For the first time, the current issue of Position Papers is a “one issue issue”, and so is a little experimental. The idea is to take a deeper dive into a burning issue of the day and to evaluate some of the more noteworthy publications on that topic. If it successful we will repeat the experiment every few issues, and in fact it would help to receive suggested topics from you, our readers.
We have chosen the vast topic of secularisation to begin with. It certainly is a big question and is the subject of much academic research. New studies on various aspects of secularisation are constantly being published, examining such matters as the effect of secularisation on the different major religions, more historical questions concerning the evolution of secularisation, and also a fair amount of works which make the case for embracing secularism.
In the current issue we look at seven different works on secularisation. Two of them are older works: Charles Taylor’s 2007 classic A Secular Age and Brad Gregory’s less known but perhaps superior work The Unintended Reformation. Both works are compared and contrasted here by Pat Gorevan. Both works trace the genesis of secularisation from the late Middle Ages and follow its trajectory up to modern times.
Margaret Hickey reviews Stephen Bullivant’s 2020 Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II. We did carry a review of this work in a previous issue but decided that it would be worthwhile to revisit this work so as to include it in this overview of significant works on secularisation. The book examines, as the title points out, a very clearly circumscribed incidence of secularisation in the modern world, and one of particular relevance here in Ireland since most of Bullivant’s findings are applicable here also, even if the time frame of secularisation in Ireland is a little different from that of Britain and America.
James Bradshaw reviews another work by Stephen Bullivant, his more recent Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, published last year by Oxford University Press. This book is in some way a follow up to his 2020 Mass Exodus. In this work he examines the surprisingly dramatic recent rise in the USA of the “nonverts”, ie. those “converts” to declaring on census forms their religion to be “none”. Religiosity in USA has always been seen as a problem for the “secularisation thesis” which equates “progress” (in science, education, social liberty, etc) and the decline of religion (which of its nature it supposed to require scientific ignorance, a lack of education, and/or the authoritarian imposition of religion.) Now the rise of the “nones” in the USA is taken to vindicate the secularisation thesis.
Tim O’Sullivan reviews Hugh Turpin’s recent examination of secularisation in Ireland: Unholy Catholic Ireland. Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality and Irish Irreligion. I myself review Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society
by Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, Ryan T. Cragun – a defence of the “secularisation thesis” against nay-sayers such as the famous Rodney Stark. Both books Unholy Catholic Ireland and Beyond Doubt appear to share a certain prejudice against Catholicism in the first case, and religion in general in the second, much to the detriment of their academic rigour. Perhaps it is just difficult to maintain an academic distance from the topic of religion; both religious and a- or anti-religious can easily fall into a kind of special pleading. Certainly this appears to be the case in Beyond Doubt where the the a-religious life is presented in almost lyrical terms, and religion is presented as a mostly negative phenomenon embraced by those with either little education or a low IQ. That authors need not necessarily fall into the trap of special pleading is made clear by Stephen Bullivant in his Mass Exodus. Bullivant, though a person who places his cards clearly on the table at the outset as a man of faith, manages to present his research in a most objective manner.
And so what are we to make of secularisation? That the Western world has been going through a process of some kind of secularisation since the close of the Middle Ages is uncontestable. Those hostile to religion would have us interpret secularisation as process whereby those shackled by religion in a kind of mental infantilism are liberated by reason, science and freedom. Certainly the modern era which replaced the medieval world was marked by a renewed emphasis on the (legitimate) value of the “saecula” – the world of here and now. In doing this it was putting right an excessively “other-wordly” conception of human life, but over-reacted against the divine as a means to reinstate the human, as if there was an incompatibility between the divine and the human. This has produced the secularising tendency which has been present in the West for over three hundred years, and which in many ways the Church through the course of the last century, and in the Second Vatican Council in particular, has sought to remedy. This is the great project which the Church is still only beginning to undertake in the face of widespread secularism: to show that the world – the “saecula” – and God are not in competition with one another, but rather should exhibit that same harmony which we see in the two perfectly integrated natures of Jesus Christ, the human and the divine.
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Were it not that we had this special issue planned for some time we would undoubtedly have addressed the issue of the terrible events unfolding in Israel and Gaza. Suffice it to say that the world has rarely seen atrocities as barbarous as those perpetrated on 7 October by Hamas terrorists on innocent Israeli, men, women and children. There was truly something demonic at work in the cruelty of those acts. And yet I, for one, cannot help feeling that the Israeli military reaction in Gaza was precisely what those atrocities were meant to provoke, and that in responding as they have done, they have in fact walked into a trap that has set in train the humanitarian catastrophe that Hamas seems to have desired all along. It seems now that nothing but divine intervention can bring peace once again to Israel and Palestine, not to mention the release of those two hundred men, women and young children being held hostage in Gaza.