Seculosity

How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

David Zahl, David Zahl

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781506449432
• eBook ISBN: 9781506449449
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Being enough is a universal longing.

Seculosity makes the case that being religious is alive and well in modern society. While American organized religion may be declining, the desire to fill the void with everyday life pursuits is another form of worship. David Zahl describes his life as having one foot in the religious and secular worlds, a claim his biography justifies and states "the marketplace in replacement religion is booming." At the heart of our society lies a universal yearning not to be happy so much as to be enough. To fill the emptiness left by religion, humans look to all sorts of activities -- food, family, relationships, social media, elections, social justice movements -- for identity, purpose, and meaning once provided by organized religion.

In our striving, we chase a sense of enoughness. But it remains out of reach. Human effort and striving is causing burn out, depression, and anxiety. Even our leisure activities, such as dating and movie watching, become to-do list items and once accomplished we'll hope to feel contentment with ourselves.

Seculosity takes a thoughtful yet light-hearted tour of "performancism" and its cousins. Performancism is "one of the hallmarks of seculosity, " affecting how we approach everyday life. It cripples us with anxiety (Am I enough?), shame (Do they think I'm enough?), and guilt (Have I done enough?). Performance-based living while admirable will only leave us worn out because when is enough, enough?

Zahl challenges the conventional narrative of religious decline claiming society has become religious about busyness and accomplishments. Zahl unmasks the competing loyalties our lives revolve around in a way that is approachable, personal, and accurate. Eventually, Zahl brings readers to a fresh appreciation for grace -- the grace of God in all its countercultural wonder.

THE SECULOSITY OF POLITICS

I’m. In. Loooooove,” announces Elaine Benes just as Jerry Seinfeld opens the door to his apartment in a classic scene from the sitcom that bore his last name. Elaine bounds in, giddy to the point of bouncing, telling her friend, “This is it, Jerry. He’s such an incredible person. He’s real, he’s honest, he’s unpretentious. I’m so lucky!”

“Uh huh,” Jerry responds, in typically detached fashion. “And what’s his stand on . . . abortion?” By this point Elaine is seated on the couch, applying some lipstick. The second the A-word comes out of Jerry’s mouth, she smears the lipstick all over her face, body language instantly seizing up.

After a moment’s shock, she ventures hopefully, “Well, I’m sure he’s pro-choice.”

“How do you know?” Jerry asks.

“Because he, well. He’s just so good-looking,” Elaine offers, unconvincingly.

You can guess what happens next. Elaine and her new boyfriend find themselves on opposing sides of a Big Issue about which they both feel strongly. Crushed, she breaks off the relationship, cursing Jerry for prodding while knowing she cannot be with someone who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with her on Roe v. Wade.

The writers play the situation for laughs, but little did they know how prophetic the scene would prove. When it was filmed in the nineties, the idea that politics could be such a clear and immediate deal-breaker between potential (soul)mates still seemed funny. It’s not that people then didn’t disagree fervently over such matters, just that Elaine’s single-mindedness was ­comical—another example of the characters in that show sabotaging their chances at love.

What once looked like exaggeration has become the new normal. According to every metric available, our society has never been more divided by politics. We are less likely than ever before to have friends who vote differently from us, and more likely to choose where we live based on how our neighbors vote. In the late 1950s, when American parents were asked how they would feel if their child were to marry someone from another political party, fewer than 10 percent indicated that it would be a problem for them. In 2010, that number had more than quadrupled to roughly 40 percent.^[1] God only knows what it would be today.

This makes sense when you consider that reports of party-based antipathy more than doubled among both Democrats and Republicans between 1994 and 2014. At the same time, the average Republican has moved to the right, ideologically, and the average Democrat to the left, leaving an ever-waning number of people with moderate or mixed political views.^[2]

Nothing about this should come as a shock. Politics is well on its way to becoming the most entrenched and impermeable social divide in America, surpassing religion, income bracket, and even race. Each passing year we retreat further into ideological echo chambers.

With the possible exception of career, politics has become today’s most popular replacement religion, certainly the one with the most forward momentum and cultural currency. For many, its substitution for Religion has been seamless, hardly even noticeable.

I was wearing plastic fangs and white face-paint when this hit home for me.

In the university town where my family and I live, rallies, protests, and fundraisers, usually of the left-leaning variety, are commonplace. People care about the Issues and aren’t afraid to let their colors fly. While the displays occasionally induce some eye-rolling, it’s preferable to apathy or suppression.

Cut to Halloween 2016, less than two weeks before the presidential election. I’m dressed up as Dracula and trick-or-treaters are descending on our neighborhood in droves, as they do every year. Kids are parading in the street, mine included, shouting and carrying on as house after house fills their bags with candy.

All the houses but one. Of the sixty or so homes in our immediate vicinity, about fifteen boasted election-related signs out front. Yet only a single yard advocated Making America Great Again.

As we passed by that address, the adults in our crew exchanged knowing looks. Folks had been whispering about this place for weeks, scandalized. I watched as a few moms and dads steered their progeny onward. One of the kids who did venture up to the door asked the owners if there was something wrong with them.

The election results would reveal that our neighbor’s political views did not lie outside the mainstream. Yet for all intents and purposes, their house was haunted. I felt like I was in a black-and-white Christmas movie, and we were shuffling past the one house in town with a menorah out front. These people did not belong.

Even a Transylvanian could see the truth: if once upon a time we looked to politics primarily for governance, we now look to it for belonging, righteousness, meaning, and deliverance—in other words, all the things for which we used to rely on Religion.^[3] Understanding politics as an ersatz religion is the key not only to surviving our increasingly fractured world but finding compassion for those in its thrall, including ourselves.

A Disclaimer

It bears repeating that, like every target of seculosity, politics is a good and necessary part of life. After all, politics simply refers to systems of governance and the power dynamics inherent to them. The questions involved—for example, which laws to ratify and how to enforce them—deserve our sustained attention and care. They warrant our emotional investment as well. Lives often hang in the balance.

Not that we could expunge politics from our day-to-day if we wanted to. Some kind of political arrangement is necessary for humans to live together, even when it’s not formalized. The exercise of power cannot be avoided if you want to relate to other people, full stop.

I should know. When friends would talk politics in college, I usually maintained that I was apolitical. What I meant was that, when it came to the GOP versus DNC, Republican versus Democrat, I was indifferent. Sounds sacrilegious today, and maybe those were tamer times, but I could see pluses and minuses to both parties’ positions—and a whole lot of similarities. The mechanics of policy-making didn’t captivate me, and I was happy to leave the nitty gritty to others and keep my energy focused on finding a girlfriend.

I no longer say that. Not because I’ve had some radical political awakening, but because common usage of the word has shifted—a measure, incidentally, of just how much the seculosity of politics has spread in recent years. Today, to claim that you’re apolitical means that you believe yourself to be a person whose life isn’t informed and shaped by power dynamics—thus revealing that you benefit from those power dynamics to the extent that you’re not aware of them. In this current sense, no one is apolitical, in the same way that no one is a-cultural or a-religious. If you are alive, you are those things—the only question is how.

When the question of political leaning comes my way nowadays, I mutter something about being “nonpartisan” and wait for the subject to change. It can be pretty uncomfortable, not unlike telling a Christian you don’t believe in God.

Politics and religion have always been close, if uneasy, cousins. Growing up in the 1980s, I associated religion with the conservative side of the political spectrum. Movements like the Moral Majority and the Religious Right explicitly tied party affiliation to faith. Good Christians vote Republican, and all that. The whole thing could not have miscarried more completely, especially when it came to the next generation(s). I’d wager that a disproportionate number of those now on the radical left grew up Baptist.

Then a few years went by and it became clear that the American right didn’t have a monopoly on religiosity in politics. Perhaps it was hearing about the French Revolution in high-school history class and my jaw dropping open when we came to the section on the Cult of the Supreme Being that Robespierre set up to quicken de-Christianization in nineteenth-century France. Or it could have been studying World War II in college and stumbling across pictures of worship services held by the so-called German Christians, in which Nazi flags flanked church altars. Or maybe the revelation came during a procrastination session at the office googling Soviet propaganda and seeing the extent to which the Bolsheviks borrowed religious symbolism and rhetoric. Then again, it was probably a natural result of watching the election cycle enough times to weary of people projecting messianic hopes onto some poor soul who cannot possibly bear the weight.

Politicians throughout history, from both ends of the ideological spectrum, have made conscious efforts to channel religious devotion into nationalistic fervor as a means of consolidating power. Just as often, a desperate populace has done the work for them. Our current form of seculosity has a slightly different makeup, though. It’s no longer the nation-state cast as higher power, or a certain leader enshrined as holy, but politics itself.

The seculosity of politics is what happens when the political becomes not one lens among many for understanding the world (e.g., the metaphysical, the psychological, the spiritual) but the only one. Or the only one that matters.

Exactly what accounts for this engulfing, I’m not sure. My pet theory is that political commitment, especially on the left, has become a measure of moral character in the way that religious devotion used to be. Doubtless it also reflects a failure of other stories to captivate the popular imagination, the decline of Religion most of all. Regardless of how we’ve gotten here, the end result is a world in which everything is politicized. Not just how you vote, but how you shop, how you eat, how you socialize, how you vacation, and even how you worship. While it’s possible to ascribe power dynamics to each one of these pursuits (and draw out their broader social implications), the suggestion that there are plenty of other ways of explaining human behavior besides politics, some of them potentially more profound, seems increasingly, well, heretical.

I remember speaking about this to a literature professor at a prestigious college. She said that in her three decades of teaching, the level of political engagement on campus had never been higher than post-2016. Much of this she saw as laudable and even exciting. Sure, she fessed to teaching a few overzealous kids who saw it as their mission to police their instructors’ political convictions, but most of those reports, she insisted, were overblown. The apathy of the previous generation had gone the way of the rotary telephone and along with it, the debilitating inwardness of slackerdom. Today, passion rules. Ideas matter. Activism is the name of the game.

The main challenge at present, she told me, was encouraging her students to think in terms other than those of power—to allow a text to speak about its own concerns, rather than sift it through a preexisting ideology; to sit below it and learn, rather than above it and judge. She felt like she’d succeeded at the end of the semester if she’d given her students another language—any other—to speak in addition to that of oppressors and victims. Easier said than done.

When a Story Isn’t Just a Story

Let’s back up. There’s a good reason why people avoid talking about politics and religion at parties, and it’s not just that both subjects evoke strong emotions, which they do. We avoid talking about religion and politics in social settings for the same reason they make such frequent bedfellows. Both religion and politics traffic in all-encompassing narratives. Both attempt to make sense of, well, everything—not just the way things are but the way things should be, the way we are and should be, the whys and the wherefores and the so-what’s. It’s the opposite of relaxing territory, conversation-wise. If you want to make a good impression, probably best to stick to less ambitious topics like HGTV marathons or why no one drives stick-shift anymore.

It’s worth dwelling on this word narrative for a moment. Someone once called us a storytelling species, and you can see why. Just think of how we spend our free time—reading the news, (binge-)watching TV, or speculating about our favorite sports team’s chances this year. These are all ways of consuming and participating in stories. The same goes for our emotional lives. It’s virtually impossible to talk about ourselves or the world without crafting some kind of narrative, usually one of progress and improvement but sometimes one of shame and defeat. Maybe our capacity for telling stories is what separates us from the animals. Who knows?

Yet the stories we tell are never just stories.

No one has done more in recent years to understand our narrative obsession—both the benefits and blind spots—than moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his aptly titled book The Righteous Mind, he lays out something he calls Moral Foundations Theory.

According to Haidt’s research, the human psyche instinctually seeks righteousness. And the righteousness we seek can be categorized according to six different foundations, which he likens to “moral taste-buds”: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• The Seculosity of Busyness
• The Seculosity of Romance
• The Seculosity of Parenting
• The Seculosity of Technology
• The Seculosity of Work
• The Seculosity of Leisure
• The Seculosity of Food
• The Seculosity of Politics
• The Seculosity of Jesusland
• Conclusion: What to “Do” about It
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes