Converting to religion after its demise: thoughts on Marcel Gauchet and his American reception.

by Steven Englund

A superb English translation of (most of) Marcel Gauchet's thirteen-year-old classic of political and social thought that rocked France, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, has recently appeared in Princeton University Press's praiseworthy "New French Thought" series.(1) It is introduced with a fine essay by Charles Taylor. This is a brilliant - original and piercing - book that deserves far more attention, and certainly more understanding, than it has gotten. For this lack of attention, Gauchet has partly himself to blame. His abstruse style is, for whole stretches, virtually impenetrable to mortal readers. It need not be. What the French philosopher has to say is both important and understandable.

Gauchet is, in some ways, a cordial and appreciative analyst of Christianity. His book makes religion into something like the historical fons et origo of human society. Religion - in our case, Christianity - has long since succeeded in totally suffusing our social language, values, and institutions. This thesis, a welcome relief from studies that have ignored religion's importance in building society, has endeared Gauchet to some, leading them overlook in him the percipient and remorseless atheist whose view of religion is that of the Enlightenment and of Feuerbach. Religion is "the embodiment of social man's negative relation to himself into social forms. . . . [It is] a way of institutionalizing humans against themselves. . . . The central noteworthy feature of the religious is precisely that this constitutive power of negation has been given the task of disguising itself. . . ." These ideas, and many like them in these pages, should confront believers - and have, in France - with some painful observations, analyses, and objections about religion.

Situating himself in the grand social theory tradition of Weber and Durkheim - one that presupposes an immense interdisciplinary learning and a taste for high generalization rare in our time - Gauchet argues that the world has reached the end of its long religious day. Although religion formed and still deeply permeates modern society, society has long since evolved beyond the gods and sacralized itself, the organic community, the nation-state. Gauchet's most original and penetrating analysis shows how Christianity, in particular, is "the religion of the end of religion." Christianity has done itself out of existence. The 'problem' inscribed at the heart of the twin foundational Christian doctrines of the infinite worth of the individual soul and the utter transcendence of God is that they led to the undermining of the Christian belief system itself, exposing it to dissidence and instability at the center. Christianity's radical removal of "the Other" (God) from the world led, as day follows night, to the decline in social human's dependence on the divine. In brief, Christianity gave rise to a faith that gradually turned against the ideological self-subjugation that all religion classically is. The Christian God liberated men and women from the ancient world's omnipresent gods, but the growth in freedom led to the modern state of affairs wherein religion as the great refusal (of freedom) has itself been refused. Expressed in Gauchet's turgid but effective prose: "[T]he greater the gods, the freer humans are, the degree of human obligation toward the law given to them from outside is, contrary to appearances, inversely related to the degree of concentration of, and separate from, the divine . . . . Transcendence separates reason and faith. . . . There is no intellectual access to a God radically separated from the world, so humans are now on their own. . . ."

(Gauchet's analysis of Catholic ecclesiology and its "necessary" religious consequences could only be called protestant. The history of the Church turns on a "major ambiguity," he believes. On the one hand, its "prevailing language is one of mediation. . . between living beings and the spiritual realm," but on the other hand, the Church's centralized institutions and articulated dogmas signify "the opposite: the impossibility of mediation, the irreversible fracture between the human city and the kingdom of the absolute." The result was that the organized Church ever more insistently established itself as the idol to be rejected - by believers as well as nonbelievers. The Reformation simply got the jump on the rest of modern history.)

As religion receded from co-extensiveness with society, society famously developed secular values, institutions, rites, etc. Remorselessly, Gauchet demonstrates that any attempt to stop or reverse "the divine's inexorable withdrawal [from society] is futile." It is futile because it fails to grasp the logic at work both in religion and in society. Perhaps Gauchet's most original analysis is the one for which the book is subtitled. He offers a close historical explication of the critical role of the state in effecting humankind's departure from religion. In this view, the state first challenged, then replaced, religious authority, rites, and institutions. Social power did not so much become secularized as the sacred saw itself reassigned from the clerical to the political form- in Gauchet's words, the "Nation came to personify immortality." All of this is a very French experience and analysis, but it is not necessarily inapplicable to Anglo-American history. The Durkheimian insight that society, in Gauchet's user-unfriendly language, "realizes the collective body's internal self-congruence," stands.

Adept at historical analysis, Gauchet has a no-less sure hand for the present. In his view, the high, arid, over-oxygenated plain onto which we moderns have debouched from our five-thousand-year trek through "religion" is at once a painful, disequilibrating, and exhilarating place to be. The "autonomous self" we now are inhabits a world that is no longer "presented" but must be "constituted." It is a world, let us be clear, that is not one whit less post-religious for being "in continuity with religious man." Again, it is best to give Gauchet's words, for they are far from lacking poignancy: "From now on we are destined to live openly and in the anguish from which the gods had spared us. . . . Perhaps we will never find a true balance between self-love that wishes to exclude all else and the desire to abolish the self, between absolute being and being-as-nothingness. Such is the daily throbbing pain that no sacral opiate can blot out: the merciless contradictory desire inherent in the very reality of being a subject."

More specifically, the "daily throbbing pain" ensues from humanity's insertion in what Gauchet calls a "new structure of social time," a world which refers for its "legitimation" to the unknowable and ever-changing future, not the immutable, mythical past. But this plunges us moderns into a kind of headlong pitch forward (une fuite en avant, in French) that is highly destabilizing. In Gauchet's words, "the less possible it is for us to consider the future an object of superstition and worship, the more apparent it becomes that the future will be other than we imagine. The more we accept ourselves as authors of history, the only remaining enigma is we ourselves."

Yet baffling and anxious enigmas we are. Constituting our individual identity when it is no longer imparted to us by the social collectivity is a problematic experience. Gauchet is curious about how we moderns tote the barge of our autonomy. We do it variously and inconsistently, he argues. We create consuming political ideologies (fascism, communism, etc.); we expand our taste for the aesthetic experience ("the continuation of the sacred by other means"); and paradoxically, we choose to "bask in a nondifferentiated residue of religion."

Here, we come to one of Marcel Gauchet's more under-appreciated but profound observations: the characteristic social phenomena of our time that sees some people turn to religious conversion as a response to the disequilibrating experience of freedom in a pluralist world. This is where Gauchet's distinction between religion as personal faith and religion as the ideological creator and designer of society stands him in brilliant stead. The two things - faith and religion - are not the same, any more than are the questions of the objective truth-value of religious myths (Gauchet thinks they have none) and religion's social valence, its power to form and inform the collectivity. Individual pockets of faith may indeed postdate the decline of religion as a major social player. In Gauchet's words: "We can imagine the extreme of a society comprised entirely of believers, yet beyond the religious."

It is a matter of choice. Some, says Gauchet, may elect generalized spirituality, some a particular religious practice, just as they may "de-accession" it and go on to another, or move around the "cafeteria" of one tradition. Gauchet personally recommends Taoism or Buddhism to the reader because "these spiritualities contain no theistic implications. . . . The void or nothing they conjure up is thus better placed than Christianity's customary theological categories to express the pure experience of thought." That said, however, he has no problem with anyone's choices. He is not your classic French anticlerical exponent of laicisme. The only serious mistake on Gauchet's telling would be to confuse this flitting among religions and spiritualities with living in or returning to a world structured by religion. The oak, as John Noonan puts it in his splendid new book (The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom), cannot go back to the acorn.

Reactions to Gauchet among orthodox Christians have been curiously favorable. Their gratitude to him for bringing religion front and center leads them to overlook his announcement of its supersession. Thus, Brian Anderson, in the journal First Things (June/July 1998), after painting a loving and useful portrait of this book's contents, waits until his short coda to demur on the issue of religion's "truth-value." Anderson allows as how "Christianity might be true." In the same issue, Richard John Neuhaus signals another study of post-religious secularization, Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, which, like Gauchet's book, descries within contemporary society's 'religious revival' the total disenchantment of the world in its social organization. To this, Neuhaus's thoughtful response is: "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. . . . We are witnessing the re-enchantment of the world," he asserts, and cites, in support, Gerard Manly Hopkins: "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."

Now one sympathizes with these men - including the philosopher Charles Taylor who, in his helpful introduction to Gauchet's volume, suggests that "God" may "really exist." Frankly, my own first reaction when I read Gauchet was to make a similar statement. The reader will thus, I hope, see that I intend no disrespect for my intellectual betters when I opine that this is all quite beside the point. Gauchet has made systematic assertions for religion's retirement as a formative social force from human history. The argument, and indeed the state of affairs, that asks to be refuted is this: the world, for all that it may be reverential toward religion, is no longer referential to religion in its social organization. This, not the possibility or desirability of personal religious faith, is what Gauchet is talking about when he writes, "Religion was initially a general shaping of humans' material, social, and mental life. All that remains of it today are individual experiences and belief systems, while actions affecting things, and the link between beings and the mind's organizing categories contradict the logic of dependence that initially governed them. This constitutes our departure from the age of religions."

No small irony resides in a state of affairs where Gauchet's points are perhaps best driven home by a recent work of Christian apologetics. Patrick Glynn's God: The Evidence. The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular World is a slim volume that has received kudos from sources as diverse as Andrew Greeley and Michael Novak, Hans Kung and Robert Bork. It opens with the story of the author's conversion to Christianity. Glynn is a Harvard-trained philosopher who worked for the Reagan Administration in arms control. The turning point in his conversion from intellectual atheism was failing in love with a woman who was "a believer . . . a strong spiritual Christian." The book's main task is to adduce evidence for why the "ugly" conclusion, "we are on our own," is no longer plausible, no longer where the smart money is going.

Glynn's "evidence" comes from two realms: the scientific and the psychological. The latter is the data accumulated about near-death experiences and the therapeutic uses of prayer and church-going. The former is the author's rather tendentious account of some of the latest speculations in theoretical physics - notably "the Anthropic Principle," a view held by a Cambridge cosmologist who argues that the cosmos is not random in its origin, as has been thought, but contains certain "mysterious coincidences" that may, and indeed should, be interpreted as constituting a telos for humankind's existence. The theory, in other words, bids fare to up-end the Copernican revolution and return homo sapiens to the center of the natural order.

The point of Glynn's compilation of 'evidence' - his piling Ossian onto Pella, if you will - is not to conclude that a person may reason his way to God (the gift of grace remains decisive, he insists) but to shift the burden of proof back onto the shoulders of the religious skeptics. This, Glynn believes he has done. He also goes further and makes social-historical statements. He sees Christianity virtually everywhere. He writes, "The reason we admire what we admire in the modern polity is precisely that the values Jesus put forward in the New Testament are the central human values. . . ." He notes, not without ironic chuckles, that "the leading American postmodern philosopher," Richard Rorty, readily grants that Christianity is the source of most secular values. Glynn, in fact, cannot contain himself: "The day, I believe, is soon coming when skepticism, unbelief, is going to be the minority position, not just among the populace at large, but even among intellectuals."

Well, perhaps, but we should pause a moment before we usher modernity or postmodernity (depending on your definition) out history's back door. Marcel Gauchet would not for a second contest much of what Glynn asserts nor try to refute his "evidence," although he might smile at the American's breathless announcement, made in the absence of any sociological, philosophical, or historical argumentation whatever, that "post-modernism is post-secularism waiting to be reborn."

The point is, Gauchet's book makes allowance for a Glynn; Glynn's does not for a Gauchet. Glynn's appeal in faith to faith illustrates Gauchet's theme that the modern human is free to do anything he likes, including invoke "the anthropological prop" that is religion. When Glynn recounts his conversion, he, in Gauchet's words "testifies to [his] faithfulness to [God's] law," but he does so "individually, from within [his] instituting freedom," and not as an individual in response to society's formation. The confiteor of the lonely vertical pronoun ("I") merely buttresses Gauchet's case that "if we have surpassed the religious, it has not left us, and perhaps never will, even though its historical effectiveness is finished. . . . We have gone from being within religion to being outside it, and this to-ing and fro-ing and unstable compromise between belonging and withdrawal, between worshiping the problematic and choosing the solution, defines our age's specific religiosity - and is perhaps the best way for the religious to survive in a world without religion." Glynn lambastes those darlings of the Zeitgeist, which he denotes as "caprice," "aesthetic obsession," "private project," "the spirit of self-creation"; yet, what is his book but an exercise in "self-creation," the winsome telling of the story of his own private project, his own wrestling with the problem of his identity?

In sum, "the departure from religion," as Gauchet affirms and reaffirms, has neither been fortuitous or coincidental, nor has it happened because "lots of people" lost their faith; nor will it be undone because lots of people - including some very smart and distinguished ones - reassert their faith or the possibility of it. Gauchet is not being supercilious or disdainful, he is simply being methodical, when he writes, "there are very good reasons for humans to convert to religion after its demise." But he adds, "there are even better reasons for these conversions not to be profound or long-lasting, since humans cannot abandon the reasons that caused them to convert."

One has the impression that Glynn - like Anderson, Neuhaus, and even Charles Taylor - fails to grasp the meaning and implications of the analysis here offered. They "have reached bedrock and their spade is turned," as the philosopher Thomas Nagel might put it, but, I would add, they do not appear to know it. The very fact that none of these men has attacked The Disenchantment of the World is telling and indeed poignant. The book has not been assailed, I would propose, both because its author has not attacked faith (that would provoke neuralgia and anxiety) and because he has stipulated to religion's - more especially, to Catholicism's - claim on the beauty part in Western history. That Gauchet has also, very politely and brilliantly, limned the end of religion as a public force, while demonstrating how Christianity contained within itself the seeds of its own supersession, therefore hurts little, for he shows appreciation both of a convert's new-found faith and pride in his religious tradition.

The recent flourishing of apologists like Glynn, with their proclaimed successful quests for certainty and (in Neuhaus's case) their deep concern for orthodoxy and papal authority, are further signs that Gauchet's analysis is accurate. The presupposition of their furious advocacy is precisely his point that the Church is no longer co-extensive with society and has not been a dispositive social force for years. In a way, Glynn and Neuhaus should be glad. If Glynn's predictions of religion's return to cultural-intellectual hegemony were accurate, he and his cohorts would lose their enjoyable posture of hard-pressed, misunderstood minority and would be seen to be speaking platitudes. In a religiously formed society, they would have no clout or audience.

They need not worry.

Teaching a confirmation class (CCD) of select high school juniors and seniors, as I have for a decade, has shown me in spades how alive and well is "the autonomous self," even in a rural Wisconsin town. Catholic Waupaca is, without making a fuss over it, decades into post-religiosity, as Gauchet understands it. A few of my kids' grandparents have lively memories of active corporate Catholicism, but fully fifty percent of my Wednesday-night flock does not live in families that go to Mass even once for every change of liturgical color. You readily see the results in their children's "Alzheimer's" approach to religious ed: after ten to twelve years of CCD, the kids (and mine always include valedictorians and salutatorians) learn something - a biblical quote, a definition, a prayer, etc. - only to forget it the next hour and learn it again in the next year's CCD class, then forget it, and relearn it, and so on. If they are beyond more than superficial embarrassment at this state of affairs, it is because none of it ties in to anything they live by and with. Precisely the social-collective aspects of religion - e.g., the Mass - are what they least feel the power of or can least be got across to them.

More to Gauchet's immediate point, a CCD teacher soon realizes that even if she leads her wards to accepting confirmation, their decisions for the sacrament are "secularly" arrived at and framed; they are options exercised for now, expressions of personal freedom and opinion, none of it a matter of life or death, all quite unrooted in the rest of what is going on around them. The one tactic I have happened upon that sparks their interest is Pascal's wager, but that is because they interpret it as a wise choice, a good bet that speaks well for the wagerer's intelligence. The few kids each year who exercise other options - opting for (Protestant) sects, fashioning individual melds of far Eastern and/or New Age spirituality, etc. - rarely stick with them. But then, neither do their more numerous Catholic counterparts, who, from the outset, make no promise, individual or corporate, to join the communitas.

Nor are my kids religious in their broader moral foundations and values. Their sense of good and bad is not, even if you push them, tied to God or Church, but to secular values and institutions (often the faux or feckless protest values of rock and/or rap music and lyrics). It used to be that morality was anchored in religion; now, the reverse holds true. Our sore-pressed pastor does his homiletic best to tie in Catholicism to his flock's pre-established (secular) ethics and morality. The world my kids join is a post-religious society drenched in religious history and references that are little known and less cared about. "San Francisco" is a word that raises many images for them, but none that is remotely likely to put them in mind of the Assisi friar. The concepts that describe their Catholicism are echt-Gauchetian: "live and let live," "private religion," "cafeteria Catholicism," "relativism," "opinionism." I do not say this in anger, still less in surprise or pleasure; I note it. It is as irreversible a fact of life up here as divorce, contraception, or the automobile.

A man who understands both what Gauchet is saying and what Glynn is doing is the sociologist, Peter Berger. In a recent article in The Christian Century, Berger accepts the central thesis, advanced by Gauchet, about the permanent end of co-extensiveness between society and religion. He essays a radically different case from Glynn's, one that is modest in tone and accepting of cognitive pluralism, in substance. Unlike Glynn, he holds that faith has little to do with scientific or, still less, with therapeutic evidence.(2) Indeed, faith, for Berger, is not about knowing but about believing, in the absence of proof. In the face of the current cultural spectrum of competing and incompatible forms of meaning, Berger advocates "epistemological modesty."(3) Championing the principle of the ecclesia semper reformanda, he makes the most of the present social reality of "weak churches" (weak in organization and membership). He speaks a most helpful and, I would say, powerful, word on behalf of the Christian strength of weakness, of the "self-emptying Jesus," of believers "unsure of themselves, groping for a few glimpses of truth to hold onto."

On the other hand, Berger has no response to make to Gauchet's central argument about the self-inflicted disappearance of Christianity as a formative social reality. None of the above should imply that I think there are no replies to be made to Gauchet, perhaps even on his own ground, but it is to say that I, for one, cannot think of any. More to the point, I especially think no effective reply will be made by readers who ignore the gravamen of Gauchet's analysis. The functional approach to religion may not be the last word, but, in the Frenchman's hands, it is a profound analysis, dangerous to ignore, misunderstand, or underrate. When Gauchet writes that "it is not the reality of [the religion] phenomenon that is in question, but its nature and role"; we must not permit our relief at the former part of the statement to make us forget the power of the latter, "nature and role."

On that thought, and in closing, we might do well to ponder some big words by Henri de Lubac, S.J., a most orthodox thinker (except when he was not). During the Second World War, the future cardinal found time and reason to ponder an even greater atheist than Marcel Gauchet - indeed an "anti-theist": Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the mid-nineteenth century socialist thinker whom Karl Marx strongly disapproved of.(4) The more business-like and academic Gauchet displays none of Proudhon's anger and unrelenting, tormented fascination with Christianity. Lubac was in turn fascinated by Proudhon's torment and fascination.

Lubac isolates one observation of Proudhon's: "A religion's hour has come when a troubled conscience puts to itself the question, not whether that religion is true: doubts about dogma are not sufficient for the down-fall of a religion; - nor whether it needs to be reformed: reforms in matters of faith are proof of religious vitality; - but whether, that religion, so long reputed to be the protector and the mainstay of morals, is equal to its task, or what I might put in other words, whether it really has a moral code." And Lubac writes - not without some fear and trembling, one suspects - "That objection is the only one, it seems to me, which is worth anything. It is the only one which gets to the bottom of things."

The Jesuit, I submit, 'got it,' and unless that hard lesson of Proudhon's, now Gauchet's, is truly assimilated, then the sorts of confessions and disclaimers proffered by a Glynn sound - to me, anyway - like a dead person's insisting, "well, my finger nails are still growing." I, too, love the Hopkins line Neuhaus quoted (above), but I would suggest that Wallace Stevens is a poet the modern believer might also profitably contemplate: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing other." Joseph Schumpeter, the Harvard economist, put the thought with more prosaic eloquence: "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian."

I would like to thank Peter Ochs, Vincent Curcio, Patrick Jordan, and Paul Bauman for their suggestions.

Notes

1. Translated by Oscar Burge. Published as Le desenchantement du monde, une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). Gauchet is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

2. Favorably reviewing God: The Evidence for First Things, Edward Oakes, S.J. nevertheless concedes he is made uncomfortable by Glynn's "feel good" arguments in favor of the religion of Christ. Granting similarities more apparent than real between Glynn and Pascal, Oakes adds mordantly, "we must be content with the apologists our age deserves."

3. Berger asks, "How long can institutions based on an alleged certainty survive in the pluralistic situation that constantly challenges that certainty?" Thinking, perhaps, of a Glynn, he replies, "I think the answer must be that they too can survive - and perhaps for a long time, but with very great difficulty."

4. The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon. Translated by R. E. Scantlebury. London: Sheed & Ward, 1948. Re-issued by Octagon Books, 1978. The book originally appeared in 1945 (Seuil) as Proudhon et le christianisme. See also Philip Rieff, "A Jesuit Looks at Proudhon: Competition in Damnation," The Modern Review 3, no. 2 (January 1950): 166-71.

STEVEN ENGLUND is completing a study of the political significance of the idea of "La Nation" in French history.