In the Absence of the Sacred
Nearer to the dust...
There’s a reason why the free exercise of religion precedes all other freedoms in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights: It’s because freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of peaceable assembly and freedom to petition our government cannot exist unless we first commit ourselves to the free exercise of religion. Collectively, these freedoms constitute and describe the foundational firmament of our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Institutional attacks on the free exercise of religion, therefore, pose an existential threat to the downstream freedoms that follow -- and always precede the ascent of secular fascism and authoritarianism.
The printing press destroyed Western theocracy. As a mass medium, print championed linear thought and reason and gave rise to nation states via the Enlightenment, the scientific method and the American, French and Industrial revolutions. Democracy emerged as the preferred social bias of print, and Western religion returned over time to its pre-theocratic status as opponent of oppression and ally of the oppressed. Judeo-Christian ethics and faith were considered foundational and essential to all modern democracies because the architects of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were wise enough to know that liberal institutions like freedom of religion, freedom of speech and democracy cannot survive without the moral authority conferred upon them by an organizing principle and power greater than themselves. Indeed, no great society has ever emerged or survived in the absence of the sacred.
The understanding of religion and faith as critical to the defense of Western democracies and freedom is precisely why secular authoritarians and fascists of all stripes -- from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin and Mao and Castro and Kim Jong-Un and Xi Jinping -- take it upon themselves to eradicate, marginalize or co-opt religion. Once fascism emerges as the religion of the state, any competing moral authority must be silenced.
That the emergence of secular fascism in the early 20th century coincided with the rise of electronic mass media (commercial music, radio and motion pictures) was hardly coincidental. Where print media champion linear thought and reason, electronic media champion distraction, emotionalism, tribalism and the cult of personality. Where the inherent bias of print promotes democracy, the inherent bias of electronic media promotes fascism and the accelerated consolidation of institutional and corporatist power.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini
Contrary to the mythologies of the dot com era and 21st-century pop culture, the rise of a massive digital pantheon with godlike power and unaccountability does not bode well for the forces of freedom in the 21st century. Where theocratic fascism rises by the sword of imposed moral authority, the rise of secular fascism demands the opposite: a moral vacuum filled by the cults of personality, celebrity, expertise and political correctness.
Still, the forces of secularism are no less religious in their orthodoxies than religious Jews or Born Again Christians. They simply worship at different temples. Collectively, Google and Apple and Facebook and AT&T and Comcast and Netflix are, for all practical purposes, the new religion of the state -- the new fascism. And like all fascists, they abhor freedom.
Religion in secular Western societies is always the canary in the coal mine. The prohibition of worship in blue-state Covid-19 lockdowns is profane, an insult to human dignity and a full-frontal assault on freedom. But few in the blue states seem to notice or care enough to speak up. Recent mob violence and attacks on the liberal institutions of Western civilization by the illiberal institutional forces of woke culture -- academia, technomedia, blue state authoritarians and their BLM/Antifa shock troops -- are likewise profane and dangerous concessions to fascism. Civil discourse and the rule of law be damned. Again, few in the blue states speak up. Apparently, nothing is profane when everything is already rendered profane, and the ends somehow always justify the means.
Secularists, atheists and neo-socialists who claim not to worship God should take note: Those who prefer to follow the (pseudo) science are no less zealous in their BLM, global warming and lockdown orthodoxies, no less opiated in thought and desperation than their religious counterparts -- especially not when the smartphones they touch more than 2600 times each and every day (on average) represent nothing short of collective fealty to history’s most perfect narcotic. In the end, all of us -- religious or atheist, right or left, black or white or brown, male or female or LGBTQ+ -- worship at the same temples of Google and Apple and Facebook and Comcast and AT&T. We are all massively addicted to an endless stream of digital narcotics, and we behave accordingly: in extremis, like desperate addicts forever in need of our next fix. But don’t take my word for it: just follow the money -- straight into the bottomless pockets of history’s wealthiest, most rapacious and most powerful drug cartel.
Ironically, Western religions are — for better or worse — the only remaining institutional voices of restraint and reflection in a nation driven mad by what many recovering addicts describe as self-will run riot. The liberal institutions of Western civilization will not survive removal of the Judeo-Christian DNA that informs them. Purged of Judeo-Christian ethics, Western liberal institutions — like academia and the news media — turn illiberal and authoritarian. Meanwhile, we are lured into complacency by endless narcotic spectacle for profit. The warning signs are crystal clear: state-sanctioned addiction and fascism are what await us all in the absence of the sacred.
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell would be appalled and vindicated in equal measure to witness the remarkable confluence of their respective dystopian visions in such vivid UltraHD relief. In conclusion I offer an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses From the Rock…
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Hi Jeff, I'm finding myself in an unusual position of agreeing strongly with half of what you say and not being so strongly in agreement with the other half -- even disagreeing some -- here and there. I suppose that merits a comment. If we all agreed all the time about everything that would probably not be a good thing.
Lying on my reading stack of books is "In Search of the Sacred" by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the famous Muslim Scholar. Much of his personal and academic history (since his college days) has aligned with the same sentiment that you cite in regards to the notion that it is a big, fear-inducing social experiment to believe that we can order society in a moral way with exclusively secular patterns of thought and behavior.
http://www.sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw26_nasr_review.pdf
We're not really sure about this yet, so it's a good conversation starter.
I spent 10 years of my mid-life studying and ministering as a Christian pastor in an ordinary, small town, Presbyterian Church (USA) setting (declining so-called 'mainline' Protestantism), so I have some pretty well-formed opinions on how religion can functions generally in culture based on years of experience lived inside a religious worldview. (In deference to any intersectional emphases that may be in play here, I am male, WASP, hetero/cis, urban/rural, Christian, leftish, able (almost fully), educated, poor/rich (been both), 57-years-old, married, DINK.
Here's my takeaway. I feel that we should consider carefully the waning of religion in the same way that Ruth Bader Ginsburg prohesied the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. She used the now famous analogy that getting rid of the voting strictures on racists counties would be like getting rid of an umbrella in the rain because you're not getting wet. And she was right. Once the coercion of the law was removed, the old, ancient, human instincts for power and control resurfaced, spawning a plethora of immoral anti-democratic voter disenfranchisement programs. Of course, one might reason that the "old human instincts" have been here all along, regardless of fidelity (or even the appearance of fidelity).
In the same manner of explanation of Ginsburg's analogy, the law, either from God or men (and now women), has historically always been deemed necessary to prevent the eruption of bad behavior rooted in response to pain and suffering. As long as there is "the law," and respect for it, this prevents people and societies from descending into chaos and bedlam when things get rough. So there's value there.
Note here that, contrary to some forums, and because I am psychologically and spiritually oriented, I don't place fault in this situation with the radical actors across the left/right spectrum. First, there's no good use at blaming people -- this never works. People are just responding ideologically to their own personal pain and suffering by fomenting against only lightly considered opponents -- with whom they actually share the common experience of becoming radicalized by the experience of realizing no one cares so much about them. Culture is disintegrating and for every profound soul feel the authentic fear and pain of this, there are 2 people yelling and screaming in utter relational disconnect. This is not good.
The law only works when people respect the law. And I don't see a lot of respect for the law these days inside the Republican Party, respect of either a religious or secular nature. Further, and worrisome to me, is that many Republicans identify with a form of Christianity that would be unrecognizable to Jesus, rooted as it is in the same identitarian manner as are the radical left, of whom they complain much.
To be fair, I think the religiosity of the Democrats is in the same identitarian silo -- they're just bonded with a different constituency.
So without playing too much politics here -- though I've obviously made my bias clear -- I'm really quite concerned that there does not appear to me -- based on my experience of pastoring -- to be a critical mass of people practicing religion in anything other than a entry-level -- and sometimes even superficial -- way. I wonder whether the allegiances of moderate Christians on both sides of the political aisle will be enough of a counterbalance against the raging politics of demagoguery currently ongoing.
I'm not really opposed to decline of traditional religion, but I do think that we really need functioning interim models of these traditional religions in conversation with emergent newer strands of culture in order to stabilize society. Chanting "lock him/her up" is not going to solve anything, and we are facing multiple crises. We need something like a renewal of old working paradigms of emergence of something novel and new.