By JUDE DOUGHERTY
The shift from a predominantly Protestant to a secular or humanist culture in North America may be dated to the mid-decades of the last century, to the period some are calling the “cultural revolution.”
Clearly a shift took place sometime in the last century, with the result, one may say, that the religious mind is no longer faced with defining its vision of the contemporary meaning of Christianity or Judaism against other religious outlooks. Each is now called to defend itself in the face of major secular attacks, hostile to all religious belief and practice.
It may take considerable learning and analysis to recognize the full extent of the secular threat to religion, but little reflection is needed to recognize its social effects, namely, a general disintegration of religious commitment, manifesting itself in a startling rise in promiscuity, divorce, and abortion, in the widespread acceptance of pornography and homosexuality, and in a growing tolerance of deviant behavior in its many forms.
The rejection of the biblical sources of morality has its social consequences. Appeals to a natural moral order fare no better.
On a more subtle level, the war against Christianity has affected the college curriculum, insofar as it has led to the neglect of classical learning, ancient and modern languages, history, theology and philosophy, disciplines all of which were pursued in part because they traditionally provided the materials through which revealed religion was received and developed.
As many have observed, a community cannot long exist without a core of common convictions. Some of the social tensions in North America are but a reflection of a deeper conflict between religious and secular outlooks. If the secular is not totally to eclipse the religious and become the measure of thought and conduct, representatives of the religious outlook will have to confront the challenge vigorously.
The following reflections are an attempt to understand the causes that have led to the present impotence of the religious mind and its prospects for the future.
Skepticism with respect to Christian convictions has been forming among the occidental intelligentsia for at least two centuries. Nietzsche already in the nineteenth century observed that the West no longer possessed the spiritual resources that had formerly infused its existence and without which it could not survive.
In more ways than one, from the last half of the twentieth century to the present, the intellectual climate has been governed by the legacy of the French Enlightenment. Views entertained in nineteenth-century drawing rooms and in the academy of that day have become mainstream.
Diderot set the tone in his famous Encyclopédie when he wrote, “Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.”
Voltaire urged the eradication of Christianity from the world of higher culture, but he was willing to have it remain in the stables and in the scullery, mainly as a moral force, lest a servant class emancipated from the traditional sources of morality might pilfer.
Like Diderot, he was convinced that the critical spirit could do its constructive work only after it had liberated man from the shackles of traditional belief. There are times when one must destroy before one can rebuild, he said.
Voltaire readily admitted his intolerance, declaring that his was an intolerance directed against intolerance.
Jeremy Bentham thought the state should actively work to stamp out religion. His disciple, John Stuart Mill, repudiated Christianity but not the religion of humanity, which he thought to be, from the standpoint of the state, a useful thing. Auguste Comte was more benevolent in his attitude toward Christianity than either Voltaire or Mill. In spite of his denial of all metaphysical validity of religious belief, he was willing to accept as a civic good the moral and ritual traditions of at least Catholic Christianity.
Émile Durkheim, carrying the Enlightenment spirit into the early decades of the twentieth century, was not so positive. For him, a major task of the state is to free individuals from partial societies such as the family, religious organizations, and labor and professional groups. Modern individualism, Durkheim thought, depends on preventing the absorption of individuals into secondary and mediating groups.
Ludwig Feuerbach, whose materialism was to have a significant influence on Marx and Freud, assigned to reason the task of destroying the illusion of religion, “an illusion, however, which is by no means insignificant, but whose effect on mankind, rather, is utterly pernicious.”
Freud advanced this theme in his Future of an Illusion, in which he describes the struggle of the scientific spirit against the “enemy,” religion. “Criticism,” he writes, “has gnawed away the prohibitive power of religious documents; natural science has shown the errors they contain; comparative research has been struck by the fatal resemblance of the religious conceptions we revere to the mental products of primitive peoples and times.”
On this side of the Atlantic, many of these ideas were to find twentieth-century expression in the writings of John Dewey and his disciples, promulgated widely in the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973. Among dozens of well-known signatories were Isaac Asimov, Betty Friedan, Sidney Hook, B.F. Skinner, Francis Crick, Antony Flew, and Julian Huxley.
Science was equated by Dewey and his disciples with “critical intelligence.” Ernest Nagel, whose work in the philosophy of science influenced generations of students, published a work entitled Sovereign Reason, a book that accurately defined the movement.
In common the humanists advocated empirical criticism of everything heretofore considered sacrosanct. It took another generation or two before such criticism was to reach the textbooks used in primary and secondary schools. Today it is the prevailing attitude in the Western academic world, an attitude uncritically adopted by those ignorant of its genesis.
The religious mind is ill situated to defend itself in the halls of higher learning given that it has for the most part been excluded from its ranks. A few professorships of Catholic studies exist in prestigious institutions, but these alone are not likely to reverse the secular tide even in the institutions where they reside.
Sadly, members of the Church hierarchy seem to have bought into the higher criticism advanced by the Redaktion Geschichte movement of the last century.
Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, the new head of the Jesuits, may be among the latest victims if press reports are reliable. He is reported as saying, “Over the last century in the church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand what Jesus meant to say [in the present context of His teaching on marriage].”
“Discernment” is required. What did Jesus really say? “What is known,” says Abascal, “is the words of Jesus must be contextualized, given that they are expressed in a language in a specific setting, addressed to someone in particular….Doubt not the word of Jesus, but the word of Jesus as we have interpreted it [in the past]. Discernment does not select among different hypotheses but listens to the Holy Spirit what, as Jesus promised, helps us to understand the signs of God’s presence in human history.”
What the future portends is not easy to say. Demographers predict an overwhelming Muslim presence in Europe by 2050. Some foresee an Islamic Republic of France and a similar status for other nation-states in Europe. The situation in the United States, in spite of its present immigration policy, is not as foreboding as that of Europe. Its future depends on a majority who recognize the value of their inherited culture and are willing to defend it at the ballot box.
In any case, Catholic higher education remains a necessary counterweight to the dominant secular, anti-Christian attitude that prevails in the universities and other centers of influence.
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