Secularism's third way

You can tell a lot about American culture by attending to the type of books that are reviewed in the New York Times book review section. Since 2015, there have been a lot of books about what has gone wrong in American public life and what, if anything, can be done about it.

On April 13, 2018, for example, Ari Berman reviewed four such books under the heading, “How Endangered Is American Democracy?”: How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; The Case Against Elections, by David Van Reybrouck; Our Damaged Democracy, by Joseph Califano, Jr.; and The People vs. Democracy, by Yascha Mounk.

So, it is telling that, although concern about American democracy hasn't abated, another subject is coming to the fore as a topic of interest: books that delve into the human condition and the meaning of life. On February 22, 2026, Jennifer Szalai reviewed two such books, about the human need to feel “valued and worthy of attention”: The Mattering Instinct by Rebecca Goldstein and Mattering by Jennifer Wallace. It seems American culture feels at sea and is trying to figure out what it believes.

The return of the prodigal son

A subcategory of this genre is of special interest to readers of OnlySky—the return of the prodigal son to some form of religious belief. In January, I wrote about two such instances: Charles Murray’s return to some form of faith in Taking Religion Seriously, and Robert Baird, another secularist who seemed to be flirting with religion, reviewing Ross Douthat’s book, Believe.

A new entry to this field appeared on March 1, 2026, when Timothy Egan reviewed Why I Am Not an Atheist by Christopher Beha. Beha’s saga is another of these atheist-turned-believer narratives. As tensions rise between religion and secularism, we may see more of these kinds of books, just as during the Cold War, there were many books by former Communists turned anti-Communists.

The basic trajectory of these books is that the author drifts into atheism as a kind of default position because our religions now are assumed to be unbelievable. But this atheistic position turns out not to be very satisfying. The book then unfolds the author’s gradual movement in the direction of the religious traditions, whether on the fringes or actually joining a particular tradition.

Beha’s book is of the latter type and, as befits someone who wrote a memoir about the year he read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series, The Whole Five Feet, he is really good at giving a capsule version of the intellectual traditions of atheism that he resolutely tried to live by into his 30s. Unlike Murray, Beha began life as a fully committed Roman Catholic and, upon discovering real love for a partner later in life, also rediscovers his love of God and fully returns to the Roman Catholic Church.

Beha’s book is important because he really was committed to the two atheistic worldviews that he identifies—scientific materialism and romantic idealism—and his inability to live within either one identifies a weakness in secularism. Beha explains the development of each of these approaches to atheism and why he found it impossible to live a flourishing human life within either one. He argues that scientific materialism, the position he says is conventionally associated with post-Enlightenment atheism, is no longer the dominant worldview within atheism, culturally speaking. Romantic idealism now dominates the non-religious culture in America and has devolved into the postmodernism that has now so unsettled American life on both the political left and right.

Beha’s book presents a challenge to secularism because if he is right that the two approaches he describes are the sum total of secular possibility, there will continue to be tremendous pressure on people to return to religion or at least to give religion a try. The specter of an unhappy life outside the religious traditions that Beha presents casts a pall on any attempt to create a flourishing secular civilization.

Beha moved to what he calls scientific materialism upon leaving his childhood Roman Catholicism. This is the traditional atheist worldview in the West. In this atheistic worldview, the universe consists of undirected matter and forces. Beha describes his admiration for the major figures who advanced scientific materialism, starting with Francis Bacon and moving on through Descartes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Darwin and Bertrand Russell. But he ultimately concludes that scientific materialism fails. For one thing, it cannot explain crucial aspects of the reality it purports to explain—it cannot account for the Big Bang, quantum theory or human consciousness. Even more important to Beha, scientific materialism does not allow for a healthy human life of freedom and meaning. There can be no freedom because matter and forces obey determinative physical laws. And there cannot be meaning because meaning is not material; it is neither matter nor force. The human need for meaning is a kind of illusion. Beha had to leave materialism behind to try to solve what he calls the “riddle of my life.”

Romantic idealism

The competing atheist tradition is romantic idealism. Ironically, both traditions agree that values and meaning in human life are in no sense real. However, whereas materialism sets forth a strictly objective account of reality in which values and meaning play no role, romantic idealism teaches that human beings are the originators of value and meaning. Humans choose their own values. The progenitors of this tradition are Spinoza, Rousseau and Kant, but it takes real shape under the teachings of Nietzsche, including, of course, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God.

In Beha’s account, Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche; then Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Camus turned Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche into existentialist atheism, which took the absurdity of human life as a presumed starting point. Reason is useless as an explanation of life and there is no possibility of acquiring anything like objective knowledge of the world. Our values are personal and fleeting. Our lives have no intrinsic meaning. In romantic idealism, suicide is a constant temptation. Beha ends his account of this worldview with Richard Rorty, who adopted a stance of “irony” in describing human life, in the sense that there was no rational basis for our adopting the values that human beings adopt.

Beha is scathing about the consequences of Rorty’s views in particular and the postmodernism he is a part of in general. Rorty died in 2007 and did not have to live with the consequences of his complacent “irony.” According to Beha, we can thank Rorty and company for the breakdown of American public life, especially the rise of irrationalism in our politics, from the anti-vaccine movement to the denial of climate change and the rise of Donald Trump. But, Beha admits, this intellectual dead end was arrived at in good faith. Irrationalism is just where atheism ends up. Beha found himself unable to live a post-modern life.

Beha escaped the consequences of atheism through a contingency—he met a wonderful woman and rediscovered love as the basis of life. But clearly, Beha feels that this approach would not be possible without some kind of God within a religious tradition. While that turned out to be fine with him, where does this leave the rest of us secularists?

Beha’s account of atheism is merely descriptive. He is not making an argument that there could not be others ways of life within the atheist tradition; but he is unaware of any. (And, of course, I am leaving out a great deal, including Beha’s very interesting treatment of Wittgenstein.) If we value secular life, we should be thinking about how to make it more attractive and sustainable for people like Beha. Specifically, we should be developing alternative secular worldviews. These other options are not going to be wholly new or alien. Beha is right that materialism and idealism are two basic positions in Western thought that are going to be starting points for any secular position. Nevertheless, there is no reason to simply accept the inadequacies in current secular thinking that Beha points out.

Newer forms of secular thinking

Let me offer one possibility just to show what such new secular thinking could be like. In 2020, David Hinton, a noted translator and Western expert in Eastern traditions, published China Root. Hinton was trying to show that Americans misunderstood the Chinese Taoist tradition that was exported to Japan and became Zen Buddhism. That original Chinese tradition, called Ch’an in Chinese, adapted Buddhist thought without becoming a form of Buddhism. But that Chinese tradition was culturally appropriated in Japan, where metaphysical elements were added to it that were foreign to its Taoist roots. It was this changed tradition that was exported to the United States and the West as the perplexing Zen Buddhism with which Americans are familiar. In contrast, Ch’an itself was what Hinton regards as an empirical tradition.

Hinton suggests that Western thought would benefit from the study of Ch’an in its original formulation. His suggestion speaks directly to secularism, because for Hinton, Ch’an was a secular, albeit rich and deep, response to the breakdown of a form of Chinese monotheism. China experienced its own death of God at the end of the Chou dynasty in the 3rd century BCE. Eventually, China developed as an alternative a humanistic framework based on empirical reality in Taoism and Ch’an. China was about 3000 years ahead of the West in creating a healthy secular worldview and we can learn a great deal from China's experience:

The Chinese model is particularly relevant to our contemporary situation for a number of reasons. First, it is made up of empirically based insights coming not from belief or abstract speculation, but from close attention to the deep nature of cosmic process and our everyday experience. And so it comports with modern scientific understanding, while adding an empirical phenomenology far more powerful and nuanced than anything found in western culture. Second, it is profoundly gynocentric, a cosmology that sees the Cosmos as female in its essence and whose deep sources lie in wisdom traditions of gynocentric paleolithic cultures. Third, it is what we might now call “deep ecology,” meaning it weaves human consciousness into the “natural world” at the most fundamental levels, a radical alternative to our culture’s traditional assumptions.

Since we secularists probably have to choose between materialism and idealism, Hinton offers us a kind of materialism very different from what we are used to, but at the same time, one with all the advantages that empiricism offers over postmodernism. I am not saying that Ch’an as Hinton understands it is our answer to Beha, but it shows us what such an answer might look like. Our ultimate goal will be accomplished when the New York Times begins to review books by people who found in secularism the flourishing life of meaning and purpose they had been looking for.