Being Religious in a Secular Age

From India to Turkey to Egypt religion has helped politicalparties win power. Religion is one of the key factors influencing outcome ofelections in many officially secular states. Religion is driving number of big industries and priests/religiousleaders continue to be king makers or influence much of power relations.Despite all this ours is characterized as a secular age and we have no choiceof travelling backwards in time or imaging an isolated place in future wheresecularism hasn’t encroached. Let us note extent of secularization one has toengage with to remain

Influence of Secular Critiques of Religion

   

We are all, willy nilly, secular in certain sense, incertain areas. Design of our cities, homes, roads, certain profanation ofsacred spaces, worldwide domination of secularism in political constitutions,text books, academia, certain secularization of dress etc. are all with us  and hardly irritate us now. Technologicalculture is inherently secularizing and we have been competing with one anotherin embracing it.

Religion has come under scanner so much so that religionistsare on defensive. Religions are said to alienate men from reality and build afantasy world, reject this-worldly joys, divide people, foster conflicts,inculcate guilt, obstruct rational enquiry and science and blaspheme againstkey finer or higher pursuits of life. These critiques have been so influentialthat millions describe themselves as non-religious. States have been compelledto embrace secular constitutions and religious states are under constant threatto yield to the secular its space. Imagine possibility and costs besides public resistance to imposing anydress code /ban on music/ban on women working in media/serials or cinema/strictban on coeducation/ secularizing educational content such as teaching ofevolution etc. in the Muslim world. In Srinagar recently a teen aged boy wasbeaten by his father for not praying and he rebuked him in turn saying that weare living in a secular state and he will go to police if he beats him again.The dominion of science and scientific attitude in our academics shows how muchnon-scientific and mythological modes of thought have been strained.  If this isn’t the de facto win of secularismagainst rival forces, what is it?

         Marginalizationof religious schools, waning of attention in general education toteaching/learning languages of religion, bourgeoning debates on familylaw,  wide ranging critiques ofsha’ria/religious law, prestige of modern jobs compared to traditional religionlinked ones (such as mosque imams), gradual displacement of prayers forchanging weather from mosques by weatherman, shrinking faith healing business,critique of traditionally hallowed image of Guru/Pir/Shrine/niyaz (prayer food)– in short disappearance of much of religion informed medieval culture  – all are victories of secular reason.Widespread influence of Marx, Darwin, Freud and many other such secularizingminds in popular consciousness including Muslim consciousness – it has beenremarked that rate of turning to atheism in certain educated elite is similarin USA and Saudi Arabia – imply that the world has become largely safe forthose who don’t want religion or any role for it in politics. Almost totalvictory of secular democratic model in politics (noted especially by AmrytaSen, among others), institutionalization of laws for equal treatment ofreligious and sexual minorities, universal invoking of human rights discoursethat has some problematic elements from a strictly anti-secular religiousviewpoint mark other signposts of victory of secular politics.  Ours is a Europeanized world in a significantsense as Heidegger noted. Religion has been either displaced by secular modesof thinking or such forms of religiosity that are not averse to secularsensibility. Our children, generally speaking, go to secular schools wherereligion might find some space but in a manner that is, often, eitherirrelevant to overall curriculum or it is seen as alienating allograftingexercise. Such is the lure of secular sensibility that some students from morereligiously informed schools may grow to be more strongly antireligious as areaction to imposition of certain disciplinary regimen.  So far religious and secular epistemes havebeen at loggerheads. Secularizing episteme was at the driving seat.  Post-70s this dominance has been dented.

 The Religious assertsamidst the Secularizing World

Peter L. Berger stated that “the world, with some notableexceptions [such as Europe] . . . is as religious as it ever has been, and insome places is more religious than ever.” There has never been a man whom onecould call non-religious in absolute sense. To be human is to be religious – tocrave for the infinite, for nobility, for dignity, for sanctity. One might havehad reasons to be alienated from religion. Religion is the very air manbreathes though he may call it by other names such as culture. Britishphilosopher Roger Scruton has written that “there should attach to the productsof a high culture the same sense of profound mystery and ineffable meaning thatis the daily diet of religion” and that after the Enlightenment “art [includingthe masterpieces of literature and music] became a redeeming enterprise, andthe artist stepped into the place vacated by the prophet and the priest.”

Throughout the world where constitutions are secular, publicpolicy has been secular but public has been, in some sense, generally speaking,religious. Various violent conflicts in the world are going on that keepinvoking some kind of religious nationalism. The Sacred is being appropriatedin political terms by various groups, activists and parties. The secular hasbeen at loggerheads with pathological forms that invoking of the Sacred has ledto. The world is today witnessing a clash, not of civilizations but the sacredand the secular. Our secular age is fighting vestiges of the sacred ineducational, social and political spheres while resolutely appropriating thesame for various ends including overcoming nihilism. Constitutions may havebecome secular across the world with few exceptions but cultures haven’t.Religion hasn’t disappeared from public sphere but shrunk and again expandedits presence. Richer nations, excepting America and Muslim world, haveregistered waning religiosity in public domain but to interpret it as gradualand inevitable triumph of secularism has been questioned as the authors of TheSacred and the Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide  attempt to document and theorize. Thequestion of sacred asserts itself as Nietzsche long back asserted. Given thefact of globalization and necessity of coexistence of cultures, there is noescape, for secular governments, from exploring religion for peace building,for restoring ecological health, for restoring psycho-spiritual equilibrium,for solving identity based issues etc. Caste system, having some religiousconnection, has been there though rise of middle class has been denting itsignificantly. The question is how come a constitution is secular in a landthat has masses following religion and different religions seeking power or atleast political assertion. For Ananda Coomaraswamy the most significant problemof philosophy is developing the science of comparative religion that identifiescommon metaphysics or makes dialogue possible between religions and thuscultures. There would have been no Huntington if likes of Coomaraswamy had beenheeded or their exposition of perennial philosophy penetrated into massconsciousness or at least in the academic world.

We are living in a post-secular age but we are also, in someimportant sense, post-theological age. The idiom today is evenpost-metaphysical in the sense that a certain way of doing metaphysics orengaging with the Supraphenomenal has been almost given up. However, it is alsotrue, that never before has the question of the Sacred been so important forcollective and individual destiny of men. Nihilism with all that it implieswith regard to care for environment, for the other, for posterity, for our ownsouls that don’t accept the consolation of this worldly progress or all thesubstitutes that have cropped up in place of transcendence is here staring atus, in fact consuming us and no idle or complacent posturing with regard to itis tolerable.

One may see the logic of the secular (as distinguished fromviolent ideology of  fundamentalistsecularism that is blind to humanizing, sanctifying role of religion) asunwittingly bearing witness to the triumph of the Spirit  What unites all of us is treasuring art andhumour which  bear witness to our sharedreligiosity. Craze for sports preserves something if not much of religion’sattitude to life as more aesthetic and playful than too serious and somber.When one reads All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaningin a Secular Age by Dreyfus and Kelley, one finds either repackaged orimpoverished versions of transcendence religions once made available beingpresented by so-called pagan secular writers and philosophers to (post)modernman. Laughter as the way to God has been old but forgotten theme of religionand mysticism – few have read full length works on the Prophet’s sense ofhumour  and Rumi’s insistence thatlaughter accesses the heart of Godhead.

In India the rise of the right roughly corresponds toassertion of religious revivalism or religion inflected politics across theworld. Was secularism fake or inadequately theorized or it had misconstruedreligious as an Other while being parasitic on it? Isn’t the religious itselfnow in significant ways appropriating the secular?  This calls for more detailed reflections inforthcoming column.

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