What I mean by the word 'secular'

What it is, why it's bad, why it's dying... and what I think I'm supposed to be doing about it!

I often use the word secular as a short-hand for a systemic viewpoint that I consider intellectually inadequate. As I am occasionally called out on this, I wanted to write a brief reference post that I can refer people to by way of an explanation and clarification. It will also, happily, serve as a thumbnail sketch of a central part of my own world-view.

The secular is the dominant world-view within the contemporary West, and has been for at least two hundred years. We might mark the ascendancy poetically as beginning with LaPlace's comment to Napoleon, “I have no need of that hypothesis”. In my Let us be Human sequence I talked about that world-view as being characterised by a rootedness in the apathistic stance, a perspective that is distanced from human emotional reactions, with the consequence that it generates a world-view that is asophic, blind to wisdom. Now that I have become acquainted with the work of Iain McGilchrist I would use his terminology and say that the secular is a world-view that suffers from left-hemisphere capture. Like all such instances the secular resists contradiction in a characteristic way: opposing arguments are not seen as rooted in intellectually legitimate perspectives but rather are instances of immorality or mental illness. To persist in opposition to the secular view justifies a response of anger and force – the gulag archipelago.

The specific element of the secular which is my principal interest, and which most usually generates my antagonism, is that it is 'religion-blind'. Religion, like art, music, poetry, drama – all the humanities ultimately – is a right-hemisphere phenomenon. It is not simply the location for where we judge between right and wrong, but it is the arena within which our understandings of right and wrong are agonistically hammered out and discerned. The asophic blindness to wisdom of the secular view has led us to an environment within which wisdom as such is denied. Wisdom does not exist for the secular world view. The particular form that this takes within the post-Christian West is a specific denial and rejection of Christianity, normally exclusively. The foundational mythology of the secular sees Christianity generally, and the church in particular, as 'the other', responsible for the suppression of speech and liberty, the burning of witches and scientists alike. This has evolved into a general consigning of religious belief into the category of 'quirky hobbies', like philately or campanology. Fine if that's your thing, but not of relevance to the world.

Which leads me to my final point about the secular: it is a dying world-view. It is dying because it lacks the intellectual resources to deal with the world as it is, to recognise the ways in which its own metaphysical assumptions have generated the problems that we now face. The secular is metaphysically naïve. An obvious instance is the rise of Islam and the challenges that incompatible ideologies generate within a shared space, but in some ways the ecological crisis is the most authentically secular problem. The secular view is the ideology of Modern technological capitalism (Mammon, the Machine). It enables and justifies the destruction of the environment in order to generate growth, and it is not an accident that 'growth' is an abstraction. I see the collapse of the wider environmental movement of the 60s and 70s (eg Rachel Carson, EF Schumacher) into the contemporary technocratic focus upon 'climate change' as an example of the secular absorbing and co-opting a resistance movement. Which is why I have always liked the Dark Mountain perspective, and why the work of poetry and creativity in response to the ecological crisis is essential work. Read Paul Kingsnorth, if you don't already.

One last point – all of this is very personal for me, and bound up with my own autobiography and spiritual journey. It is a matter of sadness for me that I lack the capacity to write the stories and poetry needed to help build the new communities that will form as the secular world collapses. Yet I am content with the work that the Lord has given me to do which is to bear witness to the greatest story, and to defend it against accusers (I need to learn more effectively how to do that without falling into the trap of counter-accusation of course!) Naming the secular, teaching people how to identify it and work to counteract it, and enabling them thereby to live richer and fuller and more human lives – in sum, teaching people the priority of worship - this too is a holy labour.

Lord, you alone are my inheritance, my cup of blessing. You guard all that is mine. The land you have given me is a pleasant land. What a wonderful inheritance!