Is "secular" really neutral? A historian reveals what the West forgot — and why it changes everything for Christians today.

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by my co host Hashish Varma as well as our guest, doctor Kevin Flat. He's the author of a new book, Secularization, Social Order and World History, and a really fascinating book.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: We're going to talk a lot about it.

00:00:51
Speaker 1: But he is also the professor of history and Associate Dean of the Humanities at Redeemer University near toront On to up in Canada, and so we're happy to have you here, Kevin, and thanks for taking time to be on the show and talk about your new book and the concepts that you presented it.

00:01:10
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, James, I'm looking forward to chatting about this. Yeah.

00:01:14
Speaker 1: So I was first introduced by to your work from the Civitas podcast, so sort of a shout out to those guys, and was really fascinated the idea of I think part of the reason that I was so fascinated by it is because I was doing a Bible study. I was leading a Bible study through Hebrews at the time, and you know, Hebrews does this whole sort of move with the shadow and the copy, and then there's the substance, as I sort of referred to it, that is the heavenly order. And it seemed like it resonated so well with that sacred social order that you were discussing. And so maybe the best place to start is, you know you're dealing with this concept that's called sacred social order. Maybe just give a brief explanation of what that is and sort of where it comes from and.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: Your approach to it. So, sacred social order it's a term that I coined, but it's based on the ideas of an American sociologist named Philip Reef, and I think maybe we'll get into his work later on the idea of sacred social order. It's meant to capture the way that most human cultures have tried to make sense of their place in the world and in the cosmos. So in most human cultures, in fact, in all human cultures other than modern Western culture, as far as we can tell, there's been this idea that human beings, the life that we live as human beings, both individually but also as a society, our social institutions, all of that ought to align with or harmonize with something that's higher than us, some kind of a cosmic order, usually associated with God or the gods. So there's this idea that the social our life as human beings that we live together in community ought to mirror or reflect or align with this higher, sacred thing. It's not something we make up. It's not something that we get to kind of create or decide arbitrarily. It's something that is part of the universe. It has demands that it makes upon us. It demands our obedience and our reverence. And so the whole life that we live as a society is a human society needs to respect that order. And so the concept of sacred social orders is a simple shorthand way of capturing this idea that the social order. The way we order our lives as human beings ought to reflect this higher sacred order, and it's meant to be an alternative term to the term religion. Religion, which for us seems like just kind of a common sense category, it turns out actually is a uniquely Western and uniquely modern way of dividing up the human experience. Most cultures historically have not done that. They haven't had words or concepts that correspond to religion, but they have had words or concepts to capture this idea of the comprehensive alignment of human life and human society with something above us. One way to think about this is we use the word religion to refer to like one particular aspect of life, or certain aspects of life that have to do with God or that have to do with the supernatural in some way. So it's like a compartment, whereas sacred social order is like a framework or a blueprint, or all of human life, all of human society, all socialists institutions. So whereas religion, the way we use the term religion, it's like an app on your phone. You know, you can use it, it does certain things. You can also Sacred social order is more like the operating system that the whole phone runs on. All of the apps have to work within that operating system. And so we think of religion as having to do with church or maybe certain things that happen in the home or in private time. But sacred social order encompasses not only those kinds of activities, but also everything from education to the state, to the economy, to the arts. The whole breadth of human experience is part of a sacred social order. And yeah, that worm in human history is to think that way.

00:05:47
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you use the analogy of the app and the software. I wrote a piece not too too long ago where I argued that the firmware for the United States and maybe the Western world as a whole, but I was really focused on the United States is liberalism. It's this notion that we have these individual rights, that there is a sovereign individual, and then everything else is sort of constructed within that. So in America we have American civil religion that really feels like it reverses the sacred social order that you're talking about, that there is a super human component to which we that has a claim on us, to which we are obligated. What it feels like American civil religion sort of does, is it draws that down from the superhuman and puts it underneath the auspices of whatever the state slash the consensus of the people really wants to do. And so, and I think that gets at partly at least your notion of secularization, which is that there's this notion that there is no real suprah human. There is a prototypical humanity maybe to which society is oriented, but there's not a superhuman notion that we are beholden to for all times.

00:07:14
Speaker 2: In all places.

00:07:15
Speaker 3: Is that a.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: Yeah? To what extent is that it's fair? And where would you correct it? Yeah? So I think that is that is actually quite accurate. So the thing that I contrast with sacred social order is what I call secular order. And a secular order is a way of organizing society without reference to something that's higher than human beings. You can have different versions of secular order, just like you can have different versions of sacred social order, right, you can have you can have Christian or Islamic or Buddhist sacred social orders, for example. You can also have different flavors or versions of secular order. But I think the one that hasn't been dominant definitely in the United States and the Western world as a whole for the past one hundred and fifty years or so is a liberal version, or what I call in the book a liberal individualist version, and secular orders as a whole have to say, Okay, if we're not going to appeal to God, or to cosmic order, or to something above human beings as the justification for our social order, what are we going to look to? And in the liberal individualistic version of secular order, what we say is basically, well, if there isn't anything higher than us that we can appeal to, it's going to be the individual, the autonomous individual who is autonomous. And the word autonomous comes from two Greek words meaning self and law. So you're basically a law to yourself because there isn't anything really higher than you to which you have to conform. And so how do we take all of these autonomous individuals and translate that into some kind of a social order. Well, you can do it through a certain kind of economic system. You can do it through a certain kind of political system that tends to be democratic, with guarantees of individual rights and freedoms and so on, and this can become a way of reorganizing every aspect of society in terms of what does the individual want and then what are people willing to consent to as individuals, And this logic works its way out in every social domain, not only politics and economics, but also things like the family and sexuality and education. We reconfigure these things as opportunities for individual self expression, for people to kind of do what they want and to freely enter into and exit agreements and contracts with other individuals. There is overlap. The one thing that's not a correct exactly, but it's a complexity here, which is that you can also have versions of a kind of liberal order in the political realm or the economic realm that can overlap with a Christian understanding of society, and a liberal order can be more or less secular, and in fact, some of the main elements of the liberal order as we have it in the English speaking world actually do have some Christian roots and some Christian influences coming from the reform tradition and coming from the English the gradual development of English law, common law, English governing institutions in Parliament and so on and so both in Canada and the US and other parts of the English speaking world. Some of that firmware of liberalism, as you, I think quite aptly put it, some of that firmware does have Christian origins as well, or is compatible Christian way of looking at things, but it's also compatible with a secular way of looking at things that says, well, actually, individual human beings are the only authority. Yeah. And you could say one of the things that's been going on gradually in the United States for a long period of time is you have this architecture of a liberal order that is kind of being moved off of a Christian foundation and onto a more secular foundation. Really not for everybody, of course, but for many people that's kind of how they've come to think of it, that it's a more secular order. So it's a little more complicated, but I think definitely one of the main forms of secular order that we have in the West today is this liberal or liberal individualistic version. Yeah.

00:11:50
Speaker 1: I think what I find interesting and done a fair amount of work on this. You know, when we think about the concerns voice to buy let's say, Christian nationalism in the United States, these desires to go back to being a Christian nation. What I found helpful in your book and really resonated with, was if the if liberalism, if we continue the metaphor, if liberalism is the firmware, then these other things Christian nation, Christian foundation. This is software running on a different firmware, and it can actually be upgraded slash replaced by new software, but that firmware is the more durable element. And I think what we're what some of those conversations about what we were found as a Christian nation we are, you know, we want to be Christian nationalists. What I think they're missing is that, yes, there's that complexity of there are Christian elements that agree with the liberal elements. They can be compatible, but they're not necessarily compatible, and that as the liberal logic begins to dominate the Christian logic, that's going to create friction with the system that requires the system to upgrade the software, let's say, right, And so you know, at the end of the day, I just think that sometimes what we're missing is we're trying to reinstall a software that isn't going to work anymore. That this notion of Christian nationalism can't really overpower the movement of liberalism, and there needs to be some more fundamental rethinking of what does it really mean to be Christian within a liberal society as opposed to trying to make a liberal society Christian almost just because if we view it as a secular order, Christianity is not a secular order. It has to be a top that in order to really truly be Christian, there has to be a shift and inverting of the authority structure. And so, yeah, those are just some random thoughts I had on after reading through your book and listening to the Tziptos podcast, I was like, yeah, this sort of gives new language to something that's been itching in my brain for a while.

00:14:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. This so there's a whole world of topics that opens up, you know, once we start talking about Christian nationalism and how that relates to kind of a prenominantly liberal political order that we've got in the West, and what I think the Christian nationalism conversation, well, you know, one of the ways that people that people tend to think about this is that it's sort of like a religious backlash against secularization, right that society has become more secular, and so religious people, in this case Christian people don't like that, and so there's kind of a desire to reassert control. And I think, you know, there's there's something to that. But if we start off with these categories of religious and not religious, there's a tendency to miss the larger thing that's going on, which is again this question of like, what's the logic to the whole society, what's the grammar of the society, and what is that pointed towards. Is it a sacred social order or is it a secular order. What's happening in conversations in the US around things like Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, some of these things that really just have been in the popular consciousness for the last decade or so, actually is not that different from some conversations that are happening in other parts of the world. So if you look at the Middle East, if you look at India, even if you look at China and kind of the Chinese cultural sphere. In very broad terms, what has happened over the last one hundred years or so is you had attempts to implement a secular order in these other parts of the world that had historically their own sacred social orders, often very complex mixtures of multiple sacred social orders. But you get with the advent of European imperialism. Also in some of these countries that weren't ever colonized by Europeans, you get what historians called defensive modernizers, who basically say, we need to make our society more like a Western society in order to be able to hold our own economically, scientifically, technologically, militarily against the West. And in both cases, plus in a third case, which is communist regimes that take over in certain places like China, you have an attempt to construct a secular order in these places and to really do away with the old sacred social order, which many of these new leaders see as kind of that's why we haven't been able to keep up with the West. It's kind of kept us behind. And so this reaches sort of its high water mark in the sixties and seventies, nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, when throughout the Muzzlim world you have these kind of secular nationalist regimes that are Arab nationalists, people like Nasar and Egypt. You have in India, that's kind of the high water mark of sort of a secular conception of Indian nationalism, of Indian national identity. In China, you have the Cultural Revolution, which is sort of the last attempts of Chairman Now to really do away with traditional Chinese culture as much as possible and implement this atheistic, materialistic, communist division. But then following the sixties and seventies, in different times, in different places and with differing degrees of intensity, you start seeing proposals or movements to bring back, or at least adapt for the modern world elements from these traditional sacred social orders. The most dramatic examples of what happens in Iran, where you have a fairly secular, westernizing, modernizing Shah as the king of Iran and he's overthrown in a revolution, and there's lots of reasons for that, but the faction that ends up dominating that revolution, the faction that's led by the Ayatola Romani, wants to create an Islamic republic and actually succeeds in doing so, And so you get this really dramatic reversal of a society that seems to be on the path to more and more thorough going secular order in a modern Western vein rejecting that, or at least the people who end up in control rejecting that, and not exactly trying to go back to a previous situation, but trying to say, if you're going to have in Islamic in my terminology, in Islamic sacred social order, now in the late twentieth century, what would that look like? And they invent a new kind of constitutionalism and new kind of republic, a whole new structure for that. There's less dramatic examples though in other places. Right you get the rise in India of Hindu nationalism, the Hindufa movement, even in the Chinese cultural sphere in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan and Singapore, but then also increasingly in mainland China, you start to get intellectuals saying, should we go back to Confucianism as a source of ideas for how we could order our society? And it's this traditional system. We don't in the West normally think of it as a religion, but it definitely is a system of sacred social order. Movements to kind of reinvigorate Confucianism and to look to Confucianism for ideas for how we can organize society and politics. Now, So I think what's happening in the US and some other parts of the West people are saying, is there is the Christian tradition a source of alternative ideas for social and political order. Whatever we think of that, the merits or demerits of that, I think it's helpful to look at that as actually part of a more global phenomenon where you've had this era of dominance and very secular ways of looking that seemed like the very secular ways of looking at society, that seemed like the only game in town. And then you have people saying, well, we've kind of lost confidence in some of that, and can we go back into our own traditions and find different ideas for how we can organize things? And yeah, I see, I see Christian Nationalismthic integralism as particular attempts to do that, not, of course, the only attempts that you can write what particular attempts to do that.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: Now, it's really helpful. I know I've been kind of fanboing this early on. You want, you have any questions you want to through author.

00:21:01
Speaker 3: I do this is this is great stuff.

00:21:04
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:21:04
Speaker 3: My own background. I grew up Pindu uh and one of the one of the great dissonances. I suppose you could say, I should add to this that my research has been, especially in the last decade in coloniality, racialization, uh, the interwovenness of the missionary, the merchant and the soldier, and sort of the modern effects that has. And I think what you're what you're describing and what you do in your book gives a sort of language that prior language has been really uneasy to and and you hone in on it with the word of religion. And I think of growing up Pindu, some of the sorts of ways in which I have students talking about religion just don't map right. So you think about the ways in which Western Christians might speak of the committed versus the nominal Christian. And I would, initially when I first became a Christian, try to map that onto what I knew in my Indian background, the Indian community that I grew up in my family, and it did just didn't work right. You'd have people that were I suppose you'd say, very devoted, Right, they're keeping all the feasts they're they're doing all the poujas, as we would call it. They're going to Temple Mundad very often. Then you have others who would go to Manda, but go on and off. But when they'd go, they were happy to go, but they were also most excited to go into the cafeteria and eat food. But then when they were done with eating the food, then they'd go up and pay their respects to the various altars that were set up. And one might be inclined to say that this latter group is nominal, but the reality was is that you have you have a very clear sense in everyday life that it's actually far from nominal, even if the religious practices seem to take a backstage. And I think, to me, the most stark moment was growing up. I've mentioned on this podcast before, probably too many times, my love for the Chicago Bulls growing up. But I were watching the Bulls win their fifth title game six. Everyone knows Michael Jordan's going to get the ball. Game tied, Michael Jordan knows Michael Jordan's going to get the ball. Michael Jordan turns to Steve Kerr and he says, John Stockton's going to come double me. I need you to step up and be ready to get the pass and nail the shot. Steve Kurrd been struggling from three. He steps inside the arc. John Stockton switches over and as soon as he starts to switch over to double Michael, MJ passes it back over to Kerr. And the thing that from my eyes was exciting was Kurr raises up hits the shot. Bulls take the two point lead that becomes the game winner. To my father, who might otherwise be considered that nominal by sort of Western religious standards, I'll never forget it. He turns, and he says, something must have happened to John Stockton. He must have done something wrong in his past life. Because what I hadn't actually paid attention to, but then noticed in the replay was when Stockton came to double Michael and he saw that MJ was going to pass it back to Kerr, he stumbles out of the double team, so he doesn't end up even he's not even able to put a hand up to challenge the shot. Well, what my father was expressing there was classic karma, or karma as we say in the West. Whatever he did in the past meant in that moment, the moment that he most needed to stay on his feet, he stumbled. And to my ears, that's never left me because kind of growing up in two cultures, I wasn't quite as attuned to thinking in those sorts of terms. But to my father just slipped off his tongue in the most natural way, in the most basic of moments, And that, to me is what actually shows that the kind of nominal language doesn't work, because there is actually a deep penetration that religion never quite captured, right. And I think the way that we tend to think of religion, often in Western Christianity in particular, and not even necessarily in historic Christianity, is that religion is in some ways tied to this this explicit form of belief right, this catechism, this dogma, this creed, and to the degree that you affirm that you're good, you're Orthodox, and we end up with situations like in Cure Guards Denmark, right where it's he has this critique of what what about your life is really actually a Christian right which you live into what I would determine our current terms is some form of coloniality, right, And when we transfer that to places like India. It's really fascinating to watch from a distance now because, as you've pointed out, there's been this this rise of religious nationalism, but it's also a bit of a reaction, right You've get this historic movement in which the missionary, the merchant, the soldier all intertwined, and through that you have the formation of this idea of India that doesn't actually exist historically. What you have is local kingdoms. But in those local kingdoms you have, for instance, the Muslim Mughal Empire, but there are plenty of people that we would term Hindus today within it, and they're not living in some sort of religious persecution, but we know the pecking order. But you also have historic groups of Jews that exist from the diaspora that are over two thousand years old. You have Christians from the first century. You have Buddhists that are you know, the date misses me, but it's a very old tradition and it's not the sort of thing that we think of in the West as a secular religious mosaic or mal pot depending on your Canada.

00:27:01
Speaker 2: Or the US.

00:27:02
Speaker 3: Right, it's it's very much a sense of we do our lives and we do our lives understanding that we're not in the same place, but our lives are animated in slightly different ways, and that allows us to do our lives. But it's not necessarily a conflict. That makes sense. And when you have the rise of religious nationalism, it really is sort of a combination of these colonial impulses that have been grafted on but also these older senses of reaction to it, so that you don't, you know, whatever is going on with American nationalism, for instance, in the current unfolding of the world, it still actually looks pretty different than what say Modi is doing, and the sorts of ways that people either affirm him or react. Those who are reacting, they're reacting out of older senses of difference. Right in the South, where the sorts of cultures are very different history, even if we'd call it Hinduism, the gods that one is worshiping are very different, the languages they speak are different, the food that they eat is different, and so they're sort of saying, you're what you're doing is another form of coloniality upon us. But the reactions still have you know, a very It's sort of like with my father, with karma, it's sort of saturated with the sacred, but it doesn't doesn't work out and saying, well, I've made this explicit theological judgment. I don't know if this makes sense, but I wonder if you have thoughts on that.

00:28:35
Speaker 2: This is fascinating. So there's a lot of threads there, and you know, maybe two that I'll pick up on initially. So one is this idea. You're exactly right. So one of the pieces of kind of baggage or connosation that comes with this conceptual category of religion is that, and especially true in places where Protestantism has has been the dominant form of Christianity, it's very much based on explicit commitments expressed through belief and certain practices to a way of understanding the world. And of course this is one of the one of the great things historically about Protestantism is precisely that it wants to create among not just kind of an elite subset of the but among the Church as a whole, a deep understanding of the Gospel, a deep understanding of scripture that is accessible to everybody, and a high level of kind of lived out commitment. But if we then take that as our model of what religion is and expect to kind of use that lens to understand what's happening in other parts of world. It can become very misleading. And the normal situation, if we think instead of sacred social order, the normal situation in a human society is that whatever that dominant sacred social order is, you definitely have people who are kind of the virtuosos in the sacred social order. You have the people who are the scribes or the priests or the legal scholars, who really know and understand the ins and outs or understand kind of what the orthodox way of looking at that is. But in the society as a whole, you have all kinds of degrees of understanding of and commitment to kind of the theory of what that sacred social order is. You have apathy, you have different degrees of kind of heterodoxy. You have people who live with just every day much lower life level of conscious commitment to that. That being said, they're still living in a society where the official account of reality, the structuring of social institutions, and for lack of a better word, kind of the grammar of the culture has been shaped, often has been shaped by a very long time, but by that official version of reality, by that version of reality that is guarded by those virtuosos, by the scribes or the legal experts or whatever. And so you know, that example of your father, I think illustrates that where he's not he isn't somebody it sounds like who would have considered it himself or would have been considered to be a very devout Hindu. But that basic logic of understanding reality that involves a concept like karma is still is still operating for him, right, And this is.

00:31:55
Speaker 3: Also should throw in too, sorry, I should throw into to your point that he would call himself a scientist. He's a he's a physician. He's been in that world his whole life. And yet that's one of those moments where what he means by a scientist doesn't match with what a Westerner would say. Yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but I think that's significant with the way I describe.

00:32:14
Speaker 2: It, significant, And that'll plan. There's a second point I wanted to to respond to as well. Yeah, and that plays into that. So just just a conclude kind of that first train of thought, this is also true in secular orders. I would say right, So our social order in the West, and this is more true in Canada than it is in the US, but I think it's overall true in the US as well. The kind of hegemonic or dominant secular social order. A part of me is a secular one, right, So for the purposes of our life together, most of the time we're thinking within a secular frame, what Charles Taylor would call an imminent frame. And that's sort of the official version of reality. Uh. And it's a liberal individual stick one. And so you know, you have people who are really kind of analogous to the scribal class in some of these other sacred social orders, also in a secular order. So you hear, you might think of, let's say, a progressive human rights lawyer in New York, or you might think of a tenured professor teaching in the humanities or the social sciences at an Ivy League institution. Right. So these are people who really know and are really committed to and understand this is the correct version of secular order that is dominant in the West right now. But then you have all kinds of other people from all sorts of walks of life who might not really be that committed to that, they live within that framework. It's to some extent part of their subconscious understanding of things. But they might also be committed to or have beliefs or values or practices that don't sit very well with that. They might be people who are first or second generation newcomers to North America, right, and they're at home, still living out of on a micro level cultural framework and maybe even a sacred social order that's from a different part of the world. But you also have people who maybe haven't had as much formal education and they don't know the correct way to think or talk about certain topics. And so one of the things that you find in Western societies is generally people who are of lower socioeconomic status, people who have less formal education. They believe in all kinds of stuff that doesn't really fit with the official version of reality. Right. They're into astrology, they're into UFOs, they're into you know, where do you find that kind of stuff, Well, not exclusively, of course, but more often in these pockets that are officially inducted into the reality. So yeah, So that's kind of one thing I would note is that in any of these in any society, you have degrees of adherence to the official version of reality, like consciously, but also everybody's still living within that framework. And that's the prim The other thing that I would say is, I think very often we tend to assume that the situation that we live in in the contemporary West today, where you have a relatively high degree, especially in urban centers, a relatively high degree of cultural diversity, a relatively high degree of diversity of worldviews and religions and value systems, I think we tend to think that's a uniquely modern situation that's brought about by modern migration patterns, technology, et cetera. And then we assume that pre modern societies were kind of monolithic. Like we think of ancient India and we're like, wow, well that must mean that everybody was what we would today call a Hindu, or you think of China and you think, okay, well it's just a very straightforward everybody's following this kind of unified Confucian model or whatever, and that's just not the case. Actually, more often it seems you do have some degree of pluralism that exists. And so you know, in the example of India, what's in India before the British come. You have the last major empire, which you referred to, is the Mughal Empire, which is a Muslim empire. It's officially committed to Islam, and that establishes, as you said, kind of a pecking order. Then of course, actually most people living under the Mughal Empire aren't Muslims, but they're following this other package of customs and beliefs and deities and practices and legal structures that we later kind of package together and call Hinduism. But you also have Christians and Buddhists and Jews and Jains that are part of the mix. Same is true in China. And in China you have this historically, this fashion situation where you have Confucianism as a very influential tradition, you have Daoism as a very influential tradition that has a long history of kind of arguing with and coexisting with Confucianism, making fun of Confucianism actually as well. And then you have, coming in indirectly through Central Asia but originally from India, you have Buddhism coming in, and there's tensions between these three systems, but what you end up with is kind of a working mo whereby these three systems exist in equilibrium and they kind of have a division of responsibilities, a division of jurisdictions that there's a Chinese term for this, which is three teachings the Sanjiao, and you have a sacred social order that actually is intrinsically complex because it has all these three elements. So anyway, that maybe is taking us a little bit far afield from what you were talking about, but the situation of multiple sacred social orders overlapping, or there being a dominant form of social order, but then also these kind of minority forms, or even the dominant form is a minority and the majority is not really committed to it, but they have to live within that framework. That's not unusual historically. In fact, that's very common, And in a society in the West today where you have a dominant liberal, individualistic, secular order, you can still have large numbers of people who to some degree are following some other vision of social order, which in large parts of the US is going to be a broadly one. It's most oftenly going to be an evangelical one, although there's also going to be other flavors and versions of that, and there's some degree of tension between that and kind of the official dominant form of social order, where that dominant form does set the parameters, it sets the limits within which those other things can be expressed, but it doesn't mean that everybody in the society is a card carrying proponent of a liberal, individualistic, secular order.

00:39:34
Speaker 1: So I want to get into Philip Reef a little bit, and this seems like it might be a good place. So what you both just described is sort of these pluralistic societies where you're negotiating or people are negotiating the boundaries of when am I part of this sacred social order, you know, this dominant sort of perspective, Where can I when do I start to give up maybe portions of my culture that I brought with me, this sort microsocial order within my family that now I'm I'm blurring the boundaries and adopting something different. So there's what I would call that is there's a negotiation taking place there. And sometimes these negotiations can increase friction to a point where it seems like conflict. But in Reef he uses the chaof comp kind of language, like there's always this conflict that's coming and I was a little I wanted to ask this question because I think I'm sure you know Philip Brief better than I do. But my thinking was that probably negotiation is almost a better term for that, and that the conflict is more a punctuation or occasional within the negotiation. But really, what's happening most of the time is this sort of like poking and prodding the boundaries of your own perspectives. You know that whether it's autonomous or whether it's uh, you know, a smaller group sort of understanding and the broader what we're calling the more dominant sacred social order.

00:41:08
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so this is you talk about my understanding of Reef, and it's an open question as to whether anybody other than Reef understands Reef. And he passed away quite some time ago, so we can't ask him, unfortunately, if we're getting it right or not. Yeah, he's famously his his this trilogy that he published at the end of his life and partially posthumously, which begins with the first volume is My Life among the Death Works. Yeah. Uh, it's really hard to understand. It's it's it's convoluted stuff. And kudos to to to you and to anybody who's tried to wrestle through this. But yeah, so so Reef. One of the major themes for Reef. So he talks about what I what I would call kind of the secular order. Reef doesn't talk so much in terms of it as an order, but he talks about what he calls the third world or the third culture. Yeah, third world. He does not mean, you know, those of us who grew up in the eighties or nineties, you know the term that we used to use for what we now call the developing world. That's not what he means, although it's an intentional play on that terminology. By the third World, Reef means a secular culture that has rejected sacred order, that has become dominant in intellectual and artistic and political circles in the West, and he sees them as a reaction against what he calls the Second culture, which in the case of the West, is the culture that was shaped by a Christian understanding of sacred order. So Reef sees the West as a whole as being in this process of transition where we used to be dominated by the second culture, which was Christendom. Basically, although there's Jewish and Islamic versions of that as well. And there's this third culture that's coming in. And for Reef, this is this is this is like a this is warfare. It's warfare that is happening culturally mainly, although it can turn violent. And his word for this is the culture comp the cultural war, or the struggle for civilization. It's a reference to this thing that happened in Germany in the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties, which was sort of a struggle between the newly unified German government and the Catholic Church. He repurposes that term for this, this this culture term. And Reef really sees this third culture, the secular cultural movement, as absolutely destructive. It is a negation of the second culture. So he says, it's actually not a culture, it's an anti culture. It exists purely as kind of this movement to destroy any concept of something higher than human beings, anything that is sacred, God in particular, God's law in particular, any kind of commandments that are prohibitions that say you cannot do this, thou shalt not. Reef sees the third culture as its central motivating thing is to destroy that and this is where I partially kind of dissent from Reef because I think there's something he's naming that's real, that does exist, that kind of destructive impulse that is targeting at the Judeo Christian tradition, that is targeting at any kind of moral prohibitions, and you do see it particularly strongly in the areas that Reef devotes a lot of his attention to, which is kind of the high arts, like a high culture, the avant garde artistic movements, certain intellectual strands in the modern West. That's definitely a real thing, but that's not the entirety of the secular order that we're living in. It also has, first of all, a constructive element, meaning it doesn't just define itself against Christendom, but it has its own sort of positive vision, its own sort of positive values that it's striving towards, one of which, connecting back to something that she said earlier, is the idea of science, and science is kind of being revered as the most reliable, the most dependable way of getting at reality and being able to exert control over reality so as to better the human condition. So that's just one example of many that it's not a destructive value in itself. It's something that's making forward as a positive goal. So it has its own constructive vision. It's not just there to destroy what's left of the Second Culture, what we've calls the Second culture. And as I think you say quite rightly, James, it does coexist to some degree with what's left over of the period of Christian dominance. It's not simply a constant outright war. There's also negotiations and truces and even compromises. And as I said earlier, the kind of liberal order that we have in a place like Canada or the US is itself kind of like a compromise arrangement between an inherited Christian vision of human beings and how society should be ordered, and more secular visions coming out of the Enlightenment or subsequent movements in the West. There is overlap, right, there have been points of agreement. And so even if you look if you go back to the American Founding, uh the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that doesn't come purely out of a of an inherited Christian vision. It doesn't come purely out of a secular Enlightenment vision. But you know, for my money, the historians who are most convincing on this, they really say like it's kind of an overlapping consensus where yeah, there's some Enlightenment influences that that are moving in a more secular or deistic direction, but there's also really strong Christian influences that are very self conscious that are rooted in a longer tradition in the English speaking world. It's not one or the other, it's it's this overlapping kind of thing. So yeah, so that's where I would you know, if Reef we're still with us today, you know, that's what I'd want to I'd want to kind of push him on this and see what he had to say that, yes, there is this destructive current in what he calls the third culture or the third world. Uh, but that's not the whole picture. There's also a constructive vision, and there's also in many cases compromises. And yeah, again going back to what I said earlier, that's the normal human condition. Is not everybit in a society agrees with each other about what social order should look like, or how we should legitimate it, or where we get its orientation from. And yet we still have to figure out how to live together. Yeah, and there can be more or less oppressive ways of navigating that. Yeah, very helpful. Hasheesh anything?

00:48:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, if it's okay, zoom out a little bit. I think we've gotten into some really interesting conversations that the nerd in me wants to just keep digging. But I think it might be helpful to zoom out a little bit and just think about the contours of the change that you're kind of advocating and what it might mean. And maybe that's that's the way to put it right, As we think about a shift of imagination from just thinking about the secular as something that stands in opposition to the religious, and we move to a thought of the sacred secular, the sacred secular social order, or I forget the exact term, but the sorts of ways that you're describing things. What change does that cause us to recalibrate in the way that we think about Western society, perhaps especially the way that it's it's embodied in Canadian and US cultures. The way that we then think about, you know, the kinds of establishment clauses that we have and the way that those are used or not used or claimed or pushed against in our sacred social sort of reality.

00:49:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, so let me let me answer this kind of in three layers. One is more and this is one of the primary audiences of the book. It's addressed more to scholars and academics who are trying to think about how do we tell the story of what secularization is. Then there's a layer that starts to have a lot more practical implications, including political implications, which is thinking of the secular not as just the absence of religion, but as an alternative kind of social order. And then finally, like for us as Christians living in this moment in this world, how might this shift the way that we approach certain things. So starting with kind of the academic level, and I'll keep this fairly brief, but basically, everybody who writes about secularization, scholars who write about secularization, they have some version of thinking of secularization as the decline of religion. So religion is this thing, secularization is you just have less of that in a society. And that's true as far as it goes right, So we can look at you know, there's fewer people in the United States today who would claim that they have a religion. Right, So that group of people who say I have no religion, I'm nothing in particular, or maybe I'm an atheist or an agnostic. Even that that group of people has been growing for the last couple of decades and much longer than that in most western countries of the United States is kind of late late to the party on that. So that's true. It's true that church attendance has been down. It's true that church membership has been down. I know there's some early indications that maybe some of that is changing. With with what you guys down south would call gen z, we would call them gen z. Maybe that's changing. It's probably too early to say that with much confidence. But yeah, but that that's so that that's real, that decline is real. But the problem is to only talk about secularization as like the decline of religion. It's like looking at what happened in the Roman Empire in the fourth century and saying, oh, what we had in the late Roman Empire was a decline of paganism. People kind of stopped talking about the pagan gods, they stopped worshiping at the temples. That sort of faded out, And that's true, it did, but you're completely missing, like it was replaced with something, and what it was replaced with wasn't just people were worshiping a different god. It changed the educational structure, It changed the laws, It changed the way people talked about political power. It changed not only the rules around sexuality and marriage, but how people behaved around sexuality and marriage. It changed how people treated unwanted children. Right like, it has massive social ramifications. And so I proposed that we need to think of secularization not just as the decline of religion, but as the replacement of a particular sacred social order, which, in the case of the West is is some form of Christendom. The replacement of a sacred social order with a secular order, which isn't just the absence of religion, but it's a whole new grammar for how we justify and orient society across all domains of life and all social institutions. It's not just about what is or isn't happening in churches. It's about what's happening in politics, in schools, in the arts, in sexuality, in literature. It shifts all of those things, just like the Christianization of the late Roman Empire brought about changes in all of those domains. So it's in a lot of ways a more radical and far reaching understanding of what secularization is. It's not just this largely individualistic decline of this thing that we call religion. It's you're moving the whole society onto a different foundation, and that has much more radical implications. So that's kind of the skull or we pitch, right. So I want sociologists of religion, religious studies, scholars, historians to start thinking this other way about what secularization is, because I think it'll help us to see a lot of things more clearly. The second layer is if we think of secular order not just as the absence of religion, but as an alternative set of values, that gives us a different way of thinking about how should we understand reality and what human beings are for, and how we should organize our lives together. I think this helps with a lot of things. So a lot of our problems that we have, I think in North America around particular issues, and this is maybe especially true in the realm of education, is that we think of certain things as just kind of neutral spaces, and so we think, okay, well, education is supposed to be public education at least is supposed to be kind of like a neutral space, and neutral means secular. It means we need to have a wall of separation between religion and the state, which includes public education. And if it's secular, and then that should work for everybody. It's neutral. But of course secular does not mean neutral, and in particular secular order, whatever version it is, let's say it's a liberal individualistic version, has its own set of core values. In the case of the liberal individualistic secular order, it includes the idea that you, as an individual are and ought to be autonomous. It's up to you to decide what is important to you, what your life should be about. Nobody else really can do that for you, and if they try to, actually they're violating your autonomy. And you shouldn't accept any obligations or relationships or institutions other than those that you have freely chosen for yourself as an informed, consenting person. So that's a particular vision of what the good life is. Right, we want a society where those individuals can be as autonomous as possible. It's not neutral, though, right, it has substantive content, and that's going to affect how you teach, not just some of the flashpoint subjects like sex ed or something like that. It's actually going to affect how you teach everything, right. It affects what do you think the goal or the end or the teleoss of education is, which is a question that's downstream from what is the end or goal of a human being? And if we think of education as I think we should, as cultural transmission as handing down a culture, this becomes very important. So this is helpful. Then it's not just like is there religion and education? That's the wrong question. It's what vision is education oriented towards? And I would say, and then how do we create a society in which we're not having one answer to that question posed on the whole population, But how do we create room for real pluralism where we don't say, okay, well, if you have a Christian or a Jewish or a Muslim understanding of this, you're kind of going to be at a disadvantage and your version of reality is going to be excluded. So I think it has practical implications there. Finally, for us as Christians, my working theory is a lot of what we do and don't pay attention to is being shaped by this mental category of religion that we have. So in my own context here in Canada, you know, in evangelical churches, you will have people who are concerned about yoga, let's say, practicing yoga, and the reason they're concerned about it is because they understand that yoga has elements that register for them as spiritual or religious. So like why I'm a Christian and if yoga has spiritual or religious elements that have to do with Hinduism, which I recognize as another religion. I have a religion, they have a religion. There's a potential conflict there that has to be navigated and it might mean, you know, people come to different conclusions about this. Of course, I'm not trying to comment on that the whole debate, but we can talk about that if you want. But that's not that's not what we're here to talk about. But at least my generation and probably the following generation maybe this is starting to change in Canada. Would then look at education and they would not It wouldn't even occur to them, like nobody's teaching them a different religion. It's just neutral, so it doesn't matter what they're being taught in school because the kind of secular value system that had become in our education system didn't register to them as a religion. So it wasn't on the range, It wasn't a rival right likewise, And I would argue, and maybe I will kind of show my cards here a little bit. I'm less worried about Evangelical Christians in Canada today going to the yoga studio and becoming practice and Hindus than I am about them actually going to the yoga studio or the gym or the fitness class, where actually the real sacred values of our culture it's all about you. It's all about being the best person you can be. It's all about enhancing yourself. Won't let anybody else tell you what to do about that. Those are the values that are going to be reinforced most of the time, probably even in the yoga class. Not that he wrote lots of Hindu sacred social order and that would be recognizable from that tradition. So yeah, so I think shifting away from can we work without this concept of religion and instead ask like, what are the values that are dominant here, and how's it shaping the context that I'm done. I think that that would be very helpful for us to do that.

01:00:11
Speaker 1: Kevin, we're kind of winding down here. I'll just resonate with that last point. I was asked to write a piece on the La Boo Boos. I don't know whether you have Laboo boos in Canada. They're these there's these ugly little dolls that supposedly resemble an old Mesopotamian god who nobody would have known about had they not created the La Boo Boos.

01:00:31
Speaker 2: And so.

01:00:33
Speaker 1: You know, there were a lot of Christians who were thinking that this could be a conduit for evil spiritual influence because it remembers, it resembles this old Mesopotamian god. And so when I wrote the piece, I said, the bigger problem seems to me to be that the there they have a subli and demand curve that makes these things almost inaccessible and drives up the price. And I said, so, if you're really concerned about what Labuo bo is doing to you, it's more economic than it is spiritual. Like that, like you need to be looking at that sort of push that this whole industry is giving you where somehow having a little boo boo has become a status symbol, Like that's the bigger problem. I don't think that an ancient deity is going to come through the little Boo boo doll and possess you. I think that if you're seeking these things out and fighting for fighting for them in stores, you've probably already been possessed by something. It's just not it's just not the laboo, you know, It's just not this ancient deity. So I totally resonated that last point, and I think there's a ton of fruit and I hope people who are listening understand. I think there is like a ton of productivity that can come out of rethinking some of what we do in terms of this sacred social order. So I, like I said, I've already thought it begun thinking it through with regard to the Book of Hebrews and how some of this can sort of help reframe my understand ending of just how that book even works. And so I just really appreciated the work and appreciate your time this morning talking to us.

01:02:08
Speaker 2: So thanks for being here. Thanks James, It's been a pleasure. And yeah, I hope people find the book useful and the idea is useful.

01:02:16
Speaker 1: Well, we'll have a link to it in the show description. Secularization, Social Order and World History is the book. Kevin Flatt is the author. Check it out in the link. I'd really encourage you to read it. It is oddly accessible for an academic book. I will say that it really well written. I didn't have any you know, you're not. It's not like reading Philip Rief, right.

01:02:38
Speaker 2: It's my number one goal, James, Yeah, number one.

01:02:42
Speaker 1: So if you pick this up, if you're a lay person in church, you're interested in these kind of things, you're not going to have any trouble reading this book. Very accessible, very helpful, and yeah, we'll close it out there. So thanks again for being here, Thanks ashish Alas for the conversation, and we'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian Care. Just want to take a seat to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.