Religious, Secular, and the Secret Third Thing

I just figured out a huge reason discourse on religious issues is so unsatisfying for me, and the participation of Jewish people almost never makes it better.

That last part has been especially perplexing lately.

I just realized the problem is assimilation into the Christian concept of “secular,” brought to you by the same crusade that universalized the Christian concept of “religious.”

After they invented “religion,” they invented “secular” as a refuge from it, and everybody went for it.

“The secular” created this zone where people could safely share a society according to pure, clean, rational principles, and they could keep their messy “religious” “beliefs” at home where they belong. This would allow unprecedented levels of cooperation and economic expansion.

All it required is that minorities give up their cultures and act like everyone else.

From a point of view where “religion” is just some weak intellectual exercise with sort of inspiring aesthetics, that sounds great!

In America, it’s no wonder enormous proportions of Jewish immigrants went for this. They were coming here to escape the old world, and they hadn’t exactly seen it work for them, so they embraced secularism wholeheartedly, invented intellectual abstract versions of Jewish life, and now we have a world where people say things like, “I’m Jewish, but I don’t practice The Faith™” [🤮], or “I’m culturally Jewish” as though that isn’t redundant but is rather meant to imply “without the yucky stuff.”

I didn’t realize exactly how uncomfortable this was for me until I spent a year in Jerusalem while my wife was in rabbinical school. That was the perfect place to observe how the crusade of “the secular” has eviscerated Jewish identity.

In Israel, “dati” (religious) means Orthodox, and the great majority of people refer to themselves as “chiloni,” meaning “secular,” although it literally means “profane,” which is amazing, but anyway.

It took me months to figure out how useless this term was.

“Chiloni” just means” “everyone who isn’t Orthodox,” which means the reactionary modern construction of what is “traditional” imposed to fend off the crusade is the only coherent concept of “religious” that remains in Israeli society. And while many of the chiloni people we met were indeed completely assimilated consumer-materialist subjects with no spiritual life, many were exactly like us: people with wild spiritual lives rooted in Jewish culture.

But we would never call ourselves “secular.”

Now, it’s horrifying modernisms all the way down; let’s not get caught up in it. The point is, the crusade to denature cultures into “religious” and “secular” domains that are economically and politically required to be analogous to each other has made it economically and politically all but impossible to remain distinct as a culture.

So this leaves me feeling that both “religious” and “secular” people are equally unhelpful for effecting cultural repair, which is my life’s entire mission.