The best case for secularisation
Did Max Weber make a good case for finding meaning and value outside of monotheism?
Has there ever been a more ominous evening than Wednesday 7th November, 1917? The War had now firmly entered a fourth year. Even ardent nationalists were demoralised at the thought of the conflict engine devouring ten thousand more sons, powered by the very coal absent from so many cheerless hearths.
In Munich, it was cold and wet. And on this night, in a kind of converted gallery space attached to a bookshop, Max Weber, Father of Sociology, delivered a lecture announcing a coming unveiling: an apocalypse. Unbeknownst to him, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd were at that very moment beginning their night’s work of seizing the Winter Palace, in the hope of ushering in mankind’s final historical phase.
Weber probably looked a little haggard – perhaps nervous. He had been on hiatus for over a decade after very severe mental breakdowns at the start of the century. Like some gaunt Hebrew prophet (indeed, he finished his talk with a portion of Isaiah), he spoke vividly about the future, without much of a glance at his notes. His theme was our coming face-to-face with something that had been long hidden:
“The destiny of our culture, however, is that we shall once again become more clearly conscious of this situation after a millennium in which our allegedly or supposedly exclusive reliance on the glorious pathos of the Christian ethic had blinded us to it.”
The ‘situation’ that was now honing into view, for Weber, was our suspension over the abyss. Christianity had merely hidden this from us – now, we would have to see our fundamental predicament. ‘Science’ (wissenschaft, a term here still retaining a broader sense of ‘knowledge finding in general’) would not be able to supply us with meaning and values outside of a religious framework. There would be no final answer to ‘life, the universe, and everything’, as rationalism was methodologically atheistic - it presumed a closed universe when doing its work, and inherently disenchanted everything it touched. The bad news, in Weber's genealogy, is that after God leaves the shot, we cannot even console ourselves by saying that some other abstraction will compel us to pursue the true and the good. Kant, to this end, is accused of really being a closet theologian:
“Every theology… presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. It is the same as with Kant's epistemology. He took for his point of departure the presupposition: 'Scientific truth exists and it is valid,' and then asked: 'Under which presuppositions of thought is truth possible and meaningful?'”
Even capital-R ‘Reason’, because it is transcendentally adduced, is but a cousin once-removed from Monotheism. We have even to wean ourselves off this, says Weber. But how are we going to go about knowledge-questing without any of our useful delusions that we are doing so to get closer to God, or ultimate truth, or some other unity which allows us to presuppose that reality is shareable?
In Weber’s careful analysis, there is no totem that we can gather ourselves around for comfort now. But – and here’s what allows him to resist being a subjectivist nihilist – he does not retreat inwards. He gives no lame talk about finding true value or meaning ‘inside ourselves’, and some of his harshest critique in the lecture is aimed not at churchgoers, but at those who would vainly seek ‘experiences’ and the pseudo-communities they foster. He notes astutely that when a transcendent object is abandoned, what we really get is polytheism - reality with multiple personality disorder. The old gods make their return, precisely in the vacuum created by monotheism and its successor, logotheism. This time, the gods are not characters of course - but they are the pantheon of the religion of “real life”, in Weber’s phrase:
“The numerous gods of yore, divested of their magic and hence assuming the shape of impersonal forces, arise from their graves, strive for power over our lives, and resume their eternal struggle among themselves”
How much more vivid this feels in 2025. We have the sacred journeys of therapy or self-help; allegiance to tribes in culture wars; billions following the oracles of algorithms and AI. But Weber had an eye on it, in a way that almost zero secularists do these days. The religious structure of human life is not something that disappears after one or two generations stop attending Sunday School. We are worshippers through and through, and old habits die hard.
On this note, he diagnoses a pathology we see a lot of today - the cultured admirer of Christianity: “the need of some modern intellectuals to furnish their souls with, so to speak, guaranteed genuine antiques.” After we notice the profound collapse in meaning caused by rationalistic disenchantment, some may find ourselves fleeing back to the comfortable and familiar. Weber will allow it, though he does so condescendingly: “We shall not bear him a grudge if he can really do it”.
I need to work on a piece trying to hash out my complete disdain for the “sacrifice of intellect” model that Weber proffers - at least in the way it is premised here on ‘faith versus reason’. The way that this idea (brought into view invariably via a very reductive usage of Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” concept) clusters around conversion stories is largely at the insistence of nonbelievers who would position their worldview as a kind of normal - a square one relative to the rest of the grid. But what of St Augustine’s meticulous questioning, testing of alternatives, and final submission to the Church as an act of rational assent? What of Pascal’s insistence that, if one were a betting man, Christianity would surely be the most reasonable option? But, credit to Weber, he at least reminds a would-be congregant that their return should be made seriously and, more importantly, silently (advice that I wish some in our public square would follow today).
I’m a sucker for moralists, so I can’t help but find Weber compelling here. He suggests we must aspire to a plight more tragic than Israel no less, a people who “inquired and waited for much longer than two thousand years, and we are familiar with its deeply distressing fate”. Of course, the full extent of their ‘fate’ had barely begun in 1917. But Weber surmises that part of their duress had been to exist in a state of perpetual longing for a climax - for some divine deliverance. But we must make do without Messianism. How are we to survive then, in the desert, without the guiding principle of the One God who will eventually act, and knowing that, by Weber's lights, we will be buffeted by gods and daimons that whisper to us and beseech us to follow them?
His solutions strike me – especially a century of bloodshed later – as terrifically naive. For who could potentially be our shimmering civilisational avant-garde, leading us on into the grim void without a metaphysical torchlight? Teenagers, Weber straightfacedly opines, in much the way that a Boomer might cringingly admire the politics of high-schoolers. While despising those who would play dress-up as medieval layfolk or as eastern spiritualists, he praises “some of the youth organizations that have quietly grown up during recent years” as “very serious and genuine”. He does warn them that they must resist a view of their movement as contributing to “something of enduring value to a suprapersonal realm” if they are to avoid merely rehearsing the religious errors of the past – but these youth volunteer groups like Wandervogel (a ‘Lebensreform’ movement established in fin de siecle Berlin) could hint at a way of achieving self‑governance and inner freedom, all while rejecting the old systems.
But it is quite something, after sketching out so terrifying a predicament as the crisis of meaning itself, to nominate boyscouts as our civilisational rescuers. Perhaps it was a disingenuous piece of flattery – the student arm of Wandervogel – the Freistudentische Bund – were the group who had invited Weber to deliver his lecture that night. But by his presence at the event, he clearly thought the organisation was onto something. And if so, I think we see where Weber might have naturally revisited his conclusions, if he had lived another few decades, and seen the sheer scale of mechanised horror and brutality possible (some of it made possible by youth paramilitary troops, no less).
What we get in Weber’s talk is an example of incredibly realistic atheism – realistic, at least, for 1917. And it is striking that within a decade or so, there would be something of a ‘revival’ of Christianity that looks, to me, rather like the one allegedly happening today. There were high-profile conversions (between 1927 and 1931, literati as eminent as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh would all convert to classically ‘catholic’ strands of belief), and church attendance was actually on the up after the War, reaching a high point by the 1930s. The same phenomenon is taking place nowadays in response to the continuing burden of the Weberian analysis, which seems to be contemplated by our society sometimes as if on a sunny afternoon, and then sometimes in the dead of night. For some eras, the hopeful dreams of the young seem enough of an answer to the deep existential questions. Then in another era, it seems they are not enough at all, and even the hardest of hearts will suddenly find themselves on their knees at Mass. The appeal of Christian faith phase shifts in response to these dynamics - initially it is an irrational retroism, and then a heroic Romantic rebellion, and then an irrationality again.
But the stakes are only higher today. Post-Weber, Christianity is cast as an ever-narrowing choice (narrowing because of the increasing price tag put on intellectual assent to the miraculous, to occupying institutions that are seen as inherently abusive, and to articulating religious particularism). Charles Taylor is the most intelligent case of how to swallow this pill by accommodation of secular critique. In a state-of-the-nation lecture of his own in 1996 he put it:
“Better, I would argue, after an initial (and let's face it, still continuing) bewilderment, gradually to find our voice from within the achievements of modernity; to measure the humbling degree to which some of the most impressive extensions of a Gospel ethic depended on a breakaway from Christendom; and from within these gains try to make clear to ourselves and others the tremendous dangers that arise in them” (‘A Catholic Modernity’, p. 37)
Sane stuff – like Jesuit missionaries, we must dialogue with our own culture to help sort out what is bad and what is good (even conceding where something has become better in the process of leaving Christian hands – human rights declarations would surely be Taylor’s go-to here). This stress on humility is always valuable. But when comes the moment for martyrdom – witness – on Taylor’s analysis? How are we to justify it with our right hand, if with our left hand we are busy vitiating our our ability to justify anything? What happens if we sign over too much in agreeing that our moral fruits are meagre, and our record a blood-stained mess? Taylor imagines a conversation with an angry secularist which sees such an event as salutary: “‘it's lucky that the show is no longer being run by you. card-carrying Christians, or we'd be back with the Inquisition!’ The liberating side comes when we recognize the truth in this (however exaggerated the formulation)” (p. 13).
I think of Holy Fooling as having a role to play here - not by asserting that the Inquisition ought to have gone further (“theocracy is so based!”), nor by agreeing that the Inquisition disqualifies the Church from ever becoming entangled with secular power again. Rather, Holy Fooling dares to ask: “but what was the Inquisition, and was it as bad as all that?”. Such a question is foolish because it brings into question what has already been so established as to become pop culture reference. But, if it sensitively perseveres, it may get to the point of resetting coordinates. It might be able to start a conversation from the ground up, and not from some fictional, highly emotive datum. This may require facing institutional corruption and sin all the more squarely, to be clear — this is not about exonerating the Church’s representatives. But one could, for example, have a conversation that acknowledges that the historiography around the Spanish Inquisition has been, at least to some extent, clouded by polemic and myth. That such a line of questioning is ‘holy’, I dare to say, is because it works from an attitude of trust and faith in the Church as a presupposition for saying anything about the truth at all.
So how does one be a Christian after Weber? One response, I have shown, he anticipates: the Romanticised leap into the arms of authority; something unexplainable, defiant, silent. But the other is the Taylorian path of dialogue - though it comes with concessions that humble us (a good thing too for our souls). Perhaps all believers oscillate between these poles. But if I recognise any draw in myself to a place among the battlements for the fight, it is in the granular business of ‘setting the record straight’, so that any project of theological reassertion can take place within the context of a lived community. No - fighting for a theological account of reality cannot be pulled off as some deracinated academic project - it must, I think, be done within something that has a history of its own; that has skin in the game.
I am aware that it will take more than a few “well, actuallys” regarding the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades to fundamentally change people’s hearts and convince them that Weber has not sealed off the pathway to a proper faith. True - people ordinarily convert due to the Holy Spirit working across several departments of their human life. But it’s all ‘bricks in the wall’, I suppose. Consider, if you are a secularist who thinks that Weber has had the best of it in this essay, the accusation that he paid poor attention to facts of the matter when it came to Catholicism. Werner Stark (like Girard, one from the social sciences department who found his way into the Church after finding materialist presuppositions rather limiting) writes despairingly of his flagrant biases:
“In open departure from his own demand for a value-free science, Weber asserted that other worldly mysticism (as represented by Buddhism) and innerworldly asceticism (as represented by Calvinism) were the superior variants of the religious quest” (‘The Place of Catholicism in Max Weber's Sociology of Religion’ in Sociological Analysis, Winter, 1968, Vol. 29, No. 4, p. 202)
as well as odd errors of fact:
“In one context [Jesuits] are called "a monastic order" and in another there is reference to "contemplative trends among them." Of course, Jesuits are not monks but secular priests, and, of course, their community was totally devoted to the very opposite of contemplation, namely meditation” (p. 206)
This was very striking for me. An uninterrogated penchant for ‘busy mysticism’, as well as that precise error about Jesuits, were two features I noted in my review for Lamorna Ash’s latest book. And so, it seems — Weber’s moral seriousness and intellect notwithstanding — the record remains in need of setting straight, even a hundred years later.
While it does, I will be writing this little newsletter. My hope, as well, is to start to increase my output – revisiting contentious issues in doctrine and church history in the hope of resetting coordinates for a proper appraisal. If you would like to help support me in this, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber.