This pairs very well with yesterday’s excerpt from Dawson.
From Desire of the Nations:
Excluding government from evangelical obedience has had repercussions for the way society itself is conceived. Since the political formation of society lies in its conscious self-ordering under God’s government, a society conceived in abstraction is unformed by moral self-awareness, driven by internal dynamics rather than led by moral purposes. To deny political authority obedience to Christ is implicitly to deny that obedience to society too. Precisely such a conception arose from the sociology which emerged in the eighteenth and came to maturity in the nineteenth century. Society was an acephalous organism, driven by unconscious forces from within, an object of study and, to the skillful, of manipulation, but in no sense a subject of responsible action.
With this conception late-modernity, as we now experience it, stands on the threshold. This, after all, is society as it has been thought about in capitalist economic theory and in revolutionary socialism; it is liberal technocratic society, which functions like a computer constantly to extend the scope of its own operations in obedience to no rational purpose. The social sciences are the heartlands of this conception, but, to the extent that they have been methodologically self-critical and understood their own abstractions for what they are, thought-experiments designed to isolate and examine certain types of relation, they have also pointed to how it may be transcended.
Society so conceived presents itself as a ‘secular’ reality. Within the traditional meaning of the term, of course, society as a whole could never be secular. Secularity pertained only to certain functions within society which had their raison d’etre in relation to this age (saeculum), not the next. The distinction of spiritual and secular was a distinction of two kinds of government within the one society. When in pre-modern Christianity two societies were distinguished as ‘two realms’ or ‘two cities’, they were polarised as moral and eschatological alternatives. They were not a spiritual society and a secular society, only a society of the saved and a society of the damned. The appearance of a social secularity could, however, be created by understanding society as a quasi-mechanical system, incapable of moral and spiritual acts.