MH

What defines secular faith most fundamentally is that the object of faith is totally dependent on the practice of faith. Whatever the object of faith may be — the institutions we’re trying to build, the socialist revolution we’re trying to bring about, the communities we’re trying to achieve and maintain, or even personal love relationships — these things don’t exist independently of the way we are sustaining and devoting ourselves to them.

In that sense, everybody has secular faith. I’m not trying to divide the world into religious and secular people. The book is not about what divides us, but about what we have in common. We all have secular faith.

Whatever you care about, whatever you’re devoted to, you both have to believe that it is intrinsically valuable and that it is fragile and finite — otherwise you wouldn’t care about it. Everyone therefore has a lived experience of secular faith, whether they know it or not, when they sustain commitments and projects.

What I’m calling religious faith is the additional idea that there is a special object of faith, like God or eternity or Nirvana, something that ultimately doesn’t depend on the practice of faith, something that exists independently and eternally. It’s the idea that finite life is not enough, that there has to be something beyond it.

If the highest object of religious faith is something eternal, then the highest object of secular faith is this fragile life we sustain together. It only exists through the way we sustain it, and it can fall apart if we fail to sustain it. But that’s exactly what makes our devotion to it so important.

The crucial question for me is therefore what it would mean to own up to and do justice to our secular faith — both individually and collectively. I also want to show that there are resources for approaching this question within religious texts themselves.