From Sacred To Secular

The Parricidal Nature of Therapeutic Secularism - Pt. 2

---

In the first post of this series, I shared a lengthy excerpt by Gen Z blogger, Nia Cherie, as a representative example of the kind of activism I am addressing when I asserted that Millennials and Gen Zs have, collectively, brought cancel culture home and are committing symbolic parricide by ousting their parents from their lives despite the fact that, collectively, their parents are not any worse than parents have been, historically.

The overarching assertion that is guiding this series is that any perceived moral ascent on the part of the aforementioned younger generations is largely the result of the development of the modern therapeutic self and the psychiatrization and concept creep that has accompanied it. Add to that the secular influence on parenting methods that is now pervasive among Christians, along with the increased access to social communication and we have the kind of tribal ritual intended to enhance cohesion and solidarity within peer groups, a ritual sociologist Emile Durkheim calls “the collective punishment of deviance.” 

In order to prove my thesis, I first need to establish the predominance of the modern therapeutic self by mapping out its complex development in the simplest terms possible. I had hoped to accomplish this task in one post, but it seems too much to ask of readers given its complexity and the present medium. As a result, I am forced to limit my treatment of the matter in this post to the larger cultural shift from sacred to secular.

As this history is a long and complicated one, I would ask you for illustrative purposes, to consider these causes in terms of tributaries which feed various creeks, which in turn feed the larger rivers, which eventually flow into respective lakes, seas, and oceans. The tributaries are at first small and obscure but as the waters merge, they gradually increase in volume and velocity until we reach the turbulent waters of the modern obsession with ourselves (i.e., safe spaces, “my truth,” trigger warnings, “I’m a victim; you’re an oppressor” narratives, etc.).

The most obvious tributary then is Western culture’s move from a sacred order to a secular order. Feeding that tributary is the more subtle shift from a mimetic to a poietic understanding of the self beginning around the Age of Enlightenment. The third tributary is downstream from the second but gains its momentum from the first. This tributary is psychiatrization and the resultant concept creep.

Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret, Rembrandt, 1634

Three Cultural Orders

The American socialist, Philip Rieff, discusses the culture’s shift from a sacred to a secular order in terms of first, second, and third world. But we shouldn’t confuse these categories with the economic categories by the same name. They refer to the way cultures derive their moral authority. Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, discusses the same shifts in terms of frames. Regardless of the terms we choose to use, the concepts are synonymous and work as follows.

Prior to the modern age, cultures were characterized by transcendence. By and large, they believed the cosmos was supernatural and “stood under the authority of a reality that transcended its mere material existence.”¹ But ever since Rene Descartes, the culture of the modern world derives its authority from nature (i.e., naturalism as opposed to supernaturalism), ultimately the self. Modern culture is, therefore, self-referential because it no longer derives its authority from transcendent authorities. 

To unpack this a bit further, Rieff explains that the first world orders were pre-Christian and pagan. These cultures rooted their laws and moral codes in the transcendent—the gods. All authority was based on fate and their belief in myths. An oracle from Delphi, for example, was considered gospel; and, Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido and subsequent founding of Rome by colonizing Lavinium was righteous and justified because the gods had determined it.

The second world order was when the culture moved from fate and myths to faith in the true myth, Christ. With the advent of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ, Western culture’s laws and moral codes were now based on God’s will as revealed in the holy Scriptures. What is significant is the fact that both first and second worlds have a shared cultural stability because they have laws and moral codes whose foundations rest in something beyond themselves. 

The third world orders are manifestly different, however. In stark contrast to first and second world cultures, third world cultures do not root their laws and moral codes in something transcendent. Rather, they ground them in themselves. They are their own source of authority. Morality is self referential and rooted in hierarchies of power.

As Carl Trueman notes, in this order “the command ceases to have authority when the hierarchy it presupposes ceases to have authority.”² For example, young children obey their parents because they recognize them as occupying a rightful place in the hierarchy of authority. But, when they start reaching the age of adulthood and begin to challenge their parents’ authority, there is no higher authority for which to appeal. Instead, moral codes can only be implemented and enforced by a will to power.

Charles Taylor calls this third world order the immanent frame. Because this world is all there is, morality and law cannot find any foundation or justification for its authority beyond itself. It must operate inherently, from within its own authority and power. “Because I said so!” is authority enough—at least until someone stronger (or someone who can leverage another’s coercive power) challenges that authority and says, “Because I said so!”

Catastrophe for Culture

Rieff sees this shift from first and second world orders to third world orders as catastrophically significant because it leads to “distinct and damaging cultural pathologies.”³ A culture whose moral and ethical codes are rooted in the sacred have a consistent logic to them because all are subject to a higher objective authority. But immanent frames or third world cultures which ground their ethics in nature or pragmatism are democratically subjective, and thus “profoundly volatile, subject to confusion, and liable to collapse.”⁴ 

Lest we doubt the gravity of Rieff’s contention that the change from first and second world orders to a third world order is as catastrophic as he claims, consider C. S. Lewis’s assessment of this same shift. In his noted lecture, “De Descriptione Temporum,” he postulates:

The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three-the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them simply as cultural changes. When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.⁵

For Lewis, in terms of effect, there was no more significant shift in history than the periods between Jane Austen’s time and his own. He referred to the earlier period as Old Western culture and believed the chasm between it and modernity, or what he deemed post-Christian culture, was the widest in all of history. Yet, in terms of cause, the actual shift he believed came a bit earlier, although more obscurely, with “the dominance of Descartes.” He explains,

Indeed, if we were considering the history of thought (in the narrower sense of the word) I believe this is where I would draw my line. But if we are considering the history of our culture in general, it is a different matter. Certainly the sciences then began to advance with a firmer and more rapid tread. To that advance nearly all the later, and (in my mind) vaster, changes can be traced. But the effects were delayed. The sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man’s blood.⁶

Lewis sees the actual historical shift taking place following Descartes who was the first to psychologize reality by hypothesizing the truth about what can be known (i.e., epistemology) beginning with himself. A final quote from Lewis will help emphasize the unique gravity and permanence of this seismic shift from the sacred order to the secular.

In response to hearing talk that Europe was becoming more pagan, Lewis finds it necessary to correct what might just be the sloppy language of the common man but a consequential misunderstanding nonetheless. He says,

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiah’s, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are ‘relapsing into Paganism.’ It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity ‘by the same door as in she went’ and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.⁷

Modern man, as it were, is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past because he is cut off from the knowledge of the transcendent. He has neither means nor categories of thought for comprehending the supernatural. Another way of saying this is he has been disenchanted. His whole way of understanding reality and, subsequently, himself and the moral codes that guide his life is now rooted in nature, his own feelings. Carl Trueman summarizes this point well when he writes,

These third-world cultures are really just therapeutic cultures, the cultures of psychological man: the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling… cultures of the third world / immanent frame are preoccupied with the self-actualization and fulfillment of the individual because there is no greater purpose that can be justified in any ultimately authoritative sense.⁸ 

Individualism and the Foundation of Identity Politics

In sum, I have demonstrated modern man now has no discernment of a logical framework for ethics derived from a higher and objective authority. Without this cultural framework, there can be no sensus communis. Thus, he cannot participate in rational public discourse; nor, can he adequately function as a member of a larger community, like that of the family or the state, whose individuals likewise derive their moral codes from their own feelings.

All morality is now subjective, internally contrived, and willed into power by way of a social contract derived from the “common will” of the group. And to establish such a contract in the greater culture, we are relegated to the tribes who share our feelings on various issues; thus, the birth of identity politics. The question that now remains is what brought about this seismic shift? In my next post, I’ll attempt to explain how the philosophy of René Descartes and psychiatry of Sigmund Freud (along with others) brought about a shift from a mimetic to a poietic understanding of the self, and finally the psychiatrization and its inevitable resulting concept creep. 

To understand these factors is to understand why today’s young adults are, collectively, “divorcing” their parents at a higher rate than ever, demanding “safe spaces” on college campuses, and “canceling” people with whom they disagree or whose views they consider offensive, demonizing all dissenters of their feelings as toxic or narcissistic.

1. Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 77.

2. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 76.

3. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 77-78.

4. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 78.

5. C. S. Lewis and Walter Hooper, “De Descriptione Temporum,” essay, in Selected Literary Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–14, 4.

6. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 7.

7. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 10.

8. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 79-80.