How does secularization enter the life of the Church? When a virtuous faith grows weak and no longer influences the everyday life of believers. When society, knowledge, and science are demonized and dominate through the teachings of rationalism and unbelief. When people lose their bond with God the Creator, they find themselves trapped in the life of the present, denying their eternal future. When some people, even members of the Church, stray from the path and choose to live a carnal life, arrogantly despising the gifts given to man by God as the image of God and the great possibilities of his spiritual nature: repentance, purification, illumination, and deification.

Secularism, as is well known, is associated with or identified as the fashion of the modern progressive age, which desires the de-Christianization and de-churching of man in the wake of the Western European Enlightenment.

The secularized or “progressive Christian” prefers to devote his life exclusively to worldly affairs, living by a secular model of life and thought. For the secularized person, obedience to the will of God, the study of death, and the victory over Death through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ do not exist, since he is bound to the deadly passions of wealth, ambition, and lust.

Although he does not deny the existence of the Church as an institution, he also wants it to be subordinated to the spirit of the world, to the transience of the material pleasures of life, while he prefers to remain indifferent to genuine Christian spirituality and the virtuous principles of life.

He goes to church, but he holds his own views on its theology, which he wants to change and adapt to his own principles, that is, so that the Church might serve as a purely man-centered institution oriented toward the social service of man, rather than toward his service to others, his healing from the passions, his repentance and purification. A key element that characterizes the ideology of the secularized is the restriction of the Church’s influence on social, political, and cultural life.

The consequence of secularization is the loss of Christian religious faith. Secularization, as a phenomenon, appears from the period of the recognition of religious tolerance and the official status of Christianity (under Emperor Constantine the Great (313) and Theodosius the Great (381)).

And likewise, when Christianity began to take part in the administrative structures and authority of the state, it began to avoid its primary purpose, as a result of which negative consequences arise for the Church—for example, the simple, free warrior and martyr loses his likeness and is forced to compromise, to adapt to various worldly pressures and demands, and to become a component of secular life.

Those among the Christians who could not endure the intrusion of worldliness into the life of the Church, desiring to live according to the Orthodox faith and to keep perfection in their lives, resorted to monastic life (either solitary or communal), which preserves the true way of life of the faithful, the Church.

Thus it becomes apparent that when secularization is introduced into the church community, “worldly” moral principles or other features are adopted or practiced within it, which alter its saving aims, its character, and its content.

On the other hand, the changes that have taken place in recent years, within the context of a more general modernization in society, in the realm of culture, in the development of science and knowledge, have led to a part of the Christians desiring to live a worldly life as opposed to a church life, since the choice of a worldly way of life is incompatible with the principles of the Christian faith and creates grounds or causes for doubt, or even for their departure from the Church.

The departure of certain traditional communities and ways of life that supported their closeness to the Christian faith became yet another factor in the retreat toward the rhythms of secularization.

Meanwhile, some church communities, in order to confront the new situation and to reduce their losses, made the mistake of beginning to “submit” and yield to the “worldly” demands and pressures they received from within and without the Church, mutating, adapting, removing, or even cutting away the genuine features that make up the truth and the order of the faith. Faith began to be confined to a particular private context.

Of course, secularization does not concern the whole Church, but only some of its members, since the Church continues, as the presence and witness of Christ, to provide the way of healing from man’s failures and the place of his return to the path of salvation.

Where there is a church community, as a place for the sanctification of those who believe in Christ, and there the work and will of Christ for the healing and salvation of man does not take place, there the particular community loses its way. When a Christian departs from life in Christ and from its sanctifying character, he risks going astray, since he abandons the prospect of hope for eternal life, which only Christ gives.

And when a church community, in its ministry to the faithful, does not regard the Kingdom of God as its chief priority, but one-sidedly occupies itself with other social, cultural, and recreational activities, it undoubtedly begins to lose its purpose as the Church on earth.

Orthodox theology is in itself the voice of God in the world. However, when it becomes secularized, in the wake of scholasticism, or pietism, or moralism, or various rational or worldly and multi-religious changes of the Protestant type, then it loses its charismatic character, since it ceases to work for healing and redemption in Christ.

Also, when a church community, in its liturgical and teaching work, labors to make people feel spiritual peace, contentment, and calm, through beautiful music and fine words that they hear at the service and in the sermon, and does not care for their repentance and salvation, then in the end it becomes a center of psychological and social support and well-being.

Then it may be said that the church community, instead of enlightening man to seek the path of truth through his journey toward victory over Death and the Mystery of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, becomes a social, cultural, or humanitarian body that serves only the worldly and materialistic needs of man.

For the above reasons, the work of the Church is falsified and distorted if some of those who serve it, instead of trying to serve the purpose of the Church and to transform the world by the power and grace of God into the Church, to convert the members of the Church in the world, in fact contribute to secularization.

Through this reckless act of certain clergy and theologians, who supposedly serve the one and only Church, the eschatological vision of the Church is lost. In other words, the Church is transformed from the Revelation of the true God into a Religion, which it can offer only as an existential substitute, devoid of meaning and effect; the feeling of seeking a higher being, of emotional or intellectual satisfaction, is mingled with barren and senseless socio-ethical actions and pleasures.

Unfortunately, in the flock of the church community there are wolves who distort Orthodox spirituality, bringing into it the moralistic, the religious, and wishful thinking, and depriving the flock of the experience of the Holy Spirit.

The response to secularization: Let Christians return to the path of Orthodox spirituality, to the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church, to the path of the Orthodox ascetic practice of the Holy Fathers, of purification, of Illumination, and of Deification.

Iraklis Rerakis, Professor at the University of Thessaloniki, President of the Pan-Hellenic Union of Theologians

Source: Kyivan Orthodoxy

Translation into Ukrainian – “Kyivan Orthodoxy”