Sunday, March 29, 2009

Defining the Secular

For those of you who don’t know (and that should be most everyone), I am currently a student working toward a Doctoral degree. Not, mind you, in something as beneficial and useful as medicine (I’m afraid I’m not quite that capable), but in a field known for its democratic, populist, responsive, and highly useful nature: philosophy of religion and theology.

It might be bad enough, mind you, were any one of these three predicates involved in my degree. “I’m a philosophy student,” “I’m a religion student,” or “I’m a theology student.” But, I have the bonus of incorporating all three fields into my studies, effectively ostracizing myself from most anyone whom I might actually want to talk to. But I will not apologize for my degree or even potential snobbery, at least not yet. There is some benefit (I hope) to my field(s). While everyone else is busy with their work, contributing to a social good, I am either sitting at home thinking, sitting in the library thinking, or maybe even sitting at the beach thinking (I a in So Cal, after all). Maybe some of these thoughts are worth their unproductive weight in gold?

All apologetics aside, my thoughts as of late are centered around my possible dissertation. I’m thinking about writing on the relationship between secular society and religious life. All of the conclusions I’ve come to so far have been fairly sympathetic to the social processes put into place some 600 years ago, the processes that have moved us toward a “secular society.” I would like to try, then, to lay out just what I believe the secular means, and why, at the end of the day, we religious folk need not fear it, even if we have to either face-up to or combat some of the consequences of it. Eventually, I’d like to reflect on what it means to be Christian in a secular society, and how, as Christians, we might take advantage of this manner of social order.

There are a variety of responses to the secularization of society. But most of these, as far as I’m concerned, have missed the point, both on the religious and non-religious side of the isle. For the non-religious folk, for instance, secularization often becomes a battle cry—freedom from the chains of oppressive religion! I dare say that, as I’m able to develop this blog, this song is far from a correct understanding of the phenomenon, for there are as many oppressive regimes outside of religion as within it. I need only point to Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany for my point. And for the religious person, the term “secular” often sounds like a dirty word, representing the falleness and reprehensible nature of humankind. But such an understanding completely misses the point as to what I believe is the true, (what I will argue is the divine), value in secularizing processes. Of course, we’ll have to root out the good processes from the bad, but all in due time. This said, what I’ll deal with for now is a basic definition of the secular, at least according to my understanding.

I’d like to develop a picture. Because of my familiarity with it, I’ll use a construction site to develop an analogy. On the construction site, you have various kinds of workers. You have carpenters, concrete workers, dry-wallers, electricians, plumbers, architects, and foremen. Each of these sets of persons accordingly are charged with a task, all of which you can probably figure out by means of their names. Moreover, each of these persons has specialized precisely in the task give them, meaning they’re able to achieve their task, in theory, quicker and more efficiently than anyone without that specialty. So, a carpenter builds the frame of the house based on the architect’s plans. And the plumbers and electricians install fixtures according to code and based on their directions. Moreover, the foreman makes sure all of this happens smoothly and on time, working out any bugs along the way. This picture is a good way to envision our social structures; we are a bunch of construction workers drawing our skills together in order to create an end product that benefits us all (after all, we get paychecks for our work). Let me draw out this picture a bit more in terms of some various

First off, in the picture above, everyone has their place, knows their function, and works toward that function based on architectural plans. But what if those plans are taken away or destroyed, and what if the architect, a week prior, benignly decided that he needed a vacation? Also, for fun, let’s put a time-limit on this scenario, namely, that the house needs to be done within two weeks and all that’s been completed thus far is part of the foundation. The guy who would be in charge of keeping order, of course, is the foremen, and he is currently facing no easy task.

Now, let’s also recognize that the site foreman is someone who has a lot of experience in one of the above specializations—probably carpentry. As such, the foreman just might be more inclined two do two things. First, he might be inclined to center the production of this house around his carpenters, leaving the other specialists a little work here and there, but only when the carpenters can’t do the job with some degree of ability. Because of the lack of work, these secondary workers fall into a general category called the non-carpenter. That is, these secondary workers are no longer plumbers, electricians, and dry-wallers—persons able to contribute a skill in their own right—but simply defined by that which they are not. Secondly, in terms of the destroyed architectural plans, the foremen will himself interpret what he remembers based on his own specialty, namely, carpentry. So, he will build some fantastic walls: very sturdy and high. But he may not have them built in the right spot, not to mention the fact that he might have too many built.

I believe that the above picture is precisely what medieval society—that time when society was held and run by Church bureaucracy—looked like. There was a foremen whose specialty was the found in sacred ritual and sacramental life, and this foremen ordered the society according to this specialty. What was not this foremen’s specialty became that which was non-sacred (just like the plumber became the non-carpenter) holding secondary and clean up positions in the social order. This realm of non-sacred activity was in medieval parlance called saeculum, that is, the secular.

If we move back to the construction analogy, there eventually comes a time when the foremen has ordered (or mis-ordered) the construction site long enough. Not only do the carpenters grow sick of building walls where there should be no walls—walls on top of walls—but also the non-carpenters begin to see themselves as valuable in their own right. Non-carpenters begin to interpret themselves as able to complete tasks better and more efficiently than the carpenters themselves have ever been able to do. They begin to notice that they both know how and where to build a pipeline, even without the architectural plans. They begin to notice that the way the carpenters string wire is downright dangerous, and that they know how to achieve the same task more efficiently and more safely. In something like a coup, the foremen is removed from his post, relegated back to his realm of expertise in carpentry. And there now (potentially) exists the freedom of each discipline to contribute its specialty both to the re-interpretation of architectural plans and to the plan’s implementation.

This above movement is precisely what many of the earliest secularization theorists meant by the term secularization. Those disciplines that were relegated by the Church to the non-sacred began to recognize themselves not merely as non-sacred, not merely as secular, but as positive disciplines, capable of contributing to the design of the house, and in many ways better than the Church could. So, when the medieval Catholic Church began to lose its power under the critique of the Reformation, there was a movement in secular society as well, a differentiating movement. There developed various “states,” organized bodies of bureaucrats who saw that they could organize societies according to the values and norms that had been developing in local cultures (English, French, Prussian, etc.). Moreover, because merchants saw that they could better order the flow of goods and services to locales than the Church ever could, there also developed economic markets. The list could go on, from the empirical sciences, to law, to medicine, to the arts and humanities. From the realm of the non-sacred—the secular—various disciplines—in technical terms, social spheres—differentiated themselves from both the Church and from each other. And this is what is meant by secularization.

In the coming blogs, I will be able to develop this analogy a bit further. As may already be noted, it seems likely that a power vacuum will be filled by a new foremen. It has, and that is something worth talking about in its own right.