Mormon scholar Matthew Bowman on what 'Conclave' teaches us about secularism and faith.
There is a “higher power at work in the film’s plot,” Latter-day Saint scholar Matthew Bowman writes, “even if it moves through human actions instead of angelic manifestations.”The pope is dead. Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, is in charge of gathering those men, the senior 130 or so bishops of the Catholic Church, in the Sistine Chapel. There, they will elect a successor to the throne of St. Peter.
Instead, “secularism” is one way of defining what religion is. In a secular society, like the one all of us in the United States, Canada and Europe live in now, whether we believe in God or not, religion is understood to be a private choice of an individual. The weather doesn’t care whether you believe in it, but today, in a secular society in which religion has become one way in which humans might choose to see the world — well, suddenly, to many people, whether you believe in it carries high stakes indeed.
Key for Taylor, though, is that the process of secularization is irreversible. Despite the fears of opponents of fundamentalism and the hopes of its advocates, we are simply not going back. No society, no legislation, no enforcement can reverse a change so tremendous and bone deep as the rise of the secular age.
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