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.