Good point, but in good times the people you're talking about won't agree. At some point, when trouble starts, we'll see a return to religion, but for the time being secularists are going their own way.
I don't know if religion is necessary to morality, but so many of the secularist arguments look weak. Morality needs all the help it can get, and religious support is to be welcomed.
I also don't know what the big answer is, but for the past few centuries religious faith has supported skepticism about the all-encompassing secular ideologies. If we lived in the 15th or 16th century, secularism would provide the necessary corrective to the certainties of religion. In the 20th century it was faith that opposed totalizing secular ideologies. Dominant beliefs need to be tempered by a degree of skepticism. A lot depends on whether the dominant faith of the 21st century will be religious or irreligious.
We should be talking about the rest of the TAC symposium of which it was a part.
Agreed.
I found Ross Douthat's comments quite germane:
...the Victorian project (which persists to this day) of doing away with Christian dogma but trying to keep Christian morality intact is doomed to failure. Not because Christian morality can’t be approached rationally by nonbelievers of good will, but because without the lived experience of a religious tradition it will never be anything more than an abstraction, an arid intellectualism, something that gets followed when following it is easy to follow and abandoned as soon as the going gets tough.
If we lived in the 15th or 16th century, secularism would provide the necessary corrective to the certainties of religion.
I'm really not sure that period can be rightly described as secular. As I read it, the aftermath of the Reformation led to the rise of divine-right monarchy, then later to the pseudo-religion of nationalism.
Yet I am pretty sure that the kind of skeptical examination of self and society on display here was nurtured in a Christian culture. I doubt that it will survive intact should that culture be significantly compromised, as is happening today.