One of the things I ponder regularly is the relationship between what seems to be contradictory movements between secularism and rampant spiritual experimentation.

On one hand I hear groups regularly pushing the idea that the advance of scientific learning pushes away religious superstition. These folks are deeply convinced that science and religion are absolutely contradictory and that religion loses every time. Great proofs are rolled out including historical cosmological errors and medical science. Antibiotics and hospitals are more trust worthy than asking your minister to pray for you.

This is of course an old notion. The assumption at the turn of the last century was that religion would progressively withdraw and we would become rational, productive and peaceful instead of superstitious and conflict ridden. This has obviously not happened.

Even thought religion was supposed to have receded, it has in fact continued to flourish and even proliferate. I’m reading John Suk’s book on his journey to doubt and finding his chapter 4 helpful in terms of describing some current trends that I see as well. Here is a nice paragraph describing what he found in graduate school.

I personally became aware of this trend when I was in graduate school and realized that all of my fellow PhD students could define what Aristotle’s concept of “epideictic oratory” was all about, and could explain the importance of social networks for corporate communication, because reason and theories mattered to these people. But the number and variety of faith choices that surrounded me was astonishing. There was a Wiccan, a Muslim or two, atheistic Marxists, and one or two New Age believers in Mother Earth and Gaea. After class was over and I would speak with them about their beliefs, they bristled when I suggested that ultimately only one of the many religions represented could ultimately be correct, or that their version of whatever faith they belonged to wasn’t the orthodox version. The kind of rational thinking they brought to their rhetorical studies seemed to have no standing in their spiritual lives. When it came to faith, as far as these PhD candidates were concerned, rationality just didn’t matter.

John D. Suk. Not Sure: A Pastor’s Journey from Faith to Doubt (Kindle Locations 1262-1268). Kindle Edition.

As a culture we are getting both more secular and more religious at the same time. How does this work?

I reread CS Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters” recently for our men’s group and was struck by the advice Uncle Screwtape offers his apprentice Wormwood

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don’t let him get away from that invaluable ‘real life’. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation’. Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

Lewis, C. S. (2009). The Screwtape Letters (p. 4). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

I remember reading this and chuckling thinking about the feuding going on “between science and religion”. Here Lewis has Screwtape suggesting that Wormwood should keep his patient FROM reading science, hard science while the reputation today is that Christians should keep their youth from studying science because it might lead them astray. What a delightful irony!

Why does Lewis have Screwtape take this approach starting from chapter 1? If you read on in the book you’ll notice Lewis’ assertion that the way for Wormwood to snack on a human is to keep they blithely disconnected from as much reality as possible. “You are there to fuddle him”, not to teach him.

Then it struck me that the answer was there all the time. It’s been obvious that in a secular society religion is progressively private. “Believe what you want as long as you keep it to yourself.” Keep your little medicine bag tucked under your shirt. Keep your crystals and your statues at home and your sacred stone in your pocket. Do what you want with it, believe what you want, but don’t keep it to yourself.

The subtle subtext of this vast cultural agreement is that religion is nothing like hard science. The deep agnosticism is assumed leaving people to pursue whatever they experience as “working” in delivering experiences of meaning and comfort which is how culturally we have defined “spirituality”.

One of the most significant causalities in all of this is of course the project of religion itself. Religion is a communal project through which groups of people attempt to come to answer foundational questions about existence. Religion is supposed to put us in better touch with what is real and the task is so important and so large that it requires us to work in community and in all seriousness. This is of course lost in the spiritual salad bar in in the private corner of our agnostic context. There can be no community in spirituality beyond the most superficial and haphazard. It is rude to suggest that one individual’s spiritual path might be drawing them away from ultimate reality and once you exert a common experience and an objective reality you entertain the possibility that someone will tell you that you are wrong which for many people is too much of an un-spiritual experience for their tastes.

Demonstration? Look at Oprah, our cultural high priestess. She’s famous for being the spiritual pusher to millions in our culture but did you ever notice that her list of gurus never narrows? Religion, which requires community, order, communal discipline and doctrine (yes, all religions have it) will emerge from spiritual conversations once they come out into the light of day. At that point the word we all learned to hate as toddlers gets aired: “no”. Once “no” is asserted, you either break community and maintain your “spirituality” or you have religion.

Religion of course has its own problems not the least of which is “cosmopolitan relativism” but that’s for a different post.

So where does this leave ordinary people?

The track record of secular atheism is pretty consistent. As a system it fails to answer whole ranges of questions that religions have traditionally grappled with. As a spirituality it tends to be too dark and nihilistic. Secular atheism simply offers no reason to compel someone to believe in it even if you believe its true. If you can’t ground an “ought” in a metaphysic why “ought” you to believe in secular atheism? Why believe in any truth at all because the universe is free of “ought”.

Furthermore, I think the fact that people are getting both more secular and religious at the same time demonstrates that secular atheism is emotionally unsatisfying apart from a certain elitism and condescension that consistently marks the literature of its chief evangelists. Regular people face uncertainty, loss, and the thirst for meaning and importance, none of which secular atheism affords.

Because religion is a project analogous to science (a quest for a communal knowledge of the real) it will not cease. Secularism will continue to maintain itself as an attempt a a useful meeting place while religious consensus proves unobtainable. Spiritualities as we are seeing them will likely stay private, individual and therefore insufficient to actually offer what those seeking them are looking for which is truth, which is ultimately, always public.