The Challenge to the Secular

Scripture

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 KJV

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Big idea

Summary

Keller opens with journalist Samuel Freedman’s observation that after the Newtown school shooting, secular humanists were notably absent from the public response, while religious language and communities filled the vacuum. He engages writers such as Susan Jacoby and Richard Shweder, who argue atheism liberates people from having to reconcile suffering with a good God, and finds their case incomplete: freedom from theodicy is not the same as a positive account of meaning, and secular movements for justice, he argues, often draw more on religiously-shaped moral capital than their proponents acknowledge.

Drawing on Viktor Frankl’s Holocaust-era observation that those who found meaning endured suffering better than those who merely sought comfort, Keller argues that a purely materialist framework struggles to explain why meaning matters so much, or where it might be found once happiness itself has become impossible. He is careful to note that many secular people display remarkable courage and compassion in suffering, but contends their frameworks give them fewer resources to draw on than they think, especially where modern individualism weakens exactly the communal bonds that sustain people through hardship.

Key points

• Samuel Freedman’s essay on the Newtown shooting response is used to argue secular humanism has struggled to build the kind of communal, ritual response that religious communities offer in tragedy.
• Susan Jacoby and Richard Shweder are engaged as representative voices arguing atheism relieves believers of having to explain suffering; Keller contends this is a limited kind of relief.
• Viktor Frankl’s wartime observation — that meaning, not happiness, is what allows people to endure suffering — is used against purely materialist accounts of suffering.
• Keller argues many secular movements for justice draw on moral and communal resources with deep religious roots, even when they don’t acknowledge it.
• Modern individualism’s emphasis on self-authored identity and personal freedom is named as a specific value that can weaken the communal support suffering people most need.

Illustrations & stories

• Samuel Freedman’s reporting on the public response to the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting.
• Viktor Frankl’s account of meaning and survival in Nazi concentration camps.
• The Old Testament story of Naaman, used to illustrate that pride, not lack of information, is often the real obstacle to receiving help and healing.

Notable line

The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness.

Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, ch. 3

For reflection and discussion

1. Do you think removing belief in God actually makes suffering easier to explain, or just changes the questions people ask?
2. Where have you seen secular and religious communities each respond to a public tragedy? What differed?
3. Frankl argued meaning matters more than happiness for enduring suffering. Do you agree?
4. Keller suggests many “secular” values about justice and compassion have religious roots. Can you think of examples, for or against this claim?
5. What role has community, religious or otherwise, played in your own hardest seasons?