Western Secularism and Christianity

General Philosophy
21

I’ve often said that I believe our concept of human rights was derived from Christianity. I think David Bentley Hart makes an historically-grounded case in his book Atheist Delusions. Of course nowadays that claim generally provokes a lot of hostility, I think because secular culture equates Christianity with the oppression of individual choice in some basic respects. And that is a conflict which I have no way of ameliorating.

I started reading Tom Holland’s Dominion a few years ago but abandoned it, I didn’t like the writing style. I’ve gotten a lot more out of Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lectures, particularly those on the period from Aquinas-Descartes-Luther (aside from those sources already mentioned.)

22

A commonplace, but is it so? Can this be shown?

The first problem is that it is not at all clear what “secular culture” might be, let alone that we might attribute to it some particular individuality. If “secular culture” is marked by anything, it is the enormous variety of beliefs and activities it encompasses.

Think on that for a bit. If anything marks “Western Secular Culture” apart from other cultures, it’s the sheer disparity in the views that it might be taken to encompass.

Which points back to the underpinnings that allow such variety. The acknowledgement of shared human needs, the fallibility of rational deliberation, the absence of a common foundation.

So of course it is “untethered and floundering, lacking a stable foundation for meaning and ethical direction” - by design!

And isn’t that a great positive?

Think on the alternative! Give me untethered and floundering over stricture, stagnation and cruelty.

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23

I note you do name it “modern secularism” but I think secularism was the hallmark of human existence long before religion was “invented.” Secularism - mores and traditions without religion - evolved long before religion did. There’s always been this thread of “doing what is right” woven into human social society, long before dogma entered the picture.

Perhaps modern secularism is a return to what we have always known.

24

Fair enough. Vervaeke isn’t a theist and is a much more nuanced thinker.

We spend a lot of time considering morality and Abrahamic religious traditions. I know Buddhism is a broad range of ideas, but what is your general sense of how it constructs moral foundations? Do the traditions of ahimsa, karuṇā, and mettā hold across most Buddhist traditions? I’m not sure I’ve ever properly understood the grounding of loving-kindness. I guess Buddhism would hold that the structure of reality has a moral substrate?

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Could be. I chose “modern” merely to focus on current versions of secularism. I guess many people are secular by default, without embracing any form of coherent secular humanism. I’m not sure about the historical antecedents of secular thought. What were you thinking of as an example?

26

That’s another topic. But from a high-altitude perspective, consider that Buddhism has probably had an analogous role to that played by Christianity, in East Asian cultures, specifically China, Japan, Korea, and others. (Less so in India from where it was driven out by the Mugal invasion.)

Early Buddhism was very much a renunciate sect, withdrawn from society and culture. But Mahāyāna is much more socially-focussed, indeed that was one of the reasons it was able to spread to China and Japan, which were much less inclined to countenance the ideal of a purely renunciate sect. (For example, Buddhist monasteries in East Asia generally have to grow their own food.)

As regards Buddhist ethics, they are much convergent with Christian ethics than are the underlying doxastic principles. Their beliefs are worlds apart, but in practice they’re very similar. I think Buddhism is a lot less prone to scholasticism, although that’s not always the case, as scholasticism is very much a characteristic of Tibetan and some parts of Theravada Buddhism. But it doesn’t have the same divides between mind and matter, thinking and being, that have bedevilled Western culture. I think that’s due to the character of the Buddha himself. Topic of my earlier thread What the Buddha Didn't Say

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27

As long as we have been living in social groups, we have had acceptable ways of doing things. We have given praise and thanks, we have proclaimed how we “ought to be,” and we have had taboos.

All of these human capacities precede organized religion.

Religion is but a by-product of our evolution. The capacity to set mores came first.

28

There’s no way to know that, unless we define “organized” religion as developed by civilization, with written texts, etc.

All simple societies chronicled by anthropologists in the last couple of centuries have had religious practices: shamanism, myths, magical rituals, witchcraft beliefs, etc. We know that 40 and 50 thousand years ago people were buried with possessions and artifacts, which suggests the possibility, at least, of thoughts about an afterlife. Cave paintings may have had religious significance.

The extent to which religion and morality arose together is unclear. Some more primitive religions seem (it’s hard to say) less interested in morality. Perhaps the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil refers to the development of civilization where people lived among large groups of unrelated individuals, and morals became more codified.

Of course modern secular morality derives largely from Christianity (in the West), just as Christian morals derive largely from previous mores and religious strictures. I’m no expert, but I’ve read that Paul moved Christianity in the direction of Greek Philosphers.

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29

I think we would want to ask, “If secularism is not derived from Christianity, then what is it derived from?” What is the proportional pie chart that maps its ancestry? Or did it spring up without being born?

30

The modern, rational approach to practical and ethical life, seems to have started when, out of a Christian-filled society, an enlightened humanism was conceived, which grew through critique and a new existential (Kierk. Nietz.) awareness of the possibility of the absurd, but at the same time out of measured progress in science from Newton to Darwin to today, we birthed the modern secularism, the rational critique of reason itself.

In the case of ethics, what has changed is that truths once claimed as the word of God, must instead now be discovered as self-evident truths. We learned of the natural law while believing God was the creator of nature. But we were enlightened to see nature itself wrote its own laws (the self-evident right); and then the same light of reason that saw deeper and more universally than than “God”, peering into the self-evident beauty of natural human reason, we realized that reason was fraught with error and even self-destruction.

And now, in modern life, we are utterly unmoored, no connection to God, no knowledge of nature’s “self-evident” constructions anymore - just work to do to barely form a decent question.

Here is where I would wonder about the lost connection to Christianity that one might seek to trace back to from our secular society.

But your main question seems to position modern secularism as possibly retaining some key pillars right out of Christianity, just without the superstitious baggage. So some baggage girds secular ethics, but by taking out the superstition and replacing it with reason and scientific measurement, the new secular character of ethics emerged.

I think this connection between secular and Christian only matters depending on what was retained from Christianity and what was gained from reason alone. Once we abandoned God and place the reasonable as the only good-faith answer, “Christianity” becomes just another moment in a momentarily, always secular march of humankind through human history. The thesis may just be another anthropological distraction from ethical progress.

It seems to me that no matter the source of ethics, it brings with it the law, even if only the notion of law. Truth that was ordained from on high or truth that nature makes self-evident to reasonable beings, is still just truth. Truth and universal law seem to remain tightly woven in any ethics.

But then, post-modernism has done away with truth, turning law into a context, not a pillar (nor are there any pillars in a post-modern house, or the pillars are free-standing not used to support anything).

So I don’t really know what a post-modern secular ethics could have in common with anything previously called ethics. If each one of us separately is our own law-maker, defendant, judge and jury, and nothing beyond these is absolute, like Christ, then it seems to me it could be a strain to call secular ethics, ethics.

Ethics without Christian-type absolutes as secular ethics seems to be, turns the ethical into more of a game piece (a construction) in a bigger game of political, economic life. We no longer look anywhere for a source or ground of law - we now build laws first and ask questions later. We work in between laws and change the laws and work differently and amend and revise - but the questions “what are our common goals?” and “what should the law for time and all reasonable beings be?” must be dismissed as woo woo, even asking about “God” in some secular settings has to be unethical, as it is unscientific and wasteful to ponder such things.

So it all depends on what is meant by “Christianity” and “secular ethics” whether a connection can be drawn. It may actually be it is precisely a severance from the Christian that defines a “secular” ethics, so seeking their overlap misunderstands completely the new game of ethics.

But I say there is a natural reason that ethics has come to be at all. There is nothing wrong with taking a secular view as the important view, but if one thinks “truth” or “true justice” or “good law” will not be a part of an ethics, which in modern terms it is hard to ever use these terms, then I wonder why we would think “ethics” could even matter, let alone be able to be written and taught and lived in accordance with.

Ethics is submission to law for sake of penance (and so character building for next time) and reparation. Christianity helped these notions blossom - forgiveness, mercy, love, sacrifice for others, hope, gratitude and praise - all good acts building good hearts. I don’t think we can think of better laws or do better ourselves without looking to Christ, but if that is the goal of secular ethics, then maybe you could call it still connected to this Christian base.

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Something of both perhaps? The fact of the disagreements you outline about the meaning or importance of entrenched moral principles and ideas of virtue seems to point to a conclusion that secularism is not watered down Christianity, at least on the assumption that there were not such disagreements within traditional Christian culture (which is itself perhaps an unjustified assumption). The disagreements make it look more secularism look more like a throwing off of traditional shackles. On the other hand, of course Christianity has left its cultural traces even among the secular.

I tend to think that the most significant moral principles and ideas of virtue are cross-cultural, so i certainly don’t see them originating with Christianity or as being abandoned by secularism. Christianity has the so-called “Golden Rule” but then so does Confucianism, and the idea seems to be pretty pragmatically basic to the idea of a harmonious society. On the other hand proscriptions against sex before marriage, contraception, abortion, divorce and so on seem to be far less significant or pragmatically justified in modernity than proscriptions against murder, rape, theft, assault, torture and so on, and these latter proscriptions remain weel-netrencehed in secular culture.

32

That’s a good formulation.

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I’ll point back to this, @Tom_Storm.

These are not Christian virtues.

Indeed, they are closer to the antithesis of much of Christianity, with its insistence on evangelism and there being only one way to attain heaven.

There is an antipathy between these secular and tolerant ideals and their supposed historical placement. Even if secular ethics derives historically from Christian ethics - and that is far too simplistic an approach - the result is a very different animal. The discontinuity outweighs the continuity. It is very far from being simply derivative; it is at least a critical transformation.

34

A rich and considered response.

Yes, I can certainly see this point.

I think a lot of secular people think of laws (if not morality) as codes of conduct that can be organized in various ways and still be useful. More like traffic lights (for negotiating movement, power relations, and values) and not connected to moral facts.

35

Indeed. Of course the moment you mention the golden rule a chorus of “I hate the golden rule” tends to erupt. I remember seeing a guy wearing a T-shirt that had an illustration of the Buddha in repose. The words underneath the image read, “Don’t be a cunt” The Buddha. Words to live by. Of course, my idea of this compared to, say, Elon Musk’s is quite different, and the problem of interpretation still vexes us.

36

This is definitely a key consideration in all of this.

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37

“Don’t be a cunt”. The Buddha― that made me laugh! And I agree with you that the Golden Rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is not a very good formulation given that what you would have others do to you is not necessarily what others would have you do to them. A better formula is ‘do unto others as you believe they would have you do’. Of course good practice of this formula requires some honesty and empathy. I’m one who believes there can be no moral action without empathy.

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38

Right. The very notion of a unique social phenomenon, “religion,” that deals with the “supernatural” is a modern Western notion. The strong dichotomy of natural and supernatural isn’t even a feature of pre-modern Christianity, and comes out of particular changes in Western theology and philosophy.

“Secular,” at least in its original context of “power relating to this age,” already supposes some other age, which is itself a particular religious belief. “Religion” being wholly distinct from the secular is itself a later distinction.

Now, to be sure, many societies make a distinction between the priesthood and the military/political leadership, although their separation is often not that clear cut (e.g., the Roman Emperor was Pontifex Maximus). Christianity is not distinct in creating any distinction, but it is somewhat distinct in giving us a hard separation of the shape we have today.

In tribal societies, but also early state societies, there is simply no separation of these functions. The head of a clan, paterfamilias of a household, often has a distinct religious role in key ceremonies, as does the civil authority, even when there is a specialized priesthood.

But this idea does come out of Christianity. The idea that human reason is too fallible to attain to even a modicum of certainty about ultimate goods and a denial of access to common foundations is quite alien to most world traditions (although there are parallels in strains of Islam). It is, however, one of the driving concerns of the Reformation.

Liberalism has well-documented theological origins (Ismail Kurun’s The Theological Origins of Liberalism, Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, etc.). Under fideism, you cannot know about ultimate goods except through faith. Under a strong nature versus grace and natural versus supernatural dichotomy, you cannot attain illumination through faith except through extrinsic, supernatural intervention. If the Sacraments are just symbols, man cannot instrumentally provide others with this necessary grace. Under nominalism and the exclusion of teleology, you cannot know what is good for things by understanding their essence. And under voluntarism, this is explicit, because “good” is an extrinsic imposition. Since values have their source in an inscrutable divine will, religion becomes the primary means of understanding values. Human reason is too fallen to attain to understanding here.

This is the theologicL ground from which secular liberalism springs. The basic idea is that, in the realm of public reasons, one cannot count on most people being illuminated by grace. This is particularly true in the early modern context where there is both religious pluralism (and violence) and the assumption that outgroups must lack such grace. Therefore, if a compromise is going to be reached, it must lie in the secular authorities managing a space of public, wholly instrumental reasons. So the goods society is to be ordered around are limited, at least initially, by these assumptions.

The accidents of Christian history is also very relevant here. The Wars of Religion were vastly more devastating than wars prior or since. The Huguenot War in France, and the Thirty Years War in Germany alone killed many times the share of the population as both World Wars combined. The parties fought themselves to exhaustion, leaving tolerance of private pluralism and a turn to a public secular space as the de facto solution. This sort of solution is explicit in the framing of the Peace of Westphalia, which remains the paradigm for the modern state system to this day.

Secular liberalism is a direct outgrowth of both this unplanned political solution, paired with the aforementioned theology. Of course, secular liberalism drops the theological grounding (slowly though), but keeps the basic notions about the knowability of key elements of the human good and the strong private / public distinction largely the same. This is certainly a distinctive influence on modern secularism because generating these epistemic conclusions is not presuppositionless, but rather relies on specific metaphysical and anthropological assumptions (which is why such a distinction is not present in other world traditions).

This is why liberalism (but not republicanism) also begins concentrated more in northern Europe, since this is where the theological ground is more secure. Whereas the earliest examples of something like modern republicanism and democracy begin in Catholic Italy, but didn’t tend towards the liberal form of secularism that is hegemonic today until it was imported from without.

Florence is a fine example here because its experimentation with wide ranging democracy came in the context of a wave of religious fervor and greater integration of policy and religion than under the Medici. So, in the US case, you can have religion supporting liberalism and a constrained pluralist Protestant identify bolstering this support, whereas the Roman and Eastern Churches had a far different reaction to liberalism precisely because they didn’t accept its starting assumptions (something you can see in philosophy to this day). And this flows into contemporary arguments, that liberalism has kept the assumptions it inherited from theology, but has never found a way to justify them (MacIntyre’s point to some extent, or Schindler’s, Simpson’s, etc.)

39

The reason I prefer that formulation is because it gets us away from emotional reasoning, which is too common when it comes to this topic. For some, rather than intellectual consideration, what is occurring is emotionally-based: “I like secularism; I don’t like Christianity; therefore secularism does not come from Christianity.” If someone has never studied the history and can offer no alternative account of secularism’s ancestry, and yet they emphatically promote that conclusion, then they are almost certainly driven by emotion.

40

On why the relationship is generally unknown by the public, despite being well covered by historians, Ismail Kurun makes an interesting point:

Defining liberalism as “the holding of liberal opinions in politics or theology,” a nineteenth-century Oxford English Dictionary seems to be aware of the relationship between liberalism and theology.But why then has this relationship that seems quite apparent to any scholar of the early modern history not attracted remarkable attention? I think that the main reason is that modernity, Enlightenment, and liberalism have generally been seen as a break from the Middle Ages. I see this reductionist paradigm as the result of many factors ranging from scientism and positivism to progressivism and anti-clericalism. The sociopolitical changes accompanying the convulsions France experienced beginning with the French Revolution seem to have contributed to a mind-set that epitomizes the French philosophes’ grand projects such as the revocation of the organized church, the creation of a civil religion undergirded by constructivist rationalism, scientism, and romanticism tinged with nationalism as the exemplary of the Enlightenment. In other words, although it is well-known that English and Scottish Enlightenments differed considerably from the French one, this prevalent mind-set seems to create a general tendency among the scholars of philosophy and social sciences to overlook the possibility of the existence of a theological relationship between liberalism and Christianity. Actually modern scholars of philosophy and political theory already tend to underestimate anything concerning theology. When a modern mainstream political theorist encounters words such as purgatory, Eucharist, Grace of Salvation, or transubstantiation in a book, he or she will probably pass off them quickly.

This is certainly part of it, but I would say the issue is deeper still. Because secular liberalism has issues with grounding (as one might expect from any young tradition, but especially one that wants to see itself as presuppositionless), it relies heavily on historical meta-narratives the justify itself. This involves both presenting prior epochs as incredibly brutal, cruel, and superstitious, and the current paradigm as the lone rational solution to the endemic cruelties and dogmatisms of all past forms of life. This is the view at its most extreme obviously, but you find the extreme version pretty often in popular history and textbooks.

But such a view is by no means obvious. The Anglo-liberal tradition is the only tradition to have carried out an almost total genocide across two different continents, almost entirely displacing their native populations. Its paradigmatic example had a legally instituted racial caste system within living memory (one derived from its ubiquitous use of a particularly brutal form of slavery). Whereas, the infamies of the other main post-Enlightenment secular ideologies, communism and fascism, are even more obvious. Hence, any story about progress has to be caveated in important ways. And this remains true even in the post-WWII, post-Jim Crow era, since this period saw wealthy liberal democracies essentially move their working class abroad, leading to conditions akin to those Dickens decried in England, and the worst excesses of the Gilded Age.

All that said, @Tom_Storm, I wonder if you have perhaps led with an issue that is too abstract to really get much traction on. MacIntyre’s thesis is interesting, but it’s also the case that people’s day to day actions and self-understanding tend to be pretty far removed from problems of metaphysical grounding and the like. I certainly wouldn’t say that it doesn’t matter, only that the effects of such shifts take lifetimes to materialize (because traditions limp along long after they have creased to be intelligible), and are very diffuse.

So, I would point instead to a more obvious outgrowth of the broad Enlightenment-secularist-liberal paradigm: consumerism. That’s an area where the linkage between changes in theology, and then the rise of secularism, and the promotion of consumerism has been studied going back to Weber. And I’d say that consumerism ties in directly to maybe the three most acute crises facing the world today:

A. Ecological catastrophes related to over-consumption (e.g., global warming, ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc.).

B. Plummeting birthrates (which now in many nations would result in 70-90+% declines in population over three generations, or even less).

C. Unrestrained technological innovation, namely the risks represented by AI, and the economic dislocations downstream of AI and automation.

We could maybe add growing and calcifying economic inequality as a fourth issue.

But these are all deeply related to consumerism, and consumerism has well explored origins in particular theologies (particularly in the denial of a teleological ordering, skepticism of asceticism, and a changing theology of labor, paired with the rejection of monasticism), and later in secular thoughts’ ejection of all non-immanent ends from the public sphere. Indeed, as Charles Taylor explores, non-immanent ends are often seen as dangerous distractions, while Humean and materialist outlooks also shift how any non-material ends are understood. That’s a big issue, but it is much more concrete, I think.

And I think it is a good question whether the broadly neoliberal paradigm, as it exists today, has the conceptual resources to articulate principled limits on consumerism, given how it accounts for the human good (and I would say the same for Marxism).

Now, the defender of liberalism or socialism will say that everyone loves stuff, as evidenced by the fact that people jump at opportunities to get more of it! And indeed, there is something to this; I won’t deny it. People do like consumer items, and they want more of them long after their “basic needs” are met. However, it is also the case that neo-liberalism has been hegemonic in attempting to shape culture and institutions throughout the world to promote consumerist identity and behavior (and so too in the case of China’s turn to state capitalism, although perhaps to a lesser extent). And it’s by no means obvious that all locales or subcultures equally fall prey to this issue (consider widely divergent birth rates within wealthy nations by social group, even controlling for education, etc.). Hence, claiming consumerism is merely an issue stemming from a universal anthropology is a bit much to my mind.

Certainly, the more traditionalist-friendly view acknowledges acquisitiveness as a key vice that all men are vulnerable to, but it doesn’t follow from this that all cultures are equally good at forming people away from it. Today, acquisitiveness is often presented as more of a virtue than a vice, as it is in many TV shows and films about billionaires (which verge of hagiography), or loveable drug lords. Mark Fisher’s exploration of “keeping it real” in hip hop culture and gangster dramas works wonderfully here; to be “real” is to be an unconstrained consumer who maximizes power and wealth. That’s not a universal anthropology though, but a learned one.

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