by Os Guinness
Today, by contrast, the churches are dwarfed by skyscraping office blocks and crouch down somewhere between the banks and insurance buildings, cramped and overshadowed by a host of competing institutions.
Here is a vivid picture of the effect of the first trend: the movement in modernization toward explosive diversification. As modernization gathers speed and the rate of change quickens, the scale and complexity of institutions and ideas continue to mount. The result is a volcanic explosion of diversification. Specialized, separate areas are thrown up, each with its own premises, its own priorities and procedures—in a word, its own autonomy.
You can see this process most clearly on a physical level. Between 1861 and 1905, for example, the number of Christian parishes in Paris grew by a phenomenal 33 percent, and the number of priests by a respectable 30 percent. The trouble for Christians was that the population of Paris grew by nearly 100 percent, so the Church was always left behind.11 Statistics for London show a similar picture. The Church was neither ready nor able to cope with the explosion, so it lagged further and further behind and became yesterday’s institution.
I was reminded of this almost daily living in France. There is no more striking sight in the environs of Paris and other cities than the little church, intended for a village but now feebly trying to serve a sprawling urban area. Inadequate in itself, it is marooned from the main currents of modern life and left to its own irrelevance.
I am not suggesting that secularization was a result of the collapse of the parish system. But the failure of the old parishes to deal with the new population was a symptom of the Church’s failure to keep up with the explosive diversification on all fronts. Whole sectors of activity (such as the place of work) and whole segments of the population (such as the poor and the working class) were wrenched out of the control and concern of the Church. The coziness of the traditional world, with its geographical concentration, social integration and conservative thought, was gone for good. The slums of the new cities were a symbol of Christian failure on a physical level. But a score of other equally uncared-for areas of thought and life were a sign that most Christians had been swept away by the explosion of modernity and had given up the unequal struggle to keep abreast.
Thus, modern work and the modern working class were both born in a century when the traditional Christian Church was largely absent from the center of the stage.12 Other ideologies were not so reticent, but despite the social and theoretical reverberations from this failure, the Church has not pulled itself together to regain the ground.
This process of explosive diversification has a secularizing effect on religion, which is felt as displacement. Once the lava settled, society’s structural shape had changed beyond recognition. Religion no longer presides over much of society as it did in the past nor participates in all of life as the Christian faith is required to do. As a result, Christian institutions and ideas are displaced from the center of modern society and relegated to the margins. At one stroke, discipleship, in the sense of the Adversary’s claim to rule over the whole spectrum of life, has been effectively neutralized.
2. The Disenchantment of Religion
As a useful introduction to this second trend, consider the growing alarm about acid rain. Borne on the shifting winds of expanding industrialization, acid rain is becoming a problem of planetary dimensions. A leisurely but lethal atmospheric plague, it brings silent devastation not only to lakes, forests and wildlife but also to the world’s great buildings and statues.
Secularization is the acid rain of the spirit, the atmospheric cancer of the mind and the imagination. Vented into the air not only by industrial chimneys but also by computer terminals, marketing techniques and management insights, it is washed down shower by shower, the deadliest destroyer of religious life the world has ever seen.
Consider for a moment what was involved in the Apollo moon landing in 1969. No operation could be more characteristically modern, yet it was really no different in principle from designing a car or marketing a perfume. Strip away the awesomeness of the vision and the pride of achievement and what remains? A vast assembly of plans and procedures, all carefully calculated and minutely controlled, in which nothing is left to chance. By the same token, nothing is left to human spontaneity or divine intervention.
This is typical of the acid rain effect of the second trend: the modern movement toward extensive rationalization. Far from being an incidental consequence of modernization, this is one of its essential characteristics.
As modernization drives forward, more and more of what was formerly left to God or human initiative or the processes of nature is classified, calculated and controlled by the use of reason. This is not a matter of philosophical rationalism but of functional rationality. In other words, reason used for practical rather than theoretical ends; reason as the servant of technology and development rather than of theology and philosophy.
Notice once again that as modernization expands, so also does that portion of life that is covered and controlled by the systematic application of reason and technique. “Simply figure it out,” says the engineer. “Anything can be made.” “Simply figure it out,” says the salesman. “Anything can be marketed.” In other words, the systematic application of reason is seen as the best tool for mastering reality, and this movement of extensive rationalization is at the heart of the imperialistic spread of science and technology.
Check for yourself. You can now find how-to manuals not only for running factories and repairing cars but also for making love, converting souls, restyling your personality and growing a megachurch—all in five easy lessons. The evangelistic training manual and the church growth pastors conference may seem poles away from the Industrial Revolution, but the former is only the latter writ small. Look closely at its style and its assumptions. Under the regimental control of reason and technique, wisdom has been reduced to know-how, fruitfulness to skill and measurable outcomes, and an arduous apprenticeship under a master to a breezy weekend seminar from an expert.
The overall result? If the impact of the exploding diversification is felt as displacement, with Christian institutions forced to become more marginal in modern society, then the impact of the extending rationalization is felt as disenchantment, and Christian ideas are forced to become less meaningful in modern society.
By disenchantment I mean simply that, as the controlling hand of practical reason stretches further and further, all the “magic and mystery” of life are reduced and removed. When reason has harnessed all the facts, figures and forces, divine intervention is as unwelcome as accident, divine law as antiquated as the divine right of kings. Human spontaneity becomes “the human factor,” the weak link in the chain of procedures. Wonder, along with humility and notions about the sanctity of things, is totally out of place. Problem solving, twentieth and twenty-first century style, is a matter of working a Rubik’s Cube rather than unlocking the riddle of the universe.
Do you see how this has a secularizing effect? Medieval Christians could use the maxim, “I dress their wounds, but God heals them.” But how many modern Christians doing agricultural service in Africa would think of saying, “I irrigated the desert, but God made it grow”? The problem for the Christian in the modern world is not that practical reason is irreligious, but that in more and more areas of life religion is practically irrelevant. Total indifference to religion is characteristic of the central and expanding areas of modern life. The deadly rain has fallen and all the spiritual life it falls on is dead, stunted or deformed.
I said earlier that our goals were to neutralize discipleship and negate worship. The first is easy. Not all Christians enter the central areas of modern society, but all who do are constricted by secularization, even if unawares. Secularization, therefore, affects far more than the overt secularist. It touches the most spiritual people too.
Today, only the very conscientious and young hothead still attempts to carry faith out into the secular world. Most believers are as used
to being frisked by secular society’s reality guards as they are to being checked for weapons before boarding an airplane, so the chances of Christians taking over any modern society are accordingly reduced to zero.
Some Christians half realize that this has happened, but they do not fully appreciate what it means. Other Christians are themselves the best testimonies to our success. The founder of McDonald’s hamburgers, for example, was recently quoted as saying, “I speak of faith in McDonald’s as if it were a religion. I believe in God, family and McDonald’s—and in the office that order is reversed.”13 Our own Propaganda Department could not have put it better.
Our second goal, negating worship, is more difficult to achieve. This is partly because the setting of worship lies outside the central and more secularized areas of society, and partly because some people seek compensation in worship for secularization in work. They hunger for an overwhelming sense of transcendence in worship to make up for a distinctly underwhelming sense of triviality in work.
In an increasing number of cases, however, secularization from the central areas has spilled over even into worship. Take the conservative preoccupation with church growth, or the liberal rage for cultural relevance (read Saturday’s newspaper and you have Sunday’s liturgy). Or go to your local congregations with their Blackberry busyness and distractions. With pressures and priorities like theirs, the last thing they can afford is to be “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” Their minds as well as their watches are synchronized with the “real world” and in “real time.” Securely earthed in day-to-day life, not for a moment are they in danger of being “heavened.” Talk about “a world without windows.” All this sort of worship is “under the sun.” We are not in danger from a worship that never “punctures the ceiling.”
In sum, it is sometimes said that the religious difference between Europe and America is like the contrast between the Arctic and the tropics. We have certainly already cooled the spiritual temperature in Europe to an Arctic level where only the hardiest of believers can survive, and then only by huddling together in their spiritual igloos. (“Always winter, never Christmas,” as one of their agents laments.) But, as you will soon discover, the steamy, equatorial spiritual heat of the United States has its advantages—not least in allowing us to cultivate exotic, poisonous hybrids that would thrive in no other climate. In fact, secularization is behind both outcomes, though we are using it in different ways.
This first main pressure, secularization, or the Cheshire-cat factor, is by far the most difficult to understand. But, as you can see, it is also the most basic and devastating. Once its work has been done, the way is open for the other two pressures to operate. Where secularization has occurred, we gain far more than a beachhead on the fringes of the modern world. We are able to neutralize the Adversary’s power at its very command center.
MEMORANDUM 4
The Private-Zoo Factor
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
“I believe in the discipline of silence,” said George Bernard Shaw about the original Quaker style of worship, “and could talk about it for hours.” Shaw’s wit fastens here on the sort of contradictions that are basic to human nature. Have you noticed, though, how the number of such human contradictions is increasing dramatically in the modern world?
You can see this supremely in what might be called “sunset values.” These are values that modern people prize highly and hold passionately, but which really gain their intensity from the fact that they are about to disappear or be changed forever. Like the setting sun, such values make a flamboyant show at the end.
Take, for instance, the contradiction in the mounting concern for wildlife and the wilderness. As humans destroy more and more species, and modern world encroaches on more and more of the natural world, they are getting to the point where the only wildlife left will be in zoos. Conservation will then justify captivity. What an irony. How else, it will be argued, can wild creatures be preserved from the advancing jaws of development?
But the question is: What will “preserved” mean then? How wild is a Bengal tiger in a wildlife park? Or the lone seal bulleting around its circular pond? Or the elephant on its ritual route behind the moat? How wild is wildlife in captivity?
I will leave you to ponder the ironies, a major preoccupation of yours, it seems. What I am getting at is that wild animals, once savage and dangerous to human beings, have become little more than pets. But what has happened to wildlife is nothing compared with the taming of religion.
Look at it from the point of view of religious believers. Religion was once life’s central mystery, its worship life’s most awesome experience, its beliefs life’s broadest canopy of meaning as well as its deepest guarantee of belonging. Yet today, where religion still survives in the modern world, no matter how passionate or committed the believer, it amounts to little more than a private preference, a spare-time hobby, and a leisure pursuit.
The Cheshire-cat factor has paved the way, but the damage is mainly the work of the second great pressure that modernization has brought to bear on religion. This, which in many ways is the reverse side of the Cheshire-cat factor, is the private-zoo factor, so called because it domesticates the hitherto untamable world of the spirit and fences in the once unbounded provinces of the Adversary. Religious variety, color and life still remain. But here, too, the price of conservation is captivity.
Incidentally, I could sense in your response to the last memo your evident distaste for the notion of new gods and old ghosts “squatting” in the post-Christian house. That is your support for a fastidious secularism coming through. Do not forget that from the slave-based Athens of Pericles to the leisured, aristocratic world of the Enlightenment philosophes, pure secularist philosophies have always been a minority interest. I agree with you that the “exorcism” of the Christian house may introduce some post-Christian squatters of a rather unsavory sort. But be assured: Such scruffy spirituality will also be in strict captivity. And the Director has plans for it too.
The private-zoo factor is a tricky one to work with and requires a rare blend of cool thinking and deft handling. To be candid (and I will be, since these emails are for your eyes only), this is one area where I sometimes feel less than sanguine. Not that I think we have miscalculated. But I do suspect that several on the Council and many of the Bureau directors underestimate the risks and the skill required to use this pressure to our advantage.
Can you imagine a hunter relaxing when he has cornered his tiger? He might be seconds away from capturing a prize quarry, but those seconds are the most dangerous of all. We face a similar risk at this stage of the Operation. The risk is that in cornering faith and driving it toward captivity, we may accidentally arouse its ancient energy and vision. Then, in an instinctive last stand, it could elude our capture and break loose again and dart in some new direction.
Make no mistake. Faith is never more dangerous than when it senses danger. In fighting for life, the conscience, the will, the mind and the emotions of an individual can be fanned into a blaze of pent-up conviction. The Christian faith grew strong this way in the first place, and periods of revival have always had this same personal element at their heart. So for religion to be personal is for religion to be powerful—but if, and only if it does not stop there.
That is our cue. If we can ensure that faith is personal but no more, then we can quietly coax it into a corner from which it will never emerge. On the whole, we are managing to do this, and so far the private-zoo factor is working well for us. And as I shall describe in a minute, if faith should burst out of captivity, we quickly have to coax that escape into becoming an extreme reaction that is as bad, if not worse.
What I am saying is that, unlike the Cheshire-cat factor, this second pressure is not automatic; and, unlike the smorgasbord factor, it is not easy. I would therefore advise you to keep a constant watch o
n your agents in this Operation. Mistakes are likely to be costly, and they are not likely to be forgiven. Success has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan, as the Director allows no one to forget.
The Heart of the Matter
The technical term for the private-zoo factor is privatization. By privatization, I mean the process by which modernization produces a cleavage between the public and the private spheres of life and focuses the private sphere as the special arena for the expansion of individual freedom and fulfillment—forcing religion to become a matter of purely private concern.1
Naturally, there has always been a distinction between the more personal and the more public areas of life, but until recently the relationship between them was marked by a continuum rather than a cleavage. Today it might as well be the Grand Canyon.
On one side of the cleavage is the public sphere.2 This is the macro-world outside the home, comprised of giant institutions (government departments such as the Treasury, large corporations such as Sony, General Motors, and Microsoft, and military complexes such as the Pentagon). To many people, this public world is large and impersonal, anonymous in its character and incomprehensible in its inner workings.
That is not to say that people are necessarily lost or alienated in such a world. Modern corporations have become adept at making work more “fun and fulfilling.” People do their jobs and earn their incomes there. But by no stretch of the imagination do most people see their work as the place where they find their identity and exercise their freedom.