SECULARISM - THE GREATEST AND MOST NEGLECTED OF FIELDS FOR RESEARCH AND TEACHING
A proposal to establish secularism as a new subject area for research and teaching
By Felix Posen*
Free Judaism 22: Spring, 2001
Secularization Has Shaped Human Culture Secularism as worldview and secularization as process have been more than a central factor in the making of modern society and culture, they have been the decisive influence. And this is surely enough to justify secularism and secularization as an independent field of research and teaching.
Secularism, an active element in human culture since the dawn of history, in recent centuries has been essential to and totally inextricable from the modernization of civilization and society. Most of the human agents of modernization, viewing the world through a piercing critical rationalism, scrutinized, analyzed and mercilessly attacked dogmas of faith, religious beliefs and the scientific ‘facts’ organized religion had sanctified. For this they were counted as rebels, unbelievers, and doubters of infuriating obduracy . In retrospect, we can see that their disputes and confrontations with religious authorities, kings and statesmen provoked the far-reaching changes which have made modernity what it is. When they turned their critical intellect on organized religion — its traditional faith in a supreme God, its established ‘scientific’ conventions (such as the earth’s centrality to the universe) — they were labeled godless seculars and atheists.
Secularization’s Decisive Influence on Our Time Though the progress of secularization has been slowed down over certain periods of time it has never halted, and in other eras has been the strongest force propelling cultural and intellectual life. Since the 17th century C.E. and the beginning of the European Enlightenment its advance has been rapid. After revolutionizing society and culture in Western Europe, it swept into Eastern Europe, where its principal vehicle was secular Communism, and from there on into large parts of Asia. Asia had known a form of atheism or secularism as early as the Buddhism of the first millennium B.C.E. Now, in the 20th century of the modern era, China, Japan, Israel and other countries embraced the new ideas. Today, even sections of Moslem society are opening up to secular thinking.
Such a major world shift in the history of culture and ideas deserves to be thoroughly researched and taught by the academic world. We need to better understand the spontaneous forces represented by the individuals and groups which have fought for secular ideas. We need the personnel and resources embodied in an autonomous research discipline and specialized research centers to investigate the process and effects of secularization and modernization in different branches of human activity — historiography, the exact sciences, philosophy, the study of religions, sociology, and so on.
An Instructive Example - the Secularization of Jewry
The story of Jewry’s secularization in the modern period is not only characteristic of the secularization of religion-dominated societies but so full of event, variation and nuance that it merits center stage in any discussion or investigation of the secularization process. Each religious denomination and ethno-geographic community in Jewry experienced the process differently, and differently from their non-Jewish host society too. To the events and trends swirling around them they were obliged to respond in some way. The thinking and writings of many individual Jews even contributed to the movement’s development, as Jewish scholars had been doing since antiquity.
As for modern Jewry and Judaism, secularization has created perhaps the deepest rift of all the rifts and fault-lines fragmenting Jewish society. Shaking off organized religion has generated new ideologies (Zionism, for one), new institutions and new socio-politico-cultural movements. In recent years the new understanding of the evolution and character of Jewry, known as Judaism-as-Culture, is yet another offshoot of this fundamental shift in thinking.
The Need for a New Research Discipline
Secularization and secularism offer academic researchers a new challenge and not a small one by any means. Meeting the challenge will, of the nature of the subject, have to be multidisciplinary. To reach a full appreciation and understanding of the achievements and conflicts which modernization and secularization have brought about and all the forms they have assumed, will require the concepts, methods and skills of the humanities, philosophy and the social sciences, as well as of Jewish Studies. The immediate task is to set about planning university research and teaching centers, equipped to offer graduates the opportunity to integrate their previous specialist studies within this new framework of the investigation of the sources and processes of secularization and modernization.
*Mr. Felix Posen’s donations support a range of projects in the field of Judaism-as-Culture teaching.
.jpg){kind=small}
