people socially and morally rudderless.
"I also agree that secularists have not been any more moral than the religious. Both secularists (e.g., Communists and fascists) and religionists (e.g., Christian nationalists and Islamic jihadists) have had their fanatics and committed horrible atrocities in the name of their belief systems.
"And regarding exclusive religious institutions, what are your thoughts about the decision by SBC to boot congregations with female pastors?"
Thanks, Eric, for sharing these comments--and I also generally agree with what you wrote.
DeleteWith regard to your closing question, I am probably going to make some response to that issue in my next blog article, which I am planning to post on June 29.
[The following was posted with deficiencies (in what I wrote) earlier today, so I am reposting a corrected version here now.]
ReplyDeleteLocal Thinking Friend Greg Brown sent significant comments in an email, which I am sharing here:
"I do read your emails and find you to be generally fair-minded. However today you used the old debater’s trick with your ALWAYS argument. We know in human affairs, always is nearly always false.
"How about this from one of my UWis history professors: 'All generalizations are false, including this one!'
"Curious about the distinction you made between secularism and secularization, I went to my chatBot for assistance. Here is the last bit of a longer statement: 'In summary, secularism is a principle advocating for the separation of religion and government, while secularization is a broader process that describes the decline of religion’s influence in society.' If accurate the two ideas would support and reinforce each other. You seem to accept secularization however. . .
"I note that you have written to oppose secularism. If secularism is a principle, as in the US Constitution, it is difficult for me to imagine how it, separation of church and state, could ever be a bad thing. Secularism doesn’t have to be synonymous with a strong (or even weak) form of atheism. One could easily practice one’s personal religion, or faith your term, and still support the principle.
"Many/most of the excesses (bads) of religion that I know of come about when religion attempts to use the power of the state to further its interests."
Thanks, Greg, for your thought-provoking comments.
DeleteSimilar to your history professor, I have sometimes said (tongue-in-cheek), I never use the word "never" in my writing and I am always careful not to use the word "always." In my defense, though, when I used the word "always" at the beginning of the third section of this post, I meant that some/many secularists or religionists seem to think/imply that one side is "always" good/moral and that the other side is "always" bad/immoral. That is certainly not a view that I hold, and I am sorry if I did not make that clear enough. Also, when I used the word "always" in summarizing what I think Zuckerman has said/written, I sought to qualify the use of "always" by enclosing it in parentheses.
Regarding the difference between secularism and secularization, I think what your AI chatbot said is clearly wrong. (I have used three different AI chatbots, and while I have gotten much good, helpful information from them, I have also gotten information that was clearly (factually) wrong, and other information that was quite misleading.) I suggest you go back and read my 2020 blog post that I linked to in the footnotes. I stand by what I wrote there.
I do support the secularization of society, for as I wrote in this blog post, it is an antidote to (White) Christian nationalism, and I think that secularization (but not secularism) is important for maintaining religious freedom and the separation of church and state, which I have mentioned in several blog posts through the years.
I am enjoying the discussion! Fr. Rohr helps us "to see the forest for the trees," that is in his urgings to see the world (saeculum) through more than just its parts that do characteristically clash at times. But I would not want to call everything in the world sacred, if only because we intuit that not everything is sacred. We also do not treat everything as sacred. I do think Rohr's greater point is a vision-correcting tool, at least a special lens, through which we may see beyond and through the worldly (secular) noise to see the active presence of the hidden God who nonetheless can be revealed and noticed, seen and experienced.
ReplyDeleteThe matter of revelation, human cognizance, and experience appears to be what the sociologists of religion are studying, but in different ways. Leroy, you focused on Zuckerman, whose work appears worth reading. Evidently he (and his co-authors in "Beyond Doubt) are responding to the work of Rodney Stark who was storming the sociology of religion field in recent decades, limiting negative judgments on the decline of religion and advancing a useful conversation. Is it possible that in the focus on religion versus secularization we are having skewed conversations?
What we call "secularization" is distinctive only in modernity, in what Zuckerman et al. note as the products of differentiation and rationalization in all fields of human scientific and material endeavor: the greater the forces of modernization, the greater the secularization. The locus of "belief, behavior, and belonging" used in defining religion actually applies even in modernization and secularization (here I'm talking). Our religious responses are diverse, though, ranging from religiosities (expressions of reliance) ranging from atheistic materialism as an extreme example to, say, cosmic and mystical approaches actually long present in greater Christianity. What do I "rely on" -- "religio"? I think this is the focal question your prompt for us suggests. For example, one who is a thoroughgoing secular materialist (and quite moral to boot) may be rather comfortable and live a fine life with others in terms of the world, "without God", yet fully reliant on the foundations and relationships, even the ideas, he or she knows in the world. Who needs the "old" religion, then?
Yes, I think it is clear that Zuckerman sees secularization as the natural result of modernization, and he still seems to think that at least American Christianity continues to espouse religious views that are pre-Enlightenment--as many of the conservative evangelical views are. He seems to have little knowledge of the thinking and actions of progressive Christian thinkers and prophets.
DeleteYesterday I received the following thoughtful comments from local Thinking Friend Vern Barnet:
ReplyDeleteWhile I might in a certain context agree with the message you cite from Fr. Richard Rohr, as it appears I question his opening statement about religions historically -- applying terms with varying connotations can be misleading. The 'secular priesthood' is a technically correct phrase that might seem a contradiction to those unfamiliar with the many uses of the terms.
More broadly in my view: only in the context of Totality can it be said that everything is sacred. Otherwise we live in a world of partialisms -- the secular world, and what we call sacred reminds us of an ultimate perspective. The world we live in has prejudice, oppression, greed, thefts, murders, and wars -- are we, ala Rohr, to call them 'sacred'? He writes: 'Everything belongs, including us.'
"Yes, the mystic can say such things, but we are called to make decisions, and loving well sometimes means separating the sheep from the goats. Apply that to political parties, if you like.
"Rohr's Pollyanna-sounding comment 'The bad is never strong enough to counteract the good' embedded in his new age meditation may be as harmful to a rich understanding of religion as Zuckerman’s. Many who criticize religion have only the slightest understanding of it. Thanks for raising this issue."
Thanks for your comments, Vern. I had trouble accepting Rohr's emphasis on everything belonging when I read his "Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer" (2003) many years ago--and I still have questions/doubts about that. But he doesn't mean that everything should be accepted and that which is harmful to people or to the earth should not be opposed. After all, he is the founder (in 1987) and resident of the Center for Contemplation and Action.
DeleteFr. Rohr, who is a mystic, has long emphasized Totality and non-dual thinking about Reality. Perhaps the ancient yin-yang concept of China is expressive of his view, of the thought of Buddhist scholars in Japan that I heard talk about the "funi" (=not two) concept of Reality. This is consistent with the both/and (paradoxical) way of thinking that I have tried to emphasize through the years in contrast to the usual either/or way of thinking that is so prevalent in the West.
While religion is on the wane, so is the scientism of the New Atheists from earlier in this century. Today, religious adherents and secular rationalists may actually have a common enemy in what now appears to be more popular than both: postmodernism. According to that revived philosophical-but-increasingly-popularist viewpoint, there are no universal truths, nothing to tell us what to believe, value, or how to behave, with the practical implication that none of these really matters.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to beliefs, values, and especially behaviors, there is such great diversity of these among religious people today, even among Christians, that it’s difficult to find any common ground to span the whole. Christians are divided more along political lines than religious ones. Those professing no religious belief are perhaps more likely to share with one another many of their values and behaviors. More relevant for society, the behavior of secularists is generally less inclined toward authoritarian ways or doing harm to their neighbors.
Christianity is in serious need of genuine revival! The kind of revival that would introduce Evangelicals to the ways of Jesus, to bring them to repentance for their Trumpism, their triumphalism, white nationalism, and lack of care for the wider society, both their neighbors and their enemies—particularly the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the fringe.
You are right, Fred. I would add that Christianity must always be freshened and kept revolutionary. Your comment on postmodernism recalled François Lyotard's definition of the "postmodern condition": that "the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age" (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984). What is "postmodern" quickly becomes the "new modern," so we can never relax our awareness of change. Cultural change means our responses need to change. The "narratives" also keep changing; what started as an artistic and literary movement a century ago now is associated with all that is contemporary (modern). We observe and feel it in our politics, media, info-tech, and so on - and the most involved players keep up with the new languages and media, or they create them with target audiences in mind (re: the Acts of the Apostles).
DeleteYour last paragraph cites how our social, political, and cultural practices struggle to keep up with continuing "post-(post-) modernity"--when change is so dramatic it terrifies, people suffer on all sides and the politics gets messier. Your thought suggested to me that the good news of Jesus Christ is, as always, a resource for healing and unity--for wholeness. What's lacking is the awareness of witnesses that leads them to create (or adopt) vocabularies, activities, narratives, stories, and redemptive social networks that make sense to "postmodern" folk, even in our diverseness. How do we tell the "old, old story"? We tell it in ways that resonate with our contemporaries, and we do so best by relying on our diversity within our unity in Christ. So we are "in the world" but not bound by its limitations. Thanks.
Thanks for your significant comments, Fred. I certainly agree with your last paragraph, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. What would it take for there to be another Great Awakening?
DeleteWith regard to your first paragraph, I think that traditional theism and the new atheism both are suffering from the widespread growth of apatheism in society--and I hadn't thought of this before reading your comments again just now, but apatheism is no doubt largely rooted in postmodern thinking.
Thinking Friend Virginia Belk, a native Missourian who has long lived in New Mexico, emailed me the following comments:
ReplyDelete"The more I learn about many indigenous cultures and observe in environmental studies, the more convinced I am that the artificial divisions created by dualism are just that...artificial!
"Diné [the Native American People often called Navajo] philosophy does not separate humans from the rest of nature; all is sacred, must be balanced and in harmony with everything else. Therefore, I guess I am with you as you embrace secularism because spirituality is there, as well."
I thought I wouldn't be writing anything more regarding this blog, but I'm finding I must do so, whether anyone sees it or not. To begin with, I would note, arrogantly, that I'm a bit of an authority on postmodernism, having published twice on it, taught it, both in the church and in college, and presented more than one paper in professional meetings relevant indirectly or directly to postmodernism. And I'm finding the mentions in this thread to be gross misrepresentations of it. They seem to be popular caricatures suggesting it is nihilism, which it is not! I would recommend some in-depth reading regarding it. One might start with C. Wright Mills's 1959 book The Sociological Imagination and read more closely Jean-Francois Lyotard's 1979/1984 The Postmodern Condition. The reality is that postmodern thinkers were simply harvesting the incontrovertible historical and empirical findings of historical and cultural relativism exposed by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists in the last two hundred years. Furthermore, most postmodern theorists were grappling with the challenges and liberating possibilities for a humanity that won't continue the terrible brutalities of the past and especially those of the twentieth century. Consider Lyotard’s statement: “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience.” And I write here about postmodernists in the past tense because in the scholarly world, postmodernism is no longer seen as the currently dominant insight to be dealt with but something that has to be considered in any movement towards human knowledge, insight, and liberation desired in the future.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I find both charming but . . . uh . . . naive is the idea that our hope must be found in Christianity. The history of Christianity, now two thousand years, provides a huge amount of evidence that it is not only not going to be humanity's great liberation but one of the greatest movements of resistance to human emancipation. And we need not even review the historical resistances to science and progressive thinking and the alliances with authoritarian rulers and colonial powers of the world. Consider the state of Christianity today. The most "woke" denominations are shrinking, if not dying, and the three largest contingents in the world are Roman Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, and Eastern Orthodoxy, none of which is showing much predilection for leading humanity into a greater age of equality, peace, and justice.
Anton (in case you see his): Thank you for your helpful description of post-modernism. I repent in dust and ashes – I had just read an article that criticized what was undoubtedly itself a popular caricature of post-modernism (the term only struck me because it aligned with what I had been taught about it over the years in Evangelistic circles – and it seemed to fit the discussion on the nature of the secularization of society).
DeleteWhatever it is that’s coloring the thinking of my atheist friends since the days of the New Atheists, and whatever it is that has also long gripped my spiritual-but-not-religious friends, it does seem to be a less rational and less “modern” way of looking at life, and one that prohibits “should” language or ethical grounding while also questioning the possibility of “facts” of science or history. Such thinking seems to inoculate people against the grounding of Jesus’ story and message—in which, yes, I still find some hope for humanity’s liberation.
True, that hope cannot be based on the history of Christendom, but history itself may be at its beginning, and there is a distinction between Jesus’ message and Christendom’s traditions and practices founded upon raw power. It’s in Jesus’ contrasting message of kenotic, cruciform love that I base my hope. That message has yet to be discovered on a societal level, and human society may still be quite young.
Thanks for adding your important comments, Anton. I never know how many people read the comments (especially those posted after the first couple of days), but on topics such as this one, perhaps there will be many who will still read the blog post itself and many of the comments.
ReplyDeleteI certainly have not read/studied postmodernism the way you have, and I do not claim to have a complete understanding of it. But I have mentioned postmodernism in a couple of blog posts, which I stand by. One of those (posted on July 25, 2018), is about the social construction of reality, which is one of the basic emphases of postmodernism.
(See https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2018/07/there-really-are-alternative-facts.html)
From what I have found, "Postmodernists believe that there is no such thing as objective reality, and that all knowledge is socially constructed."
A couple of weeks later, I posted a blog article titled "A Truth Decay Crisis."
(See https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-truth-decay-crisis.html.)
While I do not fully agree with the book introduced in that article, from what I read, "Postmodernism is a philosophy that says absolute truth does not exist.... In today's society, postmodernism has led to relativism, the idea that all truth is relative." This, I think, is a real and ongoing problem with postmodernism.
(Is there a problem if someone says, "No statement is absolutely true--except this one!"?)
Jean Francois Lyotard, in "The Postmodern Condition" described postmodernism as the “incredulity towards metanarratives.” So, it seems to me that since organized religions are all based on metanarratives, postmodernism is basically anti-religion. But secular views, such as those of Marxists, Freudians, and the like, are also based on metanarratives.
More specifically, traditional theism is a foundational metanarrative, but the modern atheists also embrace a metanarrative. That, it seems to me, is why postmodernism is a problem both for both theists and atheists (of anti-theists). And, as I suggested above, that is one of the main reasons, perhaps, for the rise and growth of apatheism in the modern world.
I'm uncomfortable carrying this discussion further, but here goes. Thanks, Fred, for your humble response to my arrogance. For sure, we can make a distinction between the historical instantiations of Christianity and the faith or spirit of Christ, which I myself have done many times. I'm not sure what you mean by "Jesus’ contrasting message of kenotic, cruciform love," particularly its implications for the reality of cultural relativism and religious diversity, but that's another discussion/topic, I suppose, even though it might be relevant to the implications of this discussion. In addition, "history" is typically "dated" from the beginning of writing, which seems to this feeble, frail human being quite some time ago, but certainly your comment that we might still be at the beginning of history is incontestable since we have no idea how long it might yet be. I know enough about the birth of "civilization" to suspect it was longer than civilization itself so far.
ReplyDeleteLeroy, some things you've noted about postmodernism are basically correct. But I want to say that postmodernism and social constructivism, while related, are different intellectual movements, although closely related by the empirical-theoretical work of anthropologists and sociologists. Neither is nihilist or solipsist, and neither denies objective reality. But both are deeply rooted in empirical reality, and I doubt very much that conservative Christianity (especially evangelical Xty) can come to terms with them, other than to dogmatically assert in the face of reality that you don't believe they're true.
I'm going to say more below, some of it repetition, but at this point I'm writing for myself (my thinking, teaching, writing) more than for you two and for others in Leroy's community of thinking friends.
There is abundant social-scientific evidence that historical and cultural relativism are true (a "postmodern" plank) and that our worldviews are largely shaped by our time and place in history (social constructivism). The seminal text for many social constructivists is The Social Construction of Reality (1966) by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. So it seems to me that the reality of relativism cannot be ignored except by some philosophical or theological ostrichian sticking one's head in the sand. I myself, consequentially, view any theological dogmatism (liberal or conservative) or philosophical dogmatism (radical atheism, scientism, idealism, materialism, etc.) as incipient authoritarianism. Again, postmodernism and social constructivism are not nihilistic, solipsistic, or denials of objective reality. That in itself would be a ridiculously illogical since to claim the finding of relativism is an assertion about objective reality. And, in fact, I would argue that postmodernism is social criticism. It is deeply rooted in the traditions of social critique, via Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, the Frankfurt School and others. (BTW, Peter Berger was an active, relatively conservative Lutheran layman , who dealt with social constructivism by compartmentalizing consciousness.)
ReplyDeleteExcept maybe for some kooks on the fringes, any postmodern thinker who claims there is no objective reality is speaking in hyperbole. (It occurs to me that Jesus might have done that on occasion. He also gets caricatured. :-) It's a hyperbolic statement informed by the reality that we as human beings do not have and cannot have direct, historically and culturally unconditioned access to objective reality. (In theological parlance, we are not capable of a divinely transcendent view.)
This simply cannot be ignored by thinking people today. If humanity cannot handle it and thus is unable to construct philosophies and theologies taking our human finitude and cultural relativism into account without despairing or becoming apathetic or self-and-other destructive, then too bad for humanity. It would be the cultural counterpart to ignoring climate change. Again, to use theological parlance, it is quite possible that humanity is too "fallen" to handle reality.
I don't know that any postmodern theorist has done this, but I would offer a distinction between absolutist metanarratives and contingent metanarratives. Lyotard does not say that all metanarratives are false or untrue. Nietzsche (the "Godfather of postmodernism" [Lawrence Cahoone]) made some such hyperbolic statements, but if you read him closely, you learn that he was speaking hyperbolically. What postmodern theorists are talking about with regard to the problematic nature of metanarratives is the fact that all metanarratives are historically and culturally contingent. And insofar as groups lift up their metanarratives as absolutes, it is inherently dogmatic and authoritarian, and thus contributes to conflict, war, injustice, oppression, and terror. This is the argument underlying the pre-postmodern and postmodern theorists who have criticized the Enlightenment severely because "modern" political, economic, religious, and other systems of thought coming out of the Enlightenment have been offered as blueprints to be imposed on those who think or act otherwise. I myself am not entirely in agreement with this critique of the Enlightenment, but it suggests that the spirit of the Enlightenment was radical in its view that there is one single, absolutely correct truth to be found, whether we're talking about economic, political, religious, or whatever systems of thought. The logic, if I understand it, is that those who think they've found the holy grail of truth tend to or contribute to the the coercive imposition on everybody. This is the problem with political, economic, religious, scientistic, secularistic, atheistic, and any other social dogmatism.
ReplyDeleteI've said too much already, but I want to add, again for myself, some comments that are meta-issues to this conversation. One is the historical (not the metaphysical) issue between philosophical idealism and materialism. In this blog thread, we've been talking as though the world is primarily driven by ideas, when, in fact, it might be driven primarily by the material power struggles of competing classes and categories of people, as Marxists, neo-Marxists, and conflict social-scientists argue. A powerful case has been made that historically systems of ideas tend to follow historically material realities rather than drive them. In other words, ideational systems are to be understood primarily as ideological or critical (critique). [Side note: Marxists, who are not dogmatic materialists, argue that historical development reflects a dialectic between ideational (cultural) and material (political-economic) realities.]
ReplyDeleteFinally (for now!), I want to talk about generalizations, I've been as guilty of this as anyone, but over the years, I've noticed that theologians seem to be especially quick to generalize about fields and paradigms outside their fields, thus resulting in caricatures. I've seen liberals do it about evangelical/fundamentalists and vice versa; I've seen it done about sociology by both liberal and evangelical Christian theologians; and, if I would take the time, I could probably identify a great many other such generalizations, resulting in caricature. Also, with regard, to postmodernism, we need to keep in mind that any such group of thinkers is not an organized party under a doctrinal platform. Quite the contrary; they themselves are often taking rather different, even conflicting views of postmodernity. I wrote the entry on postmodernism for the Sage Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion, and very early in that entry, I said, "..almost every account of postmodernism also includes some statement about the difficulty of identifying what it precisely is. This is understandable when one looks at the many locations of postmodernism in art, literature, politics, philosophy, the social sciences, even in the natural sciences (the Heisenberg principle, indeterminacy, chaos theory, paradigm revolutions)."
Thanks so much for your comments, Anton. You have given us much to think about--and far too much for me to respond to adequately at this time. Most helpful, I think, is what you wrote in your last paragraph. There are, no doubt, many who claim to be postmodernist but who have an understanding of postmodernism quite different from the thinkers who developed that understanding of reality. For example, we don't assume that everyone who claims to be a Christian fully understands and is putting into practice what Jesus Christ taught, so why should think that all contemporary people who would identify as postmodernists have the same understanding of that philosophy as Jean-Francois Lyotard et al.?
ReplyDeleteAs one who has been greatly influenced by S. Kierkegaard and Michael Polanyi, two important thinkers whose writings are, I think, supportive of postmodernistic thinking, I have not been an opponent of postmodernism as such, although I am critical of some of the ways I have seen postmodernism (mis)used. I have even said that postmodernism is less antagonistic to what I consider to be true Christianity than modernism.
It has been many years now since I have done much reading about postmodernism, but I still remember with appreciation Stanley Grenz's book "A Primer on Postmodernism" (1996). I wish I had time to say more about Grenz, for whom I had the highest regard, but here are a few words about him from Theopedia: "Stanley Grenz (1950-2005) an Evangelical Baptist theologian, ethicist, and proponent of a postmodern evangelicalism. His 'Theology for the Community of God,' a large work of nearly 900 pages, sets forth his postmodern evangelical theology. Grenz became a leading exponent of this approach, and thus can be considered as representative of postmodernism’s influence on theology."