50 Key Concepts in Theology

Secularisation
The replacement of religious world-views with non-religious patterns of life
and thought.
The word ‘secular’ comes from the Latin saeculum, meaning ‘the present
age’, and is often contrasted with the concept of ‘the sacred’. Sacred things
come from God, whereas secular things are the products of human activity.
This distinction, as we will see, is open to the objection that human
activity is also God-given and that the ‘secular world’ doesn’t really exist:
everything is already God’s world. This view has been argued persuasively by
John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy school of theology.
The concept of ‘secularisation’ came to prominence with Max Weber,
who tried to analyse the decline of religion in the West. He wrote about ‘the
disenchantment of the world’ as people increasingly rejected a religious
understanding of life in favour of ‘rational’ scientific, economic,
psychological and sociological explanations. Secularisation is now applied in
a less technical sense to describe all encroachments on religion: from the
separation of Church and State in the USA to the introduction of Sunday
trading in the UK.
Broadly speaking, secularisation theorists have divided along two lines.
There are those like Karl Löwith, who argued that secularisation is the non-
religious development of Christian salvation history. On this view, the
Christian commitment to the kingdom of God is transformed into a secular
desire to build a perfect society on earth. So secularisation is taken, in
essence, to be a Christian development.
In the other camp are those like Hans Blumenberg (The Legitimacy of
the Modern Age, 1966), who has argued that the Enlightenment marks a
decisive break with earlier Christian ideas. For Blumenberg, secular culture
has its origins in the steady development of scientific and cultural ‘curiosity’:
‘there arises in the modern age an indissoluble connecting link between our
historical self-understanding … and our claim to unrestricted theoretical
curiosity.’
Critics of ‘secularisation theory’ (as it has come to be called) throw up a
host of objections. It is said that secularism doesn’t exist as a coherent
ideology because it is simply the rejection – in numerous contradictory forms
– of religious life. So the Marxist and the atheist capitalist can both be called
‘secularists’. Others have pointed out that the truth of secularisation theory
depends upon an unproven historical assumption that religious feeling really

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has declined in the West. Furthermore, secularisation theory offers no
explanation for the current rise in neo-conservative and fundamentalist
religions.
Liberal theologians tend to welcome many aspects of secularism. They
agree with the secular contempt for superstition and admire the secular
concern with human rights. They applaud the use of science to save and
improve life. But liberal theology is not in vogue. The current neo-
conservative trend is to regard all secular initiatives with suspicion and to
insist that all truth must come through the Church.
THINKERS
Karl Barth (1886–1968) saw the process of modernity as a process of
secularisation in which humanistic values displaced the centrality of God.
Peter L. Berger (1929– ) argued in