Secular Society Isn't

The myth of disenchantment

Max Weber announced the "disenchantment of the world" in a 1917 lecture: modernity would strip the sacred out of everything and leave calculation in its place. Half of that happened. The secular West didn't eliminate religion. It rebranded it.

Walk into any major corporation and you'll find a belief system with all the trappings of organized religion. Sacred texts: mission statements, values documents. Clergy: HR, DEI consultants. Confession rituals in the form of mandatory trainings, and heresies that will get you excommunicated. The company town never died. It learned to speak the language of wellness and personal growth.

This is an observation about human nature, not a critique of any particular ideology. Give people enough time and they'll construct elaborate systems of meaning, complete with saints and sinners, the sacred and the profane. The question was never whether this would happen. The question was what form it would take.

Sacred objects everywhere

Durkheim spent The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) arguing that what makes religion religion isn't belief in gods — it's the division of the world into sacred and profane, and the collective fury when the line is crossed. Run his test on the present. Flags, logos, credentials hanging on office walls: the reaction to desecrating these objects, the visceral offense and the demand for apology, is not cost-benefit analysis. That's the response to sacrilege. Robert Bellah ran the same test on America in 1967 and found a full civil religion in working order — inaugural addresses as liturgy, the Constitution as scripture, the war dead as martyrs.

And that's fine. Probably.

Humans need sacred objects. They orient us and create shared meaning within communities. The problem isn't sacredness itself; it's the pretense that we've moved beyond it. Secular society maintains all the psychological infrastructure of religion while denying it has any such thing, which produces a peculiar blindness.

Religious people know they're operating from faith commitments. They've been told as much, constantly, by a culture that frames faith as the opposite of reason. But the secular materialist who believes human beings are merely biochemical machines, that consciousness is an illusion, that morality is an evolved preference, often doesn't recognize these as faith claims. He's just "following the science."

The cathedral has many rooms

There's a reason people keep reaching for religious metaphors to describe institutions. "The cathedral" — the phrase for the interconnected world of elite media, academia, and nonprofits — comes from Curtis Yarvin, whose politics I have no use for; the interesting thing is that the coinage escaped its author, because it names something people across the spectrum keep independently noticing: the shared assumptions, the informal enforcement of orthodoxy, the way careers advance or stall based on adherence to unwritten doctrines.

Universities have their own scholasticism. Peer review functions like the imprimatur, citation counts measure devotion, and the tenure process is a kind of ordination. Woe unto the academic who questions the wrong fundamental assumption. The fate won't be burning at the stake, since we're civilized now, but professional marginalization works almost as well.

The obvious objection: institutions with shared values always congregate and enforce norms. What makes this religious rather than just institutional?

The structure of the sacred

What makes something religious isn't supernatural belief. It's the structure.

A religious framework has certain features: claims about the nature of reality that resist empirical falsification, moral demands that go beyond reciprocity, rituals that reinforce group identity, mechanisms for identifying and punishing heresy. By this definition, plenty of "secular" belief systems qualify.

Take the question of human equality. This is treated as self-evident, a statement requiring no justification. But it's not empirically observable. Humans differ dramatically in every measurable attribute, and the claim that they possess equal moral worth is metaphysical. A faith commitment. A good one, probably, but a faith commitment nonetheless.

Or consider how people talk about history. The notion of "the right side of history" presupposes teleology, that history has a direction and a moral arc. This is theological thinking dressed in secular vocabulary. It assumes the universe has a moral structure that will inevitably assert itself, which is not far from divine providence.

The priests are real

Every society has a priestly class: people who interpret sacred texts, who mediate between ordinary life and transcendent values, who can grant or withhold legitimacy.

The credentialed expert functions as a kind of priest. This isn't anti-intellectualism. Expertise is real and valuable. But the authority granted to experts often exceeds their actual knowledge. When an economist opines on ethics, or a scientist pronounces on metaphysics, they're trading on priestly authority rather than genuine expertise. The lab coat is the new cassock.

And like priests, experts can be spectacularly wrong while remaining institutionally protected. Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1968 that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s; he kept his Stanford chair and his speaking fees for the next half century. Priestly authority doesn't derive from accuracy. It derives from position within a sacred hierarchy.

Heresy and blasphemy live on

Perhaps the clearest sign that secular society remains religious is how it handles dissent.

Disagreement comes in different flavors. Some disagreements are just disagreements, reasonable people weighing evidence differently. Others trigger moral outrage disproportionate to the actual stakes. The second kind is how you identify sacred beliefs.

Challenge conventional wisdom on certain topics and watch the reaction. It won't be "here's why you're wrong." It'll be "how dare you." The register shifts from debate to denunciation. You're not mistaken; you're dangerous, you're spreading harm. These are the language patterns of heresy trials, not academic conferences.

And the punishments, while less dramatic than historical religious persecution, follow the same logic. Social exile, professional destruction, being declared unfit for polite company. Refuting the heretic's arguments was never the goal; the example is the goal, a reminder to everyone else of where the boundaries are.

The virtue of honesty

None of this is an argument against secularism as such, or for traditional religion. Plenty of traditional religions have their own problems with corruption, abuse, and intellectual dishonesty.

The argument is simpler: be honest about what you're doing.

If you have sacred values, and you do, everyone does, acknowledge them. Examine them, ask where they came from, consider whether they're serving you well. Don't hide behind false claims of neutrality.

The religious person who knows they're operating from faith is better positioned than the secular person who believes he's transcended faith entirely. The religious person at least has a framework for examining his commitments. He can ask whether this is what his tradition actually teaches. The secular person, convinced he has no tradition, has no tools for self-examination.

What follows

Recognizing secular society as religious doesn't settle any substantive debates. It doesn't tell you what to believe about any particular question.

But it changes the terms. Nobody gets to claim the high ground of pure reason against the superstition of faith, because we're all working from faith commitments of some kind, all of us part of communities that enforce orthodoxy through social pressure and capable of reacting to a challenged belief with the fury of the faithful.

Admit that, and the disagreement gets more honest. We might argue about the merits of different sacred values rather than pretending some of us have them and others don't.

Secular society isn't, and never could be. Whether the religion we've actually got is any good — that one I can't answer, partly because a faith nobody will admit to holding is a faith nobody can examine.