Kicking the Secularist Habit

A six-step program

by David Brooks

Mar 01 '03

Like a lot of people these days, I'm a recovering secularist.

Kicking the Secularist Habit

Kicking the Secularist Habit

A six-step program

Kicking the Secularist Habit

Kicking the Secularist Habit

A six-step program

by David Brooks

Mar 01 '03

Like a lot of people these days, I'm a recovering secularist. Until
September 11 I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer
and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a
tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and
parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves
forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking
obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an
enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will.

It's now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human
race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and
better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of
scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we
are in the midst of a religious boom.

Islam is surging. Orthodox Judaism is growing among young people, and
Israel has gotten more religious as it has become more affluent. The
growth of Christianity surpasses that of all other faiths. In 1942
this magazine published an essay called "Will the Christian Church
Survive?" Sixty years later there are two billion Christians in the
world; by 2050, according to some estimates, there will be three
billion. As Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and
Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed,
perhaps the most successful social movement of our age is
Pentecostalism (see "The Next Christianity," October Atlantic ).
Having gotten its start in Los Angeles about a century ago, it now
embraces 400 million people—a number that, according to Jenkins,
could reach a billion or more by the half-century mark.

Moreover, it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism
that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be "modern" and
"relevant" are withering. Ecstatic forms of Christianity and
"anti-modern" Islam are thriving. The Christian population in Africa,
which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million,
is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative,
evangelical, and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches
are becoming more influential than many nations, with both good and
bad effects.

Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of
the future. This realization sends us recovering secularists to the
bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to figure out what is
going on in the world. I suspect I am not the only one who since
September 11 has found himself reading a paperback edition of the
Koran that was bought a few years ago in a fit of high-mindedness but
was never actually opened. I'm probably not the only one boning up on
the teachings of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, Sayyid Qutb, and Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab.

There are six steps in the recovery process. First you have to accept
the fact that you are not the norm. Western foundations and
universities send out squads of researchers to study and explain
religious movements. But as the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed
out, the phenomenon that really needs explaining is the habits of the
American professoriat: religious groups should be sending out
researchers to try to understand why there are pockets of people in
the world who do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives,
who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments that
bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that
God's will should shape their public lives.

Once you accept this—which is like understanding that the earth
revolves around the sun, not vice-versa—you can begin to see
things in a new way.

The second step toward recovery involves confronting fear. For a few
years it seemed that we were all heading toward a benign end of
history, one in which our biggest worry would be boredom. Liberal
democracy had won the day. Yes, we had to contend with globalization
and inequality, but these were material and measurable concepts. Now
we are looking at fundamental clashes of belief and a truly scary
situation—at least in the Southern Hemisphere—that brings
to mind the Middle Ages, with weak governments, missionary armies, and
rampant religious conflict.

The third step is getting angry. I now get extremely annoyed by the
secular fundamentalists who are content to remain smugly ignorant of
enormous shifts occurring all around them. They haven't learned
anything about religion, at home or abroad. They don't know who Tim
LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though those co-authors have
sold 42 million copies of their books. They still don't know what
makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal (you could walk through an American
newsroom and ask that question, and the only people who might be able
to answer would be the secretaries and the janitorial staff). They
still don't know about Michel Aflaq, the mystical Arab nationalist who
served as a guru to Saddam Hussein. A great Niagara of religious
fervor is cascading down around them while they stand obtuse and dry
in the little cave of their own parochialism—and many of them
are journalists and policy analysts, who are paid to keep up with
these things.

The fourth step toward recovery is to resist the impulse to find a
materialistic explanation for everything. During the centuries when
secularism seemed the wave of the future, Western intellectuals
developed social-science models of extraordinary persuasiveness. Marx
explained history through class struggle, other economists explained
it through profit maximization. Professors of international affairs
used conflict-of-interest doctrines and game theory to predict the
dynamics between nation-states.

All these models are seductive and partly true. This country has built
powerful institutions, such as the State Department and the CIA, that
use them to try to develop sound policies. But none of the models can
adequately account for religious ideas, impulses, and actions, because
religious fervor can't be quantified and standardized. Religious
motivations can't be explained by cost-benefit analysis.

Over the past twenty years domestic-policy analysts have thought hard
about the roles that religion and character play in public life. Our
foreign-policy elites are at least two decades behind. They go for
months ignoring the force of religion; then, when confronted with
something inescapably religious, such as the Iranian revolution or the
Taliban, they begin talking of religious zealotry and fanaticism,
which suddenly explains everything. After a few days of shaking their
heads over the fanatics, they revert to their usual secular analyses.
We do not yet have, and sorely need, a mode of analysis that attempts
to merge the spiritual and the material.

The recovering secularist has to resist the temptation to treat
religion as a mere conduit for thwarted economic impulses. For
example, we often say that young Arab men who have no decent prospects
turn to radical Islam. There's obviously some truth to this
observation. But it's not the whole story: neither Mohammed Atta nor
Osama bin Laden, for example, was poor or oppressed. And although it's
possible to construct theories that explain their radicalism as the
result of alienation or some other secular factor, it makes more sense
to acknowledge that faith is its own force, independent of and perhaps
greater than economic resentment.

Human beings yearn for righteous rule, for a just world or a world
that reflects God's will—in many cases at least as strongly as
they yearn for money or success. Thinking about that yearning means
moving away from scientific analysis and into the realm of moral
judgment. The crucial question is not What incentives does this
yearning respond to? but Do individuals pursue a moral vision of
righteous rule? And do they do so in virtuous ways, or are they, like
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, evil in their vision and methods?

Fifth, the recovering secularist must acknowledge that he has been too
easy on religion. Because he assumed that it was playing a diminishing
role in public affairs, he patronized it. He condescendingly decided
not to judge other creeds. They are all valid ways of approaching God,
he told himself, and ultimately they fuse into one. After all, why
stir up trouble by judging another's beliefs? It's not polite. The
better option, when confronted by some nasty practice performed in the
name of religion, is simply to avert one's eyes. Is Wahhabism a
vicious sect that perverts Islam? Don't talk about it.

But in a world in which religion plays an ever larger role, this
approach is no longer acceptable. One has to try to separate right
from wrong. The problem is that once we start doing that, it's hard to
say where we will end up. Consider Pim Fortuyn, a left-leaning Dutch
politician and gay-rights advocate who criticized Muslim immigrants
for their attitudes toward women and gays. When he was assassinated,
last year, the press described him, on the basis of those criticisms,
as a rightist in the manner of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which was far from
the truth. In the post-secular world today's categories of left and
right will become inapt and obsolete.

The sixth and final step for recovering secularists is to understand
that this country was never very secular anyway. We Americans long for
righteous rule as fervently as anybody else. We are inculcated with
the notion that, in Abraham Lincoln's words, we represent the "last,
best hope of earth." Many Americans have always sensed that we have a
transcendent mission, although, fortunately, it is not a theological
one. We instinctively feel, in ways that people from other places do
not, that history is unfulfilled as long as there are nations in which
people are not free. It is this instinctive belief that has led George
W. Bush to respond so ambitiously to the events of September 11, and
that has led most Americans to support him.

Americans are as active as anyone else in the clash of eschatologies.
Saddam Hussein sees history as ending with a united Arab nation
globally dominant and with himself revered as the creator of a just
world order. Osama bin Laden sees history as ending with the global
imposition of sharia. Many Europeans see history as ending with the
establishment of secular global institutions under which nationalism
and religious passions will be quieted and nation-states will give way
to international law and multilateral cooperation. Many Americans see
history as ending in the triumph of freedom and constitutionalism,
with religion not abandoned or suppressed but enriching democratic
life.

We are inescapably caught in a world of conflicting visions of
historical destiny. This is not the same as saying that we are caught
in a world of conflicting religions. But understanding this world
means beating the secularist prejudices out of our minds every day.




David Brooks , an Atlantic correspondent, is also a contributing
editor of Newsweek, a senior editor of The Weekly Standard, and a
political analyst for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.



http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200303/brooks