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You've said that there is a new space for God in the secular world. What is the nature of this "new space"?
Modernity is secular, not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action takes place in profane time. Just as in personal life the dissolution of the enchanted world can be compensated for by devotion, by a strong sense of the involvement of God in my life, so in the public world the loss of sacred time and an unquestioned transcendent order can be replaced by a strong sense of God in our political identity. God's will can still be very present to us in the design of things, in the cosmos, in both social and individual life. God can still be the source of our power to impart order to our lives.
There is an alternative reading—namely, that we're moving to a society where more and more the consensus will be around an unbelieving variant of the modern social imaginary. But to me this seems to be just a dream. It's a dream that arises among those who are deeply into an atheist or non-believing position and are convinced as a matter of faith that religion will gradually disappear and everyone will think as they do. For them, the secular world is one in which we all end up agreeing fundamentally that there's no God, and that agreement is the basis of everything. That's an impossible scenario, and the more they think like that, the worse it's going to be.
We're living in a new epoch in which the degree of diversity people have to face is in some ways frightening. It means that on the deepest level you're going to be disagreeing with the people you're co-citizens with. I think that there are lots of liberals—atheist liberals, if you like—who still don't understand this, and then there are also many people on the other side who still don't understand this.
So it's the multiplicity of possible understandings of the social order that is the defining mark of the secular world, rather than the decline of religion?
Yes. We're living in the best political order yet achieved in human history. With all its faults, we're nevertheless accurate in our sense that it answers the fundamental human need to be anchored in the good. But this distinctively modern understanding of the good is such a kind that it can be enframed in more than one way.
It follows from this that there is something unstable about everyone's position. There will be a lot of worrying about alternative enframings. People will be moving back and forth; the children of people who enframe the social order this way will choose to enframe it that way, and so on.
In this state of affairs, there is an enormous yearning for a common enframing—and this is true even among many of those who most vigorously champion "diversity." There's a kind of nostalgia for a time when people were deeply anchored all the way down—or all the way up—in a common understanding of the underlying order.
And the model for this in our own civilization—the model for being anchored all the way down—is Christendom. In Christendom, there was no room for heretics, not because the people of that epoch were especially narrow-minded but because their common enframing was threatened by important differences in religious belief. A desire to revive that model seems to animate much of the American Christian Right.
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