This secular moment

This is our moment: this secular moment.

The question of the moral and spiritual foundation of secular civilization is everywhere. You can see it in New York Times columnist David Brooks’s 2023 piece in The Atlantic: How America Got Mean.

In the article, Brooks describes a 1950s, post-war America on firm moral/spiritual foundations in contrast to today’s moral/spiritual vacuum and free-for-all. Brooks concludes that our current condition is why America is a polarized, truthless mess.

Brooks says Americans today are sad, mean, lonely, bitter, and violent. He writes that this is true generally, not just on one side of the political divide. People turn to politics to provide meaning in their lives, which politics is inherently incapable of providing.

So we end up with political tribalism and Manichaeism: us versus them. Light versus dark.

Brooks argues that the reason for the change in our situation was a decline in moral education in America, beginning in the 1960s: “Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much.” So Brooks proposes various forms of moral instruction to give people skills in living a moral life.

Brooks has done everyone a favor by showing what the current crisis is not. It is not the result of technology, nor the breakdown of the family, nor demographics nor economic inequality. You could add that it is not the result of racism, sexism or homophobia either, though all of the above contribute to the crisis.

The crisis in America—and in the West generally—is a spiritual crisis.

But Brooks has no idea why that happened. Why was there a decline in shared morality? All he can say is that there was a post-war moment of spiritual clarity “and then it mostly went away.”

Well, you and I know exactly what happened. No one ever said the Death of God would be easy. Nietzsche knew it would be very difficult.

In a recent book, I recounted the same change Brooks describes and called it, “The Death of God Come Home to Roost.”

That is why this is the secular moment.

The old forms of cultural reassurance are now unreliable. The story of human purpose told by traditional religions is not believable. Theism is over.

Of course many people, maybe still a majority, engage in religious life and even many of the non-affiliated “nones” say they believe in God.

But if they were serious about that, Americans would not be sad, mean, lonely, bitter, and violent.

So it is now the responsibility of secularists to build a healthy and flourishing future civilization.

Unfortunately, secularism is itself divided as to the foundation of a secular civilization.

Brooks points to a very specific claim that American post-war spirituality made—that “the moral law was built into the universe.” He associates this commitment with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which is a common juxtaposition. We are all familiar with Dr. King’s borrowed formulation: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I have called the question of whether reality is beneficent, quoting the theologian Bernard Lonergan: Is the universe on our side?

Secularists are split on this crucial issue. Traditionally secularists adhered to forms of materialism to counter theism. This meant that the universe was at best indifferent to human striving. Thus, a few years ago, Joseph Carter wrote an op-ed in The New York Times with the headline, The Universe Doesn’t Care About Your Purpose.

And this view of the universe as indifferent could often, as Father Richard Rohr has pointed out, become the view that the universe is actually hostile to us. As Sam Harris put it in The End of Faith, the universe “sustains us, it would seem only to devour us at its leisure.”

This belief in a hostile universe need not lead to the cultural dead-end that we are currently experiencing. In pointing to his famous “pale blue dot” image, Carl Sagan hoped that the knowledge that we are alone in a dark universe would cause us to be more loving and kind to each other—and to the planet.

But I think Philip Kitcher turned out to be right and Sagan’s hope could not be sustained. Kitcher wrote in Living With Darwin in 2009, at the height of the New Atheist breakthrough, that ordinary people would have a hard time accepting the materialist viewpoint. Kitcher would not be surprised at the spiritual crisis we are in.

Still, if materialism is true, and the universe is indifferent, or even hostile, that’s just the way it is. It may be a grim satisfaction to know the truth, but it is still the truth. And there must be some way to build a flourishing secular civilization on the basis of this truth.

My only criticism of secularists who believe this is that I don’t see much building going on. Secularists of this type seem to spend most of their time denouncing religion and engaging in the same winner-take-all politics as everyone else.

There is another way. Many secularists are afraid to give meaning, purpose, teleology—that is, a rich metaphysics—any consideration for fear that such a viewpoint must lead right back to traditional religion.

But as the example of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy shows, you can view the universe as value-based without any hint of the wonder-working, supernatural God. It is true that Whitehead used the term God in his philosophy—other process thinkers do not—but Whitehead’s God cannot alter natural processes and is thoroughly compatible with the most rigorous scientific investigation of the natural world.

Indeed, process thinkers view materialism as the threat to scientific progress. They ask, how did David Hume know that the eye sees?

I don’t mean to try to resolve this dispute here. I only want to affirm that a deeper and richer secularism—a hallowed secularism, as the writer E.L. Doctorow termed it in the novel City of God—is possible.

Many secularists, especially those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” are probably trying out this path. These are the people who made up the audience for the "On Being" radio program that used to be heard on NPR.

This approach—hallowed secularism—is having a hard time getting born. Right now it does not even have a real home anywhere.

It may turn out that this form of secularism will be the only antidote to Brooks’s mean America. If that turns out to be so, then it is even more important for secularism to get moving to flesh out this position and begin to redeem America.

We are not alien to the universe. It is our home.

Our hopes and dreams are not illusions but are the result of the same evolutionary processes that have formed everything else about us.

We are not exceptions. Our self-consciousness is the highest point of natural development. Our compassion is exactly what the universe is looking for.

We should accept the gift that we are and try to further the positive potential that is all around us.

When we see that as our human purpose, we won’t be sad, mean, lonely, bitter and violent. Instead, we will be joyful, giving, communal and peaceful.

That is the direction we need to go. And it is the responsibility of secularists to help get us there.