When religion gets secularism wrong

As someone on the political right, I’ve had to take up the cudgel for secularism many times.

By pure chance (or algorithm), I happened across this article on Christianity vs. secularism in the United States.

It’s mainly concerned with birth rates and the question of how many people in the US are truly Christian. As a Jew, I don’t have much of a dog in that particular fight. But there was one section that struck me as important.

The author, who appears to be a conservative Catholic, seeks to delineate the differences between Christian and secular worldviews. His conclusions are, needless to say, much to the latter’s disadvantage.

As someone who is at least nominally on the political right, I’ve had to take up the cudgel for secularism many times. In addition, there is my experience living in Israel, where the divide between the religious and the secular is much contested. For both reasons, this is an issue on which I often feel the need to comment.

I have no idea whether the author’s description of the Christian worldview is accurate. However, the section on secularism struck me as deeply problematic.

First, it clearly equates secularism with progressivism, or at least the author’s idea of progressivism. This is inadequate, to say the least. A large number of secular people are liberal, conservative, libertarian, or adhere to other belief systems. Even if we put that aside, the author’s view of secularism is quite inaccurate.

The author’s comparison is as follows:

Christianity’s worldview:

Nature: God created nature, which is to be respected. Nature sets limitations, and the limits are good.

Hierarchy: Hierarchy is natural and, therefore, good. Loving authority reflects God’s created order.

Egalitarianism: Christian egalitarianism simply recognizes each person's individual dignity. It doesn’t mandate equal outcomes.

Meaning: Sacrifice leads to meaning and holiness. Love without sacrifice is mere selfishness, and suffering is redemptive.

Sexuality: God created man and woman in His image. God’s plan for sexuality and marriage is oriented toward family and children.

The prevailing secular worldview:

Nature: The universe exists to serve individual happiness. Dominating nature—through cloning, abortion, or gender reassignment surgery in the name of surpassing limitations is practically a mandate.

Hierarchy: Power is the ultimate currency. Hierarchy is acceptable if you’re on top but intolerable if you’re at the bottom.

Egalitarianism: Everyone’s outcomes should be the same because everyone is the same. Different outcomes can, therefore, only be attributed to injustice. This does not apply to the elites. See Hierarchy.

Meaning: Pleasure is life’s highest fulfillment. Suffering must be avoided at all costs, and sacrifice is only to be admired if followed by success.

Sexuality: Sex is the most pleasurable thing in existence. Therefore, sexual exploration is the highest form of self-realization. Children, like venereal diseases are a negative outcome to be avoided.

I take the author’s description of the Christian worldview as accurate both for the sake of argument and because my knowledge of Christianity is limited. I imagine there are probably many Christians who would disagree with the author’s description, but I leave the argument to them.

Regarding his description of the secular worldview, however, I think it is almost fatally flawed, for the following reasons:

Nature: There are, in fact, a very large number of secular people who do not believe in “dominating nature” and many of them violently oppose it.

The most obvious example is environmentalists, who see the domination of nature as an absolute metaphysical evil. Man, in their view, is a rapacious monster who is scouring the planet in the service of greed and tyrannical arrogance.

They see nature, in contrast, as nurturing and benign. To some, the planet itself is a living being that, in turn, gives all things life. As such, it must be protected from man’s dominating psychosis at nearly any cost, possibly including voluntary human extinction.

Even among non-environmentalists, there has long been a growing discomfort with industrial society and its discontents. We can see this in innumerable ways, such as NIMBY activism, a weakness for pseudoscience, distrust of the medical system, fear of “toxins” and pollution, and so on.

Hierarchy and Egalitarianism: I put these two together because they are on more or less the same topic. Moreover, the author’s claims regarding both are self-contradictory and, in many ways, obviously wrong.

For example, a very large number of secular people do not see power as the “ultimate currency” and many of them view not just hierarchy but power itself as an absolute evil. Power and power relationships, they believe, are inherently oppressive and must be overthrown. In their minds, hierarchy is never acceptable.

Moreover, the author acknowledges this in his section on egalitarianism. In it, he essentially admits that secularism does not believe in power as the “ultimate currency.” Instead, many secular people embrace an ethics of radical egalitarianism.

Now, the author is right that, in practice, this never applies to social and political elites. But he is not comparing practices so much as creeds. As he explicitly states, he is contrasting worldviews.

Even in this very broad sense, the author is again obviously wrong. Most secularists, I think, accept some form of hierarchy, if only by default. Even among the most liberal, this takes the form of a vaguely defined meritocracy. In some cases, such as followers of Ayn Rand (a militant atheist), secular people openly worship hierarchy and believe that egalitarianism is fundamentally evil.

Meaning: On this, the author is not just wrong but, I think, quite blinkered. Even the most progressive secularists hold fast to abstract ethics and ideas that give their lives meaning. These ethics and ideas are sometimes deranged, but they are moral imperatives that progressives hold sacred. If they must sacrifice and suffer for these ideals, more’s the better. There is an ascetic quality to progressivism that is often overlooked, and it is a grave mistake to underestimate its power and appeal.

Among secular people who are not progressive, their lives are most definitely not all about hedonism. Especially in countries like the US, whose culture is defined by the “Protestant work ethic,” most people work very hard and often thanklessly. They must do so to provide for themselves and their families.

This is a kind of suffering and sacrifice. It also does not always lead to success, though many Americans prefer to think otherwise. Nonetheless, even if a person’s efforts fail, the labor itself is seen as virtuous. The belief that it is inherently good to defer pleasure, perhaps indefinitely, in service of a larger goal is almost universal in American society.

Sexuality: I’ll go out on a limb here and say that to view sex as the “most pleasurable thing in existence” is simply to acknowledge reality. On a purely physical level, sex is maximum pleasure. A billion years of evolution have made it so for perfectly logical reasons. One can hardly blame people for pursuing it.

Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s true that most people view sex as a form of “self-realization.” It may be for some, but for most of the rest, it’s one of the pleasures of life that they hope to indulge in frequently.

This doesn’t make sex the be-all and end-all for them. Given Americans’ ferocious work ethic, sex is clearly not their highest priority. Their career is usually their primary vehicle of “self-realization.” This comes with its own problems, but it is quite far from sexual hedonism.

Even if Americans were all sexual hedonists, moreover, this would not necessarily be an entirely bad thing. If the 20th century proved anything, it’s that man can pursue far worse things than the perfect orgasm.

The author is right that secular people have fewer children. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t want children. In fact, by having fewer, they tend to invest more in each one. This isn’t because people with a large number of children are bad people. It’s simply a practical matter: There’s only so much to go around. The secular tendency toward fewer children has many drawbacks, of course, but it is far from a belief that children are a “venereal disease.”

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Ultimately, the author’s understanding of secularism serves his purposes. He wants to extol religion and demonize its rivals. As a result, he creates a caricature of secularism and then condemns it. His claims are convenient, but they are not true.

Secularism is not the satanic force he imagines. It is simply a way of being in the world. It is different from religion, but largely due to emphasis rather than opposition. That is, religion prioritizes God over the world while secularism prioritizes the world over God.

Despite pretensions, religion has never truly rejected the world because it cannot. Even monks have to eat now and then. In the same way, most secular people are not of the devil’s party. Many of them are atheists, but even atheists—whether they like it or not—live lives influenced by religion. The historian Tom Holland, for example, has often pointed out that an enormous number of secular and atheist ideologies are essentially Christian.

Secularism and religion are both human phenomena. As a result, both are flawed. If you want to criticize them, however, you have to get them right first. I don’t know whether this author gets religion right or not. I do know he gets secularism wrong. That is why, in the end, he fails to shed much light on either.