Rowan Williams on Secularism (joined midstream)

Is there an historical, intra-worldly perspective that exhausts what can be said about our transactions and perceptions and self-perceptions? Is there a 'seeing' of the world from some vantage point within it that leaves no room for any seeing from elsewhere? If so, on the basis of the discussion so far, that would be a condition without the possibility of art, an ultimate secularity of the imagination.

And if this is correct, secularism fails by bidding for an ultimately exclusive, even anti-humanist closure; it looks to a situation in which we are not able to see the world and each other as always and already 'seen,' in the sense that we acknowledge our particular perspective to be shadowed by others that are inaccessible to us. This is a failure because it finally suggests that there is nothing beyond the processes of successful negotiation--or, in plainer terms, no substantive truth but a series of contests about sustainable control and the balances of power. Fundamental criticism--political, moral, credal--is thus rendered impossible. Those religious writers (John Milbank in particular) who have recently pressed the thesis that there is an innate 'violence' in secularism (a striking reversal of the received wisdom of modernity, for which religion is the inherently violent presence in culture) mean not that secularism is an aggressive ideology inviting conflict--it's meant to be precisely not that--but that, in having to criteria other than functional ones, it takes for granted contests of power as the basic form of social relation. And because history obstinately refuses to end and art continues to flourish, secularism in the sense that I have been outlining does indeed seem a doomed enterprise, bound to fail in what I have called its 'pure' form.

However, while we might be relatively confident of the moral and imaginative failure in general terms of a programmatic secularity, putting the question about secularism in this way also invites us to think about the varieties of secularist success. The dominance in our culture of managerial standards is too obvious to need much comment; it has changed the face of education at every level, and is the key to understanding why politics has become a mode of marketing. But there is a further and disturbing dimension to this which needs mentioning, and that is the effective secularizing of a great deal of religious discourse. Secularism as I have been defining it--a functional, instrumentalist perspective, suspicious and uncomfortable about inaccessible dimensions--is the hidden mainspring of certain kinds of modern religiousness. When religious commitment is seen first as the acceptance of propositions which determine acceptable behaviour--the kind of religiousness we tend now to call fundamentalist--something has happened to the religious identity. It has ceased to give priority to the sense that God's seeing of the world and the self is very strictly incommensurable with any specific human perspective, and is in danger of evacuating religious language of the pressure to take time to learn its meaning. Wittgenstein's remark that religious language could only be learned in the context of certain kinds of protracted experience, particularly suffering, is a very un-secular insight, since it assumes that to be able to make certain religious affirmations is bound up with how we construct a narrative of difficult or unmanageable times in our lives. There can be no descriptive pre-empting of religious meanings by requiring instant assent to descriptions of reality offered by straightforward revelation. All the major historical faiths, even Islam, which is closest to the propositional model at first sight, assume in their classical forms an interaction between forms of self-imaging and self-interpreting, through prayer and action, and the formal language of belief; that language works not simply to describe an external reality, but to modify over time the way self and world are sensed. To say that fundamentalism represents a secularizing moment is to recognize that there has been a dissociation here between language and time, so that the primary task (function) of religious utterance is to describe authoritatively and to resolve problems. It is not easy to restore to this kind of religious ethos the awareness of subject and object alike 'being seen' which I have suggested as basic to the non-secular vision.

However, the wheel comes full circle. Secularism fails to sustain the imaginative life and so can be said to fail: its failure may (does) produce a fascination with the 'spiritual.' But its very pervasiveness in the first place means that this spiritual dimension is likely to be conceived in consumerist terms--either in the individualized funcionalism of much New Age spirituality or in the corporate problem-solving strategies of neo-conservative religion. Secularism and fundamentalism feed off each other; in reflecting on the first form of the question in my title, the implicit lament for the apparent weakness of the 'modern' project, it wouldn't do us any harm to note that the restriction of religion to the private sphere doesn't necessarily guarantee a moderate and compliant religiosity. The very insistence of the prevailing cultural instrumentalism is just as likely, or more likely, to reinforce elements in religious language and practice that are themselves impatient with inaccessibility, time, and growth. A private inflexible faith confronts the managerial public sphere in a mixture of mutual incomprehension and mutual reflection.