I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future--it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to be a fight that people who undertake it enjoy because it makes them feel as though they stand for something, but it's as pointless as standing for monarchy. You can make all the eloquent arguments you want about this position or that, but it's all hot air unless it has some grounding in the spirit of the times.
We are entering an era in which anything goes--we're already in it. It's an era in which there will be no consensus about anything, and people will believe pretty much whatever they want, whatever suits them. The human mind is ingenious and endlessly inventive. It can come up with the cleverest ways to justify the most absurd ideas. All any argument needs is a splinter of truth, and with it an elaborate fortress of delusion can be built.
And yet there is something in all of us that, despite our proclivity toward delusion, knows the real thing when we find it. And we are more likely than not to find the real thing in those elements in our culture that, even if a little tattered and worse for wear, have withstood the test of time.
That's where we find the ballast that keeps things on an even keel, and one such invaluable source of ballast is the world's great religious traditions, east and west. It doesn't matter what the officials of these traditions say or how they try to control things, because they cannot control the uncontrollable. Everything we need is available to us or is implied in these traditions; the question only remains whether we have the will to undertake the quest to find there what will do us any good.
The definition of authority is changing. Too great a proportion of the world's population is now and will continue to be too well informed, to have too easy access to too much information. People will not consent be told what to believe, but they will hearken to those who have found a way to live deeply, authentically from that which has been retrieved from that which sleeps in the tradition. The new authorities will be those who live something that demonstrates that a robust alternative exists that is plausible to the mind, resonant with conscience, and refreshing to the soul.
There will always be the people who want things in black and white, and while they can cause a lot of trouble, they are not the future. Even if their influence is strong for awhile, it will be short-lived. They are not the ones who are searching out a way forward. The future lies with others who can no longer be satisfied by the rationalist/materialist straitjacket of the cultural left or the dead, abstract fundamentalism/dogmatism of the cultural right. They will demand something real, something that lives, that's intellectually honest and yet warm and fertile.
The way forward requires that we look back with a second naivete. This avoids the problems associated with Lot's Wife Syndrome, because it is not motivated by a desire to retreat. Rather it is motivated, as was our father Abraham, by a longing to move forward into an unknowable future yet trusting in a promise whose fulfillment lies in the far distant future. We must travel lightly, but not without bringing along essential gifts that were bequeathed to us from the ancestors.
We cannot live as the ancestors lived, but the rationalist prejudices of the moderns caused much that our premodern ancestors valued to be discredited and lost. Our job now is to retrieve the lost gifts, and to adapt it to our life now lived in circumstances unimaginable to the premoderns. And the place to start is in a reverent recovery of much of that which modernity has rejected in the great religious traditions, all of which have premodern origins.
We no longer can maintain a "first naivete", which is the state of the believer before critical consciousness. We must search out what has been forgotten or lost with a second naivete, which is the attitude toward the suprarational that is childlike in its receptivity, but, because we must travel lightly, shrewd in its judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous.
Secularism and the materialism that is associated with it is on its last legs, but they will continue to have their partisans. Secularism/materialism was for a short time the spirit of the age, and it excited those who were among the age's most influential thinkers from the French philosophes through Marx, Darwin, Freud, and to their followers now on the cultural left. I don't begrudge them their day in the sun; I learned much from them. But their day is done.
[12/16/23: An expanded version of this post can be found here, "A Post Secular Age."]