11. Evaluating Secularization
11. Evaluating Secularization
The process which has been described above in its British form, and which currently operates, with local variations, throughout the Western world, has been variously evaluated by theologians. At one extreme stands Harvey Cox, who in The Secular City (1965) maintained that urban secularization is to be seen as a wholly good and Christian development, even though one of its by-products is that God has become anonymous and is no longer known. Others from an opposite extreme have denounced secularization as unmixed apostasy. It is not possible here to enter into the complexities of this debate: I limit myself in this final section to making four “perspec-tival" points which may help to shape our overall response to what we see happening around us.
First, the secularizing of society was inevitable. Whether we applaud it as “man come of age" or deplore it as man off the rails, we should recognize that the secularization of Christendom was something that sooner or later had to happen, and any nostalgic idea that it could have been avoided should be banished from our minds. For Christendom, both unreformed (in the Middle Ages) and reformed (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was a Church-dominated, rural and static culture, prescientific, preindustrial and pretechnological, full of fanciful ideas about nature, man and the cosmos, and quite unprepared for rapid social change. From the Renaissance there flowed, like a river growing in size and speed, first the knowledge explosion and then the technological explosion. This was the biggest cultural trauma in Western history so far, and it made Christendom's historic way of thinking about life under God seem increasingly remote.
I do not imply that the Christendom synthesis of knowledge and culture informed and interpreted by biblical faith cannot be successfully rethought and realized afresh in our time—with T. S. Eliot, John Baillie, Herman Dooyeweerd, Francis Schaeffer and many more I think it can. But it would have been unrealistic to expect that the West could work through this trauma of transition without great numbers of people throwing out the baby of Christian faith with the bathwater of Christendom's prescientific outlook because they thought that the two were one. So we ought not to panic, as if we face something enigmatic and inexplicable, when we find that this has actually taken place.
Second, the secularizing of society has brought real spiritual loss. Against those who hail secularization as if it were God's kingdom coming, the sad side of the process—the "expense of spirit," to use Shakespeare's phrase, and the eternal ruin of souls—must be stressed. When individuals or groups who once professed the faith give it up, it is apostasy, a falling away; and the end of apostasy, as the Epistle to the Hebrews declares, is death, in every sense of that word (see 6:4-8, 10:26-31). By the light of the Bible we recognize in the process that has been going on throughout Europe for two centuries, and intensively in England for two generations, the pattern of spiritual decline spelled out in Romans 1:20-32 where Paul describes how men transfer their instinct to worship and serve from the true God to things they have made themselves, and how this loss of God leads to the loss of good in human relations, and an increasingly frenzied descent into debauchery, all provoking divine judgment.
Inevitable as the secularizing of the West may have been, that does not excuse the apostasy which is bound up with it; and without questioning God's lordship over the process we must recognize the reality of his wrath against the spiritual decline which it has brought. Jeremiah (9:1) wished that his head were waters, and his eyes a fountain of tears, that he might weep for his people: anyone with an ounce of compassion in him will feel the same as he looks at the tokens of the spiritual state of Britain today.
Third, the secularizing of society tends to disintegrate society. The fact must be faced that many current social trends lead towards nihilism and anarchy. True as it may be that we are still distant from both, and other communities are perhaps nearer, it is to this and nowhere else that the road we are following leads. The seeds of all kinds of sin lie in every human heart; restraints of law, custom, religion and public opinion may hold them in check; but the more these restraints are weakened, the more we may expect to see these seeds grow, and human relations in society being disrupted as a result. That the restraint of religion is being weakened seems clear from the decline of the churches and the general withering of religion in the home. That other restraints are being progressively weakened seems to follow from contemporary willingness to tolerate what earlier eras would have thought intolerable—a state of moral apathy which we call the permissive society.
The weakening process may be expected to continue, for permissiveness has a continually erosive effect. Public blasphemy recoils on the community which tolerates it by eroding the capacity to respect or hold sacred anything at all. Pornography recoils similarly by dehumanizing our thoughts about sex, and so dehumanizing those who think them. Violence glorified by artists and the media as a way of establishing individuality in a hostile world dulls the inner sensibilities which ordinarily hold back the rage that lies hid in all our hearts, and so tends to brutalize and leads us step by step towards the jungle. The society which tolerates these things and has no strong public opinion against them is terribly vulnerable. I was once in a boat which began drifting towards an open dam, and I remember how I felt as it began to pick up speed, before we got it under control. Watching British society move during the past decade has often given me similar feelings.
In the early eighteenth century, as J. Wesley Bready showed in England: Before and After Wesley, English society underwent a decline into brutalized irreligion and immorality that bade fair to produce total social chaos had it not been arrested. What put that process into reverse for a century and a half was the impetus towards personal and social regeneration that sprang from the Evangelical Revival. Bready's view of the social dynamics of the Revival followed that of Elie Halevy, who had written: “In the vast work of social organisation which is one of the dominant characteristics of nineteenth-century England it would be difficult to over-estimate the part played by the Wesleyan revival. . . . We shall explain by this movement . . . what we may tmly term the miracle of modem England, anarchist but orderly, practical and businesslike, but religious and even pietist."18
Historical parallels are always in danger of oversimplifying problems, but they can sometimes suggest solutions. It may be that today as in the eighteenth-century spiritual revival can save our society from further dehumanization and collapse. It is certainly hard to see, in the long run, what else can. These things should drive Christians to their knees.
Fourth, the secularizing of society is a summons to Christian action. Jesus' disciples are called to be the salt of the earth, the working antiseptic factor that keeps society from decay. So Christians should use whatever power and influence they have in the social system to set up and safeguard public righteousness, and to further decisions which express Christian values. Part of the task facing every Christian generation is to see how far society can in this way be "Christianized.” This follows from the "cultural mandate" of Genesis 1:28, linked with God's concern for community holiness as expressed by the Mosaic law and the prophets, and with Jesus' call to neighbor-love; and it follows equally from Jesus' directive to worldwide evangelism in Matthew 28:19, for the establishing of Christian patterns of community is itself a help and a step forward in making disciples.
If, therefore, Christians lack power to exert Christianizing influence, they should consider before God how they might acquire it; and if no access to power seems open to them, they should still seek, as did the company of evangelical leaders to which Wesley belonged, to create alternative patterns of communal living in homes, extended families, local churches and ad hoc "task force" associations which will function in society as a city set on a hill, demonstrating to the world around the power of Christ in action.
In any case, Christians owe it to God and their fellow men and women to maintain constantly that the divine moral law is not only obligatory but also natural in the sense of constituting the only ethical fuel on which human nature can run without burning itself up. Human nature at bottom does not change, whatever cultural shifts occur at surface level, and it remains as true as it ever was that joy and fulfilment are only found within the framework for conduct that God's law—his torah, that is, his fatherly instruction—erects. And Christians need also to proclaim with new energy that the living Lord Jesus, the Christ of Calvary, of the Em-maus Road and of the upper room, is the sole source and secret of freedom and meaning for man, just as they must display in their own lives the contentment which comes of having found this secret and knowing that it is theirs for ever.
Most of all, Christians should labor to understand the secularization that goes on around them—what arguments and hurts (usually the latter rather than the former) lead people to embrace secularism, what issues hold their attention, why their way of seeking true community and true individuality is counterproductive, and how an active Christian minority (which is all we can hope for at present) can take up the problems of a drifting society, neither denying nor oversimplifying them, but irradiating them with the light of biblical truth and the reality of divine grace.
It is time to seek the Lord, and to do some homework.
Questions for Thought and Discussion
1. What is good, and what is bad, about the current secularization of our society?
2. How far do the attitudes of the organized Church today contribute to its eclipse as an influence in society?
3. Is the ideal of a Christian society realistic today in any form?
4. Is it possible to justify the attempts of Christians to bring public life into line with God's law when they themselves are a minority group?
Notes
1Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (Harmondsworth: Pelican ed., 1969), p. 14; compare David Edwards, Religion and Change (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), p. 16: "Secularisation occurs when supernatural religion—that is, religion based on 'belief in God or a future state'—becomes private, optional and problematic."
2Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (London: SCM, 1966), pp. 15f.
3David Martin, "Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation," Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 176. Martin wants to see the term dropped, as scientifically bogus and loaded, "a tool of counter-religious ideologies/' The Religious and the Secular (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 9.
4See W. Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Cape, 1963).
5See W. K. Jordon, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959).
6See R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972).
7F. R. Barry, Secular and Supernatural (London: SCM, 1969), pp. 40f.
8op. cit., p. 22, note 22.
9For some statistics, see David Martin, A Sociology of English Religion, chapters 2, 3 (London: SCM, 1967), and Bryan Wilson, op. cit., chapter 1. Most recently, the U.K. Protestant Missions Handbook, Vol. 2 Home (London: Evangelical Alliance, 1977) gives 182 per 1000 on an average Sunday (p. 5), but it has been suggested that this may include children at Sunday School.
10T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber, 1939), p. 19.
nLeslie Paul, Alternatives to Christian Belief (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967), pp. 6f.
12Newbigin, op. cit. pp. 126f.
13Compare C. E. M. Joad, Decadence (London: Faber, 1948). Joad finds the essence of decadence "in the view that experience is valuable or is at least to be valued for its own sake, irrespective of the quality or kind of the experience, and in the appropriate beliefs about life, morals, art and society which entail and are entailed by this view, together with the scales of value and modes of taste associated with these beliefs" (p. 95).
14Edwards, op. cit. p. 99.
15op cit., p. 98. For evidence about religious education, see P. May and O. R. Johnston, Religion in our Schools (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968).
16Paul, op cit., pp. 182 f. For parallel evidence from the world of art, see H. R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (London: IVP, 1970).
17"Our Western world has not been faithful to its Christian inheritance. Its values have too often been those of materialism, pleasure and luxury. It has lost the virtues of simplicity of life. Its morals have fallen far short of the righteousness of Christ. It has been complacent about the existence of terrible poverty and hunger in many parts of the world. Is it surprising if the judgment of God falls upon us?" (A. M. Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, Diocesan Notes, January 1974).
18Cited from J. Wesley Bready, England: Before and After Wesley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 3rd impression, 1939), pp. 179f.