Surviving the Secular: Faith, Grief, Parody

Abstract

Surviving the Secular: Faith, Grief, Parody Michael Kirwan (bio) In The Diary of a Country Priest, George Bernanos offers an unsettling image: [T]he Church is not only ... a kind of sovereign state with laws, officials, armies – a moment, as glorious as you please, in human history. The Church is on the march through time as a regiment marches through strange country, cut off from all its ordinary supplies. The Church lives on successive regimes and societies, as the soldiers would from day to day on the inhabitants.1 I am aware the metaphor of military occupation is problematic, given the present state of war in Europe, but I am intrigued by its audacious and honest assertion, that there is something parasitic about the Church’s relation to the space it is occupying (if only temporarily). How do we imagine the Church’s survival into a post-Christendom future? Is it possible, as Bernanos suggests, that the contemporary Church, apparently burnt out and running on empty, can nevertheless draw sustenance from its environment – no matter how indifferent or hostile the local population? While not losing sight of Bernanos’s fugitive regiment, I will suggest in the conclusion that the musical term ‘parody’ might better describe the relation of dependency that he has in mind. Regarding the Church’s post-Christendom survival, there are other indications that the future may be different from what is generally predicted. Crawford Gribben concludes The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland with some striking assertions: What passed as Christian Ireland is finally over – and Christians should be glad ... What has passed as Christian Ireland is dead. But its critics cannot relax any more than believers ought to despair.2 Gribben’s book narrates the ‘rise and fall’ of Irish Christianity, as we commemorate the historical markers of Ireland’s ascendency, its ‘coming of age’ as a modern secular state (independence in 1922, constitutional amendment to remove the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church in 1972). The see-saw picture would appear to be a vindication of the standard ‘subtraction’ model of secularisation: ‘the common notion that the secular is [End Page 239] a natural substrate that remains when the fantastical ideas of the supernatural are finally shed’.3 Religion is irrelevant to human flourishing and may even impede it. However, the subtraction model has come under testing scrutiny. According to Charles Taylor, author of the monumental A Secular Age, it is simply not the case that stripping away religion reveals a fully coherent and autonomous (oven-ready?) secular social order.4 Ireland’s commemoration of its emergence into autonomous statehood occurs just as the continued feasibility of the secular state is at risk. Its vulnerabilities are dramatised in millennial convulsions: religious extremism, financial collapse, the surgence of populist, ‘post-truth’ politics and the coronavirus pandemic. Each of these shockwaves has further damaged the late twentieth-century consensus around an international, rules-based world order. The German commentator Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde initiates discussion of the ‘post-secular’ when he poses the question, as far back as the 1960s, as to whether the free, secularised state exists on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee.5 In short, the secular state does not have enough in its account to satisfy its creditors; we might say that the various crises listed above are the equivalent of a frenzied run on the bank. This challenge is taken seriously by the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, and by Joseph Ratzinger, in their conversion on the ‘pre-political foundations of the free democratic state’ in Munich, 2004. With this ‘post-secular’ possibility in mind, Gribben’s surprising predictions seem more plausible. The passing of ‘Christian Ireland’ might in fact be a source of gladness and hope for Christian believers. ‘After the failure of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance.’6 Gribben considers two scenarios for the continuance of Irish Christianity: an ‘Augustinian’ option and a series of ‘Benedict’ options. The first of these, inspired by the City of God, resists the sectarian temptation to exclusivism as a response to traumatic collapse. The second envisages smaller, more intensive Christian communities...