Japheth’s World: the rise of secularism and the revival of religion today

This essay explores what it means to say that we live today in “a secular age.” A distinction between two kinds of secularism is introduced and the proposal is made that the secularity that characterises our age belongs to a distinctively Graeco-Christian heritage. This proposal is elaborated and developed in the context of the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God and against the background of the decline in theodicial conceptions of history. However, rather than see these issues as connected to a growing nihilism in European society or in terms of a movement towards a widespread atheism, they are interpreted, in many respects optimistically, in terms of the awakening and ongoing movement of a distinctively democratic desire.