{"id":163,"date":"2014-12-06T15:23:40","date_gmt":"2014-12-06T21:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulandcity\/?p=163"},"modified":"2014-12-07T13:48:37","modified_gmt":"2014-12-07T19:48:37","slug":"byu-prof-fears-secularism-3-what-me-worry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulandcity\/2014\/12\/byu-prof-fears-secularism-3-what-me-worry\/","title":{"rendered":"BYU Prof FEARS SECULARISM (3): What, me Worry?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

As I was saying:\u00a0 The Salt Lake Tribune has presented me as a critic of \u201csecularism.\u201d\u00a0 Fair enough \u2013 I am happy to criticize something we can call secularism.\u00a0 Adam Miller finds my program, as stated in Tribune, too simple. \u00a0Hancock poses a false choice, Miller says, between a faithful and a \u201csecular\u201d view.\u00a0 Sure, he concedes, the academy\u2019s view is secular, but that\u2019s OK, because we can learn from secularism.\u00a0 Anyway, the issues are not simple (as the Tribune\u2019s Hancock would have it), but \u201cmessy.\u201d\u00a0 Most of all, we must see that faith and secularism can learn from one another.\u00a0 But Hancock doesn\u2019t want to learn; he only wants to guarantee the vindication of \u201cwhat we already think.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is indeed a very deft way of dealing with the Hancock problem:\u00a0 There are problems with secularism, and also advantages.\u00a0 Hancock is charmingly simple, but reality is complicated.\u00a0 Hancock thinks he knows the answers already, but we must be open to \u201cmutual transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s have a closer look at the problem.\u00a0 Just how simple is Hancock?\u00a0 And just how \u201cmessy\u201d or complicated is reality?<\/p>\n

First, re. my charming simplicity.\u00a0 What is simplistic, I suggest, is to take the Tribune\u2019s narrative framing of me (Hancock vs. \u201cSecularism\u201d) as an adequate statement of my views.\u00a0 Ms. Stack had the courtesy to cite and I think link my own actual statements of my position in First Things and at Meridian Expand.\u00a0 Miller, Wickman and others might do the courtesy of considering these statements before they exult in my simplicity.\u00a0 Here, for example, is an excerpt from my introduction to Meridian\/Expand:<\/p>\n

\u00a0All faithful engagements with intellectual and cultural trends and forces will be welcome, and that means entertaining both comparison and contrast between the church and the world.\u00a0 We will seek both to identify points of opposition between the gospel and leading intellectual trends and to discover intellectual and cultural resources that open up new possibilities in fully appreciating and articulating gospel truths, wherever these may be found.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does this sound like the point of view of someone whose interest is focused narrowly on vindicating what I already think I know?\u00a0 Of course, if anti-anti-secularists were really interested in getting a sense of what my alternative to \u201csecularism\u201d might look like, they could consider consulting whole books I have written on the subject, books addressed to philosophers and scholars that attempt to dig beneath the problem of \u201csecularism\u201d to the deeper question of the very meaning of \u201creason\u201d considered as a an alternative to revelation and to the morality of a political community.\u00a0 From Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics<\/a><\/em> to The Responsibility of Reason<\/a><\/em>, I have been concerned, not to say obsessed, with the complications inherent in the notion of \u201csecularism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course it would be unreasonable (if you\u2019ll pardon the expression) to expect my critics to master my scholarly works before responding to a newspaper article about my anti-secularism.\u00a0 But I might ask them not to assume at the outset that I am unaware of the marvelous complexities and messiness they relish.<\/p>\n

Turning now to Matthew Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center.<\/a>\u00a0 I think Prof. Wickman represents a fairly common response to my concerns from colleagues learned in the humanities and human sciences.\u00a0 Again, this response seems to be consonant with Adam Miller\u2019s:\u00a0 Hancock is simple, but secularism is complicated.\u00a0 Here is Wickman\u2019s concluding paragraph:<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I think Wood is right: secularity is a profoundly, and historically, uncertain category. And, from the perspective of the humanities, and BYU, the more uncertainty the better, for that makes everything seem all the more complex, open, and infinitely possible. But that leaves us in a tenuous place with which neither Hancock nor Wood may be entirely comfortable, a place of paradox we can perhaps best articulate by paraphrasing the aphorism (mistakenly attributed to Abraham Lincoln) about the common man: God must love the secular, he made so much of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This seems to amount to: we have no idea what secularism is.\u00a0 But we are sure of one thing: Hancock is wrong to worry about it.\u00a0 In a word: \u201cWhat, me worry?\u201d (for those old enough to remember the motto of the great Alfred E. Neuman).<\/p>\n

\"alfred_e_neuman\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Earlier in his statement, though, Wickman cites Charles Taylor (or a secondary source on Charles Taylor) as a warrant for a particular understanding of the secular that reassures us in our determination not to find it worrisome:<\/p>\n

Indeed, Wood adds, it is the ambiguity between those positions that incites \u2013 and, historically, fails to secure \u2013 \u201ca settled method in public and institutional life by which multiple perspectives (including multiple understandings of secularity) can both cohabit and be equally heard.\u201d By this estimation, what secularity seeks is not global domination but rather a seat at the table.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK then.\u00a0 This indeed amounts to an argument that we should not worry about secularism. But I cannot help but notice that the argument requires a certain, pretty definite \u2013 and pretty contestable \u2013 definition of secularism: i.e., secularists are nice, they just want a thousand flowers to bloom and just to be allowed a seat at the table watching them bloom (and not to be excluded by those who seek \u00a0\u201cglobal domination\u201d \u2013 which would be the non-secularists, I suppose.\u00a0 Like me, I suppose).<\/p>\n

So here seems to be the state of the anti-simplistic argument: Secularism is complicated, messy, we have no idea what it means \u2013 ergo, we mustn\u2019t worry about it.\u00a0 Or: Secularists are nice and only want certain\u00a0others who are asserting their global domination (those Mormons<\/a>, maybe?) to give them a seat at the table \u2013 ergo, we mustn\u2019t worry about it.\u00a0 One thing is sure, in any case, one thing is not messy or complicated: we mustn\u2019t worry.\u00a0 And certainly we must not worry in such a way as to trouble the peace of our academic colleagues or give the impression that they could be wrong in any significant respect, because, after all, the academic enterprise is about civility and collegiality and so about never, ever impolitely proposing that any of its basic assumptions might be less than well-examined.<\/p>\n

So here we have arrived at the point where I must confess guilt re. the charge of simplicity.\u00a0 There is much that is messy and complicated about the origins of meaning of secularism.\u00a0 It is fun to sort through this complicated messiness; I do it all the time..\u00a0 But one thing is not so complicated: secular liberalism today is not about holding off the world domination of religious orthodoxy just enough to secure a place at the table to watch all the flowers blooming.\u00a0 Secularism is a worldview that is dominant in the academy and increasingly among legal and mediate elites, and many others too. \u00a0 (Consider on this point the legal and constitutional analysis of Steven D. Smith, cited in my previous post here.<\/a>)This view of the power of secularism in today\u2019s world may be too simple for your taste, but that is not the question.\u00a0 The question is: is it true?\u00a0 I would invite Adam Miller and Matthew Wickman to consider this question.<\/p>\n

If we were to consider this question as applies to Charles Taylor\u2019s marvelously subtle and non-confrontational interpretation of secularism, we might find that even he cannot completely avoid the question of the actual (simple) moral-political implications of contemporary secularism.\u00a0 [to be continued\u2026]<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I was saying:\u00a0 The Salt Lake Tribune has presented me as a critic of \u201csecularism.\u201d\u00a0 Fair enough \u2013 I am happy to criticize something we can call secularism.\u00a0 Adam Miller finds my program, as stated in Tribune, too simple. \u00a0Hancock poses a false choice, Miller says, between a faithful and a \u201csecular\u201d view.\u00a0 Sure, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1988,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBYU Prof FEARS SECULARISM (3): What, me Worry?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As I was saying:\u00a0 The Salt Lake Tribune has presented me as a critic of \u201csecularism.\u201d\u00a0 Fair enough \u2013 I am happy to criticize something we can call\" \/>\n<meta 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