I take my title from the critic and literary scholar Simon During, who coined the phrase “cultural secularization” as a way of understanding the sharp decline in prestige — since the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the last decade — of the “high humanities.” The concept will strike many as evasively abstract, and certainly it is as open to skepticism and revision as its predecessor and model, the social-scientific and philosophical account of religious secularization that extends from Nietzsche to Weber to Charles Taylor. But the core of the religious secularization narrative rests on a basically unimpeachable empirical claim — that we have “moved from a condition in 1500 in which it was hard not to believe in God” to a modernity in which unbelief “has become quite easy for many,” as Taylor puts it. During’s parallel claim — “Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture . . . The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population” — cannot yet command the same ready assent. But in our universities, where tenure tracks in the humanities are swiftly disappearing, where majors and enrollments in fields such as English and art history are plummeting, some such notion as “cultural secularization” seems necessary — even, once you get past a first recoil at its conceptual hubris, obvious.
The Wages of Cultural Secularization
