THE CRACKS IN SECULARIZATION

Giandomenico Mucci, S.J.

One speaks today of two sociological categories, of which the second, desecularization, indicates
the overcoming of the first, secularization. The theory of secularization was created at the beginning
of the Nineteen-hundreds on the basis of the thought of Comte, Durkheim, and Weber and has
dominated the analysis of religion in the western world. It is founded upon the thesis that the
processes of modernization and development of the experimental sciences and technology
inevitably bring about the rise of atheistic and religiously neutral societies.
Beginning in the Nineties of last century, Peter Ludwig Berger, followed by many other
sociologists, philosophers of religion, anthropologists, and historians of ideas, began to criticize the
validity of the theory of secularization, moved by a greater interest in the various forms of religion
and the growing importance of religious problems in the public sector.1
Today in many countries, the debate over religion does not principally concern the rejection or the
negation of its rationality or credibility, but above all the return of old “religious” phenomena, of an
irrational nature, magic or myth, dressed up in new clothing. This does not mean that, in the West,
the process of desecularization has overcome that of secularization, which remains tenacious even
now. It means, however, that something new and different is developing in secular society.

The secular man

A chorale of Bach solemnly affirms that man’s place is next to God,2 an affirmation which is ever
true for believers. And for others? In a glance, one would say that a sense of the transcendent, that
which Christianity attributes to the living God, does not make up a part of the cultural logic which
retains that sense of the transcendent insignificant for rationality and man’s freedom.
Recently, commenting on a book of Roberto Colasso, Giorgio Montefoschi wrote: “Contemporary
society looks at itself. Not beyond. Ever. And, it is satisfied, or rather despairs, thus. With the
definitive and insuperable measuring of its boundaries, beyond which nothing exists, much less the
divine; with the crowding and concentration, within these boundaries, of all the disciplines which
serve to establish the useful, to annihilate doubt, and homogenize certitude, to guarantee control;
with an encyclopedic knowledge, limitless, accessible by the pressing a button, which is not
knowledge at all, because it excludes the effort of knowing and the dialectic of the mind; finally,
with the assurances of progressivism and humanitarianism: the obligation of being, above all, good
here and now, sacrosanct and praiseworthy, without thinking of what is beyond, of the future life”.3
When Salvatore Settis criticizes the institutions of the European Union inasmuch as they make the
market the only certitude, the only domain which is able to regulate society in all of its facets, it
seems to us to highlight a particular case produced by the secular society.4
This culture reverberates even in large sections of the ecclesial world, and it could not be otherwise.
There it manifests itself as a mentality which, without making too many distinctions, demands the

1
Cf. P. L. Berger, «The Desecularization of the World. A Global Overview», in Id. (ed.), The Desecularization of the
World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Washington D. C., Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999, 1-18; V.
Karpov, «Desecularization: A Conceptual Framework», in Journal of Church and State 52/2 (2010) 232-270.
2
Cf. J. S. Bach, Weihnachtsoratorium, Schluβ – Choral, n. 64 («Bei Gott hat seine
Stelle / Das menschliche Geschlecht»).
3
G. Montefoschi, «Ma riaffiora di continuo la nostalgia del sacro», in Corriere
della Sera, 27th of September, 2017, 39.
4
Cf. S. Settis, «L’Europa disarcionata», in Il Sole 24 Ore, 21st of May, 2017, 23.
autonomy of subjective judgment, passing off as hypocrisy and prejudice even references to
transcendence and the norms and values proposed in the name of the Gospel. There exists even in
the Church the temptation of believing only in the “ethics of the subject”, as Daniele Hervieu-
Léger5 has defined it, that ethics which teaches that preconstituted ethics do not exist, but only those
which the subject and the society in which it lives, chose and assume in its responsible autonomy.6
Lost and ill-adjusted
The culture and the dominant society of the secular man have created in the masses, even Catholics,
quite persistent phenomena of people being lost and ill-adjusted. The Second Vatican Council,
which spoke of a “new period of history” and of “such an acceleration as to be only with difficulty
kept up with by individuals”,7 clearly predicted it.
The quality of being ill-adjusted, with the psychological, moral, and religious difficulties that it
brings to light, produces reactions, of which three are most easily recognizable. There are those who
deny the modern historical development and hide, because of fear, behind prepackaged phrases and
simplistic ideas: they are superficial changes; the young have always been rebels; the more things
change the more they stay the same, and saying similar things. There are those who stay closed in
their own professional bubble, and the excuse of staying updated in one’s specialty is used. All the
rest remains foreign to them, and they convince themselves that they are in touch with the times.
Then there are those who live obsessively focused on the past, and, waiting for its impossible or
unlikely return, bellow bitterly, deploring the wickedness of the present age.8
To this last category, in which are included even many ecclesiastical and lay intellectuals, a worthy journalist
many years ago referred: “Culture, erudition are certainly gifts, but they may also constitute a limitation in
comprehending the times, when culture and erudition remain anchored to historical premises now overcome:
there is no more rigid conservatism than that which is based on reasonable premises, if those premises are
part of an entire historical structure upon which the sun has set. Every new epoch demands new intellectual
tools”.9
Having second thoughts?
As we were saying, the processes of secularization are not extinct. Among them, the most fearful
are individualism and indifference. And against the “globalization of indifference” the Pope never
ceases to put us on guard. The greatest danger is constituted by the evolving of secularization into
secularism, or indeed into a form of global makeshift religion which alone would give sense to the
life of man and its endeavors: which would itself have the values promoted by modernity (liberty,
emancipation, progress, etc.) if they should be radicalized, daring not to recognize their own limits.
It is significant that from within modernity itself, voices are multiplying which bespeak inquietude
and insecurity over the much feared next steps of the culture. Card. Jozef De Kesel, archbishop of
Bruxelles-Malines, cites Jürgen Habermas, who is an atheist philosopher but who speaks of “post-
secular modernity”: a formula which expresses the hope that in the contemporary public debate
reasoning deriving from religious experience is included and those “storehouses of values” which
exist in civil society also through the merit of the Churches are reevaluated.10

5
Cf. D. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde, Paris, Bayard, 2003.
6
Cf. G. Pecora, «Alla conquista del relativismo etico», in Il Sole 24 Ore, 28th of January, 2018, 25.
7
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Gaudium et spes, nn. 4-5.
8
Cf. E. Baragli, «“Lo choc del futuro”», in Civ. Catt. 1977 IV 360-362.
9
A. Scurani, «Cattolicesimo in decomposizione», in Letture 24 (1969) 713.
10
Cf. J. De Kesel, «Un nuovo ruolo per le religioni nella società post-secolare», in
Vita e Pensiero 100 (2017) 15-22.
 And also significant is the position of another non-believing thinker, Günther Anders-Stern (1902-
1992), known for having denounced the “pretensions for dominion of a progress the materialistic
basis of which has led to the collapse of the human before the imminent ungovernability of
technology”. As one expert writes, in his philosophy one finds a “religiosity without religion”, with
which “he tries in the first place to determine the mutations which the world and man have
undergone as a result of ‘becoming hypertechnological’—changes so radical as to be grasped only
by means of ‘theological concepts’—and then to attribute to such processes of the obsolescence of
man and of the deterioration of the relationship with nature that solemn seriousness which they
merit for their final character. This seriousness, however, is not recognized as such by the
indolence of contemporary man, whose emotional, moral, and cognitive capacities are not up to the
changes which he contributes to bring about”.11
In short, in the secular city, the monolithic block by which it is represented and exists, cracks,
lesions, and crumbling appear which justifies its observers that speak of “desecularization”.
By analogy, well aware that it treats of different fields, the debate aroused in Italy by an article of
Ernesto Galli della Loggia, published 30 years ago in a well-known daily paper, is brought to
mind.12 According to this essayist, after the defeat of communism, the renewed dynamism of
Catholicism and the general rebirth in a big way of religious ideals, “the whole of the secular values
of a liberal progressivist bent is undergoing a strong attack from the time when their substantial
hegemony was established in the entire West. The impression however is that they are unable to
change their defensive stance, that they do not know how to react if not by reproposing
imperturbably themselves hic et nunc, with a certain irritable self-sufficiency, which tends almost to
suggest that the question of values, which has for some time has been stirring up our society, is
itself illegitimate.”
This question is “connatural to human nature”, and therefore “the secular liberal-progressive
thought must recognize that, for reasons which, in a certain degree, are bound to the theoretical
foundations themselves of society at large, once transferred to the level of the historical praxis of
society at large, this tends too easily to become and to be felt as a simple ideology of 360° tolerance
and ethical indifferentism. Those of a secular bent have up until now occupied themselves too little
with this danger.
“No society can live and hold itself together only aiming at the growth of its income, or occupying
itself only with its optimal distribution. But in this way it easily exposes itself to the accusation, on
the one hand, of being the bearer of an intimately ‘materialist’ vision of the world, and, on the other
hand, of being objectively responsible for a social-political reductio of the perspectives and
problems of the lives of individuals: that is, of tending to impose, always and in every way, in the
society and the state, the future not only of every expression, but also of every personal Bildung”.
And part of the emerging question about values are “the need for final certainties, of values stamped
with the mark of the eternal”, which democratic-progressivist secularism “is unable, moreover, to
satisfy”.
Desecularization is a concept which entered into the cultural debate not long ago, but, as the article
cited shows, though from a point of view mostly social and political, it has been for some time that
within the secular city one recognizes the indifference with regard to some of its premises and
results, among which individualism and indifference to ethics are numbered. They are doubts,
questions and cracks which permit us a lot of hope. “If Providence wishes, one more time, to aid us,

11
D. Colombo, «La teologia atomica di Günther Anders», 25.
12
Cf. E. Galli della Loggia, «Mea culpa di un laico», in La Stampa, 28th of September,
1988, 1 s.
it will only do so by raising up among us men gifted with a lucidity adapted to the circumstances
and a courage equal to their farsightedness”.13

13
Bouyer, Cattolicesimo in decomposizione, Brescia, Morcelliana, 1969, 20.