Secularity and religiosity as a human condition

"Those who contribute to the secularization narrative with a kind of pessimism from an Islamist or conservative perspective are also not, in my view, doing the right thing," we had said. Indeed, such discourses end up, strangely, making an important contribution to secularization's presenting itself as the triumphant ideology of the end of history. Yet their starting point may be conservative: the protection of religion against secularist attacks, the awakening of a consciousness among the religious. But in doing so they do not even notice that they are looking through a secularism-centered window of history and reality.

The state of consciousness that the secularization thesis in any case tries to instill is that religion will eventually withdraw and, in its place, man, with his reason, will and values, will sit at the center of everything. To set man against religion and God in this way is of course a distinct form of mental deviation, and believe me it is not at all new, and not a form of deviation that will wholly dominate the world.

The victory drums that the secularization thesis beats, with the lifestyles it spreads to the world, with its capitalism, its consumer culture, or its superstitions that ultimately lead to idolatry, may also be seen as nothing but the whisperings through which the religion of shirk has always expressed itself since humanity came into being.

Warning people, the religious above all, not to be immersed in the world, giving sermons and counsel, is in any case the most important job of religious discourse.

But to fall into a panic of "religion is slipping away" while doing so reflects, when seen from the understanding the Qur'an inculcates, a futile state of mind

. From the standpoint of the Qur'an's account, religion is God's religion, and it is He who protects it. Whoever follows it has protected himself and saved himself.

From here, the flailing of the secular person and his claims of self-sufficiency present a distinct scene, as helpless and wretched examples of servitude to man displayed throughout human history.

Indeed, there are also very valuable studies showing that the claim of a secular age, or

the secularization thesis, is not factually true

sociologically.

Studies of

Peter L. Berger

and

Thomas Luckmann

that show, even in the periods said to be the most secular the world has lived through, that not such a thing but on the contrary a religious revival had developed, and moreover in the case of Europe, are of this kind

. Berger and Luckmann

even say that Christianity in Europe lived its real golden age in the modern period. The limits and discourses of religiosity valid especially in rural areas in the Middle Ages, when religiosity is assumed to have been more dominant, were nothing but a vague paganism, and with urbanization more bookish forms of religiosity came into play through Church organizations.

The book titled The Nature of Religion by

David Hume

, one of the famous thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, sets out a model working on a cyclical basis, far more explanatory against the thesis that secularization is in an evolutionary development against religiosity, or monotheism against polytheism. In the Age of Enlightenment, when secular values climbed to their peak, this framework, contrary to the generally accepted approach, frees from an evolutionary approach both the movement within religion itself from monotheism to polytheism and back, and the line of development between the secular and the religious in history.

In contrast to the evolutionary positivist approach as the dominant paradigm in the field of the history of religions, Hume, much earlier, describes transitions both among religions and within each religion from polytheism (superstition) to monotheism (bookishness) and from there back to polytheism. This mobility allows us to discern a change, in the form of a kind of pendulum model, among the tendencies in the history of religions.

The developments or discourses recorded in our age as a move away from religiosity are actions and discourses that have existed together with religious discourse since the first human, in conflict and argument with it. From time to time one has prevailed over the other and gained a relative superiority.

But in no period of the world has one completely destroyed the other

.

Because both the desire for secularity and the desire for religiosity are two basic tendencies existing within the human being

.

These two tendencies

sometimes within a society

go back and forth between themselves like a pendulum. Visible movements of becoming religious or moving away from religion are seen in society. But these occur within a society as historical waves. It is not possible to detect here an evolutionary movement in favor of one.

Sometimes

within a religion itself

a movement of worldliness-otherworldliness develops in favor of one and against the other. Then religion, without being internalized, is simply instrumentalized entirely in line with worldly tendencies and purposes. That is, instead of heeding religion's call to salvation and changing himself, man bends religion to his worldly interests, distorts it, and subordinates religion to himself.

And sometimes

within an individual

a movement toward becoming religious or worldly can be observed. A person is not always in the same state of mind, the same approach. A person immersed in the world one day may, the next day or an hour later, turn to a religious state under the influence of an event he experienced, news he received, something he saw, a message he read. This turning may take the form of a repentance or a rebirth experience. The exact opposite can also happen. A person may move away from the feeling that he lives entirely under divine supervision, with the sense that one day he will give an account of everything he has done, and incline toward the world.

In all these cases, to see that there are transitions that can be called universal between the secularity and the religiosity of the person, of society, or of religion itself, it is enough merely to be human

. Because throughout history and in every part of the world every human being and community experiences, and has experienced, these transitions. There is no evolutionary line among these transitions; there are manifestations of a human condition that constantly repeats itself. Moreover, we must pay attention to the fact that the very ground on which secularity turns into an ideology, is expressed as a claim and a belief, is also entirely the ground of religion.

We are in any case no strangers to those who, while expressing their own secularity (laiklik), express almost the excitement of belonging to a religion or a community of believers.

Against all this, the claim of a Secular Age is nothing but a wretched cry raised from a secular front in an eternal fight that already exists.

For those who look from a religious perspective, God will in the end perfect His light.