Letter From the Editor

Secularism and Its Discontents

NICK TABOR

When the Turkish government announced, in 2020, that it was converting the church of Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque, the news was a flashpoint in Orthodox circles. “I think all Orthodox people in the world grieve over Turkey’s decision,” Archpriest Serafim Gan, the chancellor of the ROCOR Synod of Bishops, told one journalist. The Assembly of Orthodox Canonical Bishops of the US said Turkey’s announcement denied “the universal vocation of this holy and sacred space,” and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOARCH) called for a “day of mourning.”

In the days following the announcement, the news inspired many paeans to Hagia Sophia itself, but it also spurred tributes to something else: the doctrine of secularism. The GOARCH statement praised the “secular ideal of inclusivity” that the Church of Holy Wisdom had long represented. By keeping the building religiously neutral, the statement said, Turkey had always signaled that it was “a secular state that valued the equality of all its citizens.”

It’s unusual to hear this kind of language from Orthodox bishops, or from religious leaders of almost any stripe. And yet it reflects an important truth. Secularism, in this context, is not a bugaboo that amounts to godless liberals enshrining atheism in public life. Rather, it’s a response to pluralism, a means of making sure people of different creeds and traditions can live together in harmony. For people who find themselves in a religious minority—as we see with the Christians in Turkey—secularism can be a refuge. We might even trace the entire project of secularism back to Christian ethics. It can be seen as an expression of respect for our neighbors, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Perhaps a better word for secularism, in this context, is laïcité. At one time it was the French term for “laity”; but in the late-nineteenth century, it came to refer to the separation of public institutions from the Catholic Church. In modern-day France, more than a century later, it describes a doctrine where religious expression is actively, even aggressively, banned in the public sphere. While this doctrine has no exact parallel in other countries, many people of all faiths, throughout the Western world—including the Orthodox—clearly hold to some version of it.

But if secularism, or laïcité, has its unlikely defenders, it also has its unlikely critics. One person who celebrated the Turkish government’s decision was Archimandrite John Manoussakis, a philosophy professor at the College of the Holy Cross. If Hagia Sophia could not be restored to its status as “a place of worship to the living God,” Manoussakis wrote, then it was better for it to “be used as a living place of worship to God than a mausoleum for the ghosts of the past.” The announcement represented “a victory for the polymorphous sacred,” he wrote, “over the monotonous secular laïcité.” 

I must admit that Manoussakis’s argument resonated with me personally. When I visited Hagia Sophia in 2018, after years of anticipation, I expected to feel overcome with awe; but instead, it seemed to me the church had been reduced to a crass tourist attraction. It was hard to take a step in any direction without walking in front of someone who was posing for a photo. I couldn’t help but think that if Hagia Sophia were a mosque, at least more visitors would have treated it with respect. For his part, Archbishop Elpidophoros, of GOARCH, also made it clear in a 2021 statement that he did not see secular status as the endgame. For Hagia Sophia to remain a museum, he said, would be “less than any of us would desire.”

This is all to say that secularism, in the sense of laïcité, has both values and limitations—and that Orthodox Christians, perhaps more than most faith groups, have a complicated relationship with it. Our church has extensive experience on both sides of the power equation. In our historical memory, we know what it is to be ensconced as the official state religion, and to have our interests bound up with those of an imperial government; and we know equally well what it is to be marginalized and persecuted. And in the US, where Protestantism is the dominant faith, the freedom we enjoy as Orthodox owes as much to secularism as it does to the primacy of Christianity.

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However, any serious treatment of secularism and the secular has to go beyond laïcite. Here we might take a lesson from the Canadian writer Charles Taylor. His 2007 book A Secular Age, a mind-expanding blend of history, sociology, and philosophy, has done more than any other text to define the ways we talk about secularism and the secular. (Many readers who find its 874 pages too daunting have benefited instead from Jamie Smith’s well-regarded CliffsNotes version, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.)

As Taylor explains, the term “secular” originally referred to chronological time—as opposed to liturgical, or sacred time. It comes from “saeculum,” the Latin for “century” or “age.” Secular time is what we think of as ordinary time; “indeed, to us it’s just time, period,” Taylor writes. “One thing happens after another, and when something is past, it’s past.” This, as opposed to higher time, or God’s time, which has its conceptual basis in ancient philosophy, and in Christianity is represented by the liturgical year. Higher times, Taylor writes, “gather and re-order secular time.” According to their logic, “Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997,” Taylor writes. Gradually, during the Middle Ages, the term “secular” was expanded to describe every part of human life that wasn’t directly associated with the church. Farming and household labor were secular; reading the Psalter in church was sacred. (In this sense, evangelicals, with their distinction between “secular” and “Christian” pop music, are using the term correctly.) But even though Christianity gave rise to this language, Christian theology has also always challenged any binary opposition between the earthly and the sacred. The world is charged, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said, with the grandeur of God; and every part of our lives has a spiritual dimension. Countless figures in our tradition have argued this point, from St. Anthony the Great up to Fr. Alexander Schmemann. As Fr. Alexander famously argued in For the Life of the World, when Christians set out for church on Sunday mornings, “whether they have to drive fifteen miles or walk a few blocks, a sacramental act is already taking place.”

At the same time, the secular/sacred binary has never completely gone away. There has always been an impulse, in Christian life, to withdraw from secular society. For examples, we need not limit ourselves to Christian-inspired cults, nor to the culture wars and their offshoots (such as the “Benedict option” now being promoted by the blogger Rod Dreher). Many of us practice a form of withdrawal during Great Lent, when we limit our media consumption so we can focus more intently on prayer; and part of our preparation for the Eucharist is the laying aside of all earthly cares. Monastics, historically, have committed to withdrawal as a lifestyle.⁠1 This paradox has been a constant in Christian history.

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This new issue of Jacob’s Well deals with secularism in both senses of the term. In the pages that follow, Aristotle Papanikolaou argues for a “Christian secularism,” a paradigm founded on the principle of hospitality toward others—including those of other faiths. Vasileios Thermos critiques the Orthodox “addiction” to what he calls another form of secularism, one borne in Byzantium. Cyril Hovorun—and building on his essay, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz—assess the culture wars as a product of secularism, wherein Christianity has allied itself “with its enemy—ideology” (as Hovorun writes), and examine the implications for church life. Jesse Hake reflects on what Western society has lost in the secular age, then draws on the example of Hagia Sophia to imagine what an ideal post-secular order might look like. And Sister Vassa Larin speaks about navigating the secular world in our spiritual lives. In a preview of her book in progress, she offers some practical advice about how Christians can sanctify ordinary time.

The front and back sections also have tributes to the recently deceased priests Leonid Kishkovsky and Sergei Glagolev; a beautiful reflection from Anastasia Farison on why young mothers should avoid the path of “self-abandonment” as they sacrifice for their kids; a pastoral note from David Bryan Wooten about practicing civility in our hyper-politicized age; two poems by Erik Osterberg; and more. 

Planning for this issue was already complete when Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine in late February, and since that time, there have been moments where it felt odd to be focusing on anything else. However, in a context like this one, the question of secularism could not be more relevant. Putin has, for years, tried to recover some version of symphonia, the Byzantine model of unity between church and state, and, in drawing on the shared religious history of Russia and Ukraine to justify the war, he has also received critical support from Russia’s head bishop, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. But Paul Gavrilyuk and Seraphim Danckaert, who have launched the organization Rebuild Ukraine, have a different understanding of Orthodoxy’s value in wartime.  They joined our assistant editor Amelia Antzoulatos for a conversation about the crisis and what it means for Orthodox Christians to work within their tradition—and without—to respond.