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Modern Religion

I remember a decade and a half ago when atheism first found its voice and came charging into the public discourse, denouncing Christianity and waving around a cudgel of rationality1. The previous quiet skirmishes now past, the first real battle in what would become the New Atheist movement was afoot, and in an argumentative style it would break open the taboo on ā€œatheismā€ as something one believed only in the privacy of oneā€™s own home. If one had been harboring a quiet disdain for the whiff of that preachy air, one now had a champion, someone whom could be cheered while obliterating the still unenlightened. Events where organized will titles such as ā€œReligion: Societal good or societal illā€, which promised to settle once and for all lifeā€™s most abstruse questions. This was the moment of glory for the self-coined Four Horsemen2, academics who had come riding out of their tower to bring wrath upon the charlatans and peddlers of faith, that most irrational and dangerous of memes.

Today this all seems a bit gauche, but at the time I remember a definite intoxicating sense that a new crack in the culture had opened, that those who thought dogma a holdover from another time had finally stormed the last bastion. Of course a minority had always set upon their soapbox and decried religion as a confidence trick or flowers on the chain, but never was this said so loudly, and with so much righteous indignation. No one noticed a truce with modernity had been made, that religion was to be believed or tolerated indulgently, but never really openly attacked, until the peace had broken down and war was already on. It was now only to choose a side, this new form of transgression having opened a whole new front in the culture war already in full swing. It wooed its proselytes, drew its battle lines, and everyone felt like they where engaged in something very important.

Even though the battle raged, it was a time when a pan-political agreement held that every candidate was Christian by assumption, bending the knee in ways unbelievable if pressed. Religion was still to be taken seriously in politics by all sides with all actions being by definition found in scripture; this was before those most moved by the Spirit voting en masse for Donald Trump (the thrice married adulterer whose language was more pure Id than one enlightened by Christian charity) and proved once and for all the homage given the Good Book more a mask upon something ultimately as simple as power.

Much has happened in the interim. Thing are once again mainly quiet on the religion front; But who then won? This, as it turns out, a more complicated question to answer then where the sides which fought have believed. The result is something more akin to the Peace of Westphalia than to that of Cannae. Organized religion may indeed have been given a last lethal blow and is dying a slow death in the West, but not in the way one would have guessed given the lines on which the battle was fought. Both sides thought in a binary, that either one cast aside all irrationalities and gave oneself over completely to science, or one doubled down on inerrancy and burned the books of the evolutionists. But in the end, there was no great triumph of the New Atheists, who at this point have instead become passe. Their momentary stridency flared up and filled lovers and haters with the sense of impending victory a fleeting second before the whole movement expended itself and faded into the background. Also, while the faithful were always fighting something of a rear-guard action and never really expected a Third Great Awakening, there was no sudden rise of the Antichrist to lead the masses into temptation. In the end, like everything so seemingly existential to our modern limited attention spans, the ever restless cultural discourse changed topic and everyone forgot to consider religion at all.

Yet religion in America is in the process of remaking itself in ways no one guessed. Church, the brick and mortar building which brings believers together in congress to reaffirm as public act their faith, has increasingly fallen out of favor. A corporate structure as scaffold in oneā€™s faith is on the wane as all denominations are losing members year over year3. Even among those who still claim adherence to a mainline denomination the feeling of the necessity of communion is less felt, of the common ritual as something foreign and strange. More than 40% of millennials who claim for themselves Christianity no longer claim a congregation. Even the Southern Baptist Convention, the archetype of US evangelical faith and bastion of traditional belief, is hemorrhaging congregants every year4. What then remains of functionalism5 when all is belief and nothing remains of the performative?

At the same time that unchurched believers were in the ascendant, the reprobate have remade themselves not as New Atheists out to evangelize a still misled world, but instead were busy reinterpreting religion a tool of the patriarchy and therefore not only silly, but pernicious. Now for the new Woke Left, if one was to proclaim a faith too loudly or too biblically, one has in effect just proclaimed oneself a misogynist in all but name (a certain dispensation given the black community for ā€˜culturalā€™ reasons). Religions new detractors conceived of the traditional dogmas as something more akin to an effect than a cause and so logical argumentation to be pointless endeavor. Religion no longer caused good people to do bad things (in Hitchenā€™s formulation), but we were fallen first, the original sin of patriarchy and oppression sewn deep in the occidental mind from which the bible would be mere indictment. Religionā€™s adversaries no longer were missionary, going out into the world with reason girding their loins and ready to battle, but instead retired inside their new battlements only to glower from atop their ever-growing theoretical walls. In the new enlightened interpretation, all was structures of power, and religion once more became flowers on the chain. But this time something even deeper and more insidious than that of capital was at the source.

The Right had always used religion as something of a political tool being by nature a conservative institution, while the left has tip-toed in quiet ways around the issue and tried to kluge their agenda into some religious language so as to grant an indulgence to the progressive impulse. With so much of this at odds with the new Woke understanding and the rest for personal interpretation, now a days not much is said about oneā€™s faith in polite company, and not much is asked. It is a Donā€™t Ask, Donā€™t Tell for the 21st century. One was free, nay encouraged to believe what one will, but in a quiet personal way and to make no great claim of universal truths. The critique of the Reformation was that it began with one Pope on the seven hills of Rome and ended with seven popes on every dunghill in Europe; now there is no need of popes as each is to find a spirituality not even bound by some restrictive allegiance to sola scriptura or any such stricture. One now is to innovate if sincere.

In some ways this is to admittedly overstate the case. Actually theological knowledge has always been something suspect6, with only white Evangelical Christians managing to get a score above 50% in surveys of basic biblical and doctrinal knowledge (all other demographics falling south of half). Most congregants have always, it would seem, been happy with the conviction that someone, somewhere has worked out the details and filled in the rest for themselves. Since the advent of polling, I know of no country or faith which can claim its adherents show any real concern with questions above the most basic tenants, and even these are asking too much most of the time. There is a fundamental reason why, if one has spent any time in church at all, that most preaching is forever on basic level which never seems to progress. Like politics, one must stay on message, not deviate from the most over-simple of points, and repeat this ad nauseam if one hopes to make even a basic notion adhere in ones audience. The only thing which seemed to invest a section of the US with a new thirst for religious knowledge was the momentary thrust of atheism into the dialog, and this only in some very limited way. For that one second both sides cracked open their bibles in an arms race that was never won by either while both claimed victory. And then everyone was bored with the debate once again.

Religion may no longer be best word to describe the current diffusion of ideas. For most it now seems a grab bag of bits stolen from a myriad contexts. Kierkegaard would complain of the ease in which the Danes held their faith, a passive belief which required no great struggle of self. Today apathy extends to any kind of doctrine and instead floats lightly in some vagary which is no longer bounded by a larger theology, instead only subject to what one finds appealing. Belief in heaven tracks pretty consistently at 72% polled in America, while hell, its more vindictive twin, is less certain with only three quarters of those affirming the first also affirm its opposite7. God seems permanently popular8 at 80% polled, though I would suspect more ill defined than previous years. Monotheism has always been more an empty box for a concept than one in-and-of itself. Jesus added a theory of mind to the abstraction, allowing a ready anthropomorphization to fill out the bones. Yet at the same time, only a steadily declining slim majority associates God with the biblical account. What is left of anything concrete when the humanity of God as trinity with Jesus fades, and the whole notion of the divine slips back into the undefined?

One hears too frequently a flippant quoting of Chesterton, ā€œWhen men stop believing in God, they donā€™t believe in nothing ā€” they believe in anything.9ā€ Yet it may indeed be true when given a wider lens for its object less beholden to an idiomatic understanding of ā€˜religionā€™ as practiced in times past. John McWhorter writes in his essay Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion10 of the way the most irreligious demographic has re-imaged the essence of sin and salvation into something which would probably be denied by all involved, but in reality folding in a faith so clandestinely as to be contested. To the extent that Protestantism has always been iconoclastic, desirous of the destruction of the symbols of faith and wishing to tear down the cathedrals and instead make god immanent, they have succeeded beyond their own imagining, liberating religion from any form of doctrine and spreading it quietly out and into convictions based less in fideism to defined dogmas and more thought of as esoteric enlightenment which has no bounds.

  1. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was published in 2006, the same year which Sam Harris published his book Letter to a Christian Nation. The following year God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens came out.Ā 

  2. YouTube - The Four HorsemenĀ 

  3. Gallup - Church attendance hits new two decade lowĀ 

  4. The Economist - The Southern Baptists are beset by two related fiascosĀ 

  5. Sociology of Religion - FunctionalismĀ 

  6. Pew - US religious knowledge surveyĀ 

  7. Pew - Belief in HeavenĀ 

  8. Pew - Belief in GodĀ 

  9. I hesitate to use quotes in this case, as no phrase such as this is found in any of Chestertonā€™s works. While widely attributed to him, the specific verbiage seems to vary from citation to citation with only the gist as constant such that any reference to this is really more a paraphrase at best.Ā 

  10. Daily Beast - Antiracism, Our Flawed New ReligionĀ 


Tyler is born in New Mexico and lives in the clouds.