Some decades ago Peter Berger became convinced that secularization theory isn’t true. Science, technology, and modernity do not necessarily lead to the decline of religion. Secularization is the exception—a parochial western and central European phenomenon that is also characteristic of what Berger calls “an international secular intelligensia.”
Now Berger is revising his views. In “Further Thoughts on Religion and Modernity” he writes, “ I held the misleading notion of some sort of unified consciousness, religious or secular. I had overlooked the (in retrospect obvious) possibility that an individual may be both religious and secular.”
Berger is surely right. We’re complex animals, fully capable of operating in different ways at different levels, which explains why an Evangelical minister can tweet gospel passages without somehow experiencing a conflict between his use of modern technology and his biblical faith. We live in plural worlds.
Secularization, thinks Berger, is not a matter of replacement but instead relative displacement. With modernity comes a robust secular discourse (science first and foremost, but also modern moral and political views that are not based in theology). This discourse both feeds upon and advances the development of a secular form of life that displaces religiously defined reality in many areas of life. For example, when we get sick we call the doctor first rather than visit a church to offer a prayer.
But Berger’s point is that calling the doctor does not preclude offering a prayer. We can alternate between secular and religious definitions of reality. But secular discourse, he think, is the default discourse in societies that have become modernized, and religious faith becomes more a conscious choice than the default setting.
That’s right, I think. But Berger draws an irenic conclusion that is too dependent on conceding the public realm to secularity while limiting the religious to private life. Given our ability to toggle back and forth between secular and religious ways of thinking, he advocates a “peaceful coexistence of a secular discourse in the public sphere with a plurality of freely chosen religious discourses.”
Secular modernity is not medical knowledge or technical know-how, or even modern science. It is a diverse and often merely tacit set of claims about our ultimate ends as human beings unified by the consensus that our final end is not to know and worship God.
I can toggle back and forth between my faith and scientific, technological, economic, sociological, and psychological ways of thinking. But I can’t live both the modern secular vision of human flourishing and the Christian one. As St. Augustine observed, we are either members of the City of God or the City of Man. No peaceful coexistence there.
June 26th, 2012 | 5:14 pm
“Secular modernity is not medical knowledge or technical know-how, or even modern science. It is a diverse and often merely tacit set of claims about our ultimate ends as human beings unified by the consensus that our final end is not to know and worship God.”
That seems discusable. I will change more by something like:
“It is a diverse and often merely tacit set of claims about our ultimate ends as human beings unified by the consensus that our final end is not necesarely to know and worship God”.
Or in other words, it is a consensus that people ought to be free from any consensus regarding religious matters, since that is a private election, not a public imposed one.
June 26th, 2012 | 5:16 pm
I would add a view that modernity (shorn of its excesses) is part of a Christian religious life. For example, the doctor’s practice is part of, and a result of a montheistic approach to reality. Chrisendom birthed modern science, and physicians act as “mask of God” (using Luther’s term). Hence, the doctor is not an addition to prayer as an answer to it. I am scientific because I am Christian.
June 26th, 2012 | 5:39 pm
“For example, the doctor’s practice is part of, and a result of a montheistic approach to reality.”
Silly me. I thought the roots of western medicine lied in ancient polytheistic Greece, with Hypocrathes as its father.
June 27th, 2012 | 12:34 pm
Well Sergio, that’s what you get for thinking. The ancient Greeks and other pre-modern or non-modern cultures may have developed some knowledge of healing herbs and the human body which they could use to treat some conditions, but modern medical science as a systematic investigation of physical reality using the scientific method didn’t, and couldn’t, exist until the 17th century in Western Europe. And it was an outgrowth of the Christian view of the cosmos as rational due to the rationality of God and the dependability of natural laws due to the promises of God.
June 28th, 2012 | 2:51 pm
Fred:
Well, that´s discusable. It was the greeks who first started to think in terms of natural causes, including in the field of medicine. So maybe without the thinking and philosophy of the greeks, the modern rational method of scientific rationality wouldn´t have been inveted at all. For christians it took more than a millenia to rediscover it, and couriously the moment that civilization started using it, it also started a path down into becoming a secularized one. So no, rationality does not depend on God, as much as christian theologians have tried – in vain- to link both concepts.
June 28th, 2012 | 4:20 pm
_So maybe without the thinking and philosophy of the greeks, the modern rational method of scientific rationality wouldn´t have been inveted at all._
That’s quite possibly true, but it was the adaptation of classical rationalism by Christianity that led to modern science. Greek rationalism was perhaps a necessary, but definitely not a sufficient, condition.
_ For christians it took more than a millenia [sic] to rediscover it_
That, I’m afraid, is utter nonsense. Do the names Augustine, Anselm, Lombard, Abelard, and Aquinas mean anything to you? Augustine developed his thought, modeled to a large degree on Plato, in the 5th century. Anselm wrote in the 11th, and Aquinas adapted Aristotle in the 13th. True, there’s about a 500 year gap between Augustine and the greatest Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, but a) that had more to do with barabarian depradations (including the Vikings) and time to recover from the collapse of Rome than it did with Christianity, and b) it was not a period of inactivity for Christian philosophy. Saint Benedict, for example, wrote in the 6th century. Missionaries to what is now Germany were combining classical ideas with Christian belief in those years. The idea that the years from 500 to 1500 AD were an age of darkness and superstition superceded by an age of recovery of lost knowledge that led to further supercession by the “Enlightenment” is a self-serving myth created by certain 18th century figures like Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and Kant. Read a little history.
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