How (Not) to be Secular--A Review

I’m not the first person to say this and I’m pretty sure I got this from someone else. So here goes: the great sin of our age isn’t that God’s dead, but that God’s trivial. He just doesn’t matter. “There is no God” is more than atheistic fiat. It’s the de facto way American culture works. We may give attention to him here and there but frankly, we don’t pay much attention. We give him his due, sort of, kind of, maybe—not really. It affects everything from what we spend our money on, to justice issues, to race relationships, to what we think about in our spare time. He’s just  not really considered.

I recently finished a book entitled How (Not) to be Secular—Reading Charles Taylor, by Jamie Smith. Smith is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. He’s taken Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age, and made it understandable. Don’t think that reading Smith’s a whole lot easier! He’s got a glossary in the  back just to keep the reader informed. It’s not an easy read. But if you want to understand the western culture we live in, that’s the book to read. Smith comes from a distinctly Christian worldview (Smith is a Philosophy Professor at Calvin College) but the goal is to understand culture more than provide an apologetic for the Christian faith. Here are a couple of his main points:

In the modern secular world, we doubt transcendence. As a result, doubt and longing are the cross pressures (how people respond to the lack of transcendence) of the secular world. Pg. 11

What makes our modern secular age is the default assumptions about what is actually believable. Some people call this a plausibility factor. A God whose personally involved in our world just doesn't seem plausible (e.g. I think Leslie Newbigin came up with that idea in The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society). Pg. 19

There is no goal beyond human flourishing. Pg. 23

Civility becomes the naturalized, secularized sanctification. Pg. 43 

Humanism isn’t something we fell into but an achievement (Taylor makes this very clear and Jamie Smith captures it nicely). Pg. 57

We are buffered and sealed off from enchantment (the sense of God’s presence in the world) which also seals us off from meaning and significance. Consequently we no longer view this world as a “Cosmos” created by God but as a “Universe” that is cavernous, anonymous space. Pg. 64, 69

All of this secularization is rooted in assumptions! There really is no neutrality only “unthoughts” as he calls them (Taylor—and thus Smith in writing about Taylor—begins in the later part of the book to show the inconsistencies of secularism). Pg. 80f

The real consequence of secularism is that you have no reason for meaning, morality, or beauty (he calls this agency, ethics, and aesthetics). These become “cross pressures” on our secular culture which forces us to violate the logical implications of a secular culture devoid of God. Pg. 102

In fact, secularism faces the same dilemma Christianity faces: to attain any sort of moral aspiration requires you repress your ordinary human desires!  Pg. 112

Consequently, there really are moral codes in a secular culture and they focus on political correctness. Pg. 128.

It’s an incredible book. The last chapter Smith entitles “How (not) to be Secular” but does little to clearly actually unpack specifics of what that may look like. The reader has to figure it out on his or her own. But it's a great book, one that I will turn to regularly as I seek to be a good Christian leader in today's culture.