Secularism and Everyday Experience

July 26, 2007

What better pairing could be imagined? Woody Allen and Billy Graham! Both come off quite well.. and Billy Graham in particular, while stating clearly his convictions, is affable and funny. I find it hard to imagine a contemporary Christian leader pulling this interview off with a sense of humor. Imagine James Dobson answering these questions.. the distaste would be obvious.

The interview encapsulates a central question concerning religion: what is secularism. I find it a central question because there is a fair amount of agreement over the near universal sway of religious thinking among cultures around the world.. and one powerful explanation for this is the idea that religion is somehow natural to human beings. We need a perceptual lens to process and explain the world, and such a lens can be defined as religion. But if religion is a universal, what does one do with secularism, which seems on its face to be a lifestyle defined by a lack of religious commitment?

One answer would be to propose that secularism is a godless religion.. that is to say, it involves a kind of faith and could be classified as a worldview. I don't like that answer.. because I don't think it actually matches secular experience.

This video interview between Woody Allen and Billy Graham begins to get at this issue of secularism. On the one hand Billy Graham is a stellar example of a religious-minded person. When a question concerning pre-marital sex comes up, he immediately makes reference to the "rules" that God has given.. making an analogy to baseball. Graham's instinct is to move from a question about life to a larger frame of reference.. that movement is typical of the religious-minded person. The more frequently such a frame is invoked, the more religious we will be inclined to call a person.

Does Woody Allen have a similar frame? Someone who wished to argue that secularism is some kind of religion would have to show where such a "religion" is located. Allen's point of view is characterized by a lack of reference to any kind of frame. His opinions about life and relationships are determined by his sense of what is reasonable in life.. with no reference to a rule book. Perhaps the argument could be made that his self and good feelings have become a religion.. but the point that makes sense of Woody Allen's statements is that there is no rule book.. and it seems philosophically perverse to label that position a hidden rule book.

Reading the essay on religion in Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures I came across a comparison that makes sense of the contrast between Graham and Allen. Geertz speaks of religion as one mode of interacting with the world:

But no one, not even a saint, lives in the world religious symbols formulate all of the time, and the majority of men live in it only at moments. The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is, as Schulz says, the paramount reality in human experience—paramount in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly rooted... [119]

Bringing this to bear on the interview above, we could say that Graham is highly successful at applying his religious frame on a large swath of experience. But even with Graham this religious frame will at times give way to just ordinary life. Going to the grocery store presents no great ethical issues and there is hardly a need to invoke the rule book. In this case life flows in a rather secular manner. Woody Allen could be said to live much of his life in this everyday world.. resisting the desire to invoke a rule book and sticking with a rather pragmatic view of the world. Secularism thus stands out as something all its own.. not a religion or a worldview buttressed with symbols. It is a willingness (at least an attempt) to live without any such frame of reference.