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Religion to secularism and back

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The great debate between the religious and the secular can in many ways be boiled down to one word: Faith. It is something that you either have or do not have, and the chasm between believers and non-believers is virtually unbridgeable. For those who have faith in a Christian context, the Bible is the inspired word of God, true in all of its essentials. It provides an explanation of human life on Earth, it provides guidance and commands on how human beings should relate to God and to one another. It stipulates rituals and sacraments. It holds forth the promise of an after life to which all should aspire. For those who do not have faith, the Bible is no more than a collection of the myths and legends of an ancient semi-pastoral, semi-nomadic people. The God of the Bible, whether Yaweh or Jehovah, is as relevant to them as Zeus or Jupiter. The Bible may be of literary or anthropological interest, but as a guide to life today it is no more significant than The Iliad or The Aeneid. For them, the Bible is a sometimes amusing, sometimes totally incredible account of what supposedly took place several thousand years ago, but it is of human, not divine, origin. There is thus an enormous gap between believers and non-believers.

For some 1,200 years between the fourth and 16th centuries, the western world lived in an era of faith. From the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine onwards, Christianity progressively gained a foothold in the hearts and minds of Europeans. All were believers in one or another form of Christianity. The church and the Papacy were dominant religious and political institutions. Even after the Great Schism of 1054, eastern Christians did not abandon their faith but merely transferred their allegiances from Rome to the Orthodox Patriarchates. And Christianity flourished. The church oversaw the building of magnificent cathedrals and monasteries, and the establishment of the first great universities. And it lived in the lives of the faithful through the provision of education, health care and relief for the poor.

This world of absolute faith came under very gentle attack in the 16th century, not through the Reformation but through the writings of the Dutch philosopher Erasmus. He proclaimed what came to be known as the doctrine of humanism, a humanism divorced from all religious polemics. Although he remained a Christian, Erasmus' writings were viewed in their time as a threat to the faith. In the 17th century, researchers such as Galileo and Newton launched the scientific revolution. One of the effects of that revolution was to demystify the workings of the universe to the detriment of the intellectual authority of the church. In the 18th century, the French "philosophes" of the Enlightenment, particularly Voltaire, launched a vigorous and direct attack on the church and Christian beliefs. They proclaimed faith to be absurd and proposed that it be replaced by reason. Their views carried the day during the French Revolution when a statue to "The Goddess of Reason" was erected in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

The intellectual siege of faith carried on and took on new dimensions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The work of the biologist Charles Darwin was particularly important. Darwin's theory of evolution, which came to be widely accepted, threw into a cock's hat the account of creation found in the book of Genesis. And if that were the case, what else in the Bible was essentially mythical? The studies of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry, threw some further spanners in the works. Freud's work on the subconscious revealed that human beings frequently respond to impulses over which they have little or no control. This finding showed that humans are not evidently responsible for everything they do. This in turn raised questions about the Christian concepts of personal responsibility and sin. If sinners are not directly responsible for their actions, what happens to the Christian doctrines of reward and punishment? What happens to the belief in hell?

These and a host of other issues and questions led many westerners to abandon faith in favour of rationalism and secularism. All of the mainstream Christian denominations have suffered a flight from the pews. This is true of the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran denominations. (Maclean's magazine published an article a few years ago in which it estimated that, at current rates of attrition, there would be only one Anglican left in Canada by 2069!) Everywhere the number of priests and ministers is shrinking and churches are either up for sale or simply closed down. What is more, most congregations are getting older and dying off.

What is true of the previously faithful is also true of governments. Most western countries have chosen to put increasing distance between church and state. The constitution of the United States decrees separation between the two. In the 20th century, the French Republic virtually turned secularism into a state ideology. What is known as laicité has established deep roots in French society. It is often joked that even nominally Catholic Frenchmen enter a church only three times in their lives -- for their baptism, their wedding and their funeral. In most of the rest of western Europe, rationalism and secularism reign supreme. Even in the highly conservative United Kingdom, there is a move afoot to "disestablish" the Church of England once Queen Elizabeth passes from the scene.

But if rationalism and secularism appear to be on the march throughout much of the western world, there is also a contrary tendency at work. In various parts of the globe, there has been a real resurgence in religion and religious belief. In the United States the so-called "crusades" of the late Rev. Billy Graham filled vast stadiums and arenas. A variety of tele-evangelists have attracted millions of viewers. Mega-churches and holy crystal palaces dot the landscape. The growth in the number of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians has been spectacular in the United States. In Africa, the number of "born again" Christians has increased from 20 million in 1970 to more than 400 million today. India, a country of 1.3 billion people, was established by its founders as a secular state but has seen a steady increase in the influence of Hinduism in society and politics. The current government of India makes no secret of its intention to make "Hindutva" or Hinduness a leading characteristic of the state.

Then there is the vast world of 1.5 billion Muslims spread out in the 53 countries that are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and beyond. By and large, they have not been exposed to intellectual movements such as the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment. As a broad generalization, it is probably true to say that the Islamic world continues to live in an age of faith. Secularism and rationalism have made little headway there. That does not mean to say, however, that there has not been a religious resurgence among Muslims. Beyond the extremists of al-Qaida and the Islamic State, there are the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahabi movement in Saudi Arabia. Both of these latter actively promote greater piety and observance of religious structures and appear to be increasing the number of their adherents.

In short, the mutual incomprehension that so often characterizes relations between the secular and the religious does not seem likely to disappear anytime soon.

Louis A. Delvoie is a Fellow in the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen's University.

The Kingston Whig-Standard 2018 © 

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