Exploring the Postsecular

This chapter explores the postsecular through a reading of E. L. Doctorow’s City of God (2000) and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) which present characters and quests animating binaries of faith and faithlessness as well as the need for a middle ground. With religion in the new millennium in American fiction occupying center stage, the postsecular as a category allows one to tease out such nuances of the religio-secular interaction. This chapter employs Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s theorizations on the self (from Sources of the Self and A Secular Age ) as part of a modernity that was reformative yet alienating. Taylor’s work implies, therefore, that both religiosity and secularism are in need of a revision for the possibility of an improved alternative. The nostalgia for the self as an intricate part of the community, on the one hand, and a complete disengagement with society and community, on the other, are evidenced in Cormac McCarthy’s text. The plot sees an old-world Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, and a remorseless psychopath, Anton Chigurh present contrasting viewpoints about faith and community. Taylor’s definition of the crisis of the modern self that suffers alienation can be found in these characters for whom religion becomes either meaningless or a set of utilitarian laws that can be bent according to one’s wishes. As McCarthy’s text introduces us to corruptions of selfhood and community that the Enlightenment engendered, Doctorow’s text introduces a postsecular space and a porous consciousness that seeks to strike a balance between religion and secular ideas. In City of God , the Episcopalian priest Pemberton and the writer Everett, overcome by various forms of spiritual stagnation and intellectual boundaries, look for release. While for Everett, such limits are encountered in various scientific questions, and questions of justice, he experiences release only through the faculty of the imagination and through writing. Similarly, for Pemberton, his spiritual impasse begins to resolve with his physical and intellectual movement out of his church into the city where he is able to connect with other human beings such that a dynamism is set into force. Such connections are also encountered through other reiterative images of flow in the text denoted through pathways, classical music, and stories that not only manifest a consciousness that is highly permeable or what Taylor calls the ‘porous’ self but also demonstrate the necessity of a connectedness and community that fosters this. This middle space is meaningful since it symbolizes discussion and debate and therefore growth that communities can provide based on collective knowledge. Therefore, illumined by Taylor’s ideas of modernity, self, and community while McCarthy’s text delineates the extremes of the modern rational project and sets into motion the need for a middle ground of communal existence and conversation, Doctorow’s text shows us the movement from the ‘buffered’ self to a more permeable personhood and consciousness and the significance of such a postsecular space.

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