The Secular Experiment and the Crisis of Civilization

Secularists assume the universe came about by some chance mechanism. However, the universe, or universes as is known now, is too complex to be explained as such. Secularism, or a thought process that negates the existence of a supreme being, has given rise to a number of problems in the West that would cause its weakening, and its ultimate demise as predicted by Western sages.

God is creator de novo, and controls and sustains creation.

A human being is a mortal entity and needs a supreme being to give him and his life any meaning and purpose. He/she is otherwise at the disposal of emotions and desires that are unstable, constantly changing and unreliable. He needs supreme agency that is beyond him and beyond human control. Such an agency must be transcendental, neutral equally applicable to all and sundry.

Despite constant and continuous onslaught from various secular quarters, religion survives because it answers three basic life questions that are important, according Jonathan Sachs, Chief Rabbi at the United Hebrew Congregation of the Commonwealth. These three questions are: Who am I? Why am I here? How shall I live? Homo sapiens is the mean-seeking creature and religion has always been his greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and and the market economy as four institutions that characterize modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to these basic questions that humans ask.

Science can explain how but not why.

• Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.
• Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say.
• As for the liberal democratic state, it gives us the maximum freedom to live as we choose, but the minimum direction as to how we should choose.
• The market gives us choices but it does not tell us what constitutes the wise or the good or the beautiful choices.

Moreover, these important questions are beyond the realm of science. Science deals with what is observable, what can be seen and measured. And cannot answer what is not observable, and cannot be measured.

Throughout the seventh century, Europeans civilization was tortured by religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes, John Lock and other political thinkers of the time wrote against a background of terrible dislocations by the wars of religion, religious-tinged political struggles between great European dynasties, and the ruinous conflict between the British Crown and parliament. These troubled times provided an occasion to rethink the proper relationship between the claims of religion and the operation of worldly (or secular) political power.

Among these, Hobbes in his greatest single work, Leviathan (1651) consisting largely of theological analysis wrote of the operation and function of state in terms of human worldly interests. He said the state should aim at limited secular goals and view religious rivalries as one more threat to peace. But he thought the secular rural cannot be indifferent to religious matters. To maintain peace, he must suppress outward expression of all religions except one, no rivalries of doctrines can be allowed. Furthermore, a secular state has no moral mandate.

Mary Eberstadt is a senior research fellow at Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Ethics and public policy Center in Washington, D.C. She wrote How the West Really Lost God published by Templeton Press PA on June 1, 2007.

In the book she said, "For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners. Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche's famous story of madman's who runs into the marketplace declaring that "Gott ist tot", and in sociology as the "secularization thesis" it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear. As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist line story goes they find themselves both more skeptical of religion's promises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.

Eberstadt's thesis is straight forward; as goes the natural family, so goes religion. She uses the double helix structure of DNA to illustrate this interdependence. The structure of DNA is like a twisted ladder with two side rails linked tougher. Similarly, religion and natural family are "the double helix ;of society. Religion directs biological reproduction towards meaningful social and spiritual ends. Without it family loses its connection to those ends. But without the natural family, religion loses an important support.

Eberstadt concluded that the natural family has fallen apart in the West, and the West lost God as a result of weakening of family institution. What is true for the West and Christianity may be true for other faiths, if they follow the same line of thought and practice.

Almost all mainstream American scholars and everyone else in America accepted the view that widespread secularization of American public life was a natural fact of modern history. This view was challenged by Christian and others as discussed in the following.

Christian Smith, Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote a book titled The Secular Revolution, Power, interests, and conflict in the Secularization of American public life published by University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. In addition to Smith, a number of authors contributed articles on different aspects of American secularization.

The book surmises that American secularization was not a natural, inevitable, and abstract by-product of evolutionary modernization, which transformed the landscape of American public life. It was actually the result of power struggle that took place in the nature of a regime change or revolution. According to Smith, secularization of America was a revolution of a secular kind, and like other revolutions it had its ideology, leaders, revolutionaries, agents, guards, and institutions which literally guarded every aspect of it.

Almost all of the secularist activists were from the American knowledge class, the academic, scientists, and literary intelligentsia of the times. They belonged to the presidents, college faculty, publishers, lawyers, public lecturers, reformers, and so on. Behind these famous figures stood many thousands of others, who were unrenowned yet constituted an aspiring category category that supported and shared their interests and causes. Suffice here to say that the movement to secularize American public were backed and mobilized from a particular kind of elite knowledge class.

It is important to understand that most of the American activist and 0secularist secularizers took their cues from their predecessors in Europe. Few of Americans were original thinkers, and looked to the likes of Hume, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Darwin, Wells, Huxley, Wells, Spencer, Durkheim, Comte, and Freud and others.

The American secular revolution succeeded because it had material resources to deploy in promoting its cause. A profound social change going on during this time was secularization of higher education, accomplished through active participation of American industrial capitalism. It was at this time that led to unpresented growth and centralization of wealth under control of such financial magnates as the Morgan, Rockefellers, Mellon's, Carnegies, and Du Pontes.

Pew Research Center is a Washington, DC based non-partisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. According to its findings reported on May 5, 2018 the vast majority of Americans, 90%, believe in some kind of higher power, with 56% professing in God as described in the Bible and another 33% saying they believe in another type of higher power or spiritual force. Only one-in-ten American say they don't believe in God or a higher power of any kind.

A more recent report October 20, 2025 stated a growing of US adults say religion us gaining influence in America, which gives hope that faith will revive sometime in the future. But the American state guards secularism and treats other countries on the yardstick of secularism.

Carle Zimmerman, A Harvard sociologist elaborated the effect of the current status of secularism in Family And Civilization Published by ISI Books, Wilmington, Delaware 2008 edited by James Kurth. Zimmerman describes the long-term reality of Western societies where traditional family has been deteriorating since Renaissance and shifted emphasis of culture away from tradition toward interest of individual, as its primary beneficiary.

Zimmerman's book is a sobering description on the future of Western societies with their declining birthrates, proliferation of single-parent families, and government policies that undermine the role of parents and families. Even more disturbing is that the West is following the same disastrous trends, which plagued ancient civilizations before their collapse.

A major problem in societies ruled by individual considerations and atomistic families is loosening of constraints on its individual members with the result they quit having having children. They become focused on pleasures of the individual and are concerned only about the present. Eventually such societies expire from lack of man power. The Question is why should expanding individual freedoms lead to demographic disaster? It is that cultures which do not organize their collective lives around family create structures and policies that privilege individual autonomy at the expense of family

Zimmerman quoted historical precedents. Written when baby boom was beginning, he identified long-term trends that are only now beginning apparent. He said, "the extinction of faith in the familistic system in Europe in the last two generations is identical with the movements in Greece during the century following the Peloponnesian Wars, and in Rome from 150 AD to 250 AD. In each case the change in faith and belief was associated with rapid adoption of negative reproduction rates, increased acceptance of perverted forms of sex behavior, and wit enormous crises in the very civilizations themselves."

Seeing that today's negative trends have been developing for a long time, and demographic concern is beyond the reach of public, alongside continuous onslaughts on the family institution, Zimmerman concluded that the prognosis for Western civilization is very bleak.

Commenting on a striking feature feature of Zimmerman's analysis, Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College, Purcellville, Virginia said that the decline in family (really, the attack on the family, as he states) is not a matter simply of impersonal forces but direct and conscious work of the state. Baskerville quoted Zimmerman indicating that negative historic relationships existed "between the type of family and strong central government" and argued that it was in their absence that family developed most extensively. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, "the state wishes to have only enough family power left as is needed to achieve the functions of government"

To overcome the problem the state initiated, the state may yet attempt to provide economic incentive for larger families, or take more draconian to encourage childbirth. Europe is already offering such economic incentives, with scant success. Zimmerman concluded that the core problem was a loss of faith.

James Kurth who edited the the new edition emphasized that from the beginning of the problem, Christianity "has maintained a constant position regarding the importance of family." He described the connection: "Faith in one's God, faithfulness in one's marriage, a faith in the future of one's next generation" meaning "a successful revival of family and civilization must entail a return to fidelity." If and whether the West can or will adopt this path is very questionable since it is in the fatal embrace of secularism, the very opposite of having faith.

Conclusions: religious skepticism in Europe started as an aftermath of Renaissance, which laid emphasis on reason as source of legitimacy, and individual freedoms became the primary focus of European societies at the price of family and its welfare considerations.

Secularism came to the United States as a revolution brought against the established Protestant church by secular activists who looked to Europeans for inspiration and guidance for selfish reasons, and instead of presenting creative faith alternatives joined with them. Recent Pew studies show American public is less religious and more secular, and the future of coming generations is even bleaker.

Secularism has irretrievably seeped into the Western societies and caused a multiplicity of problems .Its most devastating effects are apparent in families. Family is the foundation of any society and on its strength or weakness depend the strength or weakness of a nation. Thus the future of Western society is great jeopardy as concluded by Western sages including Zimmerman.

Religions are essential for human existence and human society. Belief in a Transcendental God gives life a meaning and higher purpose. Without faith a human loses his existential nature, lacks vital components of life, and is devoid of essential purpose of life.

Muslims believe and practice a system of life where God is at the center and focus of all human activities. And in all matters of life, they take their guidance from this vital consideration. Islam aims at establishing peace, and works for justice and equality for entirety of humankind. It considers family as the fundamental unit of its society, and lays great emphasis on its purity and strengthening of bonds between its members and the society for the good of all concerned.

As such, hope for the future of the West lies in making amends with Islam and Muslims. The West must recognize transcendence and its enduring faith values and restore morality in all its dealings.