Robert Royal
Faith and Reason Institute

The Soul of Man under Secularism
Speech to The Philadelphia Society
April 28, 2007

               In 1891, the British humorist and aesthete Oscar Wilde wrote an essay entitled “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”  Like many literary figures who have been bewitched by socialist and Marxist mirages, Wilde projected his own hopes upon some very bad ideas about how human societies should be organized. Among other things, he believed that socialism would produce great material abundance and that it would allow large numbers of socialist comrades to become artists. Some did, of course, like Solzhenitsyn -- in the Gulag. Unfortunately for Wilde the hundredth anniversary of his pious work of socialist science fiction happened to fall in 1991, which is to say precisely the year that real existing socialism collapsed in its international flagship, the Soviet Union, thoroughly discrediting socialism for all those with eyes to see.

          There are no laws of history, but there are broad truths and partial parallels that our uncertain grip on human life sometimes allows us to glimpse. I often wonder these days whether the current campaign promising a glorious future for the Soul of Man under Secularism – whether in the hardcore neo-Darwinian bulldoggery of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett or in the soft-core, in several senses of the word, bellydances of the modern academy, media, and entertainment industry – will seem a similarly wild delusion a century from now, akin to what the great Russian novelists, called “brain fever.” Let me try in the brief time we have together to explain why I believe that may prove to be the case. 

Our subject in this session is religion and the future of conservatism.  I am only too aware that not all conservatives are believers, or all believers conservatives, alas. There are longstanding disagreements among conservatives themselves about what our thing really is. But to cut through several possible misunderstandings, I want to distinguish between two very different ideas about sacred and secular. A believer with a sound conservative view of the human condition, which is to say someone who respects this side idolatry what is ancestral, real, external to his own mind, who acknowledges antecedent truth and the limits and imperfections in nature and human nature, who welcomes the tolerably good and complex over the terribly perfect and simple, and wisdom over cleverness – such a believer also finds room for the properly secular in the sense of a common public space where many voices, religious and not, may engage in dialogue about how we should live together. As a believer, I myself would also add that this space exists under God because there is nothing truly outside what Richard Weaver, that profound and now much forgotten American conservative, once called our “metaphysical dream of the world.” But I can live with those who wish to think out loud in a secular space just so long as the secular is not subtly transmuted, as has often been the case in recent years, into secularism. The proper secular sphere will be more or less neutral towards various positions; but an improper secularism is an ideological position, like fascism or Marxism, that excludes religious thought in principle. Therefore, it is not and cannot be a neutral public space.

The current battles over the place of religion in the public square essentially revolve around whether we shall live in a properly secular or improperly secularist social order. A conservative friend of religion, as I have defined him above, will see this as a partial reprise of some earlier ideological battles.  The West has suffered lately from scientific socialism (Marxism), scientific racism (Nazism), and -- more recently -- scientific secularism, so to speak. Some influential public voices have decided in the last few years that science and its correlative secular reason demand a strict and state-enforced secularism as the only method of organizing our lives in the modern world -- without noticing that a value-free activity, which science is by definition, is a quite helpless guide to the many human questions we face. In fact, there are several ways in which an exclusively secularist approach to various human problems undermines the things we think most valuable in the West.

          How does a dogmatic secularist, for example, give an account of intrinsic human dignity, or fundamental rights, or free will and its correlatives, economic and political liberty? Those of us who come out of the older Biblical tradition -- Christians and Jews, and even those on the fringes of traditional Western religiosity who have absorbed certain notions of the Divine from the Western mainstream -- have no trouble doing so. The very first pages of the Book of Genesis tell us that God made man in His own image and likeness. We have the capacity to know things, as well as to know good and evil. And we have the freedom to act according to what we know – not an absolute freedom of course – we can leave that delusion to the life coaches and other snake oil salesmen -- but a limited and circumscribed liberty of action. It is from these deep currents that flow Western notions of dignity, rights, and freedom. Tat was, of course, explicitly the understanding expressed in our Declaration of Independence. By contrast, a strict materialism and secularism will find great difficulty in accounting for any of these human characteristics. And conservatives of whatever stripe, believers and not, who hold human dignity, freedom, and knowledge in high regard must pay careful attention and respect to their religious roots if these central pillars of our civilization are to survive and exert any real social force.

          It is surprising that so few people recognize this. In fact, we often hear precisely the opposite: that we still need liberation from “superstition.” It would be far truer to say that we are enduring a new internal assault -- secular fundamentalism – which makes us even more vulnerable to external threats like Islamic Fundamentalism. The new militancy of the neo-Darwinists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins openly proclaims that there is no such thing as human freedom because everything is strictly determined by physical causes. In a debate I once had with the distinguished Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, he argued that human behavior is “only” 60 percent the result of our genes and 40 percent the result of a “complex algorithm,” which results from the interaction between genes and environment. The seeming seriousness of this attempt to quantify human action should not deceive us about its fundamental frivolity. If this is true, there is no such thing as liberty for human individuals and, therefore, no such thing for human societies as well. When I remarked to Wilson that “a complex algorithm” did not seem to be much of a foundation of our Western liberties, he had nothing to say.

          Whatever rhetorical knots we tie ourselves up in at home, we should be clear that religion is not going to disappear as a strong force in the rest of the world. Western Europe is pretty much the only place where the classic theory of secularization as a result of modernization has partly proven true, though even there the story is more complex and open to possible renewals than news media who do the cheerleading for the secularist blues let on. Generally elsewhere, as I’ve tried to show in the conclusion of my book, The God That Did Not Fail, religiosity has persisted and even increased somewhat as an answer to some of the dislocations produced by modernization. There are bad forms of this reaction as we see in the militant forms of Islamic and Hindu Fundamentalism. But there are good forms in the tremendous renewals around the world within many faiths. This should not surprise a conservative who believes in the substantial constancy of human nature. As the sociologist of religion Peter Berger has said: “The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has been a perennial feature of humanity. (This is not a theological statement but an anthropological one – an agnostic or even an atheist philosopher may well agree with it.) It would take something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish this impulse for good.” I’ve tried to document this, too, in the historical chapters of The God That Did Not Fail. From ancient Greece to modern America, religion seems to be hardwired into most of us. Again, historical parallels are not exact, but the Soviet Union, assisted by a huge nuclear arsenal, the Red Army, the KGB, the Gulag, and influential fellow travelers in the West was unable to produce the New Soviet Man who was a scientific atheist (80 percent of Russians today say they are believers). In America, despite superficial appearances, MTV, the New York Times, and Michael Moore are not likely to have any greater success.

          A conservative should not put too much faith in sociology, but there have been some remarkable recent studies of the social effects of belief, stimulated, it must be said, in part by the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism. The spring 2006 issue of Foreign Policy, which is published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, featured a cover story analyzing the demographic decline in several developed societies. An American journal of international relations carried this analysis because the editors believe that the sheer demographic collapse in some countries and the reasons behind it will have powerful repercussions for the United States and in both foreign and domestic affairs. The author, Phillip Longman, a fellow at the liberal New America Foundation, argued that a kind of “soft patriarchy” is returning because differential birthrates favor “the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own fold or nation.”

          Western Europe presents the most alarming case, of course, but there are common beliefs that empirical studies have identified as associated with childlessness or low birth rates in other regions of the world. Among these, the most prominent are: 

 – opposition to the military

 – acceptance of “soft” drugs

 – approval of homosexuality

 – support for euthanasia

 – considering yourself a “citizen of the world”

-- rare attendance at church. 

As conservatives used to say when I was a young man, sociology is the painful elaboration of the obvious. Longman does not look very carefully at why such beliefs are interrelated and associated with small families or childlessness, but it is clear that all of them are more inward oriented rather than directed towards others in ways that having and raising children require. In any event, he predicts that more traditional social values and religious beliefs will inevitably grow stronger because traditional families also tend to transmit their values to children in high percentages and families with non-traditional views do not reproduce at as high rates. By definition, a society that literally does not reproduce itself is not sustainable.

Not only will such a society begin to falter militarily and economically, it will be marked by a pervasive hopelessness about the human future. Perhaps for those who look only to their own immediate enjoyment that is of no great concern. For those of us who believe, however, that human life on earth participates in a certain cosmic order and meaning, and that what we do here says much about who we are and what we aspire to , it is time to speak out more confidently about the importance of both faith and reason to the good human society, even if we struggle personally to live according to one or the other. We cannot seriously recommend faith because it is a social remedy.  We believe, or not, on other grounds, and reap benefits or harm as a consequence. But we can say truthfully that even reason today has shown the crucial contribution of faith to free institutions and appears necessary to their very survival.

          But not just any faith. The beliefs that Longman finds harmful are quite cheerfully professed in many religious bodies today. What we need for our own good is something much more substantial and of a certain kind. History may help us here, a truer history than the old Enlightenment version that saw Christianity, the central Western faith, as primarily a matter of irrationality, dark ages, medieval cruelties, crusades, inquisitions, anti-science obscurantism, religious wars, and several other cartoon-panel evils. Secular scholars have already produced a large body of revisionist work that demonstrates the absurdity of this old picture (beginning with the notion that Christianity rejected reason), though such research has not yet changed the standard textbook presentations of Western history.

          Any future conservatism will need a different way of understanding the religious and secular histories of the West. In the classical world, for example, which was already quite religious and not the rationalist precursor of the modern world as if often claimed, the Christian faith appeared more universal than both the gods of the ancient city and the concepts of the ancient philosophers. That was what gave it its power. The Christian God is not indifferent to the human race, as the pagan gods and philosophy’s absolute being were. He is the Creator and from Him flowed both the order and beauty of Creation, as well as the temporal dignity, freedom, and eternal destiny of mankind. From that change in religious perspective, at a depth hard for us even to perceive anymore, came the truths we usually think of as fundamental to how we think about one another and human society, but were not so before Christianity.

          One reason we have difficulty in appreciating this shift is that our own age, in both its modern enlightenment and post-enlightenment forms, has been content to fall back into ancient confusions. In Deism, for example, the great Enlightenment figures hoped to maintain the Christian belief in a benevolent Creator, as well as survival after death with rewards and punishments, while at the same time basically accepting the scientific worldview of a God who is, at most, a watch-maker, quite similar to the ancient absolute being. A conservative is not supposed to appreciate the Enlightenment, but I for one believe it brought us certain benefits. The problem is that by pursuing one set of rational advantages too exclusively and too confidently, the Enlightenment undermined itself and with it some of the religious foundations that it tried to preserve in a partly secularized form. The postmodern crumbling of the Enlightenment has given us a kind of postmodern polytheism, in which traditional Western belief is one among several positions, some spiritual some not, but all regarded as basically unprovable by reason and therefore akin to the gods of the ancient cities, useful for social solidarity but without any normative universality.

          It is easy to see the problems with both approaches. The old Enlightenment exaggerated one form of reason and the impersonal nature of God with the loss of real love in the world. The new postmodernism distrusts reason and loses foundations for the things we believe rise above materialism – rights, freedom, creativity, even the human mind itself, which cannot be accounted for in any materialist reduction. Religion cannot and should not be primarily in the business of providing a rationalist account of the characteristic human things for the benefit of the social order. Religion serves us all best when it concentrates on God and tells us about our relationship to Him. But it can point to beliefs – and did historically – that satisfy our intuitions about the good and root them in the nature of reality beyond the reach of reason without making them a matter of pure will.

 It is telling that in recent years there has been a recognition of this truth on the part of some prominent non-believers – perhaps because we have begun to feel acutely our weakness, particularly  in the face of radical Islam. In Germany, Jurgen Habermas, one of the most highly regarded secular philosophers, has noted lately that the crisis of values in the West raises “some doubts as to the ability of the constitutional democratic state to renew its existential foundations from its own resources, rather than from philosophical and religious, or at least from a general ethical communal prior understanding.” In Italy, philosopher and former Senate president Marcello Pera – another unbeliever –  has been advocating a “Christian civil religion” as perhaps the most promising way to reinvigorate Western confidence in its own value, especially at a time when other traditions threaten us and our own seems willing to grant value to every tradition but itself. Even in France, the international gold standard for secularism, presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy has been saying that the French need to learn how to speak about religion again in public. A conservative may not like what he initially hears if that conversation occurs, but that it’s being suggested at all is certainly a sign of a major shift in opinion.

          The idea that religion is essential to popular government is hardly new. In America, George Washington argued in his Farewell Address that “reason and experience both”  – in the eighteenth century this meant almost all purely human knowledge – “forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of  religious principle.” National morality, for Washington, was the foundation of a stable democratic order. Thomas Jefferson, in many ways more a continental Enlightenment rather than a North American thinker, asserted: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?” And he added: “no nation has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be.”

          At one of the impasses during the Constitutional Convention, which took place just down the street here at Independence Hall, Ben Franklin, another Founder often thought to be a non-believer, famously called for prayer to resolve the difficulty and observed, “the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men.” He added, “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?” 

          This sentiment, which went into eclipse in the twentieth century, has begun to return in the twenty-first. The two early American presidents were making more than practical observations; they were pointing to perennial features of the human condition, conservative principles, in brief. By contrast, modern, allegedly practical thinkers like Max Weber, John Rawls, and others who provided the model for so much secularist thinking in the twentieth century, have over time shown themselves over time to be quite impractical dreamers. Most of us see the value of secular systems of politics and economics, systems that not only respect but encourage liberty and pluralism. But there is a vast difference between, on the one hand,  the kind of secular pluralism open to the essential values and virtues that religion provides in virtually every age and society and, on the other hand, secularism – an ideology not an ideal – that has shown itself self-critical and self-enclosed to the point of self-destructiveness.

           Under the circumstances, it is almost comic in the Wildean sense, that scientists like Richard Dawkins, who occupies a chair at Cambridge University in the Public Understanding of Science, are militant materialists. Dawkins has described religion as a “virus” and religious education as “child abuse.” For all the problems that religion has created over the ages, at least it never denied the very basis of human dignity, freedom, and thought. Dawkins does deny all these things and is strangely not criticized for an essentially inhuman view of the world that would do far more damage to children, adolescents, and adults than does the usually healthy influence of a reasoned faith. He and the other militant scientists and secularists have become very fundamentalist about science and very angry about religion lately. It is difficult to understand why. With the system of materialist determinism, religious believers are as necessary a consequence of the material forces of the universe as any other phenomenon, say the materialists themselves.

          An irreverent observer may suspect that the reason the scientific fundamentalists are agitated is that religion remains strong in the world and religious believers are not willing to be intimidated, as they sometimes were in the past. No one but a small band of religious extremists opposes science in its proper place. In America, there is a substantial percentage of the population who oppose the teaching of Darwinism, but this stems more from the fact that some theorists insist on its materialist implications than from the facts of evolution, which would gain greater popular backing if it were not presented as a denial of the very possibility of faith. In the meantime, biologists, physicists, chemists, and scientists of many other kinds – many of them believers themselves – go on about their work unhindered and even honored by our society. It would be a great step forward if the scientific community itself were to recognize the benefits that theology and philosophy bring to the human race in areas that do not fall within the realm of empirical science. They might find they get along with believers better than they expect and that they would allow room for other kinds of knowledge without which the very societies that value science along with other great achievements of the human spirit will not long endure.       

          There is great urgency for a broader reconciliation of faith and reason. A curious things has happened over the last two or three decades in the West. The old modernity of science, reasoned democratic deliberation, and rationalized economics has lost much of its cogency. A new postmodernity – or neo-modernity – of shifting scientific paradigms, discourses of power, and anti-globalism has replaced it among Western intellectuals. This development involves more than the varying fortunes of figures such as Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, all of whom have entered the twilight of the gods to one degree or the other, as gods who  have failed, in my scheme of classification. The West faces a crossroads in which it will choose either to deny the foundations of its deepest values or to open itself up to new currents – outside the framework of the Enlightenment project and the crises that project has produced – among  them renewed forms of faith and of reason alike. The choice is more than an intellectual exercise. It goes to the heart and mind and soul of what it will mean to be human in our time and the immediate future. How we choose will make the difference in the very survival of the West.