Worship in a Secular Age

Schmemann’s definition of secularism is not “the absence of religion” but “the negation of worship” — the reception of the world as an end in itself by a man who may perfectly well believe in God. This file expounds the argument of his 1973 essay, the critique of religion reduced to a “department of life,” his refusal of the “sacred/profane” division, and his objection to the Christian responses that accept the secular terms.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Essay

“Worship in a Secular Age” was appended, with “Sacrament and Symbol,” to the second, revised and expanded edition of For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), and it is the sharpest short statement Schmemann made of a theme running through his whole corpus (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” appendix to For the Life of the World, 2nd rev. ed., SVS Press, 1973; see The Book and Its Origin). The argument was framed for a moment when Western theology was much occupied with “secularization” and with programs for adapting Christianity to it; Schmemann’s response was to redefine the term and then to refuse the programs.

Secularism Defined

The definition is the whole argument in a sentence: secularism is the negation of worship.

Schmemann is explicit that this is not the same as atheism, and the distinction is the point. A secularist may believe in God, attend church, pray, and hold entirely orthodox opinions. What defines him is something prior to opinion: he does not receive the world as gift, and therefore does not offer it. The world, for him, is simply there — self-explanatory, self-sufficient, to be understood, used, and enjoyed on its own terms. God may be added to that world as its creator, its moral guarantor, or the object of a private devotion, but the world itself is not referred to him (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973).

This is why Schmemann treats secularism as a theological and even a liturgical problem rather than a sociological one. It is not a matter of church attendance figures. It is a stance toward creation — and it is precisely the stance he had already identified, in the first chapter of For the Life of the World, as the fall: the reception of the gift without the Giver, eating without blessing, the cessation of thanksgiving (see The World as Sacrament). Secularism, on this reading, is not a modern novelty but the oldest human error wearing modern clothes; what is modern is only that it has become the default and has organized a civilization around itself.

The corollary follows immediately. If secularism is the negation of worship, then worship is the answer to secularism — not as a remedy applied afterward, but because worship simply is the act secularism omits. The Church does not respond to a secular world by devising strategies; she responds by doing what she has always done, and by understanding what she is doing (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973).

Religion as a “Department of Life”

The form secularism takes inside religion is the confinement of religion to a compartment, and Schmemann’s descriptions of this are among his most quoted.

A secular society need not persecute religion. It has a subtler instrument: it assigns religion a place. Religion becomes one province of life among others — alongside work, politics, family, leisure — with its own buildings, its own professionals, its own hours, its own vocabulary, and its own recognized sphere of competence: the inner life, personal morality, the consolation of the bereaved. Within that province it may be as intense as it likes. What it may not do is make claims about the whole (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1979).

Schmemann’s charge is that Christians have very largely accepted the bargain, and that the acceptance is more damaging than any persecution. A Church that agrees to be the religious department of a secular society has conceded the thing at issue — that the world is properly understood without reference to God, and that faith is an addition to an otherwise complete account of reality. That concession is made in practice long before it is made in theory: by the Christian who is devout on Sunday and a functional secularist from Monday, and by the parish that understands itself as a provider of religious services (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; Church, World, Mission, 1979).

The link back to his liturgical theology is direct. If the Liturgy is the act in which the Church becomes herself and enters the Kingdom, then it cannot be a religious service rendered to a clientele; and a congregation that comes to get something — consolation, beauty, an hour of peace, the fulfillment of an obligation — has already, whatever it believes, adopted the secular frame (see Liturgy as Theology).

Against the Sacred/Profane Division

The deepest move in the essay is Schmemann’s refusal of the division of reality into sacred and profane zones — and here he says something that has surprised readers, because it sounds at first like an attack on religion itself.

Christianity, he argues, is in a real sense the end of religion — where “religion” means the cultic arrangement by which a sacred realm is marked off from a profane one, and a society sanctifies its life by contact with the holy through appointed times, places, objects, and persons. The New Testament announces the end of that arrangement: the veil is torn, the temple is Christ’s body, the hour comes when true worshippers will worship neither on this mountain nor at Jerusalem but in spirit and in truth (John 4:21–24), and the Christian assembly has no temple, no sacrifices, and no sacred caste in the old manner (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; the same argument historically in Introduction to Liturgical Theology, trans. Moorhouse, London: Faith Press, 1966, ch. 3; see The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis).

The point is not that nothing is holy. It is that Christ has abolished the division: not by making everything profane, but by making everything capable of holiness — because the whole world is now the matter of communion with God. The Christian sacraments do not sacralize a corner of the world; they reveal what the whole world is for (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1).

And here is the sting, which Schmemann applies to his own tradition and not only to Western Christendom. Religion in the cultic sense can return inside Christianity — and, he argues, largely has. When the Church’s worship comes to be understood as the sanctification of a Christian society within this world, when the sacred is again a realm to be entered and left, when holiness attaches to objects and hours rather than opening the whole of life to God, then Christianity has quietly become a religion again in exactly the sense it was meant to end. This is his account of what happened after the peace of the Church, and it is the historical argument of Introduction to Liturgical Theology stated theologically (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, chs. 3–4; “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; see The “Western Captivity” and Liturgical Piety).

The irony he presses is that the sacralizing and the secular mentalities are complementary rather than opposed: both accept that there is a religious zone and a non-religious one. They differ only over how much space the religious zone should occupy.

Against the Available Christian Responses

Schmemann rejected the two responses his contemporaries were offering, and did so in terms that have kept the essay alive.

Against liberal accommodation. The program of “secular Christianity” — translating the faith into secular terms, relocating its meaning in ethics and social action, discarding worship as archaic — surrenders on the essential point. If the Church’s specific act is the offering of the world to God, then a Christianity that keeps the ethics and drops the worship has kept the fruit and cut the root. Schmemann was not indifferent to social action; his whole account of mission is that the Liturgy sends the Church into the world (see The World as Sacrament; Church, World, Mission, 1979). His objection is to the reversal by which the Church’s relevance is measured by criteria the secular world supplies.

Against defensive sacralism. The opposite response — to build the walls of the religious enclosure higher, to intensify the ritual, to make of Orthodoxy a preserved world set against modernity — is, on his diagnosis, not the antidote but the same disease. It accepts the compartment and simply furnishes it more richly. Worse, it can turn worship into an escape: a beautiful, absorbing hour that consoles precisely by removing one from the world, which is the opposite of what the Liturgy does (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; Church, World, Mission, 1979; see The “Western Captivity” and Liturgical Piety).

That Schmemann attacked both flanks is one reason his position has been hard to place, and one reason he has been claimed and rejected from both directions ever since (see Influence and a Sober Assessment).

The Answer

The essay’s constructive answer is not a program, and readers looking for one have sometimes been frustrated. Schmemann’s answer is that the Church must understand and do what she already does — that the recovery of worship as the Church’s entrance into the Kingdom, and of the human vocation as the eucharistic offering of the world, is itself the response to secularism, because it restores the act secularism denies (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” 1973; see Liturgy as Theology).

Whether this is enough of an answer is a fair question and is treated in the collection’s assessment (see Influence and a Sober Assessment). What is not in question is that the diagnosis has worn well. Written in the early 1970s against a theological fashion that has entirely passed, the essay’s account of a faith politely confined to its own compartment reads, half a century on, as a description of the present.

References

Schmemann, Alexander. “Worship in a Secular Age.” Appendix to For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd revised and expanded edition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973. (Secularism as the negation of worship; religion as a department of life; the refusal of the sacred/profane division; the rejection of both accommodation and defensive sacralism.)
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. 2nd rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973. (Chapter 1: the world as gift; the fall as the cessation of thanksgiving.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Translated by Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1966. (Chapters 3–4: Christian worship as the end of cultic religion, and the return of the cultic after the peace of the Church.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The Church’s situation in a secular society; mission.)
Scripture: John 4:21–24.