Why the Sacred–Secular Split Leaves People Tired and Divided
For most of my 34 years as a pastor, I’ve seen a pattern that keeps repeating.
Many people want the church to be a kind of theological Disneyland. It’s a place you visit for inspiration, comfort, and meaning—and then you go home to the real world, where different rules apply.
More than once, after a sermon where I explored the public values found in the Abrahamic traditions—values like care for the poor, limits on power, truth-telling, and dignity for every human being—someone has said to me, kindly but firmly:
“That’s nice, Pastor, but the real world doesn’t work that way.”
What’s interesting is that many of these same people still want the church to bless the real world—their work, their nation, their family, their economic life. They just don’t want the church to question it.
The result is a quiet deal:
- Church offers comfort, rituals, and hope
- The world sets the real rules
The values of faith end up living in a very small space—safe, contained, and mostly private.
But this creates a deeper problem. It doesn’t just split church from society. It splits people.
Many end up living with two value systems:
- One for Sunday
- One for the rest of the week
Most people don’t like this. They sense something is off. Discipleship becomes thin. Faith starts to feel performative. And over time, this kind of divided life can drift toward meaninglessness—even nihilism. It leaves us passive, both as people guided by a wisdom tradition and as members of a democracy.
How can we take “love your neighbor as you love yourself” when we ignore the policies and institutions that most directly impact our neighbor?
Faith becomes a ride on the Teacups: pleasant, emotional, and forgettable once you leave the park.
I have heard leaders in every wisdom tradition name the same kind of dynamic in their communities.
Yet, with the low levels of trust in institutions and in each other, we are going to need a new way to form a social contract that draws on our diverse traditions in a new way. More on that next week.