In the last installment of our series on Christian Smith's The Secular Revolution we highlighted the top-down secular revolution as it occurred in American education. Again, Smith argues that American students studying at renowned German universities in the late 1800s and early 1900s received a thorough immersion in European secular thought. When they returned to our shores, they were ready to carry that revolution forward on our own academic soil.

Revolutionaries wore the guise of reformers, the assumption being that American education was horribly broken, and needed a radical overhaul.  As Smith points out, essential to understanding the historical secularization of American higher education

…was the crucial influence of leading educational reformers—such as Harvard's President Charles Eliot, Johns Hopkins's President Daniel Coit Gilman, and Cornell's President Andrew Dickson White—who, while often publicly extolling the value of a nebulous version of "religion" for human civilization, actually worked with capitalist tycoons to orchestrate the institutionalization of a new system of higher education that intentionally marginalized religion from its central work (103).

A revealing example:  Cornell's President White penned the infamous A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896), which, Smith remarks, was "the culmination of twenty years of activist writing against religion," where religion was always presented as "the dark enemy of science."  White believed that the dark forces of religion were bound to lose, for the progress of enlightened science over superstition was inevitable.

In short, White and other reformers were Janus-faced, one face presenting a reassuring but patronizing smile to religious believers, and the other, marked by a scheming, we-know-better wink to fellow secularizers behind the scenes.  This kind of duplicity marked (and still marks) the entire secular revolution. 

Such duplicity was not merely a supercilious pose, but a strategy of secularization, one that merits our closer inspection.  This strategy has several key components.  In this installment of the series, we examine the "two-spheres" doctrine.

Surely, you have heard something like the following.  Science and Religion deal with two separate spheres, the natural and the supernatural, the realm of fact and the realm of belief.  "Science teaches us about the heavens, and religion the way to get to heaven." Therefore, there is no conflict, but a kind of division of labor corresponding to a division of reality.  As long as each stays within its own sphere, there can be no conflict, but only a happy and complementary harmony.

The problem, as Smith demonstrates in detail, is that those who soothingly cooed the formula from the secularist side, did not actually mean a one-for-you, one-for-me division of the spheres, but rather a two-for-me, none-for-you. Smith gives us a glimpse of this strategy in his own academic field, sociology.

Witness the words of the eminent sociologist, Lester Ward, one of the founding fathers of American academic sociology.  With one face, he stated:  "The religious explanation is the supernatural, the scientific explanation is natural."  Ahhh, a truce. Mutual understanding.

The other face?  Ward asserted that "superstitious beliefs had hindered the progress of science," but since "the scientific era began there has been no such faith in the supernatural as exists among savages"—at least among the truly enlightened. Thus, with "science marching relentless forward…there is scarcely room to doubt" that the "conquest" of science over superstitious supernaturalism "must ultimately become complete."  To be blunt, "Among people acquainted with science, all supernatural beings have been dispensed with, and the belief in them is declared to be wholly false and to have always been false."

Two separate spheres?  Or two-for-me, and none-for-you? As Smith states, while secularists publicly stated that "science and religion are different ways of knowing, concerned with different orders of reality," in reality, they really meant that science and religion "are actually absolutely incompatible and antagonistic sources of knowledge."

The knowledge that science provided was real, based on observation and hard facts.  Religion didn't really provide knowledge. Since it was based on ignorance and superstition, the only thing it provided was an obstacle to science.  Hence, for secularists, "the two knowledge systems are perpetually engaged in a war that religion is always losing."

In sum, American secular revolutionaries assumed exactly what they had received from European Enlightenment thinkers.  History is marked by an ongoing war between error and truth, superstition and science, religion and reason. History goes backwards when we embrace religion.  History goes forwards when we embrace science, and so we must do so with all the zeal of a religion.  American secular revolutionaries, especially those who had taken up academic positions in the early 20th century, were bent on pushing history forward in American academia—and that meant pushing religion out, and doing so with all the zealousness that was formerly channeled into religion.

Harvard's Secularization
How a college lost its faith

Harvard has never been shy about honoring its traditions. From the stained glass windows of Memorial Hall to the bright red bricks that line its storied buildings, the University likes to keep its relics intact.

Well, most of them.

Ironically, the Crimson shield—the University's logo and the ostensibly eternal distillation of its identity—has undergone significant change since the University's birth back in 1636.

Back then, it wasn't just about "Veritas." It was "Veritas pro Christo et Ecclesia;" not just Truth, but Truth for Christ and Church.

What exactly happened to "Church"? And where did Christ go?

It used to be that Harvard had only one business—training young men for deployment into the ministry. And it wasn't overnight that it transformed into the famously secular research university we know today.

Rather, the movement gathered momentum gradually, propelled by intellectual leaders who, while using Christianity as an implicit foundation, believed above all in the advancement of scientific and academic knowledge.

For the Puritans who founded the College, separating God from academia was unthinkable. "The whole notion of a secular entity was unheard of," says Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes.

By the 19th century, Harvard was undergoing a liberalization of its religious ideas under the influence of the Unitarians, who had come to control Harvard and institutionalized a greater emphasis on reason, morality, humanism, and intellectual freedom. "Unitarianism is a much more broad-based, hospitable religion, at odds with the old Calvinists," says Gomes. "[The movement] led the way to what eventually became a secularizing process."

The Harvard Crimson online edition

At Boston College, protests of Condoleezza Rice muted

After a high-profile ramp-up to the ceremony, including an impassioned outcry from some faculty and students, the graduation passed uneventfully, with no arrests and no evictions from Alumni Stadium. There was applause as Rice's name was called, and more clapping in response to her remarks about triumphing over segregation's restrictions in her native South. Her speech was pointedly noncontroversial -- devoid of policy statements, with only a tangential mention of Iraq as she spoke of the need for graduates to remain optimistic.

"I know how hard it can be these days, when we see images of genocide in Darfur or violence in Iraq or destruction along our own Gulf Coast, to believe that such a thing of human progress is possible...." she said. "But in moments like these, draw solace from education and also from historical perspective."

Protests inside the stadium took a gentle form: About 50 of the 3,200 students seated on the stadium floor turned their backs and held up placards denouncing the war as Rice received an honorary doctorate of law. Some 200 faculty did the same, according to a count by faculty members. Approximately 30,000 people attended the commencement, according to BC police.

© 2006 Boston Globe
This excerpt is provided for educational purposes only

Gould calls for the separation of science and religion

Among the most recent advocates of the "two spheres" approach to parsing the domains of religion and science is the late Stephen Jay Gould, unflagging apologist for Darwinism, popular writer, and Harvard professor (teaching biology, geology, and the history of science). Gould's most famous offering occurred in his Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999).

"I write this book," Gould informed readers in his Preamble, "to present a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to an issue so laden with emotion and the burden of history that a clear path usually becomes overgrown by a tangle of contention and confusion." In short, Gould called for a "principled and respectful separation" of science and religion.

This separation is entirely reasonable, argued Gould, because science and religion deal with two separate domains. Science deals with the "factual character of the world" while religion deals with "the realm of human purposes, meanings, and values." Or, in a rather patronizing tone, "We [scientists] get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages. We study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven."

All is fine and dandy, then, for ne'er the two can conflict…if each stays in its respective domain, that is. What we have, so Gould claims, is not essential and ceaseless conflict between science and religion, but None Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA for short. Stated Gould:

NOMA is a simple, humane, rational, and altogether conventional argument for mutual respect, based on non-overlapping subject matter, between two components of wisdom in a full human life: our drive to understand the factual character of nature (the magisterium of science), and our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the magisterium of religion).But what kind of a compromise is NOMA? Science gets reality. Religion gets…gets…to be a kind of moral cheerleader for those who need it. That is, science will allow religion as long as it makes no reality claims, and just sticks to making people nice.

If we dig a little more deeply into Gould, we find out why he can claim that science can say nothing about morality. "Nature is amoral–not immoral ... Nature just is." Simply put, there are no factual claims about morality. Morality is purely subjective, a truth every in-the-know scientist knows. The view of nature Gould held—that of modern, reductionist materialism—is entirely antagonistic to Biblical claims that morality is written into our very nature. Thus, the magisterium of science actually undermines the "moral basis of our actions," and hence demonstrates the futility and mere subjectivity of the magisterium of religion. Like Spinoza, Gould apparently thought that the "vulgar" still needed the nice morality tales of the Bible—as long as they behaved themselves.

Benedict Spinoza
Early apostle of the religion of Enlightenment

As we've argued, American secular intellectuals in the late 18th and early 19th century were anything but original. They received the equivalent of a baptism in secularism when they traveled to Europe's universities in search of graduate degrees. It is therefore worthwhile to uncover the origins of the secularizing spirit that animated European Enlightenment revolutionaries.

The secular revolution started earlier than one might suspect. Although we could travel back further—all the way back to the middle ages, and even beyond—let us look at one of the most notorious and earliest of the modern secularizers, Benedict Spinoza.

Benedict Spinoza was born Baruch de Espinoza on November 24, 1632, the son of recent Jewish immigrants from Amsterdam, in the most infamously tolerant and liberal of states, the Netherlands. His family had good reasons to seek toleration, since for many generations they had been victims of forced conversions to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal. In the Netherlands, there would be freedom to worship as Jews.

But while Benedict’s father, Michael, was a devout Jew, his son rejected Judaism by the time he was in his teens. Instead, he became an advocate of a new religion, the religion of science. Spinoza was to become one of the most celebrated and influential apostles of this new religion of Enlightenment.

For Spinoza, science really was a religion. He rejected the Judeo-Christian belief that God created nature, and instead asserted that God and nature were identical. God is nature, and nature is God. Science—not revealed religion—truly reveals nature. Revealed religion is merely ignorant superstition, and the Bible is a product of that ignorance. Spinoza was part of a radical circle in Amsterdam, largely former Christians, who began to attack the Bible and revealed religion with the greatest religious zeal.

Spinoza gave the west one of the first formulations of the “two spheres” approach to science and religion. As Spinoza maintained, “reason is concerned with the realm of truth and wisdom, whereas theology is concerned with piety and obedience.” Science deals with truth. Religion deals with morality.

Sounds nice? Sound familiar? What Spinoza really meant, was that religion is for stupid people, or in his terms, “the vulgar.” The vulgar are incapable of reason, and hence they must be calmed and directed by religion.

Benjamin Wiker

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