ABSTRACT
This chapter explains modernity and its "before" and "after," which for simplicity's sake the author entitle the "sacral" age, the age of "secularization," and the "post-secular." In modernity, the secular anoints itself as the order of neutrality and rationality whose self-appointed task is to adjudicate religion by both policing its excesses and protecting its privacy. Secularization is a cultural category, a characteristic phenomenon in the NATO nations where mainstream religious belief is becoming increasingly unbelievable, particularly among the educated set and young. It never fails to amaze careful and sympathetic readers of both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard—it takes a certain type to pull that off—how deeply convergent and yet how wildly divergent their views are. But Nietzsche thought that science was just one more version of Christian Platonism, that the death of "God" implies the death of "absolute truth," including the absolutism.
