Reading Our Way to Post-Secularity

Kathryn Reklis
Associate Professor of Theology
Fordham University

In July 2024, Pope Francis released a letter on the role of literature in pastoral formation. Literature provides “privileged access… to the very heart of human culture, and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual” the Pope argued, and treating it as non-essential in pastoral formation – a kind of entertainment or “minor art” to take or leave – “can lead to serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of future priests.” The patience, time, and mental activity required by reading challenges our efficiency-obsessed age with a different order of time itself, with reflection and rumination. Literature expands our worldview and develops empathy for the lives, choices, experiences, and feelings of others different from us (but with whom our imaginations are activated to seek and find common ground). This empathetic understanding of others, in turn, prevents facile and narrow judgments, as we are taught to understand other human actors with humility and sensitivity to the complexity of the world. 

I resonate with everything the Pope is recommending. I am not a pastor, but I cannot imagine my inner life without the formative power of literature, and I seek to entice my students to these pleasures in my teaching. What intrigues me most, however, is how this particular defense of the spiritual and formative powers of literature echoes arguments that have been made for nearly 100 years to defend the secularity of literature and, more recently, its post-secular potential. Our attitudes toward literature – what we want it to do for us and how we think it does it – have long been a way to navigate the boundary between religion and secularity.

If you have ever served on a core curriculum committee, participated in a spirited debate on U.S. public school common core standards, or read one of the many contemporary think pieces on the decline of the humanities, you will realize that the Pope is not alone in trying to articulate what reading is for. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham notes in The Humanities and the Dream of America, no sooner did the humanities emerge as a principle to organize undergraduate study than they were perceived to be in crisis. The tenor of this crisis should sound familiar, oscillating between distress at the society at large (no one appreciates the humanities anymore! where is all the funding?) and castigation from within (the disciplines have become too specialized! we have surrendered to the logic of the markets!). The hope for the humanities in the post-war years was to overcome both internal and external crises and create, through proper study, “the whole man” – a morally upright citizen both active and gregarious in public, but possessed of “rich emotional, spiritual, and even instinctual life (75).” 

This was a decidedly secularizing project. In language very similar to Francis’s, literature was offered as the privileged site to unite a society fracturing under new global pressures, increased industrialization and urbanization, shifting societal norms, explosive class reorganization, and Jim Crow segregation: in other words, a means to form the liberal subject when the theories of liberalism were being put to the test. Literature was positioned to do the formative spiritual and emotional work for all people that Christianity had previously done for some. The whole sinking ship – of American education, of American civilization – would be held together not by the Protestant faith of the past, but by a new commitment to liberal study, exemplified in the power of literature. 

As projects go, this one was a failure. American society is not held together by the spiritual and emotional power of a shared body of literature. Even our most talented students have forgotten how to read. As post-colonial scholars like Aamir Mufti and Gauri Viswanathan have argued, literary study was exported around the world as a vehicle for secularization that was laden with Christian assumptions and practices, masking particularity under the language of universality. Academic disciplines have largely retreated from the spiritual, formative work imagined in the mid-century, aware that claims to hold a civilization together often privilege certain kinds of people and certain kinds of culture at the expense of others. Literary studies strove to distance itself from these crypto-theological aims, striving for an objectivity and neutrality that would place the discipline more squarely in line with other secular academic disciplines. The demands of efficiency, rigor, and productivity have profoundly shaped all of us, including those of us lucky enough to study literature or theology for a living. 

Maybe precisely because of these failures, and in the face of new pressures fracturing American culture into rival understandings of truth and distrust of academic institutions, the last few decades have seen many literary scholars and theorists arguing for post-secular literary studies. In its most compelling form, “post-secular” in these instances means something like a return to a more wholistic, integrated form of learning. If a secular/religious binary is imagined as natural and stable, then a whole range of human experiences – emotions, embodiment, mysticism and what Michael Warner names as “ultimate questions as finitude, mortality, nature, fate, and commonality” – were relegated to the “religious” side of the binary and therefore off limits to secular, objective study. Post-secularism in this context is a longing to recapture a more expansive form of human knowing and being that resists the disciplinary power of our academic disciplines.

But, of course, there is the danger that this longing for the post-secular will double back on itself: in reaching for all the things elided by the “secular,” the “post-secular” might just end up privileging the same things that used to count as “the religious” without really troubling the dichotomy that got us into our post-Enlightenment-bifurcated-subject-fractured-culture mess in the first place. A secular/post-secular dichotomy is not much of an advance.

Whether we understand the Pope’s appeal to literary formation as an embrace of “secular” literature or an appeal to something beyond the secular, his appeal is just one of many that continues to look to literature to do privileged work in making sense of our spiritual lives. A bit more cynically, we might wonder if by the time the Pope feels compelled to weigh in on behalf of literature the battle has already been lost.

More hopefully, we might ask what we are looking for when we turn to reading as a way to be spiritual in a secular age or to resist that secularity altogether. In so doing, we might have to be less certain that we know what literature does to us, less sure we can name what counts as “the whole man” and more curious about what we want out of that wholeness. How, Francis asks, can a pastor hope to “speak to the hearts of men and women if we ignore, set aside or fail to appreciate the ‘stories’ by which they sought to express and lay bare the drama of their lived experience in novels and poems?” But the stories people tell and the dramas that live in their hearts often contain more “heterodox, eclectic and often populist forms of religion and spirituality” than our theories of secular or post-secular literature acknowledge. Literature’s demands on us may exceed generating empathy or focusing our attention. If literature has often been a way to navigate the boundary between religion and secularity – a special vehicle to allow us to traverse this divide without giving up the privileges we imagine inhere in both camps – wherever literature might take us beyond this dichotomy is surely more wonderous, more strange, and less predictable than we often have the courage to imagine.