Our Secular Age

A new project for an old debate

We are in a moment where history seems perfectly poised to repeat itself, where forces and ideas that dominated our discourse decades ago are now ready to return.

These ideas concern the role of religion in American public life, the question of if and how our institutions and legislation should be designed to generate and enforce a vision of the Common Good that is aligned with a particular religious practice. The discussion over this question raged white-hot at the beginning of the 21st century before being largely superseded by debates over racism and racial justice during the Obama and Trump administrations. Now, with inflation certain to constrain the fiscal ambitions of any incoming administration and with a comfortably-permissive right-wing judiciary, incoming Republican administrations are likely to focus their power on reconstructing American society and culture along “traditional” Christian lines.

This project is an effort to prepare for and to - in some small way - counteract this exercise of power, to offer a positive vision of what our secular age makes possible and to defend this vision against its foes.

It is worth taking space to define what this project is *not* - this project is not an attempt to defeat religion or spirituality in general, nor is it an assertion that that humans should only speak in terms that can be somehow connected to contemporary physics. This is not New Atheism 2 - this work is undertaken in a much different cultural context and with a deeply-different web of conceptual distinctions than the conversations that occurred during the second Bush administration.

My hope, also, is that the pain and injustice which awaits us at right-wing hands can be softened and shortened through dealing with it consciously - by facing the suffering knowing that it is wrong, that it is temporary, and that the world we create on the other side of it will be stronger and more just as a result of what we endure. Victory, for me, would look like living in a world where work like this is no longer necessary. That world is certainly not here today, and until we succeed in creating that world we have a lot of work to do. For that work, I hope to help you get ready.