SECULAR HUMANISM TODAY
The modern world is often said to have turned its back on
religious belief. But secular morality is rooted in Christianity and the two
creeds should work together to resist the rise of populism
One
of the things I have always found fascinating and maddening about Christianity
is its political slipperiness. Is it basically progressive or is it basically
reactionary? It is more progressive, more radical than any secular form of
politics. As an undergraduate I was excited by the prophetic vision of
universal peace and justice; it felt like a more benign version of the Marxism
that one or two of my peers espoused, and more substantial than the vague
socialism that almost all the rest of them subscribed to.
But how could one counter the argument that Christianity is essentially
backward-looking? Its strongest forms are often defiantly opposed to certain
liberal causes, and the Anglicanism that I vaguely affirmed was steeped in
nostalgic traditionalism. Should one try to reform Christianity, which would
make it more attractive to one’s liberal friends – or would that mean watering
it down, reducing it to little more than a desire for political progress with a
tinge of religiosity?
As a postgraduate student of theology, I found that liberal reformism was very
much out of fashion. The sharpest thinkers strongly rejected liberal
Protestantism, arguing that it merged the Gospel with Enlightenment
rationalism. I largely agreed, but quietly harboured a rather liberal concern:
shouldn’t we also affirm Christianity’s affinity with liberal values with the
humanism of our day? Instead of scorning it as a rival creed, shouldn’t we
argue that, in fact, the humanist vision largely derives from Christianity? It
seemed that there was a delicate knot to unpick here, and that the usual
answers were too blunt.
After 9/11, the polarisation between religion and secular liberal values seemed
to sharpen. Atheist secularists were driving this polarisation, but church
leaders were often adding to it. But Christianity is actually deeply involved
in the ideal of universal human rights, and in the idea of “secularism”, in the
sense of the separation of Church and state. This can be expressed without the
old wet liberalism intruding – but only if we tell a bold new story of how
Christianity relates to modernity and its dominant creed, “secular humanism”.
This public ideology gets lost amid the complexity and partisan bickering. It
arose on Christian, mainly Protestant, soil. Even if secular humanism rejects
religion in the name of “rationalism”, its moral assumptions derive from the
Christian centuries. The key to this dynamic is the little word “deism”. For
most of the architects of the Enlightenment were deists – believers in a rational
God. They rejected, or sidelined, revealed religion but inherited Christian
moral assumptions and often adapted Protestant zeal against superstition and
empty ritual. It was these thinkers, whose heyday was about 1680-1790, and who
include Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Kant, who
established the creed of the modern West. And subsequent thinkers, such as Marx
and John Stuart Mill, were no less indebted to Christian moral tradition. So
the humanist principles of liberty and equality are rooted in Christianity.
It does not come naturally to us to believe that we can move towards a world of
ever-greater justice for all, that all lives are of equal worth, that
oppression and discrimination must end. It comes far more naturally to see
drastic inequality as inevitable, and distant others as inferior to us.
And secular humanism has continued to be shaped by its Christian basis. In the
mid-twentieth century the ideal of universal human rights was launched by
mostly Christian thinkers and statesmen. And Christianity was central to the
civil rights movement in America.
To point out the Christian basis of modern moral assumptions is hardly a new
argument – Nietzsche was perhaps the first to make it, from his hostile
perspective. It is widely accepted by academics in various disciplines and,
over the past decade a few authors have, often tentatively, raised the issue.
It was a major part of Terry Eagleton’s response to the new atheists, for
example, and Nick Spencer, of the think tank Theos, has made the case, drawing
on the American historian of ideas, Larry Siedentop. Paradoxically, even the
“secular” aspect of secular humanism has Christian origins, for it was
Protestants who pioneered the separation of Church and state.
Our affirmation of secular humanism must be balanced by criticism of it. It is
limited. It does not offer people meaning, or have the same power to inspire or
sustain them, or to help them form strong social bonds. There is a “thinness”
to secular humanism.
But it would be a mistake to reject it in favour of the true thickness of
religious culture. Instead, I suggest, secular humanism must
necessarily be expressed in thin terms, so that it can unite almost
everyone in a diverse society. That does not make it a dangerous thing,
as neoconservative thinkers say. But it does make it an incomplete thing:
it has no coherent account of why we should seek the good of all, for
example, or of why moral universalism is a sacred ideal.
It feebly claims – with little evidence – that this ideal comes naturally
to all rational people; the reality is that secular humanism derives its
moral vision from Christianity. This explains its goodness, and its inadequacy:
for in secularising the Christian vision it thins it out. Rejecting
secular humanism feels straightforward and brave, if one is a Christian – but
this is a temptation. The task is to affirm it, and point to
its Christian roots.
Secular humanism remains the West’s core creed, in spite of the current rise of
illiberal populism in the US and Europe. But it lacks self-awareness and
self-confidence. A half-baked populist movement, with a muddled message, has
the power to discombobulate it utterly. There is little sense that secular
humanism knows how to define itself, or defend itself. Strange though it may
sound, I think that Christians have a special role in helping secular humanism
through its present wobble. It is a tradition with deeper roots than it knows.
