Hunger Pains after a Decade of Secularism

But Christians are still working up a menu.

The advent of the decade of the seventies confronted theologians, and more particularly those regarding themselves as “liberal,” with inevitable shifts in theological focus. The preceding two decades were marked by the most serious attempts at reevaluation of “religious language,” these being the outcome of, among other things, the quest of theology for meaning. This quest was accelerated by the impact of current scientific and technological advances.

Theologians seemed to feel that the demand for precision in scientific expression in general made it necessary to restate traditional theological concepts. Behind this lay the conviction that modern man would reject traditional concepts out of hand as totally outdated.

This led, especially from the midsixties, to a mania among theologians of the trendy type to a new and seemingly inescapable coming to grips with secular culture. By the opening of the seventies, many felt that the basic groundwork of this process had been laid. Technopolitan man was glorified as the harbinger of a new day in which such questions as the normative quality of Christian faith for all of mankind were hopelessly anachronistic. The “secular man” whose thought forms and mores were drawn from urbanized life was proclaimed to be the model for the future.

Along with The Secular City, and broadly supportive of its thesis, came the “prophetic” words of Charles Reich’s The Greening of America with its siren song of the end of an era. Through the development of a new level of consciousness, especially among pot-smoking youth, there was promised an end of bourgeois life forms to which historic Christianity was allegedly bound.

A situation surfaced, however, in which it appeared that secular forms of life and the culture they fostered could not displace the lingering demands of the human spirit for the elements clustered around the broad subject of Transcendence. These centered in the conviction that there is One who stands above our affairs, a conviction supremely repulsive to the “theology of secularity.”

In fairness it needs to be said that one representative of the God Is Dead movement realized this in the early seventies. Paul Williams Van Buren wrote in Christian Century (May 29, 1974) that “Theology’s God can only be … the radically transcendent.” This suggests that the announcement of the end of belief in transcendence by the secular theologians was premature.

In the early seventies, secularism continued to offer challenges to historic Christian faith, but its ability to eliminate opposing forms of thinking seemed to offer decreasing promise. Rather, there came severe challenges to secularism’s claim to a monopoly on the pursuit of truth. It should be noted that some countercultural movements had already in the midsixties challenged the sweeping claims of many forms of the technological consciousness. It did, however, remain for new emergences of the 1970s to bring under severe fire the arrogant claims of the scientific method to see and describe reality. These newer challenges to the secular adulation of “technopolitanism” did not appear as head-on attacks. Indeed, many of those involved in presenting such challenges were probably not aware at the time of the significance of what they were advocating.

In any case, the most surprising factor that emerged on the religious scene in the seventies was the reassertion of “the spiritual,” of forms and institutions as well as ways of thinking that were supposedly dead or at least dying before the impact of secularism. This produced strong shock waves within liberal circles, waves that only recently have been calmed.

One of the most penetrating (and genial) analyses of this resurgence of “the religious” appeared in the April 29, 1981, issue of Christian Century. In “Theology for a Time of Troubles,” Langdon Gilkey notes that this phenomenon has not only occurred within our technological culture, but “as a conscious and relevant reaction to the tensions and dilemmas created by that culture.” It was this, of course, which was a source of embarrassment to the more radical forms of “secular theology” of the sixties.

It is not only the fact of the reappearance of religious concerns in the decade just ended that seems to have “caught theological as well as secular savants by surprise” (loc cit.), but the kinds of religious expression that have appeared. The spectrum is very broad, and in some of its aspects, frightening. Not only has there been vast extension of what Gilkey calls “fundamentalist religion of every variety,” but, as well, of far-out types of cultic and esoteric belief.

Many of these forms are basically congenial to some, at least, of the traditional elements in today’s cultural life, notably of middle America. But more surprising is the fact that elements and movements quite alien to our general culture find a home in the halls of academe. The occult, for example, seems no longer bizarre in university circles, but even seems to find acceptance as religious forms in these circles.

As a result, such questions as the meaning of religious language and the verifiability of religion’s claim, formerly regarded as all-important, seem to many to be trivial and irrelevant. This poses the most serious problem of adjustment for those who regard themselves to be the guardians of mainline and mainstream Christianity.

These questions relate not only to the theological scene, but touch also the entire range of values in the social order. The high visibility of “the religious” seems to modern churchmen to pose real threats to the smooth ordering of public process. Who would have dreamed a decade ago that mainline religious thinkers would feel threatened by “fundamentalistic” groups calling, for example, for the protection of the lives of the unborn?

How should evangelicals view and evaluate the surprising emergence of spiritual movements that challenge—with seeming success—the entire secularistic establishment? It is appropriate, first, to be grateful that the secular confidence has been shown to be a broken reed, and second, that the foundations for the contemporary plans to scrap the Great Commission, articulated with such vehemence at the Bangkok Conference in 1973, have been undermined.

On the positive side, evangelicals can rejoice that the “winds of the Spirit” still blow where he wills. While not all currents seem to be favorable, yet at the center of the assertion of “the religious,” Jesus Christ emerges as the towering figure he really is. Finally, the times offer an urgent challenge to “test the spirits” to discern which qualify as God’s indicators for our day.

HAROLD B. KUHNDr. Kuhn is professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

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