Sacralization of Secular Spheres in Modernity

Abstract

Our proposal is aimed at analyzing a series of sacred forms that question that initial hallmark of the general theory of secularization which, based on a teleological conception, postulated a movement from the sacred to the profane, from the religious to the secular. These new sacred forms describe a different pattern that goes from the secular to the religious, as new forms of sacralization. In this sense, we analyze, first, the historical emergence of the grand narrative of secularization in Europe, which describes a unidirectional process from the religious to the secular. Second, we carry out a genealogical critique of the narrative of secularization. Third, we analyze the other direction in that dynamic tension that goes from the secular to the religious. Fourthly, we analyze new forms of sacralization that emerged in the French Revolution, in American “civil religion”, in post-war Europe, in the commemorations of Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day, in the Coronation Ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II, in the proto-event of 11 September 2001, in the sacralization of the person and in the sacralization of the child. “See to it that no one enslaves you through the vain fallacy of a philosophy, founded on human traditions, according to the elements of the world and not according to Christ.” (Saint Paul, Epistle to the Colossians 2: 8); “In the imagination of the simple patriot, the nation is not a society but the Society. Although its values are relative, they appear, from his naive perspective, as absolute. The nation is always endowed with an aura of sacredness, which is the reason why religions, which claim universality, are so easily captured and domesticated by national sentiment, religion and patriotism converging in such a process.” (Reinhold Niebuhr); “Everyone can only choose for himself who for him is God and who is the devil because with respect to values, in fact, it is always and everywhere not only a matter of alternatives, but of an irreconcilable fight to the death, between ‘god’ and the ‘devil’.” (Max Weber).

1. Introduction

It has been thought of as a historical process leading from the sacred to the secular. Well visible is the teleological stamp of this belief, whose trail leads back to the first wave of enlightened modernizing sociologists (Saint Simon, Comte, Spencer, Condorcet); it was believed that the more modern a society is, the more secular and less religious it would be. What reality seems to exhibit, however, is rather a process that can be said to be advancing between the sacred and the secular, as long as these are seen as two guiding distinctions, of permanent value and in constant dynamic tension in the real world. The theory of secularization was also thought of as a universal general theory (Berger 1967), when, in reality, what we discover is the coexistence of diverse secularizations, de-secularizations and modern sacralizations (and we must stress the need to emphasize this plural). Our response to these lines of interpretation is that we do not live in a post-dualistic world where the old transcendence/immanence distinction can be made a clean slate, as naively thought by that first wave of secularizing conviction, which considered modern society to be embedded, with all its trappings, in immanent finitude. Fifty years later, Berger himself redefines his approach, stating that there currently exists “on the one hand, a coexistence between different religions and, on the other hand, a coexistence between religious discourses and secular discourses” (Berger 2014, p. 9). Social reality persistently warns us of the presence of new religious realities that fill with self-transcendent stretches the very immanence of that cosmos that was postulated purely and exclusively as an immanent realm, but understood in a narrow sense, urgently in need of a reinterpretation of the kind we propose here.

2. Results

2.1. The Unfolding of the Grand Récit of a General Theory of Secularization

The self-awareness of living in a secular age can only emerge from the empirical evidence that “belief in God is no longer axiomatic, (that) there are alternatives” (Taylor 2007, p. 3). We have moved from a society where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, or at least not to have the axiom of belief in God as the cardinal axis of common sense (because it was socially prescribed to believe and proscribed not to believe, in a massively believing context), to one where faith, even for the most radical of believers, is a human possibility (Taylor 2007, p. 3) among others. Charles Taylor, taking up Hugo Grotius’s formula, asserts that this crucial sociological fact will produce a new pattern of meaning according to which we act within an “immanent secular framework” under the premise: etsi Deus non daretur (Taylor 1998, pp. 34 and 36) (“as if God did not exist”), and even if God did not exist, the principles that emanate from such a “secular immanent world” are binding. It could be said that within the saeculum a new guiding distinction emerges, that which differentiates between an “us” (post-religious subjects who are governed by rational claims of validity) and a “them” (religious believers guided by their faith).

This irrefutable sociological fact will produce a great narrative of secularization that begins with the “modernizing” proto-sociologists—Saint Simon, Comte and Spencer—who champion the grand récit (in Lyotard’s terms) that constitutes modern societies, relying on a narrative of progress (Koselleck 1975, pp. 350–423) that constitutes and continues civilization until reaching the “positive” stage where the “secular immanent framework” will have an unavoidable importance. Although Taylor challenges the secularist and denialist prejudices that tend to understand the secular as merely the space that remains when the supramundane reality is emptied of religious content or to see religious indifference as simply the result of scientific-technical progress, nevertheless, he does not shy away from the teleological character of that “evolutionary consciousness of stages”, since according to him, the plausibility of this “secular immanent framework” is based on a process of historical maturation sustained by the argument that “the superiority of our gaze over previous forms of understanding is part of what defines the advance of the current stage over all previous stages” (Taylor 2007, p. 289); modern religious indifference is not the absence of belief but a historical condition that requires the imperfect past tense, “a condition of having overcome the irrationality of belief” (Taylor 2007, p. 269).

2.2. Critical Genealogy of the Grand Récit of Secularization

Based on this sociological fact from a specific historical context, that of the dynamics of transformation of Western European Christianity from the Middle Ages to the present day, a general theory of secularization has been constructed based on a “sociological conjecture” that serves as a “regime of knowledge” with not only descriptive but also prescriptive connotations and which we could formulate, in the terms of José Casanova, as follows: “the more modern, the more secular a society is, and the more secular, the less religious” (Casanova 2006b, p. 17). This conjecture has ultimately been proven false in empirical terms. This general theory of secularization in Europe has functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy (Casanova 2002, p. 24) insofar as a majority of the population in Europe has come to accept the premises of this theory as a normal fact (when, in reality, Europe is an islet of secularist exceptionality in the face of the usual ocean of persistence of the religious fact in the rest of the world) and has projected them as an original from which to make worldwide copies, making it clear that modernization and secularization, empirically speaking, are not two synonymous terms. When we refer to religion, we should not forget that “there is no global rule” (Casanova 2006a, vol. 8, Nos. 1 and 2, p. 17).

A refutation of this “conjecture” that automatically associates modernization and secularization (Joas 2012, pp. 23–43) as the progressive disappearance of religion can be found, for example, in the United States, where, according to de Tocqueville (1990, p. 309), the advance of rationalism (that is, education and scientific knowledge) and the value of individualism (i.e., liberal democracy and individual freedoms) do not necessarily lead to a decline in religion. In other words, the United States is both a secular and a religious country at the same time. The First Amendment to the Constitution does not prohibit the thirteen original states from practicing their own established religions. What Congress vetoed was the establishment of an official political religion in the United States. In colonial America there was no feudalism or a national church spread throughout the thirteen original colonies, from which the new federal state needed to separate. Therefore, the separation between church and state was amicable, not only because there was no hostile separation in relation to a pre-existing established church, but also because the separation was constituted to protect the free exercise of religion, that is, to construct the conditions for the possibility of religious pluralism (denominationalism), where the assumption is that religious diversity is a “good” for society or the nation.

The Western European pattern of tensions and conflicts between the “secular” and the “religious” cannot be mechanically applied to other parts of the world as if it were the rule to follow, the original from which copies are made, when it is rather the exception (Davie 1999, pp. 65–83) to the rule; in fact, a large part of non-Western postcolonial societies have not followed the Western-European pattern. Nor can it be applied to Confucianism or Taoism, insofar as they are not characterized by a tension between “this world” and “the other world” or by an ecclesiastical organization of mediation. These religions have always been “intramundane” and “secular”, and for this reason there has been no generalized process of secularization in Western terms.

2.3. The Other Hidden Direction of the Pairing: From the Secular to the Religious

The grand problem of the general theory of secularization was to have entrusted its plausibility to an evolutionary conception of teleological character, according to which there is something like a universal law of evolution (sic Herbert Spencer) that leads from the religious to the secular with an unequivocal finalistic orientation, when in fact we must keep in mind that the secular “should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of “religion” and thus replaces it” (Asad 2003, p. 191). In the historical processes of secularization, an interesting ideological inversion takes place. Initially, “the secular” was part of the theological discourse (saeculum), and, later on, the very category of “the religious” was born from the political-secular and scientific-secular discourses. Therefore, “religion” itself emerges, as a historical category and as a universal globalized concept, as a result of a construction of Western secular modernity (Asad [1993] 1994; 2003, p. 192). Let us see this through a modern example, that of nationalism emerging throughout the nineteenth century. This is a “secular” product, since it is designed to develop within processes of secularization and modernization. Emile Durkheim was the first sociologist to show how nationalism became a source of production of sacredness (Santiago 2010, pp. 349–67), which according to him replaced that previously produced by historical religions. The new cult of the nation thus guaranteed the social bond at a time when the old gods were aging or dying, and others had not yet been born to replace them (Durkheim 1982, p. 398)1. During the Revolution of 1789, French nationalism worshipped society, without any mediation, without projecting itself into something that symbolized it, in contrast to what had happened previously with totemic and theistic religions. At that time “purely secular things were transformed (…) into sacred things: thus the Fatherland, Liberty and Reason (…) In a given case it has been seen that society and its ideas became directly, and without transfiguration of any kind, the object of a true cult” (Durkheim, opus cit, p. 201). Recently, studies have emerged showing how the notion of “God’s choice”, which was first experienced by the Israelites and formulated in the Old Testament texts, has been adopted by the modern nationalist movement (Van der Veer and Lehmann 1999, p. 6). A proportion of these studies examine the ways in which the idea of choice served to justify the aims and actions of an imperialist policy, while another group of the studies try to explain suffering by providing a stimulus to political emancipation and national liberation. Both forms of choice can be conflated with ideas of racial purity and uniqueness: the men who believed they were bearers of a special mission in British colonial affairs in the 19th century were very consciously Christian and white, as were their counterparts in the Netherlands, in Germany or in the United States. In the substratum of the actions of these men, three concepts are discovered (Van der Veer 2001, p. 30): religious elements, secular nationalism and the notion of race or racial characteristics. First, there is the idea of choice of a certain people, which incorporates political and social as well as religious ingredients. Second, there is the theme of revival or rebirth of the entire nation. Pietists and Methodists introduced the metaphor of “Awakening”—a kind of collective regeneration—in 18th century Protestantism, and 19th century nationalists used the notion of revival to explain and advance the idea of a Christian nation, “a nation under God” (Gorski 2020) as it was called in the United States. The third idea is the belief in a new Messiah who serves as a spiritual (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, etc.) and/or political leader. In 1914, even those who received a secular education were socialized with biblical stories that pictured their respective political leadership in biblical terms and with spiritual qualifications spelled out in the Old and New Testaments2. The religiously united secular national community would recreate itself by creating commemorations of the nation’s violent past (“sacrificial Birth and Rebirth”). As we see, in all these examples, “the secular” and “the religious” lend each other concepts, figures and meanings that highlight the ideological inversions that are established between them, even within a predominantly secular world.

But, as opposed to the teleology implicit in European trends of secularization, which postulates a final conversion of the religious “them” into the post-religious “us”, both circles do not function as irreconcilably opposed or disjointed elements, but as two sides of the same coin, two circles of sociality, which must be carefully understood as possibilities that enter into relationship and tension, and interpenetrate within each society, giving rise to different constellations. The religious and the secular continue their struggle within today’s public culture, where a set of complex classificatory systems of symbols and meanings compete to constitute a semantic field in permanent dynamic tension in which national life and national identity are implicated. Let us begin by clearing up three common confusions that we should avoid.

Everybody worships. Worship has not receded in a supposedly “secular” world, but has rather migrated from the explicit worship of God to the implicit worship of things of human creation (Cavanaugh 2024). The ubiquity of worship indicates a deep longing in the human heart for the transformation of our lives. What characterizes the modern West is not disenchantment as a unique trend but rather the condition of having learned to describe ourselves as disenchanted and enchanted. What has diminished in the West is explicit worship of the Jewish and Christian God; what has not diminished is worship. People kill for all sorts of things: gods, flags, freedom, ethnicity, oil, nations, the workers’ revolution, the free market, and many other ideologies and practices that people treat as ultimate (Weber 1946, p. 149). Worship is not confined to gods but applies to all sorts of realities commonly labeled “political” or “economic.” We all believe in something; we are spontaneously worshiping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things.

2.4. Modern Sacralizations

In the writings of Emile Durkheim we also find a series of fragments that support the thesis of the presence of modern resacralizations of spheres that are in principle secular, such as the nation and the human person. Durkheim never spoke of modern polytheism like Weber, but he did point to the idea that the processes of “indetermination of collective consciousness” would generate processes of individualization and a strong differentiation of collective representations in the plural. According to Durkheim, the collective effervescence (Durkheim 1982, p. 205) that originates the transcendence of the ordinary world and creates an extra-ordinary plus and the subsequent emblematisme that he observes in the first human societies can also be observed in the symbolism of national realities at the end of the XVIII and throughout the XIX century, in the midst of the intensification of social life created by the French Revolution, in the origin of the nation as the proto-modern expression of collective identity. In Durkheim’s view, there would be no substantial difference in ritual form between the gathering of Christians celebrating the major milestones in the life of Christ, Jews recalling the Exodus from Egypt, or a gathering of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new morality or a new legal system or a significant event in national life. We have to remember that what makes the religious fact recognizable as such is not its content but its form. The contents of the sacred can change over time; i.e., they could be established and they could also lose their aura of sacredness. Each society creates its own sacred contents. What was sacred in the past could be less sacred today and could even be totally desacralized in the future. We have to remember that the religious fact is nothing mysterious or supernatural; it is present in all civilizations and in all ages. First we began by sacralizing nature itself in the pre-axial religions; then we sacralized the gods of the sky in the axial religions, but then in the modern post-axial era we have sacralized the nation, the individual, the child. It is not born of individual feelings, but of states of the collective soul, and can acquire as many forms as the collectivity that engenders it, and its nature can only be determined through two indicators: practices and beliefs. “In short, it is the unity and diversity of social life that determines, at the same time, the unity and diversity of sacred beings and things” (Durkheim 1982, p. 385). We should not forget that the sacred in modern societies is not a uniform constellation of symbols and rituals that produces a unanimous consensus among all citizens. Modern societies, in Durkheimian terms, have a plural collective consciousness with multiple sacred forms that are sometimes in opposition to each other (Lynch 2012, p. 135). To speak of the sacred in modern societies means to look at contingent historical situations (Tweed 2006, pp. 54–79) that create specific forms of transcendence—the constitutive element of production of sacredness—some of these being still axial and manifesting in the mapping of universal religions, but other forms emerging with different post-axial characteristics, such as the sacralization of the nation and more recently the sacralization of the person and more specifically of the child, as we shall see.

The historical selection of the different cases that we study below is based on history and on the set of operative social forces that act within these two poles, religious and secular, configuring a semantic field in permanent dynamic tension that gives rise to specific sacralization constellations within different societies where secularization and sacralization are two processes inherent to social evolution. The processes of secularization and sacralization coexist within societies. There is no single direction that leads from the religious to the secular, as a first version of the secularization that emerged in Europe thought, but rather society sacralizes, creates new sacred forms from secular spheres.

(A)

The French Revolution

Beginning with our analysis of expressions of modern resacralizations affecting the nation, let us look at the case of the French Revolution (Hunt 1988, pp. 25–44; Edward 1988, pp. 44–66). Abbé Sieyés, in his celebrated Qu’es ce que le Tiers Etat, published in 1789, stated that the French nation was “a body of associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly… It was something anterior, pre-existent to all social phenomena and institutions… The image of the Patrie is the only one to worship” (Sieyes [1789] 1970, pp. 10–11). According to this fragment we can observe how the community of salvation is transformed into a community of worship, of practices, into an imagined national community, in Benedikt Anderson’s terms, in which the new object of worship is the nation (Santiago 2015, p. 37), or rather, “the people of the nation”. The historical event does not represent a transfer of sacredness, as Llobera (1994, p. 187) notes, moving from the sacred to the profane, as was usually postulated by the European metanarrative of secularization, but the sacralization of a secular domain made possible by the performative revolutionary acts of 1789 and the years that followed the revolution, thus creating a new post-tax religious constellation. From the French Revolution emerged a constituent will represented in a new faith whose principles are contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Mathiez [1904] 2012)3. The royal-regal becomes the national. This sacralization transforms a secular reality such as the nation. We have already seen how originally “the secular” was part of a theological discourse (saeculum), where secular forms become independent progressively from religious tutelage, but, later, as a consequence of the secularization process, the category of “the religious” will emerge from political-secular discourses and scientific-secular discourses, something that is evident in these new modern post-taxial sacralizations (Asad 2003, p. 192). This new metamorphosis of “the religious” situates religion as a historical category and as a globalized universal concept within the cultural and political programs of Western secular modernity. The Durkheimian reference is revealing in this regard: “This capacity of society to set itself up as a god or to create gods was at no time more perceptible than during the first years of the French Revolution. At that time, indeed, under the influence of the general enthusiasm, purely secular things were transformed by public opinion into sacred things, thus the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. There was a tendency to erect for itself a religion with its dogmas, its symbols, its altars and its festivities… There remains the fact that in a given case, it was seen that society and its ideas became directly, and without transfiguration of any kind, the object of a true cult” (Durkheim 1982, p. 201).

(B)

American “civil religión”

The concept of American “civil religion” coined by Bellah and Tipton (2006, pp. 225–45) offers a genuinely modern example of resacralization of the secular reality of the nation. If Durkheim has offered us the juicy example of the French Revolution, Bellah will draw a series of important conclusions from “a collection of beliefs, symbols and rituals in relation to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity (the American republic)” (Bellah and Tipton 2006, p. 233). This religious variety is a community of worship, of practices, not so much a community of beliefs, since people hold diverse beliefs. This variety is not oriented to the salvation of the soul of the believer but to the welfare of the citizen, as Robertson-Smith and Durkheim had already warned. The milestones of emergence of “civil religion” occur in the midst of periods of socio-political explosion, of crises that test the social creativity of a collective (Gorski 2017). The first of these periods is represented by the revolutionary war of independence against England, where George Washington emerges as the Moses who leads his people by breaking the chains of tyranny. The second period is forged around the Civil War, the “center of American history,” a moment that captures the tragic intensity of a fratricidal struggle in one of the bloodiest wars of the 19th century. While the first period focused on the question of Independence, on whether the emerging country should or could govern itself, the second period concentrated on the idea of slavery, which would eventually represent the most far-reaching problem for the complete institutionalization of democracy within the country. The Civil War brought with it the deeper questions of national meaning, and Abraham Lincoln, “our martyred president” (Bellah and Tipton 2006, p. 236), would appear as the new Jesus picking up the baton from Washington with new challenges to respond to. As the third period of challenge, Bellah places it in the midst of the crisis over the public-sphere consequences of the Vietnam War and the collective effervescence generated by the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King as the symbolic catalyst.

Civil religion is a national community of worship but not a community of salvation; “it is something genuinely American and new. It has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and its own sacred places, its own solemn rituals and its own symbols” (ibid., p. 245); “the God of the civil religion is not a “unitarian” God, … (but) is more related to order, law, freedom and justice than to salvation and love” (p. 232); in fact, J. F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address, places as enemies, not other men, but tyranny, poverty, disease and war.

In this sense, civil religion is a post-tax religion, reordering the presence of Hebraic and other Christian traits in a new context. Bellah takes up the example of Tocqueville, from whom he draws inspiration when he states that American civil religion is a “democratic and republican religion” (Bellah and Tipton 2006, p. 239)4. According to de Tocqueville (1990, p. 309), the advance of rationalism (i.e., education and scientific knowledge) and the value of individualism (i.e., liberal democracy and individual liberties) do not necessarily lead to a decline of religion. That is, the United States is both a secular and religious country; the First Amendment to the Constitution does not prohibit the thirteen original states from practicing “their own established religions” in them. What Congress vetoes is the establishment of an official political religion in the United States. In colonial America there was neither feudalism nor a national church spread throughout the thirteen original colonies from which the new federal state needed to separate. Therefore, the separation between the state and the church was friendly, not only because there was no hostile separation in relation to a pre-existing established church, but also because the separation was constituted to “protect the free exercise of religion”—that is, to build the conditions for the possibility of religious pluralism (denominationalism) (Niebuhr [1929] 1957, pp. 3–6, 17–21, 25; Casanova 2012) where it is assumed that religious diversity is a “good” for society or the nation.

(C)

Post-war Europe

As examples of modern resacralization, in the wake of Durkheim, we can cite other equally interesting cases. Let us consider the example of post-war Europe. If anything is Europe, it is a symbol, a totem, but, for Durkheim, the totem is not only a symbol of something that is sacred to the believer but is a constituent part of the sacred as such. This occurred in Europe in the space of time immediately following World War II and the dreadful Shoah (Schwedberg 1994, pp. 378–87). These are events of collective shock, of crisis, of tragedy (let us recall, in this sense, the energetic pronouncements, perhaps forgotten today, of Winston Churchill in defense of a United Europe in 1946, as well as the founding of the Council of Europe in 1949), episodes that galvanized the pro-European movement) that elucidate a sort of new post-tax and post-national piacular rite and prelude a new political ideal, that of a United Europe, born in opposition to the perverse Nazi glorification of the national state, aspects that will crystallize in the Congress of the Hague in May 1948. The new modern European self-representation would therefore be the result of a negative identity, based on events of the recent past. Jeffrey C. Alexander has situated the Holocaust as the meta-event and the dominant collective representation (Alexander 2004, pp. 196–264) that symbolizes such a negative collective identity (evil) in the second half of the twentieth century. This meta-event is comparable to the meta-event represented by the Sermon on the Mount, if we attend to its implications and repercussions. Without this set of events of reappropriation of the past in the present, Auschwitz would not have gone beyond the stage of a war crime to become a universal cultural trauma. Alexander gives voice to the “experience of a universal trauma” (Alexander 2013) that can be understood as a sociological process that defines a painful harm inflicted on the collective, establishing the victims, assigning responsibility and distributing the ideal and material consequences as a way of restoring the well-being of the community.

(D)

Memorial Day

For Warner (1959, 1962), “Memorial Day and similar ceremonies in the United States are one of the several forms of collective representations which Durkheim so brilliant1y defined and interpreted in The Elementary Forms of the Relígious Life” (Warner 1962, p. 30). The “Memorial Day rites of Yankee City and hundreds of other American towns … are a modern cult of the dead and conform to Durkheim’s definition of sacred collective representations”. They “consist of a system of sacred beliefs and dramatic rituals held by a group of people, who when they congregate, represent the whole community” and they are “sacred because they ritually relate the living to sacred things” (Warner 1959, p. 278). Warner analyses “the unifying and integrative character of the Memorial Day ceremony—the increasing convergence of the multiple and diverse events through various stages into a single unit in which the many become the one and all the living participants unite in the one community of the dead” (Warner 1962, p. 16). The ceremony consists in “the progressive integration and symbolic unification of the group” (Warner 1962, p. 18). Warner summarizes his own thesis as follows: “Memorial Day ceremonies and subsidiary rites (such as those of Armistice or Veterans’ Day) … are rituals of a sacred symbol system which functions periodically to unify the whole community, with its conflicting symbols and its opposing, autonomous churches and associations … in the Memorial Day ceremonies the anxieties which man has about death are confronted with a system of sacred beliefs about death which gives the individuals involved and the collectivity of individuals a feeling of well-being. Further the feeling of triumph over death by collective action in the Memorial Day parade is made possible by recreating the feeling of well-being and the sense of group strength and individual strength in the group power, which is felt so intensely during the wars … when the feeling so necessary for the Memorial Day’s symbol system is originally experienced” (Warner 1962, p. 8)5.

(E)

Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Ceremony in 1953

Edward Shils and Michael Young see their interpretation of the meaning of the British Coronation (Shils and Young 1953, pp. 63–82) as “merely restating the interpretation, in a particular context of [Durkheim’s] more general view” (p. 67). The Coronation was, they claim, exactly the kind of ceremonial of which Durkheim wrote, “in which society reaffirms the moral values which constitute it as a society and renews its devotion to those values by an act of communion” (p. 67). The Coronation Service itself was “a series of ritual affirmations of the moral values necessary to a well-governed and good society” (p. 67). The service and the procession which followed it were “shared and celebrated by nearly all the people of Britain”; “in these events of 2nd June the Queen and her people were, through radio, television and press and in festivities throughout the land, brought into a great nation-wide communion” (pp. 70–71). This popular participation throughout the country “had many of the properties of the enactment of a religious ritual” (p. 72). There was “the common sentiment of the sacredness of communal life and institutions … people became more aware of their dependence on each other, and they sensed some connection between this and their relationship to the Queen. Thereby they became more sensitive to the values which bound them all together” (p. 74). On sacred occasions—of which the Coronation is only one extremely “august form”—the whole of society is felt to be one large family, and even the nations of the Commonwealth, represented at the Coronation by their prime ministers, queens and ambassadors, are conceived of as a “family of nations” (pp. 78–79). Shils and Young sum up their analysis of the Coronation’s meaning as follows: “A society is held together by its internal agreement about the sacredness of certain fundamental moral standards. In an inchoate, dimly perceived and seldom explicit manner, the central authority of an orderly society, whether it be secular or ecclesiastical, is acknowledged to be the avenue of communication with the realm of the sacred values. Within its society, popular constitutional monarchy enjoys almost universal recognition in this capacity, and it is therefore enabled to heighten the moral and civic sensibility of the society and to permeate it with symbols of those values to which the sensitivity responds. Intermittent rituals bring the society or varying sectors of it repeatedly into contact with this vesse1 of the sacred values. The Coronation provided at one time and for practically the entire society such an intensive contact with the sacred that we believe we are justified in interpreting it … as a great act of national communion” (p. 80). The coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II in the British monarchy in 1953 offers, in the view of Shils and Young (1953, pp. 63–82), an excellent opportunity to see how in particular social contexts and at specific historical moments, a specific figure or institution can come to represent the “sacred center”6 of society.

(F)

The proto-event of 11 September 2001 in New York City

The proto-event of 11 September 2001, in New York, the destruction of the WTC that resulted in the death of 2998 people and 6291 injured, also has important repercussions on the rituals that create and recreate the nation. Although, initially, the terrorist act, ritually, meant a heinous shedding of blood—both literally and metaphorically—making use of the vital fluids of the victims to cast a belligerent and horrific painting on the canvas of social life (Alexander 2006, pp. 91–115), in a second phase, the destruction of the WTC, counter-performatively, brought people together in a cross-cultural, cross-racial and cross-class ritual act in which everybody shouted, in the midst of a great piacular rite, as a sign of mourning, “We all are Americans”. The new social space (Ground Zero) and the new time (911) create the conditions of possibility for the communion of consciences in an act of social fusion successfully carried out to constitute itself in the center of the social, in the manner of a “total social fact”, in Marcel Mauss’ terms. The social reaction to the attack represents an appropriating event immune to social differentiation in which a cultural trauma has resacralized certain discourses in the public sphere. Public grief and remembrance of the events of 9/11 become the ritual counter-model of a sacred drama that evokes national and international adhesions with the victims of the assault as sacred symbols of freedom and democracy. What is interesting to underline is that what has created a kind of moral communion, even in a functionally differentiated society, is not the sharing of the same beliefs, since the United States is a pluralistic and culturally differentiated society, but the sharing of the same practices within the public sphere in which an emerging social creativity re-enchanted and morally re-armed society. However, as Gordon Lynch aptly notes, “The events of 9/11 not only demonstrate how, in pluralistic societies, sacred rituals not only elicit the intended response from their respective audiences but also show how ritual activities and ritual counter-activities related to the sacred can be implicated in entrenched patterns of violent conflict” (Lynch 2012, p. 45).

Terrorism is not only a form of political action but also a form of “symbolic” action. In Austin’s terms we can say that terrorism is an illocutionary force that aims at a perlocutionary effect. It is not “culture” as such that creates the scripts for action, but pragmatic efforts to protect particular cultural meanings in pursuit of practical objectives. Throughout historical time, and with sometimes tragic and terrifying consequences, a pronounced tendency has gradually emerged among Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations to project evil onto the other, as something exogenous to one’s own, thus creating a guiding distinction that divides between one’s own “sacred/friend” and the “profane/enemy” of the other, within a cultural logic of exacerbated polarization. In this plot, Bin Laden struck the first blow in a charismatic and “creative” way, since he initially controlled the deployment of the means of symbolic production. The actor/terrorist/martyr/suicide martyrs succeeded in destroying the tainted icons of modern American capitalism, the Twin Towers, which evocatively symbolized the atheistic Western enemy. But, nevertheless, from that apocalyptic and Dantesque painting, typical of Brueghel the Elder, emerges a moral communion, “a cross-cultural, interracial and interclass ritual counter-act”—bringing together the firemen, the brokers, the policemen, and coextensively the whole American and world society behind—in which everybody shouted, in the middle of a great expiatory rite as a sign of mourning, “We are all Americans now”, extending both national and international solidarity. Ground Zero and 911 serve as the iconic spatio-temporal context; that is, the act of destruction of the towers and the holocaust of the innocents makes them “turn from something profane into something sacred”; the ashes of the towers and the immolated represent the “new symbol of the nation’s fusion”. This commemorative ritual revives the high points of emotional intensity; the participants feel involved in that ritual center of attention (Collins 2004, pp. 53–87), symbolized in the monuments created for this purpose in southern Manhattan. What is interesting to underline, from a sociological point of view, is that what has created a kind of moral communion, even in a functionally differentiated society, is not the fact of sharing the same beliefs, since United States is a pluralistic and culturally differentiated society, but the fact of “sharing the same practices” within the public sphere in which an emerging social creativity re-enchanted and morally re-armed society.

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The sacralization of the human person

The nation is not the only modern secular sphere that has become sacralized; dignity and respect for the human person have also become part of the sacred core of modern society. Let us analyze the legal, sociological and theological factors involved in this process.

We can initially interpret the belief in human rights and universal human dignity as the result of a specific process of sacralization in which every human being has been made sacred, being institutionalized in “law,” and generating increasing and widespread motivational and sensitizing effects within modern society. If we presuppose this, then it seems reasonable to understand changes in the penal system from changes in the understanding of the sacred. From this perspective, the reforms of criminal law and penal practice, as well as the creation of human rights at the end of the 18th century, are an expression of a profound cultural change through which “the human person becomes a sacred object.” A new meaning has been ascribed to sacredness. The history of human rights can be interpreted as a history of sacralization (of the human person).

Although within the universal religions—Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam—there is already the germ of the sacredness of human life, in the form of an ethos of love and universal respect for the (neighboring) other, the process of germination of such a seed take place within the American Revolution and immediately afterwards in the French Revolution. Although the dominant position has considered that human rights have their origin in an approach coming from the Enlightenment, according to which the “charisma of reason” (Weber 1978, p. 937) is the last historical form of charisma coming from the original phases of the French Revolution, individual freedom is the result that represents the best of all worlds; however, in the opinion of Joas (2011, chap. 1) it was Jellinek ([1895] 1979) in his work entitled The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: A Contribution to Modern Constitutional History, originally published in 1895, who placed the Christian roots in the Declaration of Human Rights and not so much in the French Enlightenment, which was skeptical, if not hostile, towards religion. Therefore, in this perspective, rather than a sacralization or charismatization of reason, we would be witnessing a “sacralization or charismatization of the human person”.

The intellectual roots of human rights in Renaissance humanism, in the Reformation or in Spanish Scholasticism are generally of less help in understanding the phenomenon we are analyzing than the dynamics of its sudden institutionalization. It is here that Jellinek observed the decisive importance that religious freedom has had for American Protestants, especially for Calvinist-inspired congregations, to which Troeltsch (1931, p. 673) adds Baptist, Quaker and certain forms of free spirituality. Thus, Jellinek places the hero of his story as the Puritan pastor Roger Williams, who leaves Massachusetts in 1632 to settle in Rhode Island, where he guarantees religious freedom not only to Christians of any denomination but also to Jews, pagans and Turks. Jellinek’s central thesis is that “the idea of inalienable, legally established, sacred and inherent rights of the individual does not have a political origin but religious. What has been held up as a work of the French Revolution was in reality a fruit of the Reformation and its struggles. Its first apostle was not (General) Lafayette but Roger Williams, who, driven by a deep and powerful religious enthusiasm, went into the wilderness in order to find a government of religious liberty and his name is proclaimed by Americans with the greatest respect” (Jellinek [1895] 1979, p. 77. Emphasis ours). The idea that individuals not only have rights within a state, but also rights against the state, and that these rights are not conferred by the state, points to a religious origin of these rights. This appears clearly in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, where State and religion are clearly differentiated, but where the free exercise of all religious belief is protected and encouraged.

A work by Émile Durkheim from 1898, brought up by Joas (2011, chap. 2), sheds much light on the phenomenon we are analyzing. During the turmoil produced by the Dreyfus scandal in 1898, he wrote: “This human person (personne humaine), whose definition is like the touchstone that distinguishes good from evil, is considered sacred in the ritual sense of the world. He partakes of the transcendent majesty which the churches of all times have attributed to their gods; he is conceived as a being invested with such a mysterious property that he creates a vacuum around sacred things, removing them from vulgar contact and withdrawing them from habitual circulation. The respect given to it comes precisely from this source. Anyone who offends against human life, against human freedom, against human honor, inspires in us a feeling of horror analogous to that experienced by the believer when he observes that his idol has been profaned. Such morality is not simply a hygienic discipline or a good economy of existence, it is a religion where man is both faithful and God” (Emphasis ours) (Durkheim 1973, p. 46). Durkheim elaborated a theory of social change and its operative forces but he did not elaborate a theory of the “process” of sacralization of the human person. He links the particularities of modern society to a growing energy that comes from the fact that “the feelings that have man as their object, have become very strong […] The group […] is only the means to realize and develop human nature […] The quality of man, […], has naturally become the object par excellence of the collective sensibility” (Joas 2007, p. 133). In another passage Durkheim states: “There is nothing that man cannot love and adore in common but himself. This is how he has become a God to himself and can no longer create other gods without lying to himself. And insofar as each of us embodies something of humanity, each individual consciousness contains something divine and is shaped by a sacred and inviolable character before others” (Durkheim 1973, p. 52). For Durkheim, “this religion of humanity has all it needs to speak to the believer in a tone no less imperative than that used by the religion it replaces […] In reality (the believer) receives his dignity from a higher source, one he shares with all other human persons. If he has a right to religious respect, he has it because he shares it with humanity” (Emphasis ours) (ibid., p. 48). The creation of human rights is but part of this process of inclusion and sacralization of the human person and of the coextensive sacralization of humanity. This concept of sacralization of the person has nothing to do with the egocentric individualistic liberal (and utilitarian) glorification of the self but with human personality (Durkheim 1973, p. 45; Joas 2007, pp. 151–68). For Durkheim the “sacredness of the person” is not “a” belief system that contributes to social integration but the “only” belief system that can ensure the moral unity of a country.

The driving idea of this new faith in the person is not selfishness but sympathy for all that man represents, a great suffering for all the pains that afflict man, for human tragedies, a commitment to fight against them. The history of human violence and degradation in 1776 in the American War of Independence, in 1789 in the French Revolution and in Europe in 1948, after the dreadful Shoah, have led to a clear awareness that the dignity of the person is something sacred and inviolable. But suffering, by itself, does not give rise to new values such as the sacralization of the human person. It is necessary to create a “narrative” (Joas 2011, chap. 3) that makes it possible to overcome a horrific event, connecting it with the creation of new values and meanings that are incorporated into the social, religious and political context. In this way, a violent and traumatic event becomes a “cultural trauma” (Alexander 2013, pp. 6–31) that receives its empirical basis from the experience of the members of a collectivity who feel that their existence has been threatened in a horrendous event that leaves indelible traces in their group consciousness and marks their collective memory forever, changing their future identity irrevocably. The various human rights narratives undoubtedly play this role.

This idea is not foreign to Christianity itself. Durkheim himself makes it clear in his 1898 work: “Christianity expresses in an inner faith, in the personal conviction of the individual, the essential condition of divinity… The center of moral life has thus been transferred from outside to inside and the individual has been placed as the sovereign judge of his own conduct not needing to resort to other criteria than himself and his God” (Emphasis ours) (Durkheim 1973, p. 52). It is a mistake to present this sacralization of the human person and its corresponding moral anchoring as antagonistic to Christian morality. On the contrary, the former derives from the latter. By assuming the former, we do not deny our past, but rather we continue it. Durkheim was following, with nuances, a line of argumentation that had already been initiated by prophets of the Enlightenment such as Saint Simon and Comte when they postulated that sooner or later a new religion of humanity (Durkheim 1973, p. 48) would replace the theocentric religions.

We can exemplify this idea in the recent developments experienced by the Catholic Church itself since the Second Vatican Council (Casanova 2011). The process of transformation of Catholicism throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the process of its internal democratization, which has come to be called aggiornamento, confirms Durkheim’s vision of the sacralization of the person operated in advanced modernity, but what none of these prophets and founding fathers of positivist sociology could have anticipated is that, paradoxically, the old gods and old religions, whose death Durkheim announced7, have gained new life by becoming bearers of the process of sacralization of humanity, as in the case of the Catholic Church.

While previous encyclicals were addressed for the most part to the Catholic believer, beginning with Pacem in Terris in 1963, popes have tended to address their pronouncements to the whole world and to all people. From a theological point of view, “this entails the transfer of the principle of libertas ecclesiae (which has served him to use his ad hoc influence in conflicts between nation states, sometimes assuming their perspectives and in other cases coming into open conflict with them), which the church has so scrupulously guarded over time, to the individual human person, to libertas personae” (Casanova 1997, p. 212 ff.). In this process, the pope could undergo a curious transformation from being the holy father of all Catholics to become the common father of all God’s children and the self-proclaimed spokesman for humanity, defensor hominis. The Papacy has been attempting to recreate the universalist system of medieval Christianity, but now on a global scale. Perhaps the fundamental difference is that the sword of spiritual power can no longer seek the protection of the sword of temporal power in order to exercise its authority against competing religious regimes in order to obtain a monopoly of the means of salvation (which would render the Catholic dogma of extra ecclesia nulla salus worthless). What sense does it make to speak of the church today as One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman? The recognition of the principle of religious freedom means that the church has agreed to compete in a relatively open global system of religious regimes. In this process of globalization, the Roman Catholic Church has ceased to be a predominantly Roman and European institution; i.e., it has become de-Europeanized. There has been a noticeable shift of the Catholic population from the Old World to the New World and from the North to the South. In recent papal and episcopal pronouncements, especially those on matters of public morality, the fundamental change is that they are not addressed to Catholics as faithful members of the Catholic church, bound to follow the specific norms of Catholic morality, “but rather to all individuals as members of humanity, bound to follow universal human norms, which derive from the universal human values of life and liberty” (Casanova 1997, p. 220).

Undoubtedly, the set of arguments analyzed—legal, sociological and theological—provide empirical support to the argument launched by Talcott Parsons half a century ago around the idea of a “generalization of values” (Parsons 1964, vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 339–57), and more specifically to the generalization of the sacred value of the human person.

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The sacralization of the child’s life

What is more sacred than the life of a child?

Felix Adler 1908

Jack and Jill climbed the hill

to bring milk to his mother,

with good advice for each of them

that they will take good care of each other

“Let’s run to the other side of the street,” shouted Juan.

“Honk, honk,” the bus replied.

Too late they heeded his warning signal

Jack lies in the roadway.

Safety Education: A Book of Plans for the Elementary School, 1923.

Viviana A. Zelizer, in an excellent 1985 paper collected in a compilation by Jeffrey Alexander (Zelizer 2001, pp. 302–28), relates that on 22 July 1903, five-year-old Mary Miner was playing with friends in front of her father’s restaurant on New York’s Bowery when she was hit by a Third Avenue streetcar and killed. The driver narrowly escaped violence at the hands of a mob that, according to police estimates, numbered 3000 people. Press reports describe the girl’s father as so frantic with grief that he had to be forced to desist from a desperate attempt on the driver’s life. Twenty years later, on May Day 1926, declared nationally as “Accident-Free Day” for children, memorial services were held at the unveiling of two monuments in New York City. The crowd solemnly honored the memory of the 7000 children killed in traffic accidents during the previous year.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the accidental death of children run over by cars and trucks became a new and alarming social problem. Public response to child victims was more intense and organized than to similar deaths of adults. At first, crowds of neighbors spontaneously demonstrated their solidarity with the grief of bereaved parents, but this was formalized in official acts of public mourning. A national security campaign to protect children’s lives took shape.

Zelizer develops the idea that the magnification of child mourning in the twentieth century is a measure of the transformation in the cultural meaning of childhood, specifically, the new exaltation of the sentimental value of children. If child life becomes sacred, then child death becomes an intolerable sacrilege, provoking not only parental grief but also social mourning. The response to accidental death was only one manifestation of a broader rise in public concern for child life that began in the late nineteenth century.

Therefore, reducing infant and child mortality rates quickly emerged as a national priority.

Analysis of the response to the accidental death of children serves as a measure of the “sacralization” of child life. The individualistic and psychological approaches focusing respectively on “rational investment” and “better love” are misguided. The 19th-century revolution in child bereavement and the 20th-century campaign for child life are less significant as measures of changes in private sentiment, i.e., an improvement in maternal love, than as dramatic indicators of a broader cultural transformation in the value of children. Because children, regardless of social class, were defined as emotionally priceless assets, their death became not only a painful domestic misfortune, but a sign of collective failure. Individual and group responses, therefore, were shaped by a cultural context that held child life uniquely sacred and child death uniquely tragic.

The need to create a separate “sacred” space was linked to the new value of child life and the growing moral offense of “killing” children. Although children’s memorials had a utilitarian purpose (so that the tragedies of reckless driving could be dramatized and motorists “brought home”), their essential function was to symbolize collective sentiment. In a study of war memorials, Barber (1972, p. 328) has shown how the spatial location of the memorial symbol is necessary to express “those attitudes and values of a community toward those persons.” In the case of children killed in traffic accidents, private mourning and parental grief alone were insufficient. Collective mourning at the site of the children’s memorials served to express collective grief.

Ariés (1962, p. 329) recalls that in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist, which does not mean that childhood had no cultural significance in pre-modern society nor that children did not receive love and devotion in medieval families, but that this “short childhood” of the medieval period, in which the main transition was between a phase in which a dependent infant entered the social world of adults, has been gradually displaced by a “long childhood”. It is through this notion that childcare begins to acquire the status of an autonomous sacred form. In medieval society, the child who died “too early” was probably buried in the backyard like a dog or a cat today. For Ariés in the nineteenth century there is a “revolution in feeling” (Ariés 1974, p. 68) by which the “death of the other”, particularly the death of a close family member, was defined as an overwhelming tragedy. The death of a young child represents the worst loss imaginable.

The “sacralization” of children (Zelizer 2001, p. 323) in the twentieth century led to a greater intolerance of child death, whether by disease or accident, and a great concern for protecting children’s lives. Children of all social classes were not only vaccinated against disease and better fed, but their lives were increasingly supervised and tamed. Since the 1930s there has been a significant evolution from the demographic–economic notion of the “useful child” to the economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless” child.

3. Conclusions

In the scrutiny of new sacred forms that we have consigned, the unidirectional and teleological evolutionary movement—from the sacred to the profane—that comes from the general theory of secularization and that has been projected as a regime of knowledge and philosophy of history is refuted, and we have seen that, between the sacred and the profane, there is a dynamic tension, and in certain contexts it can be secular domains such as the nation, the human person, the child, etc., that are sacralized because each society produces at each moment its own sacred forms. The religious and the secular should not be understood as the origin and end of a process that begins in Europe and spreads worldwide, but rather as two constellations of meaning, between which there is a dynamic tension at all times, giving rise to waves of secularization and waves of sacralization, both in the plural. We must move away from any historicism that considers societies to evolve from the religious to the secular and begin to consider the tension between processes of secularization and sacralization according to a variable geometry in which multiple modernities appear, defining different paths of social evolution.