The Narnia 3 Blog

Is "Secular Humanism" Dead?

The heretofore tedious presidential campaign has been a little more interesting in the last couple of weeks as the religious beliefs of Mitt Romney (a Mormon) and Mike Huckabee (a former Baptist pastor) have come into play. Romney made a speech about his faith and tried to portray Mormonism as being within the mainstream of Evangelical Christianity, instead of a cult. This is something LDS leaders have been attempting for about 20 years with far less success than, say, Seventh Day Adventistism.

Camille Paglia, in her Salon Magazine online column, commenting on his speech and religion overall made some interesting comments:

But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of secularism"? The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young. Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.

But primary and secondary education, which should provide an entree to great art and thought, has declined into trivialities and narcissistic exercises in self-esteem. Popular culture, once emotionally vibrant and collective in impact (from Hollywood movies to rock music), has waned into flashy, transient niche entertainment. The young, who are masters of ever-evolving personal technology, are besieged by the siren call of materialism. In this climate, it is selfish and shortsighted for liberals to automatically define religion as a social problem that needs suppression or eradication. Without spirituality in some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs -- including the tranquilizers that seem near universal among the status-addled professional class of the Northeastern elite.

Her observations are intensely thought-provoking. Many Christians, particularly those from more fundamentalist backgrounds often are guilty of fighting battles that are long since over. Evangelicalism perhaps is on the brink of the same problem. Fighting "secular humanism" today is perhaps the same as fundamentalists still battling "modernism" in the past. The later is dead and former is in its death throes. The illusionary spirituality of the New Age movement is still alive but hardly the force it was in the past few decades and the fad of eastern mysticism is largely in the rear view mirror. Currently, the most formidable religious and cultural challenges to Christianity is fundamentalist Islam, which has great appeal to the lower rungs in the socio-economic and cultural ladder. What Paglia notices about "secular humanism" is largely true; that movement has taken popular culture to the lowest common denominator and left in its wake a spiritual vacuum.

The world view that Paglia advocates: a "religion" centered on an anthropocentric and aesthetical, "art and nature. . .the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe," is hardly a new construct. And, it is unlikely to catch on as a viable worldview for the middle and lower economic/cultural classes; particularly since "practical" and "skill oriented" courses have come to dominate secondary education. This problematic occurrence, creating a de facto two-tier distinction between "college prep," for the "top" students; and "vocational preparation" for the perceived dullards, became the dominant philosophy in the late 1970's effectively removing quality instruction in the arts, music, and literature from "regular" high schools.

Strangely, what Paglia see as an alternative to religion is exactly what many in the "emerging church" community are trying to incorporate into Christianity. There is nothing inherently wrong or unbiblical about aesthetical concepts or endeavors. Authentic, Biblical Christianity sees God as the creator of all that is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. Beauty is one of the "good things" that God has given to us to enjoy (1 Tim 6:17). But, the very beauty that God incorporated into the creation is only a beginning point (Rom 1:20) not a destination. Unfortunately, the emerging church lacks, in many sectors, a solid Biblical and exegetical foundation that can keep their flirtation with the arts from becoming an end unto itself, leading them straight into aesthetically pleasing Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism.

Evangelicalism, in many ways, hitched its wagon to the star of political power, notably on the right side of that spectrum. The new "Evangelical Left" is emerging as a reaction to that track, but it is certainly doomed to simply spin down into the same drain that consumed the "Social Gospel" dominated mainstream denominations in the past. A Biblical Evangelicalism, centered on Scripture and focused on God's purposes in history, needs to refocus itself, recognize the real enemies of the faith today and vigorously engage them.