Modernity dead?

And just when you thought you could put modernity behind you....

The news of modernity's death has been greatly exaggerated. The Enlightenment project is alive and well, dominating Europe and increasingly North America, particularly in the political drive to carve out "the secular"--a zone decontaminated of the prejudices of determinate religious influence. In Europe, this secularizing project has been translated, ironically but not unsurprisingly, into a religious project with increasing numbers of devotees of "secular transcendence"--all the while marginalizing forms of determinate religious confessions as "dogmatic." In the United States, the march of the secular finds its expression in the persistent project to neutralize the public sphere, hoping to keep this pristine space unpolluted by the prejudices of concrete religious faith. The religious response to this has been the confused "Constantinian" project of the Religious Right, which has sought to colonize the public and political spheres by Christian morality (or the morality supposedly disclosed by "natural law").

James K.A. Smith
Introducing Radical Orthodoxy