Family under Post-Secular Conditions

Petruschka Schaafsma
Professor of Theological Ethics
Protestant Theological University, The Netherlands

Societies in Europe and North America are increasingly being described as post-secular. Scholars argue about whether this is true and, if so, what “post-secular” means. Is religion being taken more seriously again as important for human dignity? Or is it primarily a matter of religion’s renewed visibility in the public sphere? Whatever the answers to these questions, the term “post-secular” also expresses a longing. A longing for a new era in which facts, rationality and calculability are not our only approaches to reality, but in which there is also room for imagination, the unsayable, and transcendence. This longing has been fuelled in recent decades as major crises have confronted us with the limits of our human capacity to properly shape coexistence on this planet. 

Clearly, there are opportunities for theology and the church in the rise of this longing. But also dangers. For me, the greatest danger is uncritical annexation: declaring our quasi-hopeful projections, fuelled by feelings of powerlessness and despair, made to seem legitimate by attaching the word “God” to them. Meanwhile, we ourselves remain thoroughly secular.   

Can we imagine a better way? As a theological ethicist, I try to do my part to make “not easy” use of the post-secular space. I do this by exploring the transcendent moment in morality. People experience the good as something that is not only good for them, and as something inescapable. This happens in situations where the normal course of life is disrupted and the question of what is right to do arises. The good is experienced as an appeal beyond one’s own interests and desires. In this sense: transcendent. 

In what situations can this transcendent appeal be found? To find answers to these questions, I draw inspiration from thinkers who, without preconceived religious interest or ecclesiastical missionary purpose, point out where the limits of a fundamentally secular attitude impose themselves on us. For example, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who analyses our time as a time of acceleration and innovation towards “always more and better,” with the result that the space for a real experience of relationship with the world and with others becomes very limited. Only the sphere of the family seems to be exempt from this experience of alienation, which puts an enormous strain on it: it is practically the only place of resonance in an otherwise cold and indifferent world. The family is the last source of existential transcendence, the functional equivalent of religion in the absence of a great religious order of existence. Under this pressure, the family can hardly help but succumb, especially since the very givenness that characterises the family is seen as the enemy of resonance. 

With Rosa, then, we discover the family as a sphere in which a transcendent good imposes itself on us. At the same time, we see that this discovery should not simply be followed by an attempt to (theologically) rehabilitate the family, whether under the banner of “family values” or not. For the family succumbs precisely to its openness to transcendence. Rather, Rosa asks us how to make sense of the scarce experiences of transcendence so that they become an attitude that is applicable more broadly than just in specific spheres of life such as the family. It is an attitude of wonder, receptivity, humility and reverence. Theology and the church are rooted in a wealth of reflections and practices to nurture this attitude into a critical and constructive impulse beyond the secular.