Secular: Concerning the Here and Now

By Harry T. Cook

The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rome (Italy) -- known as the pope -- came to America a week ago and said, among other things, that being "secular" is bad for us.

He's worried, he says, about the separation of "faith from life ... we need to reassess urgently the values and underpinnings of society, so that a sound moral formation can be offered to young people and adults alike."

If I am not mistaken, the underlying theme of those remarks is that you can't have morality apart from religion. The conventional Catholic position is that you can't have a meaningful moral structure apart from adherence to a theistic philosophy based on the person of Jesus Christ.

That must be news to the following persons and groups: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians and a whole host of unbelievers -- each and all of whom, especially if they live and have their being in the United States of America, are eminently free to reject everything the pope said. They can reject it out of hand; they can reject its thin and shaky intellectual argument; and they could, if they wished, present a mountain of evidence to the effect that you can, indeed, have a moral framework that has nothing whatsoever to do with organized religion and its usual theistic philosophical approach.

"Secular" -- what does the word actually mean? That which is "secular" is of the present world. The term, however, is almost always used in a pejorative manner. It is put in counter-position to "sacred," as if the two were opposites. They are not.

To be "secular" means being concerned with and giving one's intentions and energies to the here and now, because we are "here" and not in some mythical "there," and we are living "now" rather than in a past or future "then."

One of my enduring images of religion at work was the sight of saffron-robed Buddhist monks living among Cambodian and Laotian war refugees in a camp in eastern Thailand, which I visited in 1979. The camp was run by the International Red Cross in cooperation with a Lutheran mission group.

The Red Cross saw to the housing, feeding and medical treatment of the refugees; the Lutheran authorities dealt with the paperwork to get them out of the camps and into countries that would have them; the monks dealt with what I could only describe as the pastoral work that was as desperately needed as everything else.

Mostly the monks just sat in silence with the refugees, sharing their meager lot. I spotted one of them cradling an infant in the folds of his robe, smiling down at the little one out of the universe of his internal mystery.

There is little chance that any of the monks I saw in the camp were theists -- that is, believers in a transcendent deity of the human imagination, much less in a human avatar of that deity to whom worship must be offered.

What I witnessed, though, from boundary to boundary in that camp was a morality born of human concern for other human beings in a particular time and particular place. That phenomenon is known as "secular humanism," and its moral foundations are as sound as any of which the Roman Catholic Church or any theistic belief system can boast.

So I am secular and proud of it. I am a humanist and proud of that, too. I care about my fellow human beings in the here-and-now, inasmuch as I can do nothing for them in a there or a then. Is that my religion? If I have to have a religion, then, yes, that's it.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.