Secular Revival

Religion, conceded Freud, has performed vital functions within civilization, offering us an imaginary compensation for our helplessness in the face of nature through fantasies of a controlling intelligence and an illusion of our capacity to summon that power through rituals and prayer. Above all, Freud saw religion as a mechanism of repression, channeling instinctual drives into socially acceptable forms. Chateaubriand’s lush Catholicism does not at all fit this notion of religion as the ultimate form of renunciation, but Freud’s portrayal of the austere and sublime legalism of Mosaic Judaism certainly does.
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One standard image of the nonbelieving secularist is of a hedonistic immoralist—as Fyodor Dostoevsky feared, if God is dead, everything is permitted. But to the contrary, it may be that secularism does not escape the dynamic that Freud believed is the motor of religion: the repression of instinct followed by a sublimation into other satisfactions—in other words, precisely the process that turns religion into an obsessional neurosis. Even among champions of the secular worldview, we sometimes find worries that secularism lacks magic and emotional depth, that it is a hyperrationalist creed that preserves the internal compulsions of religion without its animating beliefs or its consoling message of cosmic meaning and personal redemption. Frequently, the counsel of the secularist is to be brave, buck up, and face the world as a heroic pessimist. [...]

I would dare say that for most professional scholars, religion reclaims their attention not because faith reasserts its ancestral claim but because the secularist narrative has gotten snagged in contradictions and complexities. Among these snags must count the weakening of confidence in the oppositional terms that structured the secular worldview: irrational versus rational, faith versus knowledge, and the most basic dichotomy, religious versus secular. It is unlikely that diminishing confidence among secularist intellectuals would have occurred had it not coincided with the robust return of religion in cultures around the globe. Quite simply, the world has refused to cooperate with the expectations and divinations of the secularists. [...]

Surveying this global landscape of renewed public religion in 1999, Peter Berger, one of the greatest living sociologists of religion, concluded, “the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.” [...]

Yet, insofar as this is possible, it is only on the grounds prepared by secularism. For secularism emerged historically as the only mode humans have found to successfully and peacefully manage the tensions of diverse belief systems within a pluralistic framework. [...]

Secularism is undoubtedly suffering through a crisis of confidence. Perhaps, though, this presents an opportunity to reinvigorate the secularist vision. Outspoken atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins may allow nonbelievers to do some cheerleading, but they are not likely to reenergize the radically secular worldview. After all, their arguments are familiar; they have been enumerated many times already. They are, as Freud’s fictive opponent feared, likely to breed intolerance. Better to recognize that both the history of religion and the secular story are not lacking in examples of intolerance, but neither is one or the other short on acts of charity and hospitality, right up to and including love across the borders. Besides, it is not clear that anyone stops believing because of the better argument. [...]

The secularizers should worry less about converting believers and more about reinvigorating secularism’s own potential for deep meaning and rich experience. [...]

We should put aside the language of a clash. The reinvigoration of secularist values need not involve an attack on religion, any more than the reassertion of religion need involve an attack on nonbelief. Indeed, in a pluralist situation, secularists can worry about the order of their own house, without concerning themselves overly much with their neighbors. But this is the important point: religion and nonreligion can coexist in this way when and only when they both already stand firmly within a relationship defined by secularization. The moment that secularized relationship ceases to be the case, we would all have cause to worry, believers and nonbelievers alike.

Read the whole lengthy essay: Secular Revival by Warren Breckman