Society has become increasingly secularized over the last century, both in Europe and in America, a trend that shows no sign of abating in the current century. And this increasing secularization brings of necessity a decreasing presence of Christianity and other traditional religious faiths.
If we accept this fact, and we believe that religions in general and Christianity in particular have been baneful obstacles to progress, then we cannot help but to make merry, and look forward to the cheerful day when humanity will be delivered from the darkness of superstition.
But if we accept this fact and, on the contrary, we believe that religions in general are signs of humanity's natural inclination to worship, and that Christianity in particular has been the revelation of Whom we should worship, then we cannot help but be concerned as our culture marches merrily into the dread darkness of unbelief.
But is increasing secularization inevitable? That is, must secularism increase and Christianity and other traditional faiths decrease?
The answer to that question will depend in part upon what we think secularism is. In its original sense, the term "secular" refers to the natural realm, the world, as distinct from the supernatural realm. It simply marks the difference between the temporal and eternal. In that sense, the secular realm is not set against the eternal, but merely distinguished from it.
But the term "secular" has taken on a different sense, one captured by the suffix "-ism." Secularism denotes a dedication to the world as opposed to the supernatural, and proclaims a kind of declaration of war against traditional religion. It turns a proper distinction into a furious antagonism.
Now we return to our question: must secularism increase and Christianity decrease? For those who think that secularism is some kind of an inevitable, historical necessity—be they secularists or Christians—secularism must increase as Christianity decreases.
But what if the Secular Revolution really is a revolution, the result of a well-planned, well-funded campaign to sink Christianity and put a new world order in its place?
What if—and this is perhaps the most startling point—what if one of the best, most effective weapons of secular revolutionaries is spreading the rumor that secularism is inevitable—an historical, impersonal force that cannot help but run full throttle until it throttles everything sacred in its path? In that case, it will achieve victory simply by declaring it, and then all that is needed for the triumph of secularism is for people of faith to do nothing.
In an effort to answer these questions, tothesource will examine in a series of emails a most important book by Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life.
Smith's argument is that the "secularization of the institutions of American public life did not happen by accident or happenstance" (32), rather, "American public life was secularized by groups of rising scientific, academic, and literary intellectuals whose upward mobility...was obstructed by the Protestant establishment....What these secularizers were actually pursuing was not primarily a neutral public sphere, but a reconstructed moral order which would increase their own group status, autonomy, authority, and eventually income" (37).
These secularizers posed as neutral observers of an inevitable historical tendency, that was not inevitable at all, any more than they were neutral. Instead, secularization was the happy result of their well-planned, well-funded efforts to remove traditional religious faith and replace it with a social order of their own making.
These American revolutionaries imported their founding ideas from Europe, from the centuries-long secular revolution that had already transformed the Old World, and which they hoped could transform the New.
This may sound like an abstract and merely academic argument, but such is not the case. Smith, a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is quite concrete in documenting the activities of the revolutionaries, because every successful revolution is in the details—the textbooks pushed for adoption in colleges in the early 20th century, the grant money given to colleges with secular strings attached, the behind-the-scenes letters of one secular activist to another, the popular magazines funded to coat the public square with propaganda, and the list (as we shall see) goes on.
In examining such concrete details, along with the abstract arguments that gave them form and substance, we hope to give our readers a much better understanding of the nature of secularization. So please, stay tuned for The Secular Revolution.
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