Book Returns
Urban Bungle
Wilfred M. McClay on Harvey Cox’s The Secular City
Not every anniversary is worth celebrating. But it seems a shame to let the fortieth year of Harvard theologian Harvey Cox’s most famous book, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965), pass without comment. For one thing, there was no more emblematic book of the 1960s, and like so much else from that era, it has insinuated itself into the culture thoroughly, even as the power of its arguments has been almost entirely exhausted. That being the case, there is a certain fascination in returning to the text itself, and attempting thereby to intuit the source of its electrifying influence during its day.
Travel back with me, then, back into those remote and bell-bottomed yesteryears, when the world was still green and new, and the sweet scent of revolution lingered in the air like the aroma of marijuana.
The Exciting City
Every page of The Secular City trembles with excitement over the possibilities of a fresh start, one that would throw overboard all the old baggage—even the word God itself—and unashamedly embrace the genuinely religious possibilities inherent in modern secular life. The book’s readers could be secure in the knowledge that, whatever it was that the Christian gospel was about, it was still happening, baby—and in fact was happening better under conditions of a secularizing culture.
But what about the idea that secularism was a Bad Thing, the enemy of religious faith? Well, that was so wrong. Equally unhelpful and old hat, too, were such characteristic Christian moral conceptions as original sin, repentance, justification, and atonement. And any fool could see that systematic theology was pretty much a crock, a form of mental solitaire for nerds and losers.
But the Bible was surprisingly okay, because it had these amazing stories in it, which could be interpreted in all sorts of interesting and empowering ways. (As Cox pointed out, you could even say that, because Adam named the animals, he helped God to create the world. Which would be very cool.) And the Bible, in Cox’s reading of it, affirms that “there are no powers anywhere which are not essentially tameable and ultimately humanizable.” Too bad that Job was not made aware of this.
And why is secularization such a good thing, contrary to received opinion? Because it frees us to be the autonomous and unconditioned selves that Jesus wants us to be. There is much talk in The Secular City about the goal of being “mature,” being “adult,” moving out of the “tutelage” of superstition and other-directedness. Secularization empowers us to remove all impediments to that aim.
Why should this stripping-away of cherished beliefs be the enemy of the gospel? What’s to be afraid of? Why the long faces? Isn’t it better to get rid of all phony and cheapening “God-talk,” stop pretending that we can put God in a box, and instead go on in our profane way, having cleared the field for fresher and more authentic epiphanies? By this standard, an atheist like Albert Camus turns out to be a far better Christian than any conventional religious leader, precisely because he had the guts to toss out “the God of traditional theism” and all the bourgeois claptrap that went with him, and live authentically, fearlessly, in solidarity with others—like Jesus.
One can imagine the lecture hall of young Harvard students erupting in cheers at such bold and irreverent professorial truth-telling. They could do exactly what they wanted to do, and reinterpret it as a quest for meaning, rather than a mere panty raid. Now that’s a hermeneutic a guy can actually use.
Exorcizing Kansas
Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is the author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina) and A Student's Guide to U.S. History (ISI Books). He is a member of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
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