Video: Whatever Happened to Secularization? A Talk by Harvey Cox

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hello, everybody. And welcome back. My name is Margaret Rose, and I'm the vice chair of the HDS Alumni/Alumnae Council. It worked. I'm really pleased to introduce somebody, who, of course, needs no introduction in this place, the incredible Professor Harvey Cox. 
[APPLAUSE]

Our session today is called "Whatever Happened to Secularization?" Harvey Cox, Jr. Is the Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus. He began teaching in 1965, both at HDS and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College, an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin, and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. 

His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. That you all know. He explores urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and the current spiritual movements in the global setting, particularly Pentecostalism. Professor Cox was previously a visiting professor at Brandeis, the Seminario Bautista de Mexico, and the Naropa Institute, and the University of Michigan. 

The most recent books are How to Read the Bible, and Lamentations and the Song of Songs-- A Theological Commentary on the Bible. The Secular City was published in 1965 and became an international bestseller. It was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the 20th century. There are many other books that you, no doubt, know about. He's going to tell us about some of them. And we look forward to hearing him now. 

Though, I have to say one thing. Of my own time at Harvard Divinity School, besides taking a wonderful class in which he asked me to do some translation for which I was completely incompetent at, he also played at my wedding-- 
[LAUGHTER] 
--The Embraceables, so the embraceable Harvey Cox. 
[APPLAUSE]

Well, thank you so much, Margaret. I remember that wedding. It was a great event. And welcome to all of you for the 200th-- as I look out across this group of former students here, I see a few who still owe me term papers. 
[LAUGHTER]

You know who you are. And maybe you can close the page by handing in those greatly overdue term papers. And I guarantee you that I will read and enjoy them, as I always do reading student newspapers-- term papers. 

So inevitably for me, talking about the topic of secularization, where it came from, what it is, what happened to it, has to be a little bit autobiographical. The book that Margaret Rose referred to, Secular City, published in 1965, I originally titled God in the Secular City. I wanted to assure readers that just because something was becoming secular that is no longer under ecclesial control or definition, I didn't mean that God was not present. 

The biblical perspective is present in all of history, in nature, in political movements, and individuals. And it is for us to discern the presence of God, which is not confined to religious and ecclesial institutions. However, the editor said to me, God in the Secular City, no, no, no. Let's just call it Secular City, which is what happened. That was the title. 

So I brought along today something that I haven't handled for very, very many years. I decided it might be kind of fun to show some of you-- and this might appear to be a little braggartly-- some of the original translations. This book was translated eventually into 17 languages, some of which I had never heard of, the languages I had never heard of. 

So we have [FRENCH] French, [GERMAN] from the Germans. [NON-ENGLISH]. I think that's Dutch, but I can't be sure. [NON-ENGLISH]. Now, I don't know what that is. 
[LAUGHTER] 
But it's a foreign language that I can't read. Well, I won't go on. 
However, I think one might say that I bore, therefore, the curse of an early success. Yeah, the book was very widely read, very widely circulated. And trouble was, the editors and others kept thinking that I should write one that would be equally successful. And for 50 years, I tried to do that and never did succeed. 
[LAUGHTER] 

Still tried, but never quite made it to that. So the question, however, that I wanted to post to all of you and to myself on this anniversary occasion-- what about this whole question of secularization? How did it start? How did it-- why did it become such a big deal? Why was there so much commentary on it? What's happened since? 

And I have to say that the year that I spent, that Margaret Rose just referred to, that wonderful year in Berlin, 1963, '64, after I finished my doctorate here and went and worked in Berlin in the church in that divided city with a wall running right down the middle, I was assigned to work with some church groups in East Berlin. So I went through Checkpoint Charlie probably more times than anybody you'll ever meet and came back, by the way. 
[LAUGHTER] 

I was greatly inspired and instructed by the Christians in the east who were not committed to overthrowing the communist regime there, but how to live within this new society that was emerging and to bear their witness there and not jump over the wall and come back to the west. They didn't particularly favor people who made that move. 

It was a wonderful year for me. And it was especially important because that was the year that I really discovered the life and theology of another former Berlin resident, namely Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I soaked up Bonhoeffer's writings, including the letters and papers from prison, which some of you have read, I'm sure, in some courses that I've given, and began to see the world a little bit through Bonhoeffer's perspective. 

Now, I remember that, in the last year of his life, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned-- actually, for two years, he was in prison-- the last year of his life, he was relatively sure-- in fact, quite sure-- that he was never going to get out, that he was he was going to be executed by the Nazis. He had a chance to get out at one point and refused it, because he was afraid it would endanger some of the other prisoners. 

And he wrote some letters to his friend, Eberhard Bethge, which were collected in that wonderful volume-- letters and papers from prison. And in one of those letters, which made a big mark on me and which is quoted in The Secular City, he says something like this, "We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all. How do we speak of God without religion? How do we speak in a secular fashion of God?" "Speak in a secular fashion of God?" 

Well, in a way, the whole book that I wrote, the whole Secular City book, was an attempt to answer Bonhoeffer's question. Now, however, what has happened in the intervening years-- there have been a number of intervening years, 50-some years-- is people have said, no, Bonhoeffer was really wrong. Eventually, Bonhoeffer, by the way, was killed by the Gestapo. He had involved himself in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He was found out. And just before the Americans closed in on the concentration camp where he was being held, he was hanged. That was in April of 1945. 
People said, no, look, he thought we were approaching a time of no religion at all. How could anybody be so mistaken? Look what happened all around the world, all these predictions about the decline and marginalization of religion that people were making. Some very wise people were-- including members of the Harvard faculty back 50 years ago-- were saying, eh, religion and modernization, that is a zero sum game. The more modernization you have, the less religion you have. More religion, less modernization. 

So we're on the road to modernization. And religion will be more and more marginal. And we'll have to-- there will be patches of it here and there, of course, but it will not-- it's time-- the time when religions could enter into the public arena, could form cultures, could inform political movements is over. 

Now, that was wrong. And one of the things that happened during my brief career here at Harvard Divinity School is that some of-- perhaps, all or almost all of the most significant spiritual leaders and spokespeople of the 20th century were people who made their mark in the secular political cultural sphere, especially in the political sphere, but not completely. 

Think of the great, the titanic figures in the history of religion in the 20th century. Gandhi, whose spiritual insights derive from the Bhagavad Gita and the Sermon on the Mount, as he says, really sparked and led the revolution that ended the British Raj in India. 
Or think of Martin Luther King, Jr. When people-- certain people, at least, thought that the black church was not a significant political or social factor, they were wrong. They hadn't read the history of the black church of America. But Martin Luther King made his mark, a spiritual mark, a religious, theological mark, mainly in the public arena. 

There was Bonhoeffer, himself. One of my favorites is, of course, Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. I'll never forget that picture when I first saw it in The New York Times of this old lady sitting down. She was supporting the farm workers in their strike out in California and, eventually, sitting in, being dragged away by police. It was her witness. 

Think of Malcolm X, who also made his mark in the political social arena, growing in his instance on the Muslim faith. So we have Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim. And what was happening in the 20th century was not, as it turned out, the decline and marginalization of religion, but religion assuming a role in the public sphere that people had really not expected. 

Now, look, when that happens, it's good news and bad news, when religion begins to shape the public realm Remember that, among other things, I am a student and still an admirer of a teacher that I had when I was at this school, namely Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich, for all of his vast accomplishments in theology-- and there were many-- was the guy who brought back into theological discourse the category of the demonic, the demonic. 

He was greatly criticized for that. He seemed a little superstitious, a little weird. But he had lived through the First World War and the coming of Nazism to Germany. He knew that evil in the world was not just something in isolated individuals. There were evil, demonic forces in either unconscious or subconscious or, in some way, social that had to be dealt with. 

And I think that has to be said also about religion. If there is a revival of religion, which there seems to have been, rather than the disappearance of religion in the last decades, look out. I've studied religion long enough to know it's good news and it's bad news when you have a religious revival. 
You can produce a Martin Luther King, a Malcolm X, a Gandhi, but you can also produce and motivate people to hate and to divide. You can spark enmity with a powerful, powerful force that religion supplies. So as it were, the game has changed from the game that was going on, at least as it was being described when The Secular City first appeared. 

We're not dealing-- we are not dealing with the disappearance and trivialisation, marginalization of religion. You're not dealing with that. We're dealing, as one my friends used to say, not with the death of God, but with the rebirth of gods and goddesses and sprites and spirits and spooks. All this is coming back and is making its impact for good or for evil and often for both on our lives and on our society. 

So it's a different theological task than I tried to put my mind to 50-some years ago. In fact, I wanted to hold up one book here that nobody knows about. This is a book, which is a collection of conversations I had with a very insightful Buddhist theologian, Daisaku Ikeda, which were recorded and published in this book. The book is called The Persistence of Religion. Now, that's a little different, isn't it, than The Secular City? 

The question was, why has religion persisted? And what does it mean for us that religion has persisted? How do we deal with that as theologians and theological students? So I want to take a little pause, in fact, because I have a sore throat today to rest my throat and to hear from a few of you with a couple of questions that I want to pose. I'll be careful not to blow my nose because I have a mic right here. It's going to resonate through the entire building here-- entire tent. 
[LAUGHTER] 

Going to pose a couple of questions. Think about it for a moment. And if you have something that you'd like to say, it would be useful. First of all, let me ask a couple of these questions. And you can pick the one you want. What you think happened in the last 50 years-- we've been talking about last 200 years. I haven't been here for the whole 200 years, believe me. I've been here for the last 50-some. 
[LAUGHTER] 

What happened, such that Bonhoeffer's prediction and many other people's predictions about the marginalization of religion didn't happen? In the Islamic world, in the Buddhist world, did not happen. Something quite different happened, kind of a Renaissance, a revival, of religious movements for bane and for blessing. Why did that happen? Why do so many thoughtful people misjudge the arc of history? Why did that happen? 

That's one question. Another question I'd like to put to you, as related to that one, is if, in fact, we are dealing with a plurality, a conflictual plurality, of different religious movements and impulses, how does that shape the work of the theologian, the minister, the student of religion? How does that-- what difference does that make? 

When I was a theological student, we kept seeing books like religion and the modern mind. It was often the modern man, modern man, who was taken to be technical, rational. And we had to re-translate the gospel in order to reach that kind of mentality. I don't think we think that way anymore. That's really not what we're doing. 

But first of all, why did this happen in the last 50 years? And how does that change our calling as theologians, as ministers, and those who work in the field of religion? I'm going to give you about two or three minutes to talk to somebody close to you. And I'm going to send out-- 
[COUGHING] 

--the mic runners. And please, respond to either one of those questions or both of them. Go ahead. 
So order, please. So if you have some response you'd like to make, and I sure hope you do, put your hand up. Here is somebody right here, mic runner. 

Hello? Hey, everybody. You'll get a chance in a minute. 
[LAUGHTER] 

So one source is the women's spirituality movement, which brought in goddesses. And I remember at the very beginning of that going to a group in Austin, Texas at the Unitarian Church that was very humanistic. And we started a little evening program talking about goddesses. 
And somebody said, hey, wait a minute. We're Unitarians. We believe in one god at most. 

[LAUGHTER] 
But women have discovered, not only the concept of the female divine in many, many different manifestations, but also brought us into a kind of cross-cultural look at how the divine in female form exists in many, many different cultures, some ancient and past, but often being revived today. I'm currently part of a ritual group. Your minister, but I'm-- and sometimes these happen in churches, but also, part of another ritual group that learns about and relates those goddesses to women and what women need to do in the world. Women hold up half the sky. 

Yeah, thank you. I'm glad you brought that up because, in my view-- I was here at Harvard Divinity School just as the women's studies program was being birthed and people like Emily Culpepper-- does everybody here remember Emily Culpepper? 

Oh yes. Absolutely. 

One of my favorites students. The only student in the entire history of my teaching here to whom I gave an A-plus because she and a cohort of her fellow women took over my course one time. They were smart enough not to take over an administrative building. Who needs an admin-- they took over a course with my kind of quiet agreement. And they taught it for about a week and a half and did a fantastic job and brought up readings from feminist sources and all the rest. 

I think even-- so I was here when all that was happening. And I'm enormously grateful for it, in part because the impact of the women's movement in theology and religion and church life was, enormously larger, I think, than even those original women anticipated. Because it uncovered a lot of the spirituality, the divine, if you will, in the secular, or in the allegedly secular, and brought to the surface in a way that can never be denied again. There it is. 

So I'm glad you brought that up. And there was a great program here-- was it yesterday or the day before-- on the history of the feminist movement here. Those of you who remember Emily Culpepper will remember she used to walk around the corridors of Harvard Divinity School in her Superman suit to attract attention to the women's cause. 

Now, Emily was a fairly small woman. And the Superman suit was a little bit too big for her. So the arms would sometimes flap, but she was a kind of a feminist gorilla. She knew what gorilla theater could get across. And I'm-- of all the students-- well, there are many, many students I'm grateful for-- well, I'm exceptionally grateful for Emily. Other comments? 

Does this work? Yes. The statistics I read showed that, in this country, as well as in the rest of the world, participation in organized religious institutions continues to shrink. In this country, theological schools are closing down right and left. Now, the most familiar phrase as a minister I encounter is, oh, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. Want to comment on that? 

Sure. I think you're right, statistically and in some respects, but not entirely correct. If you look at Europe, the measurable elements of religion there, church attendance and all that, seem to be going down. But if you look at other parts of the world-- look at China, after 40, 50 years of atheist rule, there is a religious revival going on in China, traditional Chinese religions and Christianity. Christianity is growing very, very rapidly in China. And there are predictions that, within the next 30 or 40 years, it could well be that one of the largest, if not the largest, Christian community in the whole world will be in China. 

Or look at Africa, specially Sub-Saharan Africa, where you have thriving religious movements, many of them charismatic or Pentecostal or mixtures of indigenous African religions and Pentecostal and other charismatic expressions. Now, this leads me to answer my own question in a way about the decline and alleged decline and marginalization of religion. 

In my view, that was a very Eurocentric reading of world history. It was imposing or projecting on the whole world something that was indeed happening in Europe, the decline of the power of institutional religion for various historical reasons that I could go into, not what was happening in South America, where you had the liberation theology movement, not what was happening in Africa or Southeast Asia. 

We went through a period about 20 years ago, a certain point, at which the majority of Christians in the world no longer lived in Europe and North America, where you continue to have either a stable or somewhat declining populations, while they're growing rapidly elsewhere, especially forms of Christianity that were viewed, at least, as somewhat marginal in this country, the Pentecostal and glossolalic religion. 

So here's how I illustrate that to myself. When I was a doctoral student here, one of the key words we like to throw around was the word, "demythologization." And we especially liked it in the German form, [GERMAN]. 

[LAUGHTER] 
What was the thesis? The thesis was we have our message, the gospel message, in a mythological language. We no longer understand or relate to mythological language. Therefore, it has to be translated. It has to be demythologized. Rudolf Bultmann and many others working on that. 
Then, not too much later, when I started becoming very fascinated and involved with Latin American liberation theology and I taught, as my introducer said, for two years at the Seminario in Mexico City, the phrase they liked was not demythologization. It was a phrase in Brazilian Portuguese. And I'm going to say that, too-- [PORTUGUESE], the de-northification of theology. 

What those folks were saying in Latin America and Africa and other places was, what we've inherited is a northern Eurocentric view of Christianity, the Bible, the Gospel, Jesus Christ, and all the rest. And we have to de-northify it in order for it to be voluble in our setting. 
OK, just take one other question, if we could, if there is one out there. Yeah, right here. Yeah, did Cornell whisper that into your ear? 
[LAUGHTER] 

We worked on it. 

OK, all right. 

I'm very quick. It was unfair because you answered the first question before I got a stab at it. But I was going to say that secularization is the exception. And I think you described it. For the second one, I would say that someone who is biblical will understand that diversity is in service to unity. And therefore, we're very much interested in the pluralistic. 

Mm-hmm, good. All right. Well, let me take the next step here, because I have a few more-- oh, yeah, let's hear his comment. If we don't let him have the mic, he's going to jump up and down and yell and scream. 

[LAUGHTER] 
No, I'm not. And I would like to personally mention, Harvey, as I was in your first class back in 1965, and I am crushed to know that you gave an A-plus to somebody in your career. 

Well-- 

But what I-- 

It was somebody. And it wasn't you, right? 

That is true. That is true. But over here, we were talking about the fact that, at least in America, religion, according to Pew, is not on the rise. But what is on the rise is the involvement of religion in politics in ways that are both, as you mentioned, constructive and seemingly somewhat less so. What do you think about the role of religion in politics today? And what could religion do going forward, if there's going to be a continued role in politics for religion to the better in our country? 

Yeah, good question. Now, I mentioned all those figures whose main impact-- spiritual impact, if you will-- was in the political and social realm. Now, look what we have, however-- something that I had never anticipated-- a liberation theology, a liberation theologian who is the pope. I mean, my fondest prayers would not have expected that. 

Now, he doesn't like to use the word "liberation" theology. Be clear about that. He doesn't want to do that. But everything in his agenda-- almost everything-- there's is a very important exception that I'll get to in a moment-- has to do with the church exists for the excluded, the broken-hearted, the people pushed to the periphery. This is what the church exists for, a church which is open to the world, which is serving the world. And it's this guy from Argentina. 

Remember, Francis is the first pope since 411-- a long time in there-- who is not a European. Every single pope has been a European, one kind or another. We've had a whole flock of Poles and Germans and Italians recently, always Europeans. He's a man from the world of the south, from South America. He's a Brazilian. 

And furthermore, whereas every pope since the second century, when assuming the responsibility of the papacy, took the name of a previous pope, usually, until they get up to something like Gregory XIV or John XXIII or Ignatius LXXXVI. I don't think they've ever reached that. This is a guy who broke that chain, the first one. 

Now, most people haven't read much into that. I read an enormous amount into that. What a choice. He took the name Francis, Francis of Assisi. And by that, he is really saying to himself and to you and to all of us, here is what my agenda is going to be-- to be with the poor, to be with the broken-hearted, with the lepers, with the outcasts to comfort them, to support them. That's what I'm going to do. 

And remember, as soon as he became pope, one of his first trips out of Rome when he became pope was down to the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean, where bodies were washing ashore of people from Africa who were trying to escape hunger and despair. And he said mass right there on that little island on a boat that had capsized with some of these folks, drowning them. And he faced Europe and said, these are our brothers and sisters. We have to receive them, welcome them with open arms. 

Now, that's a counter-cultural statement, given the current sentiment in a lot of Europe, which is not particularly welcoming of these needy folks. So I think something important and structural has changed there. And I find it extremely encouraging. In fact, I decided I was so interested in Francis that-- I should brag here a little bit that I met him last November when I was in Rome. I made some arrangements and I met Francis. And you can even go, if you want, on the website at Harvard Divinity School and see me meeting him. It was a great, thrilling moment for me. 

By the way, the day before I met him, the person who had arranged the audience said to me, Harvey, how can I put this? The pope really doesn't understand English. How's your Spanish? I said, well, I haven't used it, but I'll try. He said, well, however weak, it's better than the Holy Father's English. 

So when I met him, we started speaking in Spanish. He'd been a little sober. And he immediately lit up. And if I could put a little balloon over his head, he'd probably say, thank god, one gringo who knows a language that I can understand. 

We had a nice long talk about various things, the things he's reading. We discovered that we both have the same favorite movie, which is Fellini's La Strada. We talked about that. We talked about a number of things. But the main thing I wanted to convey to him was that there are a lot of people in this world and they're not all Catholics or even Christians who see him as a sign of hope in a time when there isn't a whole lot of signs of hope around. 

So as we were leaving, he was holding my hand. He said, would you pray for me? I said, of course we'll pray for you. So the next week, our little local Baptist church here, Old Cambridge Baptist Church, I asked them to put Pope Francis on the list of people we prayed for every week. And he's there. 

So about three months ago, somebody came in to visit this Baptist church and came rushing up to me afterwards and said, is this is a Baptist church? I said, well, yes, it is. And you're praying for the pope? I said, you better believe it we're praying for the pope. And I hope you are, too, whatever church you're in. 

You see, there are signs, not only in the world out there, but even in the crusty, old ecclesial institutions that there's a possibility of breakthrough, new life, new breath. And a lot of it is coming from the southern world, from Africa, South America, and the Asian rim and, eventually, China. There's going to be a Chinese pop one of these days. The Chinese have taken over everything else. Why not the papacy? They'll be there. And I think we could be in pretty good hands. 

So I'm coming close to a conclusion here. And let me put it this way. Secularization, whatever happened to it? Maybe it never really existed. Maybe it was a kind of an illusion, a distorted vision of those of us who were focused too much on the culture and religion of the Eurocentric world. And we saw religious institutional decline. Certainly, it was there, attendance at church and all that. But we didn't look around the world and see an enormous revitalization of religious movements, again, for good and for evil, all around the world, which is exactly what was happening. We needed a [PORTUGUESE] of the theological enterprise. 

I've also come to believe-- this is my, really, final remark-- that instead of talking about the secularization, which has been really not, in the long run, the most productive category to talk about these things, I'm beginning to think in terms-- I'm trying to think of the right word-- the dispersal-- the dispersal of the sacred. Not its decline, its dispersal into various institutional, political, cultural movements again for blessing and for bane. 
The sacred is not any longer the monopoly of religious institutions. It's out there everywhere. And it can appear in distorted form, in misleading form, or if can appear frequently in pristine and beautiful form. So our job as, I think, as theologians is to see where it's happening, see where it's emerging, sort out the wheat from the chaff, and affirm what, as I said in The Secular City, what God is doing in the world-- in the world-- and not just through religious institutions. 

Let me close by a fond memory I have, which actually echoes what I've just said. I had been working at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King in the 1960s, from about 1964 on. He got me arrested twice. I never had the honor of being in the same jail with Martin Luther King. I kind of resent that. He was arrested 22 times I'm told. Me, only twice. 

But he called me one time. I think it was about 1967. He said, I want you to speak at the annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was the organization he had organized. We're going to meet in Birmingham. I said, Birmingham? Not a very friendly [INAUDIBLE]. He said, well, now, we've passed the open fair occupancy laws and things like that. And we got to go back to Birmingham. 
I said, well, why do you want me to speak? He said, well, we still have this problem, Harvey. He said, there are a lot of people in the churches, our churches, black churches, white churches, who don't think being out there in the streets demonstrating and marching is really appropriate for church people to be doing. 

I couldn't believe that coming from King. I said, well, isn't that what the whole thing is about? He said, well, there are awful a lot of people that we have to persuade that is a relevant and appropriate thing for church people to be doing. And I'd like you to talk about that. So I went down to Birmingham and I was introduced by Dr. King. And somewhere in my files, I have a picture of Dr. King introducing me. 

And the title of my talk was, "What is God's Business?" "What is God's Business?" My answer was the world is God's business. What's happening in the world? The movement of the world toward the Kingdom of God. That is God's business. And we are engaged and called, as church people, to be involved in that work. Our work is in the world, too, where God is initially at work. 

So anyway, here we are. 50 years, 200 years, 52 years of my being around Harvard Divinity School. 200 years of Harvard Divinity School having been here. It's an enormous thrill to see all of you here. And do remember, if you still have a term paper that's due, I won't grade it down just because it's a little late, 23 years late. 

[LAUGHTER] 
That's OK. Do hand it in. You can send it to me. I still have a mailbox here. And thank you all very much for being here. 
[APPLAUSE]

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