There’s an old joke about a fellow who says he used to be an atheist but he gave it up because there were no holidays. As someone who has run the gamut from secular to traditional to what is called today Modern Orthodox, I appreciate the joke. However, now that I have been on the journey toward observance, I see most people driving in the opposite direction.
Even America, the most religious of Western countries, is losing its religion: for the first time, a Gallup poll reveals that fewer than half of Americans reported belonging to a house of worship.
Secular culture is the result of a complex series of historical developments, such as the Enlightenment and the rise of science, but also a result of abuses of power, hypocrisy and arrogance in which “pious frauds” masqueraded as religious leaders and adherents.
It is, indeed, a great irony that the same religions that gave us our ethical order have often exhibited discrimination and worse.
For all that valid claims can be made against religions throughout the ages, the problems of today’s secular age are known to all: low birth rates, depression, anxiety, addictions and the loss of a sense of community. We think of ourselves as highly educated, sophisticated and advanced but we are adrift as a society, beset by personal problems that ravage the body and the self.
In The Atlantic magazine, Shadi Hamid writes that “if secularists hoped that declining religiosity would make for more rational politics, drained of faith’s inflaming passions, they are likely disappointed.”
Instead, the fervor of religious belief has been channeled into the political arena.
In addition, social issues and moral issues of great import seek resolution. If society makes fame and celebrity, financial success, science and technology the new gods, how are ethical and moral decisions to be made?
We already see that lack of purpose, meaning and identity give rise to profound problems. Religion has been part of our civilization and our identity for millennia. When it is removed from our culture, our society loses a part of its identity.
Religion embodies our history, wisdom literature, reflections on life and the search for truth. Not “my truth” but Truth in the philosophical and theological sense. The late chief rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, wrote that there are times when each of us has to decide, not just “What shall I do?” but “What kind of person shall I be?” It has historically been religion’s role to assist people in that quest.
There is no doubt that science has been a spectacular benefit to the world and its achievements in improving the quality of life are astounding. But as Sacks used to say, science takes things apart to see how they work and religion puts things together to find out what they mean. Science is about physical nature and religion is about human nature. The one should be seen as complementing the other, even enhancing the other. It is not science or religion, rather it is science and religion.
Dictators understand the threat that religion represents to them. Bret Stephens of The New York Times points out that autocratic regimes have always been “ferocious in their repression of spiritual and religious movements because religion cultivates a moral conscience free of political control.” If we end up with politics and no religiously-inspired moral conscience, we will have diminished ourselves, our governance and our freedom.
The theology of religion is based on belief in God but is every bit as much about us. Rabbi Sacks writes about his own understanding of Judaism: “We think that religion is about faith in God. What I had not fully understood before was that faith in God should lead us to have faith in people, for God’s image is in each of us and we have to learn how to discern it.”
Our secular, materialist, technological society does not prioritize the human dimension. That is the mission, the role and the very purpose of religion.
Religion is the antidote to cynicism and despair. Sacks rejects the nihilism of Yuval Harari, who writes in Homo Deus, “looking back, humanity will turn out to be just a ripple within the cosmic data flow”. Instead, he endorses the idea of the quest to discover something larger than the self. In a secular world, the diversion of sports events and entertainment take an exaggerated importance to fill the gap left by the loss of a greater cause: “Most simply, the religious mindset awakens us to transcendence. It redeems our solitude. It breaks the carapace of self-hood and opens us to others and to the world.”
There is a group of writers and intellectuals in Israel who are avowed atheists and yet, even they, enthusiastically embrace the study of Jewish source texts like the Bible, the Talmud and the prophets. As the late Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzbergert write in their book, Jews and Words, the modern Jew stands on “the lonely shores of tormented modernity” between “the old synagogue and the new, wide world,” between “authority and uncertainty.”
These texts represent memory, culture and identity which shaped them and their ancestors throughout history. They claim it as their patrimony, too.
If secularism is to be the path ahead, then we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the loss that is being incurred. As Princeton professor of Christian ethics, Paul Ramsey, wrote: “Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men.”
The writer is distinguished professor emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo