my daughter, the fundamentalist

Little R, with little to show for the day, saw me reading Charles Taylor's book on secularism and attacked it with a venom (which is a pity, because it looks quite interesting). There's probably no gene for scepticism so, gosh, this is going to be a lot of hard work! [er..it could be that she just liked the shiny cover].


Some people think that secularism is the same thing as atheism; a more interesting angle would be that it opens up the space for different forms of religious/spiritual experience (along the lines chalked out by Lesley Chamberlain). If modernity was a second Fall or a "second turning inwards" (Arendt) then one doesn't have to necessarily see it as opposed to faith.

Of course, the truth is that the old religious forms and practices have fallen by the wayside: rituals are seen to be too mechanical; we have less sympathy for the authority of organized religion; and religion plays a far smaller role in determining or influencing our values, norms, and lifestyles). You can tick off the usual suspects: science, urbanization, reason, ...

Well, that may not be such a bad thing after all-even though there's no denying the something valuable has been lost in the 'demythologisation'. On the other hand, the space vacated by the traditional forms has been taken up by all sorts of crazies: evangelicals and fundamentalists, born-again zealots and revivalists. Some are dangerous, others merely silly.

And with this group there are also the free-floaters, people who pick and choose what they like in their search (Zen, Buddhism, Sufism, Kabbalah, New Age...). The 'authentic self' has got to meet truth half-way, on its own terms, and it has to speak our language. This may sound to many as something frivolous and, ultimately, futile since there have to be shared symbolic orders, widely recognized or ordained 'channels', bridges, sacraments, places of refuge. To say that there are 'chance receptacles' is surely just one of the logical outcomes of the development of Protestantism: the lawless heart searches in the dark night (a hidden affinity with Romanticism?).

The real horror for the old school is that what they call a 'loss of faith' is met with such equanimity. That for the moderns there isn't a spiritual crisis is probably a sign of how deep the crisis is! (Fenelon: indifference of the soul). The lax approach to sexuality, the worldliness of the bourgeois soul that places all value in the security afforded by objects, the inability or reluctance to ask the serious questions in life or even believe that there are answers to them...all this smacks of a profoundly a-religious and sceptical attitude to the highest possibilities in life. Or so it is argued.

At the deepest level you don't think that's true, or what truth there is in it has to be seen in the light of the terrible social rigidities and stifling narrowness of the old approach. And to paraphrase Ghazali: once you're out of Tradition, there's no going back. But even that's too negative. No-one can deny the deepening of the subjective side of things (Schuon), the 'psychological' richness (Maritain) that comes about after a fall. As the Allama tells us (relying on Rumi, I think): the fall is really the beginning of our rise...and "finitude is not a misfortune."

Maybe R was on to something: the shiny surface of humanism and secularism are important. One suspects that God does judge us by appearances. And if one must err, then surely it is better to do so on the side of freedom?