Has secularism dead-ended?

Evangelical Christian success at installing a demented human as President of the United States did not happen overnight. A point of emergence (among others) was the proliferation of Born Again cohorts in the American heartlands in the 1960s-70s.

“Born Again” at the outset, and as a stubbornly stable definition, uses the metaphor of rebirth and adult baptism to assert a return to the font of the Christ, Jesus, as entrée into and guarantee of personal salvation.

Built on this metaphor is a determined, even militant tweaking of Protestant Christianity towards a fundamentalist theology. And while not all Born Again Christians are fundamentalists, the tendency is robust within their broad community.

The self-ascribed Born Again Christians of the mid-20^th Century pivoted backwards to a late 19^th Century hardening around literal readings of a Bible regarded as both infallible and inerrant. This hardening is a reaction (indeed reactionary) response to modern challenges to the Bible, such as the recognition of Darwinian evolution and Spencerian social evolution.

As the 20^th Century moved on, feminism, the civil rights movement, gender equality advocacies, and the international accord on universal human rights, emerged and were seen by these groups as existentially threatening to fundamentalists of Christianity, and indeed Islam and Judaism. The yearning to return to the comforts of a paternalistic order, racialized hierarchy, and dogma intensified.

RETROGRESSIONS
With this theological hardening — hardening even further by the beginning of the 21^st Century — the cross-over to political power mongering was imperceptible: cultural change is much more difficult to detect than political developments. Church-oriented groups morphing into a mega political action group happened outside the visual field of elite political commentators.

With Donald Trump’s switch to, and quick take-over of, the Republican Party (with his consolidating call sign Make America Great Again, a.k.a. MAGA) the transition quickened, from obscure faith-defender coteries to brazen political front.

And the Constitutional principle of a secular state receded from the American mainstream commons.

Secularism, a reinforcing scaffold of democracy, was slandered as embedded in “wokeness.”

This thumbnail history of usurpation of democracy from inside democracy has attracted this column’s attention several times in the past year. Today this column returns to the 19^th Century in the US (viewed from the Philippines, a nation that has not yet left the 19^th Century, although this is a topic for the future), to focus on another angle to the same massive development in the Western world.

It is to ask the question which cannot yet be answered adequately for now: is this a permanent retrogression? Does democracy have a prayer of survival?

Given that the US is the biggest economy in the world — despite its current runaway degradation as a political, economic, and cultural powerhouse — all humans will one way or another be impacted by a US turn away from democracy and the secular.

To be sure, democracy (in any of its many forms) is a well of contradictions. Most constitutions of modern states declare secular values, particularly in inscribing the ideal of the separation of church and state. But the same documents explicitly state a relation to God, particularly to uphold the utopian aspirations of these declarations of sovereignty.

GRAFTS
There is a space at the heart of founding documents of democracies that is filled with a longing for religion. Notwithstanding modern culture’s reliance on the primacy of science and law in the conduct of human affairs and to guarantee the integrity of national communities, democracy’s citizens have found ways — many of which are bizarre — to graft religion to the experience of the nation state.

In the Philippines, the ascendance of the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) and the sustained power of the Roman Catholic Church through the 20^th Century and into the 21^st Century has obliged politicians to curry favor with the leadership of these churches. As a matter of course. Realpolitik operates on the understanding that the INC can make or break a political party in elections.

In India, acknowledged globally as the world’s largest democracy, dominant lineages of thought conflate Hinduism with nationalism; and indeed, with national unity and stability. The Hindu fundamentalist Bharathiya Janatha Party (BJP) has ruled India since 2014.

Concerning both India and the Philippines, secular analysts regard the power of institutional churches as abominable, and ultimately destructive of democracy.

The same can be said about the US under the current leader. Except that the collapse of democracy in the US, if it comes to pass, may doom the democratic project entirely for humanity.

Unless, that is, the grafts presently being made up produce liberative political models that respond to what is clearly a tenacious human need for spiritual — hence cultural — affirmation, without yielding political power to churches.

It should be clear by now that  if such new models are not devised, the immediate future will see societies where laws do not apply to the divinely ordained, anyone can be disappeared and abused, megalomania at the top of the social hierarchy is condoned, the elite is allowed untrammeled greed and the rest unprotected, and imperialism resurrected.

The institutional religions may mitigate against these evils at certain levels, but the historical record substantiates their impact as the undertow of democracy.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.