Sociologist: Modernization and secularization are not the same thing

In "Secularization Falsified" in First Things (February 2008), American sociologist Peter Berger observes that modernization and secularization are two entirely different processes, and the outcomes cannot be equated.

Modernity is not characterized by the absence of God but by the presence of many gods—with two exceptions to this picture of a furiously religious world. One is geographical: Western and Central Europe. ... The other exception is perhaps even more relevant to the question of secularization, for it is constituted by an international cultural elite, essentially a globalization of the Enlightened intelligentsia of Europe. It is everywhere a minority of the population—but a very influential one.

My own life experience would suggest that he is right. I am a Catholic Christian who lives in a multicultural city (Toronto) which hosts representatives of just about every perspective available on life, the universe, God and all that.

That's modernity - just about everyone on the planet is theoretically only a day or so away from landing at Toronto International Airport. The collapsed distances of modernity do not mean either that the local belief systems don't work (we've been here a long time and we survived). Or that the best solution is to banish all beliefs except for the materialist atheism of the secular elite from the public square. In fact, that is one of the major flashpoints of conflict these days, often revolving around apparently trivial stuff like the right to say "Merry Christmas" in public.

Almost always, in my experience, it has been the secular elite who front such "rules", not new immigrants, who typically want accommodation of their own traditions.

Regarding the interesting example of the growing conflict in Turkey a modern majority Muslim nation, Berger notes,

A country in which the challenge to secularism is politically prominent right now is Turkey. The Turkish Republic was founded in 1923 by Atatürk, who was decidedly anti-Islamic and probably antireligious in general. He wanted to “civilize” Turkey, and civilization for him meant the secular culture of Europe. His political model was the French one—public life made, as it were, antiseptically free of religious symbols and behavior. Thus Atatürk proscribed the traditional fez as male headgear, insisting that Turkish men don European-style hats or caps. (This, by the way, had a very visible anti-Islamic implication: It is difficult wearing headgear with a visor in front to touch one’s forehead to the ground in the mandatory obeisance of Muslim prayer.)

This secularist ideology was firmly established in large sectors of Turkey’s society, particularly in the Kemalist political and military elite. It was dominant in urban, middle-class populations. Back in the Anatolian hinterland, a deeply Muslim culture continued to prevail, with people paying lip service to the Kemalist ideology but at the same time passively resisting it in family and community life.

In recent years, this resistance turned politically active. A series of avowedly Islamic parties entered the political process, challenging the Kemalist orthodoxy. For a while, the military intervened to stop such parties from taking power. But this has become progressively more difficult. One reason is that masses of Anatolians migrated to the urban centers, bringing their Muslim culture with them. Another is that Turkey (partly motivated by the elite’s desire to have the country admitted to the European Union) has become more democratic, and, as a result, all those unenlightened people are actually voting. And yet another reason is that some in the elite have come to doubt the old secularist orthodoxy and become lukewarm in their resistance to political Islam.

Essentially, if modernity means the jet plane, the blog, and the cell phone, materialists and non-materialists alike use them. But - if Canadian experience is any guide - the secularist would like to assert control and restrict access to those who go along with his agenda.

Far from being surprised that there are conflicts, I am only surprised that the conflicts are not more severe.

Note: The image is from Speaking of Faith.

When "secular" means "materialist"

Zachary Gappa, director of the Center for Research for a Just Society, observes that the Google search engine folk seem to have bought into a definition of “secular” that does not mean “no one perspective rules” but “religious perspectives are excluded.” For example,

The Christian Institute sought to purchase an advertisement from Google, "so that whenever the word 'abortion' was typed into the popular search engine, its link would appear on the side of the screen." Google refused this request, stating, "At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of web sites that contain 'abortion and religion-related content'".

If Google had simply declined to allow advertisements involving the controversial topic of abortion, their decision would be completely understandable and fully within their rights as a private company. By removing a controversial topic from their advertisements they would not be discriminating against one religious view in favor of another. But this is not what they did.

Instead, Google accepted "adverts for abortion clinics, secular pro-abortion sites and secularist sites which attack religion," while refusing to accept The Christian Institute's "religious" ad. They did not shun the topic of abortion—just the "religious" view on abortion. In other words, they have discriminated against those whose view on abortion is influenced by their belief in God in favor of those whose view on abortion is influenced by their belief that God does not exist.

The organization has filed suit, but they are one of many straws in the wind right now, and not the largest.

Politics, religion, and civil rights - a teetering balance worldwide

Recently, I wrote about my friend Mustafa Akyol’s response to the controversial film Fitna. Another reader, Mohammed, notes that Fitna’s renditions of the Koran are not very accurate, according to a scholar to whom he directs my attention.

I’m no Arabist, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Atheist authors often quote the Bible out of context, ignoring the history, and I suppose that many can play at that game, and use the Koran too.

To show how complex real life is, Ezra Levant, the Jewish lawyer who is fighting for free speech in Canada, says that he prefers the Canadian Muslim Congress to the Canadian Jewish Congress on this key issue. (You would have to live here to understand in detail, but basically, Canadian leftists ally with politicized Islamists to undermine free speech - the two groups have nothing in common expect their disdain for things like free speech. And groups that lean left tend to buy into the package, without considering the big picture.)

While we’re here, here’s Mustafa’s contribution, along with that of a number of other thinkers, to a symposium on Turkey’s future:

First of all, Turkey’s secularism is one of a kind, and it has almost no resemblance to the separation of church and state in the United States. In Turkey, secularism means that the state can dominate and control religion. Secularism protects only the state, in other words, not religion.
Turkey’s secularist establishment even speaks of the need to protect the society from religion. “The secularism principle,” Turkey’s Constitutional Court argued in a 1989 decision, “requires that the society should be kept away from thoughts and judgments that are not based on science and reason.” (This is also quoted in the indictment against the AKP.)

Turkey’s secularists abhor “moderate Islam” as much as radical Islam. Indeed, they see any sort of religious influence on society as a threat to “modernity.” According to Princeton historian Sükrü Hanioglu, the extreme secularism of the Turkish Republic is rooted in the “vulgar materialism” of late-19th-century Germany, which heralded a post-religious age of “science and reason.” This philosophy, which was emulated by some of the Young Turks and was inherited by most of their republican successors, has become the cornerstone of the official state ideology. That ideology, often called “Kemalism,” also includes a very staunch nationalism, a belief in a protected and state-regulated economy, and, as foreign visitors to Turkey will notice, a cult of personality created around the county’s founder, Kemal Atatürk.

This ideology tolerates no “deviation,” and therefore political parties in Turkey need not be “Islamist” to clash with the secularist establishment.

Yes! Many people worldwide do not understand that secularism in North America has NOT historically been the same thing as “laicisme” (routinely translated as “secularism”) in France or Kemalism in Turkey.

Secularism in North America has - at least historically - meant that church and state were separated for the benefit of both. Separation of church and state means, among other things, that the government is not supposed to dictate to religious bodies what they should think, say, or do beyond protecting the basic civil rights of members of a religious organization.

Unfortunately, in the wake of globalization, there are dark hints that the less benign French approach may be gaining ground in North America, and we can all only hope that reason will prevail in Turkey.

Books: Decline of secularism leads to panic among "new atheists"?

John Gray, author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, has some interesting thoughts on the sudden spate of "new atheist" books in the last half decade. He thinks it is a panicky response to the decline in secularism:

It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian. However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal. The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.

The trouble with secularism is that it isn't about anything. After City Hall has put a stop to Christmas, Succoth, Eid al-Fitr, Diwali, and all that, what will we celebrate? City Hall? That's what destroyed the twentieth century materialist regimes (fascism, communism, etc.) People want to reach beyond themselves, and certainly far, far beyond City Hall.

Also

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

One for my reading list, and maybe yours.

Insulting Canadian-ness, anyone?

Private assaults on believers/unbelievers are a risk, but government-backed ones, often on behalf of secularism, are also a major challenge, according to reports by the Acton Institute, such as this one:

In 1971, the Turkish government shut down Halki, the partriarchal seminary on Heybeliada Island in the Sea of Marmara. And it has progressively confiscated Orthodox Church properties, including the expropriation of the Buyukada Orphanage for Boys on the Prince's Islands (and properties belonging to an Armenian Orthodox hospital foundation). These expropriations happen as religious minorities report problems associated with opening, maintaining, and operating houses of worship. Many services are held in secret. Indeed, Turkey is a place where proselytizing for Christian and even Muslim minority sects can still get a person hauled into court on charges of "publicly insulting Turkishness." This law has also been used against journalists and writers, including novelist Orhan Pamuk for mentioning the Armenian genocide and Turkey's treatment of the Kurds.

But, significantly, the Institute warns,

The patriarch's solution to Turkey's problems -- and that of religious minorities -- is to move the country to a more Western model of tolerance and religious freedom by bringing it into the European Union. "It is my conviction that the accession of Turkey to the European Union would benefit all of its citizens, including the minority communities of the country," Bartholomew writes in his new book. "For Turkey would be required to make significant, indeed substantial modifications to its legislation, adhering to the principles of other European nations."

The EU Card

Unfortunately, recent history is not so favorable to this view. It is a doubtful proposition that the EU mandarins in Brussels, who resisted any effort to mention the Christian roots of European civilization in a failed draft constitution, would come rushing to the aid of the Patriarchate and other religious minorities.

There is a vast difference between a secularism like that of North America - which is simply a means of disentangling religion from politics, and tends to benefit both - and a secularism like that of France or Turkey, where secularism is pursued as some kind of virtue for its own sake.

Then you get idiotic crimes like “insulting Turkishness.” To see what I mean, try out a phrase like “insulting Canadian-ness.” If that ever becomes a crime, I’ll know things are going nuts here.

Religion and politics: What does new, more religious government in Turkey portend?

Not necessarily what you might think, says Mustafa Akyol, deputy editor of the Turkish daily News. Here's Akyol, advising against jumping to conclusions about Turkey's new leader:

Mr. Gul is a practicing Muslim, and his similarly devout wife, Hayrunnisa Gul, wears the Islamic headscarf. Hence some people wonder whether this God-fearing First Couple symbolizes a setback in Turkey's two-century-old quest for modernization.

Akyol explains,

Mr. Gul soon found a chance to discover the virtues of the modern West during the two years he spent in London and Exeter for postgraduate studies. As he recalled in a recent interview, he was deeply impressed by the openness, tolerance and pluralism of British society. A most notable experience was the pastor who kindly invited him to perform his daily prayers in the university chapel. He realized the problem in Turkey, the authoritarian secularism that disallowed his wife's education because of her headscarf, did not stem from Western-style democracy, but the lack thereof.

In 1991 Mr. Gul joined the Islamist Welfare Party, but never shared the anti-Western and anti-Semitic demagoguery of its leader, Necmeddin Erbakan.

In the late '90s, Mr. Gul and the likeminded, including the charismatic Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdogan, formed the "reformist" movement in Welfare, and soon broke with it to found the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2001. The party emerged as, and still is, the champion of free markets, liberal reforms and Turkey's effort to join the European Union.

Well, if the ejection device for Islamic extremists is in good working order, this sounds like a plan.

Hmmmmm: Thoughts from Mark Steyn on secularism

My compatriot Mark Steyn writes in America Alone,

Reviewing the film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Polly Toynbee, the queen of progressivist pieties in Britain, wrote that Aslan "is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging, and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can."

Sounds very nice. But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there's nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you're dead -

[ ... ]

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. (Pp. 97-98)

Some people ruffle feathers; Mark likes to bust a pillow and scatter the contents over the balcony in a high wind.

Commentary: Why it is hard to separate politics and religion

In “The Politics of God”, a long essay in the New York Times, Columbia Humanities prof Mark Lilla offers some thoughtful reflections on the political theology that can lead to violent extremism, starting from the premise that sixteenth-century Europe was much like the modern Middle East:

A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

Not a man of easy assumptions or simple answers, Lilla writes of Rousseau’s views, for example,

Religion has its roots in needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for protecting the private exercise of religion. But it did raise doubts about whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be psychologically sustainable. When a question is important, we want an answer to it: as the Savoyard vicar remarks, “The mind decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing.” Rousseau had grave doubts about whether human beings could be happy or good if they did not understand how their actions related to something higher. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics.

But what happened when, sickened by the Reign of Terror sponsored by atheists during the French Revolution, German Christians decided that a reformed religion was the answer? For that, you must read the article, but here’s a hint ....

... the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth. For what did the new Protestantism offer the soul of one seeking union with his creator? It prescribed a catechism of moral commonplaces and historical optimism about bourgeois life, spiced with deep pessimism about the possibility of altering that life. It preached good citizenship and national pride, economic good sense and the proper length of a gentleman’s beard. But it was too ashamed to proclaim the message found on every page of the Gospels: that you must change your life. And what did the new Judaism bring to a young Jew seeking a connection with the traditional faith of his people? It taught him to appreciate the ethical message at the core of all biblical faith and passed over in genteel silence the fearsome God of the prophets, his covenant with the Jewish people and the demanding laws he gave them. Above all, it taught a young Jew that his first obligation was to seek common ground with Christianity and find acceptance in the one nation, Germany, whose highest cultural ideals matched those of Judaism, properly understood. To the decisive questions — “Why be a Christian?” and “Why be a Jew?” — liberal theology offered no answer at all.

And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, slouched in to replace it?

Lilla’s suggestions for addressing Islamic extremism and interesting and thoughtful too.

Turkey and non-liberal secularism

My Turkish friend and colleague Mustafa Akyol interprets Turkey's tangled politics with a clarity beyond praise.

Turkey deserves close attention because there secularism is not in the least liberal.

Although the AKP has been in power since 2002 and has carried out a very successful program of political and economic liberalism--in the classic sense--Turkey’s staunchly secular establishment never fully trusted the party that had (?) started as a liberal offshoot of a more radical Muslim thinking. Thus while the AKP leaders defined themselves as “conservatives,” Turkey’s secularists continue calling them “Islamist,” a label designed to tarnish their image, at home and abroad, as some Taliban-style Muslim totalitarians. Therefore the political battle in Turkey, which reached its tipping point when Turkish generals issued a harsh “secularism memorandum” on the night of April 27, has commonly been defined as a power struggle between “Islamists” and “secularists.” And for the uninitiated foreigner, it was easy to presume that the former is bigoted and xenophobic, and the latter is open-minded and pro-Western.

Yet the true picture is exactly the opposite. While the AKP is a strong proponent of free markets, civil liberties and Turkey’s European Union bid, the secularist opposition, led by the People’s Republican Party, rejects all these objectives. The secularists actually think that most of the liberal reforms the AKP has spearheaded during the EU process are in fact part of a plot cooked up by Western “imperialists” designed to dilute Turkey’s national sovereignty. A series of recent bestsellers by a die-hard secular conspiracy theorist, Ergun Poyraz, is a good indicator of this zeitgeist. His “investigative” books paranoidly argue that the AKP leaders--and their headscarved wives--are in fact crypto-Jews who collaborate with the “Elders of Zion” to destroy Turkey’s secular system.

The correct way of interpreting Turkey’s power struggle would be in fact to define it as a conflict between liberal Muslims and illiberal secularists.

Of course, it's not really that hard to understand. Secularists are never liberal when they see no advantage to themselves from freedom of thought, or conscience, of markets, of the press, or whatever. If they are materialists, they do not in fact believe that there is even a divine spark in their fellow humans that must not be snuffed out.

Materialist myths: Primitive people are religious, modern people are secular

One of the enduring implicit myths of pop media on the subject of religion is that way back when - when people didn't know anything about how the world worked - they were religious, but nowadays we are much smarter. As Mario Beauregard and I show in The Spiritual Brain, people have always been religious or spiritually minded - or not, as the case may be.

So I was really intrigued when, at a recent lecture in Toronto, a distinguished clergyman drew the class's attention to the work of anthropologist
Mary Douglas, on the "myth of the pious primitive":

Secularization is ... an age-old cosmological type, a product of a definable social experience, which need have nothing to do with urban life or modern science ... The contrast of secular with religious has nothing whatever to do with the contrast with traditional or primitive. The idea that primitive man is by nature deeply religious is nonsense.

Traditional societies have always known this, of course. She goes on:

The truth is that all the varieties of skepticism, materialism and spiritual fervour are to be found in the range of tribal societies. They vary as much from one another on these lines as any chosen segments of London life. The illusion that all primitives are pious, credulous and subject to the teaching of priests or magicians has probably done even more to impede our understanding of our own civilization than it has confused the interpretations of archaeologists dealing with the dead past.

Atheism: New York atheist gives millions to Catholic schools

Honestly, it makes way more sense than you think for an atheist to give money for tuition to Catholic schools. Here's retired hedge fund manager Robert W. Wilson's explanation for why he gave $22.5 million to the Archdiocese of New York's program for needy students' tuition:

"Let's face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization," Wilson said. "Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent. Keep in mind, I'm helping to pay tuition. The money isn't going directly to the schools."

"It was a chance for a very modest amount of money to get kids out of a lousy school system and into a good school system," Wilson said.

It's not hard to see, in the background to this story, an indictment of the performance of the inner city public education system.

Frankly, I don't think that the problems of secularist inner city school systems are fixable.

When I was a child in the 1950s here in Canada, the "public" system was actually the "Protestant" system. Underlying British North American values, including spiritual values, were taken for granted. But as the Protestant bedrock moldered away or was legislated away over the decades, asserting any value whatever against a contrary value statement became more and more difficult.

Finally, it reached the point where a friend phoned me, bewildered by a school board document she was reading that pointedly refused to make any moral judgments about schoolyard bullying. That might hurt the bully's feelings, after all. He mustn't be encouraged to think that he is to blame for his behaviour and should just change it.

As policy analyst Robert Novak notes in a recent edition of First Things (June/July 2007, not on line yet), secularism did not really replace transcendent commitments with a humanist value system. On the contrary, secularism is more vulnerable than most habits of mind to deconstruction by post-modernism. No ethical standards can be confidently asserted in such an atmosphere (though endless irrational rules are made, together with strategic exceptions for whiners who have perfect pitch).

Plaudits to Wilson for providing an escape for thousands of child refugees.

(Note: What about successful secular private schools, you ask? In my experience, where they work well, they stay in touch with the broad, older Western culture where, for example, people are considered responsible for their conduct and bullying is considered shameful. But it is important to recognize that even the non-religious aspects of that culture were and are non-materialist. A wonderful movie illustrating that culture is The Emperor's Club, whose story revolves around the character issues created by the Mr. Julius Caesar contest at a not-especially-religious private boys' school. And what about religious schools mired in sex scandals? In general, these schools gave up older, spiritually oriented accounts of the human person for modernist therapy-centred ones - and reaped the bitter fruit in vast abundance.)

Thinkquote of the day: On Dawkins' popularity

A friend writes, " ... Dawkins [an anti-theistic Darwinist ] is a force to be reckoned with, if only because he commands so much media attention and popularity."

Yes, I came across a beautiful comment for By Design or by Chance? from one of Dawkins' editors:

More than that, the elegant Oxbridge don is a cultural icon. As one of his editors explains: If you’re an intelligent reader, and you read certain literary novels that everybody has to read, along with seeing Tarantino movies, then reading Richard Dawkins has become part of your cultural baggage.[6] (p. 104)

Yes, cultural baggage. We need to keep in mind that it actually does not matter if Dawkins is talking rot. His fans are very anxious to hear and accept that rot. It goes with everything they believe, and against everything they do not believe.

As a result, they will behave - at best - toward those who question it as people do toward those who would deprive them of a pleasure. At worst, they will assume that they have been attacked personally, and respond in kind. My guess (as good as anyone else's) is that we'll see more of that before we see less.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.