Has the Western World Been Secularized?
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A farmer with many barns full of grain used to pray every day asking God to help the poor. But every time poor people asked him for help, he said he had nothing to give.
One day his son heard him pray again. When the prayer was done, he said:
“Father, I wish I had your grain.”
“And what would you do with the grain?”
“I would answer your prayer.”
The farmer did not mean what he prayed, in other words: his faith meant nothing to him in practice.
Secularization?
Usually it is assumed that the role of religion in the Western world has been greatly reduced in recent centuries. Far fewer people attend church and the influence of biblical teaching in everyday life has greatly diminished. The general opinion is that secularization has continued strongly in the 19th and 20th century. According to this view there once was a kind of ‘golden age of religion’. But was there ever such a ‘golden age of religion’ and has the western world become secularized since then?
Fighting for Religion?
Let’s take a brief look at the development of the church in the past centuries. It is understandable that the Reformers in the 16th and 17th centuries, as founders of a new religion, were very much concerned with the formulation of what they believed in, if only to oppose the Roman Catholic mother church.
This blog was written in a restaurant opposite the Martini kerk in Groningen (in the northern part of the Netherlands). In the early 17th century, this restaurant was the presbytery of the Groningen minister Gomarus. He conducted a heated discussion with his colleague Arminius about the dogma of predestination. Put simply, their difference of opinion involved the question whether people have any influence on their ‘election’ and salvation and whether we can do anything to deserve a place in heaven. Gomarus did not think so, Arminius claimed that people have their own responsibility. This was not just a (somewhat strange) semantic struggle. Literally, people were at each other’s throats and some were killed in street battles between supporters and opponents of the two preachers. Gomarus won. But in our time we no longer see that fierce involvement in faith matters in the Western world. In that respect the western world seems to have become secularized.
Mammon in power
But why was so much energy spent on this kind of struggle and why did people not put charity into practice? After all, not only in society as a whole, but also within Gomarus’ church, power had always rested with the rich. They appointed the clergy and they occupied the best places in church. In many old Dutch churches the so-called ‘herenbanken’ (usually elevated pews for the rich) still remind us of that period. Now they are part of our cultural heritage, but essentially they are the embodiment of the power of Mammon, the idol of money.
It was the rich who determined whether poor people received money from the church and on what conditions they were to receive it. There was no question of a society resembling the first Christian community in Jerusalem.
Those who said they believed in God had turned their religion into a system that oppressed people. The church did not call the rich and powerful into line. It led to enormous hypocrisy: those with pious words on their lips, pursued their own financial interests. Jesus preached that it was impossible to serve two masters: God and Mammon. In a church that serves Mammon, there cannot be real faith.
Conclusion
Already in ancient times, from the reign of the emperor Constantine, the Roman Catholic Church was part of the prevailing worldly culture of prestige and wealth. The Protestant churches were also secularized from the outset. This secularization was ingrained in the new religion, it was an essential part of it and therefore not a change that occurred in later centuries.
Christian churches have changed greatly since World War II. Church attendance has fallen sharply, but the pews which were exclusively for the rich are now accessible to everyone. This disappearance of hypocrisy is certainly not an example of secularization, but rather the opposite of it.
Translated by Ite Wierenga
tags: secularization, Roman Catholic Church, Protestant Churches, Mammon, Martini-kerk, Groningen.
