How the West was lost

For more than a century, Western intellectual life has operated under a powerful assumption: As societies modernize, religion declines. Science advances, education expands, economies grow more complex—and faith recedes. This story, often called the “secularization thesis,” shapes everything from college classrooms to Supreme Court decisions. Religion, we are told, belongs to humanity’s childhood; modernity marks our coming of age.

Kevin Flatt’s Secularization, Social Order, and World History (Routledge, 278 pp.), puts that thesis on notice.

Flatt’s challenge runs deeper than following the evidence of religious decline. He contends that the entire paradigm rests on conceptual foundations that collapse under scrutiny.

The problem begins with two words most of us use without thinking: religion and secular. Flatt says these are not timeless, universal categories. They are modern Western inventions. Historically speaking, most cultures possessed no equivalent to our idea of “religion” as a distinct sphere of life concerned with private belief and worship. Even the Latin term religio did not mean what we now mean by religion. It referred to rites and obligations—not a system of doctrines detached from politics, economics, or law.

Premodern societies operated with what Flatt calls a “sacred-social order.” Law, sexuality, education, and public life were understood as aligned with some higher moral reality. Suprahuman powers gave shape to the whole.

Flatt draws on sociologist Philip Rieff, who argued that all cultures prior to the modern West recognized some sacred canopy exercising authority over human life. The West became distinctive not because it matured beyond religion, but because it rejected this canopy. Flatt sharpens Rieff’s insight: Modern society did not simply lose the sacred; it constructed a new social order that explicitly denies any authority higher than human beings. Moral order did not disappear. It was relocated. This reframing is Flatt’s most significant contribution.

Consider Rome. In the ancient world, divine and civic life were inseparable. Public rituals were performed on behalf of the state; the gods were implicated in military, legal, and agricultural affairs. Religion was not private preference but the glue of the social order. Christians were persecuted not for unusual beliefs but for their refusal to participate in the sacra publica—the public expressions of loyalty to the gods.

Thus, Christianity challenged the moral architecture of the state. It offered a rival sacred-social order—an alternative account of ultimate authority that relativized Rome’s gods and, by implication, Rome’s political claims.

For Flatt, that ancient struggle provides the template for understanding the modern West. Christianity displaced public paganism as the West’s ordering principle, but in modernity, it has itself been displaced by a different comprehensive vision—one that grounds common life in human reason, consent, and autonomy rather than in a divinely ordered cosmos. Secularization is more than a decline in church attendance.

The secular order is not the residue left behind after religion fades, or a neutral platform on which rival worldviews peacefully compete. It is a constructed morality that reshapes law, education, authority, and identity according to a new legitimacy. Secularization, in other words, was not subtraction but substitution.

This insight destabilizes the old thesis. If secular order required deliberate intellectual and institutional effort—if it involved elite capture of universities, courts, and cultural institutions—then it is not the inevitable endpoint of modernization. It is a contingent achievement of a particular cultural movement in a particular time and place.

Flatt is not the first to challenge the secularization thesis. Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (Harvard University Press 2007), famously dismantled the crude “subtraction story” according to which modernity simply peels away religious illusion to reveal a rational core. Taylor argued that modern secularity represents a shift in the “conditions of belief.” We now inhabit what he calls an “immanent frame”—a social imaginary in which the world is understood without necessary reference to belief in God.

Flatt builds on Taylor’s insight. Flatt asks what this immanent frame means as a principle of social and political organization. If transcendence is bracketed not merely in imagination but in law, education, and public life, we are no longer describing new conditions of belief but a new social order. The immanent frame is not merely a backdrop within which belief becomes optional. It is the organizing grammar of a particular moral project.

He also disputes the assumption that pluralism automatically yields secularization. Many societies—especially in South and East Asia—have long sustained multiple sacred traditions without abandoning transcendence. Pluralism does not logically require bracketing all higher authority. Modern Western pluralism is not the natural solution to diversity. It is one specific solution, rooted in Enlightenment assumptions.

Every social order rests on some account of what ultimately defines authority and legitimacy. Secular socie­ties simply insist that their guiding principles be justified without reference to anything beyond the human world.

That claim raises an unsettling possibility. If the secular is not an absence but an alternative way of ordering human life, then it cannot be described as merely the unadorned rational layer beneath a former religious veneer. It possesses a substantive character of its own.

Flatt is careful here. Modern secular order is historically distinctive precisely because it refuses grounding in suprahuman realities. Yet it is not ideologically neutral or value-free. Like earlier sacred-social orders, it operates with a unifying social grammar defined by a framework of core values. From social contract theory to notions of spontaneous order, from art and sex reimagined as vehicles of self-expression to expanded accounts of personal autonomy, secular modernity has developed its own moral architecture.

Flatt closes by asking whether a value system centered on individual autonomy can sustain community cohesion, interpersonal trust, and long-term investment in shared institutions amid migration, pluralism, and digital polarization. The secular order is young by historical standards. It may prove durable. It may not.

For Christian readers, the implications are considerable. If secularization is not inevitable, it is reversible. If “religion” as a private sphere is a modern construct, then the church’s marginalization may reflect a historically contingent circumstance rather than a permanent feature of modern life. What has been constructed can be examined, questioned, and, if necessary, replaced.