This is a long
essay that deals with the general theme of secularization in the West and how
to understand that. It is part of a major research project of mine that seeks
to plot what kind of spirituality-religiosity might be relevant to people in
the 21st century
The Secularized West – How Do We Evaluate It?
It is plain to see that, in many areas (perhaps even in most
areas), the so-called “western world” (or simply “the West”) is by and large “secularized.”
The word “secular” comes from the Late Latin word saeculāris (meaning
“temporal”) which, in turn, comes from the Latin word saeculum (“an
age”). Defined more precisely, "secular" refers to a public
order where there is no one particular kind of religious hegemony. It includes
the separation of church and state. It also means the existence and acceptance
of a plurality of opinions (including religious opinions). Seen in this way,
the secular order is an open-ended, polymorphic, polyvocal order of diverse
sorts of people saying all sorts of things. And, ideally, anyone in the secular
society has the right to ask any question (from
philosopher John Caputo’s helpful description. See bibliographical link at the
end).
When we say though
that the West is largely “secularized,” we mean that it (that is, a great
number of people living in it) is largely focused on this world, this
life and how humans and their habitat could exist and flourish in the here
and now. The flip side of this secularization is that, in general, western
society pays little or less and less attention nowadays to God, religion, the
supernatural or the next life (particularly, heaven or hell). What is more,
even many self-professed religious believers in western[ized] societies,
although nominally “religious,” live their daily lives by and large without
really being much aware of God and the supernatural realm.
Meanwhile, some others
(especially, more “seriously” religious people) bemoan this secularized western
world and see it as the source of godlessness, immorality and of the many present-day
evils that beset us. It is thought that this secularized world spawns a godless
and hedonistic milieu as well as a loss of traditional “godly” values. It is
common to encounter voices saying that the West is lost in a crisis of meaning
because of the loss of the authority of religion (read “Christianity”) which supposedly
held everything together once upon a time (cf. e.g. Carroll 2004, p.1).
For a very long
time, I (especially my younger, more conservative self) also thought of the
secularization of the West in those above-mentioned negative ways. That drastically
changed when I encountered and studied more deeply the philosopher of religion
and radical philosopher-theologian Don Cupitt. Cupitt, I think, is one of the
most creative and insightful philosophical-theological minds today and he
deserves to be read and studied more widely. He has a startlingly different take
on this phenomenon of secularization. Cupitt has argued in many of his writings
(in particular, in The Meaning of the West [MW]) that this so-called
secularized West is actually something like the logical and evolved form
or grown-up, more mature version of Christianity! In fact, I think it is fair
to say that he suggests that the postmodern, humanistic West (which
many Christians consider as the evil antithesis of Christianity) should actually
be considered <Christianity as it was meant to be>! In short, it is the realized (and
important to add) “yet very flawed” “Kingdom of God.” How about that for a
change?
I think I have some
say in this because I am an immigrant here in the West who came originally from
a staunchly Catholic-Christian developing country (the Philippines, which happens
to be westernized in many ways) and who also lived for a long time in a non-western
country (Japan). Moreover, I did graduate studies in Western Europe, the heart
of “the West” for six years. I freely chose to leave my homelands to resettle
and live in the West (now in Ontario, Canada). In the course of my life, I have
seen the differences between the West and some non-western countries.
Based on personal
experience and study, let me begin by saying that there are so many genuinely
good things in western societies. This is why so many of us have decided to uproot
ourselves, migrate, and settle here. In a blog post in Australia’s Sea of
Faith website, Greg Spearritt said,
There are plenty from elsewhere … who desperately want to live in the
West. And for good reason. They may not be perfect, but Western societies look
after their own like no-one else does, including their weaker members and
even those who dissent from prevailing political or social views. (Would you
rather be gay in Abuja, Riyadh, Beijing or Sydney?) Western technology is the
envy of the rest of the world, even of people like Osama bin Laden who use it
to attack the West. Western medicine gives us an ever-longer, healthier
lifespan. Western governments actively seek the moral, physical and
intellectual improvement of their people and contribute to the well-being of
the world’s poorest through (relatively) string-free aid budgets. (That’s not
to mention the work of Western NGOs such as Oxfam, Red Cross, Amnesty
International and Médecins sans Frontieres) The West is innovative, constantly
on the move, and – most important of all – it loves life wholeheartedly
(Spearritt, 2008).
Before anything
else, I would like to say unambiguously at the outset that it is
definitely not my intention here to unilaterally and uncritically glorify the
West. There are many negative, even downright evil things to be found
in the West today. To name a few: unbridled capitalism, the staggering gap
between rich and poor, a superiority complex (white privilege in most cases), racism,
and so forth. I happen to be completing this essay in the wake of the death of
George Floyd, Jr., at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis (June 2020).
This event has led to widescale demonstrations and public unrest in the US and
other places around the world in order to highlight the evil of racial
discrimination against black people. It is heartbreaking to see such a damning
instance of social dysfunction in 2020 in the West! This is to say: Yes, I
am well aware of the many dysfunctions of western societies. Despite
that and in the face of all that, I still think that it is important not to
forget that so many good and wholesome things in life that we do widely enjoy
here in the West can only be dreamed of by many people in many non-western
countries. Let me reiterate: take that from someone who has left his original
countries, decided to live here in the West and is very happy to have done so. That’s
my personal context.
In this essay, I
would like to ask and explore the question: Is the secularized West really all
that evil as conservative religious believers think it to be? Let me get a
little ahead of myself and answer with (a cautious and qualified) “No”. A
more careful examination of the matter with some guidance from philosopher-theologian
Don Cupitt will surprisingly show that the secularized West actually shares as
it were the very DNA of Christianity in striking ways and we have to say that, indeed,
that much maligned secularized, irreverent, and irreligious West is actually
Christianity’s child … but all grown-up now!
Jesus, the Kingdom, and the Church
First of all, it
is plain to see that many forms of institutional Christianity in the West are dying.
That is a difficult thing to witness for many Christians. To be personal, it is
also difficult for me because, despite everything, I do consider myself a
Christian. Don Cupitt suggests though that this situation is not necessarily a
bad thing because the Christian Church, he reminds us, was always meant
to cede its place to a greater reality anyway – a reality the Gospels
call “the Kingdom (or Reign) of God” that is supposed to come more perfectly on
earth! And let us be clear here: The “Kingdom of God” IS NOT EQUAL to
the Christian Church! Isn’t that what Christians say when they recite the
Lord’s prayer: “May your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”?
Recall that the
vision of a peaceful and prosperous life here on earth (not in an
afterlife called “heaven”) was the original vision of Judaism in the first
century common era. And first century Judaism in turn, it should never be
forgotten, was the historical Jesus’s own matrix of location. Historically
speaking, the historical Jesus himself was first of all a healer-ethical
teacher who concerned himself primarily with the alleviation of the sickness
and pain of people in the here and now and, Cupitt emphasizes, taught people primarily
how to live and act so as to make this world a compassionate place
without resentment and rancor (MW, 140-41). This is clearly illustrated in a
teaching that many scholars firmly believe to have come from the very lips of
the historical Jesus himself, “Love your enemies!” (Matt 5:44; Luke 6:27).
For many
Christians that is startling news indeed because they have been taught (wrongly
in Cupitt’s [and my own] opinion) that Jesus concerned himself with showing us how
to live in this passing present world in such a way as to be saved at the
moment of death from eternal damnation and gain eternal salvation in a future
life in heaven. A closer, more scholarly study of the New Testament and
its background history will show that Cupitt’s conclusions are basically sound
and that the usual “received” form of Christianity focused on eternal salvation
was arguably not the focus of Judaism in the first
century, nor was it the original emphasis of Jesus’s own historical teaching,
life, and ministry.
After Jesus’s
death though, his followers soon elevated him to a lofty divine status. Thus, he
came to be understood and portrayed as the divine Saviour who lived, taught,
suffered, and died primarily in order to procure an other-worldly kind
of salvation in “heaven.”
To reiterate (with
the risk of sounding redundant): “Heaven” (i.e., a blessed state in the
afterlife) was definitely not the main concern in Second Temple
Judaism, the matrix from which Jesus and early Christianity sprang up; neither
was it, we can strongly argue, the main concern of the historical Jesus in his
teaching and ministry. Practically all critical biblical scholars are agreed
(this in itself is astonishing because scholars rarely agree with each other!)
that the historical Jesus’s main concern was “the coming of the Kingdom of
God,” as a new order to be established here on earth. (See Cupitt, Jesus
and Philosophy)
When we underscore
the this-worldly emphasis of Jesus and his original Jewish matrix, we are
startled to see that this is a remarkable common trait between him and
us today in the secularized West. Many of us in our day to day living (I’m
thinking of those who will read this piece) are, I would say, primarily
concerned with having a wholesome existence here and now for ourselves and for
others, and not so much about securing an admission ticket to heaven. In that
sense, we are quite “secular” or “secularized,” compared to our ancestors. But
then, Jesus’s world and Jesus himself was also “secular” while, at the same
time, in possession of a bigger worldview in which God was understood as actively
working to establish a truly good and just earthly order in the here and now.
The Paradox of Institutional Christianity’s Decline in the
West
As mentioned, it
is clear that Christianity in its institutional form in the West is in a sorry
state of deterioration—It has already become quite irrelevant and abandoned in
many pockets of western societies, especially among young and middle-aged
people.
Bluntly enough,
Cupitt does not think that institutionalized Christianity is worth saving. Recall
again that the “Church” was originally set up (even this is good orthodox
teaching!) in order to prepare for a fuller realization of the “Kingdom,”
something that is bigger than the Church. That is just one way of saying that
organized and institutionalized Christian religion was always intended to be merely
a stop-gap measure. Along the way though, the Christian Church became part of
the Roman empire. In time, imperial ways and an imperial mindset became so much
a part and parcel of its structure that the Church became too attached to the
exalted role, influence, power, prestige, and privilege that it received
through the centuries. This inordinate attachment and hubris make it difficult
for the Christian Church to let go of outdated notions and ways of doing
things, believing firmly that many of its doctrines, principles, and traditions
are eternally valid and unchanging. A lot of that is simply not true because
many so-called “sacrosanct” elements in Christianity are merely historically-conditioned
things and not applicable anymore in the present. Many westerners have intuitively
grasped that and abandoned traditionally organized Christianity in droves. Moreover,
there does not seem to be a future that would reverse that trend except in
small pockets of ultra-conservative, reactionary Christians.
A poignant
illustration of the Christian Church’s misplaced orientation and disordered
attachment to itself is found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers
Karamazov which contains a poem about “The Grand Inquisitor.” There we see
Christ himself returning to earth in Seville (Spain) where he ministers to
people, only to be arrested by the Spanish inquisition and told by the Grand
Inquisitor that, irony of ironies(!), he is no longer needed by the Church
because he actually interferes with what the Church is trying to do – which is,
to put people under the control of the Church itself whereas, again sadly
ironical, Christ was trying to give them genuine freedom. That is still the
mentality prevalent in a lot of forms of organized Christianity and Cupitt
thinks that it is obsolete for today. It is sad to observe how institutional
Christianity seems to be trapped in a kind of navel-gazing and still largely
insists on many mythological and outdated beliefs and teachings that many
westerners can no longer assent to with integrity. I would even add, many
westerners reject institutional Christianity (or at least major aspects of it) in
good conscience. At least, I know I do so on many counts! So, “churchy” Christianity in the West is
definitely on the way out.
Despite
Christianity’s decline, what we should continue to cherish and preserve, Cupitt
strongly insists, are the ethics and spirituality of the West’s Christian
heritage which are genuinely significant achievements (see MW, vii-viii, x
and 10).
Two Core Christian Doctrines - the “Unintentional” Source of
Secularization?
Now, if we search
for the ideological source of why the West became secularized and concerned
almost exclusively with the here and now, Cupitt has a surprising answer. He suggests
that the Judaeo-Christian doctrines, first, of <God’s creation of the
world as good> as well as, second, the more characteristically Christian
teaching on the Incarnation (the notion that God became human in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth) might actually be the theoretical wellsprings
of the West’s secularization in the first place! It was really startling for me
when I first encountered this idea. It just never occurred to me to look at the
matter in that way before. But upon more reflection, Cupitt’s suggestion has gradually
made quite a lot of sense to me through the years.
First and
foremost, the Christian tradition affirms that this world and all that is in it
is fundamentally good … nay, (in keeping with God’s declaration in Gen. 1:31)
it is very good (in Hebrew tov meod – in the intensive form). And
then, what is the teaching of “divine incarnation” anyway but the “dangerous” idea
that has the effect of collapsing the widely held assumption that there is an
unbridgeable gap between the wholly transcendent Divine Being (YHWH in the
Hebrew Bible) and immanent human beings and things? When you posit the idea
that in Jesus, the Christ, divinity and humanity--is believed to have--met
and fused, the (perhaps unintended) consequence of that is some kind of
bridging or even obliteration of the distance between divine and human. Thus,
in the person of Jesus, the human-divine messiah, the divine and the human encounter.
The divine and the human even fuse in perfect union. In technical terms that
has been called the “hypostatic union.”
How is that the
source of “secularization” then? Well, after the idea of the incarnation became
established Christian doctrine, it was but logical to go from <union
between divine and human in Jesus> to, as mentioned above, applying
this principle to the common notion that there is a vast chasm between the
divine realm and the human realm. Therefore, by virtue of the human and divine
realms meeting in the incarnation of Jesus whom the New Testament calls “the
firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15), the distance between the divine realm and
this material world was, in a sense, collapsed; the gulf between the
"sacred" and the "profane" was lost and the focus of
human religiosity shifted from God "out there" to God-divinity in “the
here and now, "in carne" (in the flesh); in other words, in
the secular! (See MW, 6-7, 15-25).
Critical Thinking
Another distinguishing
feature of Western culture is the activity called “critical thinking.” This is
what I, as well as all my other professor-colleagues at the university, try to inculcate
in our students. But what is it exactly?
Critical thinking can be described as a critical attitude by which
the value of all truth-claims and assumptions must be continually subjected (again
and again, in every age) to careful, rational analysis and, if possible, direct
testing (Tarnas, 1991, p. 395). The effect of this continuous process of analysis
and testing is the realization of the following: firstly, that some truths—even
things people have killed and died for throughout history--cannot be conclusively
proven at all (for example, the existence and nature of God); secondly, that most
so-called “truths” are in fact “constructions of meaning” or interpretations
(of what is meaningful and valuable) by some people (especially by some who have
or had the power to impose their interpretations as “truths”). With
critical thinking, we also understand that no interpretation is final
although religions such as traditional Christianity have asserted that there is
a dogmatic finality to many of its doctrines. This kind of critical thinking,
we can argue, is what was able to advance western civilizations from a
pre-modern, uncritical general mentality to a modern frame of thinking in which
rationally and empirically provable truth is considered the most weighty and
important kind. (By the way, for the record, let me state that I don’t agree
that scientific truth is the only thing that counts because there are other
non-empirical truths that seem to be more important). In like manner, this same
spirit of critical thinking is also what has propelled us into the present
epoch of postmodernism, a milieu of radical questioning of all so-called “absolute”
and “normative” truth-claims.
We
can even say that the ultimate result of critical thinking might be a kind of
nihilism by which we “see through it all” and—like Buddhists—realize with a jolt
that behind all our interpretations, images, and metaphors about the nature of
reality, there is, in the end, just NOTHINGNESS. Taken negatively, that can be
interpreted nihilistically as “life is utterly meaningless”. But it need not
be so. I think that this realization of NOTHINGNESS being the endpoint of
all critical thinking can be a positive thing when “Nothingness” is taken to
mean a pregnant NOTHINGNESS (as expressed for example in the Zen-Buddhist
concepts of “Mu” 無 or “Kū”
空.) This may be one reason why Buddhism is so popular in the West today. Such
a notion of “nothingness” puts the accent on the concept that the “self” or
“ego” (that is totally independent of others and the whole universe itself) is “nothing”
(a mere illusion) because the more profound truth is that each
individual is radically and just a part of a greater whole comprised of all things-interconnected/interexisting-with-one-another
in the universe, both living and non-living. A more detailed explanation
of that will be left for another occasion.
The
West and Its Science and Technology
We can argue that the
traditional Western emphasis on reason and critical thinking— (before the
Enlightenment it was done) in confrontation with faith (Lat., Fides et Ratio faith and reason)—is
the feature that gave birth to science and technology, areas in which Western
societies are second to none. Having lived in a high-tech eastern country
(Japan), I know firsthand that non-western countries that are very high-tech
today largely owe that achievement because they originally borrowed from the scientific
and technological breakthroughs of the West. We can ask then: Why did the West
become so advanced in science and technology? Is it because the West extricated
itself from its Christian roots and embraced a “religion-free” or
“Christian-free” mode of existence from the Enlightenment onwards, a move that
fostered the development of science and technology? Cupitt firmly replies in
the negative and I tend to agree with him. Rather, he claims that it is precisely
because of the West’s Christian roots that reason and critical thinking came
to have paramount importance in western civilization (MW, 49-55)!
To go deeper on
this, the Christian tradition inherited the Jewish tradition’s bedrock claim
that God is the creator of everything, that is, God created “creation,” (which
in modern parlance is nothing else but…) the universe as a consistently and
wonderfully ordered place with certain laws to govern its smooth and continuous
operation and maintenance. And since these “laws” (ethical as well as physical)
are all part of the Creator’s mind and will, they are all supposed to “make
sense”; that is, they are supposed to be consistent with reason (“reasonable”)
and thus also with science. Hence, in classical Christianity (which is still particularly
valued for example in the Roman Catholic tradition among others) there is
supposed to be a harmony between faith and reason (Lat., fides et ratio).
It follows then that
in the West it was considered a noble undertaking to seek to understand further
even the physical laws of the universe (science and all its sub-disciplines
such as physics, chemistry, biology, etc.). This is the reason why the great
universities in Mediaeval Europe (such as, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, etc.) were
all begun under the auspices of the Catholic Christian Church. The Church felt
that practically everything lay under Christianity’s purview for the simple
reason that everything comes from God. Therefore, in addition to specifically
religious disciplines such as theology and canon (church) law, the Christian
Church also energetically pursued and encouraged philosophy (the disciplined
inquiry into rational human thinking) as well as the natural sciences. In all
of this, the approach that it used was a disciplined and rigorous application
of reason (yes, that’s the root of critical thinking) seeking to delve
more deeply into the mysteries of the Creator and the Creator’s creation (=everything!).
[A Faith
Perspective Maintained] On the other
hand, it also acknowledged the limits of human reasoning and, hence, it also upheld
the supreme value of faith so that when people reached the limits of their
human capabilities in the effort to grasp the mysteries of God and the physical
world, they would still have the humility to acknowledge that human reason is
limited and be open to surrendering themselves in faith to the mystery of
existence, rooted in a firm faith-trust in God.
The Role of Christian Spiritual Disciplines for Critical
Thinking
Cupitt also suggests
that there is a connection between the practice of self-reflection on one’s
spiritual state encouraged by Christian spirituality and the West’s spirit of
critical thinking. This is seen particularly in the development of monastic and
religious life (i.e., the disciplined life of Christians who professed vows,
lived in community, and undertook to live the religious-spiritual life in a
dedicated and intense way) where the spirit of critical thinking was given a
major impetus. Monasteries and, later on, religious orders were founded originally
with the principal purpose of fostering a radical effort to follow the spirit
of Jesus Christ and attain a more perfect union with God. In effect, this was
pursued through prayer, ascetical disciplines, self-examination, life in
community, and manual labor. In time, ministry to one’s neighbors in need and to
society at large was also given emphasis. Through all this, the members of
religious orders (i.e., “religious” [noun]) such as Benedictines, Franciscans,
Dominicans, Jesuits, etc. were ideally dedicated, Cupitt points out, to living
a radically “examined life” of continual self-examination to check whether one
was progressing in the spiritual life. Cupitt suggests that this critical spirit
of self-examination is actually the hallmark of critical thinking and modern
science. The internalized spirit of self-examination of “monks and
nuns” (and other spiritual practitioners) eventually became externalized
in western societies and took the form of continual critical appraisal and
testing that marks the disciplined pursuit of all knowledge in the universities
and schools, scientific or otherwise until today (MW, 105).
The West as an Evolved Form or “Child” of Christianity
As mentioned
earlier, it is commonly thought that from the European Enlightenment onward, many
people in the West were able to make a clean break from religion in general and
Christianity in particular and embrace a vision of humanity, of human life, and
of the world itself as being in itself good without needing to have recourse to
the Christian God and the Christian supernatural scheme of things. As we have
seen, Cupitt suggests a different picture. There has not been a “break”
between the West and its Christian religious roots. Rather, Christian
society has naturally evolved and developed from an explicitly religious entity
to a secular one precisely because of the religious notions that
lay in its core. In Cupitt’s surprising words, “we remain what
Christianity has made us, and in many respects the postmodern West is more
Christian than ever” (MW, 36).
According to
Cupitt, proof of that can be clearly seen in many things such as in the many wholesome
values that westerners live by; or the belief in, indeed even the systematic
social institutionalization of ideals such as charity, fairness, poverty-relief,
protection of a society’s most vulnerable members, and the emancipation of
women, among many other typically “western” values. Again, where do all these
typical “western” characteristics come from? There is only one logical source
according to Cupitt – Christianity itself (MW, vii-viii; see also Murray
2018).
In summary, Don
Cupitt claims that the contemporary, secularized West is, in a deep sense,
the direct heir of some of the finest traits of Christian ethics and
spirituality. I would even rephrase that in the following way: the West,
I think, is practically the grown-up child of Christianity, a child who has, in
a sense, forgotten its parent and the many things (many negatives but also many
positives) its parent bequeathed to it. That does not take away the fact that
the West is Christianity’s (now grown-up) child. The values that Western
societies accept (as common-sensical), treasure, and fiercely defend; the
values that are enshrined in some remarkable documents such as the UN charter
of human rights, the UN declaration of human responsibilities, the Global Ethic
declaration, the Charter for Compassion, among many, many others, are, at their
root, values originally coming from the West’s Christian parent. At the
end of the day, we can even say that these values find their ultimate source in
the deeply humanitarian ethics of—what we can argue is the historical,
pre-mythological—Jesus of Nazareth himself. Jesus’s ethic lives on in our
contemporary humanitarianism and, Cupitt even claims, in the western welfare
state. The Christian spirit of disciplined self-examination lives on in the western
ideal of critical thinking and the perpetual striving for self-correction and
betterment. Indeed, what were Christian “introverted” practices of spirituality
have become “extroverted” in those forms!
The West is the (very flawed yet somehow) realized Kingdom
of God
We have seen that <establishing
a utopian kind of society here on earth (the Kingdom-Reign of God) in which God
would be sovereign and true humanity would be enhanced> was arguably the
main aim of the life and ministry of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore,
when originally Christian values that enhance true humanity have become the
“common sense” of a given society as it has happened to some extent in the
West, we cannot help but say that this situation is a very positive
achievement, even when the given society has become rather detached from its earlier
attachment to an explicitly acknowledged supernatural Being and realm. That is how
Cupitt looks at the secularized West.
In short, the
state in which major elements from Christian ethics and spirituality have taken
root in society, for Cupitt, is actually the spirit of genuine
Christianity that has been fulfilled in the here and now; it is the
state that Christianity was always meant to achieve. “And it doesn’t matter whether we (in the
West) want it to be or not – it is what we are” (Murray 2018). Thus, Cupitt can
declare:
Nobody in the West can be
wholly non-Christian. You may call yourself non-Christian, but the dreams you
dream are still Christian dreams, and you continue to be part of the history of
Christianity. That’s your fate. You may consider yourself secular, but the
modern Western secular world is itself a Christian creation (MW, 67).
I may not be able
to assent a hundred percent to Cupitt there (which I treat as hyperbole for
emphasis) but I do largely agree that to be located in western societies and to
embrace, benefit from, and live according to the wholesome humanistic values of
the West means, to a certain extent, to participate “in spirit” in what
genuine Christianity always sought to achieve, a Christianity that is, in a
profound way, the cultural parent of the West.
Critical Demurrers: Dark Shadows in the West
Having said that, I
repeat that it is not my intention to unilaterally glorify the West. We are all
too familiar with the very dark shadows that are present in western societies.
Just to name a few things again: our rampant consumerism, cancerous
economic growth, exploitation of poorer sub-groups within our societies and the
effort to extend that exploitation to countries through unfair terms; abuse of
the earth and environmental and ecological destruction, neo-colonialism and
neo-imperialism, and so on and so forth. The list can be endless. These are all
well-known pathologies and dysfunctions of the West that are, it must be
remembered, being constantly pointed out, critically reflected upon, resisted,
and struggled against by the finest souls among us. And THAT is
precisely the point. No matter how many shadows are found in our western societies,
there seems to exist a built-in apparatus to critically self-reflect,
resist, and provide solutions to it. The possibility for that self-examination
and self-correction (the application of reason and critical thinking),
according to Cupitt, is still one of the greatest gifts that has been given to
us by our Christian parent. I maintain this with Cupitt perhaps because I’m a
hopeless romantic and optimist. But even if I’m over-optimistic, I should at
least say that there seems to be a deep truth in what Greg Spearritt (again
commenting on Cupitt’s The Meaning of the West) says below:
We’re an inexorable work in progress, going substantially nowhere much
like a soap opera, but making small and what Cupitt calls “indelible” gains.
And the gains cannot be denied. Slavery, sexism, racism and child exploitation
all still exist, but they’re officially outlawed and for the most part swiftly
jumped upon when they come to light. It’s hard to believe that any of them
could ever again be accepted practice in the West.
The
history of the West, when viewed from a “glass is half-full” (instead of
a pessimistic “glass is half-empty”) perspective, does show that there has
been progress made on so many counts in upholding human rights and dignity.
We can complain all we want about present-day evils and dysfunctions but a perspective
that also takes into account all the progress we’ve made in the West should
be a necessary part of a more balanced evaluation of the matter. And to be
included with that, I strongly maintain, are the fine traits that we’ve
inherited from our Christian legacy (while also cognizant of its very dark
shadows).
Is There
a Place for God and Christianity in All This?
This
question deserves another sustained critical reflection not possible here. Let
me limit myself here to a few brief remarks. I think that a Christianity (that
wants to maintain its form as it is now) does not seem to have a future in the
West. Although this “old time” Christianity seems to be flourishing in many
parts of the developing world, when (or if) these areas undergo a development
in the direction in which western societies have moved on since the
Enlightenment, institutional Christianity will suffer the same grim fate
therein. It goes without saying that institutionalized religion has to undergo
a complete overhaul if it is to continue being a relevant entity in the West.
“God”
is an even bigger issue than institutional religion. Personally, I believe that
there is a place for God in the secularized life of Christianity’s grown-up
child (the West) but, like institutional religion, this notion will also have
to undergo a complete revision and overhaul. But since humans are fundamentally
beings that seek depth and transcendence, they will always seek to find ways to
address the “bigger-than-life” questions, questions of which “God” has been the
standard symbol and answer in the West for most of its history.
---
 |
| Don Cupitt |
Works Cited
Caputo, John (2016). Post Modern, Post Secular, Post Religious. Youtube. Accessed Nov. 5, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ABEuQXQbs0&list=PLV7Diz4DTv4lbiEz0KoaJwu4hEiFcQMml&index=4
Cupitt, Don (2008). The Meaning of the West. London: SCM.
________ (2009), Jesus and Philosophy. London, SCM.
Carroll, John (1998). Ego and Soul: The
Modern West in Search of Meaning. HarperCollins, Sydney.
________ (2004). The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited.
Scribe.
Douthat, Ross (2012). Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of
Heretics. Free Press.
Spearritt, Greg (2008). Review of The Meaning
of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity (SCM, 2008), by Don
Cupitt, SOFiA (Sea of Faith in Australia), April 2009, Original Link: http://www.sof-in-australia.org/blog.php?blog_id=464
(accessed on Jan 17, 2019 / no longer working when attempted on Feb 19, 2020).
Tarnas, Richard (1991). The Passion of the
Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View.
New York: Ballantine Books.
(The) Wheatly Institution (2016). “John D. Caputo: Post Modern, Post
Secular, Post Religious. ” YouTube Video, Nov. 21, 2016. Accessed May 27, 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ABEuQXQbs0&list=WL&index=13&t=939
(18:05).
Wow. To be savoured over and over. Truly a tour de force.
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