Rise of the Post-Secular

When I started school at age seven, I was convinced I was the only Christian among the three hundred students in attendance. That turned out to be not quite true; the others were just clever enough to keep their heads down.

If someone discovered I went to church, they were baffled. How could I possibly believe in fairy tales? Had I missed the memo? Religion was obsolete, science had disproved God’s existence, and now, finally free from its oppressive force, we were about to build a brave new world. It was other kids telling me this—not tenured professors at elite universities.

Any churchgoing kid growing up in Sweden during the seventies or eighties will tell you a similar story. Not one of persecution, but of being regarded with mild condescension. When we started university or stepped into our first jobs, we’d swap strategies on how best to come out as Christians.

As a historian, Halldorf puts Sweden’s secularism in context:

We lived at the zenith of a culture brimming with secular self-assurance. This movement started among the educated elites during the Enlightenment but went mainstream in the 1950s. The years following World War II were a time of searching in the Western world: a quest to define what a modern, postwar identity would look like. In the United States, religion became part of that identity. The country adopted “In God We Trust” as its national motto in 1956, and before long, presidents were closing their speeches with the now-familiar benediction: “God bless America.”

Sweden, however, chose a different path. We equated modernity with a secular, enlightened rationality, cast in stark opposition to tradition, and set out to become the most modern—that is, secular—nation on earth. . . .In public debates, Swedish politicians and leading intellectuals declared religion a relic of the past. Its claims, it was said, had been disqualified by the lack of scientific proof for God’s existence. . . .

A 1949 editorial captures the mood. With thinly veiled satisfaction, [the daily newspaper] Dagens Nyheter observed the decline of Swedish religiosity, noting that the only holdouts were “groups which, for various reasons, represent what one might call an earlier stage of human development”—namely, “the rural population and women.”

Today, though, that and most other newspapers have a theological columnist. In 2025, the media named Jesus the “Influencer of the Year.”  Church attendance, confirmations, church membership, and church attendance are all up, especially among young adults. The percentage of young Swedes who attended church doubled from 2017 to 2024, from 17% to 34%.  The percentage of Sweden’s Generation Z who believe in God climbed over the same period from 20% to 34%.

In addition, Halldorf cites what we have been calling a “vibe shift.”  He quotes a podcaster, an atheist, who said, “people used to think: This person is religious—that means he is stupid and backwards. Now they think: This person is religious, and that is a quality akin to understanding poetry. Even if I don’t get it myself, I respect those who do.”

Halldorf quotes another journalist from that same newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, that had said religious people such as women were from “an earlier stage of human development.”  He then brings up the term I want us to consider:

“Conversations about spirituality—and I don’t mean yoga in Bali—are making their way into parties. Even at secular, intellectual dinner tables that once kept religion firmly at arm’s length.”

Sweden was becoming post-secular, in Jürgen Habermas’s sense of the word: a society where secularism is no longer the unquestioned norm.

Human beings are inherently religious, Halldorf observes.  And using Luther’s definition of God from the Large Catechism as that from which we “expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress,” he says that Sweden didn’t abandon religion.  Rather the nation switched gods.  And as time wore on, the new gods of science, technology, and progress failed to fulfill the utopian expectations and proved to be a poor refuge in distress.  Today, secularism is being questioned.

In my book Post-Christian:  A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, I discuss this  emerging post-secularism.  I too cite Jürgen Habermas, considered one of the most important contemporary thinkers, a peer of the key postmodernist philosophers whom he now critiques.  Excuse me for quoting myself:

Habermas sees the emergence of what he calls a “post-secular society.” In coining the term, “post-secular,” Habermas recognizes that in the contemporary world, the secular and the religious exist side by side. He calls for a dialogue between the two—in his sense of communication that results in mutual understanding—with each side learning from the other.

In a paper entitled “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” Habermas says that secularism, by itself, cannot sustain a humane society.  Secular science has great power, but it has no mechanism within itself for questioning how it experiments or what it produces. (Habermas is concerned about the misuse of technology, especially biotechnology.) Secular morality at its best is individualistic, but societies need “collectively binding ideals” that create a sense of “solidarity” with other people. Secular society, having lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole,” has a “motivational weakness,” that is, an inability to inspire. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” he says, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.” According to Habermas, “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

I go into more detail about what Habermas has to say, including his suggestions for how secularists and religious people can get along with each other.  I also point out his blind spots and misunderstandings. But I conclude, “Nevertheless, despite problems and limitations of his approach, Habermas has opened doors—in academia, politics, and culture—that Christians can walk through.”