Tamás Nyirkos

Another anniversary, that of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. As the renowned historian András Gerő remarked today on DunaTV (and also in an article on 24.hu), the phrase “the God of Hungarians” was so widespread at the time that it in fact became part of a secular religion of the nation. Which is no novelty, of course; I myself have written on several aspects of this national religion in my 2018 book on Political Theologies.

Just to name a few: beside references to a national God in poems and political speeches, the new religion also produced its own patriarchs like the revolutionary governor-president Lajos Kossuth (“the Moses of Hungarians”) or saints like the martyrs of Arad (thirteen Hungarian generals executed after the defeat) whose memory has developed into a fully-fledged cult afterwards.

A few years ago, I even saw a reliquary containing the bones of the martyrs and parts of the gallows where some of them were executed (just like pieces of Christ’s cross):

All this, however, was nothing extraordinary. The “civil religion” of America (as Robert Bellah wrote in his famous study) also relied on a part biblical, part national symbolism; or, as Carlton Hayes put it, nationalism everywhere had the same religious underpinnings. Not even in the form of a “secular” religion but as a “religion” per se.

In 2020, “identity politics” and “wokeness” became new members of the secular religions club. As Tom Slater put it in Spiked magazine, “Identity politics has become the new secular religion.” The points of similarity are already well-known: collective rituals and liturgical clothes,

an unquestionable doctrinal system (“wokeness is the new orthodoxy”), including an absolute moral code (“virtue-signalling” and atonement for “past sins”), resulting in popular enthusiasm and intolerance (“a Salem-like hysteria”) or even official persecution (“Heretics must be ousted. Blasphemies must be scrubbed”).

Now all this is once again not a definition, but a parody of how religion is sometimes defined by those who don’t like it. Moreover, it is also unclear what makes identity politics a “secular” religion, and why wokeness is called a “new” – perhaps real? – religion at the end of the article. (And why not simply an “ideology”, for the article also applies the latter.) Yes, I know that this is not an academic paper. And it shouldn’t be. What it nevertheless clearly shows is how “religion” is mostly used as a simple derogation. Moreover, speaking of “the new religion of the ruling class” adds a populist flavor to its anti-religious zeal. All in all, secular-religious talk doesn’t seem to come to and end in 2021. It doesn’t seem to become more accurate, either.

As I said before, Wikipedia’s definition of “secular religion” is problematic in itself:

“A secular religion is a communal  belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly entities.”

But the bigger problem is that the initial list of secular religions already contradicts this definition:

“Among systems that have been characterized as secular religions are capitalism, communism, Juche, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, democracy, liberalism, progressivism, transhumanism, Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity, and the Cults of Reason and Supreme Being that developed after the French Revolution.”

On this somewhat chaotic list the most obvious mistake is, of course, the reference to the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being is certainly not an “earthly entity” but a transcendent deity. The name was chosen only in order to distinguish it from the idea of the Christian God. This shows already the most typical presupposition of secular religion discourse: that everything that is similar to Christianity but not identical with it; and has a secular purpose as well, must be a secular (or quasi-, or pseudo-) religion, even if it has an evidently supernatural, personal Absolute. I would understand, to be sure, if a (fundamentalist?) Christian theologian made such a move. If one thinks that there is only one true, revealed religion, namely Christianity, then everything else will look very secular. And even more dangerously so if it in some way imitates Christianity. What I don’t understand is how anyone else can make a similar distinction between “secular” and “genuine” religions.

All in all, let’s face it that the Cult of the Supreme Being was exactly what the name says: a cult (a worship, or a “religion”, if you like) of a personal God. Even the immortality of the soul (another not very secular idea) was added:

All in all: there was nothing secular here, except the moral, social, and political purposes that the cult of the Supreme Being certainly aimed to serve. But are “genuine” religions totally devoid of such purposes? Are there any “transcendent” religions that are “fully” transcendent?

But this is only the most obviously problematic example. By a closer look, the Cult of Reason also implies belief in a transcendent Absolute. The “Reason” mentioned here is not the mind of any individual person, but an imagined universal principle of rationality, so not a personal deity, but a transcendent something all the same.

It could also be asked whether the new, transhuman (sometimes literally “immortal”) creations of transhumanism, the imagined “People” of democracy, the idealized “Proletariat” of Communism, or the “invisible hand” of the market are any more “secular” than the Supreme Being of the French Revolution. Or even any more impersonal, for formulas like the “will”, the “wisdom”, or the “actions” of the people, the proletariat, the market, etc. keep reappearing all the time. Are all these metaphors only? Maybe so, but the question still remains to be answered: why do we use exactly these kinds of metaphors? Does the fact that we cannot get rid of them points to a more profound issue? Or is it just a sign of our basic irrationality?

By the way, it seems that even Reason is impossible to worship without some divine personification.

As the Wikipedia entry on secular religion says (and I’m inclined to take it as a definition): “A secular religion is a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly entities.”

But what is a “communal” belief system? Does it mean that there are also “non-communal” ones? Is there any belief system (with an emphasis on the word system) that is not communal but – let’s say – individual?

To go further: what does it mean that such a system “often” rejects or neglects metaphysical aspects? That sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t? Then what is the difference between a belief system that rejects or neglects metaphysical aspects and a belief system that doesn’t? Or do both of these belong to the same category?

Also, is it the same to “reject” something and to “neglect” it?

As for “metaphysical aspects”, I wonder what the non-metaphysical aspects of the “supernatural” would be, for “supernatural” seems very much like a per se metaphysical concept itself.

I also don’t understand what the phrase “commonly associated with” means. Who is this “common” self who associates the “supernatural” (whatever that means) with anything?

The term “traditional religion” – especially in the singular – is likewise difficult to understand. There may be traditions that are sometimes vaguely called “religious”, but I know of no such overarching category as a single “traditional” religion.

I’m also unaware of any “typical religious qualities,” just as I’m unaware of any “earthly” ones; at least until someone explains to me why the opposite of “religious” is “earthly”, especially when the very term “secular religion” suggests that “earthly religions” are just as “religious” as non-earthly ones.

The perhaps most miserable word of all is, of course,”entity”, which usually means “I-know-not-what” – but, as we have seen, it is true of the whole article that its creators had no idea of what they were talking about.

And this is just the beginning!

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me about a comprehensive introduction into the topic of “secular religions”. There is, however, no such book srictly speaking. The only one by a similar title, Hans Kelsen’s Secular Religion was written in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is actually (as the subtitle goes) A Polemic Against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social Philosophy, Science and Politics As New Religions, so rather an extroduction than an introduction.

We have, of course, plenty of great books on political theology and political religions, as well as on many specific topics from the altars of Wall Street to psychology as religion. Just a few months ago, Tara Isabella Burton published a new one called Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, but once again on specific cultural (or spiritual, whatever that means) phenomena in contemporary America, and not on “new religions” in general.

Yes, of course, Wikipedia also has an entry on “Secular Religion”, but this is rather a medley of different arbitrary examples: citing for example only ONE modern case, that of the former Turkmen president’s cult of personality. Hm. Maybe I will also write a more detailed review on this entry later.