Towards a Postsecular Society

[Introduction]

The word ‘religion’ means different things to different people. At one extreme it represents everything primitive and superstitious that we have struggled to eradicate over the last three hundred years, and at the other extreme it represents a quiet joy of recognition and warmth in the heart for everything we hold most precious. Hence, to use the word properly is to recognise the spectrum of its reception. The word ‘postsecular’ on the other hand represents little to anyone, because it is recently coined and not much in circulation. The term implies that there might emerge, or already be emerging, a quality of thought that goes beyond the secular, a thinking that celebrates our hard-won democratic rights and freedoms, but which is more open to the spiritual than the secular mind has generally been. In the late 20th century an increasingly casual atheism became central to Western culture, if not to Western society. This casual atheism was a precocious and extraordinary part of Marx’s thought in 1860, but by 1960 most Western schoolchildren would be culturally impelled to adopt it, almost without question.

The origins of the secular mind in the 17th century are complex. It is useful to think of Western thought as following a presecular form up to the 17th century, and then, over a three-hundred year period, developing into the secular form familiar in the middle-late 20th century. The emergence of a possible postsecular mode of thought has to be dated from about 1980, and its origins, rather ironically, may lie in science. In the 1980s Fritjof Capra in ‘The Tao of Physic’ and Gary Zukav in ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ popularised the parallels between mysticism and quantum theory. Commentators from a wide spectrum of thought began to see quantum holism and quantum indeterminacy - which these books explained to a lay audience - as undermining the classical mechanistic view of the universe, and allowing new modes of thought to surface. This is ironical because it was physics that underpinned the Age of Enlightenment, and which led to the secular, even atheistic, late 20th century outlook. It looks like physics is again underpinning a transition, this time from the secular to the postsecular.

I shall quote just one recent notable event in support of this idea: the award of the million-dollar Templeton prize for progress in religion to the British physicist Paul Davies in 1995. Davies won the prize on the basis of a series of books including ‘God and the New Physics’ which ends with the proposition that ‘science is a surer path to God than religion.’ This ought to be considered remarkable, at the very least prompting the reflection that religion must be rather unsure of itself to reward such a statement with such a prestigious prize (other recipients include Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham). It is also part of the irony previously raised when one considers that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for his views on science and religion - these views, when compared to Davies’s statement, now look mild indeed. (Many consider Bruno to have been condemned to death for his Copernicanism, but it now looks more likely that it was merely his heterodoxy and quarrelsomeness. However he could never have conceived of anything as radical as the above statement by Davies.)

We might sum up the religious trajectory of the last four centuries in the West as follows: in the middle of the 17th century thinkers were all theists with a few deists appearing; in the middle of the 18th century thinkers were mostly deists with a few agnostics appearing; in the middle of the 19th century thinkers were mostly agnostic with a few atheists appearing, and in the middle of the 20th century atheism dominated Western thought. This atheism ranged from casual, as in Marxism, to vituperative, as in writers like Richard Dawkins and Gore Vidal. Indeed it is often surprising how vehement the rejection of religion can still be today, when our secular freedoms have been so long guaranteed in the West. What the postsecular begins to question is the assumption that the spiritual impulse itself has to inevitably create the presecular religious hierarchies that we so rightly reject as inimical to freedom and democracy. It is an accident of history that religion is associated with feudalism, and a Western accident in particular that it is associated with spiritual intolerance and persecution. Neither is a rejection of the spiritual a necessary outcome of the scientific worldview but rather an accident of a parallel historical process that had falsely identified religion as a repository ofknowledge . We begin to see the Western prejudice against the spiritual as arising out of a series of accidents, and not as an inevitable process. This opening up of thought is what we are characterising as postsecular.

To say that the spiritual life of the new millennium has to some extent found an ally in science is to state only part of the current dynamic however. A renewal of the spiritual life as a genuinely 21st century phenomenon, as opposed to the embattled survival into the secular world of presecular religion, emerges in a variety of contexts. We can list these as:

1- the 'new' sciences of quantum mechanics, relativity and chaos (complexity) theory, which challenge the deterministic, mechanistic and reductionist worldview

2- the emerging field of consciousness studies

3- transpersonal psychology from Jung to Wilber

4- sections of Postmodern thinking including Heidegger and Levinas

5- sections of Christian theology, in particular the 'Radical Orthodoxy', inspired by Postmodernism

6- the creative arts in the 20th C, for example artists from Constantin Brancusi to Bill Viola who have explored a wide range of conventional and unconventional spiritualities in their art

7- Deep ecology and ‘ecosophy,’ mystical approaches to Nature, from Thoreau to Dillard.