In the 1960s and 1970s. it was just assumed that secularization was inevitable, as proclaimed with exaltation by Martin Marty in his 1963 The Secular City. Secularization theory, which underlay the joys of secularists, predicted that religion would play a decreasing role in the world. That prediction met many spectacular rebukes.
Personally, I remember an instance when a friend in Isfahan, Iran looking at a just-delivered new edition of former CIA operative and university professor Richard Cottam’s Nationalism in Iran. He was weighing on what books he would take with him in his hasty retreat to Turkey in 1978.
The book predicted that there was one thing we could be certain of: the imans and mullahs of Iran would play a decreasing role in the country’s politics.
As he contemplated a race to escape the clutches of the white-turbaned Islamic revolutionaries in the neighborhood, he picked up the book and with an unprintable explicative threw it against the wall. Right at the same time, a similar secularism was blinding urban scholars in New York City.
Among the scholarly and public policy elites in the city, most also thought that the mullahs, pastors, and rabbis were swarming out of the secular city.
In August 1975, The New York Times published a series on the gloomy picture of the future of religion in New York City. Little did they realize that religious congregations, particularly evangelical ones, would start to grow back.
In 1978, there was a significant jump in the number of new congregations founded, especially in the boroughs but also a few in Manhattan. This year was the beginning of the Postseuclar Era in the city (as well as in Iran). However, the conditions for the city and religious growth were still tough.
By now, we have seen incredible growth of religion in Iran and New York City. The postsecular public square means that every group has some equality of access to the public square in NYC. That means high competition between seculars and religious of all types and some conflict.
We need to constantly watch for good ideas coming out of the competition and to produce a group of ambassadors to keep the public square open and the competition from getting out of hand.
In Iran, the postsecular state went so religious with an autocratic Islam that it squeezed the secular and other competing religions out of the public square. Here, the first step is to discover and promote a diversity of Muslim theological schools and those other religious and nonreligious voices.
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