We may all be secularists now, but what kind? Today's debates over the public role of "faith-based" organizations and other church-state issues show that one idea of what it means to be a secular society is giving way to another.
Whenever one sets out in search of the simple and obvious in American history, one soon comes face to face with a crowd of paradoxes. And none is greater than this: that the vanguard nation of technological and social innovation is also the developed world's principal bastion of religious faith and practice. The United States has managed to sustain remarkably high levels of traditional religious belief and affiliation, even as it careens merrily down the whitewater rapids of modernity.
This was not supposed to happen. Sociologists from Max Weber to Peter Berger were convinced that secularization was one facet of the powerful monolith called "modernization," and trusted that secularization would come along bundled with a comprehensive package of modernizing forces: urbanization, rationalization, professionalization, functional differentiation, bureaucratization, and so on. If by "secularism" we mean a perspective that dismisses the possibility of a transcendent realm of being, or treats the existence (or nonexistence) of such a realm as an irrelevancy, then we should have expected religious beliefs and practices to wither away by now. To be sure, one can grant that the taboos and superstitions of the great religions transmitted a useful kernel of moral teaching. But their supernaturalism and irrationality have to be regarded, in this view, as vestiges of humanity's childhood. Our growing mastery of our material existence enables us to understand and manipulate this world on our own terms, through the exercise of instrumental rationality. Secularity in all its fullness should have arrived as naturally as adulthood.