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What Comes after Essentialist Religion?

One of shrewdest distortions encouraged by the secularist attempt to separate the world into distinct secular and religious realms is that it serves to obscure what can only be called the religious nature of the modern secularist project itself. How else can we explain the intolerance of our secular elites who demonize as “fundamentalists” all (Christian and Muslim alike) who dare to inject their “religious” motives into our common secular culture? That they do so in the name of tolerance only makes more obvious that their values are rooted in an absolute commitment immune to rational critique—the very attributes that Cavanaugh finds at the heart of the modern secular rejection of “religion.” Maurice Cowling, in his monumental study, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, puts it well: “Secularization, so far from involving liberation from religion, has involved merely liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand that it is a religion to which they are committed.”8 So the struggle is not between the enlightened advocates of modern secularity and the benighted followers of an absolutist and irrational religion; rather, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness” (Eph 6:12). The modern myth of religion is a contemporary manifestation of what the New Testament calls “the world,” which is governed by the principalities and powers, and about which St. Paul warned us when he wrote, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). W. C. Smith had good instincts when he wrote a generation ago, “I have come to feel that, in some ways, it is probably easier to be religious without the concept; that the notion of religion can become an enemy to piety.”9 William Cavanaugh has done us a service by showing just how cunning that enemy can be. As Christians we owe allegiance to Scripture and the Holy Spirit but not to anybody’s idea of what “religion” is or ought to be.