Secular Society Isn't

The Myth of Disenchantment

The secular West didn't eliminate religion. It just 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 (mandatory trainings), and heresies that will get you excommunicated. The company town never died. It just learned to speak the language of wellness and personal growth.

This isn't a critique of any particular ideology. It's an observation about human nature. We can't help ourselves. Give people enough time and they'll construct elaborate systems of meaning, complete with saints and sinners, sacred and profane, orthodoxy and heresy. The question was never whether this would happen. The question was what form it would take.

Sacred Objects Everywhere

Consider how people treat certain symbols. Flags. Logos. Credentials hanging on office walls. The reaction to desecrating these objects (the visceral offense, the demand for apology) is not rational cost-benefit analysis. That's the response to sacrilege.

And that's fine. Probably.

Humans need sacred objects. They orient us. They 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. This creates 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 a evolved preference, they often don't recognize these as faith claims. They're just "following the science."

The Cathedral Has Many Rooms

There's a reason people keep using religious metaphors to describe institutions. The phrase "the cathedral" to describe the interconnected world of elite media, academia, and nonprofits isn't just polemic. It captures something real about how these institutions function: 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. The tenure process is a kind of ordination. And woe unto the academic who questions the wrong fundamental assumption. Their fate won't be burning at the stake (we're civilized now), but professional marginalization works almost as well.

But wait, you might say. Isn't this just how institutions work? People with shared values naturally congregate and enforce norms. What makes this specifically religious?

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, and 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. The claim that they possess equal moral worth is metaphysical. It's 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, a moral arc. This is essentially theological thinking dressed in secular vocabulary. It assumes the universe has a moral structure that will inevitably assert itself. That's 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. The track record of credentialed predictions (from population bombs to dietary guidelines to pandemic models) would humble anyone who took the track record seriously. But 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. Other disagreements trigger moral outrage disproportionate to the actual stakes. The latter category 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 emotional 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. The goal isn't to refute the heretic's arguments. It's to make an example. To remind everyone else what the boundaries are.

The Virtue of Honesty

None of this is an argument against secularism per se, 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 as such. Examine them. Ask where they came from. Consider whether they're serving you well. Don't hide behind false claims of neutrality or rationality.

The religious person who knows they're operating from faith is in some ways better positioned than the secular person who believes they've transcended faith entirely. At least the religious person has a framework for examining their commitments. They can ask "is this what my tradition actually teaches?" The secular person, convinced they have 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 does change the conversation. It levels the playing field. It means nobody gets to claim the high ground of pure reason against the superstition of faith. We're all working from faith commitments of some kind. We're all part of communities that enforce orthodoxy through social pressure. We're all capable of treating our beliefs as sacred and reacting to challenges with the fury of the faithful.

The sooner we admit this, the more productive our disagreements can be. We might actually argue about the merits of different sacred values rather than pretending some of us have them and others don't.

Secular society isn't. It never was. It never could be. The question isn't whether we have religion; it's whether we have good religion.

And that's a question worth taking seriously.