Secularisation expresses the tendency of individuals to dispense with an obligatory reference to any religious affiliation. This is a deep trend in which we can observe the weakening of the place of religion both in social mores and in public institutions.

Secularisation is thus a sociological phenomenon. It can be observed and analysed in order to try to understand its origins and its development.

That is why I prefer the word “secularisation” to the word “secular” because it is a process which has been going on for generations in Europe.

Then, over the years, the philosophical understanding of the relationship between religion and the state is increasingly translated into legal terms through the political process. Laws are enacted to establish the way in which this situation is to be lived out practically.

Words can be slippery, and it seems to me that the possible English equivalent of laïcité, “secularism” (coming from a different political, legal and philosophical background) and especially because of its suffix “-ism”, encourages people (and often Christians) to see this in terms of an ideology which is being imposed on them.

 

How can we delineate a secularised culture?

In the first instance, we can use numbers. Secularisation is often linked to the percentage within a population who identify as atheist, agnostic or without religious affiliation

• 53 % of Britons identify as non-religious in 2022 [1].

• In France, in 2021, 51 % of respondents in a survey replied ‘no’ when asked if they personally believe in God [2].

However, this is not the whole story. Charles Taylor recounts the process in his magnum opus, A Secular Age [3] (874 pages!). He describes the process of secularisation in three steps.

• Stage 1: the withdrawal of religious practice from public life to the private realm.

• Stage 2: the decreased participation in religious practices or decline in religious belief by individuals.

• Stage 3: A shift in culture whereby faith becomes one human possibility among others.

This process has enormous consequences for the way people live. The rejection of God leads people to have a new sense of self, which Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self”.

In other words, they are impervious to the “enchanted world” which contains God, angels and demons, or anything outside of the human level of existence. On the contrary, they are shaped and directed by their own inner personal values, voicing statements such as “Be yourself” or “That’s my truth” or “Follow your heart, it knows the way”.

In short, the individual has replaced God as the source of authority and becomes Homo Deus – a God unto himself.

 

Downsides

Firstly, it's hard to bear the responsibility of deciding what one’s authentic identity is. People today often feel fragile and vulnerable. They want to avoid hearing ideas which seem intimidating.

Christians are often perceived to be activists seeking to impose their dangerous, disrespectful and intolerant ideas on others

As a result, even universities offer "safe spaces" and issue "trigger warnings" to protect students from having their “identities” questioned. This is a challenge for our evangelism because Christians are often perceived to be activists seeking to impose their dangerous, disrespectful and intolerant ideas on others.

Secondly, how can people cope when they are finding it difficult to live out their ideal of being authentically themselves? In today’s secularised society there seem to be 3 possible strategies.

1. Protecting your "rights" by belonging to a militant group (e.g. LGBTQIA+).

2. Seeking outside help and advice from the army of therapists available today, such as psychologists, life coaches, personal development specialists.

3. Seeing yourself as a victim of circumstances. This is the narrative of what is sometimes called “woke” philosophy which considers that an individual’s problems have more to do with societal structures and cultural assumptions than with psychological factors.

Thirdly, Charles Taylor asserts that what he calls the “the closed perspective of the imminent frame” of secular existence (because it discounts anything outside of the human condition) has never proved satisfactory since people long for something transcendent.

There is a yearning for meaning over and above their everyday, flat existence. There may be a refusal (or more often an ignorance) of historical Christianity but a diffuse spiritual hunger remains, a longing for something bigger, grander, deeper, wilder than “our petty circle of life”.

There is a craving for something sublime to break into our “membrane of self-absorption” [4].

 

Contextualisation

Article 10, “Evangelism and culture” of the Lausanne Covenant, states that “the development of strategies for world evangelization calls for imaginative pioneering methods. Under God, the result will be the rise of churches deeply rooted in Christ and closely related to their culture.”

Much of our apologetics answers the question of the credibility of what we believe (“Is it true?”) but people are not asking that type of question. We have to make the Gospel visible and tangible.

And we have to fully realise that the only contact people have with Christianity is their contact with Christians they know, in their day-to-day lives (such as family, colleagues, neighbourhood or friends).

This has enormous implications for our churches! How can churches prepare their members to live out their faith in an authentic way and bring the gospel into their relational networks?

This infographic of a healthy church is a convenient tool to illustrate the way forward in our European context:

In today’s secularised world, churches need to refocus on the absolute essentials. A healthy church is centred on the Gospel and is a place where Christians learn to love God and to love people, in their cultural context.

We meet together as the gathered church to prepare each Christian to live as salt and light all through the week in the scattered church. Hebrews 10.24-25 encourages us to meet in order to “spur one another on towards love and good works”. This is so important!

Evangelism today involves, above all, building loving relationships in our daily environment. The way people make decisions today, for example before making a purchase, is by looking at the evaluations of other users.

We are “users” of the Christian faith and can therefore recommend the Gospel to the people who have come to trust us as they see us living as Christians in a visible and tangible way. That is how Christianity becomes plausible!

In the gathered church, as we praise God and hear his Word expounded, we are encouraged by remembering that Jesus is our specificity and that nothing is better than the Gospel.

Pastors and leaders should use our time together each Sunday to prepare the “messengers” of the Gospel to live their daily lives with joyful confidence

But I am convinced that pastors and leaders should also use some of our time together each Sunday to prepare the “messengers” of the Gospel to live their daily lives with joyful confidence. This means making the most of being together to help Christians to understand today’s world whether it be the crucial issues of society or just wonderment at the ways we see transcendence around us.

You can find more about developing a healthy church in our secularised climate in my book Re-Connect Your Church published by IVP(UK).

David Brown is a pastor in Paris, and the coordinator of the ELF Church Revitalisation Network.

 

Endnotes

1.  Hannah Waite. “The Nones: Who are they and what do they believe?” Theos. November 11, 2022. https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/research/2022/10/31/the-nones-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-believe.

2.  Joanna York and Hannah Thompson. “Less than half of people believe in God in 2021, French poll finds.” The Connexion. September 23, 2021. https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Less-than-half-of-people-

3.  Harvard University Press, 2007.

4.  The words in inverted commas in this paragraph come from “A secular Age” pages 338 and 711.