Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  The term began to offer a genuine and useful distinction with the rise of Christianity, in which the difference between this world and the next, or between the temporal and the eternal, was crucial.115 “Secular” now served to distinguish this world—the here and now, the “secular” domain—from the next life, or from eternity. The secular domain was still not “not religious”; rather, as Nomi Stolzenberg explains, it constituted “a specialized area of God’s domain.”116 This sense of the term is perhaps most clearly reflected in the common distinction between the “secular clergy” and the “regular clergy”: the label “secular” clergy refers not to priests who have lost their faith or renounced religion, but rather to priests who perform their religious work in the world—in a parish—as opposed to priests who retreat from the world to the rule (or regula) of a monastery.

  Thus, even before modern secularism came onto the scene, two versions of the “secular” were already discernible. The most conspicuous was the Christian version, but we might also refer to the “pagan secular.” In both its Christian and pagan versions, “secular” emphatically did not mean “not religious.”

  Then, in early modernity, usage changed; “secular” came to acquire its more standard contemporary meaning of “not religious.”117 “Modern secularism,” Stolzenberg observes, is “reductive.” It “eliminates the tension between [the profane and the sacred] by simply preserving one and discarding the other.”118 This newer conception seems most resonant with the naturalistic worldview associated with modern science, as we have discussed. We might describe this as the “positivistic” conception of the secular, in contrast to the Christian and pagan versions. And it was this positivistic or “not religious” kind of secularism that was ostensibly foreordained to dominate modern thought and culture.

  In sum, history has handed down to us three broad categories or families of “the secular.” There is the pagan secular, in which heavy if not exclusive emphasis is placed on this world and this life, but this world and this life (or at least some parts or aspects of this world or this life) are viewed as having a sacred quality. Then there is the Christian secular, in which this temporal world and this life are a “specialized area of God’s domain.” As such, this life has value—indeed, immense value—because it is a (subordinate) piece of the larger domain of eternity. Finally, there is the distinctively modern positivistic secular reflected in the naturalistic worldview associated with modern science. This is the “not religious” and “disenchanted” world of Weber, Russell, Stace, and company. These three versions of the secular correspond to the three existential orientations we have considered earlier.

  Each of these secular possibilities—and each of these existential orientations—remains available to people today, and each has its adherents. Perhaps ironically, however, positivistic secularism seems to be the official version, so to speak, and yet in reality to have the smallest constituency and the least political influence. Its official status is manifest in the fact, as noted, that “secular” is today typically taken to mean “not religious,” and it is only the positivistic secularism that does not recognize “the sacred” and hence is genuinely not religious (in a conventional sense, and also as we have conceived of religion in chapter 2). But although there is no way to take an accurate head count, the positivistic version of secularism probably has the fewest real adherents. Most people, even including thoroughly worldly members of the cultural elite like Dworkin, are probably not simply secular in the positivistic sense. They believe in science, to be sure, but they also embrace commitments and endorse values that are not reducible to the materialistic or naturalistic terms and entities that science studies.

  As a test question, we might ask people today whether they think it is acceptable and desirable to use human beings—perhaps old or disabled ones—as mere material subjects for scientific research, as was done in Nazi Germany. Or whether it is acceptable to resolve social and political conflicts by simply exterminating particularly troublesome ethnic groups or human populations where this can be done without undue cost or difficulty. Nearly everyone will recoil with indignation from these questions, and will protest that such measures are impermissible and indeed monstrous. We may say, with Stephen Hawking, that “the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”119 We may even concede the logic, on purely scientific grounds, of Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Jacques Monod’s dismissal of Western liberal humanism as “a disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressism, belief in the ‘natural rights’ of man and utilitarian pragmatism.”120 And yet most people today seem utterly unwilling to embrace the normative implications of those deflationary views.121

  Luc Ferry makes the point with a different example. “I am sure,” Ferry says, “that if you witnessed the lynching of somebody because of the colour of his skin, or on account of his religion, you would do what was in your power to help him, even if to do so was dangerous. And if you were to lack the courage, . . . you would nevertheless admit to yourself that, morally this is what ought to happen. And if the person being attacked was someone you love, then you would probably take enormous risks to save him or her.”122 In this taking of enormous risks, Ferry continues, there is a willingness to sacrifice. “Sacrifice, which returns us to the notion of a value regarded as sacred (both from the Latin ‘sacer’), paradoxically retains, even for the committed materialist, an aspect which can almost be described as religious.” More specifically, we see in this commitment “a making sacred of the human.”123

  Perhaps there are exceptions—the playwright George Bernard Shaw, for example. “Throughout his life,” John Gray reports, “the great playwright argued in favour of mass extermination as an alternative to imprisonment. It was better to kill the socially useless, he urged, than to waste public money locking them up.”124 But if this was indeed Shaw’s position, nearly all of us would react to it with horror—because, we would say, human life is “sacred,” or “inviolable,” or “infinitely precious,” or something of that sort. Insofar as we insist on some such proposition, we depart from the positivistic secular in favor of something else—perhaps the transcendent secularism of traditional Christianity or Judaism, or perhaps the more immanent sacredness of modern paganism.

  In sum, positivistic or naturalistic secularism may be appropriate to our scientific enterprises. But in the realm of moral and political discourse, it has a more complicated and less exclusive role. People do have their “interests,” and the use of science in the instrumentalist effort to satisfy those interests is perfectly appropriate. Economists, practitioners of the “dismal science,” are not evil; on the contrary, they perform a function that is valuable and necessary. And yet the near universal and categorical condemnations of genocide, and the widespread assertions of human rights said to grow out of some quality of intrinsic “human dignity,” suggest that most people and most governments today also have a continuing commitment to the sacred in some form. Perhaps to the transcendental sacred of Christianity and associated faiths. Or perhaps to the immanent sacred of “modern paganism.”

  Under Cover of Secularism

  And so we return to the metaphor proposed at the beginning of this chapter—of secularism as a facade. Descriptions of the modern world as “secular” are, it seems, accurate and at the same time profoundly unilluminating, even obfuscating.

  Thus, politics today concerns itself with this world, not the next world (if there is a next world). Even the most ardent activists on the “religious right” do not defend favored policies on the ground that these will send more people to heaven.125 And today’s pervasively consumerist culture immerses us in the here and now; it does not defer gratification to—or seem to put much stock in—the life to come. So the political world today, and much of the cultural world as well, are thoroughly “secular” in the older sense of “concerned with this world.”

  But modern life—modern political life in particular—is not “secular” in the
modern sense of “not religious.” Nearly everyone continues to attach “sacred” status to something or other—if not to God and the angels, then to nature, or to the human person (or at least to some human persons at some stages of development), or to the state, or to some sacralized conception of the course of history, or to something else. The political and cultural struggles of our time grow out of these competing sanctities. “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion,” the political philosopher John Gray observes; as an agnostic and secularist in the positivistic sense, he offers the observation with a sigh.126

  To be sure, insofar as the pertinent categories presented to us by modern culture are still “religion” and the “secular,” and insofar as the “secular” is deemed more respectable for the political and philosophical reasons suggested at the outset of this chapter, many educated people will still classify themselves as “secular”—and hence, by implication, “not religious.” Their commitments to the sacred will be largely inarticulate and ad hoc. They may stand zealously and righteously on their commitments to human rights or equality or the environment, but they will not acknowledge that these commitments are a form of “religion,” or of an intuition of the sacred.

  Often they will still struggle to present their positions in terms of “interests.” The reason we must sacrifice urgently and presently needed energy and jobs to preserve some obscure and minuscule species, such as the snail darter, they may say, is that the species just might turn out at some future date to have some unforeseeable medicinal value;127 this remote possibility, which on its own terms would convince no one to sacrifice significant present interests, serves to give positivistic respectability to a more obscure judgment about the sanctity of a species.

  Some decades ago, G. K. Chesterton observed that in many such controversies, what we see is “a fight of creeds masquerading as policies.” And he noted that “we have contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite . . . was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical.”128

  Comfortable descriptions of our world and our age as “secular” thus work to make us opaque to ourselves. Ronald Dworkin was among the more articulate philosophers of our time, and his identification of the pervasive religiosity lying beneath the surface of ostensibly positivistic secularism was a contribution we can appreciate. But Dworkin also recognized that although millions of people in fact adhere to something like his immanent religion, most of them would not think—or, probably, consent—to describe themselves in this way. They are, Dworkin implied, religious without knowing it. Theologians like Karl Rahner argued, controversially, that many devotees of non-Christian religions are in reality “anonymous Christians”;129 Dworkin showed that many self-proclaimed secularists are in fact “anonymous religionists.” Or, most likely, “anonymous pagans.”

  One consequence of this situation is that on surveys of religiosity, these people—these immanent religionists—will check the box for “none,” or perhaps the box for “agnostic.” Or, sometimes, for “Catholic” or “Jewish,” even though these reports reveal next to nothing about what the respondents really believe and about what they really hold sacred. Nor is it just the surveys that are insufficient; the modern conceptual scheme, still in thrall to an ostensibly inevitable positivistic secularism, may not offer the immanently devout the conceptual resources to describe even to themselves what they really believe and hold sacred.

  Pundits and scholars and social scientists will accordingly continue to describe the social and political world and its movements in terms of “religious” versus “secular,” even though these categories do more to conceal than to reveal the real motivations and values of the relevant actors. And thus, as T. S. Eliot suggested in the essay that provoked and gives shape to this book, “the current terms in which we describe our society . . . only operate to deceive and stupefy us.”130

  Modern paganism, in sum, is alive and even pervasive—but mostly inarticulate, and concealed (even from itself). We cannot count on it openly to declare itself; we can only attempt to discern its influence, its manifestations, and its occasional self-expressions. The next two chapters will attempt such discernment with respect to the contemporary “culture wars.”

  Postscript

  After this book had been submitted for publication, Anthony Kronman, the eminent legal scholar and former Yale Law School dean (and, as it happens, my former teacher in, of all things, Uniform Commercial Code), published his massive Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.131 Running to over eleven hundred pages, the book is an intensive spiritual-philosophical reexamination of Western thought from Aristotle through Augustine through Spinoza and up to more modern thinkers including Nietzsche and Heidegger. And that reexamination culminates, as the title indicates, in a philosophy or orientation toward life that Kronman describes as “pagan”—a term Kronman understands in much the same sense of immanent religiosity proposed here.

  As the title also suggests, Kronman’s book seems calculated to be a sort of sequel/counter to Augustine’s famous Confessions. Just as that book narrated the saint’s conversion from paganism to Christianity, Kronman criticizes Christianity and its influences and (in an early chapter) describes his own more contemporary conversion—not from Christianity but rather from Marxism back to paganism. If Augustine’s spiritual autobiography was reflective of the Christian revolution of the period in which that book was written, Kronman’s tome reflects the contemporary movement to throw off the effects of that revolution and recapture something like the classical or “pagan” orientation that preceded it.

  Given the book’s length and depth, and considering that my own book had effectively been completed before his was published, it has seemed prudent to resist the temptation to incorporate or respond to Kronman’s Confessions in any serious way here. The book represents a major intellectual achievement that deserves close and deliberate study and reflection, not hasty reaction. It seems not amiss, though, to observe that the book provides weighty evidence for the central argument of this chapter.

  When this chapter was being written, Kronman’s book was unavailable; I accordingly used Dworkin’s Religion without God as “Exhibit A” evidencing the development of “modern paganism.” But Kronman’s book might have served even better. Like Dworkin, Kronman finds the theism of Christianity and Judaism impossible to accept but thinks a more immanent religiosity is defensible, and attractive. Also like Dworkin, he offers Spinoza as the seminal theorist or exponent of a more immanent faith that is the appropriate modern alternative to Christian and Jewish theism. Kronman’s argument is more extensively developed. And, perhaps most conveniently, Kronman actually recognizes his position as “pagan,” and openly calls it that.

  Without pretending to offer any full-scale analysis or critique, therefore, I offer Kronman’s book as a further and substantial piece of evidence supporting the interpretation advanced here.

  1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.

  2. Jose 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.” Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17. See also David Martin, On Secularization: Toward a Revised General Theory (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8–9 (noting “the ubiquity of secularization stories, and
the varied ways they combine prescription and description”).

  3. Paganism is hardly unique in this respect; Christianity is also very different than it was in late antiquity. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xvii (remarking that “the Christianity of the High and Late Middle Ages—to say nothing of the Christianity of our own times—is separated from the Christianity of the Roman world by a chasm almost as vast as that which still appears to separate us from the moral horizons of a Mediterranean Islamic country”). The distinction is that there is a major modern constituency that calls itself “Christianity” but no major modern constituency that calls itself “paganism.”

  4. James J. O’Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 66.

  5. The parallel here to Rawls’s well-known distinction between political and comprehensive liberalism is intended.

  6. See generally Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). See also Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32 (“The origin point of modern Western secularism was the wars of religion; or rather, the search in battle-fatigue and horror for a way out of them”); Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christianity in a Secularized World (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 11–14, 18.

  7. See Craig Calhoun, “Secularism, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75, 80 (“What issued from the Peace of Westphalia was not a Europe without religion but a Europe of mostly confessional states”).