JamesThere is a widely held belief that, in recent decades, society has taken a secular turn away from God. This explains the drop in church attendance and the rise of the so-called “nones”- millennials no longer identifying with organized religion. It’s certainly true that many Americans and others in the Western world are tuning out the traditional message of Christianity, especially when it comes to the arena of natural law ethics. But is it accurate to identify this as a massive swing to secularism and cold atheism? Many still consider themselves “spiritual” if not religious. Is it even possible to be truly “secular”?
Cardinal John Henry Newman addresses this very point in one of his Plain Sermons. He organizes Western man into two categories: one follows the inherited divinely revealed teaching of the Church, passed down through the centuries for two-thousand years. The other category rejects that teaching in favor of…what precisely? A sterile, materialist atheism? Maybe not. Newman’s answer shines a light on a phenomenon taking place today, more than one-hundred years after he preached this sermon. As always, it’s best to go directly to his own words.
First there are the faithful Catholics who simply accept what has been passed down to them: Sacred Scriptures and the immutable Tradition of the Church.
When then, a man, thus formed and fortified within, with these living principles in his heart, with this firm hold and sight of things invisible, with likings, opinions, views, aims, moulded upon God’s revealed law, looks abroad into the world, he does not come to the world for a revelation–he has one already. He does not take his religion from the world, nor does he set an overvalue upon the tokens and presages which he sees there.
Makes sense. But what about the other category? Rejecting the Divinely revealed teaching of the Church in favor of relativism and individualism, where do these people go? Newman tells us:
But far different is the case when a man is not thus enlightened and informed by revealed truth. Then he is but a prey, he becomes the slave, of the occurrences and events, the sights and sounds, the omens and prodigies, which meet him in the world, natural and moral. His religion is a bondage to things perishable, an idolatry of the creature, and is, in the worst sense of the word superstition. Hence it is a common remark that irreligious men are most open to superstition. For they have a misgiving that there is something great and Divine somewhere: and since they have it not within them, they have no difficulty believing that it is anywhere else. . . Scripture is the key by which we are given to interpret the world; but they who have it not, roam amid the shadows of the world, and interpret things at random.
The point is that the vacuum left in the soul of someone who has rejected Christ and the teaching of the Church He founded will inevitably lead him to attempt to fill it with a pseudo religion or cult, which can manifest itself in many different ways. There will always be a religion of some sort for man, even if it falls under the name of “atheism.” But even atheism is not a particularly popular religion these days. Far more likely is that you will run into the growing number of “nones,” the “I’m spiritual but not religious” sort. Where do they go for their doctrine and rituals? Newman tells us: “the occurrences and events, the sights and sounds, the omens and prodigies, which meet him in the world, natural and moral.” Whether it’s through political activism in pursuit of the secular Marxist utopia, the widely popular cult of bodily perfection, or old-fashioned superstition and the occult, man will always find a religion for himself.
In his book, The Recovery of the Sacred, noted historian James Hitchcock adds to Newman’s point by analyzing the consequences of the secularization of the sacred liturgy over the past fifty years. Buying into what Hitchcock calls the “fallacy of explicitness” the liturgical reformers of the late ’60s sought to strip away many ancient rituals and rites within the liturgy; elements, they assumed, were inconvenient, obsolete obstacles to modern eyes and ears. In order to make the liturgical experience more “intelligible” and “relevant” Latin was universally abandoned, the liturgical prayers were woefully simplified, the priest began facing the people, adding to a sense of dialogue and familiarity with the people. As a result, a deeply rooted sense of the sacred, mystical and transcendent at liturgy was lost among the faithful. Hitchcock’s point is that the people cherished these rituals and expressions of reverence. They were fundamental expressions of man’s need and longing for the transcendent and mystical. Abruptly doing away with them in the name of relevance has had disastrous consequences. People left the informal and sterilized liturgies and simply began to look elsewhere for encounters with the transcendent and mysterious. It is no surprise that many Westerners began turning to other forms of spiritualism, whether the occult, or religions of the far east.
Newman’s point is that the inner pull for something greater than the sensible world cannot be completely erased from man’s heart. Man has an intellectual soul and the spiritual pull of his nature cannot be blotted out. If he decides to reject the Gospel and the Church, he will simply float about, eventually filling the void with a different religion or cult rooted in the fads of the day. Hitchcock’s lesson for Catholics is that we should recognize the inner spiritual pull about which Newman spoke and understand that our own traditional rituals and rites are tried and tested forms of expression that help us connect with God and the invisible world. We shouldn’t have abandoned them. Now they should be recovered.
(Featured image: Blessed John Henry Newman, by Sir John Everett Millais)