Why Faith is Out of the Question
Believing in God in a secular age can feel like having a split personality—or, not so much a schism in yourself, but a straining to live in two worlds at once, with two clashing sets of codes and commands. Or maybe it’s like being married—I mean, you talk to this person every day, you’ve cried and changed and your friends know all the details!—but as soon as you leave the house to apply for a loan or library card, they put down “married” in quotes and trade pitying whispers in the back room. “Shame, these retrogrades. Think there’s someone there. It could be dangerous to keep playing along.”
“Shhh. It makes them happy. As long as they keep it to themselves!”
The conflict between the two worlds can get wearing. People pleasing might have been your jam, had not your regressive views proved to be so unpleasant. It’s simple enough to see why—the matter has long been settled, and the spirit of the age has drawn a line in the sand: the modern, rational man can no longer suffer the foolish specter of religious faith.
Unless you’re living under a rock, there’s no avoiding the din of denouncement. (And that rock probably has internet, so again, here we all are.) We know the verdict, we can recite it by heart—religion belongs to a bygone era. It’s gone with the wind, man; science has won. It’s not that we don’t hear the sentence; the interesting story is that this is a story, like every one that came before. To hear it told, you’d think our glorious now is simply “the way things are,” the cold brave morning after a long night of myth and magic. But to tell this story of now, one must discount a much longer back then, when religion was a given. Man’s dusty career has been to maraud and pillage, of course, but above the circle of the earth, there were deities to appease and sacrifices to render. In the midst of such pagan pantheons, ancient Israel claimed to worship the one true God; and in our latter centuries, Christians have worshiped a Messiah from those same monotheistic roots. Still, be they gods or God, the unseen world was ever in sight.
“Maraud with me”
Yet the question of today is not whose god is truly God—this is no Elijah on Mount Carmel—but rather wonders why anyone would climb the hill to dispute deities in the first place? No longer is it a question of “Which god?” but rather “What god?” A handful of atheists seem as dogmatic and assured as any old-time preacher; but most people experience somewhat less glee in the Nietzschean death of God, and can’t shake the besetting gloom. Faith is out of the question, but it doesn’t mean it’s fun. As writer Julian Barnes put it, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” [1]
“Where are the prophets of Ba’al, Gehazi? Did you forget to send out our e-vite!?”
As I launched into my first weeks of seminary, I was craving context for our current times. I may be late to the party, but until I holed up at L’Abri last year and read critiques on modern culture, I had never heard western civilization preached as anything less than the steady tramping of human progress. The story is much more winding and woolly; and we may not be so Rocky Mountain high. To be sure, we’ve witnessed astounding advancements, but modernity has also seen a complex pivot away from a past that was permeated with a sense of the sacred. It is clear that the “God question” is off the table, in many ways; but who or what swept it off? And when tradition is tossed out, what rushes in to take its place? They say when the student is ready, the master appears. Mine happened to appear in a class textbook—a hoary old Catholic philosopher, of all people. Enter Charles Taylor.
Let me rephrase. It is actually author James K. A. Smith who channels Taylor for us rubes who aren’t ready to throw his 900-page tome in the beach bag for summer reading. A Secular Age is Taylor’s intricate mapping of Western thought up to the present, and academic circles have praised the work for its crucial insight. But then, that’s academic circles. Smith, a professor of philosophy himself, figured most folks won’t be grabbing this book off the shelf at Barnes and Noble; and he wrote How (Not) to Be Secular in a bid to condense Taylor’s roadmap for the rest of us. It’s like a CliffsNotes on cultural critique, a sort of “I read the exhaustive philosophies so you don’t have to.” (Plus, he throws in lines from the Postal Service and Seinfeld, so he also totally gets me.)
Smith begins by posing the conundrum: why, after eons of hailing the gods, do we no longer look up? Christian apologetics (the defense of the faith) has historically aimed to fill the “God-shaped hole” in the human heart; yet as Smith notes from his years of ministry, people today don’t even feel the gap—and if so, they don’t look to religion for the answer. It’s no longer a question of what you believe, but what can even be believed. In philosophy-speak, the “plausibility conditions” for faith have shifted.[2] We moved from a world in which it was almost impossible not to believe in God to one in which it is nigh impossible to entertain belief of any kind. This has been a seismic shift in our collective thinking; and it is this revolution that Taylor begins to trace.
From the dawn of man to medieval times, explains Taylor, humans have viewed the world as enchanted and “open” to spiritual forces. Because of decisive shifts in western thought and technology, however, we have moved toward a worldview that is “closed” to outside interference and centered on the here-and-now. Our secular age does not even believe in transcendence, much less look for it. With the supernatural shut out, we have enclosed ourselves within an “immanent frame”—immanent referring to the material world we can see, and the frame that seals it all in. You might say that flatness you feel while living your best life in the wealthiest consumer culture of all time is an actual thing. We live and move within a stifling biodome of here-ness.
My frame, my choice
But what are you gonna do? Progress is progress, and we were always bound to end up here, right? We have all been steeped in this tale of inevitability, yet according to Taylor, the choice to chuck the transcendent was not a necessary or even certain leap. The immanent frame is a careful construct, yet it is sold as simply the rational, scientific bedrock beneath centuries of superstition and fog. Owing to the Enlightenment, Darwinism, and a host of complex factors, we’ve landed on a unique way of explaining the world within a newly closed system. This includes constructing new meaning, too; our worldview “…makes it possible to now imagine meaning and significance as contained within the universe itself, an autonomous, independent “meaning” that is unhooked from any sort of transcendent dependence.” [3] In other words, all you see is all you need.
In place of a traditional view that set man under God and over creation, we’ve adopted the values of “exclusive humanism,” which sets human flourishing, autonomy, and economic success as the highest good—and ours alone to determine. If you checked the label of exclusive humanism, it would read, “Made by man, for man.” (Size: Large and In Charge) So deeply ingrained is this worldview, should anyone pipe up with the primitive restraints of religion, they’d be marched to society’s corner to have a good hard think about their refusal to embrace progress. They want to drag us back to the Dark Ages, these clowns!
Who wouldn’t be wooed by this brave new world? To shake off the limits and chart his own course—this is the western narrative, the manifest destiny of man, his ingenuity glinting with brilliance, his possibilities endless. The trouble is, new order means new demands, and in some ways heaps higher expectations on mankind than ever before. “[M]odernity fixates on moral articulation—a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior that further and further delineate high moral expectations.”[4] Think you’re leaving crushing moral obligation behind? Don’t dream it’s over. There are new rules now, and judgment galore. (Think of the ever-increasing “political correctness” codes, as one example) Unfortunately, the new codes can’t inspire compliance; they can only compel behavior. Christianity, at least, claimed to cure the core disease, the corruption of the human heart; but the new moral project doesn’t even promise that. Yet remarkably, we are urged ever onward toward a certain utopia of Man, somewhere over the next hill. Maybe next year. Keep enforcing those codes!
A wee ennui
As hard as we’re working, our age is marked by malaise and dissatisfaction. The promises have not paid off. At the same time, we can’t seem to shake the haunting of our enchanted past. Some seem to sit fine with the party line, but most feel the “cross-pressures” of the irresistible yet inadequate promises of secular materialism. There are yawning gaps in our worldview, and it is the honest souls who admit that they’re suffocating—as James tells it, those reluctant agnostics drunk on bourbon late at night, haunted by a creeping desire for deeper meaning. Our allegiance to exclusive humanism would totally work, if only it worked totally.
Taylor doesn’t end his book on a grand solution, or even a triumphant smackdown of postmodernism; but neither does he nurse nostalgia for returning to some golden era (even a Catholic one). Still, naming the dis-ease is half the battle, and Taylor has a true feel for the numbing cross-pressures of a secular age. Although it masquerades as “the way things are,” I now see the secular worldview widely propounded in the west as just that—a view of the world, a lens through which we create meaning and make decisions. Reading this book was like taking off the glasses for cleaning. I don’t know that anyone would come to faith in God simply through an elegant argument or a scholarly treatise; but I do think, at least, the unexamined lens is not worth looking through (to crib from another ancient philosopher). In How (Not) to Be Secular, I gained needed perspective on our modern times, and even noted a curious similarity between the two worlds I inhabit. A belief in God may appear preposterous; but a surrender to the doctrines of humanism, it seems, might involve as much faith and dogma as believing the orthodox truths of that old-time religion.