Anglican theologian John Milbank opens his well-known book Theology and Social Theory by claiming, “Once, there was no secular.” What he means is that the idea of a “secular” space, an area of human existence from which God can be safely bracketed out, is one that “had to be instituted or imagined, both in theory and in practice.” This secular domain was not a reality that ancient and medieval men were unaware of because of superstition and ignorance, as they were, for example, ignorant of the existence of microbes. Rather, it was not a thing at all. Milbank argues throughout his book that this idea of the secular—which is not only essential to the project of modernity but is the project itself—is the fruit of a Christian heresy, of a misconstrued reading of the dominion God granted man in the beginning, a dominion which came to be seen as the granting of an autonomous space for man’s action.
The modern project itself is a “secularization.” The founders of modernity were all seeking to create an allegedly neutral space for politics, economics, morality, art, and technology—one that did not have to answer questions of ultimate meaning. That is why they sought to confine religious faith to the private sphere. The faith was no longer the truth about the world but, at best, a personal opinion. This is not to say that they denied God exists (though some did), nor that they thought God was irrelevant to the individual believer in his private life and so indirectly involved in the public realm. They argued it was best to leave God out of common life for the sake of peace, though this, as William T. Cavanaugh has shown, is simply a myth masking the violent nature of the modern State. To believe this project was a success requires turning a blind eye to the endless revolutions that swept the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (by which this project was imposed upon an unwilling populace), the two world wars that decimated the twentieth, and all the conflicts already plaguing the twenty-first. If secularization has brought anything, it has been the deadliest conflicts in human history.
The failure of the modern project runs much deeper than its glaring failure at bringing peace. Defenders of this project can always argue that the violence it has unleashed is due to those reactionary and ignorant masses that refuse to let go of their outdated notions of religious truth. But my point is that the project would have failed even had it attained some semblance of peace. The root cause of its failure is the unreality of what it seeks. There is no aspect of human existence that can be isolated from God. If God is who Christians believe him to be, subsisting Being itself, the very ground of existence, then nothing whatsoever can exist apart from him. To exist is to participate in God’s Being, which means to be created. To be a creature is, by definition, to be dependent upon a creator, and to be dependent is, by logical necessity, to be in a relationship with said creator. We can think of things apart from their dependence on God but only as abstractions.
Catholicism is acceptable to modernity if and only if it ceases to be Catholicism.
The modern project tried to build a world based on these abstractions, so it is no surprise that it has failed. It was trying to go against reality. But where it has actually succeeded has been in convincing us to believe in its myth. Even many of us Catholics live and work in the world as if God were only relevant for an hour on Sunday mornings. We might say our prayers before meals, cross ourselves as we drive by a church, hang a rosary from our rear-view mirror, openly identify as Catholics, but once we go out into the world, we make our business, economic, and political decisions as if God did not exist. We live as practical atheists. What does God have to do with how we treat our workers, or how much we pay for goods and services? These decisions are governed by market forces, independent of God, or so we are told. What does God have to do with politics? Do we not live in a country with a clear separation between Church and State? And so, the modern Catholic goes about his life schizophrenically: acknowledging God’s sovereignty on Sunday mornings but bowing to the sovereignty of the State or the market or whatever other worldly power the remainder of the week. The Catholic, thus, lives as if the secular were a real thing and in doing so unwittingly contributes to the perpetuation of its myth.
The human mind strives for consistency, even if arriving at it takes generations. If Christians live as if God did not exist, they will soon begin to believe it—and if not them, their children or their children’s children. If God is irrelevant to politics, why shouldn’t he also be irrelevant to economics? Why not to education? To art? The secular encroaches upon every aspect of human existence until the inevitable conclusion is reached: If God is irrelevant to all these aspects of human existence, why should he be relevant at all? And if so, why should we believe in him? Even when we acknowledge him out of some lingering piety by, say, accepting that he set all things in motion, we place him at a safe distance from our quotidian affairs. We arrive at the clockmaker god of the Deists. All religions and beliefs are tolerated as long as they burn incense at the altar of this distant god. Catholicism is acceptable to modernity if and only if it ceases to be Catholicism.
The Second Vatican Council was convened to address the very world that had, more and more, deemed God irrelevant. The council fathers realized that because of the very character of the modern age, the Church needed to reflect more deeply on the role and purpose of the laity. If the great heresy of modernity is that it has relegated God to the fringes of human existence, that it has come to think of the world as divorced from him, then those best suited to testify to the reality that God is the very ground of all existence are those who live and work in the world. As Lumen Gentium (LG) states:
But the laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven.
Lay men and women are not second-class members of the Church; they are the Church: “The laity are gathered together in the People of God and make up the Body of Christ under one head. Whoever they are[,] they are called upon, as living members, to expend all their energy for the growth of the Church and its continuous sanctification, since this very energy is a gift of the Creator and a blessing of the Redeemer” (LG, 33). The mission of the Church is the mission of the laity. The failures of the laity are the failures of the Church. If the modern world has come to see itself as separated from God, it is because the laity has failed to live up to its vocation. Instead of renewing the entire temporal order according to Christian principles, the laity has bought into the lie that the temporal order is somehow alien to God, living in such a way that the only thing that distinguishes them from their non-Catholic neighbors is where they spend their Sunday mornings.
The vocation of the laity is far more radical than being “kind” neighbors, “model” employees, or “good” citizens—something even non-Catholics can be. Vatican II puts it thus:
Christ’s redemptive work, while essentially concerned with the salvation of men, includes also the renewal of the whole temporal order. Hence the mission of the Church is not only to bring the message and grace of Christ to men but also to penetrate and perfect the temporal order with the spirit of the Gospel. In fulfilling this mission of the Church, the Christian laity exercise their apostolate both in the Church and in the world, in both the spiritual and the temporal orders. These orders, although distinct, are so connected in the singular plan of God that he himself intends to raise up the whole world again in Christ and to make it a new creation, initially on earth and completely on the last day.
God is not satisfied with simply sustaining us—and the entire universe—in being. He desires to live with us: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). If creation is proof that there is no secular, the Incarnation further confirms it. No one can more fittingly utter the Latin playwright Terence’s famous phrase than Christ: “I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.” Christ’s redemptive action is not restricted to saving souls for the afterlife. He came to save the world, to renew all of the cosmos. The whole of the temporal order, meaning the entirety of daily life, everyday work, familial and social relations, the totality of human activity and endeavors—even our leisurely and recreational activities—all fall within the scope of the salvation brought by Christ. And if that is so, then they are the laity’s mission. The lay Christian cannot simply be a good neighbor; he is called to transform the very nature of neighborly relations in light of the Gospel. The lay Christian cannot simply be a model employee or an exemplary boss; he is sent to transform labor relations infusing them with Christian charity. The lay Christian cannot simply be a good citizen; he has been given the task of transfiguring the entire polity so it might become increasingly like the heavenly Jerusalem. In living this way, the laity is doing the sanctifying work of the Church.
Man was created in the image and likeness of God. To alienate God from human existence is to deform man himself. Secular man looks at himself in a distorted mirror; what he sees there, having removed God, is something less than man. The Catholic tradition has always maintained that the state of existence separated from God is what we call hell. To try to build a world apart from God is to build a hellish world, one where the dignity of man is trampled on continuously. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century attest to this. But even the disfigured face of secular man has been taken up by God: “See, my servant shall prosper, he shall be raised high and greatly exalted. Even as many were amazed at him—so marred was his look beyond that of man, and his appearance beyond that of mortals—so shall he startle many nations, because of him kings shall stand speechless; for those who have not been told shall see, those who have not heard shall ponder it” (Isa. 52:13–15). He who harrowed hell also promised that its gates would not prevail against his Church. That means the laity can confidently set out to storm the gates of hell itself.