9. Why Secularization?
9. Why Secularization?
The deepest causes of the de-Christianizing of British society during the past two generations are not peculiar to Britain, but have operated more or less potently all over the Western world. They are well known, for they are often discussed. They may be classified for neatness under the headings of attraction (the impact made by appealing alternatives to the Christian view of man), reaction (the impact made by the church's failures and inadequacies), and distraction (the impact made by practical materialism). Basic to all these factors, however, has been the eclipse first of biblical theism and then of the Bible itself in Western Protestant minds, and it is with this that we must start the story.
In the sixteenth century, at the time of the Reformation, faith in the God who made, sustains and rules this world, and in the Bible as his inspired word of instruction to man, was clear and strong. Under its influence experimental science was bom, as the reverent study of God's wonderful works.6 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, deism, with its idea of the adequacy of natural religion and of God as the mighty mechanic who, having set the world going, is now content to be its absentee landlord, had the effect of undermining belief in both special providence and special revelation; it barred God out of his world, and silenced him into the bargain. Kant's Religion Within the Bounds of Pure Reason (1793), which reduces religion to performing moral duties viewed as God's commands, shows this tendency at its height.
Nineteenth-century German idealist philosophy restored the sense of God's nearness which deism had destroyed, but it was only a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. Idealists saw knowledge of God as an aspect of self-consciousness, and equated God with our thoughts and feelings about him, and denied just as firmly as the deists had done that God reveals, by some process other than philosophic reflection, things that have not entered into the heart of philosophic man. The Bible was seen as a record of religion rather than of revelation, and biblical criticism was practiced in a way which convinced onlookers that the Bible could not be trusted about anything, while physical science, working with an interpretative model of evolutionary development and making great strides in all fields, was thought to have exposed the biblical view of God and the world as primitive and in no sense scientific.
After the First World War theism revived a little in the West and the sophistry of the supposition that science has refuted, or could refute, the biblical view of God's relation to this world began to be seen by one and another. But the damage was already done; the course of Western intellectual development was now set in a non-Christian direction, and when the war of 1914-18 knocked the bottom out of the optimistic evolutionary view of man as getting better and better it was to the atheistic optimism of the communists and the atheistic pessimism of Freud and existentialism that men turned. In Britain it was Freudianism that had most influence.
Freud was a determinist, halfway to being a behaviorist; he saw each man as driven by irrational impulses of which he was largely unconscious, and which he repressed to his own ruin. Freud saw religion as a neurosis, God being the personified projection of a tyrannical conscience (the super-ego) which was itself the neurotic product of repressed jealousy towards one's father (the Oedipus complex).
It is relevant when weighing this idea to bear in mind that in clinical practice Freud had found some cases of infantile jealousy of fathers, and also that he was himself an atheist Jew in an uneasy relationship with his own father. His prescription for mental health was to let repressed desires come out, particularly in the matter of sex; his prescription for society was tight restraints to prevent aggressive desires destroying civilized life altogether. This seemed pleasant good sense to many people in the dispirited days between the two world wars, and the Freudian view of life was widely taken up as a credible alternative to what was felt to be the incredible, indeed superstitious view held by Christians, which in any case (so it was held) Freudianism could explain away.
The de-Christianizing process was further helped by the contempt, mild or fierce, that the Church's inertia in the face of change provoked in the popular mind. Part of the problem here has been the static way of thinking which stemmed from the so-called "medieval synthesis" of religion and all life which was the scholastic theologians' supreme achievement. "The trouble about the mediaeval synthesis/' wrote F. R. Barry, "was that it was far too complete. The Church and Christianity were equated with a temporary historical situation and a transient phase in cultural evolution, assuming that it was final and permanent. For example, the social ethic of St. Thomas takes for granted a small-town economy, and is viable only in that context. . . . Theologies built on the doctrine of the 'natural law' tend to a static social philosophy, and tend to forget that history means change. . . . But to resist change is to be destroyed by change. . . ." Under the pressure of the widening interests, new social patterns, explorations of individuality, and new sense of history that flowed from the Renaissance, "increasingly wide areas of life began to assert their independence from 'religious' or churchly control, and more and more 'secular,' this-worldly interests began to claim and vindicate their autonomy. . . ."7
This is a generalization about several centuries of European history, but something of this kind certainly took place in England, in its own very English way. Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was a late sixteenth-century defense of the Anglican establishment built on foundations of "natural law"; it assumed an absolute monarchy and a single church structure to which the whole nation belonged. It remained the standard apologia for the Church of England up to the First World War, two centuries after it first went out of date on both these latter points. As nineteenth-century men came to see more and more clearly that industrial and urbanized patterns of life had come to stay, so indignation at the Church of England's rural and reactionary mentality increased, and progressive persons turned away in disgust, dismissing the Church, and Christianity with it, as an obstructive irrelevance. It is to be feared that during the past century there have been many for whom the conservatism of the Church has undermined the credibility of the faith.
As for the distraction of materialism, the pressure point for British people seems not to be so much theoretical (whether Christianity is true) as practical (whether worship and spiritual life matter). The feeling has spread that the good life for man in God's world is to avail himself of the endless enjoyments which technology now puts at his disposal, and that it is not important to take time and trouble learning to know and serve God, since God will accept us all, whether we have loved him or not. If we cannot be accepted for actually being good, we shall at least be accepted for not doing so badly as we might have done.
Alistair MacIntyre's famous description of the Englishman's creed as a belief that there is no God, and it is wise to pray to him from time to time, is as false as it is clever; it is the exact opposite of the truth. Various sociological investigations during the past thirty years have made it clear that most Englishmen still possess a residual belief in "one above," however vaguely conceived. F. R. Barry quotes "the immortal remark" (made to him?): "After all, bishop, I suppose we all believe in a sort of a something"8—yet most Englishmen neither attend a church, nor relate their belief to matters of personal morality, nor regularly pray. Atheists—that is, persons who deny the Christian faith because they deny the existence of the personal God of Christian theism—are a minority, but practical atheism—that is, living as if theoretical atheism were true—is the life style of the great mass of our people.
The term "secularism" was coined by G. J. Holyoake in a fine flush of Victorian indignation to mean "the doctrine that morality should be based on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or a future state." According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, it is now used "in a more general sense for the modern tendency to ignore, if not to deny, the principles of supernatural religion in the interpretation of the world and existence."
It is all too apt a description of the current British outlook. What has caused this? Not so much dogmatic unbelief, it would seem, as on the one hand a sense that the Church, the official instructor in Christianity, is remote from real life, and on the other hand a clamor, never-ending, from the manufacturers, the media and the automobile—"buy this"; "stop, look and listen to that"; "move around, and go somewhere else"—a clamor which drowns the quieter voices suggesting that time should be given to exploring eternal issues.
Materialism in Britain operates less as an argument than as an enchantment. It is not theoretical but pragmatic, calling for and capturing not so much men's assent as their attention. Its motivating force is not hostility to the truth but rather love of the world, which drives out every other concern. Like all other modes of sin, the more worldly mindedness is indulged the stronger it grows. The present degree of secularism in our society is of itself a strong force pressing for secularization to be carried further.