Separating Secular from Sacred—Endarkenment, Not Enlightenment

Recognizing the religious nature of MultiEarth economics is essential to understanding it. That’s what this blog believes. But, of course, few people think of their economic activity as expressing their religion. Most people identify themselves as adherents to one of the faiths that has emerged across human civilization. “I am a Jew,” we say—or Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or some other faith.

Here’s what’s so fascinating (and tragic). All of these faiths reject the economic religion which is at the core of the MultiEarth worldview. They consider it the worship of false gods. An idolatry. A faith that destroys lives, the environment, and undermines cultures. So how does it happen that MultiEarth economics remains so disconnected from religion in the dominant Multi Earth mind?

The answer lies, I think, in the dualism that entered into Western civilization from the age of reason onward, an age referred to as the Enlightenment. Though at that time (the 17th century) it was enlightening to end the unhealthy enmeshment of religious authority that blunted the rigorous inquiry of science, the dualism that resulted has today brought us a new “endarkenment.” For example, what is “secular” and what is “sacred” got put into separate containers. The traditional religion with which we identify resides in a container marked “Sacred.” But economics and our religious devotion to it lives in a separate container named “Secular.”

These separate silos mean that the social teaching of what we consider to be our faith rarely, if ever, challenges our economic decisions. As a result, religious people make decisions that okay cheap wages or slave labor, permit mountaintop removal for access to coal’s polluting energy, justify endless war on terrorists or whoever, fund and lobby politics into corruption, and punish those who try to blow the whistle on any of these.

This dualistic view of reality means we do not usually comprehend how a timeless statement once made by Jesus, “You cannot serve God and Mammon,” rebukes us. He flatout rejected global capitalism and every other MultiEarth economy.