Secularism And Meaninglessness

 Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

When a culture separates human existence from God it ultimately separates human existence from meaning. Today’s wide-spread existential angst is the natural byproduct of the ascendant secularism of the past half-century.

Meaninglessness is a peculiarly Western affliction. Cultures that hold to religious meta-narratives, even non-theistic ones, generally do not produce huge numbers of people who can relate to something like Munch’s painting, “The Scream”. To relate to that that you have to grow up in the part of the world that has embraced the idea that God either is, or may be, dead.

To say the West is reaping the whirlwind from our newfound and widespread Agnostic/Atheistic tendencies is a sort of cosmic understatement. The fruit of unbelief is flowering in all sorts of ways in Europe and North America today. Some of these “flowers” are obvious like school-shootings, sky rocketing suicide rates, and human beings being aborted by the millions each year. Others are less quantifiable, such as our alienating loss of a sense of community. But whether culturally-promoted unbelief produces bloody statistics or a just vague feeling of general malaise, the touchstone for all is the removal of transcendent meaning in life, a meaning that can only be found in humankind’s relation to its Creator.

Many people, some Evangelicals among them, decry the idea of “civil religion”, a particular society’s generalized, and often theologically fuzzy, corporate ethical system. Until fairly recently the civil religion of the West, particularly of America, was firmly based on the Judeo-Christian worldview, a worldview put forth perhaps most succinctly in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It was the influence of these cornerstones of Judaism and Christianity that led, for instance, to the assumption of the “inalienable rights” of man that we see in the U.S. Constitution.

While it is true that this corporate ethic did not often lead to widespread Christian conversion in the biblical sense of the term it did enforce on Western society a generalized respect for God, His place in the Universe and our accountability to Him as creatures made in His image. In short it promoted the idea of ultimate meaning, a meaning that encompassed, justified and, to some degree, explained human existence. Beyond that it encouraged the ongoing development of human community based on values derived from this ultimate meaning.

I submit that this Judeo-Christian-inspired civic religion, while in no way perfect, served the Western world well for centuries and that we, as a culture, are profoundly the less for its passing.

This religion has been replaced by another religion, though one that hates to go by that name because it associates the term “religion” with the God it consciously seeks to reject. Secularism, if it deifies anything, deifies human egocentrism. “human beings are the measure of all things” is its motto and, as such, it at least officially claims to put human beings” welfare at its center. The problem is that our real welfare is utterly untenable apart from our relationship with God. Take away the value conferred on human beings by their Creator and you ultimately take away all value whatsoever. The result is the meaninglessness onto death that Western culture is seemingly fatally wedded to today.

It is in my view no presumption to place the blame for modern angst on the advent of this new “anti-religion religion”. The idea of God may inspire fear in the human heart but it cannot inspire meaninglessness. The Secularist can trumpet his philosophy’s supposed liberation from unnecessary fear of moral accountability to a transcendent Being all he wants, but with this “liberation” from fear comes a “liberation” from life-sustaining meaning. This is as true as night following day.

And make no mistake about it; unless something changes night is coming upon the Western world.