Seeking a secular story of existence

In the early years of the 21st century, the New Atheist wave, headed by Christopher Hitchens, gleefully anticipated the decline of religion, which they considered a malign influence in the world. While they were not uniformly anti-spiritual—Sam Harris was especially spiritually oriented—they were largely cheerful materialists. Undirected forces and matter were the stuff of existence. Mark Lilla described this materialist orientation in political terms: secularists had no truths worth killing over, unlike religious believers.

Only one member of the New Atheist wave—Philip Kitcher in Living with Darwin—expressed the concern that this materialist worldview might prove demoralizing for ordinary people.

How do things look now, approaching 20 years later?

In America and much of the West, the decline in religious affiliation accelerated in the new century. Today, approximately 30% of American adults identify themselves as “nones”—reporting that they are unaffiliated with any religious tradition. Many former houses of worship stand empty. No American religious figure today captures the attention of the culture the way that Reinhold Niebuhr did in the 1950s and Billy Graham did in the 1960s.

Religion is definitely in decline.

It might be objected that religion has a tremendous influence in Republican Party politics. This is true, but it is not a sign of religious renewal. Religious leaders want taxpayer money for religious schools and since their political coalition won in 2024, they are getting it. But interest group politics is all that this reflects. The fact that a nonbeliever like President Donald Trump leads this coalition is all you need to know about the decline of religion in America.

But has the decline of religion led to a flourishing secular society? The religiously conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says no. He argues in a recent column that

the religious order of the Western world is arguably post-Christian but not especially secular. As the sociologist Christian Smith wrote in a new book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete,” the decline of institutional religious faith has not given us the “secular city” envisioned in the 1960s. Instead, the rise of “supernatural, enchanted, magical, esoteric, occultic” ideas among the younger generation means that Christianity now confronts a strange postmodern version of the paganism it once overcame — a cultural situation in which its own supernatural claims are no longer a stumbling block but perhaps an essential selling point.

Tom Krattenmaker told a similar story on OnlySky: we nonbelievers have not yet developed compelling secular social structures that provide the benefits of religious community.

And it isn’t clear that it can be done.

We could expand this baleful tale of the decline of religion in America not having positive effects by pointing out that as religion has declined, American public life has deteriorated. It has become more irrational and unhappy.

Of course, that observation might just reflect the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Or, more scientifically, correlation is not causation.

Maybe the decline of religion has nothing to do with our current political plight. Maybe that plight is the result of social media and declining economic opportunity.

It might even be that we secularists are fine and only our political opponents, overwhelmingly churchgoers, are increasingly crazy.

While discussions of causation in society are inevitably speculative, I’m confident that the decline of religion has something to do with the current condition of public life. I say this because of the evident loss of meaning in America. There is a general feeling of rootlessness and hopelessness in the culture. This is why the success of the Trump coalition has not led to any feeling of satisfaction.

The fact that churchgoers are as angry and unhappy as everyone else just means that the Death of God affects the churches too, which would come as no surprise to Nietzsche.

We are all still substituting political affiliation for the healthy social bonding and community that religious life once produced. That is why I think the decline of religion has something to do with our plight and why we need to overcome that decline.

How can we build a flourishing, stable and confident secular civilization? As Ryan Cragun and Jesse Smith show in Leaving Religion, people do not need church-like substitutes to live satisfying secular lives.

But there is one accomplishment of religion that secularism must achieve—the establishment and exploration of a story of the meaning of human life. Every culture develops at least a certain orientation to reality. This is certainly true of Indian, Buddhist, Islamic and Chinese civilizations today and has been true of the great indigenous civilizations of the past.

The organized nonreligious movement in the West has been pretending that this is not necessary. But our failure to address the deepest questions of existence has kept the secular project from moving forward.

Until recently, Western secularism loosely adopted the Christian story, substituting enlightenment and progress for the coming Kingdom of God. But that substitute story lacks a coherent cosmology and ontology without a divinity to undergird it. Today, that story has lost its appeal.

Roughly speaking, there are two candidates for the secular story of existence. These two approaches correspond to the negative and positive answers to the famous question posed by the theologian Bernard Lonergan—is the universe on our side?

The materialist story favored by the New Atheists asserts that the universe is a dark and lonely place. Random forces and matter lead to unpredictable outcomes, like the emergence of life, but do not yield any meaningful pattern. Humans have evolved a need for meaning and purpose and a fundamentally moral orientation to existence. But these feelings do not reflect anything in reality. They are an evolutionary spandrel, arising out of the need for social organization without constant coercion. In other words, our feelings are illusory.

This story is brisk, a little tragic, but it is bracing. Science has certainly advanced following it.

The other story is more difficult to describe but it better coheres with human yearning. In this story, the universe is ordered and rational and can be said to lead naturally to complex organization, life, consciousness, self-consciousness, empathy, generosity and love. This is the universe as understood by Alfred North Whitehead, classically, and recently by Bobby Azarian in his book, The Romance of Reality. In this story, human needs reflect reality.

We secularists do not need to go to war over these two stories. But we have been wasting time with relatively insignificant matters and even extraneous issues—such as political concern over the influence of religion and the separation of church and state.

Fighting about religion is not going to usher in a secular civilization. We need to be debating these stories among ourselves and working to develop social structures appropriate to each. Eventually history will choose one, or combine them, somehow, or come up with something quite different.

But we need to get moving. It’s been 20 years since the New Atheist wave arrived in America. Twenty years after the death of Jesus, the rudiments of the Christian story had already been worked out and Paul was organizing churches all over the Mediterranean. In contrast, we secularists have been wasting our time.