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SECULARISM AND SECULARISATION
Sir Anthony Kenny

Introduction
The reformation was a terrible mistake. In saying this I do not deny that the Church of the sixteenth century was deeply in need of reform.

What I mean is that the reformation could have, and should have, been achieved without the splitting of the Christian church into hostile factions.

The division of Christendom was an unnecessary tragedy. The theological issues which separated Luther and Calvin from Catholics had been debated many times in the middle ages without leading to sectarian warfare.

Few twentieth century Catholics and Protestants, if not specially trained in theology, are aware of the real nature of the differences between the contrasting theories of the Eucharist, of grace, and of predestination which in the sixteenth century led to anathemas and bloodshed.

It comes as a surprise to most contemporary Catholics, for instance, to discover that they, no less than old-fashioned Calvinists, are bound to believe that no-one reaches heaven who is not predestined to do so.

On the other hand few Protestants can explain the difference between the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran explanation of the Eucharist in terms of plantation.

Those who are professional theologians in this century have shown that if the doctrinal issues had been handled by the reformation divines with the goodwill and the patient subtlety which characterised the best of their medieval predecessors, there would have been no difficulty in finding formulas of reconciliation.

Questions of authority, of course, are easier to understand, and more difficult to arbitrate and reconcile than questions of doctrine. But in the early sixteenth century it should still have been possible to maintain the unity of a reformed Christendom under a reformed Pope subject to the authority of General Councils of the Church.

The Oxford Franciscan William Ockham in the fourteenth century had proposed such a constitutional Papacy. Such had been the actual practice in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, even St Thomas More, for the greater part of his life, believed such a scheme to be the divine design for the Church.

Of course, the predominant force in the break-up of Europe's religious unity was not theology but the ambition and avarice of Kings and Popes, and the growth of nationalist feeling resentful of international control. None the less, once the division had been made, even nationalism became, for a while, subordinate to sectarian religious passion.

The Wars of Religion

The seventeenth century was the age of wars of religion. Europe worked out the consequences of the religious reformation.

After the religious civil wars in France had been ended by Henri IV, Calvinist turned tolerant Catholic, a Catholic League in the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestant German princes until the Thirty Years war was brought to an end by the Peace of Westphalia which established co-existence in the Empire between the two religions.

After the death of the Catholic Mary Tudor, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the enthronement of King James I from Calvinist Scotland in 1603, there was little chance of England returning to Catholicism, despite the fantasies of the Gunpowder Plotters in 1605. But the English Civil War, which led to the execution of James's son Charles I in 1649, was, in the minds of many participants, a conflict as much between the Church of England and other Protestant sects as between King and Parliament.

After 1650 it could no longer be said that Europe was divided into two hostile military camps; that had already ceased to be true when, in the later stages of the Thirty Years War, the France of Louis XIII, under Cardinal Richelieu, had taken sides with the Protestant King of Sweden against the Austrian Catholic Emperor. But the last of the wars of religion was still to be fought.

Eleven years after the execution of Charles I his son Charles II returned to England from exile in 1660 on a wave of popular reaction against the tyranny and austerity of Cromwellian rule.

As his reign progressed, however, royalty became less popular, especially as the heir to the throne, the King's brother James, was a sturdy Catholic. The Whig party under Shaftesbury sought to exclude James from the succession; Charles moved Parliament to Tory Oxford from Whig London, and you may see, next door to the Bodleian library, the convocation house where Parliament met to vote on the fateful exclusion Bill.

Charles prorogued Parliament before the bill could be passed; had he not done so, the history of Ireland would have been very different.

Catholic James II did succeed but was driven out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and replaced by the Protestant William of Orange. The war which settled the succession was fought out in Ireland and ended with the Battle of the Boyne.

The issue was a purely religious one: it was not a question of whether Ireland should be ruled from England, but whether the sovereign of both countries should be Catholic or Protestant.

Not since 1689, I believe, has there been a battle in Europe which turned so exclusively on religious issues, not even the battles of the Spanish Civil War. The war of 1689 was the last of the wars of religion.

The Beginnings of Secularism

The century of the reformation and the century of the wars of religion were succeeded by two centuries of secularisation.

Though in eighteenth century France only Catholicism was officially tolerated, in the reign of Louis XV, a degree of freedom of thought was permitted through indolence rather than policy, and a group of thinkers, the philosophes of the French enlightenment, created a climate of thought hostile to the status quo in Church and State.

The philosophes saw the power of the Church as an obstacle to the development of such a science, and they saw it as their mission to replace superstition with reason.

Already at the end of the seventeenth century Pierre Bayle had argued in his Dictionnaire historique et critique that in view of the unending conflicts within both natural and revealed theology, moral teaching should be made totally independent of religion.

A belief in immortality was not necessary for morality, and there was no reason why there could not be a virtuous community of atheists.

Voltaire, the best known of the philosophes, though not an atheist, promulgated a deism which left no room for Christian doctrines. Rousseau's The Social Contract was banned because of its denial of the divine right of kings but the regime which banned it was swept away by the French Revolution.

The Revolution could claim to be the offspring not only of Rousseau but also of the enlightenment philosphes whom he opposed. The revolutionaries did their best to destroy the Catholic Church not only because of the political and economic power it had enjoyed in the ancien regime but also because of their belief that it was an obstacle to scientific progress.

In the Cathedral of Notre Dame an actress was enthroned as a goddess of Reason. Ex-priests, retrained as deists, were sent round to country parishes as 'Apostles of Reason'.

Long after the Revolution had blown itself out, Rousseau's influence was still to be felt throughout Europe through the romantic movement.

The excesses of the Revolution led to a traditionalist reaction against secularism. It was short lived. French armies had carried with them the slogans of the French Revolution. The liberal ideals of free democracy lived on as an aspiration throughout Europe.

The Second Wave of Secularism

A second wave of secularism can be traced to Hegel, who introduced the concept of alienation: the state in which people view as exterior to themselves something which is truly an intrinsic element of their own being.

His followers Bauer and Feuerbach saw religion as the supreme form of alienation. Humans, who were the highest form of beings, projected their own life and consciousness into an unreal heaven. 'Religion', said Feuerbach, 'is the separation of man from himself: he sets God over against himself as an opposed being'.

Hegelian critique of religion was given a new lease of life by Marx, who, as is well known, described it as 'the opium of the people'. 'The history of all hitherto existing society' states the Communist Manifesto 'is the history of class struggles'.

Superficially, history may appear to be a record of conflicts between different nations and different religions; but the underlying realities throughout the ages are the forces of material production and the classes which they create.

The legal, political and religious institutions which loom so large in historical narrative are only a super-structure concealing the fundamental levels of history: the forces and powers of production, and the economic relations among the producers.

The philosophy, or 'ideology', which is used to justify the legal, political, and religious institutions of each epoch are merely a smokescreen concealing the vested interests of the ruling classes of the time.

After Marx Nietszche, more shrilly, taught that the concept of God was the greatest obstacle to the fullness of human life: now God is dead and we are free to express our will to live.

In Britain and Ireland neither Hegel nor Marx nor Nietzsche had great influence on public life in the nineteenth century. But here there were two different agents of secularism in operation.

The first was the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Utilitarianism sets up pleasure and pain as the criteria of morality and judges actions by their consequences.

For the utilitarian there is no class of actions which is ruled out in advance as immoral. This conflicts with the belief either in natural law or in a divine decalogue which rules out as sinful certain prohibited actions - such as, in the view of the great majority of nineteenth century Christians, abortion, contraception, and homosexual sex.

Darwin and Freud

The second agent of secularism was Darwin's theory that all the species which populate the world today, including the human race, are the products of evolution by natural selection.

Darwin's theory obviously clashes with a literal acceptance of the Bible's account of the creation of the world in seven days, and the length of time which would be necessary for evolution to take place would be immensely longer than the six thousand years which Christian fundamentalists believed to be the age of the universe.

However, a non-literal interpretation of Genesis had been adopted by theologians as orthodox by St Augustine, and most Christians did not take long to adapt to the idea that the earth may have existed for billions of years.

It is more difficult to reconcile an acceptance of Darwinism with belief in original sin. If the struggle for existence had been going on for aeons before humans evolved, it is impossible to accept that it was man's first disobedience and the fruit of the forbidden tree which brought death into the world.

On the other hand, it is wrong to suggest, as is often done, that Darwin disproved the existence of God. For all Darwin showed, the whole machinery of natural selection may have been part of a Creator's design for the universe.

After all, belief that we are all God's creatures has never been regarded as incompatible with our being the children of our parents; it is equally compatible with our being, on both sides, descended from the ancestors of the apes.

At most, Darwin disposed of one argument for the existence of God: namely, the argument that the adaptation of organisms to their environment shows the existence of a benevolent creator.

In the twentieth century a new intellectual force appeared in favour of secularism: the teaching of Freud. Freud explained the religious conscience as a sublimated residue of parental discipline in childhood; religion was something which a mentally healthy adult would grow out of.

The permissive attitude to sex of many societies in the late twentieth century, which contrasts so vividly with the sexual restraint inculcated by traditional religion, is undoubtedly due not only to the increased availability of efficient contraception, but also to the ideas of Freud.

He was not the first thinker to assign the sexual impulse a place of fundamental importance in the human psyche, but few previous moralists had adopted such a positive attitude towards it. He did not assemble a statistical demonstration of a connection between sexual abstinence and mental illness; nor, in his published writings, did he recommend sexual license.

What he did do was to give widespread currency to the vision of sexual desire as a psychic fluid which seeks an outlet through one channel or another. Seen in the light of that metaphor, sexual abstinence appears as a dangerous damming up of forces which will eventually break through restraining barriers with devastating effect on mental health.

The Economic and Social Basis of Secularisation

Of course, secularisation cannot be explained, any more than the reformation can, purely by citing the intellectual elements which favoured it.

The enlightenment, the romantic movement, Marx, Bentham, Darwin and Freud built up ideologies which were alternative to religion. But the widespread adoption of those ideologies was largely the result of economic and social factors.

In most but not all societies, increased prosperity seems to favour secularism. This phenomenon can be described from a religious point of view, by saying that the availability of consumer goods enmeshes the affluent in worldliness.

From a secular point of view, it can be argued that the removal of deprivation and exploitation in this world removes one of the most potent forces which engage people to look forward to another world.

Another force which works in favour of secularism is increased mobility - the greater ease of travel within and between countries. Religion is easily passed on from generation to generation in a village whose population remains static and cohesive.

Those who travel to cities for work, or who emigrate to other countries, often on arrival give up their faith. The populations of the countries which receive immigration from a variety of cultures find it harder to believe in the exclusive claims of their own faith when members of other faiths are in their midst.

In the twentieth century secularism was imposed by force and persecution on large sections of the human race. But even in countries where there was no official pressure to secularise, voluntary secularisation has proceeded apace.

Of course, it would be wrong to see contemporary history as constant progress to secularism. The end of Marxism in Russia, though driven by the secular ideology of liberal utilitarianism, has seen a spectacular revival of religion symbolized by the grand new Moscow cathedral just being completed to replace the one razed to the ground by Stalin.

In the US pressure is mounting from the religious right to boycott trade with nations persecuting Christians. In Israel and in Muslim countries we have seen the growth of fundamentalism, and the increasing power of parties and factions whose base is religious.

Secularisation in the British Isles

If we concentrate on these islands we see little sign of an end to secularisation. What I want to do for the rest of my time is to consider the effects of secularisation on the relationships between the different states and communities within these islands.

In the eighties analysts used to pick out three intractable problems in different parts of the world: South Africa, Palestine, and Northern Ireland.

The problems of South Africa, now fundamentally addressed, did not involve religion. The issues between Israel and the Palestinians involved race as well as religion, and in so far as they involved religion, it was a question of two different faiths rather than two branches of the same faith.

The Palestine problem was more tragic than the problems of Northern Ireland, but for a while at least it looked as if progress towards its resolution was moving faster than the peace process in Northern Ireland.

A secularist might have concluded that the more religious a conflict was, the more difficult it was to solve.

In recent years another conflict has developed, which has put the problems of Northern Ireland into perspective. Many have quoted Churchill's speech of 1921, describing the changes which had been brought about by the first world war.

The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the groupings of parties all have encountered violent and tremendous change in the deluge of the world. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once more. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that had been unaltered in the cataclysm which had swept the world.

Churchill was comparing the hatreds within Northern Ireland with the peaceful condition of the states of the former Austrian Empire, e.g. Yugoslavia.

In recent years in the region we have seen another ancient quarrel surface in all its hideous integrity. The mosques of Mostar and the onion towers of their Serbian republic take their place beside the dreary steeples of Tyrone and Fermanagh.

Secularisation as Remedy

With the Bosnian tragedy to keep our thoughts in perspective, let us return to the topic of secularisation in these islands. My contention is this: increased secularisation elsewhere has led to the isolation of Northern Ireland from all other peoples of the islands.

In Northern Ireland, the echoes of the last of the wars of religion still reverberate. The conflict in Northern Ireland remains primarily a religious one, despite Marxist attempts to analyse it in class terms.

The form which the troubles have taken has run counter to the economic and social interests of both communities in Northern Ireland. The conflict is between two groups who identify themselves, above all, in terms of their religious allegiance.

In 1985, at the time of the Anglo-Irish agreement, I wrote a book called The Road to Hillsborough. I ended it by setting out reasons why the Union between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom must be maintained.

Since then Peter Brooke, when Secretary of State, gave official sanction to the thesis that the British have no selfish strategic or economic reasons for preserving the Union.

If he is right, there remain the arguments from sentiment and from morality. To this day, Unionists believe in the commonality of sentiment between Ulster and Britain.

In the Financial Times of August 28th 1997, David Trimble is reported as saying that Ulstermen, Catholic or Protestant, have more in common with Scots or Liverpudlians than with Dubliners.

Sadly from the point of view of the Ulster Unionist party, this feeling of common identity has not, for a long time now, been reciprocated in Scotland or in Liverpool.

There was a time when religious affiliation was so important throughout these islands that it was natural for Protestants in Britain and Catholics in the South of Ireland to feel a special affinity for their co-religionists in the North of Ireland. (Catholics in England, anxious since penal days to prove their patriotic credentials, never identified themselves unambiguously with their brethren across the Irish Sea, South or North).

The days of that instinctive religious affinity, it must be said, have now gone, and probably gone for good.

In Britain, the religious links with communities in Northern Ireland have been attenuated by two interrelated factors.

The first is the secularisation which I have described: the Christian religion, of whatever denomination, has become less and less important in the political and cultural life of the people.

The second is ecumenism: as a response to secularism, devout Christians both Catholic and Protestant have come closer together in face of the common enemy.

As a result of ecumenism and secularisation, people on the east of the Irish Sea have found more and more alien a province of the United Kingdom in which cultural and political identity is primarily defined by the historical opposition between two Christian sects.

For many years, the effect of secularisation in Britain was that British people felt themselves out of step with the entire island of Ireland. The North and the Republic, in both of which religion retained the traditional dominance it had lost in Britain, seemed equally distant. Whatever Ulster, Catholic or Protestant, may have believed, Liverpool and London felt that Dublin and Belfast had more in common with each other than they had with them.

It might be a different division of the church which was dominant in the two parts of Ireland, but in each part of the island religion was what mattered first and foremost.

In Northern Ireland, to this day, the major political parties draw their support primarily on a religious basis. Political parties in the Republic are not similarly sectarian; but this, for a long time, was only because the predominance of a particular version of Christianity was written into the constitution. The influence of religion on politics remained central in Ireland, North and South, long after it had ceased in Great Britain.

Conclusion

Since I wrote The Road to Hillsborough, however, a great change has taken place. I then said that many British found the Irish, north or south, equally difficult to understand because of the role which they allowed religion in politics.

Since, roughly, the time when Mary Robinson became President of Ireland, there have been changes which call this generalisation into question. The Republic of Ireland seems on course to follow, for better or worse, the same secularisation of political decision-making as has taken place during the last half-century in Great Britain.

Will Northern Ireland become the only part of these islands in which religious allegiance is the determining factor in social and political institutions? If so, what conclusions should be drawn by those who seek the long-term well-being of the people of the province?

Before leaving you to answer this question, I must confess that after planning this lecture I found reason to question one of its basic assumptions. The death of Princess Diana led to an outpouring of quasi-religious sentiment without parallel in the recent history of this country.

Having read a sample of the spontaneous tributes to her which were laid in front of the royal palaces, describing her, among other things, as 'Queen of Heaven' and 'Saviour of the World', I have begun to wonder whether perhaps, after three centuries of secularisation, the irreligion of the English is after all only skin-deep.

Sir Anthony Kenny is a philosopher and Warden, Rhodes House, Oxford

Studies, 1998.

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