The Failure of Secularism, and Its Successes

I have just finished reading a chapter in Rowan Williams' book Faith in the Public Square, entitled "Has secularism failed?"  Reading this work is part of my recently begun PhD program, as I attempt to gain a broader understanding of Charles Taylor and his model of a 'social imaginary.'  Taylor is now most know for his major work A Secular Age which sets out to tell the story of 'how we got here' in the 21st century.  As such, Williams' chapter could be read as a score card for our secular age, an evaluation which reinforces many of Taylor's own critiques and comments of the world we experience.

Williams' assessment of secularism could be summarized as having failed because it is "linguistically bereaved" (11), that is, secularism's epistemological stance leads it to foreclose 'possibility' in objects.  Secularism aims for "a situation in which we are not able to see the world and each other as always and already 'seen,' in the sense that we acknowledge our particular perspective to be shadowed by others that are inaccessible to us" (15).  Secularism built on the Enlightenment project of an exalted human ability to know in fullness.  The success of the scientific method in the natural sciences led to other disciplines adopting, as much as possible, its methodology.  But the result was often reductionism.  All knowledge needed to be fact, needed to be literal, and, above all in Williams telling, needed to be functional.

However, the high tide of Enlightenment optimism began to meet resistance in the rocks of the Romantics.  Williams writes of the challenge that art brings to secularism.  "Art makes possible a variety of seeings or readings; it presents something that invites a time of reception or perception, with the consciousness that there is always another possible seeing/reading" (13, emphasis original).  This is an inherently non-secular project, as it presents something which is beyond our possessing power, beyond our ability to exhaust.  This is where secularism shows itself to be linguistically bereaved, as it lacks the vocabulary to express the moral value of art.  Art invites us to see an object as something which can be seen from perspectives other than our own; it invites us to take time to contemplate possible other readings, an invitation which comes at great cost (in the world of functionalism and managerial efficiency).  This cost of time requires a self-involvement, "even a self-dispossession" which borders (or not) on love.  Indeed, art even beckons us to consider the transcendent, as we acknowledge that more time than our own could be spent in gazing upon this object, perhaps already has been spent gazing upon the object, "the possibility of an always more sustained and self-invested seeing - a greater love" (18).

Thus art and imagination are stumbling blocks to secularism, and marks a failure in its project.  However, here, dashed against the rocks, we can find a surprising companion to secularism: religion.  Religion, and Williams is not using this term pejoratively, can also stumble on imagination when it "claim[s] the possibility of historical closure and exhaustion" (18).  Religion (Williams specifically names Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) acknowledges this transcendent possibility of a greater love in the divine.  To use Christian terms, it is God, the Creator, to knows beyond limits, and who contemplates the objects of His creation with self-investing love.  Where religion runs into problems is where it forgets that this perspective of the divine "is not the same as a perspective in the world" (18), that is, where religion its own exhaustive knowledge.  To do so, ironically, is for religion to become secular, and Williams terms this secular religion 'fundamentalism.'

Fundamentalist religion focuses on propositions which determine human behavior rather than identity formed over time in the context of suffering and experience.  The language of this latter religion "works not simply to describe an external reality, but to modify over time the way self and world are sensed" (16, emphasis original).  Fundamentalist religion (as Williams has described it) shares with secularism an exhaustive epistemology; that we know all that we need to know and thus simply require the power to implement it.  Such a theocracy is "admitting the victory of secularism in the political sphere; the exhaustion of reading would have been accepted as axiomatic, simply relocated to religious territory once more" (19).  Secularism's influence on religion is not confined the political, however.  It also can be seen in our consumerist conceptions of religion; we adopt a faith in order to solve our problems, actualize ourselves, etc.  This, too, is an adoption of the secular emphasis on function.  It instrumentalizes religion, conceiving it as a tool to produce what we desire.

To diverge from Williams' arguments for a moment, both of these models assume a disengaged and punctual self.  By disengaged I mean they assume that we can know 'purely,' in a way that is untouched by the circumstances of our context.  A punctual view of the self is one that is free to treat the world instrumentally, one that is subject to change and reorganization.  Both of these assumptions cut against the view of the embodied person who lives in a world given and ruled by God.  For the secular and fundamentalist models to work, we must not be 'works in progress', people who are on a journey toward personhood, but must instead be full capable to knowing and changing the world.

Thankfully, as Williams points out, religions traditions have historically contained within them self-critical elements.  These are the impulses which seek to de-center the believer, and such impulses help to counter the secular influence on religion.  Nicholas Lash calls on this critical role of theology to destroy the idols that our positive language of God tends to create and to remind us that the object of our faith is a God who is beyond knowledge (see Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus, particularly chapters 1 and 9).

The fact that religious language has this self-critical mode of speech highlights, for Williams, the potential role of religion in a procedural secularist society.  Procedural secularism, that kind which can be defined as "a public policy which declines to give advantage or preference to any one religious body over others" (2), is a good idea for Williams.  However, it has the tendency to fail in the arena of the imagination.  Religion can serve as secularism's self-critical voice, inviting secularism to continually investigate its foundations so that it does not fall into programmatic (totalitarian) secularism (an evil for Williams).

Thus, secularism has failed to win the human imagination, it has succeeded in influencing fundamentalist religion, and it requires the voice of religion for it to continue to succeed in a healthy way.

**All quotations taken from Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.