How Not to Be Secular in Religion and Medicine
Jon Tilburt, MD, Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Ethics, Mayo Clinic
Constructively addressing “medicine and religion”, as important as it may be, can be fraught or freighted with misunderstanding about the terms “religion” or “religious.” Ironically, it is possible to be unreflectively “secular” in one’s assumptions about what we mean by the topic. Arguably, any handling of “religion” in contemporary culture and scholarship must acknowledge its conceptual and linguistic interrelationship with intuitions about the term “secular.”
In his book How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, James KA Smith explicates Taylor’s reading of the ways in which different senses of “secular” shape contemporary late modern intuitions about what we mean by “religion” and it role in public life.
Drawing on Smith I will unpack the plural senses of the term “secular” and its inextricable influence on contemporary renderings of the term “religion.” Smith’s first sense of secular is consistent with an ancient usage denoting something that is of “ordinary or of this world” in contrast to something “sacred or set apart from the ordinary of this world.” The second and more common popular sense draws on a more modern notion that to be secular is equated with being neutral, unbiased, areligious, and enlightened – a condition associated with effects of the Enlightenment, and the purported progress of society to throw off the superstition and mythologies of previous eras. This second sense is the dominant albeit unreflective sense of the term in common usage particularly in academia and medicine. Smith interpreting Taylor offers a third sense of secular that highlights the contestability of belief, the imminent frame of reality, achievement of an exclusive humanism. In this third sense “secular” denotes our age as the water in which we swim. Nothing in that age denies the possibility of religious belief, yet cross-pressures in various beliefs as well as an explosion of various forms of enduring meaning-making and transcendent longing manifest within our time. Each of these senses of “secular” entails a different rendering of what counts as ‘religion’ or ‘religious’. I will argue that before engaging substantive questions like the role of religion in medicine any discussion of “Medicine & Religion” must stipulate which sense of “secular” is being deployed along with any corollary senses of “religion” and/or “religious.” To illustrate, I will contrast a conventional rendering of the topic of “Religion & Medicine” derived from the second sense of “secular” with a Augustinian-informed rendering of “Religion & Medicine” derived from the third sense of secular and how each might influence the contents of a medical school lecture or graduate bioethics course on “Religion & Medicine,” including topics addressed, standpoints from which they are addressed, and content chosen.
By highlighting the implicit operative assumptions behind contemporary usage of terms like “secular”, “religion” and “religious,” substantive debate and discussion about “Religion & Medicine” can be more constructive and rigorous without ironically presupposing contested assumptions about its topic.
In his book How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, James KA Smith explicates Taylor’s reading of the ways in which different senses of “secular” shape contemporary late modern intuitions about what we mean by “religion” and it role in public life.
Drawing on Smith I will unpack the plural senses of the term “secular” and its inextricable influence on contemporary renderings of the term “religion.” Smith’s first sense of secular is consistent with an ancient usage denoting something that is of “ordinary or of this world” in contrast to something “sacred or set apart from the ordinary of this world.” The second and more common popular sense draws on a more modern notion that to be secular is equated with being neutral, unbiased, areligious, and enlightened – a condition associated with effects of the Enlightenment, and the purported progress of society to throw off the superstition and mythologies of previous eras. This second sense is the dominant albeit unreflective sense of the term in common usage particularly in academia and medicine. Smith interpreting Taylor offers a third sense of secular that highlights the contestability of belief, the imminent frame of reality, achievement of an exclusive humanism. In this third sense “secular” denotes our age as the water in which we swim. Nothing in that age denies the possibility of religious belief, yet cross-pressures in various beliefs as well as an explosion of various forms of enduring meaning-making and transcendent longing manifest within our time. Each of these senses of “secular” entails a different rendering of what counts as ‘religion’ or ‘religious’. I will argue that before engaging substantive questions like the role of religion in medicine any discussion of “Medicine & Religion” must stipulate which sense of “secular” is being deployed along with any corollary senses of “religion” and/or “religious.” To illustrate, I will contrast a conventional rendering of the topic of “Religion & Medicine” derived from the second sense of “secular” with a Augustinian-informed rendering of “Religion & Medicine” derived from the third sense of secular and how each might influence the contents of a medical school lecture or graduate bioethics course on “Religion & Medicine,” including topics addressed, standpoints from which they are addressed, and content chosen.
By highlighting the implicit operative assumptions behind contemporary usage of terms like “secular”, “religion” and “religious,” substantive debate and discussion about “Religion & Medicine” can be more constructive and rigorous without ironically presupposing contested assumptions about its topic.