Western Secularism and Christianity

General Philosophy
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This subject often comes up indirectly during discussions.

I’m interested in what people think of the claim that modern secularism is little more than Christianity without God. Many here will probably be familiar Tom Holland’s popular version of this notion wherein he argues that to a significant degree modern Western moral assumptions still come out of a Christian framework, even if people no longer believe in it explicitly. Progressives imagine we have moved beyond superstition but our foundations remained rooted in tradition.

One related and useful place to start might be with Alasdair MacIntyre, who makes a connected but slightly different point. He argues that modern secular and liberal moral language has become fragmented. While we still use words like “rights,” “justice,” and “freedom,” we’ve lost the shared background (e.g., Aristotelian or Christian ideas of telos, or human purpose) that once gave those terms a more stable meaning and normative structure. Without that shared framework, moral debate often turns into muddy disagreement with no clear resolution.

For example, we treat human rights as obvious and self-justifying, yet we often disagree deeply about what, if anything, actually grounds them, or how to weigh them when they come into conflict with other claims or interests. Or in debates about identity, harm, and issues like free speech or abortion, we often seem to end up with competing intuitions rather than agreement on underlying principles. Should be added here that MacIntyre’s point isn’t that we ought to go back to Christianity, but that modern liberal morality may still be relying on older moral structures it no longer fully acknowledges or can properly justify. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s quip (I’m paraphrasing) that if you believe in grammar, you’re a theist.

So I’m curious how others respond to this framing, whether it’s correct and to what extent it matters. Is secularism best understood as a kind of diluted continuation of Christianity, or has it drawn on broader sources and developed its own independent coherence? Conversely, could this thesis just be a sophisticated form of reactionary thinking, capturing a partial truth while seeking to restore the authority of tradition by framing secular morality as derivative and groundless?

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I don’t know what the significant degree may be regarding moral assumptions, when the only one that counts is my own, which I can state for the record has nothing to do with Christianity.

What is a moral assumption anyway, and how does it relate to modern secularism, which typically describes general civil affairs?

The ground for the subjects here, is metaphysics, and for that, the shared framework for potential agreements in significant degree was never there, so can’t be something since lost.

Two cents, you know…..before the regulars show up.

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First, I think a focus on ethics might be misleading here because it will turn our attention to the position that moral knowledge must be grounded in religion. This is in fact a thread in a particular Christian theology that exerted a lot of influence on liberalism, not a universal Christian position, and also largely a modern formulation.

However, the influence of theology on the dominant metaphysics and epistemology: on mechanism, nominalism, materialism, etc. is as profound, if not as obvious or easy to parse. The same is true of core notions like freedom, progress, and “modernity” itself. But these all reinforce each other, so it is a tangled not.

I also think there is a lot of nuance required here. Just some thoughts:

A. Because some areas of modern thought are far more influenced by past theology than others. Theology certainly left a profound mark on modern naturalism, but motivations for the development of what we today call naturalism were multiform, and this is an area where alternative groundings have been more forthcoming (even if they still lie on core assumptions inherited from theology). By contrast, the modern tendency to define freedom in largely voluntarist terms, primarily as power/potency (i.e., primarily in terms of choice, “the power to choose anything”) has more strictly theological origins. It is also a fairly stark outlier in world traditions (although, notably, it has an analog in Islamic voluntarism, which came out of similar issues and came to similar solutions, e.g., atomism and occasionalism). This notion of freedom I would argue has really not received alternative groundings, and has serious issues with coherence, and is more of a straightforward theological inheritance.

B. There is no uniform “Christianity” from which modern thought descends. The fracturing of Western Christianity lies prior to the formation of dominant modern philosophies (namely: mechanism/naturalism, liberalism, voluntarist notions of freedom, and secularism). Secularism grew out of particular Christian streams related to fideism and one approach to nature versus grace debates (chiefly the assumption that ultimate goods could only be known through extrinsic supernatural grace, leaving a space of “selfish” secular reasons to the “public sphere”). In general, Anglo-analytic thought shows more influence from particular Protestant theologies, particularly the Reformed tradition, while Renaissance thought and Counter-Reformation thought exerts more influence in Continental thought. This is sometimes explicit: Rawls and Calvin, Heidegger and Suarez).

C. Influence actually varies by area. Historians of economics note the strong influence of the Reformed tradition through the Scottish Enlightenment for instance. Seemingly adjacent fields (psychology, sociology, anthropology) have different influences, and display a quite different anthropology (which is then reinforced by political polarization across fields). Economics tends more towards mechanistic explanations and tries to have a very strong firewall between the “normative” and “descriptive,” whereas this tendency isn’t as pronounced in related social sciences.

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Right, but an ancient of medieval Christian might have said much the same re Paganism and Platonism. That doesn’t negate the huge influence of Platonism on the Christian worldview and metaphysics.

Just for instance, perhaps the most avid defenders of the distinctively Christian metaphysics that developed into mechanism in recent memory are the New Atheists; and yet they obviously don’t affirm Christianity itself.

Well, has (dis)agreement been uniform throughout history? Certainly, there have always been disagreements, but it seems very hard to claim that levels of disagreement are static across epochs. From mid-antiquity on, you see growing consensus in ethics and politics, even without initial consensus in metaphysics. A figure like Boethius or, earlier, Cicero, could borrow liberally because traditions had already converged. And indeed you see things like the late Platonists using Epicetus, a Stoic, as an ethics guide because of this consolidation, until by late antiquity there is a Platonic synthesis and a very similar Christian synthesis and no remaining schools. And this synthesis remained dominant in Latin and Eastern Christianity, Islam, and Jewish thought for well over a millennia, even if there were always disagreements. I think this represents a strong case for variable consensus.

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“Modern secularism” . . . that sounds like a big tent. Reading through your OP (which I appreciate), I think perhaps what you have in mind is a person who, while not a supernaturalist in any sense, believes that there are compelling ethical values that can and must be applied in modern societies.

If that’s more or less the target of your question, my answer would be: No, I don’t think such a person’s views have much to do with Christianity – not even a liberal Christianity that rejects Biblical literalism, miracles, etc.

There are a lot of reasons for saying so, but I’ll offer just one. My secular person believes that their values can be demonstrated and/or argued for. Someone with a spiritual orientation is more likely going to point to the reality of certain experiences as the basis for morality.

If MacIntyre is right, words like "rights, “justice,” and “freedom” can’t be given independent justifications apart from the cultural experiences in which they were originally embedded. My secularist disagrees.

I’m curious, like you, to see what others have to say.

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…..then hasn’t disagreement been uniform?

The kind or degree of, changes over time, but if the ground of possible agreement remains purely metaphysical, and historical precedence demonstrates there isn’t any to significant degree, then either metaphysics is not the proper ground, or, there is no possibility of significant agreement regarding human affairs in general, if it is.

Given those you mentioned, plus Locke 1689, Rousseau 1762, the inevitable and impossible to ignore Kant 1788, the metaphysical ground has been sufficiently established. Just not agreed with in the aforementioned significant degree.
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If the ground of the distinctively Christian doctrine is a book of past experiences passed along to guide the future, can it really be metaphysical?

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Just to open up the perspective a bit… How influential has Western Secularism or Humanism been in revolutionizing Christianity?

Very!

I’d like to point to the Gaudium et Spes:

“The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.”

A papal constitution that brought about an unbelievable existential shift towards Christocentric humanism.

This papal apology for slavery isn’t a random progressive move by a hippie pope. This has been a persistent movement within the Church for many decades now.

If you’re interested, we might want to look for the shared hermeneutics and the ongoing dialogue between humanism and Christianity; it’ll make for a more meaningful discussion in my opinion.

Edit:

I wrote this a while back for a different purpose, but I thought it might fit here to give some quick background information about Gaudium et Spes.

Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) is a Constitution signed and delivered by the Vatican in the 1960s. It was a Pastoral Constitution that in many ways was centuries in the making; namely a grounded reaction to enlightenment signed into Catholic law.
For 250+ years, the different instantiations of liberalism, humanism, (social-)science, and secularism were met with great hostility at first and remained to be eyed with profound suspicion by the Church. The Vatican had walled itself off against these influences and remained steadfast for centuries; a sovereign Catholic bastion opposing these significant culture shifts…

During the second half of the 20th century however, something really tilted out of balance. The Church was losing power and influence, sure, but more importantly, it was losing its social imaginary; It was losing its capacity to make sense of the human condition in a way that resonated with contemporary humans that were living this (post-) modern experience. We were struggling with the remnants of two World Wars, looming global nuclear destruction (cold war) and the onset of technocracy; the beginnings of a meaning crisis. A crisis the church could no longer assist in because it had become such a closed feedback loop.
And so this mental Leonine Wall became untenable in the eyes of Pope John XXIII, who opened up the windows to let some fresh air in and it was Pope Paul VI who oversaw the finalization of the historic council.

What came from it was this existential shift:

The church reached out. It offered a Christocentric humanism. It declared that Catholic spirituality isn’t found solely in scholastic dogma, but it’s a lived tradition and deals with the contemporary as much as the past. It shifted its perspective, its reality even.

I’m an atheist myself… So I observe this mostly in socio-cultural terms; mind you that my telling here is somewhat romanticized and interpretive (I do love my hermeneutics).
A catholic scholar might give me a nudge and say I’m leaning too hard on the existential shift and it’s more of an revision than a transformation or that I’m over-emphasizing this rigid bastion mechanism. I wouldn’t argue those points, they are fair and valid, I simply have a different perspective on what constitutes transformation. And coming from that perspective, I must say, I think this was incredibly brave, clever, wise and daring. We are talking about an absolute behemoth here; a hegemon for many centuries; one of the most powerful institutions mankind has ever known. And it did the unthinkable. The opposite of what an institution normally does when it’s in trouble: It opened up, instead of retreating further. It stopped monologuing from afar and instead started a dialogue from a space of self-reflectivity.

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I think it is simply wrong. Thinkers like Montaigne and Bacon rejected Christian dogma and authority. They, like some more recent thinkers, look back before Christianity. But the power and influence of the Church should not be overlooked. They did not enjoy the freedom of speech that we today take for granted.

Reason not scripture or revelation is for them the higher authority.

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I think it would be wrong to conflate secularism and freedom of speech per se. Secularism has included, for instance, Stalin’s Russia, the Third Reich, mass religious repression during the French Revolution, etc. The most ardent heretic hunters of antiquity, the Middle Ages, or even the Reformation period couldn’t dream of the level of surveillance and control over speech and belief that these regimes exercised (simply as a practical matter; with no education system, communication traveling no faster than a horse, and parishes being local, there is no infrastructure for mass indoctrination or censorship).

But certainly, you do get greater levels of freedom of speech and expression in some secular contexts, which then becomes dominant in liberal democracies at a later period. I would say the relationship here is fairly complex though. Part of what allowed totalitarian regimes to operate as they did was the evacuation of the space occupied by various traditional institutions (the Church being just one). In the stable, late-liberal context, there is this same sort of evacuation, but it’s more gradual, and is held in check by institutions and laws designed to thwart totalitarinism. It’s also the case that freedom of speech could gradually increase in the contexts precisely because it has been rendered increasingly impotent, while more potentially disruptive forms of speech have been either legally or institutionally barred from key venues.

In this context, “separation of church and state” is quite a misnomer. The order of the day is the total subservience of the church to the state. What you had previously, in Latin Christendom, but also in Pagan contexts, was a true separation, with multiple overlapping areas of authority (e.g., the clash of Pope/bishops and Emperor/kings). There are parallels to this outside the West as well. The supremacy of the state is rather a one-sided victory. It has had the benefit of neutralizing religious conflicts, but also opens the possibility of totalitarian state control as well (the “politics as religion” thesis).

Now, as much as people denigrate “Whig history,” the Anglophone nations really were the forerunners here, and helped to spread an institutional framework that could be vastly more open. However, their case is interesting precisely because it involved a somewhat gradual loosening, scaffolded the old supports of religion and nationalism. I would say that the system seems to be facing some obvious strain today, although technological changes are a big part of that.

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Great reply. Noted. As you may imagine, the thesis isn’t mine and I just wrote up a very general account that I have heard as a bit of a springboard.

Good point.

I was wondering if this point would be made. I’d like to hear a range of views on this.

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Any chance you can expand on this?

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You raise a good question. I’m not sure exactly what I have in mind, since it’s not really my thesis. I guess people would say that our institutions and culture, including hospitals, universities, moral frameworks, and rights, all have Christian origins. From thsi point, there are obviously a range of directions one could go in, e.g., lamenting the loss of a transcendent purpose that makes it all meaningful, or celebrating the lack of supernaturalism. I guess the overarching question is to what extent secular culture is an “adaptation” of Christian values and ideas, and what we should make of this.

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Yes, I guess the obvious question for this thesis is to what extent Christian formulations draw from earlier/pagan traditions.

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Yes, and I recall a few old European Marxists insisting that, to them, communism was really just a messianic religion, drawing from well-established Christian models, including the savage persecution of heresies. No doubt there are many ways to present this kind of argument.

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I agree. The point is, the reader should be aware of constraints put a writer when interpreting what they say. The issue here is Christianity and secularism. Both Bacon and Montaigne, as well as Descartes and others, write about the need to be cautious in what they say. Their views on Christianity may not be what can be taken from a snippet.

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Sure. Myself, I’m not inclined to make too much of it, just because the question is so overarching, and could be examined in so many ways. The Nietzschean perspective is worth dwelling on, I suppose – whether the “genealogy of morals” is a story that runs from Greek culture through the “slave morality” of Christianity and winds up in a modern (19th century) form that tries to substitute reasons for commandments from God.

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There’s an informal fallacy that consists in rejecting an argument because of its origins. It’s called the Genetic Fallacy. See:

Examples:

  • That think tank is funded by environmentalists, so whatever it says about the environment is wrong
  • You only support Universal Health Care because you grew up in a socialist nation
  • Korean pop music is terrible because it is all corporate funded.
  • Plato was an aristocrat, therefore the theory of forms is wrong.

The issue is one of relevance. It’s clear that usually, the origin of an argument does not determine its truth value. There are exceptions, of course; and the credibility of an argument might depend on its origins - those environmentalists might have undue influence on the think tank, and having access to universal health care might lead one to think it not a bad thing. But credibility is not the same as truth. And sometimes the origin is relevant - consider someone believing that vaccines are dangerous after having read a study that was later retracted.

The fallacy cuts in two opposing directions - rejecting an argument because of its source, and failing to consider the credibility of a source. It consists in treating the origin as irrelevant when it is relevant, and as relevant when it is irrelevant.

The upshot is that the origin of an argument is not a proxy for its truth.

Suppose it is argued that Christian ethics is itself a continuation of Judean tribal and prophetic morality transformed by Greek philosophy, and the contribution from Jesus was the idea of Charity. That’s not an example of the Genetic fallacy until it is asserted that therefore Christian ethics is false or worthless or contributed little to the discussion.

There is the risk here of a veiled appeal to ecclesiastical authority in ethics: something like that secular ethics has Christian origins and Christian ethics derives authority from divine revelation therefore secular ethics has a disguised dependence on divine revelation. Of course, that would never be made explicit.

There is also the risk of rejecting worthwhile arguments because they have a Christian origin - Nietzschean rejection of charity, for example.

If secular morality is “Christianity without God”, then so what?

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It has drawn on many sources, and it is independent of its Christian heritage - but not totally. And futhermore, I question whether it is coherent — mainly because of the tendency of post-Enlightenment philosophy to view science as a source of moral authority. Science is a method, ever-evolving and fallibalistic, as it should be, but there is a strong tendency to worship it. I’m sure the ideal of interstellar travel and the conquest of space arises out of the sublimated longing for heaven.

I think some bellwether texts in this area, apart from McIntyre, who you mentioned, was also Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism. It shows in great detail the unexpected ways theological principles influenced modern culture and politics.

Another is The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie. It also illustrates how deeply theological and philosophical questions underlie the Enlightenment and the liberal political tradition. ‘Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which according to Gillespie dismantled the rational God / universe of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born of a concern that anything less than such would jeopardize His divine omnipotence.’

I see many of these themes playing out in debates here, often unconsciously.

Something I’ve pondered is the sense in which human rights were originally predicated on a covenant between God and man. Christ’s atonement offered the hope of salvation for all, on the condition of accepting it. But I wonder if Western culture has retained the sense of the unique value of every individual, but now without the belief system that underwrote the original premise. Now the individual conscience is practically the arbiter of morality, hence the relativism and subjectivism that McIntyre highlights.

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Yes, I actually studied Weber in sociology and that was the text.

That’s a great paragraph and, perhaps, somewhat milder than I thought you might be on this one. There are so many intersecting strands of thought in this. Do you see identity politics as a kind of secular transformation of Christian moral categories such as sin and guilt, innocence and redemption, and repentance and judgment?

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Yes, well that’s certainly an argument. Which I guess is why I put the quesion and and does it matter?

Good point. And Universities and hospitals seem to have religious origins.

I take your point on the genetic fallacy. I guess the second part of the argument from Christians and Muslims might be that that secular culture, without a grounding in transcendent or moral truth, is untethered and floundering, lacking a stable foundation for meaning and ethical direction. And we back in “grounding country” again…