What About Secular Humanism?
Why not just promote wise humanist societies, like in Europe?
(This essay continues a series that begins here.)
After having made, over the past few months, a case for the validity of a theistic personalism, the past few weeks I’ve been exploring some of the practical advantages of a personal concept of divinity — the idea that God manifests as, relates to us as, and can be related to as an absolute, cosmic “Thou.” Two weeks ago, I looked at the idea that theistic personalism underscores human dignity in unique ways. And last week we started talking about the idea that theistic personalism is uniquely useful for establishing moral coherence.
There’s certainly more that could be said about the ways relating to a personal God offers distinct advantages at the moral and social level.1 In the meantime, it occurred to me that it might be worth exploring one of the most compelling apparent counter-arguments: namely, Europe.
A sprawling diversity of culture, Europe is generally more secular-humanist than the U.S.2 There’s been a significant turning away not only from religious institutions, but the whole idea of spiritual, “supernatural” thinking altogether. Meanwhile, European countries have fairly low crime rates (especially violent crime), and their judicial systems tend to rank among the highest according to rating agencies like the World Justice Project. Western European countries in particular have high rates of literacy and high percentages of citizens with “tertiary degrees.” Western Europe is also evincing some of the most mature behavior in the world, I would argue, when it comes to responding to climate change and to the underlying consumption crisis. And, of course, the Nordic countries famously top those world “happiness” lists year after year.
Likely nothing is more exemplary of the success of European secularism than the “Nordic model,” in fact — the “high trust” social contract of the Scandinavian countries. The Nordics have become increasingly idealized as happy, peaceful, prosperous places, and their success is largely attributed to a humanist Bildung (or character formation) movement, originally a German idea that was earnestly undertaken in Scandinavia in the 19th and 20th centuries, as detailed in Lene Rachel Andersen and Thomas Bjorkman’s book The Nordic Secret.
It certainly seems like secular humanism provides a solid core for the formation of healthy, cohesive, progressive culture — which then lacks, y’know, inquisitions, crusades, fundamentalism, pietist scourges, and so on. And I wouldn’t necessarily argue that it isn’t the case that secular humanism can work over the long term.
But I have to admit, I’m suspicious. Mainly, because I wonder how much you can separate any of this European success from a personalist theism in the first place. Really any of it.
As Lene Andersen and Thomas Bjorkman point out, the Nordic folk-Bildung movement was rooted in the legacy of European humanism, tracing back to the early sixteenth century or so. And these days, when you say “humanism,” you tend to think of something naturalistic or secular: The ideological center is humanity’s goodness, inherent dignity, and potential. Humanism is associated with the effort to create a good world apart from any supernatural premises. It’s associated with the oft-memed atheist argument: “I don’t need the threat of hell to be a good person.”
But this isn’t at all what humanism started out to be, and I think you could make a case that this isn’t what humanism inherently is, either. The early focus on humanity was not intended to restore human dignity by retrieving humans from an imaginary relationship with an imaginary God; it was intended to restore human dignity by retrieving humans from a religious machine that was losing its soul — in order to re-establish humans in healthy relationship with God, as children of God.
The “O.G.” humanists
Take, for example, Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, which he supposedly wrote over a couple of days while traveling with Thomas More in 1509. In the voice of the archetypal goddess, Folly, Erasmus gambols through all the stations of human life, high and low, noting the foolishness in each. The playful and lyrical tone of the essay makes clear how inevitable this folly is, but also how the color of life emerges from it. This color is divine, in its way. Humans are glorious in their imperfection, because all folly is liberated in cosmic love.
And then take his companion piece, the Enchiridion, a more serious manual on human formation published a few years earlier, in 1503. Humans are free to be fallible, but it’s compassionate to try to cultivate ourselves — and to cultivate one another.
All of this is highly human-affirming. But it’s also highly theistic. The momentum upward is toward a perfect Being, and the freedom to fail occurs within the auspices of this perfect Being. We are too foolish to truly save ourselves — and yet, also, we can help ourselves. And the existence of a perfect God above all is what makes this ultimately comic and not tragic.
Or consider Oration on the Dignity of Man, by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of the foundational manifestos of the Renaissance, written a few decades earlier, in 1486. After creating the universe and assigning its beings to all the archetypal stations, from the heavenly to the debased, God creates humanity last, and God realizes that there is no original archetype left to assign to humans.
I think it’s worth taking in some of Pico’s voice here. These are long quotes in old-school language, but I think they’re worth reading for the sake of an overall point:
God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur.
But . . .
Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders.
So, to humans, God says:
"We have given you, Oh Adam; no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision . . . I have placed you at the very center of the world . . . We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer . . ."
This is a beautiful way to frame the human condition, and you can sense the zeitgeist of the coming Renaissance in it. There’s a marked course correction from what was the prevailing spirit. But notice what the course correction is: It’s not from a theistic way of looking at things to a “naturalistic” way of looking at things. It’s away from a life-constricting kind of pietism toward an empowered exploration of the cosmos, orchestrated through divine generosity.
Humanism is a turn away from a spirituality with such an emphasis on the perfect light that everything else turns dark. And it’s a turn away from such an emphasis on divinity that the dignity of human agency gets erased. But it doesn’t depart from theism. It revives it.
For centuries, humanist theories of development remained a celebration of our progress from the bizarre stations we find ourselves in toward the highest light — with an insistence that this progression be a dignified, redeemed process, no matter where it begins — because it all occurs under the auspices of divine love.
Three hundred years after Erasmus and Pico, it’s a Lutheran pastor, N. F. S. Grundtvig, who becomes the prophet of Nordic Bildung. After spending a night questioning his Christian faith and fighting what he deemed to be a literal battle with the devil, Grundtvig is inspired to reinvigorate the faith of the Danes, again re-defining not away from theism, but away from the deadness of the existing church.
As Andersen and Bjorkman tell it, Grundtvig realized:
[I[t is God’s intent that each people should grow its own spirit. There is thus no conflict between the Danes’ Viking heritage with its Norse mythology and Christianity, as long as the church is a church of the people growing from the people and its spirit. Rather than seeing the Bible as the source of Christianity, it is every community around Jesus and the oral traditions developing in them, the flavor and history of each individual people, that to Grundtvig is the source of true Christianity. From the merging of each people’s spirit and the Holy Ghost (or maybe they are in fact the same?) emerges locally meaningful Christianity in the hearts of any people.3
Again, not a revolution away from theism, but a revival. It brings the self-determining powers, and the local, personal sensibilities of the individual forward, but it still situates this pro-human regard in the pursuit of a divine ideal.
This is in 1810. Grundtvig gradually evolves his revival into a spiritually-undergirded human development movement. Within decades, Nordic folk-Bildung is on its way.
You can’t beat the pathos
It should be clear that nothing infuses the human condition with archetypal power like these divinely illumined stories. Nothing nearly this radiant comes from a cosmos based in quarks and protons. Physicalism is alienating not only because it’s devoid of ultimate relationship, but because it’s ultimately devoid of the highest lyricism, too.
Meanwhile, secular Europe continues to mine its theistic past. In that 2017 Pew study mentioned in the footnotes, though only 22% of Europeans attended church, 71% percent identified as “Christian,” suggesting a rise of a “cultural Christianity,” which reminds of the “Christian atheism” that Zizek supposes should be a guiding light for the future. There’s a clear understanding that there’s something inherently valuable in Christianity’s infrastructure, even if there’s something that people also want to get away from.
But maybe we can see a colossal error here, which is the presumption that Christianity can be better understood by today’s secularists than by its theistic founder, known to his followers as “The Anointed.”
To be clear, I’m not talking about Jesus exclusively. I’m talking about this principle of avatarhood in general. Let’s include Buddha, and Krishna appearing to Arjuna, and Shankara, and Ibn Sina, and others. (Though I’m also not saying that Jesus wasn’t the greatest.)
Do note: These folks weren’t theorists. Their definitive, sometimes world-resetting ideology came from revelations occurring at the deepest level of being. At the very least, we must see that world-resetting ideology is not achieved casually. Prophets are engaged in intensive inner, metaphysical work.
At the very least, we can be suspicious of a secularism that is not rooted in deep forms of contemplation. You can’t just read authors. You need someone to read the deep texture of reality.
. . . Which, mostly, secularism doesn’t, and secularists don’t.
And past this, again, I think you can’t escape the power of those cosmic archetypes, like a personal divine. A personal divine is more resonant. It’s more idealistic. And at its best it’s also more habitable. In this model, we are called to the heights and, also, we can’t help but to be children relative to those heights. It’s luminous, challenging, liberating, and nurturing all at the same time.
Meanwhile, it’s not clear how resilient secular humanism proves to be in the face of the meaning crisis. Europeans struggle with loneliness, and the problem is accelerating especially rapidly among the youth.4 Also, there’s reason to suspect that ostensible measures of satisfaction may be masking a deeper void of real purpose.5 And negative correlations with religious participation, at least, have been observed. When people leave the churches, they don’t meet anywhere else quite as effectively. And efforts like Alain de Botton’s School of Life, which set out to be a sort of church for atheists, don’t seem to cohere in quite the same way.
Why is that? Is it because life is just getting harder, independent of the ideological basis of society? (Blame it all on the phones, maybe?) Or is it more that these secular efforts are actually synthetic, lacking a true cohesive core?
Is secular humanism a grown-up approach to reality, ready to discard the childish rind of myth from which it emerged? Or is secular humanism “living off the interest” of something that it can neither generate itself, nor sustain?
Explorers carried away
This isn’t meant to be a polemic against secular humanism. Let a diversity of views air and interact. But maybe, at its core, humanism is still seeking what it has always been seeking — which isn’t simply liberation from theism because theism is freighted with bad religion? Maybe it’s seeking liberation from the bad religion, yes, but toward a life-giving, personally transformative, and community-fortified perception of an archetypal, and theistic reality?
It’s like the humanists stepped out of the religious container all those centuries ago — rightly, because the container was getting too stuffy — and then along the way the whole effort was hit by the bus of scientism. The church was beating people up, so humanists looked down at humanity, and when they looked up they found physicists scrubbing divinity from the sky. (Then, before they knew it, they were all entrenched in universities, where secular humanism appeared to be the only “permissible” choice.)
Meanwhile, I think you simply can’t deny the pathos of a relational cosmology within a personal Absolute. I think you can’t help but wonder whether anything so life-giving can come from any other narrative.
And if so, then there’s just one last little step to take. If this narrative of a relational personal Absolute is so pathos-filled and life-giving, then there just remains to entertain that it’s powerful for a very simple reason:
It’s powerful because it orbits something deeply, absolutely real.
Ultimately, I think it’s worth exploring that the concept of “shalom,” for instance, really most plausibly exists if there is a Being that perfectly understands it.
There’s a saying that in Europe, a hundred miles is a long way (and in America a hundred years is a long time). Europe is a culturally complicated place that’s hard to speak of in general terms. But as a very basic thumbnail, in a complex 2017 Pew Research study on Christianity in Western Europe it was found, for instance, that while in the U.S., 48% of adults identified as religious and spiritual, and 27% identified as spiritual but not religious, only 24% and 11% of Europeans, respectively, said the same. Only 22% of Europeans said they attended religious services regularly.
The Nordic Secret, p. 238
Although Americans generally report higher rates of loneliness in middle age than their European counterparts (a key factor of well-being and social cohesion), the general phenomenon of loneliness is increasing in Europe — and especially among the youth, with one 2024 study finding 57% of Europeans between 18 to 35 feeling seriously lonely.
There’s the interesting work of Felicia Huppert, based on data from the multi-round European Social Survey (ESS). Huppert finds that there’s a difference between “life satisfaction,” and true sense of flourishing, meaning or purpose. While Western European cultures score highly in measures of the former, a more nuanced study of the latter — flourishing, meaning, or purpose — reveals comparatively small numbers of people scoring highly (8 to 10 on a ten-point scale): 41% of people in Denmark, for instance (and as low as 10% in a more fraught society like Russia’s).