Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC


How religion became secular

Thomas Rodham ABC Religion and Ethics 27 Nov 2012


Once upon a time religion was in the world and made the world. Religion made the messy, chaotic world legible to human understanding and amenable to human purposes.


But no more. Religion has been brought low by its old foes - philosophy and politics. Religion persists and is even popular. But it is now in the mind, a matter of personal belief projected outwards ("faith"). In short, religion is now secular.

I focus here on the trajectory of the Abrahamic family - that is, the highly theological monotheisms (other forms of religious-ish behaviour, such as the atheist Asian religions, require their own accounts). This kind of religion rests on a metaphysical unification of the divine, the social-order and nature. It gives us an enchanted world and a guarantee that we know our true place in it. The enemies of theological religion have always been philosophy and politics because both present inherently secular ways of grappling with the nature of the world that bypass religion. Their rise has shattered both enchantment and Truth. Religion still creeps about the place, but in a thoroughly subordinate role.


Philosophy is always trying to see the world - natural and social - from a non-orthodox perspective. Philosophers are those annoying people who are always saying, "Yes, but ..." As in: Yes, of course God exists, but just suppose that the heavens are like a giant clockwork mechanism that goes automatically after it's been set up? Wouldn't that be an interesting way of looking at things?

Religions can be seen as rich communal storehouses of practical knowledge, about subjects as diverse as ethics, agriculture, hygiene and economics, that provide access to more wisdom about how to live than any one person could ever come to on their own. (That is a significant reason for their attractiveness even in the modern world, apart from the social club benefits.) But its metaphysical constraints - the ultimate answer is always that God did it - mean that religion can't compete with philosophy in the theoretical knowledge game.

Philosophy constantly spits out alternative approaches to understanding the world, most perniciously by creating dedicated collaborative epistemic communities. So, for instance, every major academic discipline, from physics to economics to mathematics was started by philosophers. These lovers of theoretical knowledge for its own sake leave the speculative orientation of pure philosophy behind as they develop specialist methodologies and employ them systematically upon different bits of the world. If they are given space and freedom (that is, universities) they generate vast quantities of robust theoretical knowledge about how the world really works. Religion, of course, knows this full well, which is why it always tried to keep the keys to knowledge to itself - for example, in medieval Europe by exercising tight control over literacy, libraries and universities.

But the Enlightenment let philosophy out of its bottle for good, and since then it has succeeded to an astonishing degree in producing much better accounts of how the world works than any religion. It has convincingly shown that all religions make serious mistakes about matters of fact (astronomy, history, medicine) and about how facts are connected (evolution, cosmology). The sacred triangle between the divine, human society and nature just isn't out there, so, obviously, your prayers cannot affect the weather or your marriage prospects.

Academic inquiry has shown that the world is actually much more complicated than religion ever claimed - exposing the limits of religious knowledge communities. But at the same time, it has also shown that the world doesn't need God, or any other supernatural agency, to make it work. Even in ethics, it has shown up the inconsistencies, biases and questionable foundations of religious teachings and identified a plethora of alternatives that beat iron age patriarchal tribal mores hands down. (How many genocides does God order in the Old Testament? Death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath? We can do better than that, surely.)



Politics is about earthly power and has an underlying Machiavellian pragmatism that has always been in tension with religious accounts of the divine and "true" social order. Politicians are the ones who have bright ideas like: Hey, what if I stop killing and torturing the people who disagree with the official church about the doctrine of the Trinity. Think of all the money I would save and all the extra taxes I could raise.

The pragmatism of politics is a threat to the theological domination of society in more than one way (hence the truism that the separation of church and state actually protects religion). On the one hand, religion can easily be corrupted by politics if it is seduced by the possibility of using direct earthly power to make sure the social world follows the divine script properly. The exercise of that power can't be done without yielding to the logic of politics and becoming embroiled in the profane arts of government (like the prince bishops of medieval Europe or the Ayatollah Khamenei). And then the people stop taking the clerics' heavenly status claims seriously.

On the other hand, politics can reach out to religion as a source of legitimacy for its own Machiavellian strategies - blessing kings, wars and taxes, for example. Here the seductions themselves are earthly: access to the king's court, monetary rewards and extra-legal privileges for clerics. Sooner or later the clerics are selling indulgences to build gorgeous palaces and raping peasant children with impunity. And then, again, the people tend to lose faith.


Since the unleashing of politics and philosophy - that is, since the arrival of modernity - religion has been forced to adapt. Out went the mighty all-encompassing metaphysics in the face of the top-down scrutiny of querulous university academics. Out went the claim to absolute truth in the face of the bottom-up revolution of peasants wanting the right to their own opinion. The new religion is individualised, marketised and deracinated.


Liberal democracy is all about dealing with the fact of reasonable disagreement, that as soon as one relaxes totalitarian social control one will find that other people have completely sincere beliefs and judgements that differ from yours. When he said, "Here I stand. I can do no other," Luther didn't think he was making a plea for individual freedom of conscience. He thought he was right. But when plenty of people start thinking they have the right to stand up for what they believe, one has to find a modus vivendi (or face interminable civil war). One has to find a way to live in the same political space as people whom you believe are utterly - metaphysically - wrong.

The trouble is that once you set up some rules for keeping the peace - state neutrality on religious matters, no religion in the public square and so on - they do much more than keep the peace. One ends up finding one's Lutheran, Catholic, Jewish or even atheist neighbours actually very pleasant. It becomes harder and harder to remember that the really important thing in the relationship is that they're going to hell. Politeness and civility come to matter, and people decide to keep their revelations to themselves. Instead of religious credos being too dangerous to utter in public, mentioning them becomes something of a social gaffe, like blurting out your taste in pornography.

Meanwhile the damned philosophers are busy creating a secular intellectual space open to all and independent of any religious dogma. Religion's storehouse of wisdom is bypassed and then surpassed by towering cathedrals of secular knowledge. Then it is subjected to criticism of its science, history, ethics - even of its literary qualities. If you try to talk about miracles and divine providence these people ask if you also believe in UFOs or fairies; and ethnographers may ask if they can study your interesting sub-culture.

For the great majority of the world's faithful - those who do not live in sequestered theocratic communities - religion is a personal matter that takes place largely within the mind of the individual. Outside this inner world they must act as if their beliefs were irrelevant. Above, the world turns according to a godless physics, biology and economics. Their social interactions are dominated by the fact of pluralism: they must bear in mind the different beliefs of others, and limit their talk and actions to what heretics and the godless can go along with.


Pluralism and individualisation also brings markets. Of course, marketing is nothing new to the monotheistic religions, but previously they were often in the comfortable state of being monopolies able to charge whatever price for their spiritual services they wanted in their customers' attention and property. That meant that they tended to set a "price" for their services that maximised their profits, even though it left a great many people unserved or underserved (what economists call "the deadweight loss of monopoly"). Indeed, in the heyday of religion most people probably weren't particularly religious because they weren't the core market and the core product wasn't designed or priced with them in mind.

Nevertheless, monopoly not customer service is what every corporation dreams of and struggles for. In this light, monotheism's visceral distaste for polytheism can be seen as typical protectionist behaviour (three out of the ten commandments are about monopoly and trademark protection). Under monotheism when your prayers aren't answered it's your fault and you need to pay or pray more. In contrast, if you have a choice of gods you can play them off against each other, as the Greeks did, by switching to a different god whenever one fails to deliver. Multiple gods means market competition between divine service providers and lower prices for the ordinary consumer (and so also more freedom to think for yourself).


The modern state of affairs requires religions to compete with each other like regular companies in a free market. Monopoly profits from captive consumers are a thing of the past - in America more than 50% of the population has changed their religious affiliation at least once. Since people tend to think all religion is pretty much the same thing (different paths to the same ultimate truth) all the religious denominations are desperate to avoid being fully commoditised, like pork bellies, as fully substitutable with each other and compared purely on price. So they strive to differentiate themselves, like supermarkets or airlines. They identify and target distinct types of customers - like single mothers, high-flying business types, or specific ethnic groups - and then woo them with free lunches, parking, day-care, and sermons they like to hear. To increase retention rates they pay close attention to customer feedback and tweak their offerings to meet changing tastes. They have to come up with competition strategies against new start-up religions and franchise operators moving into their areas.

All this marketing is, of course, quite profane. The success of a religion is now judged in terms of the numbers of "bums on seats" it can corral into its services, and the amount of time and money those bums can be persuaded to give up; not by the truth of its theology. The "true" religion must compete in the marketplace with the mass of heresies and trivial spiritualisms (like horoscopes and crystal-ball gazing), distinguishable only by the success of their marketing strategies. And the marketing affects the content of modern religions as well, turning them into a set of recognisable hack genres such as one finds in airport book-stores: self-help and personal-growth, horror (I'm thinking of that weird one with the snakes), Dan Brown-style conspiracies, Twilight-esque fantasies, fantasy epics (Catholicism) and so on. Many of the fastest growing religions hardly bother with theology at all, because their customers don't have time for all that wordy stuff.

One of the interesting consequences of this is that modern religion has diversified its offerings to supply every consumer niche, rather than demanding that the spiritually inclined accommodate themselves to the one "true" church. Tastes which went somewhat unrecognised and un-catered for before are now met by specialist providers. For example, fundamentalists eschew the established religious providers altogether and start their own co-operatives to meet their peculiar concerns with purity. So, in some countries with a thriving free market for religion (most prominently, America) there is probably more religious activity than ever before.


Contemporary religion has been deracinated - separated from its cultural context. In the enchanted world, religion was always felt as much as thought because it was literally embedded into the social landscape and rituals of everyday life. That gave religion a solid foundation, and helped make defection difficult to even imagine. It also protected religion from theological excesses by requiring that religion take a form that a human society could actually live by.

But now that the enchanted world has shattered, theology can no longer depend on the solid foundations of social practices. Almost the whole of western Europe, for example, enjoys its quaint Christian culture (history, holidays, recipes, nice old buildings, church weddings and so on) as part of a cultural identity, but hasn't the faintest interest in Christianity. Religion for us is an ethnic identity thing, not a belief thing.



Fundamentalists, along with their worried observers, make an even bigger mistake in believing that religious movements based on literalist readings of sacred texts constitute a revival of old-time religion. Instead, they are a fundamentally modern and secular phenomena of individuals searching for meaning in their own lives and fitting together a personal theology from bits and pieces of texts that suit them, and then joining clubs that see things the same way.


The secularisation thesis actually happened, though not exactly in the way twentieth-century sociologists predicted. They thought levels of religiosity would decline as religion lost its hegemonic dominance over society, whereas in fact it is the nature of religiosity which has changed. Contemporary religion is a thoroughly secular affair. It is matter of individual conscience projected outwards, and as such hard to distinguish from secular faiths like environmentalism or socialism.



Thomas Rodham is a graduate student who blogs on philosophy, politics and economics at The Philosopher's Beard.

On the Wider Web

Anti-Terror Move Could Ensnare American Muslims

Noah Feldman


Hamilton's Choice

Martha C. Nussbaum


Look Back in Anger

Samuel Moyn


Best of

Is Canberra's cafe culture obsession sustainable?

Is Canberra's cafe culture obsession sustainable? (ABC News)



on Twitter for the latest Religion & Ethics updates.



How Does this Site Work?
