Post-modernism, the ideology of new academic elites, cannot be considered to have any more reality than modernity, it is purely a ‘theory’, a hypothesis about the crisis of meta-narratives, and of the historical, certainly in the West!

This crisis we are passing through, cannot be ‘resolved’ by technocrats or experts or thinkers as a self-crediting ‘authority’, like Wittgenstein it has to emerge out of a deeper knowledge and practice like the deep religious practice of which Charles Taylor speaks. To speak of ‘deep religious practice’ here, we are talking of faith amongst a body of people in a long historical tradition, a faith that enables a tradition to organically renew itself, we could say of Catholic tradition that ‘the more it changes the more it remains the same’ or as John Henry Newman said, the more it changes the more it remains true to itself!

Rationalism has no answer to this, though reasoned reflection and reasonableness (as with Stephen Toulmin) are together with faith, indispensable in discipleship and witness!

Secularism, the ideology of Modernity, had to borrow from Christianity its core values and some of its rituals. Like atheism it is a degraded theism ( cf. Nietszche).

Now that the ideology of neo-liberalism has collapsed, together with the disintegration of a whole way of life, we can no longer continue to resort to the old discourse of secular rationalism, which regarded religion and faith as superstitious remnants of archaic society!

Secular thought as pure ideology advanced in the context of neo-liberalism brought us to the precipice of anti-religionism and decadent atheism!

The unraveling of the entire edifice begs the question of the legitimacy of the secular and the
marginalisation of religion. Secular discourse is on the defensive in a way that we have never experienced it since 1945, and religion is undergoing a process of re-sacralisation, and re-entering the public domain (Casanova).

From all of this we are compelled to re-situate both secular and religious in a new relationship, but one that takes seriously the core values, traditions and practices of organized religions! We are in an entirely changed situation today, and we do not know where the current crisis will go!