Religion's Response to Modernization

Secularization is almost a synonym for modernization. It is that aspect of modernization that produces the values of secularism, by which he means "the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevancy of God."
 
These developments affect all persons, Christians and unbelievers alike. They have great power to shape the consciousness of those within society. In so doing, they have created an atmosphere in which unbelief seems natural and belief seems odd. Yet the church seems blissfully unaware of this condition, like the proverbial frog in the kettle. While this is a time of great peril, Wells believes that it is also a time of great opportunity. In the providence of God, times of reformation in the church's life frequently come out of times of disorder and chaos. God often tears down before he builds up, and this may be one of these times.
 
Unfortunately, religion, evangelical Christianity in particular, is not responding very well to this challenge, in Wells' judgment. He opened No Place for Truth with an account of the first day of his systematic theology course, in which a student complained after class about having to take systematic theology, which so obviously had no bearing on his future ministry. This sets the discussion of the entire book.
 
Wells points out that theology has generally been comprised of three elements:
 

(a) The confessional element - is the body of beliefs the church has inherited and holds, which crystallizes into doctrine.

(b) The reflective element is the church's endeavor to understand the meaning of being the recipient of God's Word in the present age. This in turn must proceed down three avenues. It must be biblical theology, covering the whole of Scripture and establishing the connections among the different parts. It must be historical theology, surveying the history of God's working in the church in the past. This will give the church the ballast necessary to assimilate the spiritual benefits of the past and to relativize the present with its pretentiousness. It must also be contemporary theology (although Wells does not use these terms), relating the content of the confession to what a given period considers normative.

(c) The third element is the cultivation of a set of virtues grounded in the first two elements. It is a matter of the church obtaining the wisdom that comes from basing its practice on its beliefs.'

 
The evangelical church has, however, been strongly influenced by the forces of modernization and has done poorly at carrying out these tasks of theology. Wells says, "As the nostrums of the therapeutic age supplant confession, and as preaching is psychologized, the meaning of Christian faith becomes privatized. At a single stroke, confession is eviscerated and reflection reduced mainly to thought about one's self." The pastor seeks to pattern the pastoral office and function in terms of the two roles that the culture most admires: the manager and the therapist. This is what theology is reduced to: reflection in the academy and practice in the church.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Spiritual Vagrants in the Modern World

The transition from a world in which God and his truth were accorded a central and often public place to one in which they have neither did not happen overnight, of course. It came in fits and starts, amid confusion and sometimes conflict. A longer view indicates that it came in two basic stages, however.
 
In the first, God began to disappear from public view, and the whole noisy human enterprise took his place. In the second, the whole human enterprise was itself displaced and the organizing center of life was assumed by the extraordinarily pervasive and impersonal forces that modernization has unleashed on the world. We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God's creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition.
 
It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance - and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.
 
We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives - including the soil in which our Christian faith grows - is constantly shifting.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Modernity is the Consequence of Modernization

By modernization, Wells means the process by which, for the sake of manufacturing and commerce, our society is organized into cities. This process results in the rise of modernity's values. He says, "In this context, the term modernity refers to the public environment created largely by urbanization, the moral etiquette, style of thought, and relationships of which are shaped by the large, impersonal structures that fill it."
 
The effect of this modernization is to create two separated spheres, the public and the private. The one world is defined by personal relations, and is made up of small, insulated islands of home, family, and personal friends. The other is defined by the functions within the capitalistic machine. In this great system of production and distribution, persons are valued not for who they are or what they believe or hold as values, but for what they do. In this realm, in fact, personal relations may actually be a hindrance, since much efficiency depends on being impersonal. This anonymity also works against accountability. The worker is disengaged from any sense of responsibility for the product manufactured, any accountability to the ultimate consumer of the product.
 
This urbanized modern workplace not only undercuts accountability, but it also has a similar effect on the cogency of religious belief and morality. Because of the wide range of worldview, cultural and ethnic difference, and personal values found in such close proximity, the values of each inhabitant have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator in order to eliminate antagonisms among the competing views. And when the public life is divested from the private world, it becomes connected instead to the machinery of the technological age. There also is a strong orientation to the future, as persons are "forced to anticipate and adapt to the oncoming change. "
 
In this modern society, the centers of culture have nothing to do with geography. Rather, they are involved with "a number of large, interlocking systems that form the structure of society." These are, for example, the economy; the political government (world, federal, and state); the universities that generate and disseminate knowledge; and the mass media, which do the same for the images by which we understand ourselves.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Modernization and the Issues

Modernity has been hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of God's truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume, perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension too noticeably or noisily on others or into the public square.
 
The right of each individual to his or her own private thoughts and beliefs is held to be both axiomatic and inviolable. So it is that the particularities of evangelical faith - the things that make it different - are dissolved. Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe - so long as I keep those beliefs from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy. So it is, as John Cuddihy has suggested, that civil religion is always a religion of civility: the edges of faith are rounded off, the angles softened.
 
Modernity is not simply an issue; it is the issue, because it envelops all our worlds - commerce, entertainment, social organization, government, technology - and because its grasp is lethal. There is no part of culture that can gain any distance from it and hence no part of culture that is neutral or safe. All of culture is touched by the values and appetites, the horizons and hopes that modernity excites.
 
Worldliness is a religious matter. The world, as the New Testament authors speak of it, is an alternative to God. It offers itself as an alternative center of allegiance. It provides counterfeit meaning. It is the means used by Satan in his warfare with God.
 
Worldliness, as we have seen, is that set of practices in a society, its values and ways of looking at life, that make sin look normal and righteousness look strange. It is the view of the world that puts the sinner at its center and relegates God to the periphery.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Costs & Benefits of Modernization

The benefits of a modernized world are obvious and innumerable. Modernization has liberated us from the provincialism of small towns, opened the world to us, linked us to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world. With our technological achievements we have made our world more comfortable, in some ways safer, certainly more productive. In this century alone we have come close to doubling our life expectancy. We have enlarged our knowledge of the world, secured freedoms once only dreamed of, expanded rights, opened the doors of education, lifted hopes, and mightily multiplied our prosperity.
 
But in order to enjoy these manifold benefits, we have had to pay some stiff costs. Modernization has also blighted our lives by cutting our connections to place and community, elevating our level of anxiety, and greatly diminishing our satisfaction with our jobs. It has spawned pervasive fear and discontent. It has contributed to the breakdown of the family, robbed our children of their innocence, diluted our ethical values, and blinded us to the reality of God.)° It has made us shallow. It has made its empty.
 
Those who thought that affluence could be made to compensate for or offset the drain on the human spirit that modernization has exacted were sorely disappointed. While we now bask in relative plenty, the very means of amassing that plenty - the reorganization of our world by the processes of modernization - has diminished our soul.

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Three Developments in Modernization

Norman Cantor has argued that three developments in particular have given birth to the growing sense of nihilism in art, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and rock music.
 
First, biotechnology, which built on the discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA, has succeeded in driving home the idea that human life is defined by impersonal genetic codes rather than personal choices. This perception has greatly diminished the sense of human significance.
 
Second, astounding advances in computer science and technology have reproduced or surpassed many of the tasks that were once thought to be defining marks of human uniqueness.
 
Third, new communications technology has not only brought news, sports, and entertainment from around the world into American living rooms each day but has also given vast new power to multinational corporations and forced the last pockets of Marxism into desperate disarray. Like computer technology, the new communications technology has expanded human capability and increased human efficiency, but it has diminished human stature. We have been dwarfed by our own inventions and in many ways have become irrelevant to their workings. For these and many other reasons, we have come to feel small, empty, unspecial, meaningless.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Process of Modernization

The process of modernization is driven by four main realities: capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications.
 
1. Capitalism emerged as a defining force in Europe following the collapse of the old medieval synthesis, but it did not effect evident changes until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when industrialization got under way, and it did not reach its full intensity until technology became both ubiquitous in society and indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. At the same time, however, capitalism has developed a profound dependence on the sorts of freedom typically provided by democratic societies. But in societies that have afforded rights of free association, unrestricted travel, and a belief in the propriety of the capitalist economy, capitalism has successfully reorganized the social structure for the purposes of manufacturing, production, and consumption. It has concentrated populations into cities and produced massive systems of finance, banking, law, communications, and transportation. In short, it has changed the shape of our world, how we relate to it, where we live, how we experience our work, and the values and expectations that we bring with us in order to be adaptable to and successful in this public sphere.
 
2. Technology is, of course, essential to modern capitalism. Its importance lies not simply in the fact that it facilitates the production of knowledge, makes possible medical and engineering breakthroughs, and is now indispensable to all modes of production. Equally important is the fact that it also rationalizes all of life. People who live in technologically logically dominated societies are prone to think naturalistically and to subject all of life to a calculus of benefits - to assume that whatever is most efficient is most ethical.
 
3. Modernization has also been driven by the stunning growth of urbanization, which has now spread beyond the West to become a worldwide phenomenon.  During the twentieth century, this trend has been amplified in America by mass migrations of peoples from Asia and Central and South America. They have brought with them their own ethnic identities, cultural habits, languages, religions, and values - all of which have been brought into close proximity to one another in our cities. The new multicultural environment has produced a secular ecumenism and a powerful demand for pluralism, for mutual tolerance, for private space in which to hold one's beliefs, live one's own lifestyle, do what one wants to do. Thus far, the Constitution seems to be securing this much for each person, within the boundaries of the law, but it seems to be producing an encompassing relativism as well.
 
4. Finally, modern telecommunications has made us all citizens of the whole world. Television is perhaps less a window on the world than a surrogate eye that preselects what images of the world we will be exposed to. Still, we have become witnesses of an extraordinary range of events that daily shape and shake the world. Television gives to us a psychological transcendence of space, both physical and cultural, linking us to other people around the world. The bonds that television creates, unlike those that once prevailed in the small towns of America, are entirely synthetic - even if it doesn't seem that way. The communion that television provides - the communion of common voyeurs - can seem as real as that of a local neighborhood. And television also produces mass communal reactions to material that is bound to any specific context, to wholly homogenized information, to the fads and fashions and disconnected sound bites of mass culture. It spins out information in such abundance as to rob most of it of any value.
 

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.