2 - The present social function of religion

Summary

The question of what has happened to religion with the emergence of the modern world is a difficult one to answer. The last chapter focused on one particular feature of modernity, namely, the recognition that society is a human construct, the product of human agency. The problem of religion and modernity is wider than that. There is disagreement both about the features that constitute modern society as distinctively modern and about the defining characteristics of religion. If we do not agree on what modernity means and on what religion means, how can we relate the two?

Until the 1960s religious people, especially Catholics, saw the modern world as essentially hostile to Christian faith and life. John XXIII was the first pope to stop deploring the modern world and, instead, to speak positively of its achievements. The common Christian view was that the modern world in its beginnings in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution was built on a rejection of both the truth of the Christian faith and the authority of the Christian churches. Modernity meant secularism, which in turn meant the exclusion of religion from the public life and decision-making process of society. No wonder the modern world and Christianity were in opposition.

Then in the sixties came a dramatic change of attitude. In his best-seller The Secular City (London: SCM Press, 1965), Harvey Cox wrote with enthusiasm of secular values and secular society, regarding the acknowledgement of their integrity and relative autonomy as bound up with Christian faith in the Creation and Incarnation. Secularity – respecting the secular world with its tasks and values – should not, he said, be confused with anti-religious secularism.