What is Secularization? A Few Key Books on the Secular, Religion, and God
What is secularization? What does it mean to be secular? Few words cause the humanists among us to so quickly nod in approval, and cause the religionists to shake their heads and mutter under their breath. Like most things so divisive, secularism is also catastrophically misunderstood in its natural and in its origins. A while back I was asked on Facebook if I could provide a list of works on secularization and Christianity that I have found helpful, and to which I constantly refer. With my uncanny, lightning quick turnaround of about a year (give or take), here is my response!
As always there are a few rules I have my list follow. I typically do not list multiple works from the same author (as you will see, I nearly immediately break this rule). I also only list books that I myself have read completely. As such, if my list looks like it is missing a bunch of titles--well, it probably is. These are works that I have found useful and interesting. I have also chosen for this list to provide works that are primarily historical in orientation. In other words I'm not worried about books that are attempting to make normative or prescriptive solutions for how Christianity and secularism should relate. For that reason I have largely omitted theological books on secularism/secularity, which is an animal unto itself and is a list for another time. Same thing goes for atheism and secularism, which deserves its own list.
Enjoy this list, just in time for some "light" summer reading!
Secularization, The Big Picture
These are books that cover the "big picture" of secularization.
It nearly goes without saying that if you are at all interested in the concept of secularization, this is the book you need to read. Buy it (or listen to it, as weirdly enough there is a mostly palatable Audible version), and be prepared to take it slow and let yourself marinate in the sprawling arguments of this book. James K. A. Smith has even written an incredibly helpful guide to Taylor's magnum opus titled How Not To Be Secular that is an extremely rewarding read in its own right. It is difficult to summarize Taylor who is notorious for writing big books (do yourself a favor and pick up his Sources of the Self which is also a (sadly really long) must-read). As usual I try to limit these lists to one entry per author so it didn't get an official place on the list. But in essence one of the major takeaways that Taylor wants his readers to have is that the really interesting stuff about "secularization" is not the decline of religion. Rather "secularization" names for Taylor a shift in the modes in which we believe things. Both secularism and atheism are themselves part of these modes of belief, and secularization is as such not the absence of Christianity as many claim, but its sneaky, lingering presence among phenomenon that we no longer associate with religion. Taylor also uses a lot of his own jargon (though this is less off-putting than it sounds, as he patiently explains what he means by his terms. Don't worry, this isn't like Martin Heidegger's neologisms that will make you lose faith in language). Phrases like "immanent frame," "cross-pressured" "porous self" and "social imaginary" litter the textual landscape. But soon you too will be able master Taylorspeak (works great at parties too). I spent an entire summer back in 2011 or 2012 dedicated to slowly working through Taylor's arguments, and I am to this day extremely thankful that I did (and that I have a spiral notebook filled cover to cover with notes to reference) as this book continues to guide my thoughts and prove new insights as I slowly try to catch up. If you can only buy one book on this list, this is it.
I am already breaking my rule of not including two or more works by the same author (and I'm about to do this again in the next item below as well), but since these are so good and were explicitly designed as a trilogy I figured, why not? Dupre's work is intent on tracing the intellectual origins of modern thought. Typically, these stories are traced to the Renaissance, when the light of human decency and imagination was rekindled from the sickly slumber of the Dark Ages. Dupre is one of many scholars no longer convinced by these antiquated ways to tell the story, and instead sees the roots of modern thought as laying deep in the middle ages--and even Christianity itself. This becomes particularly evident in the second volume, which investigates Enlightenment ideas in particular. Where many try to narrate the Enlightenment as in some sense the coming of age of humanity and the casting off of superstition, Dupre argues instead that the Enlightenment and what followed it were in fact obsessed with religion and theology. But in the course of its obsession these things also underwent radical transformations. What is often told as the story of secularization in terms of the sloughing off of religion and the disproving of theology is told instead by Dupre as the constant renegotiations internal to theology itself. While there is no simple narrative to be distilled from Dupre's immensely learned book, this trilogy is absolutely invaluable to understand the background transitions that are part and parcel of the many notions of secularization put forward by scholars and others over the years.
Breaking my rule again for another trilogy that I have found both indispensable for my thought and just absolutely, jaw-droppingly learned. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Brague is one of the most well-read academics working in the humanities today. If nothing else one can read for the pleasure of watching a master at his craft. He narrates the intellectual disappearance of natural order (Wisdom of the World) the breakdown and transposition of notions of law (The Law of God) and the rise of the notion of the human as absolute creator (The Kingdom of Man). One could extend the trilogy by also including The Legitimacy of the Human and Moderately Modern, which are sister-volumes to each other and which both serve as satellites supplementing Brague's Kingdom of Man. All of this sounds a bit alarmist and could be dismissed off hand as an apologetic misuse of history. But Brague is not really an apologist, and his handling of the sources is really something to behold. His trilogy makes for a fascinating read alongside Dupre's, above. His works provide immensely helpful background context into which one can situate the conversations over secularization, and see why they often takes the direction they do (the death of God, the irrelevance of theology in the face of science, man as a creator of morality, and so on).
Secularization: Science and Religion
Does science cause secularization?
Only a third of the length of Taylor's big book, Harrison's arguments nonetheless lack none of Taylor's heft. While not directly on "secularization" per se, it is indispensable to the topic and is now widely considered a field-defining classic even though it came out only in 2015 (and was based on the 2010-2011 Gifford Lectures). To see how some of this plays more directly into secularization, grab $150 and see Narratives of Secularization which is edited by Harrison. I have written a lengthy review of Harrison, so I won't spend too much time here. But in a nutshell Harrison argues that "science" and "religion" as categories that help us organize and carve up the world in fact arose together historically. One we see this, the notion that science automatically secularizes, or that science is necessarily antagonistic to faith, are artifacts of the categories we use rather than accurate historical descriptions. I'm doing the book no justice, so just go out and read it and prepare to have a lot of things you take for granted completed deconstructed. I am trying to avoid a certain amount of overlap for this list so it didn't make it on the list itself, but John Hedley Brooke's Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives is also a must-read companion to this book.
A wonderful and oddly entertaining book that earns its amazingly bizarre cover. I initially picked this book up because I thought it would provide some diverting travels into the world of magic, mysticism, and the occult that has always accompanied science (and still does). It turns out that in addition this book is a truly stunning piece of scholarship. Josephson-Storm has an incredible command of languages (he is translating from 8 languages in this volume alone, and an additional 4 or so are represented in his prior book, The Invention of Religion in Japan) and it pays off by allowing a very wide-angled approach to the topic. "Disenchantment" is a popular notion often associated with secularization. It is the idea that the world no longer appears to be a place of religious mystery but simply the cold mechanism of scientific description. The trouble is that, as Josephson-Storm shows, science historically has been accompanied at all stages by theology, "superstition," the paranormal, and so on--and often ironically by the same people touting secularization to begin with. This suggests not only that secularization is something of a weasel-concept, a blank check whose value is penciled in to fill the needs of the pencil-holder, but also that science was not the death of magic or of God, quite the opposite (even the logical positivists believed in ghosts!) Of the many fantastic takeaways here, one of my favorites is Josephson-Storm's linking of the death of God and disenchantment to the notion of "the vanishing of the faeries," a literary trope that goes back as far as the high Middle ages. Josephson-Storm notes early on that his study will serve as a nice companion volume to Harrison's The Territories of Science and Religion, in the sense that where Harrison looks at the construction of science and religion, Josephson-Storm adds "superstition" as an equally mobile category that, when invoked, often hides the "secular's" link to our weird, theological pasts.
Following on the heels of a number of wonderful books debunking many of the popular episodes often held up as the perfect examples of an ignorant church holding back rationality and human progress (see a few of my lists here), this book in particular focuses on the personal, social, political, and economic backgrounds that help us see why "warfare" as a narrative arose. To be sure, if one wants to find conflict between religion and science one can find it--and in abundance. But what is lost when we look at the problem in terms of religion and science is that these categories 1.) take on meaning only by looking at the specificity of the historical situations in which they occur and 2.) this means that broader aspects that are not so easily distinguishable from religion and science such as economics or even personal rivals, are a necessary and intricate part of the story. Moreover, as in the game of telephone, a remarkable aspect of how the rise of secularization is seen to be tied to the sickly and fading concept of religion has to do with the game of telephone effect--each passage of information has demonstrable distortion. Science causes secularization not so much in and of itself, but because people who disliked religion thought it should, and they shaped their stories to reflect as much.
Secularization: Human Agency
How are changing notions of human agency over time related to secularization?
Human agency is so close to us--is us--that we do not often think about, well, how we think about human agency. In many ways similar to Charles Taylor's project (in fact if one reads book reviews of Pfau this is the constant comparison that is brought up). In particular, through a close analysis of literary, theological, and philosophical texts, Pfau is concerned to trace how and why modernity began to be unable (or uninterested) in grasping the "trans-generational, hermeneutic dimension intrinsic to conceptual activity within humans" (33). In other words, Pfau is looking at how contemporary concepts like human freedom, rights, our assumption of the facts/values distinction, and the like have all come to be turned against tradition, hermeneutical interpretation, and so on, and are seen as (to borrow from Charles Taylor) an age of "authenticity" where the cry is to be yourself and accept yourself as you are as your own sealed little world. In effect modern identities attempt to defend themselves from the past by constructing a "radically autonomous and entrepreneurial model of agency--one that both produces and consumes both its own conceptual inventory and those social, moral, economic, and political meanings to whose construction that inventory is deemed uniquely conducive" (35-36). Much of postmodernism--often described as a reaction to modernity--is not immune to this, but affects a hypertrophic version such as in the most unreflective forms of identity politics on the Left or in the aggressive "naturalizing" of parochial, historically determined notions of agency that one often sees in the Religious Right. In particular, Pfau's analysis is incredibly illuminating for secularization narratives because he reveals how forms of how we envision and conceptualize human agency are very often deracinated forms that were initially constructed by the Christian revolution and broken down piecemeal through a variety of negotiations over time. In effect "in their linear and monochrome progression [through concepts such as ] 'modern' 'secular' and 'epoch' institute engagement and loss as the affective signature of human experience" and so write "disenchantment" right into our core experiences of ourselves (37). But things can be seen "otherwise."
This initially seems a bit more niche than many of the broad topics covered in other books on this list. As it turns out though it opens up into a rather extensive notion of how agency has been conceived over time. Originally, genius was a term that referred to the gods, daimons, demons, faerie, muses, and other creatures influencing the mortal realm. As time has gone on, to simplify the story quite a bit, genius is now a reference to the inner potentials and achievements of a person. This is important because it helps us key into one of the many variables allowing us to understand our our perception of the world at a phenomenological level has changed. When one speaks these days of the "hiddenness" of God, we often believe we "intuitively" know what that means. God does not "appear" to be present. But in many ways the expectation of what that appearance looks like has changed. To see an Isaac Newton, for the ancients, would have been to see the hand of God blessing a creature with insight. Today, we often merely see the high IQ of an individual. When we talk about things like "disenchantment" these types of valence flips in our expectations are incredibly important and the concept of "genius" provides an intriguing doorway to analyze concepts of human agency over time.
Secularization: Academia
How is secularization related to the methods, institutions, and personalities of academia?
Secularization--especially in its self-proclaimed heyday in the 1960's and early 70's--was often touted as a natural or quasi-natural phenomenon. Which is to say, secularization comes about as the inevitable result of history or science or technology or even human nature. Much of this was a holdover from Positivist ideas like August Comte's notion of the three stages of humanity (religious, then metaphysical, then scientific). Ironically, this three stage program is itself a holdover from Christian historiography and in particular its most powerful expression in Joachim of Fiore. Nonetheless, as Christian Smith and the various contributors to this volume argue, secularization was a program that was imagined, fought for, and evangelized. Smith's two essays on secularization in higher education and the publishing world of sociology and anthropology (which tilt the scale at a whopping 170 pages altogether) are worth the price of admission alone. A really fascinating series of histories that have largely been forgotten, but are essential for understanding where we are today in America.
A handy and mercifully short guide to how universities in America shaped and were shaped by secularization. Far from some explicitly anti-religious fervor, it was a largely innocuous byproduct of specialization and the rise of the humanities. However, that said, Roberts and Turner nonetheless do rightly point out that the aspirations of many secularizers in the humanities did reach religious levels of zeal (and often co-opted religious terms and even entire worldviews). The humanities were, after all, originally meant to replace religion (in particular, Protestantism) which had reigned for so long as the central powerhouse of knowledge. When this edifice began to crumble, it was not enough for its opponents to rejoice in its weakness, something had to be ready to take over the functions of unity that it previously enacted. Thus the highest irony here is that if the intent of secularization was initially not anti-religious, in order for it to be successful it had to parody and sometime wholesale supplant by taking over and secularizing Protestant theology. This book can be seen as a helpful primer for the longer work by George Marsden, The Soul of the University: From Protestant Establishment, to Established Nonbelief (which I have yet to read in full, hence it doesn't make the list officially. See? I can sort of follow my own rules).
Until recently, it has gone mostly without remark about how theology and religious practice have been more or less ignored or even written out of historical reconstructions. This in turn gives the anachronistic--and indeed, incorrect--view that many thinkers were in a sense proto-secularists who were bushwhacking the path leading to where we are now, or at least where good secularists say we ought to want to be. This historiographical phenomenon fascinates me, and I have written a bit on it under the somewhat sensationalized label "Deleting Theology." What this edited volume by Firestone and Jacobs does so well is to display that many ideas of secularization are driven by claiming a hall of secular heroes composed of thinkers who were in fact fully incorporating theological and religious ideas and practices into their system. In this sense there is a sort of circularity: earlier thinkers are represented as proto-secularist because of the way their thought is framed, which in turn gives warrant to a particularly accented "secular" line leading to the present day. When theological and religious ideas are put back into their proper places, however, the picture begins to complexify considerably.
One of the necessary evils of doing history is dividing it into more workable segments based upon what is thought to be some essence or family resemblance in a given period. The problem is that these periodizations, while useful and for the most part unavoidable, can turn around and take on a life of their own. One of the more famous examples of this is how often "the Middle ages" (or even more aggressively, "The Dark Ages") serves as a shorthand to dismiss an entire thousand-year chunk of time and everything in it. For secularization this has proven particularly salient as it allows one to lump together Christianity, Christendom, theology, superstition, tyranny, barbarism, and a whole host of other unpleasant things. Kathleen Davis has done us a favor by tracing exactly how this trope--in particular through the charge of backwards "feudalism"--has actually shaped historical consciousness over time. As Europe developed its own narrative of secularization, the "other" that it wanted to identify and so marginalize--the religious, the sacred, etc.--ironically came to play a more and more central--albeit negative--role. The problem is that the Dark Ages (and with it things like feudalism) are myths. An irrational myth as such haunts the foundations of our transition as humankind into a more civilized, rational age.
This book blew my mind when it first came out. A very similar approach to Peter Harrison's Territories above, Cavanaugh wants to contest the popular notion that "religion is especially prone to causing violence." To do this, however, Cavanaugh looks at how the categories "religious" and "secular" are in fact twin categories that are constructed simultaneously. As such, the claim that "religion is prone to violence" is actually a sophisticated philosophical and political power move that relies upon particular configurations of power to function. There is in fact, says Cavanaugh, no transhistorical or transcultural essence to religion that would allow one with any consistency to distinguish it from supposedly secular phenomenon. To back up this provocative claim, Cavanaugh enacts a truly Herculean act of scholarship looking at how the category of "religion" evolved over time (chapters two and three, which form the heart of the book, have nearly 700 footnotes between them). Like all of the books in this list, it is hard to do justice to the complex arguments and the book really just needs to be read to truly be appreciated.
Secularization in Literature
Perhaps one of the oddest historical associations--especially for the religious among us like myself who love a good novel--is that the novel was conceived originally as a genre meant to supplant religion. As George Lukacs wrote in his Theory of the Novel for example: "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." The novel is meant to achieve a world-defining coherence that is purely immanent, purely defined without reference beyond itself in which meaning can bootstrap itself upward, so to speak. In Erich Auerbach's magnificent book Mimesis looking at how the world is represented through the course of Western thought (and in my decidedly non-expert opinion, it is still unmatched in its analysis) the eventual secularization of meaning as Lukacs sees it also, for Auerbach, terminates in the novel as a genre. Auerbach grounds this secularization as starting--ironically enough--in the self-emptying of Christ: "The story of Christ, with its ruthless mixture of everyday reality and the highest and most sublime tragedy, which had conquered the classical rule of styles" (Auerbach, Mimesis, 555). Vincent Pecora in this fantastic book traces another, alternative strong within the novel: one of a rediscovery of God. Here the dark side of secularization--the loss of meaning, the indifference of the world, the impotence of human will--all in turn cry out for a longing for God. A wonderful analysis that reminds us how much secularization is affected not by science, but by literary and historical representations.
Continuing with the theme of the novel as a genre meant to displace God and religion we turn to an even more specific instance of that goal: science fiction. The Victorian period--saturated as it was with the professionalization of science, the Darwinian controversies, and radical social change--is often painted as an era that lost its faith in God. There is some truth to this, but what is often missed is how little science actually played into this. It was rather the dissemination of radical sci-fi visions of humanity coming of age, exploring a vast and daunting universe, that prepared the Victorian imagination for a world without God. Much as H.P. Lovecraft was to do with his notions of "Cosmic Horror" which served as an intentional inversion of the Christian universe, science fiction in the Victorian period "with its pointedly unrealistic realism ... confronted problems and questions posed b a possible future without religious belief while appealing to an ew readerly desire to fill a void that secularism helped to create" (17).
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