The Last Christian on Earth

by Os Guinness

  As was bound to show through eventually, this statement of secularization was both exaggerated and biased—not surprisingly, because it was put out by agents on our side as part of an overall Enlightenment assault on religion. As the world modernized, they said, religion was declining and disappearing. Secularization was all about the decline and disappearance of religion.

  The advocates of this view were on our side, but they were head-strong and not inclined to listen, and for a while no one looked too closely at their claims. Eventually, one of the Enemy analysts did, and the overstatement was exposed for what it was. It was both biased, with its secularist assumptions showing through, and it was also comically incorrect in terms of the facts. Beginning with the eruption of fundamentalism in the Iranian revolution in 1979, it became apparent beyond dispute that religion is very much alive and well in the modern world—simultaneously revitalized and re-politicized. The early secularization theorists were well intentioned, but they had an agenda, they had got it badly wrong, and the theory itself came under scrutiny.

  At that point, we moved in quickly and sowed confusion. Some thinkers—mostly secularists themselves—doggedly held to the original idea, twisting and turning to re-shape it to match every objection raised. Other thinkers, however, at once swung to the opposite extreme, pronounced the world incurably religious, and renounced the idea of secularization altogether. All this chaos worked for us magnificently. Needless to say, the goal of secularization in our strategy was never the disappearance of religion but its decisive distortion, and that is beyond contradiction.

  A Process, Not a Philosophy

  We must never succumb to our own propaganda, so it is important to keep the proper definition clearly in mind. By “secularization” I mean the process through which, starting from the center and moving outward, successive sectors of society and culture have been freed from the decisive influence of religious ideas and institutions.5 In other words, secularization is the process by which we have neutralized the social and cultural significance of religion in the central areas of modern society, such as the worlds of science, economics, technology, bureaucracy, and so on, making religious ideas less meaningful and religious institutions more marginal. Our goals in this are simple but far-reaching: to negate the centrality of faith in life and to neutralize the Adversary’s rule.

  Defined this way, secularization is deadly to the Church because a central requirement of the Adversary’s rule is integration: the integration of faith and the whole of life, a requirement Christians share with the other members of the Abrahamic family of faiths. Jews are required to integrate their faith under the Torah and Muslims under the Qu’ran. Similarly, Christians are required to integrate their faith and the whole of their lives under the rule of the Adversary. This they can no longer do.

  This definition of secularization begs a number of questions, but let me leave them on one side for the moment and turn to a remarkable fact. Since 1900, the percentage of the world’s atheistic and nonreligious peoples (agnostics, materialists, Communists and so on) has grown from less than one percent to more than twenty percent; in fact, from a mere one-fifth of one percent to over one-fifth of the world’s population.6 Entire countries such as the Czech Republic now have a huge majority of secularists.

  This explosion of secularists is the most dramatic change on the religious map of the twentieth century. Even Christian findings affirm this now, although the gloomiest of Christian prophets did not foresee such a possibility in 1900. Atheistic and nonreligious peoples now form the third largest bloc in the world, behind only Christians and Muslims, and catching up with them fast. (Eight and a half million “converts” each year to be precise.)

  But what does this fact mean? “Come now,” you are probably saying. “You can’t take credit for that. That success is due to the improved performance of the Counter-Apologetics Division. All you are describing is the dramatic rise in secular alternatives to religious belief.”

  Of course, of course. Your old department deserves some credit, but that obscures the real reason this has happened. As I have defined it, secularization is not the same thing as secularism, so it cannot be measured by a Dow Jones index of rising or falling atheism.

  Secularism is a philosophy and has all the strengths and weaknesses of any ’ism or philosophy, not least that it demands some effort of mind or will. Secularization, by contrast, is not a philosophy; it is a process. More important still, its roots are not in an intellectual concept but in institutional change. It is a process that has actually taken place in the structures of society. Secularization has its subjective and its intellectual side—a very important part that might be called modern consciousness or the modern mentality—but this is the result and not the root of the process.

  Unlike a secularist philosophy, such as atheism or naturalism, this secularized mentality is not something people think about or choose. Rather, it rubs off on them. It comes as part and parcel of objective, institutional changes that have actually occurred through modernization and cannot be avoided or simply wished away. Secularization is therefore contagious in a way that secularism never is. Wherever modernization goes, some degree of infection is inevitable.

  The fact is, secularization promotes and improves on the old weapon of secularism in two important ways: it goes deeper and reaches further. Secularization (the process) goes deeper in that it provides the perfect setting for secularism (the philosophy).

  Imagine a sports shop in a ski resort that wants to improve its sale of ski wear. What would help it most would be to have not only attractive designs but also good snow conditions. Even the best designs would sell poorly in the Sahara. Similarly, secularization provides the perfect conditions for secularism. It is the new context that enhances the old concept, making secularism seem natural, even necessary.

  Therefore, with due respect, your counter-apologists cannot take full credit for the recent surge of secularism. We have had secularism around for millennia, but it has never before caught on like this, because it lacked the ideal conditions. Look at nineteenth-century skepticism, either in England or on the Continent. When it stuck to largely intellectual arguments, as the noisy secularist societies did and the New Atheists still do, it appealed only to a tiny minority. But when it caught the imagination of the masses through other means, people were converted without any serious argument or extensive reading. The soil was well prepared. As one enemy historian notes, secularism and secularization are not the same problem. “Enlightenment was of the few. Secularization is of the many.”7

  Up to the nineteenth century, discussion of religion had been continued in roughly the same context for thousands of years. An intelligent Roman would have been as much at home discussing the Christian faith with Pascal or Voltaire as with his contemporaries. But today’s conditions would amaze them all. The truth is that a whole gamut of things has gone into the breeding of all these recent agnostics and materialists, including in the Soviet era some old-fashioned persuasion, KGB-style. But in all of it, argument has played the lesser role and atmosphere the greater. The contribution of secularization has been decisive.

  Importantly too, secularization reaches further than secularism in that it affects and influences religious people too. Secularization is a silent process that simply happens, rather than a philosophy that can be chosen or rejected. So, it subtly shapes even those people (Christians included) who would never knowingly subscribe to such a philosophy and turns them into subconscious secularists. Marx’s sidekick Engels noted wryly how English religion and respectability were infected by nineteenth-century skepticism: “The introduction of salad oil has been accompanied by a fateful spread of Continental skepticism in matters religious.”8 But secularization today has come under a more sophisticated cover and is far more devastating.

  Thus, secularization works for us because of a double thrust: it compounds secularism, thereby increasing its power, but it also constricts religion, thereby decreasing the power of religion.
Both secularization and secularism serve the same objective in our strategies, but secularization is the stronger, surer, subtler means of reaching our goal.

  Bad Religion, No Religion

  So far I have said more about what secularization is not than about what it is. But one further point before we explore the latter. Our use of secularization as a weapon marks a key departure from our usual tactics against the Enemy. For the first time in history, we are attacking not only the Christian faith but also all religion in the modern world. For secularization affects all religions.

  Some of the old guard on the Council saw this as unnecessarily risky. After all, it has been a standard operating principle from the beginning that bad religion is more damaging to true faith than no religion. Generally speaking, this still holds true. But bear in mind certain things about Operation Gravedigger. In the first place, it is more than just another operation. If it succeeds, the Western Church will be in our pocket, and it will be the curtain raiser to the final thrust for victory over the Church worldwide.

  The fact is that the present moment of maximum secularization is only an interim period between the passing of the Christian age and the rise of a new religious era. Trendy theologians may play up a “religionless future” and talk of secularization as the “exorcism” of everything in the tradition they do not like, but only because of the secularization of their own theology. No one will be more dismayed by the number of new gods and old ghosts that crowd in as squatters in the conveniently emptied house.

  Also, remember that we are promoting secularization not to remove the Christian faith altogether, but to reduce its influence in areas essential to its integrity and effectiveness. By putting an end to Christian influence in the central sectors of modern society, we level a body blow to the Adversary’s authority. He no longer rules over the whole of his followers’ lives. Once that happens, whatever faith is left is limited and inconsequential, and lacks the mental and moral muscle to resist us. In fact, once domesticated, such faith will be a useful workhorse for the society we have in mind. The “pit pony” of tomorrow’s world, as the Director likes to say.

  Rebellion by Any Other Name

  Field agents who have never served anywhere but on the modern front do not appreciate the magnitude of what we have accomplished. We have pulled off something in the last three centuries that is little short of revolutionary, but latecomers take it as routine. What we have achieved is both a revolution in human affairs and a revolution against the Adversary’s rule. Scholars use fancy words such as “differentiation” and “fragmentation” to describe the new situation, the way in which traditional religion has lost its authority in more and more spheres of life. Let them each choose their own terms. Let them measure secularization in a thousand different ways, and debate the fine distinctions. All that matters to us is the outcome. Rebellion against the Adversary by any other name is just as sweet.

  Our progress becomes apparent if you compare the situation we have engineered with what was typical in the past. For example, compare the state of the Christian faith in twentieth-century Europe or America with that in the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth or sixteenth centuries. The numbers of Christians in these earlier times might have varied, spiritual vitality might have ebbed or flowed, and compromise and hypocrisy might at times have been more evident than fidelity. But where there was faith, however small numerically, it had a characteristic social and cultural influence because it mulishly insisted on applying the Adversary’s rule to all of life. The benighted faithful uttered such slogans to themselves as, “If Jesus Christ is not lord of all, he is not lord at all.”

  That, as they say, was then. Modern faith, however large it is in numbers (as in America), almost never has this integrated view. Call the result differentiation, or simply call it fragmentation. But it is secularization that has made the difference. More and more spheres of life have been liberated from the Adversary’s interfering rule. Now, those Christians who try to reverse the fragmentation are met with outraged cries that are music to our ears. What right do Christians have to “impose” their views on others? What used to be integration is now “imposition.” Worse still for them, they are told they are “coercing” others who do not share their values.

  A World Without Windows

  What I have described so far is the objective and institutional side of secularization. Let me pick up the equally important subjective impact. Humans have always been open to a world beyond the world of the natural, the visible and the tangible.9 In other words, they always believed there was a world beyond the world of the five senses, and what they could see, touch, taste, smell, measure and calculate.

  Certainly, most people spent most of their lives in the “seven-to-eleven waking world” of mundane, everyday concerns and interests. Certainly, there were varying degrees of openness to anything beyond, with most people fitting comfortably between the extremes of skeptic and mystic. Certainly, many of the experiences that went beyond ordinary reality (for example dreams) were not necessarily considered to be religious.

  But in the traditional world there was always a world that was beyond. Indeed, experiences that were held to be “religious,” “sacred,” “other” or “transcendent” were held to be the deepest human experiences of all. Such experiences called ordinary life into question and cast a religious frame of meaning around the everyday world. Pursuits as down-to-earth as business deals, making love, farming and politics were all seen in the light of the world beyond. Human worlds enjoyed the shelter under the shade of divine truth, however that was understood.

  Secularization has changed all that. Today, for some people all of the time, and for most people some of the time, secularization ensures that ordinary reality is not just the official reality but also the only reality. Beyond what modern people can see, touch, taste and smell—in other words, the world brought to us by science and the five senses—is quite simply nothing that matters.

  One of the Enemy analysts puts the point with graphic simplicity. Human life has traditionally been lived in a house with windows to other worlds. These windows may have sometimes become dirty, broken or boarded up, but they were always there. Only in the modern world do humans live in what he calls “a world without windows.”10 Shut off from transcendence, modern people are shut up to triviality.

  Once you see this, you get a very different perspective on all the exaggerated talk of Christian energy in America or the new religious consciousness in the West. The energy is there, of course, but it is harmless because it is faith in a shrunken form, faith shorn of the genuinely supernatural. More and more of modern American faith is “under the sun,” as old King Solomon used to say. The worship, the preaching, the publishing and the conferences are all about realities that are this side of the ceiling. The ceiling is rarely punctured.

  Put the impact of the subjective and the objective together, and the result is devastating for the Church. In some parts of the world the Christian faith has become contentious and controversial, so radioactive that Christians are quite unable to go about their work and simply be. But in more and more of the world, the Christian faith has become irrelevant to a degree that is unique in human history, an achievement we owe mainly to secularization.

  The Blowout and the Fallout

  I would be intrigued to know what you had already glimpsed of the Cheshire-cat factor, though I suspect that as a veteran counter-apologist, you credited the wrong source. Some agents kick themselves when it is first explained. The thing had been going on right before their eyes, but they had been trying to interpret it in overly intellectual frameworks that ignore cultural infiltration and concentrate on concepts rather than context.

  You may not have made that mistake. But a precise mind like yours will want to get down to more than a general definition of secularization, and look more closely at its character, causes and long-term results. You will also need to examine the overall process of modernization that has carried this secularizing eff
ect.

  Keep in the back of your mind that secularization is not produced by any one cause. This is the secret of its elusiveness and power. The fact that it cannot be traced to any single cause works to our advantage in various ways. Enemy analysts sometimes hunt for a clear explanation that can be verified with scientific precision. Failing to find it, they pronounce the search impossible or the danger a hoax. We are eternally indebted to them for diverting people’s attention from the problem.

  Other intelligence experts, determined to be less simplistic, seek to account for the secularizing effect with a complex chain of causes and subtle reasoning. Obviously we have to keep track of their work much more closely; there is always a slight chance they could break through to a correct understanding. But the reality is terribly slippery. Often, as a result, their complications thicken, their subtleties grow more and more refined, the number of their variable factors slowly mounts, while the explanation grows more elusive still. In the end, the search becomes a goal in itself. The fox escapes, but the excitement of the chase is strong, and the hunt goes on and on.

  The top field agents who will return to the Summer Training Seminars this year will have a course on the full complexity of the dynamics of secularization. But here I want simply to draw your attention to the two most important trends behind it. These are only two of many trends that could be cited, and secularization cannot be traced back to either of them in a single straight line. Yet these trends are fundamental, and their contribution to secularization is like the combined effect of a volcanic explosion and the fallout of acid rain.

  1. The Displacement of Religion

  Have you ever seen a silhouette of the London skyline in the eighteenth century? Compare it with the same skyline today. The contrast in Paris is equally striking. What is dramatic about the earlier skylines is the dominance of Church architecture. Abbeys and cathedrals tower above the other buildings, representing the social power of the Church, while spires and steeples, symbolizing the human spirit, thrust upward to a world beyond.