The Limitations of Secular Knowledge on the Interpretation of Research Involving Religious Phenomena

• In Event: 46.069 - The High Cost of Secularism on the University in the Age of Pluralism

Abstract

The most important question for the 21st Century academy is the one philosopher Dallas Willard (2009) poses.
Is reality secular? Is adequate knowledge secular? And is that something that has been established as a fact by thorough and unbiased inquiry? Is this something that today’s secular universities thoroughly and freely discuss in a disciplined way? Certainly not! Nowhere does that happen. It is now simply assumed that every field of knowledge or practice is perfectly complete without any reference to God. It may be logically possible that this assumption is true but is it true? (pp. 123-124)
These questions suggest a promising line of intellectual inquiry that could reinvigorate both the university’s academic integrity and its potential for advancing human flourishing through theory and research.
In the last few decades there are growing challenges to secularism’s dominance in the academia and the culture from both religious and non-religious scholars (Baker, 2009; Berger, 1999; Carter, 1993; Cheng & Boyd, 2011; Habermas, 2011; Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006; Hart, 2010; Malik, 1990; Marsden, 1994, 1997; Pera, 2011; Ratzinger & Pera, 2006; Sacks, 2012; C. Smith, 2003; S. Smith, 2010; Sommerville, 2006, 2009; Taylor, 2007; Waggoner, 2011; Warner, 2010; Willard, 2009). I am proposing that the radical secularization of the academy has produced four major problems that are bankrupting the Western university and impoverishing the culture.
• First, otherwise highly educated people (ourselves and our students) are left woefully ignorant of things most human beings in the world experience and know.
• Second, secularization has radically diminished the university’s commitment to the unbridled whole-hearted search for truth and thus is no longer the free and open marketplace of ideas.
• Third, the exclusivity of secularism and its tendency to disdain orthodox Judeo-Christian principles, in particular, contradicts the university’s own self-professed commitment to pluralism.
• Lastly, radical secularism has left the university with what law professor Steven Smith (2010) calls a “thin, desiccated public discourse.”
In an effort to be “open” to some perspectives, it has become closed to others. This paper will illustrate the secular limitations placed on research interpretations of religious/spiritual phenomena by using two examples. First a look at a methodologically rigorous study of forgiveness and human flourishing wherein the authors (Krause and Ellison, 2003) report that their participants who believe they have been forgiven by God have higher life satisfaction. Nevertheless the summary suggests this is not because of their relationship to God but to the “psychosocial institutional factors” in the churches. Likewise, Putnam and Campbell in American Grace largely attribute their findings on the higher civic engagement and generosity of people in churches and synagogues as due to intense social networks. This forced secular interpretation of religious phenomena denies even the hypothesis that one can have a relationship that matters with a living God.
If reality is secular, the university is forging ahead the best it can to advance knowledge. If reality is not secular, the university is woefully intellectually diminished.

487 words

Author

• Mary Poplin, Claremont Graduate University