The Power of Faith, and its Battle with Secularism

The premises and themes of this blog are well-articulated in the talk “Religion: Bound by Loving Ties,” by Elder Jeffrey Holland in Oct. 2016 (video & transcript at https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland_religion-bound-loving-ties/).  Namely that, among other things, religious faith has been a (or the) great moral, artistic & scientific force for good in society.  And that faith today is in an existential battle with secularism, as seen recently, for example, in attempts to apply a religious litmus test to presidential nominees (http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2017/september/this-dogma-wont-hunt-feinstein-durban-sanders-and-new-relig.html).

Here are some favorite excerpts (in addition to his text’s literary references, the video has also an audiovisual depiction of faith-inspired art & music):

“Will and Ariel Durant put the issue squarely as they reflected on what they called “the lessons of history.” “There is no significant example in history,” they said, “of [any] society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”


…If that is true — and surely we feel it is [e.g., the great moral failures of Nazism, Communism, socialism…] — then we should be genuinely concerned over the assertion that the single most distinguishing feature of modern life is the rise of secularism [in agreement with Dennis Prager’s assertion that Leftism is the most dynamic religion of the last century] with its attendant dismissal of, cynicism toward, or marked disenchantment with religion. How wonderfully prophetic our beloved Elder Neal A. Maxwell was—clear back in 1978—when he said in a BYU devotional:

We shall see in our time a maximum . . . effort . . . to establish irreligion as the state religion. [These secularists will use] the carefully preserved . . . freedoms of Western civilization to shrink freedom even as [they reject] the value . . . of our rich Judeo-Christian heritage. Your discipleship may see the time come when religious convictions are heavily discounted. . . . This new irreligious imperialism [will seek] to disallow certain . . . opinions simply because those opinions grow out of religious convictions.  [see one example of the fulfillment in the article cited at the beginning]

…distinguished legal scholar Elder Bruce C. Hafen framed it even more seriously than that:

Democracy’s core values of civilized religion . . . are now under siege—partly because of violent criminals who claim to have religious motives; partly because the wellsprings of stable social norms once transmitted naturally by religion and marriage-based family life are being polluted . . . ; and partly because the advocates of some causes today have marshaled enough political and financial capital to impose by intimidation, rather than by reason, their anti-­religion strategy of “might makes right.”

…Call it secularism or modernity or the technological age or existentialism on steroids—whatever you want to call such an approach to life, we do know a thing or two about it. Most important, we know that it cannot answer the yearning questions of the soul, nor is it substantial enough to sustain us in times of moral crises.

...Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, formerly Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth for twenty-two years, a man whom I admire very much, has written:

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.

The legendary German sociologist Max Weber once described such a loss of religious principle in society as being stuck in an “iron cage” of disbelief. And that was in 1904! Noting even in his day the shift toward a more luxurious but less value-laden society, a society that was giving away its priceless spiritual and religious roots, Weber said in 1918 that “not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness.”

…theologian David Bentley Hart …wrote:

Atheism that consists entirely in vacuous ­arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism.

We are grateful that a large segment of the human population does have some form of religious belief, and in that sense we have not yet seen a “polar night of icy darkness” envelop us. But no one can say we are not seeing some glaciers on the move.

Charles Taylor, in his book with the descriptive title A Secular Age, described the cold dimming of socioreligious light. The shift of our time, he said, has been

from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is[only] one human possibility among [many] others.

Charles Taylor also wrote that now, in the twenty-first century, “belief in God is no longer axiomatic.” Indeed, in some quarters it is not even a convenient option, it is “an embattled option.”

… In fact, religion has been the principal ­influence—not the only one, but the principal one—that has kept Western social, ­political, and cultural life moral, to the extent that these have been moral.

… Just to remind us how rich the ambiance of religion is in Western culture … let me mention just a few of the great religiously influenced non-LDS pieces of literature that I met while pursuing my education on this campus fifty years ago, provincial and dated as my list is…..The King James Bible, … John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress….Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. … Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—… Russians Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy….British giants like George Herbert, John Donne, William Blake, and Robert Browning; throw in Americans like Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor; …an American who became British, like T. S. Eliot, and a Briton who became American, like W. H. Auden; and for good luck throw in an Irishman like W. B. Yeats… you have biblical imagery, religious conflict, and wrenching questions of sin, society, and salvation on virtually every page you turn.

Having mentioned a tiny bit of the religiously related literature I happened to encounter as a student, I now note an equally tiny bit of the contribution that religious sensibility has provoked in the heart of the visual artist and the soul of the exultant musician. [An audiovisual presentation was shown.]


Brothers and sisters, my testimony this morning, as one observer recently wrote, is that “over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.” Roman Catholic scholar Robert Royal made the same point, reaffirming that for many, “religion remains deep, widespread, and persistent, to the surprise and irritation of those who claimed to have cast aside [religious] illusion”—to those, I might add, who under­estimated the indisputable power of faith.

The indisputable power of faith. The most powerful and enduring force in human ­history. The influence for good in the world. The link between the highest in us and our highest hopes for others. That is why religion ­matters.

… Speaking both literally and figuratively of a recurring feature on that landscape, Will Durant wrote:

These [church] steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope, these lofty city spires, or simple chapels in the hills—they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We ­cannot know. But as long as men suffer these steeples will remain.