Abstract
This chapter argues that the terms in which the discussion concerning secularization and toleration is regularly framed fail to capture essential ingredients of our situation. Toleration, on the one hand, has morphed into nonjudgmentalism. The term “secular,” on the other hand, fails to capture a pervasive religiosity discernible in modern progressivism—a religiosity oriented toward an immanent sacredness rather than toward the transcendent sacred of traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In the light of this distinction, this chapter discusses the contemporary culture wars and the resources for toleration that can be found in each disposition.
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Notes
- 1.
José Casanova explains: “In one form or another, with the possible exception of Alexis de Tocqueville, Vilfredo Pareto, and William James, the thesis of secularization was shared by all the founding fathers: from Karl Marx to John Stuart Mill, from Auguste Comte to Herbert Spencer, from E.B. Tylor to James Frazer, from Ferdinand Toennies to Georg Simmel, from Emile Durkheim to Max Weber, from Wilhelm Wundt to Sigmund Freud, from Lester Ward to William G. Sumner, from Robert Park to George H. Mead. Indeed, the consensus was such that not only did the theory remain uncontested but apparently it was not even necessary to test it, since everybody took it for granted.” Casanova, Public Religions, 17.
- 2.
Writing in 1968, the sociologist Peter Berger expressed a common view in predicting that “[b]y the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a world-side secular culture.” Berger, “A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion,” 3.
- 3.
The assumption or perhaps the prejudice has been that, as Learned Hand put it, “tolerance ends where faith begins.” Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 72.
- 4.
See Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
- 5.
“The world today, with [the] exceptions [of Europe and of ‘an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education’], is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken.” Berger, The Desecularization of the World, 2.
- 6.
Bruce, God Is Dead.
- 7.
Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light.
- 8.
Lipka, “A Closer Look.”
- 9.
This theme runs through many of the essays in Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, Rethinking Secularism (see especially Alfred Stepan’s contribution); and Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Variaties of Secularism.
- 10.
Casanova, Public Religions.
- 11.
Philpott , Shah, and Toft, God’s Century With respect to religion itself, the authors explain that “contrary to . . . predictions, the portion of the world population adhering to Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism jumped from 50 percent in 1900 to 64 percent in 2000.” Id. at 2. Moreover, “a dramatic and worldwide increase in the political influence of religion has occurred in roughly the past forty years.” Id. at 9 (emphasis deleted).
- 12.
Berger, The Desecularization of the World.
- 13.
This argument is distilled from Smith, Pagans and Christians.
- 14.
Dworkin, Religion without God.
- 15.
Ibid., 10.
- 16.
Ibid., 6, 20–21.
- 17.
Ibid., 5, 42–43.
- 18.
Ibid., 38–39 (emphasis added).
- 19.
Ibid., 40.
- 20.
Marty, “Religio-Secular… Again”; See also Ledewitz, Hallowed Secularism.
- 21.
Dworkin, Religion without God, 2–3.
- 22.
This point is developed at greater length in Smith, Pagans and Christians, 31–40.
- 23.
A major supporting work is Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.
- 24.
Ferry, A Brief History of Thought, 243.
- 25.
Ibid., 244–45 (emphasis in original).
- 26.
Kronman, “Is Modern Paganism True?”
- 27.
Cf. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, 135 asserting that “paganism […] was such a lightweight religion as to constitute a very model of secularity.”
- 28.
Charles Taylor thus explains that the concept of the secular became important in Christian discourse in describing “profane time, the time of ordinary historical succession which the human race lives through between the Fall and the Parousia [or second coming of Christ].” Charles, “Modes of Secularism,” 32.
- 29.
Stolzenberg, “The Profanity of Law,” 51.
- 30.
Secular “Latin saeculum, a word of uncertain origin, meant ‘generation, age.’ It was used in early Christian texts for the ‘temporal world’ (as opposed to the ‘spiritual world’) …. The more familiar modern English meaning ‘non-religious’ emerged in the 16th century.” Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins, 465.
- 31.
Gray, Black Mass.
- 32.
Ibid., 1.
- 33.
See Forst, “Tolerance as a Virtue of Justice,” 3 “[I]t is essential for the concept of toleration that the tolerated beliefs or practices are considered to be objectionable and in an important sense wrong”; Cf. Fletcher, “The Instability of Tolerance,” 158 observing that in “a posture of indifference” there is “no issue of tolerance, properly understood.”
- 34.
Murray , The Madness of Crowds.
- 35.
Taylor, “Israel Folau.”
- 36.
See, for example, 1 Corin. 6:9–10 (KJV) (“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, not adulterers, not effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”)
- 37.
Brown, “Israel Folau and Augusta.”
- 38.
Wales, “Israel Folau and the Hateful Intolerance.”
- 39.
For an insightful presentation of this position, see Gregory, Salvation at Stake.
- 40.
Dworkin , Justice for Hedgehogs, 330; in this vein, Martha Minow and Joseph Singer declare that today, equality is “a foundational value […]. It is a fundamental principle in our society that all people are […] entitled to be treated with equal concern and respect.” Minow and Singer, “In Praise of Foxes: Pluralism as Fact and Aid to the Pursuit of Justice,” 903–5.
- 41.
Locke, Letter, 113, 119.
- 42.
Smith, “Toleration and Liberal Commitments,” 256–57.
- 43.
Decisions and writings treating this obligation of neutrality as axiomatic are legion. For one recent example, see Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018).
- 44.
See generally Walsham, Charitable Hatred; Ethan Shagan observes that “[b]efore the 1640s, the state’s prerogative to punish religious deviance was almost unanimously praised as moderate, while broad claims for religious toleration were almost unanimously condemned as extremist.” Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, 288.
- 45.
Walzer, On Toleration, 52.
- 46.
Smith, “Toleration and Liberal Commitments.”
- 47.
Smith, “The Restoration of Tolerance.”
- 48.
Dupuis , Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.
- 49.
Matt. 5:39.
- 50.
Witte , Law and Protestantism; VanDrunen, “The Context of Natural Law.”
- 51.
The following argument is developed at greater length in Smith, “Die and Let Live?”
- 52.
Wilken , Liberty in the Things of God.
- 53.
Harper , “Roots of Human Dignity”; More generally, David Bentley Hart observes: “Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible. It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.” Hart, Atheist Delusions, 32–33.
- 54.
See, for example, Kronman, The Assault on American Excellence, 179. “The respect and sympathy invoked [in universities] today is underwritten by a shared morality that is enforced with crushing rigor. Few dare challenge its egalitarian assumptions…. Anyone who has spent any time on an American campus knows how thick the atmosphere of political correctness has become and understands that the mantra of respect and sympathy is one of its chief supports, slyly converting what sounds like open-mindedness into an instrument of close-mindedness instead.”
- 55.
Harper, “Roots of Human Dignity.”
- 56.
For further discussion, see Smith, “Toleration and Liberal Commitments,” 267–69.
- 57.
See Judd, Demise of Liberal Rationalism, 97–128.
- 58.
Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 72.
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Smith, S.D. (2020). The Resurgence of (Immanent) Religion and the Disintegration of the Secularization Hypothesis. In: Karpov, V., Svensson, M. (eds) Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54046-3_7
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