Is the Secularization of Society Beyond Doubt?

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. 

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* The authors are Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman,  and Ryan T. Cragun. Zuckerman (b. 1969) is the oldest and most prominent of the three.

** See, for example, my 2/19/20 blog post titled “Affirming Secularization, Opposing Secularism” and “Faith and Religion Are Not the Same,” my 6/10/18 post.

Walking Up “The Road Less Traveled”

Most of my blog posts are about religion/theology, social ethics, and political issues, areas in which I have studied and read about extensively. But even though I haven’t studied psychology so much, this post is about a book by M. Scott Peck, a psychotherapist who died on September 25, 2005.

M. Scott Peck was born in May 1936. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University in 1958 and then earned a medical degree in 1963 from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Peck was a psychiatrist in the United States Army for nearly 10 years, and then was the director of a mental health clinic and had a private psychiatric practice in Connecticut.  

He is said to have been among the founding fathers of the self-help genre of books. His first and most widely-read book is The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology Of Love, Traditional Values, And Spiritual Growth (1978; 25^th anniversary ed., 2002). It has sold over 7,000,000 copies!

Peck’s The Road Less Traveled is a self-help book, but it is far different from the get happy quick emphasis of so many books of that genre. The opening sentence is, “Life is difficult.” The way to overcome life’s difficulties is also hard. Since most people prefer easy ways, it is the road less traveled.

Section I of Peck’s book is titled "Discipline.” He writes, “Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing” (p. 15). The necessary discipline tools are delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.

The latter refers to achieving the delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, and directions that gives us the flexibility required for successful living in all spheres of activity.

The second section of Peck’s book is “Love.” His definition of love is, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” And he asserts, “Love is as love does” (pp. 81, 83).

Section III is “Growth and Religion.” Peck states that people tend to define religion too narrowly, but he believes that everyone has a religion. Everyone has a worldview, he says, and a person’s worldview is that person’s religion whether he/she recognizes that fact or not.

Following the road less traveled, it is possible, Peck declares, “to mature into a belief in God” (p. 223). In his case, his own journey of spiritual growth led him to affirm the Christian faith. In his second book, People of the Lie (1983; 2^nd ed., 1998), he wrote,

After many years of vague identification with Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christian commitment—signified by my non-denominational baptism on the ninth of March 1980 (p. 11).

The fourth section of Peck’s book is “Grace.” On the opening page of that section, he begins with four verses of “Amazing Grace,” which he calls an “early American evangelical hymn.”**

In this section Peck asserts, “Spiritual growth is the evolution of an individual,” and “God is the goal of evolution.” Further, God is also “the source of the evolutionary force” (pp. 263, 270). God wants us to grow into mature, loving people—and assists us in that process. That is God’s grace.

But sadly, humans often resist grace. Peck says that the reason for that resistance is laziness, which, interestingly, he says is the “original sin” of us humans.

The last subsection of the book is “The Welcoming of Grace,” and there Peck avers that “our human growth is of the utmost importance to something greater than ourselves. This something we call God” (p. 311).

Jesus sadly said, “the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14). 

Yet those who walk up the road less traveled, welcoming grace rather than resisting it, experience a joyful, meaningful life for themselves and a life of loving service to others. How amazing is God’s grace!

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** On Sept. 12, Christianity Today posted an informative/inspirational article titled “We’ve Sung ‘Amazing Grace’ for 250 Years. We’ve Only Just Begun.” 

What about Self-reliance? Learning from Emerson

 My previous blog post was about a notable Dutch woman who was born in April 1892. Now I am writing about the core emphasis of a notable American man who died ten years before that, in April 1882. That man was the essayist, lecturer, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

In this post, I am giving little biographical information about Emerson, other than to say that he was born in Boston in 1803 and died in nearby Concord four weeks before his 79^th birthday. Other facts about Emerson’s life can be found (here) on Wikipedia.**

The Background of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”

Emerson’s best-known essay is “Self-Reliance,” first published in 1841 when he was still in his late 30s. Lying behind the public issue of that 30-page essay was the philosophy of transcendentalism.

In 1836, Emerson and some of his friends formed the Transcendental Club. Their core emphasis was derived from German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose book Critique of Pure Reason (1781) propounded what became known as transcendental idealism.

That idealism held that there is an innate moral law within people that forms their interpretation of life experiences. Emphasizing what Kant called "intuitions of the mind,” transcendentalism was a reaction against the extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Such rationalism had encroached upon Harvard, where Emerson had studied in the 1820s. In 1838, he was invited to address the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. That talk was highly praised by some, and strongly criticized by others. (He was not invited to speak at Harvard again until 1869!)

Emerson charged the Harvard graduates to turn from the dead dogmas of the past and to seek the immediacy of Truth by mystical contact with God in the present. He declared, “It is the office of the true teacher [or preacher] to show us that God is, not was.”

The Core Ideas of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”

As is apparently true of many others, I was long under the mistaken idea that Emerson’s concept of self-reliance meant living/acting independently without reliance on other people. But that was not his main point.

Rather, Emerson stressed the importance of trusting one’s own intuition for contact with God rather than relying on that which had been believed and written in the past.

Although he was ordained as a (Unitarian) minister and was a pastor for a couple of years at Boston’s historic Second Church, he left that post in 1832 and never served as a pastor again. Rather, he became a critic of “organized religion,” as evidenced by his 1838 address at Harvard Divinity School.

Although the expression was likely not used back then, Emerson was definitely an early example of a person who was “spiritual but not religious.’ He saw religion as reliance upon a dead past, but he reveled in the presence of God he saw in the present, largely through nature.

Theology has in recent decades been called “faith seeking understanding”—and Emerson likely would not have been averse to that description. His objection was to “theology seeking faith,” that is, reliance on ideas of the past rather than upon one’s direct contact with God in the present.

While there is much in Emerson’s thought with which I disagree, I am in basic agreement with his emphasis on self-reliance.

A Selection of Emerson’s Words

I am ending this post about Emerson with some of my favorite statements he made through the years. The first are oft-quoted words from “Self-Reliance”: 

I have been unable to find the source, but these words about the reality (or danger?) of new ideas are often attributed to Emerson, although they are sometimes said to be from Oliver Wendell Holmes (who was six years younger than Emerson): 

The gist of the following quote is from a letter Emerson wrote his daughter Ellen in 1854: 

There is also no documentation for this quote, but I close with these significant words that are certainly Emersonian, if not directly from Emerson himself: 

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** I also enjoyed reading and recommend Self-Reliance: The Story of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010), a delightful 140-page book Peggy Caravantes authored for junior high school students. 

** For a deeper understanding of Emerson, I also recommend Emerson: The Ideal in America, an informative 2007 video available (here) on YouTube.

Is Religion a Good Thing?

So, how would you respond to the question posed as the title of this article? Perhaps some of you would quickly answer in the affirmative and a few of you would likely answer in the negative. However, maybe many of you, like me, would want to respond, “It depends.” Or, in keeping with my 6/15 posting, perhaps we would want to say, “Yes and No.” 

The Affirmative Position

Most religious people, no doubt, are convinced that their religion is a good thing. Obviously, people would not choose to identify with a religion if they thought that, overall, it was not a good thing. But other religions have often been seen as definitely not so good.

Thus, in the past there have been plenty of people who basically thought, “My religion is good, but other religions are bad”—and that idea has been particularly strong in Christianity, and more particularly in conservative Protestantism.

In the name of religious tolerance, though, there are now many who emphasize that all religions are basically the same—and that they are all basically good, for they all teach things like the Golden Rule, for example.

Since now for many “progressive” people little is more intolerable than intolerance, exclusive views of religion have largely been rejected and replaced with the universal acceptance (for the most part) of all religions as true (at least for the adherents of those religions) and good.

But tolerance should never become a barrier to critical thinking.

The Negative Position

There is a growing number of people, especially in the Western world, who think that religion is, definitely, not good. But that has been a common idea in some places in the world, like Japan for example, for quite some time.

My first realization about religion perhaps not being good came from listening to my students in Japan, where I began teaching at Seinan Gakuin University (SGU) in 1968. Most of my students had a negative attitude toward religion partly because in high school history classes they had learned undesirable things about Christianity, such as the Crusades.

Moreover, most of them had been brought up by parents who remembered how the Shinto religion was used by Japanese militarists to spur the nation toward aggressive military action in China and then later at Pearl Harbor.

Warlike activity was done in the name of Emperor Hirohito, who was considered by most Japanese in the 1930s and early 1940s as the earthly manifestation of the Shinto gods.

The vast majority of my students in the required Christian Studies classes I taught were not just negative toward Christianity, they were negative to all religions.

After a year or so at SGU, “Is Religion a Good Thing?” was the title (in Japanese) of the first article I wrote for a faculty and staff publication.

My conclusion was, “Not necessarily.”

The Both/And Position

In one of his numerous potent statements, Pascal declared, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” (Pensées, Trotter trans., #894).

That certainly seems to be true when thinking of the 12th and 13th century Crusaders, the Japanese militarist leaders of the 1930s and ’40s, or the radical Islamists of the 21st century.

But isn’t the opposite also true? People never do good so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Just the Christian examples here are legion: Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Kagawa Toyohiko, M.L. King Jr., etc. etc.

These latter individuals, though, perhaps could be more correctly described as spiritual rather than religious. In the end, it is faith rather than religion, spirituality more than religiosity, that is good.

Thus, it is faith and spirituality rather than religion that needs to be accentuated.

TTT #15 Faith and Religion are Not the Same, and Faith Is Far More Important

In recent years there has been a growing number of people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” Although the 15^th chapter of Thirty True Things ... (TTT) does not address that issue directly, it is closely related. In this article (and chapter) I contend that it is much more important for people to have faith (be “spiritual”) than to practice religion.

Religion Divides, Faith Unites

Rev. Alex McGilvey, Manitoba, Canada

In the first part of Chapter 15 of TTT, I contend that there doesn’t have to be a split between faith and religion. That is because, ideally, religion is an expression of faith and nourishes the faith of the believer, and encourages faith in non-believers. 

We live, however, in a world where much is far from ideal. And, unfortunately, quite often religion is quite different from, and quite inferior to, faith. Moreover, religion tends to be divisive. Religions often have “competed” with each other for adherents.

In an effort to overcome the tension among the religions, for decades some have encouraged, and practiced, interreligious dialogue. While certainly there is still a place for such dialogue among people of the various religious traditions, a more helpful movement is that of interfaith activities.

Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary indicates that the term interfaith dates back to 1932. But the common use of that term is considerably more recent. Still, it has become a widely used term; there is now even a website with the URL address www.interfaith.org.

Part of the reason for the shift in terminology from interreligious to interfaith is due to the fact that religion tends to divide, but faith can, and often does, unite people.

On this basis, chapter 15 deals with the following matters in distinguishing the major differences between religion and faith.

►Religion as “Unfaith”

There is broad agreement that the most influential Protestant theologian of the 20^th century was Karl Barth, the Swiss scholar who died 50 years ago in 1968. (I wrote a blog article, see here, about him on the 44^th anniversary of his death.)

One of Barth’s seminal emphases was that religion is fundamentally “unfaith” because, in his analysis, it is the result of the efforts humans expend in seeking their own salvation.

To Barth, and many others who share his ideas, God cannot be found by humans searching for God. God can be experienced only through God’s self-manifestation, which is the main meaning of the theological term “revelation.”

Faith, then, is not striving, but responding. Faith is not searching but receiving. Faith is simply the grateful acceptance of God’s abundant grace.

►Religion Can Be Evil

Charles Kimball, an ordained Baptist minister, authored a book published under the title When Religion Becomes Evil (2002). He doesn’t think that religion as such is bad, but he analyzes how religion in all religious traditions is susceptible to at least five basic corruptions leading to a variety of evils.

Kimball goes on to stress, and I agree, that “only authentic faith can prevent such evils” (back cover).

►Faith is Always Good

After a section in which I introduce Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s ideas about the difference between faith and religion, the closing section avers that “faith is always good.” Of course, that assertion is based on the way I have defined faith in the chapter.

To the extent that faith is response to God (by whatever name God may be known or Ultimate Reality encountered), that response will of necessity be a good thing.

If faith, in actuality, is being/living in a loving relationship with God as the result of direct encounter with God, how could that be anything but good?

Religion and Irreligion: Friends or Foes?

Atheists, agnostics, and other people who profess no religious faith have often been criticized, ostracized, ridiculed, discriminated against, and belittled.

Especially in recent years, such people have begun to fight back. Some of that fight has been rather hostile towards religion.

The writings/talks of the “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—are strong attacks on religion and belief in God. (I have read at least one book by each of these.)

But a milder form of irreligion is developing. One key spokesman for this movement is Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College, a not widely-known but highly-rated school in California.

This month I sped-read Zuckerman’s Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (2012) and read more carefully his Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions (2014).

The latter will be discussed at the September meeting of Vital Conversations here in the Northland (of Kansas City) with Helen Springer as a guest resource person.

Helen is the Executive Director of Oasis, a secular “church” in Kansas City. Their website, which you can access with this link, says, “Here, you’ll find a retreat—an oasis of sorts—for Agnostics, Humanists, Skeptics, Atheists, Freethinkers, Deists, questioning Theists and the like.”

Those are the kind of people Zuckerman writes for or on behalf of.

Although he seems a bit caustic at times (but those of the majority always have to be careful in criticizing the statements of those in a discriminated-against minority), Zuckerman writes mostly in an irenic manner that suggests irreligion and religion can be friends rather than foes.

The secularists he writes about are mostly, like he himself, highly moral people who would rank rather high on Maslow’s scale of self-actualization. On the other hand, the religious people he refers to are mostly narrow-minded conservatives/fundamentalists or hypocrites.

There is little, if any, recognition of the irreligious people who are self-centered, ill-willed, insensitive individuals and detrimental to society.

It is not hard to see that there are good, moral secularists such as those he mentions and such as he himself doubtlessly is. But it is also not hard to see that there are some (many?) secularists who are not so good or moral.

It is also not hard to see that there are some (many?) religious people who are like the unattractive individuals or groups he mentions. But there are also many religious people who do considerable good in society.

To his credit, though, early in the book Zuckerman writes,

Admittedly, secular men and women don’t outshine their religious peers in every way. For example, when it comes to generosity, volunteering, and charitable giving, secular men and women fall short, with religious people being more likely to donate both their time and their money (p. 22).

What he says about Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and author of Good Without God (2005), is something I can appreciate.

In reading the pages following Epstein’s introduction, though, I thought that humanism is probably right in much that it affirms and wrong in much that it denies.

Surely a clearer both/and viewpoint is not only possible but also definitely desirable.

Religious humanists can, and do, work on all the problems of people in this world that secular humanists do. Thus, healthy religion and healthy irreligion can, and should, cooperate as friends; they don’t have to be foes.

Moreover, the limited worldview of secularists should not be touted as superior to the broader worldview of those with mature religious faith.

Religion, Faith, and Spirituality

Recently, along with others in Milton Horne’s “Bible study” class at Second Baptist Church, I have been reading The World’s Religions: Worldviews and Contemporary Issues (second ed., 2005) by William A. Young. It is a fine book, but I don’t like Young’s definition of religion: “Religion is human transformation in response to perceived ultimacy” (p. 4). It seems to me that transformation is the aim or purpose of religion, not what it is.

Although it is no longer in print, I think the definition by Frederick J. Streng in his Understanding Religious Life (third ed., 1985) is better: “Religion is a means to ultimate transformation.” Streng goes on to explain: “An ultimate transformation is a fundamental change from being caught up in the troubles of common existence (sin, ignorance) to living in such a way that one can cope at the deepest level with those troubles” (p. 2).

In keeping with this view, religion can be described as what we humans do in order to achieve something. But that is one of the main reasons I have long sought to make a distinction between religion and faith. Religion is basically human efforts or attempts to gain something (salvation, peace of mind, harmony with the universe, etc.). Faith, by contrast, is response to God’s grace.

As we all know, many people now make a distinction between religion and spirituality, usually largely dismissing the former and embracing the latter. In general, that distinction is good and important. Spirituality is our basic attitude toward reality in the light of our awareness of God (the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Eternal, Mystery, the Great Spirit, or whatever term we want to use for that which transcends the physical world) and our actions on the basis of that attitude.

Religion is primarily a means toward an end. Faith, or spirituality, is more an end in itself. That is true of real worship also. Of course, worship can be engaged for the purpose of trying to get something from God, a means to an end. But true worship is focused on God and is basically praising God with no intention of getting something in the process. Whatever benefits we do receive are by-products, not direct effects from effort expended.

I have just finished speed-reading Faith and Belief (1979) by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), who was for several years director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. In this scholarly work, Smith clearly points out the difference between faith and religion as well as between faith and belief, contending that faith is prior to, and superior to, both. I may write more about Smith’s ideas later, but here let me cite a very short paragraph in Smith’s book, a statement I like very much.

“Faith is a saying ‘Yes’” to truth” (p. 163).

In that statement I think Smith means Truth. Religion is a search for Truth; faith is accepting, responding to, committing our lives to Truth. Spirituality, then, is how we live and act on the basis of that commitment.

Less Religious and More Spiritual?

“Am I becoming less religious and more spiritual?” That question, one of ten in the “spiritual audit” devised by Fred Smith ("Leadership Journal," Winter 1998), has been posed the last two weeks to those of us who attend the Wednesday evening adult studies at Second Baptist Church. The question implies, of course, that we should be more spiritual and less religious.

How we think about that question naturally depends upon the way we define religious and spiritual. But, as those you who know me might guess, I think most of us probably need to become both more religious and more spiritual. But maybe some people even need to become less spiritual and more religious. Again, it depends on definitions.

I have often had critical things to say about religion—and there is much done in the name of religion that needs to be criticized. But if we look at the words of James 1:27, we find that pure religion means, among other things, “to care for orphans and widows in their distress” (NRSV), that is, to care for those who are the neediest and most vulnerable in the world around us.

It is easy to criticize religion at its worst—but that is “contaminated” religion, not the pure religion James talks about. On the other hand, being spiritual can be, and often is, very individualistic—the inner delight of fellowship with God (or the Ultimate or the Absolute, for those who do not wish to use religious terms). Even that spirituality can, and surely does at times, lead to concern and care for others. But it can also be skewed into an inner ecstasy that remains quite private.

Those who have pure religion, in the sense defined by James, engage in, or at least support and encourage, action for the well-being of needy people. What would that mean in our society today? Among other things, wouldn’t it surely mean supporting health-care coverage for the 45,000,000 Americans who currently do not have it—and maybe even some concern for the desperate “aliens” who come to this country illegally?

It seems to me that those who oppose universal health-care and fear that some “illegal aliens” might possibly get some free medical help—including the Congressman who shouted “You lie!” when the President was addressing this most serious situation--are in need of some serious soul-searching, especially if they consider themselves spiritual and/or religious.