De Lubac on secularism

This passage from Henri De Lubac 1965 work, The Mystery of the Supernatural, has a tantalizing commentary on our theology of public life and politics. The "bitter fruit" is still with us.

Though the dualist—or perhaps better, separatist—thesis has finished its course, it may be only just beginning to beat its bitterest fruit. As fast as professional theology moves away from it, it becomes so much more widespread in the sphere of practical action. While wishing to protect the supernatural from any contamination, people had in fact exiled it altogether—both from intellectual and from social life—leaving the field free to be taken over by secularism. Today that secularism, following its course, is beginning to enter the minds even of Christians. They too seek to find a harmony with all things based upon an idea of nature which might be acceptable to a deist or an atheist: everything that comes from Christ, everything that should lead to him, is pushed so far into the background as to look like disappearing for good. The last word in Christian progress and the entry into adulthood would then appear to consist in a total secularization which would expel God not merely from the life of society, but from culture and even from personal relationships.

—The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Herder & Herder, 1998), xxxv.