The second wave of secularization . . . involves an attempt to rid the world of the sacred, the forbidden and the sacramental. This attempt is not consciously made, any more than children consciously try to free themselves from the home or jealous lovers consciously enumerate the failings of their rivals. Like religion itself, secularization is a social process, propelled by an invisible hand towards a goal that nobody need intend and everybody may regret. Moreover, the second wave of secularization has about it a kind of urgency, an intemperate dislike of opposition and a refusal to countenance dissent that are reminiscent of religious sects. You see this, for example, in the American movements in favour of abortion and gay marriage. Both of those practices threaten ancient feelings about the sacred and the sacramental, but both are regarded by many of their advocates as causes from which it is deepest heresy to dissent. Likewise the movement to remove prayers from public schools, to forbid courthouses to display the Ten Commandments, to remove all reference to God from the coinage and public symbols of the United States—these are not, as a rule, mildly voiced opinions, issued by people who wonder just how far they should impose their views on their believing fellow-citizens. They are passionate causes, often pursued with a zealotry that only religions are normally thought to promulgate.
In short, the second wave of secularization, after a period of cynicism and doubt, has given rise to a curious simulacrum of the religious frame of mind. The new distaste for heresy and desire for conformity suggest that secular ideology is now attempting to fill the gap left by the old form of social membership. But this ideology is unlike the religious frame of mind in a crucial particular, namely that it has no clear conception of the sacred, the consecrated or the sacramental. Its rituals are spare and uncertain and its occasions for awe non-existent—or almost so.
(Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy [London and New York: Continuum, 2006], 138-9 [ellipsis added])
