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In 1944 the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge in which he suggested that man had already “more or less” become “radically religionless”.[1]  By 1965, the American theologian Harvey Cox published his explosive book, The Secular City, in which he asserted that the “rise of urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era”.[2]  He went on to clarify his terms:

Urbanization constitutes a massive change in the way men live together, and became possible in its contemporary form only with the scientific and technological advances which sprang from the wreckage of religious worldviews.  Secularization, an equally epochal movement, marks a change in the way men grasp and understand their life together, and it occurred only when the cosmopolitan confrontations of city living exposed the relativity of the myths and traditions men once thought were unquestionable. . . .  If the Greeks perceived the cosmos as an immensely expanded polis, and medieval man saw it as the feudal manor enlarged to infinity, we experience the universe as the city of man.  It is a field of human exploration and endeavor from which the gods have fled.  The world has become man’s task and man’s responsibility. . . .  The name for the process by which this has come about is secularization. . . .  It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed world-views, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.  It represents . . . the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune on the furies for what he does with it.  Secularization is man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time (saeculum = ‘this present age’).  It is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 called ‘man’s coming of age.’[3]

Cox’s book thus argued for a radical secularized Christianity in which the Church’s agenda was to be set by the world.  It provoked such a controversial reaction that the following year Daniel Callahan published an anthology which included numerous reviews of Cox’s book, essays previously published in Christianity and Crisis, an exchange of views that appeared in Commonweal between Andrew Greeley, Michael Novak, Harvey Cox, and Daniel Callahan, four other essays written at Calahan’s request on Cox and secularism, and a final response by Cox along with an earlier article on Bonhoeffer published in Commonweal.[4]  Despite the initial explosive response to Cox’s argument, his book is rarely read any longer except as a representative work of the period.  Nevertheless, as George Weigel observes in his article on the 1960s in America, it did set into motion a whole host of debates about many of the major themes that continue to concern Christians today:

The cult of the new; the fondness for revolutionary rhetoric; evil understood in therapeutic categories; worship conceived as self realization; the celebration of action detached from either contemplation or serious intellectual reflection; insouciance toward tradition; moralism in place of moral reasoning; the identification of human striving with the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God…[5]

Weigel thus concludes that regardless of Cox’s intentions, “these are the things that people learned from The Secular City and its sundry offspring in the world of liberal American religious thought.”[6]  But this is not all that Cox accomplished, whether intentional or not, for he also set the stage in the United States for the reception of what is now considered to be the classic secularization thesis, articulated first in England by Oxford sociologist Bryan Wilson and, shortly thereafter, in America by Peter L. Berger.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York:  Macmillan Publishing Co., 1972), 280.  Bonhoeffer’s famous reference to “religionless Christianity” will be dealt with in a later post on tradition.

[2] Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York:  The Macmillan Company, 1965), 1.

[3] Cox 1965, 1-2.

[4] Daniel Callahan, The Secular City Debate (New York:  The Macmillan Company, 1967).  Find reference for Commonweal article on Bonhoeffer

[5] George Weigel, “The Sixties, Again and Again”, First Things, April 2008, (get pp.).  Weigel’s article is an insightful examination of how six key moments in the sixties reshaped American political culture:  1)  The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963; 2)  Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965; 3)  The Tet Offensive in 1968; 4)  The Kerner Commission in 1968; 5)  The Publication of The Secular City in 1965; and 6)  The Rise of Environmentalism in 1969.

[6] Ibid.