Post Secular

I have learnt a new phrase and the phrase is 'post secular'.  It seems that we have moved on from post modernism to post secularism.  I had a hunch this was the case but it is always good find out that others have been thinking the same thing because it acts as a barometer that you may just have got it right.  A bit of a recap for those not used to such labels.

Modern is what happened as a result of the industrial revolution.  With that came what is called the enlightenment when science and rational thinking began to dominate how the world was seen.  Along with that came a confidence that progress would make things better.  This got severely dented in the trenches of the First World War.  The obvious question was how could we be progressing if we end up with the slaughter and carnage of the Somme and Passchendaele.  If it was wavering, the Second World War pushed modernism over the edge.

No one knew what to call the new scepticism that emerged so it got labelled post modernism, because it came after modernism.  This meant that the idea of progress was dead in the water.  Things evolve and move forward, developing and changing, but don't necessarily get better.  Post modern ways of thinking question inherited forms of authority; everything has to prove it's place.  In a world where we became more aware of different views, post modernism is one where everything and nothing is true.  It is all about what the individual thinks and what makes sense to them.  There is no overarching source, or meta narrative to give it the label.  With this a secular world view takes the ascendancy.

Secular means that there is no need to refer to a religious narrative to explain anything.  Religion to the secular is just one competing claim among many.  The secular mindset doesn't really understand religion so it prefers to talk about faith communities, looking more at the social structure of particular groups who bond together under a 'religious' cultural umbrella.

The trouble with this is it quickly becomes atheistic and that is being found wanting.  Not because everyone is suddenly finding God again, or at least not the culturally expressed gods of major religious systems, but because secularism is essentially empty.  However much we understand about science and social differences, the numinous questions of 'why are we here', 'where did everything come from' persist.  Marcus Brigstocke, the comedian who has given religion a particularly hard time, found himself being unsatisfied with the overt secular doctrine of nothingness - see previous post.

So we have moved on from post modernism and its secular ideology.  We haven't gone back to a pre-modern acceptance of religious systems as the inherited source of authority.  So we are not ex-secular or ex-modernists, we have moved on, which makes us post secular.

The good bit for those of us tying to reflect from a religious perspective is that we are not as out of step with the contemporary mood as we have previously been told we are.  We still have to justify our case and that is no bad thing.