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Journal of Policy History 13.1 (2001) 47-72



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Two Concepts of Secularism

Wilfred M. McClay


Looking back over the century just ended, it is not easy to assess the status and prospects of secularism and the secular ideal in the United States. As is so often the case in American history, when one sets out in search of the simple and obvious, one soon comes face to face with a crowd of paradoxes. The psychologist Erik Erikson once observed that Americans have a talent for sustaining opposites, and he could hardly have been more right. Such Janus-faced doubleness, or multiplicity, is virtually the American specialité de la maison. 1

Consider a few examples. The American Revolution was, as Samuel Johnson delighted in pointing out, led by valiant freedom fighters--who were also the owners of slaves. 2 It would be hard to imagine a nation whose self-conception has been more firmly wedded to moralistic idealism--or to unabashed materialism. 3 The same nation that worships a high-octane, near-anarchic style of individualism is also a nation that in practice puts a stiflingly high premium on social conformity--even if the standard being conformed to is one tailor-made to look fashionably anarchic, like a pair of hand-faded, designer-torn blue jeans, purchased off the rack. 4

More to our present purpose, consider another American paradox: that the vanguard nation of technological innovation, the world's principal exemplar of capitalism's powerful and inexorable "creative destruction," is also the developed world's principal bastion of religious faith and practice--a nation that continues to sustain remarkably high levels of traditional religious belief and affiliation, even as it careens merrily down the whitewater rapids of modernity. 5

This last paradox is doubly perplexing, because it simply was not supposed to be possible. Sociologists from Max Weber to Peter Berger were convinced that secularization was merely one inevitable facet of that great [End Page 47] and powerful monolith called "modernization," and hence they trusted that secularization would come along bundled with a comprehensive package: urbanization, rationalization, professionalization, functional differentiation, bureaucratization, and all the rest. 6 If by secularism we mean a perspective that dismisses the very possibility of a transcendent realm of being, or regards the existence or nonexistence of such a realm as entirely irrelevant to the concerns of the visible, material world, then, according to the social scientists, we should have expected religious belief and practices to wither away by now, as the forces of modernization gathered strength. The taboos and superstitions of the great world religions may have transmitted a useful kernel of moral teaching. But their supernaturalism and irrationality were vestiges of the human race's childhood, properly doomed to the ashheap of history. Our growing mastery of the terms of human existence would seem to make it more and more inevitable that this world can, and should, be understood entirely on its own terms, through the exercise of human rationality. Secularity in all its fullness would arrive as naturally as adulthood.

Needless to say, these expectations have not been realized. The world we contemplate at the dawning of the twentieth-first century remains vibrantly, energetically, even at times maniacally religious, in ways large and small, good and bad, superficial and profound, now as much as ever. If the "secularization theory" long promoted by social-scientific students of religion has been fatally undermined, as many believe it now has been, the unanticipated resiliency of religious faith in twentieth-century America could certainly be regarded as Exhibit A, the single most arresting demonstration of the theory's inadequacy. 7

And yet, one should not admit this claim too quickly. Perhaps, one might argue, it is still too early to call the secularization thesis a complete failure in describing the United States. Perhaps the religious efflorescence we see at present is merely defensive and compensatory, an anxious and fleeting reaction against modernization's incursions, or an atavistic reflex that will fade, atrophy, and eventually die. Indeed, in many respects, one could say that the United States at century's...

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