This post deals with how to be religious in the age of secularism. I have previously written about new forms of religious life here. For a nuanced way of understanding secularism and pluralism, look here.

When I returned from Asia, after being functionally out of North America for 15 years, I found myself in a uniquely communal, but still liminal, space. What do I mean by liminal? Well, when I left Canada, I had left people that had more-or-less communal groups. When I came back, an important difference was that I re-entered a society in which detachment from social groups and accountability had become the norm. I was away from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. Social media had quickly infiltrated and exploited historical, spiritual and political forces that I recognized on my departure to isolate and atomize persons. I, after all, had taken course called Christ and Culture. Individuality, a broadly inarticulate ideal when I left, became expressed in self-checkouts, contrived Instagram posts, and a steepening decline in institutional loyalty (e.g. dropping church attendance, low loyalty toward alma maters, and decline in workforce loyalty).

Entering back within communal structures was experienced as profoundly liminal. However, I wasn’t alone. Weirdly, it seemed that everyone occupied liminal spaces. They were detached and seemed relatively unstructured. So, I returned with my wife and children to the security and resilience of my elder sister, who provided a backdrop for my return to my hometown (and furniture, dishes, and many a homecooked meal). I still wear the winter boots my brother-law gave me.

But the community my family and I (re)entered was not limited to my sister in my hometown, or to my other siblings and their families across the country. My spouse and I also had this troupe of friends from many countries who were a simple text message away. I had gone out into the world as if it was completely unknown; I came back with the world in tow. One way to describe the influence of social media on my life was to diffuse the identity-forming relationships across a nearly infinite spectrum. Probably more importantly, it is important to understand that more than one boundary was dissipated. Not only did my understanding of community input a broader world into the local, but I also appreciated that my world friends appeared in public spiritually. They were witnesses to the spiritual realms where their allegiance was – something seemingly absent in the public spaces of Canada.

But when I came back, I noticed a particularly pernicious form of detachment in Canada: very few people were interested in articulating their spiritual witness, or exploring their spiritual lives. Was this just an example of middle-age maturation when people settle into the pragmatic concerns of providing for house and home leaving spiritual longing to the realms of post-adolescence? Or was this a sign that spirituality had retreated to the private realm? I am still not sure of the answer.

I had grown up in an anabaptist community which strove to live confessionally rather than performatively. I had returned to a whole lot of people who hesitated to live confessionally and were very comfortable performing. Living confessionally emerges from abundance; living performatively comes from lack.

So, when I entered a conversation group this week discussing post-secularity I felt as if I was inhabiting a “contrived” problem. After all, I had experienced living in Asia, and specifically in Thailand and Saudi Arabia, where appearing in public brought your religious life with it as a matter of course. Being Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian or Muslim are not just a matter of privately practicing a religion… they are considered inauthentic and false if completely hidden.

The Western separation of church and state is central to this “Western” phenomena of the retreat of religion into the world of privacy. But the modern dominance of professionalism in public also occupies this debate at its center. When I was asked, in a job interview a year and a half ago for a public “secular” college, ‘what about the college’s mission statement was inspiring to me,’ I was put on the spot of whether I would speak confessionally or performatively. I had had similar questions asked to me in Thailand and Saudi Arabia, and responding confessionally happened without hesitation, and was applauded. In Canada, I had to be more thoughtful. I responded, “I won’t say this in my role as an instructor, but the dual emphases of decolonization and inclusion models my faith-formed belief that the good news of Christianity is for everyone.” I was careful not to broach the boundary of practicing the Christian virtues in a professional role had to be done without reference to God. I felt that I would be transgressing the secular/religious divide. I could console myself with the fact that the model of professionalism provided on LinkedIn carefully dances around this issue as a matter of course. “Religious calling” becomes “professional passion.” I got the job.

The hesitation I had reminds me, as I write this now, of experiences I had in South Korea and during my master’s degree in southern Ontario. In South Korea, I was asked to teach language in a way that diluted Christian language because it was bad for business – a thought which is also pervasive in the everyday economic interactions I have now. Also, one of my thesis advisors said his advising my thesis was on the condition that my interpretations of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” would not be explicitly religious in its orientation. My hunch that the adoption of “post secular” as a descriptive problem of Western societies seems more prescient in societies where technology has been more deeply embedded into the workings of the culture. Perhaps the whole definition of modernity is integrally connected to the technological colonization of a society’s culture. The most modern societies seem to be uniquely plagued by the rise of secularity understood as “the public world minus religion.” Certainly, a certain kind of rationality has dominated the public world – what I have elsewhere called technological rationality. Secular institutions often see this as the only rationality, but faith-formed people know it to be remarkably limited.

Hence, I am left a personal choice about how to take a critical stance towards post secularism from two perspectives. I could critique it like a Buddhist. I attempted this at my discussion group, a group of Caucasian PhD faith-formed men with their feet firmly planted in “the West”. I played an old Buddhist thought experiment on them. Imagine a ship in a bottle. Now try to get the ship out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or destroying the ship. If you try with all your imagination to get the ship out of the bottle, you can’t. But if you remember how you got the ship in the bottle in the first place, the answer makes itself obvious. Just imagine the ship outside the bottle. So too with post secular theory: you only have to imagine a world in which the bearer of culture is not technologically dominated can you solve the problem of how to live again confessionally. Given my audience though, the thought experiment did not translate – because the obviousness of the metaphor did not come through. So, I have chosen a critical standpoint from within Western cultures that is known for its technological reticence, and from which I emerged as a unique person in the world – the broad world of anabaptism.

To restate the problem then: the emergence of post secular theory reflects a growing recognition that the expectation that modernity would render religion socially irrelevant, i.e. the secularism thesis, has failed. Religion persists not only privately but publicly, albeit in altered and contested forms. Thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and José Casanova have sought to describe and assess this persistence without reverting to premodern religious authority or abandoning the gains of secular governance. From within this conversation, Anabaptist theology offers a distinctive and critical perspective. Rather than asking how religion might reclaim public influence, Anabaptism asks whether the church can remain truthful to the gospel in a secular, pluralist world.

Charles Taylor’s account of secularism emphasizes the transformation of the conditions of belief rather than the disappearance of religion. In a secular age, faith becomes one option among many, permanently shaped by doubt and plurality. This condition generates what Taylor describes as “cross-pressures,” in which modern subjects experience both immanence and transcendence. Secularism, on this view, may intensify spiritual exploration even as it destabilizes inherited religious forms.

Jürgen Habermas approaches postsecularism from a political and procedural perspective. He argues that democratic societies must recognize the continued public relevance of religion while maintaining institutional secularism. Religious citizens may contribute to public discourse, provided their claims can be translated into generally accessible language. Postsecular society thus becomes a site of mutual learning between secular and religious rationalities.

José Casanova further complicates the secularization thesis by distinguishing between the differentiation of social spheres and the decline or privatization of religion. He demonstrates that religion can remain publicly engaged within civil society without seeking political domination. Secularism, in this sense, need not marginalize religion but can coexist with robust forms of public faith.

John Howard Yoder offers a critical theological reframing of these accounts. For Yoder, the primary problem in Christian history is not secularization but the Constantinian fusion of church and state. From this perspective, secularism may function as a corrective, dismantling Christendom and restoring the church to its original status as a voluntary, non-coercive community. While secularism creates space for genuine faith, Yoder denies that it can generate or sustain discipleship. Discipleship is the religious equivalent of agency-formation. Christian witness, he argues, is not a matter of contributing moral insights to public reason but of embodying a distinctive politics rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus.

Stanley Hauerwas extends this critique by focusing on the moral fragmentation of liberal modernity. He is skeptical of post secular enthusiasm for religious pluralism, arguing that much contemporary spirituality reflects consumer choice rather than disciplined formation. While secular societies may welcome religious expression, they resist religious authority and thick communal practices. As a result, secularism fosters spiritual experimentation while undermining the conditions necessary for sustained faith.

Taken together, Yoder and Hauerwas challenge the optimism of post secular theory. Secularism does not eliminate religion, but neither does it nurture it. Instead, it exposes the depth and integrity of belief. In a post secular world, Anabaptism does not seek renewed cultural influence but embraces marginality as a theological gift. The credibility of faith rests not in public acceptance but in the visible practices of a community shaped by obedience, peace, and fidelity.

From an Anabaptist perspective, secularism suppresses imposed religion while fostering fragmented spiritual searching. It neither creates nor sustains deep faith. What it ultimately provides is a testing ground in which the church must rediscover itself not as a cultural authority, but as a lived witness to an alternative way of life.

Conclusion: Technology, Agency, and the Recovery of Communal Witness

If secular modernity tests the integrity of faith by stripping it of cultural privilege, it also exposes the deeper question of agency: who or what forms persons capable of public, truthful action? From an Anabaptist perspective, this question cannot be answered at the level of individual choice alone. Agency is cultivated—or eroded—by the structures within which people live, work, deliberate, and worship. Technology, therefore, is not a neutral instrument but a formative power whose moral significance depends on how it is embedded within communal life.

North American Anabaptist communities offer instructive, though imperfect, examples of how technology can be carefully integrated to enhance rather than diminish public agency. Hutterite colonies, for instance, are often cited for their advanced use of agricultural and industrial technologies. Yet these tools are subordinated to communal ownership, collective decision-making, and shared economic life. Technology here does not individualize or isolate; it supports the colony’s capacity to act publicly as a coherent moral agent—feeding regional populations, sustaining livelihoods, and witnessing to a non-competitive economic order. The question is never whether a technology increases efficiency alone, but whether it strengthens the community’s ability to live faithfully together.

Amish communities represent a different, more restrictive model, yet one that is equally instructive. Their well-known practice of technological discernment, which means evaluating innovations such as automobiles, electricity, or digital media through communal deliberation, reflects a deep concern for the preservation of face-to-face accountability and moral formation. While often misunderstood as technophobia, this restraint can be read instead as a defense of agency: by limiting technologies that fragment attention or undermine local responsibility, Amish communities protect the conditions under which individuals can meaningfully participate in communal decision-making and shared moral life. Agency, in this sense, is not maximized by unlimited choice but by limits that sustain belonging.

Mennonite communities occupy a broader and more internally diverse spectrum, yet many continue to practice forms of technological discernment that mirror these same concerns. Cooperative businesses, mutual aid networks, and church-based institutions often deploy modern technologies such as communication platforms, financial tools, educational systems, while resisting their reduction to purely market-driven or individualizing algorithms. When technology is governed by communal norms rather than personal branding or efficiency alone, it can extend the reach of Mennonite public witness without hollowing out its substance.

Such a model seems all the more prescient given the wild west application of AI to everything we see or hear: governing AI by communal norms can bring out confessional communication and agency rather than having performative communication emerging from thoughtless centers as is so often dominant during essay seasons in post-secondary culture.

These examples suggest that the central issue raised by post secular theory is not simply whether religion can reappear in public, but whether communities can sustain the practices that form truthful, accountable agents capable of public life. Secularism may permit religious expression, and technology may amplify it, but neither guarantees depth, coherence, or fidelity. Anabaptist communities remind us that public spirituality is not primarily a matter of visibility or discourse, but of lived practices that resist technological domination while making prudent use of technological tools.

In this light, Anabaptism does not reject modernity outright, nor does it seek refuge in nostalgia. Instead, it offers a model of disciplined engagement—one in which technology is neither idolized nor feared but judged according to its effects on communal agency and discipleship. Such communities do not solve the post secular condition in theory. They answer it in practice, by embodying a form of life in which confession remains possible, witness remains public, and agency is sustained not by autonomy alone, but by faithful belonging.

References

Casanova, J. (1994). *Public religions in the modern world*. University of Chicago Press.

Cronk, S. (1981). Gelassenheit: The riddle of Amish culture. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Habermas, J. (2008). Notes on a post-secular society. *New Perspectives Quarterly, 25*(4), 17–29.

Hauerwas, S. (1981). *A community of character: Toward a constructive Christian social ethic*. University of Notre Dame Press.

Hauerwas, S., & Wells, S. (2004). The blackwell companion to Christian ethics. Blackwell.

Hostetler, J. A. (1993). Amish society (4th ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

Janzen, R., & Stanton, M. (2010). The Hutterites in North America. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nolt, S. M. (2016). The Amish: A concise introduction. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Redekop, C. F., & Scott, C. (2005). Mennonite communities in North America. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Smith, J. K. A. (2009). Desiring the kingdom: Worship, worldview, and cultural formation. Baker Academic..

Taylor, C. (2007). *A secular age*. Harvard University Press.

Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. University of Chicago Press.

Yoder, J. H. (1989). Body politics: Five practices of the Christian community before the watching world. Herald Press.

Yoder, J. H. (1994). *The politics of Jesus* (2nd ed.). Eerdmans.