The Loss of Transcendence: On the Sadness of Shrinking One’s Worldview

The importance of expanding one’s worldview was the subject of my July 30 blog post. I’m sure most of my blog readers have done, and continue to do, that. But I’m afraid that many people, but probably only a very few of my Thinking Friends, have moved in the opposite direction—and I think that’s sad. 

In recent decades, there has been a marked increase in secularism, which usually means a denial or rejection of transcendence. 

Please note that, as I have done previously, I make an important distinction between secularization and secularism. As I wrote in a February 2020 blog post, secularism as an ideology “is confined to ‘temporal’ or ‘this-worldly’ things, with emphasis on nature, reason, and science.”

Secularism usually rejects transcendence, the affirmation of reality “beyond” that which can be analyzed by science. As I  wrote in 2/20, “When secularism is truly an ism, it is a worldview that has no room for God, by whatever name God might be understood… .”

Such a denial of transcendence necessarily involves a markedly shrinking or flattening of one’s worldview. The postmodern mindset basically embraces subjectivism and rejects the notion of there being objective realities such as God, Truth, or Good. The result is often moral relativism and narcissism. 

As eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explains, subjectivism (and/or individualism) can lead, and has led, to “a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.”** 

Much recent secularism in the U.S. is a reaction to the “Religious Right.” There is much in conservative evangelical belief and practice that needs to be rejected, or deconstructed, to use a term that is popular in some circles.

There is even a Wikipedia article on “faith deconstruction,” describing it as “a phenomenon within American evangelicalism in which Christians rethink their faith and jettison previously held beliefs, sometimes to the point of no longer identifying as Christians.”

There is what can be called positive deconstruction, which means questioning the faith one has grown up in and growing into the reconstruction of a more mature, viable faith. That is what I was suggesting in my July 30 blog post. 

But there is also negative deconstruction as noted in the Wikipedia article. That doesn’t always lead to complete secularism, as there are, indeed, some who actively seek to be spiritual but not religious. But for many, deconstruction is accompanied by a loss of transcendence.

It is sad when people jettison religious faith and accept a narrower, shallower worldview. It is sad because so much is lost. The old cliché, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, seems an apt description of what is lost. 

How very sad if in disposing of the dirty, unneeded bathwater (the out-of-date, untenable beliefs) the precious baby (the belief in God/Transcendence) is also discarded!

Many who have lost their religious faith, or never had such a faith to begin with, are not “bad” people. Many secularists are kind, loving people, showing concern for others and for the environment, working for peace and justice—at least for a while. 

Without an ongoing, sustaining sense of the Transcendent, however, people often “burn out,” become cynical and/or depressed, lose the joy of living, and seek to escape the meaningless of life by excessive emphasis on hedonistic pleasures or by over-use of drugs, including especially alcohol.

In the early years of this blog, one of my Thinking Friends was a thoughtful man who convened a discussion group mainly of atheists and agnostics. He was concerned about social issues.

This friend was a vegetarian because, he said, he realized that the grain used to fatten animals for slaughter and human consumption could and should be used to feed people in the world who didn’t have enough to eat. I quit eating beef and pork partly because of his influence. 

Several years ago, though, this friend seemingly “burnt out” and dropped out, and I ceased hearing from him. Then a mutual friend told me that he had drunk himself to death. I was greatly saddened when I heard that. 

One can’t prove anything by an anecdote, but I think my atheist friend’s story is not uncommon. It is sad, indeed, when one doesn’t have or loses a sense of Transcendence. 

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**The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), p. 4. Taylor (b. 1931) is best known for his massive, 874-page book, A Secular Age (2007). I regret that I have never taken the time and expended the energy to read the latter book carefully. In keeping with the subject of this article, though, I did read (although too hastily) the eighth chapter, “The Malaises of Modernity,” in which Taylor describes the “three forms which the malaise of immanence may take: (1) the sense of the fragility of meaning, the search for an over-arching significance; (2) the felt flatness of our attempts to solemnize the crucial moments of passage in our lives; and (3) the utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary” (p. 309).