Venerable antagonisms can be rendered obsolete by a powerful new contender. In the early Middle Ages, struggles in the eastern empire between Persians and Byzantines were made moot by the arrival of militant Islam. In the mid-twentieth century, long-standing jealousies among nations of Western Europe came to be overshadowed by the emergence of a menacing Soviet Union. In sports, a legendary rivalry between Bird’s Celtics and Magic’s Lakers was rendered a memory with the ascendancy of Jordan’s Bulls.
So it was supposed to be with the old struggles of the classical world between Christianity and paganism. Christianity is thought to have prevailed, at least officially and politically, in the fourth or fifth or maybe sixth century. As the preceding chapter explained, paganism was not so much eradicated as driven underground—and just barely and occasionally underground; so the old conflict continued to smolder just beneath the political and cultural surface. Then a new force came onto the scene—secularism. And the classical Christian-pagan antagonism was displaced, except as a remote recollection. In its place, we have modern secular society—which, as Charles Taylor observes, is a novel phenomenon unlike “anything else in human history”1—with its own distinctive promises, problems, and challenges.
So goes a familiar story. It is a story that most major thinkers over the past century or so have told and retold, or pretold, in one version or another,2 and a story that has much to recommend it—on the surface, at least. But our actual history has turned out to be more complicated, and more confounding, than the standard story contemplates. In this chapter we will need to consider some of the complications.
More specifically, we will see that the old conflict between paganism and Christianity, or between immanent and transcendent religiosities, is not defunct after all; on the contrary, the opposition is alive and well. Christianity has not followed script and quietly faded away. Not yet, at least. Neither have other forms of transcendent religiosity, such as orthodox Judaism—not to mention Islam. That much is obvious, and widely recognized. What is less obvious is that rather than disappearing, immanent religiosity—or paganism, as we have called it—has (like Proteus) merely altered its forms and manifestations.3
And the old rivalry in the West between paganism and Christianity, or between immanent and transcendent religiosities, shows signs of becoming reinvigorated. As James O’Donnell observes, “The ancient ways of thinking and speaking about religion remain powerful even among those of us who think we share nothing in common with those backward pagans.”4
And to make matters more interesting, or at least more confusing, all of this is happening behind a facade of secularism. A facade is of course not merely an illusion; it is a real and essential part of the building. It gives character to the building. For those who merely pass by, or who pause but don’t bother to enter, it is the building. And yet in reality the facade is only the outward semblance of a much larger edifice, serving to hide from view the inner chambers where people actually live and work and love—and squabble, and sometimes assail each other. Like an old Roman church with a modern facade covering an inner structure that has endured since antiquity, the contemporary period—the one in which we live—is one of a conspicuous secularism covering an ongoing conflict that traces back to the ancient world.
Secularization: A Synopsis in Two Episodes
Standard tellings of the story of secularization tend to emphasize two main developments or episodes that culminated (or at least were supposed to culminate) in two different types or dimensions of secularism. One episode focuses on political and legal developments that have produced a political secularism. The other episode features more philosophical developments—the initially epistemic and by derivation ontological developments often described as “naturalism”—that have produced, at least in some quarters, a more comprehensive or philosophical secularism.5
The political episode recounts how the chaos following the collapse of an overarching Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a series of destructive “wars of religion”: the relatively small-scale Schmalkaldic War of 1546 and 1547 between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, the larger and longer French wars of religion (including the legendary and horrific Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres) in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the even more devastating Thirty Years’ War on the Continent between 1618 and 1648, the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. Through decades of violence and political disintegration, it gradually became apparent that the project of resettling society and government on the medieval foundation of official Christianity was not a viable one; this realization in turn fostered a consensus that in a religiously pluralistic world, governments could best maintain peace and stability by staying out of the religious realm—by confining themselves to the domain of the “secular.”6
To be sure, the preceding paragraph reflects a good deal of historical consolidation, simplification, and perhaps distortion. In fact, the wars of religion did not immediately lead to the embrace of public secularism; on the contrary, the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War ratified the principle of cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the prince shall be the religion of the realm), thereby initiating the era of the confessional state.7 Indeed, it is difficult to say just when the idea of governmental secularism as the preferred remedy for religious diversity came to be adopted. One might argue that this is a relatively recent and still contestable idea that we (or at least some among us) now cling to and project back onto history, thereby attempting to claim whatever measure of legitimacy or inevitability history can bestow.8
But however meandering the historical path may have been, the idea is widely held today, at least in politically and culturally influential circles. “There is a broad consensus,” Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor approvingly report, “that ‘secularism’ is an essential component of any liberal democracy composed of citizens who adhere to a plurality of conceptions of the world and of the good.”9 This consensus is reflected in current American constitutional law, which purports to require that government act only for “secular purposes” and that government remain detached from and “neutral” with respect to religion.10
The political dimension of secularism does not in itself require the disappearance of religious faith or practice, but merely assigns religion to the private domain (where, at least according to some accounts, it is likely to flourish better anyway than it would if implicated and corrupted in the public sphere).11 By contrast, the other and more philosophical movement is more ambitious, predicting and prescribing a general decline of religion.
The central episode in this development is the emergence of modern science, which teaches us to see the world in different and less religious ways.12 Science operates on the basis of naturalistic premises; what the universe consists of is the sort of material or natural, empirically observable stuff susceptible to scientific investigation.13 This view is secular because it excludes—at least for the purposes of scientific studies and explanations—nonnatural or religious entities (like spirit, or God) and nonempirical or religious methods of knowing (like revelation). And the fact that science (in contrast to older disciplines like philosophy or theology) has made spectacular progress in understanding and reshaping the world has naturally led to a kind of science envy in other fields, and thus to an aspiration to be like science; this aspiration has sustained a pervasive naturalism—and hence secularism—at least within the academy.14
To be sure, even among self-identifying “naturalists,” debates flourish over what “nature” includes, what “science” is, and whether science should be deemed the exclusive method for knowing the world.15 Moreover, scientists sometimes describe theirs as a “methodological naturalism”: the approach employs naturalistic assumptions for the working purposes of the scientific enterprise but remains agnostic about whether there are realities beyond the natural world. Consequently, following the example of the illustrious Isaac Newton, scientists may be devoutly religious when off duty, so to speak. Even so, the conspicuous successes of science can lead its devotees to suppose that other, nonscientific views of the world are inferior, primitive, not to be trusted. “Science is the measure of all things”: so intones a revealing slogan.16
In this spirit, after perceptive and sympathetic depictions of the classical Greek and Christian worldviews, the philosopher Luc Ferry pronounces that science has rendered these views unavailable. “Neither the ancient model nor the Christian model remain credible for anyone of a critical and informed disposition.”17 Scientists themselves sometimes make similar assertions.18
Though severable, the different aspects of the secularization story are nicely complementary. Political secularism will seem more solid if it is taken not merely as a political strategy but as a reflection of the way reality actually is. And comprehensive or philosophical secularism will be all the more compelling if it can plausibly claim to be not only true but also good, or conducive to good order and political peace. Not surprisingly, therefore, in their real-world manifestations, political and comprehensive secularism often come intertwined.19 Joined, they can seem almost irresistible; hence the near universal predictions among eminent social theorists, noted earlier, that the modern world was destined to become increasingly “secular.”
Even so, the two dimensions of secularism can be taken and appreciated separately. It is entirely possible to endorse political secularism without embracing a more comprehensive secularism20 (and perhaps, at least in principle, vice versa).21 And of the two versions, the philosophical or comprehensive secularism is more far-reaching in its implications—and (for some) more unsettling.
The Abolition of the Sacred
The comprehensive secularization associated with a scientific or naturalistic worldview implies, as Max Weber put it, the “disenchantment of the world.”22 Science and secularism can thus be viewed as completing a process that Christianity set in motion. The classical world was “enchanted”; it was full of gods. Every hill, every valley, every stream or lake had its proper deity. Though capable of jealousy and vengefulness, these deities could also be quite alluring—like the nubile nymphs who inhabited woods and rivers (and who gave their name to the term “nymphomania”), or like the comely Calypso who on her island of Ogygia hosted the forlorn wayfarer Odysseus and consoled him with seductive singing as a prelude to more intimate amenities. Then Judaism and later Christianity came and banished all these fearsome or delightsome gods in favor of the one true God—a stern and lofty sovereign, alas, who was incorporeal and metaphysically detached from time and space. So the world itself—the knowable world, the world we humans actually live in—became less immediately charged with divinity. The naturalism of modern comprehensive secularism in turn dissolves that far-off God as well, leaving the cosmos bereft of sacredness and enchantment altogether.
This view of the world suggests a different kind of existential orientation. In previous chapters we considered two such orientations. One, associated with paganism, is an immanently religious orientation that affirms the reality of the sacred but locates that sanctity within nature, or within life in this world. The other, associated with Christianity, asserts a transcendent sanctity that, while entering into the world, ultimately lies beyond nature. By contrast to these orientations, the modern secularism associated with scientific naturalism denies the existence of the sacred altogether. The modern conception is ontologically egalitarian, so to speak; in a universe consisting of matter and energy and nothing else, there is no space or category for a different order of being (or beyond being) corresponding to either Christian or pagan descriptions of “the holy,” or “the sacred.” There are only different, more or less complex arrangements or systems of matter.23
So a man is more complex than an amoeba, and is capable of functions that an amoeba cannot perform: an amoeba cannot write a philosophical treatise or play a violin concerto. But in terms of their basic substance, both boil down to the same common elements—the same kinds of molecules, just more or fewer of them, and differently arranged. And of each we can say that “it is what it is”: neither man nor amoeba has some sort of “purpose” or telos that transcends its temporary material existence. In this vein, biologist E. O. Wilson observes that “no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment.”24
A poignant, quietly heroic (or perhaps mock heroic) statement of this brave new spiritually desolate condition comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.25
Is the Disenchanted World Fit for Humans?
As this picture began to emerge in the course of secularization, a question was often raised along with it: Can human beings actually live under the apprehension of such a forbiddingly empty, intrinsically meaningless world? Writing in the aftermath of World War II, the Princeton philosopher Walter Stace was doubtful. Science, he said, had given us “a new imaginative picture of the world. The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion.”26 This new worldview, Stace thought, “though silent and unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world.”27 That was because “if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.”28
From out of this Qoheleth-like, “all is vanity” despair, Stace nonetheless mustered up the faint hope that “philosophers and intellectuals generally . . . [might] discover a genuine secular basis for morals.”29 And indeed, both well before and since Stace, “philosophers and intellectuals generally” had and have devoted themselves to this project. So, how have they fared?
One common approach, usually described as utilitarian or consequentialist, sees morality in instrumentalist terms as the business of prescribing how life should be lived so as to satisfy human desires or preferences as fully and efficiently as possible. As discussed in chapter 2, this kind of morality is taken as axiomatic in disciplines like economics and rational choice theory that are based on the “interest-seeking” conception of the person. And indeed, an interest-satisfying or preference-fulfilling consequentialism does seem to be the normative posture most congruent with the disenchanted world of philosophical naturalism. Humans exist—the product of a long evolutionary process—and they have desires and preferences: these, it seems, are natural, empirically observable facts. Some actions or policies will satisfy these desires or preferences more fully or more efficiently than others; this also is a matter subject to empirical study (even if the questions are often complex and the answers contested). Thus, an interest-oriented instrumentalism seems the natural and prescribed posture within a naturalistic worldview.
But the consequentialist, instrumentalist approach also generates familiar objections. It has seemed to many that however legitimate it may be in its own right, the enlightened pursuit of self-interest or the satisfaction of desires is just not what we understand morality or ethics to be about.30 And if the goal of morality is nothing more lofty than the satisfaction of desires, why should anyone ever care about the good of others, except in a self-serving, quid pro quo way? What is the warrant for generosity, altruism, self-sacrifice? For heroism? For love?
The utilitarian David Hume tried to address such challenges by postulating a human quality of sympathy; we happen to be constituted so that we actually do care about our fellows,31 and so we help them because our own happiness is connected to theirs. Well, maybe, sometimes anyway—but there is surely a good deal in observable human behavior to cast doubt on Hume’s happy and highly convenient anthropology. For a man reputed to be the consummate hardened skeptic, Hume seems remarkably sanguine on this point. And it is hard to know what exactly to say to the idiosyncratic person who introspects and finds no such sympathy or fellow feeling in himself. Why should that person avoid trampling on others if he can profit thereby? The sociopath, it seems, or the egoist is not inherently either more or less intrinsically praiseworthy than the philanthropist or the saint; these are just people who happen to be constituted with different desires and interests.
Consequentialists have rebuttals to these objections,32 of course; we cannot and need not review the debates here. Those who find the rebuttals unpersuasive will look elsewhere for an account of morality. And perhaps the other most influential effort to ground morality on assumptions of secular rationality lies in the Kantian approach, resting on a declared “categorical imperative” to act only on maxims or principles that we can will to be universal laws.33 The imperative is thought to arise out of our nature as rational beings.
But again, doubts arise. If you can improve your personal situation by acting on self-serving considerations, why should you refrain just because you wouldn’t want everyone else to act on the same considerations? (“Because you would be acting against reason,” says the Kantian—“performatively contradicting yourself.” “No problem,” say you; “that doesn’t bother me.” “But then you would not have the purity and freedom of a wholly rational agent.” “Like I said, Immanuel, it doesn’t bother me.”) And in any case, if like Kant you happen to be queasy about performative self-contradiction, then with just a little ingenuity you should be able to formulate a universalizable maxim for anything you’re inclined to do. (“Take what you want if you’re confident you won’t get caught and are tough enough to protect your own stuff.” “Always act in the way most beneficial to [fill in your own name here].”)
Perhaps you’ll be told: “Your maxim can’t include proper nouns, especially including your own name.” But why not? Where’s the logical inconsistency in using proper nouns? Someone may say: “Because that kind of maxim wouldn’t be a moral one”; but to say that would be to beg the question. Suppose, though, that some Kantian pounds the table and insists on the prohibition. Well, you can get around it through the same tactic of generic individuation legislators sometimes use to avoid constitutional prohibitions on “special legislation.” If the New York legislature can’t enact a law specifically for New York City, it can pass one covering “any city with a population of over eight million,” or whatever. With a little ingenuity, I can do the same thing with my moral maxims; so can you.
The part of Kant that seems most promising, and that moralists perhaps most rely on, is his injunction that we should always treat people as ends rather than as means.34 This edifying prescription seems to supply more substantive moral content than does a formalistic command to avoid contradicting oneself. But once again, why must we do this—treat everyone as ends? Why, on naturalistic assumptions, that is? It seems difficult or impossible to derive the injunction from the basic categorical imperative, even if we accept that imperative: without logically contradicting yourself, you can adopt (and can enthusiastically will to be universal law) the maxim that “[Fill in your name] is to be treated as an end, and everyone else is to be treated as a means.” What you perhaps cannot consistently do is assert in an exclusive way that “I deserve to be treated as an end” or “I have a right to be treated as an end”—because any grounds of desert or worthiness you might offer for yourself (self-consciousness? rationality? linguistic capabilities? a capacity for free choice? a capacity to formulate a life plan?) would apply to other humans as well. But then, why would you need or want to formulate your maxim in this more vulnerable way anyway?
From a detached perspective, such claims (“Beings with rationality and a capacity for free choice have intrinsic worth and hence are to be treated as ends not means”) look like frail attempts to salvage or smuggle back something from the more meaning-laden, consecrated world—namely, the sacred—that the naturalistic, disenchanted world is supposed to have eliminated. Without some such tacit smuggling operation, the move from “James has the capacity to formulate a life plan” to “James is intrinsically valuable and entitled to respect” looks like a stark non sequitur. Looked at from the outside, those who invoke Kantian ethics thus seem intent on recovering something like the Judeo-Christian idea that every person is sacred—or of infinite worth, or possessed of intrinsic dignity—because made by and in the image of God.
But on purely naturalistic premises, this appeal would seem to be unavailable. Human beings are rather highly complex systems of interacting molecules formed through aeons of blind natural selection. “Straw dogs,” as John Gray affirms.35 Or, as Stephen Hawking explains, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”36
So both the consequentialist and Kantian strategies seem less than compelling. It is impossible, of course, decisively to dispose of several centuries of moral philosophizing, or of a system as intricate and sophisticated as Kant’s, in a few paragraphs. (It may also seem presumptuous, and irreverent, to treat so summarily and casually positions that earnest philosophers have pondered and pontificated on for many decades now.) We need not pretend to anything conclusive here, though; it is sufficient to say that philosophers have tried to provide a secular basis for ethics, but whether they have succeeded is questionable.37
Suppose for the sake of argument, though, that the secular arguments have succeeded—succeeded, that is, in supplying a secular basis for ethics, or “morality.” Would that be enough to make the world a commodious abode for humans? How can “morality,” often perceived mostly as a source of irksome restrictions, instead affirmatively make life worth living? We saw in chapter 2 that thinkers like Viktor Frankl and Susan Wolf argue that what people ultimately need is neither the satisfaction of their “interests” nor mere “morality,” but rather something those thinkers describe as “meaning.” And meaning, as Wolf argues, requires objective value—something she admits philosophers have had difficulty explaining.38 Even a successful version of “secular morality,” though imposing duties, might not supply such meaning; it might leave human life more morally respectable, perhaps, but also more restricted—and still empty and pointless.
So then, what to do? One alternative would be to accept the truth, bleak though it may be—to build on Russell’s “firm foundation of unyielding despair”—and thus perhaps to live out our days in this disenchanted and purposeless world in (as Stace recommended) “quiet content, accepting resignedly what cannot be helped, not expecting the impossible, and being thankful for small mercies.”39 There is venerable precedent in antiquity for this course of quietist resignation, in the Epicurean way of life.40 Or, if we find this deflationary approach to life insufficiently fulfilling, we might instead embrace the necessity of fictions or illusions that offer direction and value to our lives, even though, upon reflection (from which we would be prudent to abstain), these would have to be regarded as merely illusory.41 There is not really any point to our lives, but it is pleasant to pretend otherwise.
From a different perspective, though, all this gloominess will seem puzzling, and gratuitous. That is because nothing in science requires us to accept the picture of a purposeless, meaningless, disenchanted cosmos described (sometimes, it almost seems, with a kind of smug bravado, or sometimes with a heavy touch of indulgent self-pity) by scientists like Wilson or philosophers like Russell. Conversely, much in human experience contradicts and subverts that picture.
Or at least, so many believe. In this respect, it is clear that the predictions of religion’s decline spawned by the secularization story have turned out to be embarrassingly mistaken, or at least grossly premature. The embarrassment is apparent in two phenomena, one quite obvious and the other less so.
The obvious phenomenon is the persistence of traditional, transcendent religion. The less obvious development is the reappearance in surprising cultural quarters of immanent religion—or of what might be described as modern paganism.
The Persistence of Transcendent Religion
Writing in 1968, the sociologist Peter Berger expressed a common view in predicting that “by the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a world-wide secular culture.”42 By century’s end, though, it had become apparent that Berger and like-minded thinkers were badly off base, at least in their projections. Religion had not withered away; indeed, it showed no sign of receding (although there were indications of some migration).
Berger admitted as much. “The assumption that we live in a secularized world is false,” he later declared. “The world today, with [the] exceptions [of Europe and of ‘an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education’], is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken.”43
In a similar vein, in a recent book called God’s Century, three political scientists argue that religion continues to be a powerful force in politics worldwide and is likely to remain so in coming decades. Indeed, both religion and religious influence on politics have actually grown stronger over the last several decades.44 Canadian political scientist Ran Hirschl reports resignedly that “approximately half of the world’s population, perhaps more, now lives in polities where religion not only has remained public but also has been playing a key role in political and constitutional life.”45
Ardent secularists may deplore this development, depicting traditional religion as backward-looking and ignorant or contemptuous of science. The depiction fits some believers but not others. There is, to be sure, a substantial “fundamentalist” constituency in America and elsewhere that rejects the theory of evolution, for example.46 But there are also many other believers, including devout scientists, who see science and religious belief as complementary, not conflicting.47
In this vein, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that science and religion constitute “the great partnership.” Science, Sacks asserts, is “one of the two greatest achievements of the human mind.”48 But science has no competence to adjudicate between an account that denies any cosmic meaning and one that discerns meaning in life and the universe; both accounts are equally consistent with the facts and truths cognizable by science.49 “The first story says there is no why. The second says there is,” Sacks observes. “The science is the same in both stories. The difference lies in how far we are willing to push the question, ‘Why?’ ”50
Scientist-theologian Alister McGrath elaborates on the point:
My Oxford colleague John Lennox, who is a mathematician and philosopher of science, uses a neat illustration to make this point. Imagine a cake being subjected to scientific analysis, leading to an exhaustive discussion of its chemical composition and of the physical forces which hold it together. Does this tell us that the cake was baked to celebrate a birthday? And is this inconsistent with the scientific analysis? Of course not. Science and theology ask different questions: in the case of science, the question concerns how things happen: by what process? In the case of theology, the question is why things happen: to what purpose?51
So traditional, transcendent religion can be either suspicious of or friendly to science. Either way, it seems unlikely that traditional religion will wither away in the foreseeable future, as theorists like Berger once predicted.
To be sure, traditional religion and Christianity in particular appear to flourish more in some parts of the world—Africa, Latin America, the United States, perhaps China (against strenuous governmental opposition)52—than in regions such as Europe.53 Moreover, in the United States, recent surveys report a rise in the percentage of “nones”—people who on surveys of religiosity mark the box “None.”54 And yet, even the increase in self-declared unbelievers may not reflect any actual decline in religiosity. That is because, as we will see, even those who declare themselves free of any religion often openly acknowledge beliefs and commitments reflective of spirituality and a commitment to the sacred. This development is manifest in the career of the most influential (and thoroughly secular) English-speaking legal scholar and philosopher of recent decades, Ronald Dworkin.
Ronald Dworkin’s Search for the Sacred
Though a consummately secular thinker, from his earliest writings Dworkin resisted the pervasively instrumentalist and interest-calculating character of modern legal thought. He championed “rights”—rights understood as “trumps” or categorical constraints on laws or governmental actions based on instrumentalist policies.55 He criticized law-and-economics.56 He advocated a form of legal interpretation in which laws would be construed not to further either the subjective intentions of their enactors or the utilitarian aims of present-day policy makers; rather, laws would be interpreted in accordance with the best available moral philosophy.57
But in a secular, naturalistic world, where were these rights and categorical constraints and moral imperatives supposed to come from? Dworkin’s distinguished career can be seen as a long struggle with the question.
Thus, in one early essay, he appeared to embrace a kind of refined moral conventionalism.58 Although our moral commitments are conventional in character, Dworkin argued, we should be ruled not by shallow or unscrutinized conventions, but rather by conventions that we have carefully reflected on.59 But this seemed a vulnerable position. If our morality is grounded merely in conventions, why does it matter whether we carefully examine those conventions? What would we examine them for, exactly?
For consistency, Dworkin said, among other desiderata.60 But why? If we supposed there is some underlying moral truth against which conventions might be adjudged true or false, then it might matter whether our moral conventions are consistent, because under the so-called law of noncontradiction, internal inconsistency would be an indication of error (just as it is for scientific or mathematical propositions). But if morality is merely conventional, and if there is no objective or external standard against which conventions can be judged, then what difference does it make if we have one set of moral conventions for tall people and a different set for short people, or one set of conventions for Mondays and Wednesdays and a different set for Tuesdays and Thursdays? If my habit is to eat tacos on Tuesdays, pizza on Wednesdays, and kabobs on Thursdays, no one criticizes me for inconsistency. “It’s what I (like to) do” is sufficient warrant—indeed, the only kind of warrant that might be pertinent. The same should be true for morality—if morality is merely conventional, that is.
Something more than conventions seemed to be needed. In a later essay, Dworkin tried to use utilitarianism against itself, or against the unchecked implementation of policies calculated to further utilitarian preferences, by arguing that some kinds of legal restrictions that he disfavored (such as laws regulating pornography) violated the utilitarian premise that everyone’s utility should be counted equally.61 This argument was clever but, as critics persuasively objected, demonstrably flawed.62 While not conceding the point, in a later essay Dworkin moved on to what he at least called moral realism.63 There are objectively right answers to moral questions, he asserted; slavery is and always was wrong, whether or not it was conventional, and whether or not people believed it was wrong.
In the same essay, however, while declaring that morality was “objective,” Dworkin also insisted that it was not actually any sort of object: morality is not part of “the fabric of the universe.”64 This stance left some readers (or at least one) feeling puzzled, and disgruntled. If morality is not part of “the fabric of the universe,” in what sense is morality real, or “objective,” at all?
At about the same time, in an exploration of life-and-death issues such as abortion and euthanasia, Dworkin invoked the idea of “the sacred.”65 Insisting that the “sacred” need not be a religious concept, Dworkin emphasized a distinction between “sacred” or “inviolable” values and merely “instrumental” values.66 In fastening onto the idea of the “sacred,” it seemed that Dworkin had perhaps at last found the sort of idea he had needed all along in his effort to resist instrumentalism and to defend categorical constraints on merely utilitarian laws and policies.
And yet Dworkin’s explication of “the sacred” seemed both half-baked and (confessedly) halfhearted. Once detached from its religious moorings, what does “sacred” even mean? Dworkin proposed that we regard some things as “sacred” or “inviolable” because they are the results of a long process we respect, such as artistic creation or natural evolution. We consider a great painting “sacred” because the artist put a lot of time and effort and genius into painting it. And we regret the loss of a species of plant or animal because it was the product of aeons of evolution, so the disappearance of the species would amount to “a waste of nature’s investment.”67 But this seemed a curiously uncompelling explanation. Does our evaluation of a painting by Rembrandt really turn on how long he took to do it? If it turned out that da Vinci dashed off the Mona Lisa in a week (as Bernini is supposed to have done with his remarkable sculpture of Pope Innocent X), would we demote it from the category of masterpiece?68
Faced with this and other objections, Dworkin didn’t attempt actually to defend his “process” and “loss of investment” account of the “sacred.” Instead, he claimed merely to be describing intuitions many people in fact have (while at the same time purporting to be giving a revised and better account of beliefs that, as he acknowledged, people typically do not articulate in these terms). And having attributed these reworked intuitions to people, Dworkin expressed his own doubts about whether the ostensible intuitions are ultimately rational or justifiable at all. “It is not my present purpose,” he explained, “to recommend or defend any of these widespread convictions about art and nature, in either their religious or secular form. Perhaps they are all, as some skeptics insist, inconsistent superstitions.”69
Dworkin’s convoluted discussion thus amounted to a halting effort to support his anti-instrumentalist commitments by tapping into an essentially religious notion—the “sacred”—even though he was at that point both unwilling to own the premises that gave the notion its significance and by his own admission unable to provide any persuasive defense of the concept.
And so in his last, posthumously published book, Dworkin explicitly embraced “religion”—albeit “religious atheism,” as he called it.70
Religion, Dworkin now argued, need not include belief in God or gods. Rather, what he called the “religious attitude” rests on two beliefs or judgments. The first is that “human life has objective meaning or purpose.” The second is that “what we call ‘nature’—the universe as a whole and in all its parts—is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder” (10). These are judgments of “value,” Dworkin explained, and they have an essential emotional component (10, 19–20).
But the judgments are not merely subjective or emotive reactions: they are a response to and a recognition of actual realities in the universe (6, 20–21). With that clarification, Dworkin maintained that we should “take these two [values]—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life” (11). And the religious attitude serves to restore to us something that Weber and theorists of science and naturalism had pronounced forever lost—namely, “enchantment” (11).
As it happens, the two commitments identified by Dworkin correspond almost exactly to the two-themed account of religion we considered in chapter 2. One theme, associated with thinkers like Victor Frankl and Jonathan Sacks, sees religion as an affirmative response to the pervasive human desire or need for “meaning”: this is the first of Dworkin’s elements of religion. The other theme, articulated by Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, and Abraham Heschel, understands religion as the product of the human encounter with the “holy,” or the “sacred.” Much like Otto, Dworkin described religious experience as “numinous”; much like Heschel, Dworkin used terms like “sublime,” “awe,” and “wonder” to convey the religious attitude (2–3, 10).71 Also like Otto, Heschel, and Sacks, moreover, Dworkin insisted that these judgments and emotions are not merely subjective; they reflect the discernment of something in the universe that is objectively real, even though it eludes the more naturalistic devices of the scientists.
Unlike for those thinkers, however, for Dworkin that “something” real was not anything lying beyond or behind the perceived sublimity—not any God or gods. Rather, the sublimity is a property or aspect of nature itself, including the part of nature that is human life. In this sense, Dworkin’s religion would seem to be of the immanent variety. The sublime, or the sacred, is within and part of life and of nature, not something beyond or outside of them.72
The immanent quality of Dworkin’s religion is perhaps most clearly apparent in his admiring discussions of Spinoza and Einstein, whose philosophies he offered as representative of the kind of “religious atheism” he himself advocated. Spinoza, he conceded, talked incessantly about God. But “Spinoza’s God is not an intelligence who stands outside everything and who, through the force of its will, has created the universe and the physical laws that govern it. His God is just the complete set of physical laws considered under a different aspect” (38–39 [emphasis added]). Under what aspect? Here Dworkin invoked Einstein, who also endorsed Spinoza’s deity. And what was Einstein’s understanding of that deity? Einstein “did not believe in a personal god,” Dworkin explained, “but he did ‘worship’ nature. He regarded it with awe and thought that he and other scientists should be humble before its beauty and mystery” (40).
That is the sort of immanent “religious atheism” that Dworkin ultimately preached. It is the last answer he managed to give to his long search for something with a categorical quality that could stand against the pervasive instrumentalism of the modern world—for something “inviolable” or “sacred”—that could bring “enchantment” back into the world (6, 11–12).
From Disenchantment to Reenchantment
Whether Dworkin had in fact found what he needed is questionable, to be sure. Though he asserted that the sublimity of the world is “beyond nature,” he offered no ontological account of just what that something “beyond nature” could be, or of how it would relate to or emerge out of other, more purely naturalistic realities. It is as if someone were to describe the universe and its contents as having the naturalistic properties of, say, mass, temporal duration, motion, physical attraction and repulsion . . . oh, yes, and also of “sublimity.” Plus “objective value.” There is something incongruous in these add-ons. Dworkin’s “religion without god” seems a sort of ipse dixit, “(non)deus ex machina” solution to the challenges of meaninglessness and morality in a naturalistic world.
We will return to the point. For now, the important observation is that Dworkin’s odyssey—from moral conventionalism to a doctored utilitarianism to moral realism all the way across to the “enchantment” of “religion without god”—reflects a pattern discernible in other thinkers as well, and perhaps in elite secular culture generally. At stage one, thinkers look back, wistfully perhaps, on the “enchanted” world of antiquity and pronounce that world, alas, irretrievably lost: science has rendered it unavailable to moderns with any critical capacity. The first reaction to this loss is to announce the disenchantment and meaninglessness of the world. The announcement may be offered with resigned despair (as with Stace), or perhaps (as with Russell) with the darkly heroic satisfaction of Homeric warriors who are all the more noble because they fight courageously on without ultimate hope, knowing that they must soon and inexorably die and that will be the end of everything. And then, upon reflection, secular thinkers declare that we can have ethics or morality after all; indeed, we can place ethics upon an even more solid secular foundation.73 And upon further thought, they announce the glad tidings that the secular, naturalistic world is not as empty of enchantment or objective value as had been supposed. It turns out that amidst the “nothing but matter in motion,” as Stace put it, there is also, somehow . . . beauty, value, goodness. Enchantment. The sacred.
Nor are these merely subjective emotions; they are objectively real. Why had we somehow supposed that they had been lost? What was the reason for all our existential angst? Why were we, or in any case our parents, so taken with Sartre and Camus and Samuel Beckett? What could we, or they, have been thinking?
Dworkin is hardly a lone traveler along this spiritual path to meaning and reenchantment. We might consider two more recent and notable representatives of this rediscovery of enchantment, or of the sacred. Both are secular, atheistic, scientific. But both discern something—something real—that overflows the normal terms and categories of mundane science.
Sam Harris, the truculently atheistic author of The End of Faith and other similar works, in a more recent book reports on a personal, drug-induced experience of a “state of being” in which “love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit.”74 This and similar mystical or meditative experiences, both his own and others’, lead Harris to observe that “there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”75 While adamantly eschewing the label of “religion,” and while purporting to “remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism,” Harris uses terms such as “spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendent” to describe this additional dimension (10, 7). “Millions of people,” he observes, “have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available” (11). In such experiences it “is quite possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos” (43). And, as noted, this oneness carries with it “love, compassion, and joy” (5).
Harris does not postulate anything supernatural or metaphysically exotic as the source of such experiences; rather, he assumes that they are manifestations of an expanded human consciousness. The mystical experience “says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large” (43–44). Harris acknowledges that consciousness is a “mystery” and that “we know nothing about how consciousness comes into being” (51, 205); even so, treating mystical experience as merely an aspect of consciousness saves Harris from passing into the (for him) dreaded category of “religion.” With an unwaveringly confident bellicosity, he thus continues to insist that “the world’s religions [are] mere intellectual ruins” (5). (Except maybe, it seems, for Buddhism [21–31].)
Whether Harris should be admitted as an acolyte of Dworkin’s atheistic religion is debatable. He shuns the term “religion.” And his claim that transcendence is within consciousness, not part of “the universe at large,” might disqualify him. But then again, maybe not. After all, while insisting that objective beauty and value are real, not merely subjective, Dworkin himself is less than clear about where in the universe these blessed qualities reside. Why couldn’t they reside in the human consciousness? And then there is Harris’s admiration for Buddhism. In its substance, Harris’s view seems to be kin to the same general family as Dworkin’s.
In this respect, the recent spiritual autobiography of another admired atheist and writer, Barbara Ehrenreich, presents an even sharper instance. While describing herself as “a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training,” Ehrenreich recounts how, as a teenager, she set as a “goal for life . . . to find out why. What is the point of our brief existence?”76 Later, as she pursued a career in science, the naturalistic worldview she learned and accepted did not negate but rather underscored the why question. “Why was there anything at all? Why interrupt the perfection of universal Nothing with the momentary clutter and confusion of Something?” (85).
She was debarred from looking to conventional religion for answers. “I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe” (3).
While dutifully maintaining this atheistic heritage throughout her life, Ehrenreich recalls having had brief quasi-mystical experiences as a teenager (47–53) in which it seemed as if “another universe, intimately superimposed on our own, normally invisible, but every so often, where the dividing membrane had worn thin, [was] shining through into our own” (52). These culminated in a shattering and transforming experience, or “epiphany” (127), when Ehrenreich was walking in the early dawn in Lone Pine, California. While cautioning that the experience was ineffable, beyond “the jurisdiction of language,” she nonetheless struggles to convey the sense of it: “The world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All,’ as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it” (116).
A quest to discern the meaning of this “epiphany” has occupied much of the rest of Ehrenreich’s life. Shortly after the experience she remarked to a friend, “I saw God”—but then hastened to recant, explaining that “I was only kidding, that I was as firm in my atheism as ever” (116). In subsequent decades, immersed in graduate study, in writing, in political activism, and in raising two children, Ehrenreich sometimes lost sight of the why question, but the quest revived at a later stage, reinforced by later mystical experiences. Her last chapter speculates on various ways of conceiving of what she can only describe as “the Presence” or “the Other” (216, 221), and reflects on ways in which science itself seems to be overcoming “the collective solipsism our species has embraced for the last few centuries in the name of modernity and rationality, a worldview in which there exists no consciousness or agency other than our own” (234).
The Ranks of the Immanently Religious
Of these three cases, Ehrenreich’s is the most dramatic—and probably the least typical (though she observes that “almost half of Americans report having had a ‘mystical experience’ ”).77 Dworkin, for example, though he talked of sublimity and the sacred, reported no experience similar to Ehrenreich’s Lone Pine epiphany.
He did suggest, however, very plausibly, that his sort of less spectacular “religion without God” is widely shared. Not by everyone; perhaps unfairly,78 Dworkin classified Richard Dawkins, the prominent scientist-writer who crusades against religion and for evolution, as a nonreligious naturalist. Dawkins comes in for repeated criticism in Dworkin’s book.79 But Dawkins is the exception.
Many millions of people who count themselves as atheists have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily beautiful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about vast space but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets and pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.80
These are judgments, emotions, and convictions, Dworkins suggested, that cannot be fully accounted for and credited—as opposed to being “explained away”—by the “just the facts, ma’am” naturalism espoused by thinkers like Dawkins. Insofar as many or most people have such judgments, emotions, and convictions and do not attempt to dismiss them or explain them away, Dworkin suggested, these people are harboring and acting on a view that is “religious.”
So, how large might this congregation of the immanently religious be? As noted, Dworkin himself claimed for his fellowship “many millions of people who count themselves as atheists.” Perhaps he was exaggerating. And yet there is reason to suspect just the opposite. Recent research by the Pew Foundation suggests that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of self-described atheists who reported feeling a sense of awe or wonder about the universe increased, from 37 to 54 percent; for self-identifying agnostics the increase went from 48 to 55 percent.81 Beyond the group of atheists and agnostics, Dworkin’s description might fit the growing fold of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”82 It might fit as well the proportionally small but swelling portion of Americans who are classified as “nones.”83 Some of these people may be reductionist naturalists after the manner of Dworkin’s Dawkins. But it seems that many, while skeptical about God and suspicious of “religion” in its more conventional sense, would share the kinds of judgments about beauty and the moral seriousness described by Dworkin.84
By expanding “religion” beyond conventional theism,85 Dworkin delineated a category that might well encompass such people—even if (like Harris) they still recoil from the term “religion.” Indeed, even many who describe themselves as belonging to more traditional religions—to Christianity, in particular—might more accurately belong in the camp of the immanently religious. This contingent might well include the vast ranks of the religiously tepid—people who for reasons of habit or family tradition may self-identify as “Catholic” or “Methodist” or whatever, and who have experiences of beauty and value as Dworkin described, but who exhibit no live commitment to a transcendent deity. And even active churchgoers may recite the ancient Christian creeds and yet maintain a faith in something more immanent than transcendent. Martin Gardner observes that “today, you will have a difficult time discovering what any prominent Christian actually believes.”86 And he adds, with evident irritation: “Millions of Catholics and Protestants around the world now attend liberal churches where they listen to music and Laodicean sermons, and (if Protestant) sing tuneless Laodicean hymns. They may even stand and recite the Apostles’ Creed out of force of habit and not believe a word of it. If a pastor or priest dared to preach a sermon on, say, whether Jesus’ corpse was actually revivified, the congregation would quickly find a way to get rid of him.”87
So in the end, there is no way to count. Still, it seems most likely that the church of the immanently religious is, to borrow from the eminent poetic pagan Walt Whitman, “large; [it] contain[s] multitudes.”88
Paganism Triumphant?
Insofar as this sort of religiosity, held by “many millions of people” (as Dworkin asserted), is a belief in an immanent sacred, it could aptly be described as a kind of “modern paganism,” as T. S. Eliot claimed.
To recall the distinctions presented in chapter 4, this would of course not be “mythical paganism.” There are, to be sure, people who actually call themselves “pagans” and who purport to worship nature deities.89 And the shelves of bookstores are stocked with books about the occult or the paranormal; movies on such subjects—and about superheroes who resemble and are occasionally named for pagan deities—likewise proliferate. But these are not the socially salient and politically and culturally influential movements we are considering here. No one today (or almost no one) is claiming that Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and company are still hanging out on Mount Olympus and from time to time officiously intruding themselves into the affairs of mortals.
In that respect, though, modern paganism is not so very different from the ancient paganism of the educated classes, who likewise regarded the myths as “lying fables” and often viewed the gods as symbols of a spiritual reality.90 Primarily, “modern paganism” would be a modern variation on the kind of immanent religiosity or “philosophical paganism” expounded by the character Balbus in Cicero’s dialogue on the gods (and by Cicero himself, at least according to his own profession).91
Barbara Ehrenreich provides explicit if perhaps idiosyncratic evidence for this interpretation. Though a professing atheist from childhood to the present, Ehrenreich “realized that the theism I rejected was actually only monotheism, or the particular version of it represented by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in which the ‘one God’ or ‘one true God’ is not only singular but perfect.” Conversely, “amoral gods, polytheistic gods, animal gods—these were all fine with me, if only because they seemed to make no promises and demand no belief.”92 But she does not positively assert the existence of these sorts of deities either. The meaning of her Lone Pine and later epiphanies, as she has come to interpret them, points not to traditional religion but rather to “a world that glowed and pulsed with life through all its countless manifestations, where God or gods or at least a living Presence flamed out from every object.”93 To a modern paganism, once again, that is not so different from the ancient philosophical paganism of the educated classes.
For Dworkin, in short, and for Ehrenreich, and for the millions of “nones,” and for the millions more who consider themselves “spiritual,” and for the additional millions who report an identification with some traditional denomination but without exhibiting any active belief in a transcendent deity, “religion” (a term they may embrace or may eschew) denotes a world reenchanted with intrinsic meaning and beauty, in the way the world was enchanted before the coming of Christianity. Not a world under the stern judgment of the biblical God. Could there be a more apt, succinct description of this position, or this spiritual orientation, than “modern paganism”?
So understood, paganism is hardly a marginal or exotic phenomenon; on the contrary, it arguably surrounds us. At least as a cultural matter, we might say that in it we live and move and have our being.94
In this vein, in a book called Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, Ferdinand Mount argues that “often without our being aware of it, the ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond, almost eerily so, to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs.”95 It is not just that we owe much to the Greeks and Romans; rather, “in so many ways, large and small, trivial and profound, we are them, and they are us.”96 Mount acknowledges that his claim runs contrary to “the ideology of modernity . . . that we are moving forward and that we are going somewhere new.”97 Nonetheless, he argues, in a series of comparative chapters, that modern society is closer in its assumptions, values, and practices to classical culture than to the intervening Christian culture in a whole variety of areas: science, art, politics, sexuality (where he discerns a “Neo Pagan yearning for a return to the easy, down-to-earth sexual life of the ancient world”),98 culinary arts, hygiene, and appreciation of the physical body.
And religion. Modern Western societies, Mount contends, closely resemble second-century Rome in its religious propensities—in the smorgasbord of religious options99 covering over an underlying and immanent spirituality that he labels the “new pantheism.” In what might be taken as a one-sentence preview of Dworkin’s Einstein Lectures, Mount describes this prevalent faith as one that “sheds an equal radiance over the whole earth and every creature on it, the sort of reverence and admiration for the structure of the universe as revealed by science which have become especially associated with the godlike figure of Albert Einstein.”100
So it seems that immanent religiosity—modern paganism—is all around us. And where exactly is the sacred located for “modern paganism”? Here there can be no single or uniform answer. Just as classical paganism sponsored countless diverse cults, all fitting comfortably under the broad canopy of immanent religion or “paganism,” so also modern paganism takes various forms.101 For someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, the Other or the Presence glows through the world in “all its countless manifestations.” This would appear to be a modern variation on Balbus’s declaration that “the universe is god.”102 Others—environmentalists, for example—locate the sacred in “nature,” or in parts of nature: Dworkin gives as an example the Grand Canyon.103 Some observers perceive in modern progressivism a tendency to exalt or sacralize the state.104 Still others attach a sacred quality to the individual person. Thus, in discerning “a reemergence of the pagan elements of Western civilization,” the distinguished Protestant theologians Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson identify this “neopaganism” with “modern variations of the ancient belief of pre-Christian mystery religions that a divine spark or seed is innate in the individual human soul.”105
More generally, Terry Eagleton observes that “the history of the modern age is among other things the search for a viceroy for God. Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.” Eagleton adds that “suitably degutted of its dogma, [religiosity] is then easily wedded with secular modes of thought, and as such can fill ideological gaps and offer spiritual solutions more persuasive than orthodox religion can.”106
Ross Douthat argues that in America, Christian orthodoxy has increasingly given ground to new movements that Douthat regards as Christian heresies but that might be classified with what I am here calling “modern paganism.” Perhaps the most pervasive and influential of Douthat’s heresies, especially among cultural elites, is what he calls the “God Within” philosophy, which holds that “somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity universal and divine.” And a person’s highest duty is to “honor the divinity that resides within me.”107 This view seems almost identical to the “neopaganism” discerned by Braaten and Jenson.
The Orthodox and The Pagan
Douthat, however, writes in defense of Christian orthodoxy, as do others. That is an important fact, not to be overlooked. Within the last few pages, it may appear that paganism has gone from being something long since extinct, to an exotic and marginal phenomenon, to the triumphant and almost universal condition of our time. But that conclusion overcorrects. Although immanent religion or “modern paganism” seems to be increasing and growing more conspicuous in the modern world, it has surely not wholly displaced transcendent religion, such as traditional Christianity. There are presumably still many and perhaps millions of believers in transcendent religion—orthodox Christians, devout Jews and Muslims.
For reasons already discussed, there is no way to take an accurate census of pagans and Christians (and devout Jews, etc.). In this context, self-identifications—even sincere ones—are far from reliable. As when Eliot lectured, it is still true that “the great majority of people are neither one thing nor the other, but are living in a no man’s land.”108 And a person may be partly Christian and partly pagan, more Christian one day, more pagan the next.
And yet the provocations of the “culture wars” make it harder than it once was to remain neutral or undecided. The old opposition—between Christians and pagans or, more broadly, between transcendent and immanent religious orientations—is once again alive and well and, after many centuries, increasingly out in the open; and more and more people are forced to take a side. We will return to the point in the next chapters.
First, though, we need to conclude by revisiting this chapter’s initial theme, from which we may seem to have wandered—namely, secularism.
As we saw earlier, most of the major thinkers over the past couple of centuries had predicted that the modern world would become secular, in the sense of “not religious.” Those prophecies seem not to have been fulfilled. On the contrary, as we have seen, traditional religion remains vigorous, and a new and more immanent religiosity—a “religion without God,” as Ronald Dworkin puts it—seems to be emerging even in quite unlikely cultural neighborhoods. So, is the upshot that secularization is a myth—that it has not happened and is not going to happen?
Not exactly. But as theorists increasingly recognize, the concept of “the secular” turns out to be more complicated than is sometimes supposed; any simple equation of “secular” with “not religious” is dubious.109 Some scholars maintain that instead of referring to “secularism,” we need to start talking of “secularisms,” in the plural.110 The eminent historian of American religion Martin Marty has begun using the term “religio-secular.”111 For some, the need to rethink the meaning of “secular” is underscored by a case like India’s, where the constitution (unlike that of the United States) explicitly provides that government must be “secular” but both culture and politics are pervasively religious.112
At least for some purposes, it seems, if we are not going to simply renounce the idea of secularization, then we need “secular” to mean something other than “not religious.” But can “secular” be severed from “not religious” without becoming mere double-talk, or gobbledygook?
Perhaps surprisingly, consideration of the term’s history suggests that the severance is not only possible but easier than one might suppose; it is more a recovery than a renunciation of the term’s core meaning. The term “secular” traces back to the Latin word saeculum, meaning “generation” or “age”; the general original sense of the term is something like “of this age” or “of this world.”113 Pagan religion and pagan deities, as we have seen, were of this world. So, as we saw in chapters 3, 4, and 5, paganism might accurately be described as a thoroughly and intrinsically secular species of religiosity114—even though in paganism the adjective “secular” might seem otiose (like “wet rain” or “cold ice”).
The term began to offer a genuine and useful distinction with the rise of Christianity, in which the difference between this world and the next, or between the temporal and the eternal, was crucial.115 “Secular” now served to distinguish this world—the here and now, the “secular” domain—from the next life, or from eternity. The secular domain was still not “not religious”; rather, as Nomi Stolzenberg explains, it constituted “a specialized area of God’s domain.”116 This sense of the term is perhaps most clearly reflected in the common distinction between the “secular clergy” and the “regular clergy”: the label “secular” clergy refers not to priests who have lost their faith or renounced religion, but rather to priests who perform their religious work in the world—in a parish—as opposed to priests who retreat from the world to the rule (or regula) of a monastery.
Thus, even before modern secularism came onto the scene, two versions of the “secular” were already discernible. The most conspicuous was the Christian version, but we might also refer to the “pagan secular.” In both its Christian and pagan versions, “secular” emphatically did not mean “not religious.”
Then, in early modernity, usage changed; “secular” came to acquire its more standard contemporary meaning of “not religious.”117 “Modern secularism,” Stolzenberg observes, is “reductive.” It “eliminates the tension between [the profane and the sacred] by simply preserving one and discarding the other.”118 This newer conception seems most resonant with the naturalistic worldview associated with modern science, as we have discussed. We might describe this as the “positivistic” conception of the secular, in contrast to the Christian and pagan versions. And it was this positivistic or “not religious” kind of secularism that was ostensibly foreordained to dominate modern thought and culture.
In sum, history has handed down to us three broad categories or families of “the secular.” There is the pagan secular, in which heavy if not exclusive emphasis is placed on this world and this life, but this world and this life (or at least some parts or aspects of this world or this life) are viewed as having a sacred quality. Then there is the Christian secular, in which this temporal world and this life are a “specialized area of God’s domain.” As such, this life has value—indeed, immense value—because it is a (subordinate) piece of the larger domain of eternity. Finally, there is the distinctively modern positivistic secular reflected in the naturalistic worldview associated with modern science. This is the “not religious” and “disenchanted” world of Weber, Russell, Stace, and company. These three versions of the secular correspond to the three existential orientations we have considered earlier.
Each of these secular possibilities—and each of these existential orientations—remains available to people today, and each has its adherents. Perhaps ironically, however, positivistic secularism seems to be the official version, so to speak, and yet in reality to have the smallest constituency and the least political influence. Its official status is manifest in the fact, as noted, that “secular” is today typically taken to mean “not religious,” and it is only the positivistic secularism that does not recognize “the sacred” and hence is genuinely not religious (in a conventional sense, and also as we have conceived of religion in chapter 2). But although there is no way to take an accurate head count, the positivistic version of secularism probably has the fewest real adherents. Most people, even including thoroughly worldly members of the cultural elite like Dworkin, are probably not simply secular in the positivistic sense. They believe in science, to be sure, but they also embrace commitments and endorse values that are not reducible to the materialistic or naturalistic terms and entities that science studies.
As a test question, we might ask people today whether they think it is acceptable and desirable to use human beings—perhaps old or disabled ones—as mere material subjects for scientific research, as was done in Nazi Germany. Or whether it is acceptable to resolve social and political conflicts by simply exterminating particularly troublesome ethnic groups or human populations where this can be done without undue cost or difficulty. Nearly everyone will recoil with indignation from these questions, and will protest that such measures are impermissible and indeed monstrous. We may say, with Stephen Hawking, that “the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”119 We may even concede the logic, on purely scientific grounds, of Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Jacques Monod’s dismissal of Western liberal humanism as “a disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressism, belief in the ‘natural rights’ of man and utilitarian pragmatism.”120 And yet most people today seem utterly unwilling to embrace the normative implications of those deflationary views.121
Luc Ferry makes the point with a different example. “I am sure,” Ferry says, “that if you witnessed the lynching of somebody because of the colour of his skin, or on account of his religion, you would do what was in your power to help him, even if to do so was dangerous. And if you were to lack the courage, . . . you would nevertheless admit to yourself that, morally this is what ought to happen. And if the person being attacked was someone you love, then you would probably take enormous risks to save him or her.”122 In this taking of enormous risks, Ferry continues, there is a willingness to sacrifice. “Sacrifice, which returns us to the notion of a value regarded as sacred (both from the Latin ‘sacer’), paradoxically retains, even for the committed materialist, an aspect which can almost be described as religious.” More specifically, we see in this commitment “a making sacred of the human.”123
Perhaps there are exceptions—the playwright George Bernard Shaw, for example. “Throughout his life,” John Gray reports, “the great playwright argued in favour of mass extermination as an alternative to imprisonment. It was better to kill the socially useless, he urged, than to waste public money locking them up.”124 But if this was indeed Shaw’s position, nearly all of us would react to it with horror—because, we would say, human life is “sacred,” or “inviolable,” or “infinitely precious,” or something of that sort. Insofar as we insist on some such proposition, we depart from the positivistic secular in favor of something else—perhaps the transcendent secularism of traditional Christianity or Judaism, or perhaps the more immanent sacredness of modern paganism.
In sum, positivistic or naturalistic secularism may be appropriate to our scientific enterprises. But in the realm of moral and political discourse, it has a more complicated and less exclusive role. People do have their “interests,” and the use of science in the instrumentalist effort to satisfy those interests is perfectly appropriate. Economists, practitioners of the “dismal science,” are not evil; on the contrary, they perform a function that is valuable and necessary. And yet the near universal and categorical condemnations of genocide, and the widespread assertions of human rights said to grow out of some quality of intrinsic “human dignity,” suggest that most people and most governments today also have a continuing commitment to the sacred in some form. Perhaps to the transcendental sacred of Christianity and associated faiths. Or perhaps to the immanent sacred of “modern paganism.”
Under Cover of Secularism
And so we return to the metaphor proposed at the beginning of this chapter—of secularism as a facade. Descriptions of the modern world as “secular” are, it seems, accurate and at the same time profoundly unilluminating, even obfuscating.
Thus, politics today concerns itself with this world, not the next world (if there is a next world). Even the most ardent activists on the “religious right” do not defend favored policies on the ground that these will send more people to heaven.125 And today’s pervasively consumerist culture immerses us in the here and now; it does not defer gratification to—or seem to put much stock in—the life to come. So the political world today, and much of the cultural world as well, are thoroughly “secular” in the older sense of “concerned with this world.”
But modern life—modern political life in particular—is not “secular” in the modern sense of “not religious.” Nearly everyone continues to attach “sacred” status to something or other—if not to God and the angels, then to nature, or to the human person (or at least to some human persons at some stages of development), or to the state, or to some sacralized conception of the course of history, or to something else. The political and cultural struggles of our time grow out of these competing sanctities. “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion,” the political philosopher John Gray observes; as an agnostic and secularist in the positivistic sense, he offers the observation with a sigh.126
To be sure, insofar as the pertinent categories presented to us by modern culture are still “religion” and the “secular,” and insofar as the “secular” is deemed more respectable for the political and philosophical reasons suggested at the outset of this chapter, many educated people will still classify themselves as “secular”—and hence, by implication, “not religious.” Their commitments to the sacred will be largely inarticulate and ad hoc. They may stand zealously and righteously on their commitments to human rights or equality or the environment, but they will not acknowledge that these commitments are a form of “religion,” or of an intuition of the sacred.
Often they will still struggle to present their positions in terms of “interests.” The reason we must sacrifice urgently and presently needed energy and jobs to preserve some obscure and minuscule species, such as the snail darter, they may say, is that the species just might turn out at some future date to have some unforeseeable medicinal value;127 this remote possibility, which on its own terms would convince no one to sacrifice significant present interests, serves to give positivistic respectability to a more obscure judgment about the sanctity of a species.
Some decades ago, G. K. Chesterton observed that in many such controversies, what we see is “a fight of creeds masquerading as policies.” And he noted that “we have contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite . . . was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical.”128
Comfortable descriptions of our world and our age as “secular” thus work to make us opaque to ourselves. Ronald Dworkin was among the more articulate philosophers of our time, and his identification of the pervasive religiosity lying beneath the surface of ostensibly positivistic secularism was a contribution we can appreciate. But Dworkin also recognized that although millions of people in fact adhere to something like his immanent religion, most of them would not think—or, probably, consent—to describe themselves in this way. They are, Dworkin implied, religious without knowing it. Theologians like Karl Rahner argued, controversially, that many devotees of non-Christian religions are in reality “anonymous Christians”;129 Dworkin showed that many self-proclaimed secularists are in fact “anonymous religionists.” Or, most likely, “anonymous pagans.”
One consequence of this situation is that on surveys of religiosity, these people—these immanent religionists—will check the box for “none,” or perhaps the box for “agnostic.” Or, sometimes, for “Catholic” or “Jewish,” even though these reports reveal next to nothing about what the respondents really believe and about what they really hold sacred. Nor is it just the surveys that are insufficient; the modern conceptual scheme, still in thrall to an ostensibly inevitable positivistic secularism, may not offer the immanently devout the conceptual resources to describe even to themselves what they really believe and hold sacred.
Pundits and scholars and social scientists will accordingly continue to describe the social and political world and its movements in terms of “religious” versus “secular,” even though these categories do more to conceal than to reveal the real motivations and values of the relevant actors. And thus, as T. S. Eliot suggested in the essay that provoked and gives shape to this book, “the current terms in which we describe our society . . . only operate to deceive and stupefy us.”130
Modern paganism, in sum, is alive and even pervasive—but mostly inarticulate, and concealed (even from itself). We cannot count on it openly to declare itself; we can only attempt to discern its influence, its manifestations, and its occasional self-expressions. The next two chapters will attempt such discernment with respect to the contemporary “culture wars.”
Postscript
After this book had been submitted for publication, Anthony Kronman, the eminent legal scholar and former Yale Law School dean (and, as it happens, my former teacher in, of all things, Uniform Commercial Code), published his massive Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.131 Running to over eleven hundred pages, the book is an intensive spiritual-philosophical reexamination of Western thought from Aristotle through Augustine through Spinoza and up to more modern thinkers including Nietzsche and Heidegger. And that reexamination culminates, as the title indicates, in a philosophy or orientation toward life that Kronman describes as “pagan”—a term Kronman understands in much the same sense of immanent religiosity proposed here.
As the title also suggests, Kronman’s book seems calculated to be a sort of sequel/counter to Augustine’s famous Confessions. Just as that book narrated the saint’s conversion from paganism to Christianity, Kronman criticizes Christianity and its influences and (in an early chapter) describes his own more contemporary conversion—not from Christianity but rather from Marxism back to paganism. If Augustine’s spiritual autobiography was reflective of the Christian revolution of the period in which that book was written, Kronman’s tome reflects the contemporary movement to throw off the effects of that revolution and recapture something like the classical or “pagan” orientation that preceded it.
Given the book’s length and depth, and considering that my own book had effectively been completed before his was published, it has seemed prudent to resist the temptation to incorporate or respond to Kronman’s Confessions in any serious way here. The book represents a major intellectual achievement that deserves close and deliberate study and reflection, not hasty reaction. It seems not amiss, though, to observe that the book provides weighty evidence for the central argument of this chapter.
When this chapter was being written, Kronman’s book was unavailable; I accordingly used Dworkin’s Religion without God as “Exhibit A” evidencing the development of “modern paganism.” But Kronman’s book might have served even better. Like Dworkin, Kronman finds the theism of Christianity and Judaism impossible to accept but thinks a more immanent religiosity is defensible, and attractive. Also like Dworkin, he offers Spinoza as the seminal theorist or exponent of a more immanent faith that is the appropriate modern alternative to Christian and Jewish theism. Kronman’s argument is more extensively developed. And, perhaps most conveniently, Kronman actually recognizes his position as “pagan,” and openly calls it that.
Without pretending to offer any full-scale analysis or critique, therefore, I offer Kronman’s book as a further and substantial piece of evidence supporting the interpretation advanced here.
1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
2. Jose Casanova explains: “In one form or another, with the possible exception of Alexis de Tocqueville, Vilfredo Pareto, and William James, the thesis of secularization was shared by all the founding fathers: from Karl Marx to John Stuart Mill, from Auguste Comte to Herbert Spencer, from E. B. Tylor to James Frazer, from Ferdinand Toennies to Georg Simmel, from Emile Durkheim to Max Weber, from Wilhelm Wundt to Sigmund Freud, from Lester Ward to William G. Sumner, from Robert Park to George H. Mead. Indeed, the consensus was such that not only did the theory remain uncontested but apparently it was not even necessary to test it, since everybody took it for granted.” Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17. See also David Martin, On Secularization: Toward a Revised General Theory (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8–9 (noting “the ubiquity of secularization stories, and the varied ways they combine prescription and description”).
3. Paganism is hardly unique in this respect; Christianity is also very different than it was in late antiquity. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xvii (remarking that “the Christianity of the High and Late Middle Ages—to say nothing of the Christianity of our own times—is separated from the Christianity of the Roman world by a chasm almost as vast as that which still appears to separate us from the moral horizons of a Mediterranean Islamic country”). The distinction is that there is a major modern constituency that calls itself “Christianity” but no major modern constituency that calls itself “paganism.”
4. James J. O’Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 66.
5. The parallel here to Rawls’s well-known distinction between political and comprehensive liberalism is intended.
6. See generally Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). See also Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32 (“The origin point of modern Western secularism was the wars of religion; or rather, the search in battle-fatigue and horror for a way out of them”); Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christianity in a Secularized World (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 11–14, 18.
7. See Craig Calhoun, “Secularism, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75, 80 (“What issued from the Peace of Westphalia was not a Europe without religion but a Europe of mostly confessional states”).
8. See Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 17 (asserting that the secularist conception that they advocate, and that they perceive to enjoy a global consensus in liberal democratic societies, “has appeared only recently in history”). See generally Steven D. Smith, “The Plight of the Secular Paradigm,” Notre Dame Law Review 88 (2013): 1409.
9. Maclure and Taylor, Secularism and Freedom, 2.
10. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612–13 (1971).
11. See Andrew Koppelman, Defending American Religious Neutrality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 46–77.
12. See Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 20–41.
13. In this vein, the philosopher John Searle describes the “picture of reality” that he says is mandatory for educated people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “The world consists entirely of entities that we find it convenient, though not entirely accurate, to describe as particles. These particles exist in fields of force, and are organized into systems. The boundaries of systems are set by causal relations. Examples of systems are mountains, planets, H2O molecules, rivers, crystals, and babies. Some of these systems are living systems; and on our little earth, the living systems contain a lot of carbon-based molecules, and make a very heavy use of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Types of living systems evolve through natural selection, and some of them have evolved certain sorts of cellular structures, specifically, nervous systems capable of causing and sustaining consciousness. Consciousness is a biological, and therefore physical, though of course also mental feature of certain higher-level nervous systems, such as human brains and a large number of different types of animal brains.” John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), 6.
14. With respect to philosophy, for example, Hilary Putnam explains that “philosophers announce in one or another conspicuous place in their essays and books that they are ‘naturalists’ and that the view or account being defended is a ‘naturalist’ one; this announcement, in its placing and emphasis, resembles the placing of the announcement in articles written in Stalin’s Soviet Union that a view was in agreement with Comrade Stalin’s; as in the case of the latter announcement, it is supposed to be clear that any view that is not ‘naturalist’ (not in agreement with Comrade Stalin’s) is anathema, and could not possibly be correct.” Hilary Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism,’ ” in Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario de Caro and David MacArthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 59.
15. For a helpful survey of divergent views on these questions among professing “naturalists,” see Mario de Caro and David MacArthur, “Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism,” in de Caro and MacArthur, Naturalism in Question, 1–20.
16. Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1963), 173.
17. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 97.
18. In this vein, physicist Steven Weinberg confidently declares that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 154.
19. See, e.g., David Niose, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).
20. See, e.g., Jacques Berlinerblau, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 53–68; Darryl Hart, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
21. One can, in other words, hold an utterly naturalistic worldview and yet think that “religion” serves a valuable and necessary social function. See, e.g., John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Penguin, 2011), 207–9.
22. See, e.g., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155 (“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ ”).
23. For a sustained critical exploration of this worldview, see Joseph Vining, From Newton’s Sleep (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
24. Edward O. Wilson, “On Human Nature,” in The Study of Human Nature: A Reader, ed. Leslie Stevenson, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 271, 272.
25. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 104, 107.
26. W. T. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” in Man against Darkness and Other Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 6–7.
27. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 6.
28. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 7.
29. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 11.
30. See Nancy Ann Davis, “Contemporary Deontology,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 205.
31. David Hume, “An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,” in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 167, 212–84.
32. See Philip Pettit, “Consequentialism,” in Singer, A Companion to Ethics, 230. For my part, I have tried to suggest a religiously grounded answer to some of the major objections to consequentialism. See Steven D. Smith, “Is God Irrelevant?” Boston University Law Review 94 (2014): 1339.
33. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 82–84.
34. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic, 100–102.
35. John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
36. Quoted in Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 222.
37. For a classic treatment of the issue leading to a negative verdict, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). For a more popular essay to similar effect, see Arthur A. Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979, no. 6 (1979): 1229.
38. See above, 23.
39. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 16–17.
40. See A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 14–21. For a recent popular book advocating this Epicurean approach to life, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011).
41. In this vein, see Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
42. Peter Berger, “A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion,” New York Times, February 25, 1968, 3.
43. Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World, ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 1, 2, 9, 10.
44. Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: Norton, 2011). With respect to religion itself, the authors explain that “contrary to . . . predictions, the portion of the world population adhering to Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism jumped from 50 percent in 1900 to 64 percent in 2000” (2). Moreover, “a dramatic and worldwide increase in the political influence of religion has occurred in roughly the past forty years” (9 [emphasis deleted]).
45. Ran Hirschl, Constitutional Theocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 47.
46. See, e.g., Edward J. Larson, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 264–65.
47. See Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (New York: Random House, 2004), 284–85.
48. Larson, Evolution, 292.
49. Larson, Evolution, 20–25.
50. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken, 2011), 24.
51. Alister McGrath, Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 43.
52. See Yu Jie, “China’s Christian Future,” First Things, August 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/08/chinas-christian-future.
53. See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
54. See below, 242–43.
55. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
56. See Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (New York: Clarendon, 1985), 237–89.
57. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986).
58. Ronald Dworkin, “Liberty and Moralism,” in Taking Rights Seriously, 240.
59. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 248–53. The chapter reprinted an article that had been originally published in 1966.
60. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 251.
61. See Ronald Dworkin, “Do We Have a Right to Pornography?” in A Matter of Principle, 335.
62. John Hart Ely, “Professor Dworkin’s External/Personal Preference Distinction,” Duke Law Journal 1983 (1983): 959; H. L. A. Hart, “Between Utility and Rights,” Columbia Law Review 79 (1980): 828.
63. Ronald Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,” Philosophy and Public Affairs Journal 25 (1996): 87.
64. Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth,” 90, 99, 105.
65. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 25, 68–101.
66. Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 25, 71–78.
67. Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 79.
68. Dworkin’s “process” explanation was the more suspect because, as he conceded, only some processes seem to elicit this reaction from us. “We do not treat everything produced by a long natural process—coal or petroleum deposits, for example—as inviolable,” Dworkin acknowledged, “and many of us have no compunction about cutting down trees to clear space for a house or slaughtering complex mammals like cows for food.” Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 80. So then, why would we regard the products of some long processes as “sacred” or “inviolable” because of the process and the products of other long processes as totally exploitable and expendable?
69. Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 81.
70. Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
71. See also Dworkin, Religion without God, 24 (“The religious person perceives the universe as ‘something of intrinsic wonder and beauty’ ”).
72. To be sure, on this point Dworkin gave mixed signals. At one early point in the book he appeared to endorse “the supernatural,” or “something beyond nature,” or “some transcendental and objective value [that] permeates the universe” (Dworkin, Religion without God, 6). And he insisted on distinguishing his view from “naturalism.” E.g., p. 13 (“The religious attitude rejects all forms of naturalism”). But elsewhere, as we have seen, Dworkin said that the religious judgment holds that “what we call ‘nature’—the universe as a whole and in all its parts—is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder” (10 [emphasis added]). Dworkin also deliberately and laboriously distinguished the realm of “value” from the realm of “science” (22–29), or describable facts (a realm that for Dworkin included claims about God, who if he existed would be “a very exotic kind of scientific fact”). Religion, Dworkin emphasized, belongs in the realm of value, not of describable facts. This is surely a puzzling conjunction of propositions: namely, that the sublime is objectively real but that it does not belong to the realm of facts. Still, if the question is raised whether Dworkin located the sublime within or outside of nature, it seems that the better answer would be “within nature.” The sublime would seem to be an aspect or feature or dimension of the world, albeit one that transcends the sorts of “matters of fact” that naturalistic science studies (23).
73. See, e.g., Martha C. Nussbaum, “Skepticism about Practical Reason in Literature and the Law,” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 740 (“If we really think of the hope of a transcendent ground as uninteresting or irrelevant to human ethics, as we should, then the news of its collapse will not change the way we think and act. It will just let us get on with the business of reasoning in which we were already engaged”).
74. Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 5.
75. Harris, Waking Up, 6. See also 202 (“Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith”). Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
76. Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (New York: Twelve, 2014), xx, 1. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
77. Ehrenreich, Living, 216.
78. Dawkins at least sometimes seems to endorse the same Einsteinian sense of the mystery and beauty of the world that is central to Dworkin’s “religion.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 40.
79. Dworkin, Religion without God, 5, 42–43.
80. Dworkin, Religion without God, 2–3.
81. See David Masci and Michael Lipka, “Americans May Be Getting Less Religious, but Feelings of Spirituality Are on the Rise,” Pew Research Center, January 21, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/21/americans-spirituality.
82. See Masci and Lipka, “Americans May Be Getting Less Religious, but Feelings of Spirituality Are on the Rise.”
83. See Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones,’ ” Pew Research Center, May 13, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones.
84. Among Americans who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” 48 percent reported regularly feeling a sense of awe or wonder at the universe. See Masci and Lipka, “Americans May Be Getting Less Religious, but Feelings of Spirituality Are on the Rise.”
85. Indeed, self-adopted labels such as “atheist” can be quite unilluminating or misleading with respect to people’s actual beliefs. For example, Pew research reveals that although about 9 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God, only about 3 percent describe themselves as “atheists,” but of those who do so self-describe, about 8 percent say they believe in God or a universal spirit. See Michael Lipka, “7 Facts about Atheists,” Pew Research Center, November 5, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/05/7-facts-about-atheists/.
86. Martin Gardner, introduction to The Ball and the Cross, by G. K. Chesterton (New York: Dover, 1995), vi.
87. Gardner, introduction to The Ball and the Cross, vii. Cf. Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2002) (arguing that a great deal in modern Christian practice and worship is more pagan than authentically Christian). Viola and Barna define “pagan” rather loosely as indicating “those practices and principles that are not Christian or biblical in origin” (xxxv).
88. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Modern American Poetry, accessed July 13, 2017, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm.
89. For a discussion of modern movements that call themselves “pagan,” see Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106–22. Several readers suggested to me that paganism so-called has been making a comeback in Scandinavia in recent years. See, e.g., “Enormous Increase in Pagan Ásatrú Religion,” Iceland Monitor, March 28, 2017, http://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/culture_and_living/2017/03/28/enormous_increase_in_pagan_asatru_religion_in_icela.
90. See above, 88–93.
91. See above, 90–94.
92. Ehrenreich, Living, 213.
93. Ehrenreich, Living, 215.
94. Cf. Acts 17:28.
95. Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 1.
96. Mount, Full Circle, 3.
97. Mount, Full Circle, 6. See also 6 (“We are now hard-wired to expect history to deliver progress, flawed progress marred by horrors usually of our own making, but progress nonetheless”).
98. Mount, Full Circle, 96.
99. Mount, Full Circle, 441:
By the time of the Antonine emperors in the second century AD—that period which Gibbon regarded as the summit of human felicity—Rome was a ferment of religious choice. You could believe in anything or nothing. You could put your trust in astrologers, snake-charmers, prophets and diviners and magicians; you could take your pick between half a dozen creation myths and several varieties of resurrection. Or if you belonged to the educated elite, you could read the poetry of Lucretius and subscribe to a strictly materialist description of the universe.
In short, this is a time when anything goes and the weirdest, most frenzied creations of the human mind jostle with the most beautiful visions, the most inspiring spiritual challenges and the most challenging lines of scientific inquiry. It is hard to think of any period quite like it, before or since—until our own time.
100. Mount, Full Circle, 204–5.
101. Writing critically as a Christian theologian, William Cavanaugh asserts that “what remains when humans attempt to clear a space of God’s presence is not a disenchanted world but a world full of idols.” William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 120.
102. See above, 91.
103. Dworkin, Religion without God, 2–3.
104. See especially Benjamin Wiker, Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2013). See also Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 117 (observing that “the nation in Western civilization in many ways replaces the church”).
105. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, preface to Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 14, 7.
106. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 44.
107. Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012), 215.
108. T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt/Harvest, 1948), 39.
109. See Rajeev Bhargava, “Rehabilitating Secularism,” in Calhoun, Rethinking Secularism, 92. Acknowledging these difficulties and complications, even as he advocates its renewal, Rajeev Bhargava observes that “only someone with blinkered vision would deny the crisis of secularism.” See also Jose Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Calhoun, Rethinking Secularism, 54, 63: “For example, American, French, Turkish, Indian, and Chinese secularisms, to name only some paradigmatic and distinctive modes of drawing boundaries between the religious and the secular, represent not only very different patterns of separation of the secular state and religion but also very different models of state regulation and management of religion and of religious pluralism in society.”
110. This theme runs through many of the essays in Rethinking Secularism. See especially Alfred Stepan, “The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic Regimes,” in Calhoun, Rethinking Secularism, 114. See also Michael Warner et al., eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
111. See, e.g., Martin Marty, “Religio-Secular . . . Again,” University of Chicago Divinity School, Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, April 24, 2017, https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/religio-secular-again.
112. See Bhargava, “Rehabilitating Secularism.”
113. “Secular,” English Oxford Living Dictionaries, accessed July 13, 2017, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/secular.
114. Cf. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 135 (asserting that “paganism . . . was such a lightweight religion as to constitute a very model of secularity”).
115. Charles Taylor thus explains that the concept of the secular became important in Christian discourse in describing “profane time, the time of ordinary historical succession which the human race lives through between the Fall and the Parousia [or second coming of Christ].” Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32. For Taylor’s more detailed explanation of the relation of spiritual and secular time in premodern sensibilities, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 54–59.
116. Nomi Stolzenberg, “The Profanity of Law,” in Law and the Sacred, ed. Austin Sarat (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 51.
117. Cf. John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins: Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words (New York: Arcade, 1990), 465: “secular Latin saeculum, a word of uncertain origin, meant ‘generation, age.’ It was used in early Christian texts for the ‘temporal world’ (as opposed to the ‘spiritual world’). . . . The more familiar modern English meaning ‘non-religious’ emerged in the 16th century.”
118. Stolzenberg, “The Profanity of Law,” 35.
119. Quoted in Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 222.
120. Quoted in Joseph Vining, The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 50.
121. For a searching exploration of this conflict, see Vining, From Newton’s Sleep.
122. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 243.
123. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 244, 245.
124. See Gray, Straw Dogs, 94.
125. For discussion, see Steven D. Smith, “The Constitution and the Goods of Religion,” in Dimensions of Goodness, ed. Vittorio Hösle (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 328–33.
126. Gray, Black Mass, 1.
127. John Copeland Nagle, “Playing Noah,” Minnesota Law Review 82 (1998): 1171, 1208.
128. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, [1910] 2016), 15.
129. See Jacques Dupuis, SJ, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (New York: Orbis, 1997), 143–49.
130. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 6–7.
131. Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).