Protestantism, Privacy, and the Rise of Secularism

Charles Tayor’s Secular Age is one of those rare books that are nearly a thousand pages but demand close reading. At the center of his narrative regarding the rise of secularism is the rise of privacy. Ironically, as with much of the origins of European secularism, privacy was a creation of Protestantism. In contrast to the Catholic model where one was saved by being part of the visible community of the Church and physically entering the local church to confess one’s sins and receive communion, Protestantism held up the individual reading their Bible and discovering that they are sinners who can only be saved through Jesus.

As a matter of practical application, a church service came to mean something different for Protestants. The Eucharist became incidental. Instead, one came to church to reinforce the lessons that proper Bible reading should have provided. One sang hymns that explained the basic message of sin and salvation and listened to a sermon provided by a minister to explain the Bible. This provided our Christian with the proper tools and frame of mind to go home, read the Bible, and be saved.

This focus on the private individual had unintended consequences. If we require this personal acceptance of Jesus as the only source of salvation, what is the use of religious coercion? For that matter, why bother having the state involved with religion at all. If people are not going to be saved as a community, what is even the use of public displays of religion that might provide a sense of a community bonded by faith. Ultimately, once we make the individual alone with their private thoughts deciding what to believe the central player in the narrative of salvation, we are on a straight path to Kant's Enlightenment where each individual is answerable only to their own reason for what they believe.

The ultimate danger of privacy is that it allows for the process of secularization to unfold without people realizing what is happening. One simply decides to take a more private approach to religion, first taking religion out of the public sphere into one’s home and then into one’s head. This is easy to do because all of this can be justified on religious grounds. One can honestly believe that they are not abandoning their faith but, on the contrary, are deepening their faith and becoming more spiritual.

This claim is quite plausible for the individual. The problem comes when we insert children into the equation. Religious belief is going to be of little use if it is not passed down to the next generation. Any break in the chain and it becomes difficult for the faith to be recovered. What happens to a kid raised in a society in which the public sphere is free of religion. At best, religion becomes a quirky hobby that their parents engage in that the younger generation is free to abandon when they grow up and become their “own people.” The parents might believe that they are raising their kids in a religious home and will not realize until it is too late that their faith was something in their heads and not something they ever bothered to seriously share with their children.

Protestantism is particularly vulnerable to this as it fundamentally rejects works and, therefore, cannot demand adherence to ritual practice. All too easily a Protestant can lead a completely secular life except for the hour a week they spend in church and, since that can never be made mandatory, even that can easily be dropped.

Orthodox Jewish religious practices obviously offer their own challenges as they create more head-on conflicts with secular society that children will become conscious of at an earlier time. Judaism does not let me watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat McDonalds; I, therefore, hate Judaism. That being said, the children lost in this fashion will likely be lost anyway. What ritual offers though is precisely the ability to make the conflict clearer and avoid slipping away without realizing, at an early stage, what is happening. The Christian freshman who stops going to church can pretend that they simply are looking for one that fits them. The Orthodox Jewish freshman who starts eating the regular cafeteria food knows that they have crossed a red line.

The process of secularization gains even greater power through people seeing it as inevitable. If parents do not really expect their children to follow them in their faith it becomes all too easy for parents to Pontius Pilate themselves of any blame. If no one’s kids are religious, then I cannot be blamed if my kids are not either. I can do my private religious thing without having to do something out of my comfort zone like actually trying to engage my kids.

Keep in mind that very few people have ever lost their religion because of a book they read. Losing one’s faith to a book would require actually reading a book as well as coming to that book without any preconceptions as to what the book contained. The number of people throughout history who have read through the Origin of Species after innocently pulling it off a shelf has to be somewhere around zero. People who have read Darwin have presumably done so because something caused them to pick up his work. Furthermore, judging by membership, ideological secularists remain a minority even as most people today are assuredly secular. Most secular people never lost their faith. Instead, they, or their immediate ancestors, were raised in homes that were de facto secular without their parents realizing it. As such, they became adults who took secularism as a given and never even needed to go through the trauma of abandoning a faith.