Secularization, None Church, and the liberal democratic myth of universal values

Wherein we revisit Talal Asad

Perry Bacon’s column in this week’s Washington Post caught my eye. The “Nones” – people who identify with no religious tradition – are a subject of fascination for religious studies folks and sociologists who’ve watched United Statesians rapidly de-church. Bacon is one of these Nones, someone who grew up going to church, went through college going to church, kept up with an anti-gay non-denominational church and slowly drifted away in the late 2010s before the pandemic seemed to finally wipe things out once and for all.

Like a lot of Nones, Bacon can’t put his finger on one primary reason for leaving. He wasn’t totally onboard with the belief system. He realized that the Black radical tradition didn’t see religion as necessary for the cause of Black freedom. Then there’s the Trumpification of certain segments of Christianity, which is truly awful. After that he discovered his church was anti-gay (pro-tip: find out if your church is anti-gay).

Those are all good reasons to leave church. But I was less sure about constructive turn towards a Church of Nones. Here’s what I heard: Bacon sees the church as a place with a “specific view of the world” that offers answer to big questions. There are some people who agree and some people who disagree about this because, well, it’s religion. Bacon wants a church of universal values that doesn’t include the stuff that’s debatable. That’s when I realized we were deep in a piece about the myth of secularism.

I went back to Talal Asad after reading this opinion piece because it sounded so familiar. Asad critiques a way of dividing up the world in which there is a rational, Enlightenment world of universal values. This sphere is called the secular, the space of human life that emancipated itself from religion. In this way of breaking up the world “the secular” carves out a space from the pre-modern religious world.

Asad offers a different picture. Secularism itself has a particular vision of the world, and it builds that conception of the world through modernity. Rather than offering a guarantee of space free from violence, "a secular state does not guarantee toleration; it puts into play different structures of ambition and fear. The law never seeks to eliminate violence since its objective is always to regulate violence.”

One example is Asad’s genealogy of multiple and varied “humanisms.” He asks us to contend with the ways that humanism emerged from (certain, Western) Christian notions of both chastisement and charity, benevolence and punishment. These are inherited into “secular” notions of humanitarianism. (Even beyond Asad we could attend to the rejection of humanism in Afropessimism or the anti-specism movement.) I also think of the ways that anti-separatism has been levied at French Muslim women who choose to wear hijab in public, all under the auspices of a shared universal secular value system.

Secularism isn’t a new kind of religion but a redrawing of the lines: the state decides on the core principles that animate society. The universal values we are asked to adhere to in the US are free markets and the justification that violence is necessary to keep us free (e.g., prisons, policing). The nation-state enforces its chosen universal values – and in the case of the U.S., forces them on everyone else. The question is always what are the “universal values,” who decides their implementation, and what form of force will they use?

The problem for me, in my tradition, is that Mennonites are terrible at universal values, and it’s gotten us in trouble on more than one occasion. We’ve gotten in trouble for our refusal (at times) to own private property or join the military and our rejection of policing. You may think, “those are not universal values” and let me tell you – those absolutely were considered universal values at various time in history. Our form of life is sectarian in all sorts of ways that are incompatible with a universal system of valuation. We don’t swear oaths! Not living above our means! Also, if you live this life well, it may get you killed! Extremely weird!

I suspect the problem with a Nones Church is that people live every day in a world that is dictated by the universal values that animate the violence of the state, just as some of us are bound up in religious violence.

I mean, I get it. “Our society needs places that integrate people across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places to get practical, weekly advice about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values that they committed to during the Trump years. The anti-Trump majority in the United States needs institutions that are separate from the official Democratic Party, which is unsurprisingly more focused on winning elections than in creating a sense of community for left-leaning people.”

All of that sounds great. I would guess this isn’t radically different than what folks would say about my church. But I also know that “left-leaning people” have vastly different opinions about police abolition. We have vastly different ideas about class warfare. We have vastly different ideas about how to integrate people across racial lines. Just watch the way leftist groups cannibalize one another.

If I want to find places like Bacon describes I go to political organizing. These are sites that offer all that he’s looking for. Rather than amorphous sites of “shared values,” here people collectively and persistently redefine the assumptions of our capitalist fever dream by creating new possibilities. That happens actionably – we organize for alternatives to policing, to systems of punishment and surveillance. We organize to thwart death-dealing culture wars that target trans kids and environmental racism that builds superfund sites in historically Black neighborhoods. And we do this not as an intellectual exercise of shared values but in the face of the particular and local forms of violence that face our communities.

None of this is competition with or an alternative to the worshipping community that I am called to as a pastor. Contra Bacon, the hope of church is that we can be a place that critiques the assumptions of universal ideals disguised as liberal democracies. And that takes place not by baptizing “tolerance” or “humanism” as a narrative of the common good but by reworking the form of our bodies. We give our money away, wastefully (for capitalist ideologies) at times. We partake in shared decision-making. We believe in futures that are nearly impossible. We live as though God has redeemed all creatures. We eat together. We offer refugee for people whose lives are held in a death grip by racism and transphobia. We stick around with people we don’t always like. We celebrate.

I have little desire to defend the institutional malaise that passes as church in 2023. But I’m not convinced that a church of the secular offers much of anything more.