“[T]o the degree that religion disappears from the external world it retreats into the interior in order to erect its temples and altars in the heart. As a result, secularization did not cause the death of religion; it led rather to the alienation between a secular and monotonous cultural world and a kind of ‘Sunday existence’ represented by religion. Religion did not cease to exist; it did, however, become but one sector of modern life along with many others. Religion has lost its claim to universality and its power of interpretation, and has become particular, at times even a form of a subculture.
“To be sure, not only religion, but man himself has become homeless in the modern world. Wherever man loses the all-embracing unity of all reality that used to be articulated by religion and cultivated by liturgical celebrations, the individual human being becomes homeless and without support.”
— from “Nature, Grace, and Culture: On the Meaning of Secularization,” in David L. Schindler, editor, Catholicism and Secularization in America: Essays on Nature, Grace, and Culture (Notre Dame: Communio Books, 1990)
Related reading and listening
- A metaphysics of realism, relationality, and personalism — John Milbank gives a survey and critique of the efforts of 20th and 21st century theologians to articulate a Trinitarian ontology that reflects reality and counters secularization. (61 minutes)
- Insisting that political leaders are incapable of obeying Christ — Oliver O’Donovan on the unintended consequences of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
- An unwitting agent for the secularization of America — Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden explain how a prominent Christian Founding Father added momentum to the secularization of America
- An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
- Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
- Aspects of our un-Christening — In this Friday Feature — presented courtesy of Biola University — Carlo Lancellotti talks with Aaron Kheriaty about the central ideas in Augusto Del Noce’s writings. (43 minutes)
- The scantily clad public square — Reinhard Hütter on the necessity of the virtue of religion
- David Martin on what happened in the 1960s — David Martin talks about how the cultural shifts of the 1960s were the fruition of previous changes in the 1890s and 1930s. (17 minutes)
- Is religion just moralistic therapy after all? — Alexander Schmemann on the secularization of religion
- From darkness [sic] into light [sic] — David Bentley Hart on the ignorant myth that banishes the transcendent from modern public spaces
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- Art and the loss of transcendence — Suzi Gablik looks at how modern and postmodern artists have struggled with living in modern and postmodern societies in which there is no public vocabulary for the sacred.
