Secularism and Modernity

You’ve heard this (or a variant thereof) before, right?

With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises . . .

Presumably, those who deplore the decline of religion in the world today would not welcome the sort of devastation and despair that could give religion its second wind.

There is no other plausible scenario that could halt the slide, for a fairly obvious reason: the recent rapid growth of mutual knowledge, thanks to the global spread of electronic and digital communication.

In this particular instance, this comes from a piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Why the Future of Religion Is Bleak,” which argues that religion is on its way towards vanishing, except for perhaps as a social club with a few rituals attached to it, a Knights of Columbus without anything but the fundraising and the fancy costumes for Fourth of July parades.

This is a topic that I’ve been sitting on ever since a CFM* meeting at which the empty-nester parents lamented their kids who had abandoned going to church — even in the case of the deacon and his wife.

(*CFM = Christian Family Movement, a “small groups”-type organization in which, in groups of about 10 – 12 couples, we meet once a month to discuss some passages from a book about Christian life, and then have various gatherings of all groups together throughout the year.)

There’s a lot of circular reasoning/begging the question when it comes to this topic:  “Why don’t young adults go to church?  Because society is becoming more secular.”  And the answer that’s proffered, beyond this, tends to be that of Marx, that religion was indeed the opiate for the masses,  that the purpose of religion was to provide consolation to the poor, knowing that their sufferings in this life would be made good in the next one.

But the funny thing is, taken on an individual basis, Christianity is not, and has not, necessarily been a religion of the poor.  The first Christians tended to be not the poor, but the wealthy (or at least middle-class) and educated, looking for something that was more meaningful and made more sense to them than the worship of the gods of their fathers and mothers.  A favorite sort of conversion story was that of the wealthy man or woman rejecting wealth, and Francis of Assisi was the son of a merchant.  In fact, the story around St. Francis goes like this:  the economic growth of the High Middle Ages produced this new breed of voluntarily poor Brothers and Sisters such as the Franciscans and the Poor Clares, as a way of responding to their un-ease about the new money economy.  At least, that’s what I remember from a book from my Medieval history grad student days.

And now?  I’m still reading Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, and just saw a chart saying something I’d seen before, that, in the United States, it’s the poor who are “losing their religion” and there’s a sharp divergence, as the middle-class and better educated are not only doing a better job keeping their families intact, but are keeping up church attendance in a way that the less-educated and poorer class aren’t.  I have the impression, too, that in China the rise of Christianity is a middle-class phenomenon, too.

What’s more, when you read or hear stories of people who have converted, or have had their faith strengthened and have felt consolidation from their faith, it’s not a matter of poverty or financial distress, but other sorts of needs:  a medical crisis, ruptured family relationships, depression, etc.  Or they struggle with an acute awareness of sinfulness, either because of acute actual misdeeds or dismay over more “ordinary” sins, which is, upon conversion, remedied by gratefulness for forgiveness.

None of which points to a direct path from increasing wealth/financial security to secularism.

Now, the path towards secularism is the sort of thing where there’s a definite tipping point:  once there’s no longer any felt social pressure to go to church, then those families whose attendance was mainly the product of “doing what you’re supposed to do” will fall away, leaving only those with a clear conviction and/or sense of commitment.  Once parents see other parents around them sleeping in on Sunday mornings, they’re more likely to abandon the belief that raising the kids “in a religion” is necessary for their moral development, regardless of the parents’ own actual beliefs.

And I haven’t yet worked out a workable explanation — besides the self-reinforcing nature of this move towards secularism — that moves past just “wealth = godlessness.”   A part of it is probably modern medicine and science taking away from a feeling of mystery about the world.  A part of it is perhaps even the increasing prevalence of mental health professionals and Oprah-like popularizers of the notion that the path to happiness is sound mental health.   (And I don’t mean to imply that there’s something wrong with treating mental illness; I’m thinking more of popular writers and speakers who urge everyone to find purpose and emotional healing in mental health-based techniques rather than in God.)  Is the secularism of Europe perhaps even partly tied to its experiences with the why-would-God-permit-this death and destruction of World War II?

So, no answers, but I wanted to at least set out my initial thoughts rather than leaving these forever unfinished in a forgotten draft.