HARD AND SOFT SECULARISM
By Peter Steinfels
What does it mean to become secular? Scholars of the so-called “secularization thesis”
have disentangled at least three meanings. The first is usually captured under the label
“differentiation”: the recognition, growing in the West since the Middle Ages, that different
spheres of life are governed by their own autonomous principles and authorities rather than
directly by sacred scriptures or religious authorities. Science, medicine, law, economics, art,
politics—each has its own governing laws, procedures, and authorities.
In this sense, John Roberts presented himself as the very model of a secular man when, at
his confirmation hearings, he testified again and again that he would carry out his duties on
the Supreme Court strictly in terms of the internal demands of American law and
Constitutional principles.
In this sense, we are all secularists, and our numbers—driven by
the three great engines of secularization: science, the state, and
the market—are sure to grow. Indigenous healers will give way
to modern medicine for HIV-positive villagers in Africa. Islam will
accommodate modern economic principles of risk and reward just
as Christianity did, whether or not you consider it taking interest.
Religious leaders will fight a losing battle to prescribe rules for
artistic creativity. A variety of ancient cosmologies and creation
myths will adjust to the discoveries of the natural sciences and
the cultural challenges of modern media.
This does not mean that conflicts among the differentiated
spheres of modern life will cease. Is abortion or, better, a fertility
treatment that requires the destruction of human cells, a
medical-scientific issue, a legal issue, a policy issue, a religious
issue, or an economic market issue? (If someone can pay for it,
why not provide it?) Of course, it is all of these, but which has
ultimate sway?
In a society that is secular in this sense of differentiated spheres,
religion has not disappeared as a potential force. In many cases,
religion will not abdicate its claims to be the ultimate judgment
over ends or means. It will just do so as one of several shoving
contenders.
The second meaning of becoming secular, of secularization, is
much more straightforward. It is that religious belief and practice
itself will steadily disappear as societies become genuinely
modern (or enlightened) and humanity outgrows its religious (or,
if you will, superstitious) childhood. In this sense, secularism is a
respectable term for atheism, which was the way that the term
emerged in the 19th century. We can call this hard secularism.
The third meaning falls somewhere between the first two.
Becoming secular does not mean that religion need disappear. It
may well continue as a source of personal meaning and consolation but only as something
thoroughly “privatized” and advancing no claim to influence public life. In public conflicts
over defining the appropriate boundaries of different spheres of life, religion is ruled out a
priori as a legitimate contender.
In this sense, secularism is a set of rules regarding the limits of religion in public life. Some
of these rules are formal, such as what constitutes discrimination in employment, and some
are informal—a kind of etiquette that treats being publicly religious as akin to belching or
picking your nose. We can call this soft secularism.
Hard secularism has only a marginal place in American public life. One reason is soft
secularism, which discourages that kind of public attention to religion, at least on a serious
level. So hard secularism usually gets a word in edgewise only as mockery, which probably
strengthens religion.
Otherwise, it can argue its case in venues addressed to other hard secularists, just as
religious thinkers must largely engage religious questions at any depth in platforms
addressed to believers. All this is a loss for the culture and, frankly, for religion too. It is no
less appalling that no atheist can be elected president than was the given of my childhood,
that no Catholic could be elected president.
Soft secularism is clearly a much greater force in our public life, and a much more problematic
one. It builds on a real strength in the American experience. As a nation of multiple and often
fiercely competing Christian groups alongside a growing number of non-Christian ones, we
have, with difficulty, developed a healthy circumspection about religious matters.
In this respect, soft secularism functions to minimize if not muzzle serious religious
discourse in public life. Indeed, soft secularism is the contemporary counterpart to the
broad Protestant hegemony that reigned over respectable opinion in 19th-century America
and still dominates parts of the country.
If you are a skeptic or an atheist in small-town Texas, you probably keep your doubts or
your disbelief to yourself, unless of course you are either very subtle or very ornery. If you
are an evangelical or theologically serious practicing Catholic, you maintain a similar low
profile about it in the newsroom of the New York Times or in a great many Ivy League
departments—unless, again, you can be sufficiently subtle or choose to be ornery.
The New York Times and the New York Review ignore virtually all works of theology and
religious history—a curious contrast to the attention paid these subjects in the Times
Literary Supplement in Britain or the prestige newspapers of Germany, despite the much
greater secularization of those countries. And although our best art, drama, film, and
literature, now as always, raise profound religious issues, it is practically unimaginable that
anyone would write criticism about them from
an explicitly religious standpoint—Christian, Jewish, or simply theistic—in journals not
directed toward particular religious audiences.
In a nation of religious believers, religion will, of course, boil up all over the place: Christian
rock and rap, inspirational books of all sorts, the hugely best-selling Purpose-Driven Life,
the similarly best-selling Left Behind series, Scientology on the talk shows, and so on. It is
revelatory, however, that those interested in earning a monetary return on such efforts, like
the producers of the new Narnia movie, typically use the language of whether they can
“break out.” It is an achievement against the odds to “break out” on, say, the Today Show
or Good Morning America, though one might have a better chance on the Oprah Winfrey
Show.
Does soft secularism prevent news cover-age of religion? No, but it does somewhat shape
it. Years ago,
Paul Moses, at one point a religion reporter and later New York City news editor for
Newsday, described media attention to religion as emerging at the points where religion
“intersects with the liberal social agenda”—in other words, “on the continuing cultural war
over such topics as homosexuality, abortion, AIDS and contraception (and dissent from
church authorities on these issues).” He compared this focus to “covering major league
baseball only when there was a dispute about allowing women to be umpires.”
Of course, nothing alters this picture like the death and then election of a pope. Coverage
goes 24/7, with even some serious talk amid the repetitive and uncritical noise. But then
things go silent until another liberal social-agenda issue hits the headlines or lights up the
screen. Meanwhile, soft secularism, by fortifying a kind of “two cultures” in regard to religion,
hamstrings the intellectual pressure that might be brought from within religious traditions on
their more extravagant, occasionally dangerous, expressions.
I have been talking about public life broadly without talking about political life. Here let me
limit myself to a few provocative statements.
First, a great deal of alarm about the religious right is misplaced. The religious right has
become a crucial element in the conservative coalition, but it should not be equated with
the larger reinvigorated evangelical electorate, drawn to the Republican Party by the shrewd
moves of conservative operatives and driven there first by the long overdue struggle for
civil rights and then by more debatable choices within the Democratic Party.
In 1960, white evangelicals supported Democrats by a two-to-one margin. Now they
identify themselves as Republicans by more than a two-to-one margin. Of at least equal
significance, they now vote in higher numbers than most other groups. But the defining
positions of the administration they have brought to power are not their own.
Tax cuts, starving government, an aggressive and unilateral foreign policy, environmental
and economic deregulation—these are the dreams of conservative beltway think tanks and
K Street lobbyists, and the work of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul
Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis Libby, Colin Powell, and George Tenet, who have nothing
to do with the religious right, and of a president whose rhetoric seldom goes beyond
Rotarian religion and is probably actually less religious than Bill Clinton’s or Franklin
Roosevelt’s.
I am among those dismayed by the rise of the religious right, the shift in evangelical
political allegiance, and even more by the independently grounded policies of the current
administration. But with some exceptions I do not think that opposition to these
developments should take the form of soft secularism—in effect, trying to short-circuit
debate on the merits of specific policies by discrediting them on the grounds that some of
their advocates are religiously motivated or pose their arguments in religious terms.
This approach is not, again with some exceptions, consistent or believable: Would we want
our own favored policies and movements dismissed because they marshal explicitly religious
supporters? And it is not democratic. It excludes from the political process the larger
number of citizens who couch their concerns in religious terms.
One challenge for soft secularism is to draw finer lines on what is permissible under the First
Amendment and to defend that territory strongly while opening up both political and other
public discourse to intelligent religious discussion, including from the standpoint of hard
secularism.
Another challenge, for both soft and hard secularism, is to offer critiques of religion that do
not mirror a tendency found in many defenses of religion; namely, to compare the best of
one’s own tradition with the worst of the other’s. As in: The true personification of
secularism is George Orwell and the true personification of religion is Osama bin Laden.
Religion, like secularism, comes in many varieties and degrees of sophistication and simple-
mindedness. Contemporary secularism gravitates toward a few canonical images, largely
unchanged from the 19th century, when it should be attending to the data and asking
questions about differences among religious groups as well as about race, gender, and
class.
Why, for example, are seculars so disproportionately male, especially compared to the
disproportionately female makeup of committed mainline and African-American Protestants?
Why do less committed religious believers express more racial prejudice than non-believers
but also more than more committed believers? Why do non-worshippers contribute so much
less to charity and spend so much less time in service to the needy than the religious, and
especially the highly religious?
In a recent sympathetic review of new books on atheism, the Camus scholar Ronald
Aronson offered a kind of state of secularism report, ending on the note that a “new
atheism must absorb the experience of the twentieth century and the issues of the twenty-
first. It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces
beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about
what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to
ways of coming to terms with death, and explore what hope might mean today.”
If the new institute at Trinity College advances these tasks in any degree whatsoever, well,
as a religious believer, I say thank God.
Peter Steinfels is a journalist and scholar, who writes the biweekly “Beliefs” column for
the New York Times and served as the newspaper’s senior religion correspondent from
1988 to 1997. He served as editor for Commonweal from 1984 to 1988 and is the author
of books including A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church and The
Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing American Politics.