The deadly idea that it's a done deal

Have we validated Nietzsche's assertion that "God is dead, and we killed him"?

Well, okay, we’re halfway through January 2023 and I’m just publishing my first essay of the year here.

Try to embrace the charitable explanation, which is that I’ve had a major idea gelling for a while, but didn't want to articulate it until it had full ripened.

I see it as a further exploration of the terrain I covered in a piece from last June entitled “Spirituality Without A Lodestar Inevitably Comes Up Short.”

My first temptation is to excerpt at length from that, but then the question arises of what the point is for the reader to give it a fresh look in its entirety - which I invite you to do, as it’s no less relevant than it was last summer. The short version is that I look at some fresh statistics about religiosity and spirituality in contemporary America and conclude that, while people aren’t joining or attending churches much anymore, the people of our country yearn as much as ever for a sense of the transcendent.

Okay, one excerpt, because it serves as a good launching pad for where I want to go today:

We all need a message from something outside ourselves, an indication that there’s a significance to the pain, joy, fear and fulfillment we experience, that there’s a reason for these things called our existences.

We sense a basic architecture to the universe, even if we occasionally become smug and Nietzchian, existentialist or nihilist. We’re haunted by the sense that we play an inescapable role in that architecture.

Looking into what thousands of great thinkers over the course of thousands of years have done with that sense requires some humility. It requires admitting that perhaps the thought of contemporaries who have come along in our own lifetimes or a few decades back isn’t going to provide adequate answers.

That’s not easy for us to do these days. We are quite - to use a phrase that shows up a few times in Scripture - stiff-necked.

I’ve come a lot closer to being ready to write this in the last couple of days. I’ve come across two articles that touch on this theme of yearning for something beyond the surface of human existence.

One is a piece at The Atlantic entitled “American Religion Is Not Dead Yet.” The gist, as set forth in the first couple of paragraphs, is that there is reason for us to take heart that there is still a spiritual impetus to American life:

Take a drive down Main Street of just about any major city in the country, and—with the housing market ground to a halt—you might pass morechurches for sale than homes. This phenomenon isn’t likely to change anytime soon; according to the author of a 2021 report on the future of religion in America, 30 percent of congregations are not likely to survive the next 20 years. Add in declining attendance and dwindling affiliation rates, and you’d be forgiven for concluding that American religion is heading toward extinction.

But the old metrics of success—attendance and affiliation, or, more colloquially, “butts, budgets, and buildings”—may no longer capture the state of American religion. Although participation in traditional religious settings (churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, etc.) is in decline, signs of life are popping up elsewhere: in conversations with chaplains, in communities started online that end up forming in-person bonds as well, in social-justice groups rooted in shared faith.

I was not familiar with the authors, so I looked them up. Wendy Cadge is a sociology professor at Brandeis, and Elan Babchuk is a rabbi and self-described entrepreneur. The thrust of the careers of each has had an upbeat tone. They are looking for, as Babchuk’s bio states it, “a world that is more compassionate, connected, and just than the one he found.” He contributed to a book called Making Meaning: 8 Values That Drive America’s Newest Generations. I wish I could tell you that the eight values had more meat on their ones that they do, but, no, it’s the usual crap: inclusiveness, impact, authenticity, and “growthfulness,” whatever that is.

What they’re looking for is signs of hope in yet more worldliness. Cadge seems to think that chaplaincies and online groups are a fulfilling substitute for participation in actual congregations. Babchuk sets great store by “new models of faith in action.”

Ah, yes, we’re sunk without “new models.”

I’m reminded of what C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape has to say to his protege devil about “Christianity and”:

In Letter 25, Screwtape writes to Wormwood:

“The real trouble about the set your patient is living is that it is merely Christianity. . . . What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity AND.’ You know––Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.”

Depending on who reads that paragraph the object to the right of the “And” will vary. It could be social justice, anti-racism, prosperity, comfort, political conservatism, or doctrinal orthodoxy (when pursued for its own sake). In other words, this isn’t a “left” or “right” issue, it is one that can impact all Christians and often the “And” is adopted in the name of making Christianity purer and more proper.

In Letter 23, we get prelude to the “Christianity And” discussion:

“We do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything––even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy [God] demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that ‘only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations.’ You see the little rift? ‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’ That’s the game.”

The other piece I came across was Andrew Sullivan’s latest at his Substack The Weekly Dish. He, too, assumes a take-heart-there-are-signs-of-hope tone, but his is aimed at conservatives. His basic gist is that there are good and healthy ways for conservatives to adapt to the modern lay of the land in America:

It’s dawning on many on the political center and right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations. They’re immaturing with age. Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age. A recent, viral piece in the FT added a new spark to the conversation, arguing that if Millennials matured like previous generations, then by the age of 35, they

should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history … millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare; growing up in a far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military; experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.

These are all 21st century phenomena — and simply not experienced by the generations immediately before them. Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped.

A few paragraphs later, he lets a very large cat out of the bag. He calls the Republican thumbs-down of the Respect for Marriage Act a “missed opportunity”:

Think of the way Republican leaders greeted the Respect for Marriage Act: a majority of Republicans support it; it’s the law of the land anyway; it’s a way to demonstrate to the next generation that you get them. And yet the GOP, with some important exceptions, couldn’t do it. And if they voted for it, they were defensive, scared of the Christianist right. What a fantastically missed opportunity.

See a thematic thread emerging here? Like Babchuk, Sullivan thinks it’s key that we “get” upcoming generations. May I suggest that we have already failed them in their formative years? Check stats for what they know- or rather, don’t know - about history, philosophy or the canonical Western works.

Here, we’re kind of revisiting what I discussed in a recent post about David French’s argument that the Respect for Marriage Act is the best solution in our irreversibly pluralistic society.

Have we validated Friedrich Nietzsche assertion that “God is dead and we killed him?”

We’re now settling for feeling good enough to continue slogging through our lives, even as we have lost all sense of anything having any centrality. I have my doubts about how that’s going to work out.

Have you noticed something about the quotes I’ve offered here, and the people I’ve discussed? The only one who even mentions Christianity is Lewis. There’s no mention anywhere of the author of that faith (although Lewis has a great deal to say about him in his writings generally).

Okay, so recognizing Christ’s centrality to everything is now a niche position, a boutique worldview, a matter of taste, something that is permissible to embrace, as long as it doesn’t encroach on anyone else’s way of seeing things.

If that’s where we are, so be it. But here’s the thing about truth: It persists whether it has any adherents or not.

The task before us is to move the only needle worth being preoccupied with. And that’s going to require patience, forbearance, graciousness and wisdom. Each of us will have to do what we can, in any situations in which we see an opportunity.

Clearly, the boneheaded approach that evangelism often takes is not going to be effective in most situations. What is, then?

Well, that’s not for us to worry about:

“When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.”

Things are going to get rough, and reliance on He who is the answer to every question is the only way we’ll survive it.