Secularity: Part 2

How We Got Here

(This is going to be a nerd post where I (briefly) go into some technical background for secularization. If you’re not into that, feel free to skip this one!)

The world is not the same as it was 500 years ago. This is so for multiple reasons, but one of the biggest differences is the relationship that religion has to society. If you examine the social composition of societies in the eras prior to, say the 1500s, you will find a world wherein society is deeply integrated. Where the state, the economy, and religion are deeply interconnected, and where spiritual and material realities are not segregated, but rather have a “porous” relationship, such that the one affects the other.

Fast forward to today, and the notion of a religiously integrated state is utterly foreign. And a world where spiritual forces directly influence the affairs of men feels like a distant memory.

What happened? How did we get here? The story of secularity is a complex one. There are multiple factors that coordinated to produce the world we now inhabit. But granting this, it is clear that the secularization process finds its roots in the modernization of the West—or in what we refer to as “modernity.”

Modernity is the culmination of massive changes experienced by the West in the era following the Middle Ages, including the consequences of the Reformation; the Peace of Westphalia, and the formation of the nation state; the rationalization of economic structures; the untangling of universal religious authorities from those spheres. It is a consequence of the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Does that sound complex? Well, it is.

Modernity is one of those things that’s hard to wrap our brains around because it involves so many social realities and institutions that we take for granted in our everyday lives. It extends far beyond what we think about as “modern” (i.e., the technological developments of the 2000s vs. the 1800s), to whole spheres of human activity we assume have been around forever (e.g., the nation state, or a global economy).

One of the key features of modernity, however, is what scholars refer to as the “differentiation of spheres.” That is, various areas of life began to split out from an integrated whole. So with the Peace of Westphalia, you see the religious wars coming to an end, but you also see religion distributed among various individual political spheres. Furthermore, as the industrial revolution begins to take root, you see economic structures taking on a life of their own.

By the time you get to 1917, Max Weber is talking about how the world is “disenchanted,” and how it no longer makes sense to appeal to religious sources in the scientific endeavor. Rather, the “value spheres” as he calls them (meaning the market, the state, the arts, religion, etc.) are indelibly differentiated. No longer intertwined, and untethered from any transcendent cosmic significance, they are sometimes cooperating, often competing. But most importantly, according to Weber, the sphere of the holy is unbridgeable any longer. It remains a thing off on its own.

As much as this might rankle many of us, it’s a pretty succinct description of the way of things. I mean, when was the last time you heard of an economist using the Bible to outline a theory of market forces? Or a physician factoring miracles into his prognosis? We can argue about whether the separation of church and state is a good idea, but all of us (I assume) are just fine with keeping the government out of the religious sphere.

My point is this: this differentiation of spheres, this parceling out of religion from social life, is a de facto reality of modern life. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily good, but it is the world we have. And it’s not going away any time soon. In fact, Peter Berger argues that it’s so tightly bound up with modernity that in order to undo its effects we would have to actually reverse the industrial revolution and all that went along with it, returning us to a premodern world.

That’s not happening any time soon.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk further about the implications of secularization for Christianity, especially forms of Christianity that want to “take back” culture.

—Till then.