tothesource: Your book is called The End of Secularism—a provocative title! What do you mean by that? Is there a double meaning there? Or is the secular view of things winding down historically?

Hunter Baker:  Yes, there is definitely a double meaning.  I am referring to the end of secularism as a political philosophy that people readily accept as a solution to religious pluralism.  I am also writing about the "end" or purpose of secularism, which is, in my view, to redecorate the public square in a fashion that suits secularists.  

I am not predicting the end of secularism or of the dwindling of secularists.  But secularism as the public philosophy to take us into the future is dying because the deceptions are becoming more obvious all the time.  We now understand that it is not and could never be the neutral position.  Secularism, as Robert George once said, is a player on the field simultaneously attempting to call balls and strikes.

tothesource: You spend a fair amount of time talking about the beginning of secularism, rather than the end. You make a very interesting and important claim that the “spring of secularism,” its beginning, was actually in the “wars of religion” in the 17thcentury. Why is it important to understand the origin?

Baker: You have to understand where secularism comes from if you want to argue against it.  The Reformation happens and a lot of people are very hopeful about the future.  What they don't count on is the terrible clash of powers that results.  Before, you had one king, one religion, one people.  Now, the pins don't all line up and people aren't sure how to handle it.  

The institutional separation of church and state is a terrific development that, in my mind, really deals with the issues to the advantage of the church.  But secularism goes too far.  We should push back in favor of a healthy understanding of institutional separation of church and state.  Neither reports to the other.  Both account to God.  The church should always call the state to righteousness, to do what God would have it do.  As Luther said, people require order and safety just as they need  air or water.  The state should do the job of restraining the predations of evil.  Most importantly, the church must constantly remind the state that it may never put itself in God's place.  The church is a hedge against totalitarianism.

tothesource: In speaking about the Deists at the origin of secularism, one brings to mind that many of the most influential founders were Deists. Do you mean to argue that the American founding contains the seeds of the purely secular state?

Baker: No, I am arguing against two interpretations of the American founding.  The first is the idea that the U.S. was established as a secular nation through the Constitution.  The second is that all the founders were bent on creating Christian America.  Neither is correct.  There was an interesting mix of enlightenment deists and devout Christians working together in the cause of liberty.  My primary argument is that you can't look to the religion clauses of the First Amendment to settle the matter.  They should be read as jurisdictional:  "CONGRESS shall make no law . . ."

tothesource: We assume that you read the First Amendment differently from many judges on the bench and legal scholars in academia?

Baker: Yes, my reading of the First Amendment is unorthodox, though heavily influenced by one of the finest scholars of law and religion in America, Steven D. Smith and also by the legal historian Robert Palmer.  While it is unorthodox, I think it is highly explanatory of why the clauses cause so much trouble now.  We do not know what the religion clauses mean because we keep trying to argue that in a few words, the founders laid out an entire philosophy of church-state separation.  They did no such thing.  They left it to the states because they had no choice.  The states did not want interference or competition on the matter.

tothesource: That brings us back to the common notion that, historically, we are inevitably moving away from an age of religion and superstition, and into the age of reason. On this view, no matter what the founders thought, secularists’ interpretation of the Constitution will win out! Secularism is historically inevitable. But you take another view. You argue that the advance of secularism wasn’t historically inevitable, but the purposeful result of secular activism.

Baker: The idea that secularization is historically inevitable is one that was once uncritically accepted by huge swaths of the academy.  Today, it is under heavy attack by scholars who properly note that secularization theory expresses a wish rather than a reality.  Peter Berger criticizes the theory today, but at one time he suggested the advent of the 21st century would find small groups of believers huddled against the modern age.  I applaud his integrity in revising his view many years ago.  

Certainly, I do see that secularism has advanced in American life, most notably in the universities, thanks to activism from secularizers.  One of the key examples is a Carnegie fund that offered professor pensions to schools which agreed to sever all church ties.  At the same time, Protestants just made horrible decisions.  They were more worried about Catholics than secularists and hired faculty by the gross who had little interest in the Christian faith.  It doesn't matter if you keep the board Christian and the president Christian.  The faculty are the ones forming young minds.  If they stop caring about the mission, then the mission is dead.

tothesource: Does that mean that Christians should be anti-secular activists?

Baker: I think Christians should kindly refuse the invitation to take their religious activity and speech private.  They should maintain the validity of the faith for their approach to community life and politics.  They should point out that secularism provides little guidance for dealing with big political questions and that the values have to come from somewhere.  Too often, secularists selective crib Christian values without acknowledging the source.  We didn't just get here by accident.  We don't appreciate things like liberty, equality, and democracy by sheer accident.  Christianity has been a major civilizational force.

Christians should also learn about their own faith.  Religion is not a commodity.  Christianity is not just another religion.  Don't accept the idea that your faith is about emotion and pure mysticism and the no one else can understand it.  Realize that the Christian faith makes public claims about events that happened in history.  Stick close to the resurrection of Christ and you won't go far wrong in challenging the secular orthodoxy.

"Secularism, as Robert George once said, is a player on the field simultaneously attempting to call balls and strikes."

Wolfhart Pannenberg exhorts church leaders in his notable essay: How to Think About Secularism

"Secularists are right to expose irrationality, fanaticism, and intolerance when they appear in the name of religion, even if the secularists sometimes do so in order to discredit religion as such. Authentic Christian teaching appropriates all that is valid in the secularist culture, while laying claim to, and focusing attention upon, the truth that the secularist spirit no longer deems worthy of attention. Christians can confidently do this because they know that, just as Christian doctrines were once challenged in the name of reason and a rational approach to truth, so today secularism itself has become irrational. In our contemporary circumstance, there is high promise in renewing the classical alliance between Christian faith and reason.

Christians who lay claim to reason, however, must be ready to accept criticism, and to cultivate an ethos of self-criticism within their own communities. Traditional doctrines and forms of spirituality, along with the Bible itself, are not exempt from critical inquiry. Such inquiry is required by the alliance of faith and reason. Christian confidence in the truth of God and His revelation should be vigorous enough to assume that truth will not succumb to any findings of critical inquiry. Of course there are prejudiced and distorted forms of criticism that presuppose a secularist worldview that is inescapably hostile to Christian faith. For critical inquiry to flourish, such false criticisms must be firmly exposed and resisted. How to distinguish between critical inquiry and criticism that has been poisoned by the presuppositions of secularism is a subject for another essay. Suffice it to say that it can be done and it must be done. My argument is that, if we think it is necessary to protect divinely revealed truth from critical inquiry, we are in fact displaying our unbelief. Such inquiry, while it may at times pose difficulties, will finally enhance the splendor of the truth of God. Confidence in that truth—a confidence exhibited in proclamation and life—is the only adequate and worthy response to the challenge of secularism."

How to Think about Secularism
Wolfhart Pannenberg

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/002-how-to-think-about-secularism-39

Noted social critic Herbert London opens his latest book with a simple statement: "Belief matters." Every bit a cri de coeur, in little more than 100 pages Mr. London goes on to show how Americans, to the contrary, have come to embrace secularism - and do so at their peril.

In a chapter titled "Secularism: America's New Religion," he writes: "So much of American society has been constructed on the basis of both the belief in the divine and the organizational religion that it entails that secularism threatens to leave America with a 'naked public square,' to borrow a phrase from Father Richard Neuhaus. Secularists justify their anti-religious sentiments by citing concerns about the impending 'theocracy' of the Religious Right. This is odd, because in many respects secularism is itself not unlike a religion. It is grounded in several ideas that are valued by its adherents as deeply and unquestioningly as any spiritual creed."

The Washington Times

Remembering the Secular Age

There is no point in repeating here the lessons that secularist culture, according to Habermas, has learned from Judaism and Christianity—intuitions; habits of mind, heart, and aspiration; new standards of compassion and conscience, and the like. Even without sharing in Christian faith, secular persons ought in all fairness to give due recognition to intellectual indebtedness. In a word, pluralism cannot merely mean mutual toleration. Even to say that pluralism means mutual respect, while far closer to the heart of the matter, is not enough. For the parties committed to it, pluralism must also mean learning from each other.

If there is coming a post-secular age, it is not likely to be an age in which all intelligent people set aside their unbelief in Judaism and Christianity or their deep commitment to science and reason. But it will be, or ought to be, an age in which secular persons recognize at last that their own claim to universal superiority—the enlightened looming over those still walking in darkness—was premature. Not by pure secularism alone will the future be more fruitful than the immediate past. The times call for a global conversation among a multitude of human beings, for most of whom a sense for the sacred and the transcendent is as important as science and reason.

To be forced to choose between science and religion, or between the ways of reason and the ways of faith, is not an adequate human choice. Better it is to take part in a prolonged, intelligent, and respectful conversation across those outmoded ways of drawing lines.

First Things

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/05/003-remembering-the-secular-age-33

A tolerance which allows God as a private opinion but which excludes Him from public life, from the reality of the world and our lives, is not tolerance but hypocrisy.

Pope Benedict XVI, October 2005

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