Eyes to see

“I’m not sure I believe that God, like, talks to people or gets involved in day-to-day things,” a friend of mine said recently. “That just doesn’t make any sense to me.” I should mention that he’s a pastor, and his comment got me thinking about secularism and its impact on Christianity.

In his book A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor talks about the implicit sense we have that the world does not contain active spiritual or mystical forces. If something happens in the world, there has to be an empirical or psychological explanation. He calls this “the disenchanted world” of our secular age.

My pastor friend clearly lives in a disenchanted world, and he is not alone. This mark of secularism is widespread, even among Christians. About 20 years ago, sociologist Christian Smith coined the term “moralistic therapeutic deism” (MTD) to talk about a widespread view of spirituality he found among (at that time predominantly young) Christians. MTD posits a version of Christianity that is all about getting people to be “good people” (morally speaking) who use religion and spirituality to feel good about themselves and to deal with life’s challenges (therapeutic).

It focuses primarily on human action but not on what God is doing – largely because God is not seen as being active in the world itself (deism). While there is certainly a role for religion to play in the world in MTD, there really isn’t much for God to do.

Now those young people are middle-aged, raising kids of their own. And the deistic account of God they held seems alive and well, across the theological divide. On the “liberal” side, many people look exclusively to human action when it comes to looking for the results of religion. From this perspective, faith might inspire people to work for social justice, but it is people who do that work.

Perhaps surprisingly, the picture is not that different in theologically “conservative” circles. Sure, people here are more willing to talk about what God is doing, perhaps, but in the end, the focus often remains on people and what we do, what we believe and how we act. Perhaps God is some mysterious force working in our hearts, but in the end what matters religiously is whether humans believe the right things and act the right way.

Listening to popular Christian discourse of whatever stripe, then, you’d be forgiven for thinking that God has been more or less out of the picture for about 2,000 years. Indeed, someone recently told me that their Christian school held it as a tenet of their faith that God has not provided any new revelations or appearances since the time of the disciples!

But I wonder whether we haven’t become too secular in our Christianity. Isn’t God the main actor in the plan of redemption, reconciliation and renewal? If not, then what hope is there, really? As another pastor friend of mine used to tell me: “If God is not the subject of your action verbs, then you are not preaching the Gospel of grace.”

The unfolding

What would change if we thought of God as an active force in the world today? What lessons can we learn from pre-secular cultures, and those who have avoided disenchantment entirely? Can we find ways to make sense again of a world in which spiritual forces play a real and meaningful role?

It seems to me that deep ecology and Indigenous ways of knowing offer us some helpful suggestions. Both approaches to the world see the world itself as spiritually charged, rather than simply assuming there is a neutral physical world with some spiritual forces added in. In other words, God participates daily in the normal unfolding of creation, not just in miraculous interventions.

If God is at work in the everyday world, how do we, living in a secular age, learn to see that? The arts can help train us to see such a re-enchanted world. Filmmakers like Terence Malick, Alicia Rohrwacher and Michelangelo Frammartino show us how to see spiritual forces at work in regular, everyday ways. Magical realism (in both film and literature) reminds us to keep a sense of whimsy and of the impossible in our day-to-day experiences.

There are many tools and methods that can help get us beyond the disenchanted world of secularism to a world in which God can again be a meaningful player. For many Christians, this will feel strange – in part because we have let our sense of normal and comfortable become defined almost exclusively by the secular world. We need people who can push us to see – through humor, criticism and empathy – the limits of our secular approaches, and to open us up to something beyond. We need holy fools, poets, filmmakers, journalists, deep ecologists, artists, spiritual advisors and more to help us learn again to see God at work in the world around us.

A re-enchanted world

Called “profound and funny” by critics, a film entitled Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) depicts the human, animal, plant and mineral realms in turn. Its talented Italian filmmaker Frammartino is one of the keynote speakers at an ICS conference Oct. 16-18 called “Re-enchanting the world: Philosophy, Spirituality, Ecology, Arts.”

Christian Courier is partnering with the ICS for one day of this conference with a series of interactive workshops and a dinner for CC folks to mark our 80th anniversary!

Stay tuned for more details.