Putting Secularism Out of its Misery

Every person who has experienced the power of faith and religious conviction bridles at  the continuing intellectual hegemony of secularism in our culture. Scholars, religious leaders, or cultural trendsetters who can articulate the case for the continuing vitality of religion are prized. A just-published book has added to the cadre of culture-warrriors: The End of Secularism, by Hunter Baker, a young political scientist at Houston Baptist University. (His personal website is here; he also posts at Touchstone Magazine’s “Mere Comments” site.)

The supportive blurbs are themselves impressive: David S. Dockery, Francis J. Beckwith, and Russell D. Moore, for starters. Some of those reviewers link Baker’s work to the seminal efforts of Richard John Neuhaus, both here at First Things, and in his classic The Naked Public Square. Baker himself draws the connection in his introduction, admitting to a fantasy for recognition in the Neuhaus’ “The Public Square”  column—a recognition, of course, that was not to be.

The book is clearly written and precisely argued. The logical line is easy to follow. By the time one is done, it is easy to restate Baker’s central claims. The book really seems to fall into three distinct parts. Chapters 1-9, fully half the book, are a survey of the relationship of the state and Christianity in western and American culture and history. Baker is a master of the succinct summary; one is never left with the feeling that he has left out a development or missed a crucial concept. Based on the areas I know well, one can trust his interpretative judgments. His overview covers a lot of intellectual territory in a brief space; readers who already know that history will be able to follow his presentation swiftly. But almost every reader is likely to find some nugget that adds to his picture of the church-state relationship.

His summary of the work of Robert Palmer and Steven D. Smith on the “Religion Clause” of the First Amendment, and Smith and Philip Hamburger on the Fourteenth Amendment, was an eye-opener for me. Together they show that the Religion Clause was “merely jurisdictional”. It was not intended to create any substantive rights for or from religion. It was merely to say: the federal government has no say. It created a jurisdictional pluralism. The states were to be free to pursue their own individual patterns of church-state relations, from establishment in Massachusetts to non-establishment in Virginia. It this is so, then the Fourteenth Amendment (which is generally read as “incorporating” the Bill of Rights “against” the states) incorporate nothing. Hamburger shows that contemporaneous arguments assumed that, even after the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, it would be possible for individual states to establish a religion. The doctrine of incorporation, if applied to the First Amendment, “would be like saying, ‘The regulation of religion is a matter for the state. And that goes for the states, too.’ It is nonsensical.”

That argument is typical of The End of Secularism. What Baker does is digest a large body of work from many different scholars, and weave them into a large skein, showing the interconnections otherwise lost to someone viewing the individual pieces.

The core of the book, however, is the central three chapters on the theory and politics of secularization (10-12). Clearly, this is where Baker’s own knowledge shines. Chapter 10, “Secularism A Failed Strategy for Social Peace,” is the longest chapter in the book. Secularism is not the neutral cultural or political space it pretends to be. Secularism did not develop spontaneously in a space left empty by declining religion, rather it was an agenda actively promoted by those who wanted to undercut religion’s public role, and replace it with a secularist polity, especially advocated by the academic discipline of sociology (chapter 11). Religion may actually function to protect the integrity of  “traditional life-worlds” against the encroachment of the omni-competent state (chapter 12).

However, Baker’s own analysis suggests some weak links. In ch. 10, he spends considerable time restating the post-modern analysis of Stanley Fish (his discussion is almost as long as some of the other chapters). The “secular liberal” regime is a “shell game” that claims political and cultural neutrality for itself, even while in fact excluding certain groups—including religious people—from participating in that allegedly neutral space. According to Fish as read by Baker, “while we pretend to have something of a neutral process for adjudicating claims between groups, institutions, and persons based on common ground, the common ground does not exist and we do not want to admit it does not exist.” So when Christians and other religious people are told that their language and judgments do not fit in neutral space of public reason, they can respond to the secularist, tu quoque, neither are yours.

This strategy, however, does not fit easily with another one, advocated by Robert George, and summarized at the end of ch. 15 (“The Knowledge Situation”): by means of “natural law,” there are public reasons that non-religious and religious people share, and can equally appeal to in the public square. He acknowledges, as should be evident from his appropriation of Fish, that his discussion favors the post-modern defense against the authority-claims of secularism. But he claims “if we expand our understanding of public reason in a manner that is realistic with regard to what secularism really can and cannot offer,” that we can have our post-modern cake and eat our public reasons also. I would love to think so (really truly I would), but am not convinced.

Based on the analysis he provides, I do not know “what secularism can and cannot offer.” Given that his book proclaims “the end of secularism,” why would he want secularism to offer anything at all?

Furthermore, comparative religious ethics suggests that the natural law shared by world traditions may not give us the common ground we need. I share Robert George’s belief there is a natural law, which I take to be a universal set of moral intuitions. But how substantive are these common moral intuitions? The Aztecs believed that everyone put their lives at the service of the community, men as warriors (with risk of becoming sacrificial captives) and women (who risked death in childbirth). The Aztecs here shared a common moral intuition with all world religions: goodness is not earthly survival or physical pleasure, but contributing to the whole, perhaps by doing good as part of the community. The Hebrew prophets shared this basic intuition in their attack on the rich and powerful. The Aztecs used it to support a religious program of mass human sacrifice. The Hebrew prophets attacked human (child) sacrifice.

This simple example suggests that moral intuitions are either too thick or too thin to serve as public reason(s): either they assume certain specific insights not present in all moral traditions (the Aztecs being for human sacrifice, the Hebrews against), or they are so general that cannot bring about agreement on particular moral problems. Either way,  we are forced back to Fish’s moral anti-foundationalism.

The other 3 chapters strike me as less substantive. Chapter 13 uses the Sweden example to warn us about the use of government bureaucracy to control religion; chapter 14 shows the falsehood of the claim that religion was or is anti-science, and Chapter 16 describes the recent effort in Alabama to use religious (Jewish-Christian) ethical arguments to call for a shifting of the tax burden from the poor to the well-off. Chapters 13 and 16 seem to me to be purely polemical. The polemics hit their mark, and do so with the same clear, energetic style Baker uses throughout the rest of the book. The Alabama story, which shows the inconsistency of the secularist elite (they did nothing to oppose the political effort, although it was clearly motivated by religious reasons), was especially engaging. Still, I did not find the same  intellectual substance I found in the earlier parts of the book.

The End of Secularism might not live up to its blurbs. Fortunately, Prof. Baker is young, and will, God willing, continue to think and write about the limits of secularism and the place of religion and spirituality in the public square. I especially hope he gives more thought to the relationship between a defensive use of moral anti-foundationalism and a positive statement of public reasons, developed out of natural law. It is a compelling problem, and deserves the attention of a devoted Christian with a comprehensive mind, like Hunter Baker.