The age of substitute religions
Having largely turned away from Christianity, society now relies on new ideologies for meaning.
In a nutshell
- Pseudo-religions such as wokeism, climatism and technicism are on the rise
- These ideologies sideline human individuality and transcendence
- Dignity and accountability may erode in a world without religious values
Churches stand like leafless trees in the postmodern landscape. The Western world has largely gotten rid of God. But instead of abandoning religious fervor altogether, today’s society is teeming with substitute religions.
Wokeism
One such ideology is wokeism, an extreme form of political correctness. This new, secular religion requires letting go of one’s deluded worldview and converting to wokeness. To escape the original sin of “institutional racism” and social injustice, a public confession of sins is required. If one does not strictly adhere to woke dogma, one is threatened with persecution by excommunication in the form of cancel culture. There is no room for mercy in the woke religion: It does not matter how long ago a transgression occurred or what circumstances led to it. The Last Judgment of political correctness knows no forgiveness.
Climatism
Another secular religion has made its way into Western society. In this creed, man is no longer accountable to a god, but to Mother Nature instead. However, the structural similarities to Judeo-Christianity are astounding – in both, we find prophets, apocalyptic visions, notions of sin or guilt, and the promise of salvation. The rulers of the rich West are responsible for the destruction of the world, and only those who practice renunciation can be saved, true to the new commandment: Thou shalt not consume.
These two religions are characterized not only by their dogma and intolerant zeal but also by their advocates’ conviction that they possess absolute truth, their assertion of moral superiority and their mission to save the world.
Technicism
In the age when a civilizational change is emerging due to the modification of the biological genome and the creation of Artificial Intelligence, hubris is driving humans to completely different heights. In the bestseller “Homo Deus” by Israeli historian Yuval Harari, technicism is described as the belief that new technologies will allow humanity to transform, gaining divinity and realizing the ancient dream of immortality.
Humans have created AI that surpasses the human brain, emerging as a distinct, non-organic entity. However, the technological enhancement of humans into godlike beings raises the unsettling possibility that these successors may no longer need humanity and could even be tempted to eliminate it.
Will the disappearance of Christianity also destroy the values of the Enlightenment?
The self-deification of humanity could ultimately lead to its self-extinction. British scientist James Lovelock warns that what was once the realm of science fiction may already be a reality. A new era is unfolding, where humans are increasingly displaced by their own creations, as mechanized organisms and biologized machines ascend to superintelligence.
Human beings relegated to a background role
The enlightened Western world, which turned its back on Christianity, produces 21st century religions in which God has stepped off the stage, and humans only play a background role. Wokeism essentially reduces human beings to their skin color, gender and origin. Humans are no longer the center of the cosmos in the climate religion that deifies nature. And technicism promotes the depersonalization of humanity to such an extent that individuals are seen merely as algorithms, replaceable as more advanced ones develop in the era of AI.
This sobering conclusion raises fundamental questions: Will the disappearance of Christianity also destroy the values of the Enlightenment? Do these values, which are the basis of liberal democracy and which arose from the Judeo-Christian religions, lose their substance if the belief in the connection with the divine is lost? Is the dignity and inviolability of the individual also in danger of being extinguished if transcendence is lost?
Is free conscience an inalienable disposition that, in the words of Erich Kaestner, can be “neither lost nor trampled,” like an internal compass protects humans from paying homage to earthly deities? Humanists, along with the prevailing worldview, endorse that belief. However, doubts are warranted – doubts that even Juergen Habermas, a prominent proponent of secular reasoning, shares. Habermas, a pragmatic philosopher, has acknowledged the shortcomings of an enlightened thought that is entirely severed from Judeo-Christian faiths.
The danger of self-deification
The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century should prompt skepticism about the prevalent belief that a society can uphold Enlightenment values after abandoning the foundational worldview that gave rise to these values. These godless belief systems have painfully shown that in the absence of a higher authority, human dignity erodes, and the risk of self-deification is great.
AI and genetic interventions can manipulate fundamental aspects of human nature.
All totalitarian rulers equate their own person with the absolute, and do not recognize any higher authority to which they would be morally accountable. Influenced by the horrors of the Third Reich, the theologian and philosopher of religion Romano Guardini predicted that values like dignity and freedom would only endure for a limited time after the demise of the Christian faith and would eventually fade away.
AI and genetic interventions can manipulate fundamental aspects of human nature, as seen in the controversial work of Chinese scientist He Jiankui. His genetic modifications on two children show the growing threats to the concept of human dignity and suggest that the values upheld by the Enlightenment are indeed vulnerable. These values may not endure unless they are grounded in something beyond mere human reasoning and capabilities, suggesting the need for a transcendent basis to maintain them.
Secular society and Enlightenment values
Will Friedrich Nietzsche be proven correct in the end? Nietzsche observed that educated Europeans were abandoning Christianity, styling themselves as scientific freethinkers who claimed to live without God, yet still believed in human rights and the dignity of every individual. Such ideas, Nietzsche contended, are rooted in the Christian worldview.
The question Nietzsche resolved for himself is now sharply relevant, given the advancing erosion of the Christian faith. Do the humanistic values born from Christianity retain their compelling force in a society that rejects this faith? Moreover, how can these values be anything more than mere echoes of a bygone belief in a society where God has died? The question remains open, but it should certainly alarm us.
In the novel “Krass” by German writer Martin Mosebach, the West is depicted as growing weaker compared to other cultures. Enlightened reason has stripped religion of its mystery and led to a loss of faith in God. The novel’s opening scene vividly describes the despair of a godless Western world – a society that has abandoned not only faith but also reason. This powerful opening is mirrored by a closing image reminiscent of a biblical narrative: a believer washing the godless. As conveyed in the novel’s closing lines, only God can ultimately redeem the faithless.
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