Ronald Rolheiser has put together a fine book on the church's engagement with secularity. The content of Secularity and the Gospel: Being Missionaries to Our Children is carefully nuanced in order to deal with the complexity of secularity.
What is secularity?
Secularity is a term coined (c. 1850) to denote a system which sought to order and interpret life on principles taken solely from this world, without recourse to belief in God and a future world. Given this background, the term today more generally designates the tendency to ignore, if not to deny, the principles of supernatural religion. (39)
In spite of its philosophical stance, secularity is not automatically the enemy of the church or faith. Oftentimes, its response to faith and religion is not hostile, but mixed, ambiguous, or indifferent. Possible attitudes of secular cultures to religion
run the gamut from hostility ("The sooner the churches are eliminated, the better!") to intellectual condescension ("These poor folks still actually believe in another world!"), to indifference ("God, faith, and the church are a non-factor!"), to a positive, vital relationship that looks to God, faith, and church to be key players in the search for wholeness, peace, and security in a post-September 11, postmodern, and post-secure world ("Today we need God, faith, and the churches more than ever!"). (40-41)
Because of the complexities of secularity, the church's response to the challenge of secularity must be nuanced. Secularity is not our enemy, but the child of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Secularity "is in its genesis the child of Judeo-Christianity and its deep structure incarnates many of the moral strengths one finds inside the Judeo-Christian tradition" (41). Like an immature adolescent, it often fails to appreciate what it has drawn from its parents.
Critics of secularity must not forget its relative strengths:
Sometimes its critics forget that, while secularity mandates freedom from religion, it also mandates freedom for religion. And its moral strengths run deep, even if those moral qualities are no longer attributed by many secularists to any religious source. Simply stated, secular culture, with some inconsistencies notwithstanding, contains much of what is best morally in the Judeo-Christian tradition: human dignity, fundamental honesty, concern for others, democracy, equal voice for everyone, equality of race and gender, equal opportunity for all, tolerance of others and their differences, sexual responsibility solutions for conflict that do not involve violence and war, hospitality decency courtesy fairness, and an openness to God and the transcendent. (41)
Other positive qualities include an emphasis on "individual dignity, the innate value of the physical, private rights, material affluence as an ideal, access to comfort and entertainment, high tolerance, and high mobility" (76)
However, secularity does possess weaknesses - weaknesses that "are often the underside of [its] strengths" (76). In spite of the good qualities of secularity, "it is easy to lose the values and virtues needed to balance these off.
Hence, for the most part, secular culture struggles with excess, namely, an excess of reductionism, empiricism, mindlessness, individuality, grandiosity, narcissism, distraction, desire for comfort, cult around the human body, infidelity and violence done in the name of God and truth. Everywhere we see decisions made, consciously and unconsciously, by a vision that focuses on this life only. With this comes a dumbing down of things, an itch for individuality that makes community impossible, an adolescent grandiosity that feels that God is not needed, a blindness to the Judeo-Christian roots undergirding our culture, a fixation on youth, physical health, and sexual attractiveness (as if they were salvation), a commitment to change, growth, and mobility that is the cause of untold betrayals in our commitments, a lack of concern about the poor and about mother earth that pours itself out instead as a moral fervor about lifestyle, and a propensity for distraction as a substitute for depth and interiority. (76)
The church would do well to call attention to these imbalances rather than simply striking out at secularity on the whole. Indeed, if we are honest, we recognize that "[s]ometimes we find the good secularity in the world and the bad secularity in the church" (98).
In order to faithfully engage secularity, we must better grasp the difficult prospect of walking the wire of "being in the world, but not of it." Too often, one branch of Jesus' teaching is emphasized at the expense of the other. We must learn to honor and bless what is good - which demands solidarity with the world - while remaining critical of sinful and dehumanizing aspects of modern culture. We must seek to walk in the way of Jesus, and we must be willing to admit how difficult it actually is to follow in his footsteps:
Unless we first honor and bless what is good in our world, we do not have the moral right to criticize it. Worse still, if we do not honor the world's energies and color we will not be honoring God who is the sole author of all that is good -- including the world's energy and color.
In essence, we need to be in solidarity with our world in everything but sin, blessing it with one hand, even as we hold the cross of Christ (and the judgment it brings) with the other.
But that, as we acknowledged, is not easy. Simply put, too often we lack the moral and emotional strength to imitate Jesus, who could walk with sinners, eat with them, forgive their sins, feel the pain and chaos that sin creates, embrace everyone, be present in the world, bless and enjoy its good energies, and yet not sin himself.
This is not an abstract thing, but an earthy one: too often we cannot live as Jesus did simply because we lack the maturity to walk amid the many temptations, distractions, and comforts offered us by our world, without, on the one hand, losing ourselves in them, selling out our message, or, on the Other hand, unhealthily protecting ourselves by withdrawing into safe enclaves to huddle in fear with our own kind, protected from the world, but at the cost of denigrating its goodness, energy, color, and zest and being less than fully alive ourselves. (68)
Perhaps the reason that we in the church are so fearful, timid, and lifeless is because we subconsciously recognize how difficult it is to maintain this balance and prefer the safety of extremes.
Rolheiser calls us to the kind of community that is overflowing with the life of the Spirit - a community that simultaneously gives itself to the world but resists being of the world. What we need today
is a religious community which would have no rules, because none would be needed. Everyone would be mature enough to live out a poverty, chastity, and obedience that would not need to be overly protected by restrictive rules and symbols that set one apart. Attitudes and behavior would rather be shaped from within, from strong convictions coming from a mature heart and from a commitment to a community a vision, and a God that puts one under a deep voluntary obedience. The community would be mixed, men and women living together, but those within it would be strong enough to affectively love each other, remain chaste, and model friendship and communal living beyond sex (and without denigrating sex). The community would live an unsheltered life, be radically immersed in the world, and its members, sustained by prayer to God and community with each other, would be free. Like Jesus, of curfews and laws, to dine with everyone, saints and sinners alike, without sinning themselves. This community would give itself to the world, but resist being of the world. (69)
Though we all recognize how ideal this description is, the following remains true: Wouldn't we all like to be a part of something like this?
We dwell in a secular world, but we believe in a sacramental world - a world alive in God, created by God for God. We believe that the meaning of the world is not found within the world but beyond the world in God. The gospel is about God invading our world in Christ. The gospel will always clash with secularity. Reason is not the ultimate authority. Matter is not all that matters. And yet in spite of its extremes, secularity has much to commend it. We then, would do well, to affirm its positives, while critiquing its negatives. We do this by negotiating the difficult stance of being "in the world but not of the world."
Quotes excerpted from Secularity and the Gospel: Being Missionaries to Our Children by Ronald Rolheiser
© Richard J. Vincent, 2008
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