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Forces of Secularity in the Modern World, Vol. 1 Stephen Strehle is a leading scholar of church/state issues. In this volume, he fo- 11 cuses his rigorous historical analysis and philosophical acumen upon a topic of great interest today and source of cultural wars around the globe—the process of STREHLE secularization. The book starts with a discussion of early capitalism and how it saw Forces the real world functioning well-enough on its own principles of individual strug- gle and self-interest, without needing religious or moral principles to meddle in its affairs and eventually dispelling the need for any intelligent design or provi- dential orchestration of life through the work of Darwin. The book then discusses Forces of Secularity in the Modern World, Forces of Secularity the growth of the secular point of view: how historians dismissed the impact of religion in developing modern culture, how scientists conceived of the universe running on self-sufficient or mechanistic principles, and how people no longer looked to the providential hand of God to explain their suffering. The book ends in the with a discussion of how the Deist concept of human autonomy became a politi- cal policy in America through Jefferson’s concept of a wall of separation between church and state and how the US Supreme Court proceeded to dismiss the impor- tance of religion in shaping or justifying the values of the nation and its laws. The Modern World book is accessible to most upper-level and graduate students in a wide-variety of disciplines, keeping technical and foreign words to a minimum and leaving schol- arly details or debates to its extensive notes. “This fascinating, but scholarly and wide-ranging, account lays bare the tangled Volume 1 roots of secularity in the Western world over recent centuries. In so doing, it casts a clear light on some of the major forces that are shaping the world we live in now.” —Roger Trigg, Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford Stephen Strehle has doctoral degrees in church history and systematic theology Stephen Strehle from the Universität Basel and Dallas Theological Seminary. He is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Christopher Newport University, director of its pro- Vol. Vol. gram in Judeo-Christian studies, and the author of many books and articles on the Reformation and church/state issues. 1 PETER LANG Washington College Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture Vol. 11 www.peterlang.com Stephen Strehle is a leading scholar of church/state issues. In this volume, he fo- 11 cuses his rigorous historical analysis and philosophical acumen upon a topic of great interest today and source of cultural wars around the globe—the process of STREHLE secularization. The book starts with a discussion of early capitalism and how it saw Forces the real world functioning well-enough on its own principles of individual strug- gle and self-interest, without needing religious or moral principles to meddle in its affairs and eventually dispelling the need for any intelligent design or provi- dential orchestration of life through the work of Darwin. The book then discusses Forces of Secularity in the Modern World, Forces of Secularity the growth of the secular point of view: how historians dismissed the impact of religion in developing modern culture, how scientists conceived of the universe running on self-sufficient or mechanistic principles, and how people no longer looked to the providential hand of God to explain their suffering. The book ends in the with a discussion of how the Deist concept of human autonomy became a politi- cal policy in America through Jefferson’s concept of a wall of separation between church and state and how the US Supreme Court proceeded to dismiss the impor- tance of religion in shaping or justifying the values of the nation and its laws. The Modern World book is accessible to most upper-level and graduate students in a wide-variety of disciplines, keeping technical and foreign words to a minimum and leaving schol- arly details or debates to its extensive notes. “This fascinating, but scholarly and wide-ranging, account lays bare the tangled Volume 1 roots of secularity in the Western world over recent centuries. In so doing, it casts a clear light on some of the major forces that are shaping the world we live in now.” —Roger Trigg, Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford Stephen Strehle has doctoral degrees in church history and systematic theology Stephen Strehle from the Universität Basel and Dallas Theological Seminary. He is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Christopher Newport University, director of its pro- Vol. Vol. gram in Judeo-Christian studies, and the author of many books and articles on the Reformation and church/state issues. 1 PETER LANG Washington College Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture Vol. 11 www.peterlang.com Forces of Secularity in the Modern World Washington College Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture Joseph Prud’homme General Editor Vol. 11 The Washington College Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production. PETER LANG New York Bern Berlin Brussels Vienna Oxford Warsaw Stephen Strehle Forces of Secularity in the Modern World VOLUME 1 PETER LANG New York Bern Berlin Brussels Vienna Oxford Warsaw Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org Identifiers: LCCN 2017051104 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4358-8 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-4359-5 (epdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4360-1 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-4361-8 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Secularism. Classification: LCC BL2747.8 .S85 2018 | DDC 211/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051104 DOI 10.3726/b13133 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/. Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ © Stephen Strehle, 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com Contents Introduction 1 I. The Spiritual Crisis of Early Capitalism 19 Chapter One: The Rise of Acquisitive Capitalism in France 21 Chapter Two: The Development of Acquisitive Capitalism and Social Darwinism in Britain 53 II. The Removal of Religion from Human Development and Natural Events 85 Chapter Three: Enlightened History 87 Chapter Four: The Mechanistic Universe 129 Chapter Five: Innocent Suffering 149 III. The Marginalization of Religion in American Society as a Private Matter 177 Chapter Six: Mr. Jefferson 179 Chapter Seven: The Development of the Wall 217 Postscript 265 Index 273 Introduction Today many Christian people find the greatest threat to their existence within the growing secularity of western culture. They express less concern about the polemi- cal differences that divided the church during the days of orthodoxy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and spend more time wondering about the prospects for basic Christianity surviving as a viable force of culture in the future. Indeed, they find Jesus expressing this same concern and warning about god-lessness in the “latter days,” where the people are living a worldly existence of “eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage” (Mt 24:38), without any thought about a higher or transcendent calling in life and no fear of any imminent visitation from the heavens above (Lk 18:8). Here these Christians find Jesus expressing their same concerns over what people these days describe as “secularity.” Today sociologists use the term to describe a disposition that finds religious categories irrelevant, that interprets the world as a self-sufficient system, containing an autonomous causal nexus or immanent force, negating any need for divine intervention, let alone a cataclysmic coming of the Messiah. The process of “secularization” is described as a tendency to liberate culture from religious authority, control, and significance.1 Bryan Wilson delineates certain aspects of this process in these “latter days”: Secularization relates to the diminuation in the social significance of religion. Its application covers such things as, the sequestration by political powers of the property 2 | FORCES OF SECULARITY IN THE MODERN WORLD and facilities of religious agencies; the shift from religious to secular control of various of the erstwhile activities and functions of religion; the decline in the proportion of their time, energy and resources which men devote to supra-empirical concerns; the decay of religious institutions; the supplanting, in matters of behavior, of religious pre- cepts by demands that accord with strictly technical criteria; and the gradual replace- ment of a specifically religious consciousness (which might range from dependence on charms, rites, spells, or prayers, to a broadly spiritually-inspired ethical concern) by an empirical, rational, instrumental orientation; the abandonment of mythical, poetic, and artistic interpretations of nature and society in favor of matter-of-fact description and, with it, the rigorous separation of evaluative and emotive dispositions from cog- nitive and positivistic orientations.2 Modern sociologists spend a great deal of time debating whether the world is becoming more and more secular in its outward form.
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