The Postsecular Sacred

The most sophisticated form of atheism is a quiet, polite indifference to the sacred. It’s the sterile competence of modern life, a world so thoroughly explained, cataloged, and managed that the very category of 'mystery' seems like a nostalgic artifact. We've built a society that functions like a perfectly sealed room, climate-controlled and brilliantly lit, with no drafts of transcendence allowed in. In this environment, the hunger for meaning, the ache for something more, is diagnosed—as anxiety, as burnout, as a chemical imbalance to be corrected. The sacred hasn't been defeated in a grand battle of ideas; it has been gently, efficiently, and professionally escorted out of the building as irrelevant to our material progress.

But what if the sealed room is beginning to crack? What if the very success of our secular project—its ability to provide comfort but not meaning—is creating a vacuum that is pulling the sacred back into the mainstream? This is something wilder and more personal, emerging in art, in ecology, in psychology, and in the quiet crises of ordinary people. It was precisely this cultural shift that captured the attention of David Tacey. As a professor specializing in literature and depth psychology, Tacey observed a profound spiritual hunger among his students and in the broader culture that was being completely ignored or misread by intellectual and religious institutions alike. He wrote The Postsecular Sacred as a cultural analyst charting the strange, unexpected, and powerful return of the sacred into a world that thought it had moved on.

Module 1: The Postsecular Condition

We’ve been through a three-act play. Act one was pre-modern faith. Think unquestioned religious belief. Act two was the secular age. Think scientific reason and the rejection of superstition. Tacey argues we are now entering act three. This is the postsecular age. It’s a new development.

The first core idea is that the postsecular is a third phase of development, not a regression. It’s what comes after you’ve moved through both naïve faith and cynical atheism. The author’s own life followed this pattern. He had a religious childhood. Then, a secular education made him an atheist. Later in life, he found his way back to a sense of the sacred, but one informed by all the critiques he’d learned. This new phase integrates a modern, critical mind with a renewed sense of mystery.

So here’s what that means for us. We are not being asked to believe in old dogmas. The book suggests a new starting point. The human psyche is inherently spiritual and has never been truly secular. This is a foundational concept from the psychologist Carl Jung. Jung argued that the sacred is a built-in feature of our minds. The secular age didn't erase it. It just pushed it into the unconscious. This creates a void. A feeling that something is missing. That feeling is the engine driving the postsecular shift. It’s the psyche trying to reclaim its lost dimension.

But flip the coin. This return isn’t always gentle. The return of the sacred is often disruptive, violent, and terrifying. When a fundamental human need is repressed for so long, it erupts. Tacey points to the rise of religious fundamentalism and terrorism as a dark manifestation of this return. It’s a distorted, pathological expression of a genuine spiritual hunger that our secular culture has failed to address. It’s the shadow side of our collective denial. The sacred, Tacey warns, is a paradoxical force. It holds the potential for both profound transformation and terrible destruction.

Module 2: The Inner Turn and the Soul

We've established the postsecular condition. So where do we find this re-emerging sacred? The book argues the search has turned inward. The great cathedrals and institutions are losing their authority. The new frontier is the human soul.

This brings us to a critical insight. The collapse of external religious structures forces a necessary turn inward. The old "ladders" to God—dogma, rituals, priests—have broken for many people. We are left, as the poet W.B. Yeats wrote, to lie down "in the rag and bone shop of the heart." The spiritual journey today starts in the messy, imperfect, and often dark reality of our own inner lives. This is a feature of the postsecular age. Secularism, by starving us of external spiritual food, has unintentionally forced us to discover the wellspring within.

Building on that idea, the journey changes. The goal shifts from perfection to wholeness. Traditional, patriarchal religion often pushed an ideal of perfection. An ascetic, disembodied purity. This new spirituality is about wholeness. It’s about integrating all parts of yourself. The light and the dark. The body and the spirit. The masculine and the feminine. Carl Jung called this confronting the "shadow." It means you can't use spiritual ideas to bypass your psychological work. You have to bring your whole, authentic self to the table.

Now, let's turn to the practice itself. This inward turn is about a specific kind of engagement. Mysticism, the direct experience of the sacred, is the core practice of the postsecular age. Mysticism has been democratized. It's accessible to everyone. Thinkers like David Steindl-Rast argue it's for normal people. In fact, it's essential to becoming a complete human being. This involves a radical shift in posture. It moves from active, ego-driven seeking to a receptive state of being found. It’s about learning to let go.

And here's the thing. This is not a "New Age" invention. The turn toward the inner soul has deep roots in Western mystical traditions. Figures like Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Avila have been saying this for centuries. Eckhart famously said, "God must become our own inner self." Teresa wrote that within oneself is the best place to look for God. The postsecular turn is a recovery of this forgotten lineage. It’s a return to the experiential heart of spirituality, freed from the institutional baggage that had buried it.