Sacred vs Secular, an Eternal Yin-Yang
Can the lack of boundaries between Sacred and Profane be part of the problem we're facing?
Faith is dying in large chunks of the Western World, according to many. The ranks of the Unchurched are growing, and many think that religion has little to teach us. And yet faith, according to some others1 faith has merely changed its expression, branching out into such things as SoulCycle, Witchcraft, and activist politics. Others think that the shattering of faith is contributing to the fragmenting of identity,2 and that formalizing religious practice can strengthen a person’s identity and sense of purpose and self. 3
But one question that still needs to be asked is what effect is this having on modern culture and discourse? Why do we need to care? Who cares if SoulCycle and witchy curses have replaced church? As long as people are getting their spirituality, their Vitamin S, from somewhere, why does it matter?
So let’s take a look at that.
Now, this post is not THE ANSWER, it’s not necessarily even the beginning of an answer, it’s my attempt to poke at the problem and reach some conclusions. You might feel differently, might reason differently, when you read this. But one of the benefits of this sort of post is that you HAVE thoughts, both of agreement and disagreement, and that your reaction to those thoughts points out things in your own head to consider. With that said, let’s get to poking.
I want to start with a couple of things. One is some concepts from scholars like Mircea Eliade, whose book The Sacred and the Profane I will be using for some definitions and ideas. I will also be looking at another conceptual difference that crops up between more Progressive thinkers, such as transhumanists, who are one of Tara Isabella Burton’s new religions, and conservatives. This is the idea of the perfectibility of human nature. In fact, let’s start there, and move back to the Sacred.
Perfectible Humanity, the Progressive View
One of the big differences that keeps cropping up between more progressive and liberal thinkers and conservatives is that humanity is perfectible. Progressives and liberals often start there. Conservatives, however, start with the idea of original sin, or human nature.4
To sum up the Progressive position, humans are perfectible, and are born good, but are corrupted by the world. Many groups, such as the Soviets, believed that a proper world would create proper people, and so tried to create a Communist society, that pruned out everything that was not Communist. The idea was that people in that society, being raised properly into Communist ideals, would become perfected, become Communist humans. This shows itself in modern times by the trans movement, by much of the critical race theory, gender theory, and queer theory branches of critical theory that have come to take over much of the political discourse in the past decade, as well as universities, large corporations, entertainment, and so on.
In this theory, humans are simply shaped by society into their roles. Thus you are shaped as a man or woman by society’s expectations, and you should be able to switch between those roles at will. If you feel like a woman today, even if you have a male biological makeup, you are a woman. This also applies to animals. For example, according to one gender theorizing pediatrician who prescribes puberty blockers, chickens are assigned their gender simply because we see them lay eggs. The full ramifications of this theory is very well laid out in all its strangeness by Matt Walsh, so I won’t go further into it. 5
This also applies to race and gender relations. Since men and women are equivalent, and you can switch between them at will, there should be no difference in any profession between the genders. If there is, or if there is a difference in race, the problem MUST be that society is set up wrong, because if it were set up right, such differences would vanish. Or at least, so claim many of the theorists in that field such as Robin Di’Angelo, Ibram X. Khendi, etc. If you have trans women beating women in sports, women can’t complain, because trans women are women too. 6
It also applies to sex, which is why lesbian women should be glad to sleep with trans women, because they’re women.7 If you believe that lesbians should only be attracted to women who are biologically female, you are missing the point, which is that men and women are interchangeable, and if you feel like a woman, you are, and that must be respected even in prison.8 This is very similar to Trofim Lysenko’s idea that by changing the environment of seeds - by ‘educating’ them - you could change their nature. From his example, one can see that this set of ideas is not necessarily ‘modern’ in origin, but goes back at least a century to the early Soviet Union, possibly far more.
Conservatives and Human Nature
So what about Conservatives? Conservatives come at this in several ways. Some come at it from the religious concept of human nature or original sin, some come at it from evolutionary and biological concepts. Progressives have especial scorn for the evolutionary and biological types, calling them regressive atavists. (See Footnote 1) Jordan Peterson comes in for especial scorn, as always.
One of the problems with dissecting the ‘Conservative’ view is that there are more and more conservatives these days, many of whom used to be moderate, and even liberal. 9 It can thus be difficult because of their differing views to find a total commonality of ideas here. Some ways of stating it would include…
Humans are shaped by Original Sin, the fruit of our Fall from the Garden of Eden - Religious view.
Humans have behaviors hardwired into them by genetics and evolution, and these behaviors have shaped society for tens of thousands of years, driven by the needs of our survival.
Humans need to be treated equally under the law, and need to be given equal rights and protection, because that’s the only way to have a fair society. Nonetheless, we are all given different talents and skills at birth, by whatever agency, and we are NOT equal in a practical sense. Some have more talent at one thing, some have less. Some are born with duplicate chromosomes like Down’s Syndrome or Cat’s Eye, and they will forever be limited. They still deserve basic human rights and dignity.
What these have in common is the knowledge that humans are fundamentally not perfectible, but come with fallibility, failings, and frailties, which need to be accounted for in society. Ideas along these lines all come at it in different ways, but reach similar conclusions.
A Fundamental Difference
One of the things that struck me when I watched What is a Woman was a fundamental difference between Matt Walsh and many of the people he interviewed. He believed in a fundamental reality, and they did not. Some called the question offensive or got angry at the assumption that there WAS a fundamental reality, such as a biological reality, a reality in which two people were physically present talking to each other, in which gravity, light, and genes exist. That was a concept that they called hateful.
But why would that be? I’m sure one could make a case for gravity being misogynistic and patriarchal, because its effects on female bodies are so pronounced, but that doesn’t mean that you can cancel it. If you write articles denouncing gravity, calling it a construct and a way of knowing that is inherently misogynist, and then stepped off the top of the Empire State Building, you’d still die. Reality, the place of forces and cells and atoms, is still something to contend with, and it will kill us if we ignore it. Activists have tried exactly these tactics with biological sex, genetics, and evolution, and have managed to cancel none of it. It may not be fashionable to talk about in progressive circles, but it has not been undone, reality has not been rewritten.
Two Types of Reality: Sacred and Profane
So what is reality, anyway? People like Jordan Peterson and Mircea Eliade describe reality in two ways. I will discuss them both here.
There is what Peterson called Mythic reality, psychological reality, which comes from his Jungian roots. This is similar to what Eliade describes as the Sacred. It is a separate reality, a place of myth and transcendence. It breaks into human reality as hierophany. The Sacred is a separate mode of being, a place of awe, wonder, and a transcendent reality, which Peterson talks about as mythological. People long to be in this sacred reality, oriented mythologically, doing what you ought to do to be one with the heroes, the ancestors, etc. Living in this sacred reality, in fact, requires that you reify and re-enact the founding of the sacred myths that undergird the space. If you are Christian, for example, you regularly re-enact the sacrifice of the body and blood through communion, re-enacting it more thoroughly through the yearly liturgical cycle at Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, etc. You become one with the body of Christ, you re-enact (at least in my church) the events of his birth and death in a pageant, you cry for his execution as part of the crowd, you read the words of the saints and prophets in a cycle of readings. You may even explore deeper in Bible Study, depending on your individual faith. Other faiths do it differently, but they retell and re-enact their founding myths as well at different times and seasons. The Babylonians even did it using statues of their gods, with the priests saying their lines, during their re-enactments of faith. They would move statues between cities to carry out some of these rites. 10
Then there is the profane. The reality without gods, without the sacred. This is the real world, the non-mythic world, the world of science, of physics and biology, of the non-holy. This is the world that, more and more, modern humanity lives in. The profane is a place of logic, data, and fact, not spirituality. It is a place of technological progress, of medicine, of extended lifespans and material comfort, a wonderful place to live, a place of infinite human progress.
Many modern scientific thinkers such as Richard Dawkins prefer this profane and secular place, and rail against religion as an atavistic thing, although he may be reconsidering lately. Others, such as Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, talk about what we might be losing, and point out that humans have had religion for thousands of years. Weinstein and Heying point out that religion may be evolutionarily adaptive, and should not be discarded lightly.
Possible Consequences of Losing Religion
So what might be some consequences of the decline of organized religion? As Tara Isabella Burton points out (Footnote 1), other versions of less organized religion have spread, and the religious impulse has found its way into social justice, witchcraft, soulcycle, and the like. James Lindsay, in counterpoint, shows that the set of ideas called woke behaves very much like a religion, and points out that it has strong similarities in its core tenets to a number of religions around the globe, including Catholicism, and Calvinist Christians such as Baptists. 11
So this is one consequence, that certain groups start to act religious about their core tenets, such as social justice, The 2nd Amendment and Gun Rights, Black Lives Matter, 12 Donald Trump, trans and LGBTQIA++ rights, Free Speech as an absolute, etc. This is just a sampling, there are certainly others.
Mixing the Profane and the Secular
So what happens when you confuse science and religion? What are the consequences of confusing Sacred Truth with Secular Truth?
Polarization
Take a look at some of the issues happening society lately, and you notice that polarization is growing ever larger by the day. Why? Because one side sees a thing, and the other side sees the opposite, or at least a different view. Furthermore, those two views are irreconcilable.
But what is the difference between the sides? Simply, one group looks at the facts, and one listens to the narrative.
What is the narrative? It is the story that presents the religious re-enactment of the core belief of the group. For example:
January 6th was an insurrection against the government.
Abortion is the killing of innocent children.
Covid-19 killed hundreds of thousands of children.
Trans rights is mutilating the bodies of children.
Teachers who teach LGBTQIA++ are grooming kids for later abuse.13
So what does this do?
Firstly, it causes an irreconcilable difference in viewpoint between the two camps above. Those who have seen the evidence know that the other side believes a lie. They have the facts and the evidence at their side. The other side, on the other hand, knows a TRUTH that facts cannot shake. Presenting facts is the same as presenting heresy to the Pope.
This causes increasing polarization, because now the two sides cannot speak to each other. One looks at evidence and facts, the other at the Sacred story of their movement, which could be BLM, or Trans Rights, or Ukraine, or January 6th, or whatever you have. One side presents secular evidence, the other presents Sacred Truth, and those two sides cannot meet. Those with the evidence can be wrong, while those with the Sacred Truth cannot be, ever, because it invalidates their whole worldview.
Anxiety and Anger
Another consequence of this mix-up between secular facts and religious truth is an increasing anxiety and anger in the country and the world. You can see this in the activists increasingly protesting, angrily, during the “Summer of Love” in the people protesting and canceling others in the name of Pride, of race consciousness, of equity and wokeness, or of mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Some of the crazier anti-vaxxers, the ones who think that vaccines cause autism, or that homeopathy solves every ill, come to mind as well. And if you have ever argued with a flat earther, especially the kind who stares at your left ear while he is talking to you…
But why would this cause anxiety?
Let’s start with a question. What is secular science for? What do we use this kind of fact-based thinking to do for us?
One of the major things it’s used for is predicting the future. We use facts and logic to predict trends, so that we know what should be happening. If a source predicts a future, we can watch and see if that future comes to pass. If that happens, we know that source is accurate and predictive, at least for topics we’re interested in, and so we can listen to it and use it to predict future events.
But what happens when we watch sources for religious confirmation, for a should-based view of the world? What happens when those sources promise us, not a factual truth, but a Sacred Truth?
For an example, let’s look at the Johnny Depp trial and Amber Heard’s long campaign against him. She alleged violence on his part, and was believed for years. People still believe her, even after the trial. But many people who watched the trial saw a different story.14 They saw Amber Heard lie, repeatedly, change her story, and try to portray herself as perfect. They saw Johnny Depp tell very awkward and uncomfortable truth, and the jury's decision was massively in his favor.15
But why the controversy? Because people looked at the relative power of the two, saw her evidence, and believed her, which is reasonable. However, their belief in her became conflated with a broader narrative in society, #BelieveAllWomen, which seeks to protect women who have been abused. The problem is that Amber Heard was able to take advantage of this belief, which has a religious following, to gain virtue and thus power for herself. Since she conflated herself with the narrative of the sacred victim, which is what everyone seeks to protect, she was able to hide her own victimization of Johnny Depp.
When people saw the clash of evidence, some were able to update their worldview, because they didn’t have a sacred narrative involved. However some people still cannot believe the verdict, because for them, she is a sacred victim and that victimhood transcends all secular narratives, even decisions by a court.
This case also demonstrates another kind of anxiety, a clash in world-views, because you look at the courts, or at actual events, and they turn out differently from the way your beliefs demand that they must. When they don’t, you have a clear signal that something is wrong, but your beliefs prevent you from seeing what is wrong, which is very anxiety-provoking. There is an invisible thing that is wrong with the world, and it could be anywhere.
When you have a sacred view of the world, then you have a sacred narrative. For example, Christ must die, Christ must Rise, and Christ must come again. It is a cycle, every year, and every year Christians all over the world walk down it. When you impose a sacred narrative over history, then history must conform to your sacred narrative.
This trap of the sacred secular narrative is what happened to the Soviets and the Nazis, both having their own totalitarian religious views of the world. History had to conform to their conquest, and their triumph was inevitable, because their religious view of the world permitted no deviation from the prescribed religious mythology of their triumph. The fall of Nazi Germany and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall tell different, secular stories.
Solutions?
Having both secular and sacred is useful and necessary. Religion is very good at elucidating and clarifying the moral underpinnings of society, which we often struggle to do in secular ways. The secular, meanwhile, provides information, data, law, and science that makes our lives and societies ever better, as we work together to solve massive societal goals. However, overrunning the secular and scientific with religious behavior often clouds minds and polarizes society.
What modern secular society has forgotten is that humans crave sacred meaning. When they cannot find meaning in the sacred, they find it in the secular, and then make the secular sacred.
So how do we separate the sacred and secular, and keep them in their proper orbits? For starters, we need people to actually know and experience the difference between sacred reality and secular reality. This used to be provided by religions, and many of the more conservative churches, more evangelical churches, still provide this. So does Islam. Other churches, not so much. Many of the moderate churches in the US, for example, try to mean all things to all people, and lose their definition to chase social justice trends, instead of defining themselves by the sacred work they do. They chase secular validation instead of working on preserving that which is sacred.
Being Holy, in part, means being different. Those who are holy set themselves apart from the secular world in an important way, to follow another way, to seek deeper truths. They exist in two worlds at once, the secular and the sacred, and they balance both. The sacred provides the meaning that the secular does not, while the secular keeps society running and provides the basic day-to-day activities like jobs, medicine, and technology.
Without the sacred, secular society lacks meaning and context, the narrative that makes all the suffering and struggle of life worthwhile. We need this meaning and context as much as we need vitamins, and when we lose meaning, we seek it in maladaptive ways, much as drug use is often driven by people finding a bad way out of the meaninglessness and pain of their lives. If we refuse to seek the sacred IN sacred places, we seek it in secular places, which distorts society and ourselves. Once we seek the sacred in sacred ways, we find meaning and strength that renews ourselves and our societies.
We have never needed it more.
Primal Screams Review, by Mary Eberstadt
A review of Winfield Bevans book on the subject.
As an example, BLM protesters have been seen reenacting their founding moments in chants such as “Hands up, don’t shoot” despite the words never having been said during the events in Ferguson. This is a religious response, recreating a foundational moment of one of their martyrs. Similarly, statements of “I can’t breathe” are now commonly used during police arrests, put on t-shirts, and chanted at protests.
Children feature in a lot of these. This may be because, as society, we have strong views on children. This is partly because they are our future, and so by mistreating them we destroy our future. It is also because they don’t have a stable identity or fully developed brain, and that combined with legal concepts of adulthood leaves them very vulnerable.
Yes there is more to the case, but I think this is a fair summary. And yes, you can definitely tell that I have my own personal conclusions on the matter. I think one of the recontextualizations that I went through is that, while some people believe that Amber Heard is a victim and got no justice, I am reassured that the actual victim came forth and got justice. For those who struggle with this, remember that while there is a sacred victim in this case, nobody demands that it must be female, and nobody demands that the victim be perfect. They simply must have been the victim.
The obvious correlations between the two spheres are intolerance of uncertainty and the need to dominate, which is to say; to control. The two may appear redundant, but that is because they partially overlap.
The profane always seeks determination of result or outcome.
The sacred can be experienced, but is ultimately beyond understanding as we "know" it. We need only observe the beseeching attempts to bargain with the Almighty, to verify the attempts at mastery.
Let us pray.
"Oh mighty Atom, bestow your blessings upon us, your chosen Secular. Give us this day our energy, our gravity, our rain and our sunshine, equal in measure with our triumph over the demon Carbon."
Or, perhaps, a more traditional form:
"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."
There is, it would seem, a form of beseechment congenial to every taste. Were I to think that God owed me anything at all, I would prefer the latter of the above two prayers over the former. I have reached the conclusion that He owes me nothing, and therefore I beseech only that His will be done. Even so, the twenty-third Psalm brings comfort to those in whose heart it resonates.
So might the former, the secularist, prayer palliate, were self-deception not so essential to the secularists. In denial, their faith is affirmed. From the deists, a rigorous dogma that, ironically enough, is secular in origin. From the secularists, sneering condescension proclaims the depth of their devotion.
When the Chosen Ones achieve their objective, it is experienced as a contract fulfilled. The "Faustian Bargain" obtains.
What is missing is humility and it's cousin; gratitude.
Shall suffering cease only when a bargain has been fulfilled?
Render unto science that which is scientific, unto the Almighty; acceptance and humble thanks for blessings bestowed freely.
Whether ones "Truth" is the sacred or the profane, no benefit derives from a hubristic illusion of coercion that is the nature of contractual agreement.
Thanks for the lovely essay. It provoked the thoughts of a tired mind and touched the weary heart of an old man.
Great essay- a major improvement on the previous version.