Seculosity: Everyone is Religious

Anglican minister and author David Zahl argues in his book Seculosity that, in the secular age everyone still worships something. 

He says that if we no longer look to God for our identity, our righteousness, and our salvation, we go looking for those things somewhere else. “Seculosity” is the name he gives for that search: looking for self justification, for the feeling that we are enough, worthy, or acceptable, in worldly achievement rather than in God's grace.

Seculosity, therefore, is structurally religious. Christian theology has doctrines of sin, judgment, salvation, and righteousness. Zahl argues that seculosity has parallel concepts: failure, social or internal judgment, success, and self-worth.

Out of that structure comes a kind of substitute gospel, one that promises: if I can only achieve enough, be admired enough, healthy enough, productive enough, or morally good enough, then I will finally be okay. He calls this phenomenon, “enoughness.” Of course, the trouble is that the moment of finally being enough never arrives. There is always another achievement to chase, another judgment to survive, another version of success just out of reach.

Achievement tells us we are what we accomplish. Parenting tells us we are good people if our children succeed. Relationships tell us we are loveable if someone loves us. Politics tells us the world will be saved if our side wins. Morality tells us we are righteous because we hold the correct views. Technology and productivity tell us we are valuable if we maximise our potential. Health and fitness tell us we are secure if we optimise our body. None of these pursuits are necessarily bad. Raising good kids, being productive, caring for your health, none of it is the problem. The problem arrives when any of these good things becomes the source of our identity and our justification, the place we go to answer the question of whether we are enough.

The Reformers spent their energy on one question: how can I be justified before God? Modern people, Zahl argues, are still asking a version of that question. They have just changed the addressee. How can I justify myself? The object of the search has changed. The anxiety driving it has not.

Here Zahl connects in with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor who argues that western modernity has changed the conditions of belief. It is now possible, in a way it once was not, to live without reference to God at all. Zahl's contribution is to insist that this shift has not removed humanity's need for salvation. It has only relocated that need into the fabric of everyday life.

Taylor uses the language of "fullness". He argues that everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, is seeking a vision of life at its richest and best: this is what is meant by “human flourishing.” Zahl asks, what are we trusting to get us there? Taylor describes the immanent frame, the mental and cultural space in which transcendence becomes optional rather than assumed. Zahl describes what tends to happen inside that frame. People treat ordinary goods (career, family, politics, wellness) as ultimate goods. This pursuit of goods is religious, complete with its own gospel, judgment, and demand for righteousness.

In Taylor's own vocabulary, seculosity is one of the dominant "takes" available within the immanent frame. It offers fullness without God. And it disappoints every time, because the one thing it cannot offer is unconditional grace. Every seculosity has terms and conditions. Grace, by definition, does not.

Many Christians would say, if asked directly, that we reject the doctrine of salvation by works: we believe in salvation by grace! And yet in the actual texture of daily life, many of us are practising the works-righteousness we reject. We still live as though our worth depends on having a successful job, raising exemplary children, maintaining a flawless reputation, staying constantly productive, or becoming the "ideal" Christian. Our doctrine may be grace but our actions reveal performance.

Against all of that, the gospel offers a genuinely different foundation. You are already justified in Christ. You do not have to earn the verdict God has already spoken over you. That is not a technicality of doctrine. It is the thing that actually sets a person free from the exhausting work of self-justification.

Our discipleship in a secular age challenge, therefore, is not simply that we have stopped believing in God, it is that we have found other gods as a substitute, gods that promise fullness and can never quite deliver. The good news is that there is still a word on offer that those other gods cannot speak: you are already enough, because Christ has already done what needed to be done.