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). 

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.

Affirming Secularization, Opposing Secularism

One of the most influential theological books published in 1965 was Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. Through the years I have thought much about that immensely popular book, which sold over one million copies.

Secularization vs. Secularism 

Cox’s first chapter is “Biblical Sources of Secularization” and the first subsection is “Secularization vs. Secularism”—and that distinction is one that I have considered highly important from the time I first read it while still in graduate school.

According to Cox, secularization is the historical process by which one dominant religion no longer has control over a particular society or culture. But secularization is much different from secularism. 

So, what is secularism? Secularism, Cox contends, is “an ideology, a new closed worldview.... It menaces the openness and freedom secularization has produced.” Among other things, it especially menaces religious faith (and this is my contention, not explicitly expressed by Cox).

Cox wrote in the introduction to the 1983 edition of his book that the “sharp difference” between secularization and secularism was central to the entire argument of his book.

Why Affirm Secularization?

“Secularization,” according to Cox, “represents an authentic consequence of biblical faith.” Thus, “Rather than oppose it, the task of Christians should be to support and nourish it” (2013 ed., p. 22).

For those of us who place a high priority on religious freedom—and Cox (b. 1929) is an ordained Baptist minister, and true Baptists have always been advocates of religious freedom—secularization is good partly because as Cox says early in the Introduction of his book,

Pluralism and tolerance are the children of secularization. They represent a society’s unwillingness to enforce any particular world-view on its citizens (p. 3).

Thus, secularization is consistent with the principle of the separation of church and state, which I have often written about. (For example, see here.) As Brian Zahnd points out in his book Postcards from Babylon (2019),

in the American experiment the United States deliberately broke with the Christendom practice of claiming to be a Christian nation with a state church. It was America that pioneered the experiment of secular governance (p. 46).

In February 2010 I mentioned Cox in my blog article (see here) about Lesslie Newbigin, the outstanding British missionary who spent nearly forty years in India. In 1966 he wrote Honest Religion for Secular Man—and that was the most influential book (for me) that I read in 1967, my first full year in Japan.

As I wrote in that blog posting, Newbigin averred that Indian society changed, largely for the better, through the process of secularization. He gave these examples: “the abolition of untouchability of the dowry system, of temple prostitution, the spread of education and medical service, and so on” (p. 17).

And like Cox, he contended that secularization, which must be clearly distinguished from secularism, has roots in the Judeo-Christian faith.

Why Oppose Secularism?

The distinction between secularization and secularism, such as made by Cox and Newbigin (and me), is not widely recognized now. “Secularism” is the general term used for both—and Andrew Copson’s informative little book Secularism: A Very Short Introduction (2019) describes secularism in words very similar to how Cox explains secularization.

As an ideology, though, secularism is confined to “temporal” or “this-worldly” things, with emphasis on nature, reason, and science. For the most part, there is rejection of transcendence or anything that is not obviously a part of the visible world.

When secularism is truly an ism, it is a worldview that has no room for God, by whatever name God might be understood—or for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

While, certainly, I affirm the right of people to be secularists, if that is their free choice, still, I firmly, and sadly, believe that true secularists are missing much of great significance.

Recognizing the difference between secularization in the public square and secularism in one’s personal worldview, I staunchly affirm the former and oppose the latter—as I generally oppose all isms, including Christianism, which I plan to write about next month.