Marcel Gauchet and the transformation of Christianity into a secular and democratic society

What is it about?

Marcel Gauchet's 1997 book, The Disenchantment of the World, follows the line of Max Weber in seeing a close link between the Christian religion and the future-orientation, the attitude to productivity, and democratic, non-hierarchical social arrangements of contemporary secular society. Christianity, Gauchet argues, is the religion to exit from religion. Gauchet argues, in the second place, that any remaining religious faith outside of this transformed religion, betrays a surrender of human autonomy, entailing supernaturalistic beliefs and the justification of hierarchical forms of society. In response I support, for the most part, Gauchet's first point but argue, against his second point, that what he terms 'religion' is more correctly understood in terms of Sartre's 'bad faith', an attitude that shuts out any critical appropriation of a form of life, and that this could apply equally to dogmatic atheism as to fundamentalist religion.

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Why is it important?

Social scientists, influenced by Marxism, have often seen religion as superstructural, of itself not an intrinsic explanatory factor in the contemporary democratic state. But Gauchet shifts this perspective, seeing Western Christianity in particular as central to the emergence of democracy and humanist values in general. The implication is that contemporary democracies would do well to recognize how their values are sourced (a deep problem in recent disaffected European societies, Gauchet notes). In the second place Gauchet's thesis challenges the religious communities to reformulate their self-understanding, something urged on them since Kant, Hegel, and of course Feuerbach.

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