"Disestablish the church?" asked the English bureaucrat Charles Buller a century ago and answered, "Never! It's the only thing between us and religion." Buller's statement suggests how an official role for religion in the modern state-even if not establishment-can tame the wilder side of any profound experience of the sacred-the side that expresses itself in the uncompromising zeal of religious revivalism for a revolutionary transformation of human life.
Seeking for ways to tame the revivalist zeal needn't be irreligious. In Judaism the Sabbath ended by blessing the "God who has made a distinction between the sacred and the secular". These words state paradoxically both that the secular is something different from the sacred, yet, being made by God, is sacred, so that we should not try to breach its integrity in the attempt to create pure, integrated, spiritually beautiful communities. Until the Messiah comes, our world must be a compromise between sacred and secular. Even Christianity, so haunted by the sense of the possibility of a redeemed existence, has had to render more and more unto Caesar.
Traditional religion thus institutionalizes a cosmic double bind: giving us the precious revivalist consciousness of the reality of the non-negotiable, non-compromisable at the heart of things, it then turns around and suspends it, reconciling us to living outside of the heart, in a place where the non-compromisable has to be compromised.
Modernity, having so far allowed neither the sacred nor the secular to gain exclusive control in the civil order, public or private, is more frustrating to secularism than religion. No doubt religious authority compromised only grudgingly and after a long fight. But as a liberatory teaching severely chastened by a long history of inability to fully liberate, our religions at their best have resources in tradition to see continual trade-offs between sacred and secular as expressive of their own understanding of the dynamics of this world. Secularism, with an as-yet unchastened sense of its liberatory power, has no tradition by which to see the point of accommodation with the sacred. For it, modernity must be secular relativism: the struggle of the secular finally to gain exclusive authority over the civil order. Modernity has failed to fulfill its promise, as long as a sense of a sacred order to which human freedom must submit retains any public authority or even a private place to hide.
In modern regimes religion still retains both. In Canada, tax exemptions, public support for separate schools, flourishing orthodox Jewish and evangelical Protestant private schools, and religious voices in and out of parliament and legislatures all attest to the uneasy stand-off between sacred and secular that is modernity at its best. But to secular revivalism all these institutions, even if private, are discredited as enclaves of subversion from which unprogressive attitudes-patriarchy, heterosexism, if not homophobia, opposition to unrestricted abortion rights-are bound to infiltrate the public sphere under the skin of potential voters. The inevitable response of secular revivalism is well typified by the recent attempt (luckily unsuccessful) to withdraw accreditation for teacher-training from Trinity Western University, a Christian institution. Similarly, secular political philosophers have argued that in the interests of liberalism private religious schools must not be allowed to teach traditionalist doctrine. That secularists are thus willing to undermine the private-public distinction, the great pillar of liberalism, in the very name of a perfected liberalism is as good a proof as we need that the survival of liberal institutions will depend on the survival of the dialectic between sacred and secular and so on the survival of religious traditions.
Secular revivalists also find reasons to join the general current disaffection from the other great liberal institution, representative democracy. Representative government is precisely machinery for negotiating the non-negotiable. The alternation of parties in office means, among other things, that the pendulum will keep swinging between the sacred and the secular-that a free society will sometimes have prayer in schools and sometimes not, sometimes spousal rights for gay couples and sometimes not, sometimes more censorship, sometimes less. But the patience to endure such swings-something a renewal of our genuine religious traditions could teach us-is currently in short supply and we are entering a period of crisis for representative government when the lack of a final victory is coming to seem morally intolerable to more and more people. The crisis over religious revivalism is an essential part of that political crisis.
The irony of the next century, a continuation of the irony of this one, will be that in modern liberal societies utopian secularist revivalism will be an agent of the same coercive uniformity it once took upon itself to fight against in modern traditional societies. Politically activist religious revivalism will largely be a defensive reaction to the fear that religion will not be allowed to survive even in its private enclaves if it does not hold on to some part of its public authority. On its ability to do so-and on its ability to resist a reactive resurgence of heretical triumphalism-will depend the fate of those inconsistencies and non-uniformities that are the life-blood of free societies and of our authentic religious tradition.
Sam Ajzenstat is a professor of philosophy at McMaster University.
