Reconciling religion, spirituality and secularity: on the post-secular and the question of human mortality

ABSTRACT

Societal and semantic changes are increasing the ambiguity between religion, spirituality and secularity. As a post-secular development, these changes suggest that the secular cannot be seen to reign supreme but needs to be treated as coexisting with the other categories. Changes in one would imply corresponding changes in the others. Yet it can also be argued that these changes underlie a common concern with the question of human mortality. If religion is ultimately concerned with death and the transcendental future, then its relation to spirituality and secularity would also elicit alternative ways of addressing the meaning of dying. The post-secular is not only a platform for deconstructing dichotomous categories but also for reviving the meaning of dying as central to these categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Mortality
• post-secular
• religion
• spirituality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hanegraaff, “New Age Spirituality as Secular Religion.”

2. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious.

3. Lee, Recognizing the Non-Religious.

4. See Martin, Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory and Bruce, Secularization: In Defense of an Unfashionable Theory.

5. For example, Berger, The Desecularization of the World; and Karpov, “Desecularization: A Conceptual Framework.”

6. Some of these works include Aupers and Houtman, “Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket”; Carrette and King, Selling Spirituality; Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution; Heelas, Spiritualities of Life; and McKian, Everyday Spirituality.

7. Molendijk, “In Pursuit of the Postsecular.”

8. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular.”

9. Mouzelis, “Modernity and the Secularization Debate.”

10. Beyer, “Sensing Religion, Observing Religion, Reconstructing Religion.” Also see Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity.

11. Arnal and McCutcheon, The Sacred is the Profane.

12. Houtman and Aupers, “The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition,” 315.

13. Molendijk, op. cit., 107.

14. Ibid., 101.

15. Ibid., 108.

16. Ibid., 105. Habermas’s position is found in ‘What is meant by a “Post-Secular Society”?’ Reference to changes in consciousness was also addressed by P. Berger in an earlier work (The Sacred Canopy, 108) as ‘the secularization of consciousness’.

17. See for example, Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air.

18. For a profound statement on this issue, see Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust; The modern denial of death is poignantly discussed in Becker, The Denial of Death.

19. The concept of transcendental future concerns people’s projection of their existence beyond the lifeworld and how it may come to influence their present behaviour (see Boyd and Zimbardo, “Constructing Time after Death”). In the present discussion, it represents the construal of human mortality not only as physical termination but also the continuity of the self in existences not defined by the conventional ideas of time and space.

20. Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, 131.

21. Ibid.

22. Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity, 162.

23. Mellor and Shilling, “Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death.” For a statement on the de-sequestration of death, see Lee, “Modernity, Mortality and Re-enchantment.”

24. Johnson and McGee, How Different Religions View Death and the Afterlife, 264.

25. A broad summary of different religious viewpoints concerning death and meanings of the transcendental future can be found in Hick, Death and Eternal Life.

26. The classic statement on the disappearance of grand narratives is found in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.

27. Davies, “Dying in the Judeo-Christian Tradition”, 238.

28. Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently.

29. Heidegger, Being and Time.

30. Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions, 46.

31. Unthinkable implies areas deemed improper or depicted as lacking in representation such as point zero.

32. The ways in which modern death is organizationally and ritually treated have been widely but not exhaustively researched. See for example Sudnow, Passing On; Glaser and Strauss, Time for Dying; Kaufman, And a Time to Die; and Noys, The Culture of Death.

33. Walter, Eclipse of Eternity, 192.

34. As discussed by Lee, “Consuming the Afterlife.”

35. See Heelas, The New Age Movement and Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture.

36. As argued by Huss, “Spirituality,” 51. However, spirituality can also be seen as complementary to religion in several complex ways such as being ‘both spiritual and religious’ (see Berghuijs, Pieper and Bakker, “Being ‘Spiritual’ and Being ‘Religious’ in Europe”).

37. See Bruce, op. cit., 112. He argues that spirituality cannot be disregarded as part of secularization because it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

38. Carrette and King, op. cit., 77.

39. See Lee, “Facing the Beyond.”

40. See Dunnett, Euthanasia: The Heart of the Matter.

41. See Lee, “The Reenchantment of Death.”

42. Karpov, op. cit., 247.

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Notes on contributors

Raymond L. M. Lee

Raymond L. M. Lee is a non-affiliated researcher of modernity and religion. He was previously Associate Professor in Anthropology & Sociology, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His previous works include Heaven in Transition (1988) and Sacred Tensions (1997), both dealing with religion, identity and change in Malaysia. His recent writings have appeared in Journal of Contemporary Religion, Culture and Religion and Social Compass.