What is new on the hedonism front of the reference of secularization?

In the sociological determination of the ebb and flow between secularization and religiosity, the differences between social practices and individual practices and intentions cause serious confusion. When the nature of the human condition called religiosity is not well grasped, sociological analyses of secularization also remain findings that amount to pounding water in a mortar. What makes the situation hard to understand is above all that analyses of secularization are perceived as a race between seculars and the religious. Yet the situation is far more complicated than that.

We have said before, in the tone of discourse of those who put forward the secularization thesis there is almost a prophetic heralding of a telos, an evolutionary course toward secularization. If we said that within this heralding there is also a latent religiosity, perhaps this could be attributed merely to irony.

Yet at the other end of this discourse, a serious doom-mongering to the effect that secularization has badly taken the religious under its influence can work to confirm the same prophetic prophecies. There is an outcry that can be summarized as: religion is slipping away, our youth are becoming atheist, becoming deist, drifting from religion, and even our religious people no longer leave room for religion to intervene in their lives and behavior as it used to, and this too flows into the stream of the secularization thesis.

The truth of the matter is a strangeness produced by reading the phenomenon of secularization as a process that humanity has never lived through before and is passing through for the first time. As is well known, human memory is afflicted with forgetfulness. Historiography, ironically, is the field that gets the greatest share of this affliction. History written in the light of today sees what it will see on the past only by holding up our present interests and tendencies, and remains blind and deaf to the rest. Thus it sees something like secularization, which has in fact always been the most ordinary and even the most widespread tendency in human history, as if it were being lived for the first time, as a development peculiar to today or an invention of humanity. Either admiration attributed to an event lived today turns into exaltation, or the dimensions of the anxieties caused by an event likewise lived today can make the event feel as though it is being experienced for the first time. It is entirely psychological, that is. So the psychology's influencing historiography and giving it direction turns out not to be a possibility to be dismissed at all.

Yet throughout history there has never been a time when humanity was not tried by secularization, that is, worldliness. For worldliness is one of the most fundamental attitudes of human existence. Today it can readily be observed that, compared with a certain past, with each passing day people leave less room for religion to intervene in their daily lives or political orders. This makes it very easy to determine a relative secularization. But this determination is not peculiar to today alone. The only thing that would allow us to say that in the past people were more religious than today is the visibility of some symbols or rituals attributed to religion in the past. If we can automatically take the visibility of those symbols and rituals as an indicator of religiosity too, then we can see that today far different rituals or cult symbols are penetrating humanity's life by the most modern means.

Perhaps we need to explain somehow that all the symbols, ceremonies or discourses of Kemalism, which can be seen as the steep slope of secularization, are entirely religious, that it is not at all far from the religious way of thinking of human beings. The "savior" role attributed to Atatürk and the power to resolve felt troubles express, in a way, the reincarnation of a killed religiosity in another language and content.

It should be noted that to say religiosity is effective in every situation is an approach far from sanctifying every kind of religiosity. As we have also said before, a more religious world does not mean a more peaceful world, or a world with which God is more pleased. The rising hatred of Islam in the world today and all the movements of savage violence directed at Muslims in every part of the world are all motivated by religiosity.

Many developments seen as secularization are in fact, in relation to certain religiosities, like a far different, rigid and pious, at times extremely bigoted expression of modern religiosities. The meaning that Francophone secularism attributes to science, evolution, school and other secular symbols, and the rituals and conceptions it shapes around this, all produce an extremely bigoted secular religiosity.

In our day, a pure hedonism removed from such rituals is pointed to as a picture or indicator of secularization. People's living a life that takes no account of religious or secular sacred things, for instance their paying no heed at all to religions' restrictions in relations between women and men, cohabitation without marriage, and homosexual relations, are taken as indicators of a secularization peculiar to our age. The spread of homosexual relations, which all ancient religions have prohibited, shows in a way that secularization has been more effective against them. But this too is not new, and does not show that the world will go on like this until its end. If homosexual relations are an indicator of this, then Sodom and Gomorrah, or the people of Lot, the people of Pompeii and so on must be counted as having traveled an even far longer distance in secularization than today. For in their time homosexuality had become the norm of those societies. It is not that past, traditional societies were always very religious and today's is secularized. Is not secularity always a dominant human tendency or attitude of existence anyway?

Meanwhile it must also be said that people's doing today, with a new interpretation of religion, things they considered unallowed and did not do yesterday, so long as they remain within the circle of religion, is not secularization. Within the Muslim circle there may be more open or more closed practices in relations between women and men. In extremely religious village settings communication between women and men can be much easier, whereas in the urban environment, where religiosity is felt less, there have been in the past far more rigid harem-and-selamlık practices.

Today, in urbanization and in new interpretations and practices of religiosity, different forms of communication cannot be taken as a definite indicator of a departure from religiosity or an increase in secularization. What is essential here is not that practices change, but that practices are carried out not in defiance of religion but with religion's approval, its direct or indirect confirmation.