THE SACRED & THE SECULAR

Benjamin Robinson | July 13, 2015

The term secular comes from the Latin saeculum, which means generation or age. It has been used in Christian literature to denote the world or the present age. That which is secular is distinguished from that which is sacred, or sacrare . . . holy or consecrated to God.

Yet, a growing number of Christians (cf. Piper, Tozer, Gibbons . . . even going back to Luther) are recognizing the need to deconstruct the traditional and long-standing sacred-secular divide. In the 20th century, both conservative Evangelical churches and churches related to the holiness movement of the 19th century sought to establish clear boundaries between the secular and the sacred through the imposition of a set of social norms. Don’t dance, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew . . . and don’t go with girls who do! All of these rules and regulations were designed to protect believers from the polluting influence of the world, yet produced the adverse effect of deadening the impact of Christianity upon the broader culture.

Three examples that come to mind, which illustrate the way in which the sacred-secular divide has been understood and interpreted in the church, are the tensions between the traditional and the contemporary, the suburban and the urban, and the explicit and the implicit. By and large, in conservative evangelicalism, the sacred has been identified with the traditional, the suburban, and the explicit, and the secular has been identified with the contemporary, the urban, and the implicit.

Traditional vs Contemporary

I grew up in a very traditional, conservative, Pentecostal church with strong holiness roots. Women were not allowed to wear pants, or skirts that were higher than the knee. We were not allowed to go to the movies, and for many years owning a T.V. was prohibited. We sang from a hymnal in all of our services as we historically resisted new forms of music as representing the spirit of the world.

When I became a young man, I sought to introduce contemporary praise and worship into the life of the church . . . and was met with less than enthusiastic participation from many of the older members of the church. Just sing the old songs, several of them said to me on many occasions after enduring the blasphemous tonalities of my electric piano, accompanied by drums and bass guitar. They felt that I was bringing the world into the church . . . like I was trying to turn the Sunday morning service into a rock and roll concert. In reality, they had simply mis-identified the sacred and the traditional, not realizing that what they saw as traditional was originally contemporary in the time when the hymns were written.

Suburban vs Urban

Similarly, I recently heard a pastor say in an interview that when a young man in his congregation got an ear ring he asked him, “Who are you emulating? You’re not emulating any of the godly men in the church; you’re emulating the culture out there.” The “godly men in the church” just so happened to all be middle-aged Caucasians who were bred in the suburbs, and the young man happened to be a Latino urbanite. This pastor inadvertently identified the sacred with the suburban. Urban culture then represents the spirit of the world. The Spirit of Christ is then identified exclusively with a white-collar form of Christianity. This is the sentiment that has led to the popular denunciation of Christian hip hop music; it seeks to Christianize a culture (urban hip hop) that is thought to be inherently non-Christian, or secular.

Explicit vs Implicit

This brings us to the third form of tension: between the explicit and the implicit . . . Skillet is asked, “Are you a Christian band?” The reaction: “Well, yes, but not in a classic sense.  We sing songs outside of Christian issues. We sing about love, about life. And because of that, we’re hard to define. But, yes, we are a Christian band.” In other words, the music that Skillet produces is implicitly, rather than explicitly, Christian.

It’s interesting to me that if you are a Christian Baker, you are not expected to bake Christian cakes exclusively. If you are a Christian plumber, you are not expected to fix Christian toilets exclusively. Yet, in the realm of music, if you are a Christian band, you are expected to make explicitly Christian music exclusively. Otherwise, your faith in Christ will be called into question, as well as your motivation for making music at all.

What these three points of tension have created–both within the church and beyond its borders–is the idea that to be a real Christian one must become a traditional, suburban, bible-thumper. The cry for the deconstruction of the sacred-secular divide is simply a cry for a non-culturally constricted definition of what it means to be a Christian and to do what a Christian does.