OPINION:'Secularisation' does not adequately describe what is and has been happening to society, writes John Waters
FOR A while, we will go on grieving the Celtic Tiger. Only when it has sunk in that our adventure with prosperity has ended will we be able to enter into some deeper discussions about human life and society.
The tenor of the conversation we tend to have now is not conducive to making the kinds of connections that are necessary. But perhaps while the quality of our hope in materialism continues to decline, we will reach a point where we can begin to talk about the most fundamental kind of hope.
For this to occur, however, it is necessary to find a new language to override the fragmentation of the culture that has been affected without anyone noting the symptoms and characteristics.
Reports of an address by the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, to the World Synod of Bishops in Rome the other day indicated a series of possibilities about where we need to begin.
The archbishop was speaking about possibilities for addressing the effects of what he called the secularised environment of his own diocese. His observations were to a degree technical, intended for the ears of the church leadership, but they received considerable publicity here at home, mainly for what he said about Irish people's knowledge of Christian scripture.
"I speak," said the archbishop, "as bishop of a diocese where in recent years a climate of secularisation has made dramatic and rapid inroads into a culture which, until not very long ago, was marked by a strong presence of belief. The change is particularly notable in poorer areas, especially among the young. It is a secularisation marked not so much by hostility but by indifference, a certain superficiality and vagueness in religious culture. There are still elements of an underlying traditional religious culture, but . . . for many the scriptures are in reality unexplored, almost alien territory."
There is a number of aspects of this paragraph that I find interesting. One is the use of the word secularisation in two slightly differing contexts. The archbishop spoke about secularisation as though it were the cause of a problem of belief and also as a description of that problem. But which is it and, if both, how are these processes connected? The second thing that struck me concerns the idea that the culture the archbishop was speaking of was - until not very long ago - marked by a strong presence of belief. This assumption is generally made, but how true is it? What was the nature of the belief that used to exist before the process, or processes, to which we append the term "secularisation", began to take hold? How strong was this belief? Was it not more to do with passivity and fear than any strong cultural sense of a connection with anything transcendent?
Perhaps formulating clear answers to these questions might enable us to understand precisely why, as the archbishop has observed, we have become indifferent to Christianity.
The third point that struck me concerned our vagueness about scripture. In truth, this vagueness is not new. There was never any popular connection with the Bible in Irish Catholic society, unlike, say, some Protestant cultures on the island. This could easily be made to seem like a problem, if not the main problem. But is it really? The issue the archbishop was touching on was no less than society's capacity to grasp in its culture the meaning of reality. When this question is examined more closely it becomes clear that scripture is the cart rather than the horse.
Secularisation is a word we have come to use rather lazily, as a catch-all for everything to do with what has happened to faith and religion in society. Generally, the word summons up a political process, whereby church and State have become increasingly separated and the wider culture has become less attuned to the language and logic of religion.
But, really, the word "secularisation" is useless in communicating to modern societies what is happening to them. For it is not simply that the religious world is being divided from the material/political one but, also, and far more crucially, that any sense of an absolute awareness of reality is being dismantled in our cultures.
In effect, our societies are being reconstructed to remove any remaining consciousness of an infinite, eternal or absolute dimension. Whether we are aware of it or not, this bears down on each one of us, self-styled believers and unbelievers alike.
You might say that, in a sense, human beings have been given a new ceiling, creating the illusion that they can function within a self-defined, self-created space.
The concept of secularisation does nothing to alert us to the enormity of this change in our culture, merely signifying a liberation from the shackles of religious authority. To describe what is happening underneath this process, we need another word. The one I tentatively offer is "de-absolutisation", which describes an existential process as much as a political one.
Once the recession is up and running, maybe this is what we need to start talking about.