“In more popular parlance, however, all three words, — ‘secular,’ ‘secularization,’ and ‘secularism,’ — have to do with the squeezing of the religious to the periphery of life. More precisely, secularization is the process that progressively removes religion from the public arena and reduces it to the private realm; secularism is the stance that endorses and promotes such a process. Religion may be ever so important to the individual, and, few secular persons will object. But if religion makes any claims regarding policy in the public arena, it is viewed as a threat, and intolerant as well.”
D. A. Carson
Christ And Culture Revisited — pg. 116
Before getting to this quote I want to make it clear that I always find reading and listening to Carson stimulating. My posts here continue to critique him but that shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that I disagree with him at every point. I have read Carson over the years with great profit and I have to say that among all the big guns I’ve seen and heard preach his sermon on water and life is one of the best I’ve ever heard. In this book his section “One (Epistemological) Step Further” is worth the price of the book. In this section he quickly and efficiently undresses James K. Smith and his book, “Who’s Afraid Of Postmodernism.” In this section Carson offers a way to navigate between hard modernism and hard post-modernism, and I like it because he agrees with me.
Still, after saying all that I will continue to critique Carson. First, this quote above is pretty standard fare among the Reformed intelligentsia. I have read the same type of thing over the years from Os Guiness, George Marsden, and others. It is precisely because this type of thinking seems to own the academic and intellectual field that I continue to return to the problems contained therein. Those of you who have made a habit of reading my offerings are not going to surprised by what I say next.
The idea that ‘the religious’ can be squeezed to the periphery of life is just not true if only because the secular, secularism, and the secularization process stem from religions operating incognito. Those who are pushing the ‘secular agenda’ are pursuing it from a core of religious convictions. When ‘religion’ gets pushed to the periphery it is religion under the guise of secularism that is doing the pushing. The effectiveness of secularism is found in its ability to disguise its religious orientation.
There seems to be an inability to understand that God or a god concept is an inescapable category and as such it is not possible to have a realm where there is no god ruling. This continues to be important to re-articulate since those who want hold to the idea of the secular are insisting that the project of locking out religion (which always follows in the train of the presence of a god or god concept) from the public square is achievable. It is not.
Another way to argue this is by locating the god that is left in the public square once all other religions are removed. If, by way of legislation, god, and so religion, are removed from the public square, there must, by necessity, be a mechanism in place that monitors and governs the public square in order to make sure that it remains naked. This policing agency in our putative secularism has the responsibility to ensure that the various competing gods and their religions don’t encroach upon the public square. In a defacto sense this makes the policing agency the god of the gods. This policing agency is charged with governing the gods making sure they don’t show up in the public square. Everyone knows that the institution charged with policing the public square in order to make sure the competing gods know and keep their place is the State. The State, as God in the public square, continues to build around it a religion dedicated to the preeminence of the State as God. Hence, all of this contributes to the pursuit of a religion that dominates the public square that goes under the fatuous name of secularism. But make no mistake about it, this putative secularism is a religion, replete with all the defining characteristics of a religion. Its effectiveness as a religion is enhanced and advanced by cloaking itself as ‘secularism,’ and Christians contribute to the problem of revealing the charade when they continue to speak as if secularism is not religious complete with its own God (State), Church (Government Schools), Priests (Government School Teachers), along with every other traditional manifestation of religion. In secularism the religious is most certainly NOT at the periphery of life. Like all religions it informs everything and like all religions it is intolerant of any competitors.
It is absolutely essential that Christians begin seeing this for what it is because the failure to do so is keeping us from seeing that the option isn’t between some ascendant religion in the public square and no religion in the public square but rather the option is always between one religion or another dominating the public square.
The introductory chapter in Gordon Clark’s “Three Types of Religious Philosophy” exposes, I think, why so many Reformed people just don’t get it when it comes to analyzing secularism. The chapter demonstrates the impossibility of defining “religion” apart from a presuppositional starting point, which Clark, of course, takes from Scripture.
Carson, being a gifted exegete, would do well to examine the pertinent Biblical data on the subject of the State and religion. He would soon find that every State implies a religious philosophy just as every religion implies a philosophy of the State. Just as the atheist can never escape having a theology, the secularist cannot escape having a religious commitment; regardless of how much he may wish to marginalize all competing religious philosophies of government.
I wonder if Reformed folk would be more inclined to take up theonomy if they realized that their worst efforts as sinner saints is far better than turning the reigns over to those who hate God by their very nature.
Joshua,
Well said!
I have spent my life reading presuppositionalists. Schaeffer, Carnell, Clark, Guiness, Van Til, Nash, etc. This stuff comes as second nature for me but it sure seems to be something that large segments of the Church find foreign.