For example, in Great Britain the Church of England indicated that 16,000 parishes are now going to hold services only during Christmas and Easter. As recent statistics indicate, at any given time less than 7 percent of the population in Great Britain has any contact with the Church of England—the established church of the nation. Yet compared to other countries in Europe, Great Britain seems revivalist. Pollsters in Belgium, for instance, note that they find it difficult to find enough theists to answer survey questions on their religious commitments. This trend is indicative of much of the rest of Europe where most people have genuinely lost the very memory of a Christian heritage.
Similarly, secularization happened at the same rate and to the same degree in American universities—which are, in many respects, isolated islands of Europe on American soil. One need only consider, for instance, the University of Tennessee [Knoxville campus], which recently ordered that gendered pronouns be replaced by gender neutral pronouns like “ze.” While this administrative mandate was later overturned, the point remains that even in places such as Knoxville, Tennessee, major American universities are on the same trajectory of secularization as many of the most secularized parts of Europe.
But why has secularization not happened at the same rate in other communities in the United States as it has on American college campuses or in Europe? This question has consumed a great deal of discussion on the part of sociologists for the better part of three decades. Yet the most interesting response to this question came from Berger, who argued that secularization did happen to the same degree in the United States, but the outward appearance simply looked quite different than what we see in Europe or on university campuses. Thus Berger has argued that America was and is far more secular than it looks.
While America is not characterized by the hardline secularism and open ridicule of religion and theism often characteristic of the culture in European nations, Berger argued that the United States is still largely secularized.
As Berger explained, in 20th century America, Christianity and religion in general were transformed to something non-cognitive and optional. As a result, the binding authority of the Christian moral tradition or of any religious tradition was lost. Consequently, many of our friends and neighbors continued to profess faith in God, but that profession was ultimately devoid of any moral authority or cognitive content. From the outside looking in, America did not appear to be secularizing at the same rate as the European continent. In reality, however, professions of faith in God had little real theological or spiritual content.
Berger predicted that this collapse of cognitive religious commitments coupled with the collapse of binding authority would lead to the fact that, in the face of cultural opposition, adherents to belief in God or religious principle would quickly give way to the secular agenda—which is exactly what happened.
Just 10 years ago most polls reflected the fact that a majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. Yet in our day the very same people polled one decade ago rendered an opposite moral judgment on the same issue. Just as Berger explained, when the cultural tide turned against our society’s empty religious commitments, people were happy to jettison their moral judgment on homosexuality to retain their social capital.
As preachers, Berger’s observations are tremendously important. We, above all others, need to realize that the culture no longer shares our worldview and, as a result, the very language we use may mean something entirely different in the ears of our listeners than what we intend. The meaning of words like morality, personhood, marriage, or virtually any other moral term has radically shifted for many postmodern Americans, making our job as preachers that much more difficult.
Additionally, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has also carefully traced the influence and effects of secularization on the Western world. As he explains in his important book, The Secular Age, the way people hold to theological convictions and religious principles in the modern era is fundamentally different than how people believed in the past. Modernity has made religious belief provisional, optional and far less urgent than it was in the pre-modern world.
I had this notion pressed upon me in some force when I was a doctoral student and I had the opportunity to attend a seminar with Heiko Oberman, a prestigious history professor from the University of Arizona and one of the world’s greatest scholars on the Reformation. Oberman was about 70 years old at the time; I was in my early 20s. Halfway through the lecture, Oberman, through no fault of our own, became exasperated with the class.
“Young men,” he said, “you will never understand Luther because you go to bed every night confident you will wake up healthy in the morning. In Luther’s day, people thought that every day could be their last. They had no antibiotics. They didn’t have modern medicine. Sickness and death came swiftly.”
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