It was once considered obvious, at least to those in the know, that religion and other superstitions would fade as science made God unnecessary, implausible, and eventually ridiculous. Primitive humans saw gods lurking everywhere because of their ignorance of natural causes, perhaps, and the need for God to fill in the “gaps” of our explanations would in principle disappear. On this view, sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” the age of faith succumbed to the age of reason, and religious believers simply had to wake up to the implications of the scientific revolution, modernity, and the Enlightenment. Humans had grown up, at last, and adults put childish things behind them.
Not everyone accepts the secularization thesis, of course. A highly influential challenge to its dominance is Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). Taylor acknowledges that conditions of belief have changed—it was more difficult to be the village atheist in 1274 than in 2025—but no inevitability attaches to these conditions. A fundamental cause was the disenchantment of the world. Trolls under the bridge became dubious, as did the notion of things possessing a “charge” or power. We no longer parade statues around fields to protect them from locusts or light blessed candles to repel demons in the darkness of night. Moreover, human permeability to those forces has been rejected as well, and we no longer fear the evil eye or voodoo dolls.
While Taylor’s long account grants the changed condition of belief, with disenchantment playing a significant role in flattening the world into sheer immanence, he notices that religion has not disappeared; on the contrary, he identifies a “nova effect” by which religion slips its bonds, and belief and spirituality proliferate in wild confusion. So much for the secularization thesis, in other words.
Despite Taylor’s claims about the promises and possibilities of belief, his discussion of disenchantment has received considerable attention from many Christians, particularly those alienated from modernity and alarmed by Christianity’s decline of influence and adherence in the West. For some, disenchantment is viewed as the lynchpin for cultural apologetics, not only as an explanation for the loss of faith but also as a strategy for its recovery. If disenchantment results in a loss of faith, then surely the best strategy for recovery is re-enchantment—or so it is suggested—especially by emphasizing the weirdness of religion out of step with materialism and reductionism.
In Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, for example, Rod Dreher gives considerable attention to UFOs, demons, and alien abductions to suggest the possibilities of an enchanted world. The podcast Haunted Cosmos explores vampires and sea monsters to make our imaginations less “boring” and more prone to welcome enchantment. Well, that’s one way to deal with secularity, I suppose.
It’s certainly not the approach of David Walsh, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, in The Invisible Source of Authority: God in a Secular Age. Walsh forthrightly admits the facts: God seems to have disappeared in our secular age, and we, like Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), are forced to confront the stark question: Would the basis of morality and meaning hold if we supposed there was no God?
Today the West is short on confidence: no longer convinced of its norms, commitments and institutions, and bewitched by a palpable sense of guilt for historical wrongdoing. Many suggest that secularity is partly to blame for our enervation and incapable of providing new strength. Walsh, however, bracingly suggests that the task is to “understand the depth that is concealed within” the history and meaning of the secular and worldly.
God is absent in secularity, but this allows God to present as non-idolatrous and true to his proper way of being, suggests Walsh. Christianity, like Judaism before it, is intrinsically disenchanting, at least with respect to paganism. God creates the world, and there is only one God, so the rivers and trees are empty of nymphs and dryads. Moreover, since God creates the world ex nihilo, God transcends the universe. He is not another being among beings, another entity among entities, and does not exist the way things exist. Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, and the critics of ontotheology are correct in insisting that we ought not think of God as the first being, as if he is the start of the number line, for then God is like the Titans or Olympians. First, and perhaps more powerful, more knowledgeable, and more perfect than other beings but not the transcendent Holy One of Israel.
Secularity is thus a derivative term, completely dependent for its meaning on the reality and transcendence of God. The secular is not-transcendent, not divine, but cannot mean anything without positing the transcendent, even if only noting its absence or otherness. Christianity should take no issue with this claim, Walsh suggests, since it also insists on the otherness and transcendence of God. Secularity is a maturation of a Christian insight, for, somewhat paradoxically, “without intending it, the secular has made room for the sacred,” not inside the world but ensuring “the sacred remains properly itself.” Secularity allows the world to be the world, at last, and the sacred to be sacred—for the good of both.
Since God creates the world, he is not part of it, not another instance within the immanent frame, and his transcendent otherness is most manifest—appears despite absence—precisely when the world is not divinized or sacralized. Transcendence is “no longer mingled with the mundane,” and the sacred is thus preserved. The world is not full of gods, of course, precisely because the world is not God even though dependent on God. The world exists because of God, but we know God only because of the world, and God’s absence reveals both that and how God is.
The transcendence of God also allows for his immanent action in the Incarnation and other ways. A non-transcendent God is capable, like everything else, of being here but not there, then but not now, whereas a transcendent God acts everywhere and at all times. Consequently, we need not, as Dreher appears to need, imagine God as akin to an object in the universe and known through physical manifestations and visions. God will not be encountered in the worldly and natural ways of the mundane, opening the possibility for the life of faith and spirit.
Because we are bodies, it is understandable why our imaginations are dominated by spatiality. We imagine in the mode of “in” and “out,” “up” and “down,” “here” and “there” because of our biology. The cognitive mistake, however, evidenced by Dreher and Haunted Cosmos, is the anxious need to see evidence of God within the naturalness of the world. That is, to find marks of God “inside” the world, although this is a fundamentally erroneous category mistake. Spirit does not peel back the mundane trappings of the world, so to speak, and find divinity inside or underneath the mundane; instead, the person of spirit and faith recognizes the freedom of God and God’s human interlocutors precisely in the absence of God within space and time. The secular mind is more like mature faith than is the needy religious mind.
Among other things, Walsh is a scholar of Eric Voegelin, and like Voegelin impatient with religion when it replaces symbol with concept and definition. For Walsh, faith is more dynamic than religion’s attempts to classify and pin God down, like a butterfly on card stock. Too often, he seems to suggest, religion presents a worldly god, an idol, because too mundane, too proven, too defined. Rather, we need to have faith in the possibility of faith, in our very need of faith, since no symbolic articulation of God will capture God’s otherness and reality.
The Invisible Source of Authority is not an easy book. Walsh assumes his reader’s familiarity with Heidegger, Voegelin, Grotius, Marion, Desmond, and many others. At times the writing is repetitive without adding clarity or precision, and some claims are counterintuitive and (perhaps intentionally) more provocative than necessary. At the same time, Walsh is a serious thinker engaged in a serious exercise of thought, and the quandaries and difficulties of the book are worth the effort. This is a book requiring time to read.
Walsh asks his reader to be serious, to recognize the need to develop an interior life of the spirit mature and capable enough to deal with the world as it is, bereft of an obvious God, and in so doing to wrestle with God like Jacob wrestling the angel rather than taking solace in a tamed, enervated God, however much we moderns might feel the need for comfort in a weird enchantment. We are modern and cannot avoid this; the world is secular, and this turns out to be very good news, albeit a difficult challenge.
