We return this week to our ongoing series on the rise of secularism, focusing especially on the insightful book by Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution.

Again, we are examining Smith’s claim that the Secular Revolution did not happen by accident, but as the result of a well-planned, well-executed strategy. As we noted earlier, the push to secularize American society began in earnest at the end of the 19th century. But secularizing elites faced an overwhelmingly Christian society, which for them meant a society based upon primitive superstition. Progress entailed the destruction of such superstition.

The secular-minded therefore had to carry on a revolution without seeming revolutionary.  Religion did not fit into their materialist worldview. Science had demonstrated (at least to them) the impossibility of the spiritual world, but nearly the whole of American society held the spiritual world to be more real and more important than the material world. Religion was an obstacle to science, an obstacle that had to be systematically dismantled without arousing alarm.

But how to do it? In our last email, we looked at one aspect of secular strategy, the “two spheres” doctrine. According to the two spheres doctrine, science deals with reality, religion with morality, and never the twain should meet. On this view, religion is fine as long as it makes no claim about reality, but humbly sticks to making its adherents peaceable citizens in the new secular state—a “heads we win, tails you lose” victory for secularism. A nice strategy indeed.

Smith provides an illuminating analysis of another important and related aspect of the Secular Revolution’s strategy for dealing with religion, the casting of religion as purely and only spiritual.

Now what could be wrong with that, you might ask? After all, religion is concerned with the spiritual realm above all. What could be the harm with casting religion as it cast itself?

According to Smith, this seemingly positive affirmation was the insincere flip side of Secularism’s adamant dismissal of all things spiritual as unreal. Secularists appeared to affirm religion by publicly declaring that religion is concerned with the spiritual realm, a realm beyond the ability of science to examine. But at the same time—and far less publicly—they insisted that “all religions are finally reducible to naturalistic, material, and social causes, and are clearly false in their claims” (126). With the more famous secularizing figure Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, they declared religion to be an illusion. In short, they treated religious believers as parents patronizingly treat children who still believe in Santa Claus—with a condescending wink.

How about an example taken from Smith’s own field of sociology to make this point more clear, this time from early 20th century sociologist Charles Henderson. On the one hand, Henderson would assert that sociology “does not consider whether creeds are true or false. That work belongs to metaphysicians, theologians, [and] preachers.” Ah! A division of labor. Sociologist study religion, if they study it at all, from the outside; they merely describe it as objective scientists of social behavior. But metaphysicians, theologians, and preachers—they deal with an area beyond science, the spiritual core.

The problem, however, is that Henderson didn’t believe that the spiritual core was real. In this division of labor, the metaphysicians, theologians, and preachers are busily working on thin air. To demonstrate this, Henderson (like his colleagues) provided the real explanation of religion. Take a peek at what Henderson believed that Christians were really doing when they were praying the “Our Father.”

As the family expanded into the clan or tribe…the common ancestor became the common deity…From the long history of the family, religion has come to think out the meaning of its universal prayer, “Our Father which art in heaven” (128).

Get it? The notion that God is our Father is simply a carryover of the ancestral worship of dead fathers. Again, we find ourselves in Freudian territory. In his Moses and Monotheism, Freud presents the origins of Judaism, not in the God who reveals himself to Moses, but in the guilt of the Jews in rebelling against and murdering Moses--the father figure--in the wilderness.  Following in the same secularizing ruts in his treatment of the New Testament, sociologist Henderson argued that the “Our Father” that Jesus utters in the Gospels has no spiritual object.  It is simply the relic of the ancient Jew’s veneration of the dead Abraham, the tribal patriarch.

Wink! Wink! Don’t tell the little children that Santa isn’t real.

The condescending wink arose from their we-know-better-now attitude. Religious believers still think that the universe was created by a benevolent deity who watches over it with great care; that is, believers still think that spiritual beings are real. That is because they have yet to grasp the truth about the universe, the great cosmic secret of Secularism: the universe is an accident, an unintended effect of the fickle forces of chance and brute, indifferent matter.

The ultimate root of the secularist revolution was the denial of this fundamental Judeo-Christian belief. In the words of Lester Ward, one of the preeminent secularizing sociologists in early 20th century American academia, “There is no intelligent reason why anything should be as it is. That this little planet of ours happens to be peopled with life is merely an accident, or rather the convergence of a number of accidents” (126).

Human life, all of life, is an accident, not the result of a divine plan. A purely spiritual being has not created us. In a purely material cosmos, governed by chance, purely spiritual beings are pure nonsense.

But again, publicly declaring the beliefs of an overwhelming majority of Americans to be nonsense was a rather delicate affair a century ago. Hence the strategy of speaking out of both sides of the mouth, and this occurred not just among sociologists, but as we have said, all throughout academia in nearly every discipline. Hence, American colleges and universities became--especially under the immense influence of Freud, but also of the lesser luminaries like the sociologists mentioned above--the place where the intelligentsia whispered the “truth” about religion to the sons and daughters, even while to the parents (who were paying the tuition bill) they offered a condescending smile.

Freud's Illusions

For Freud, religion had its origin as a psychological illusion, a case of wishful thinking.

We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.

The real universe—the cold, purposeless material universe championed by secularism—had no place for God, spirits of any kind, heaven or hell, or even a natural, moral order. The Bible is a work of fiction. Theology is the handmaid to superstition. For Freud, “scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves,” and that reality can only be described by a reductionist, materialist worldview.

But what keeps us from turning Freud’s own argument against him? Is it possible that his atheism was a psychological illusion, a case of wishful thinking? After all, the Judeo-Christian God is not only a God of mercy, but also a God of the moral law and judgment. Is it possible that secularists are avoiding the uncomfortable possibility of an all-knowing, all-seeing, judging God by projecting godlessness upon the universe? As Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov famously states, if there is no God, “Everything is permitted.” Isn’t it easier to live in such a universe—without an inviolable moral law, without a judge, without boundaries?

What did Freud think? Well, as a good Freudian, he was filled with ambivalence. On the one hand, he thought the moral prohibitions that make civilization possible, codes that are supported and ratified by religion, go against our true, natural desires.

If one imagines its prohibitions lifted—if, then, one may take any woman one pleases as a sexual object, if one may without hesitation kill one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in one’s way, if, too, one can carry off any of the other man’s belongings without asking leave—how splendid, what a string of satisfactions one’s life would be!

Such wonderful license permitting anything, even though natural or desirable, is nevertheless darkened by a fundamental difficulty: “everyone else has exactly the same wishes as I have and will treat me with no more consideration than I treat him.”
Thus, we must bear all the inconveniences and disappointments of civilization. All the suppressed and forbidden desires which are truly natural must be quenched and denied.

Ironically, for Freud, religion was necessary for the development of civil society. Without the fictitious father-God strengthening the feeble chains of civilization, everyone would simply act on his natural desires. And again, for Freud, in a universe without God there are no unnatural desires and hence no immoral desires. His entire psychology was built on the belief that incest was our most natural and fundamental desire.

If we turned Freud against himself—an in this instance, turn about is fair play—would we find that he indeed did have such forbidden desires, and that he needed the universe to support him? That is a reasonable suggestion, one that takes seriously Freud’s own insight that we often build our worldview out of our unconscious desires.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

Do we live in a meaningless or meaningful world?

Secularism is a particular philosophical view, one rooted in and entirely defined by materialism, the belief that the universe and everything in it is the result of a purposeless swirl of brute matter and energy. Of course, this view was not confined to sociologists and a few philosophers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has its roots in the ancient materialist philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius who lived before the birth of Christ, and adherence to materialism goes hand in hand with the rise of modern Secularism in the 17th and 18th centuries

While many considered materialism to be a liberating philosophy, freeing us from superstition, religious wars, and confusing dogmas, we do well to mark the darker side of flushing all things spiritual out of the universe. Perhaps no contemporary has captured it better than physicist Steven Weinberg. Witness the oft-quoted words of physicist Steven Weinberg from his The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe:

It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes [after the Big Bang], but that we were somehow built in from the beginning….It is very hard to realize that this all [i.e., the bustle and activity of our Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Materialism leads to nihilism. The denial of the spiritual realm reduces human life to “a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents.”

Not a happy thought, but if indeed science has proven that the universe is simply the result of a mindless explosion…we’ll just have to grow up, and get used to it. Religion is a groundless fiction, suitable only for children.

But has science shown that the universe is pointless? That human life is a mere farce? That God and the spiritual world are childish fictions? Your humble author, Benjamin Wiker, along with co-author Jonathan Witt, take on Weinberg’s claim in their book, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. As we make clear, the reports of the death of God have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the newest science reveals that nature is not at all as Weinberg sees it. The dreary cosmos of Secularism is passing away, revealing a universe rich in meaning, so rich that it could only be the work of a Genius.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

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