This thread is motivated by a post appearing in today's Editorials forum:
The Democrats' Unreligious Fringe A FEW WEEKS AGO, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech to a group of liberal Christians in which he called on his fellow Democrats to tear down the party's self-imposed wall between religious faith and politics ...
Against the assumptions embedded in that editorial, I want to call attention to a point-of-view expounded repeatedly by various twentieth-century theologians, including notably Harvey Cox in his short 1965 text
The Secular City. According to this view, religion -- if it is to be meaningful in any modern sense -- must involve something more than the traditional trappings of religiosity, more than the supernatural miracle tales, the familiar ahistorical mystifications. If religious teachings lack a core, which is accessible to those who reject the traditional trappings of religiosity, then those teachings are simply irrelevant to today's people:
What is secularization? ... <I>t is the deliverance of man, “first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language.” It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed worldviews, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents “defatalization of history,” the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secularization occurs when man turns his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time ... It is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 called “man’s coming of age.”
... If we do accept man as pragmatic and profane, we seem to sabotage the cornerstone of the whole theological edifice. If secular man is no longer interested in the ultimate mystery of life but in the “pragmatic” solution of particular problems, how can anyone talk to him meaningfully about God? If he discards suprahistorical meanings and looks in his “profanity” to human history itself as the source of purpose and value, how can he comprehend any religious claim at all? Should not theologians first divest modern man of his pragmatism and his profanity, teach him once again to ask and to wonder, and then come to him with the Truth from Beyond?
No. Any effort to desecularize and deurbanize modern man, to rid him of his pragmatism and his profanity, is seriously mistaken. It wrongly presupposes that a man must first become “religious” before he can hear the Gospel. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who firmly rejected this erroneous assumption ... Bonhoeffer insists that we must find a nonreligious interpretation of the Gospel for secular man. He is right. Pragmatism and profanity, like anonymity and mobility, are not obstacles but avenues of access to modern man. His very pragmatism and profanity enable urban man to discern certain elements of the Gospel which were hidden from his more religious forebears ...
The Secular City This view takes seriously the secular critiques directed at religious manifestations:
....<S>ecularization — if it is not permitted to calcify into an ideology (which I called "secular-ism") — is not everywhere and always an evil. It prevents powerful religions from acting on their theocratic pretensions. It allows people to choose among a wider range of worldviews. Today, in parallel fashion, it seems obvious that the resurgence of religion in the world is not everywhere and always a good
thing. Do the long-suffering people of Iran believe that after the removal of their ruthless shah, the installation of a quasi-theocratic Islamic republic has turned out to be a wholly positive move? Do those Israelis and Palestinians who yearn for a peaceful settlement of the
West Bank bloodletting believe that either the Jewish or the Muslim religious parties are helping? How do the citizens of Beirut and Belfast feel about the continuing vitality of religion? ...
... To illustrate the dilemma from my own Christian tradition, how many Mother Teresas and Oscar Romeros does it take to balance a Jim and Tammy Bakker? And how do we measure Pope John II’s courageous vision of a "Europe without borders" against his worldwide crusade against
contraception? ...
The Secular City 25 Years Later ... To oppose all secularization wherever it appears -- in Spain, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Colombia -- because it is seen as inevitably leading to secularism is historically shortsighted and strategically mistaken. Sometimes when churches are shorn of political power and people are shaken out of age-old religious world views, both benefit. The church is freed to become truly the church, and to exercise its prophetic critique of all closed systems, including churchly ones. And the people begin to see that the gods do not decree their misery ...
The Secular City -- Ten Years Later The role which religion can play in oppression, in particular, deserves continuing attention:
... I was puzzled at how much attention the Spanish translation of my book ... received from Latin American theologians. They criticized it vociferously, but they also built on it. They invited me to Peru and Mexico and Brazil to debate it. But as I listened to their criticisms I became convinced that they understood it better than anyone else, maybe even better than I did myself. Still, they made use of it in a way I had not anticipated. Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose controversial book The Theology of Liberation appeared a few years after mine, clarifies the connection best. In the economically developed capitalist countries, he explains, secularization tends to take a cultural form. It challenges the hegemony of traditional religious world views, calls human beings to assume their rightful role in shaping history, and opens the door to a pluralism of symbolic universes. In the poor countries, however, secularization assumes quite a different expression. It challenges the misuse of religion by ruling elites to sacralize their privileges, and it enlists the powerful symbols of faith into the conflict with despotism. In the Third World, as Gutiérrez puts it in one of his best-known formulations, the theologian’s conversation partner is not "the nonbeliever" but rather "the nonperson." This means that among the tarpaper shantytowns of Lima and São Paulo the interlocutor of theology is not some skeptical "modern man" who thinks religion stifles thought; rather, it is the faceless people whose lives as well as faith are threatened because tyrannies grounded in some religious or nonreligious mythology strangle them into an early death ...
The Secular City 25 Years Later There is even an Old Testament basis for a commitment to secularization:
... Perhaps the suggestion I made at the end of The Secular City, which sounded radical to some readers then, is still a good one: we should learn something from the ancient Jewish tradition of not pronouncing the name of the Holy One, live through a period of reverent reticence in religious language, and wait for the spirit to make known a new vocabulary that is not so tarnished by trivialization and misuse ...
The Secular City 25 Years Later <edit because I posted before finishing post & for format>
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