Since the release of my book The Holy Bluff, the Search for Meaning in the Post-Religious World, I’ve been asked several times how I can speak of a “‘post religious world” when whole nations are still governed by Islamic law, the Pope is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and the President of the United States still concludes his State of the Union Address with “God Bless the United States of America”. So what am I talking about?

To understand the post-religious world, which I believe we’ve been living in more or less since the turn of the twentieth century, it’s important to understand the religious world we lived in before then. It’s easy at times to forget that for all of human history from the caves on up, the existence of some form of deity was for homo sapiens as much of a reality as the sun, the stones, the water we drank, the food we ate, our fellow creatures and, most importantly, ourselves. In fact, all these lesser realities (including us) were seen in the context of divine creation - which is why we called ourselves “creatures” in the first place.

In the religious world, the fact that different people and groups had different views on God’s nature and intentions were not seen as a challenge to God’s existence. Different tribes had worshipped different Gods from the very beginning. God was by definition mysterious.  If your neighbors disagreed with your version of the almighty, you reacted to them with tolerance or with charges of heresy, depending on your tribe’s inclinations. Disbelief was simply not an option. The American experiment (still ongoing) in separation of church and state is a prime example. The founding fathers did not choose unbelief over belief – they simply decriminalized heresy and identified freedom to believe as a God-given right, which in the religious world is not a contradiction. Fish don’t doubt the water.  So what happened?

There had been major groundswells of change during the 19th century. The Catholic Church executed its last heretic in 1826;  The Origin of Species was published in 1859; Neichze declared God dead in 1882 - and he wasn’t burned at the stake [1]; in 1879 Thomas Edison harnessed the magnetic power of the universe to turn on the lights–  and by 1893 the gods' angry thunderbolts had become something you could make toast with. Our sense of ourselves was changing. By the end of the century, with a long overdue nod to Galileo, heliocentrism (the idea that the earth orbits the sun and not vice-versa) was fully entrenched as humankind’s default position, Genesis notwithstanding. As the century turned, Religion still explained many things for many people – but it no longer explained everything for everybody. The fish were beginning to rethink the water.

When I was doing my research into what would become The Holy Bluff, I stumbled upon a fascinating book by the Reverend William Hallock Johnson, The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights, in which the Reverend argued for the endurance of and continuing need for adherence to the eternal truths provided by faith despite the mechanistic information provided by Darwin’s discoveries and the seemingly game-changing view of the universe provided by recent advances in cosmology. I was well into the second chapter before a reference to the terrible war raging in Europe prompted me to check the date of publication - which turned out to be 1916.  The Reverend was not simply defending his beliefs against some other theologian’s, but the validity of belief itself. A century before, he would have had no one to argue with.

In the century since, the argument has rumbled on with all the subtlety of a tectonic shift. From the Scopes trial in the 1920’s, where beleaguered evolutionists fought for the right to teach their theories in school, to today’s courtroom battles for (and against) the inclusion of an “intelligent design” curriculum as an alternative to evolution, we’ve seen a major tide change. And like all tides, it has left a lot of people high and dry.

The difference between the religious world view and the (for lack of a better word) secular world view comes down to one simple point: in the religious view, an eternal perfect being created everything for a purpose and we created beings draw our lives’ meaning from serving that purpose. In the secular view, creation is an accident, with no guiding intelligence behind it and nothing eternal except eternal change. Those of us who live in the post religious world are stuck between these two positions and both sides are digging in. It’s not a comfortable place to be, but it’s where we are. The United States is split pretty much down the middle and it’s not working for us.

Religion isn’t over. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. It’s my opinion that we wouldn’t be any better off if it did. The first two attempts to base a modern nation on a purely secular ideology were Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. Few among us, believers or unbelievers, would consider Stalin or Hitler preferable to Jesus. They simply filled a vacuum left by the collapse of something that had been there before.  In the post-religious world, vacuums are a problem, perhaps the problem.

Which is why I wrote the book.



[1] The actual quote is “Though God is dead, we still see his shadow” – as good a picture of the post-religious world as you’ll find.

Of the many images to hit the world media following the horrific devastation of the worst storm ever to hit  the Philippines, one of the most compelling was that of an exhausted Catholic priest walking through his parish blessing the bodies of the hundreds of dead - men, women and children - who lay strewn in the streets. He was supposed to be me. I studied for eight years to become a missionary priest and the Philippines were a mission country. That priest was doing the job I walked away from.  

I walked away from it because I lost faith in the belief that God could either cause or prevent hurricanes. In walking away, of course, I gave up the right to have anybody bless my body when I wind up strewn on whatever street fate has in store for me. You don’t get anything for free, not in this world. We need to look at both sides of this coin.

The people of Tacloban City believed in God. They still do. By all accounts, prayer is the only consolation they have. The government isn’t helping, food is in scarce supply, their homes are gone and the loved ones whose bodies they can find are rotting in the streets.   The question of “How could God let this happen?” is secondary to the need to hang onto the last and only available straw when the stark reality of the human condition calls in its loan. Our priest has his work cut out for him.

We know what causes hurricanes, or typhoons as they’re called in the Pacific – weather systems caused by the blind interaction of heat and cold, at the beck and call of that damn butterfly flapping its wings, how much ice is melting at the north and/or south poles, currents running up against each other and millions of small and large events as removed from our control as the earth’s rotation around the sun, not to mention the pull of other planets on our own. We understand it, but we can’t do anything about it, and our success at predicting it well or soon enough to protect ourselves from its hazards can be clearly observed over a priest’s shoulder in the Philippines as he blesses his hundredth body of the day.  The fact that our own use of fossil fuels may be making it worse is hardly comforting, and unlikely to cause any additional faith in the ability of our science to help us out of this.

Nothing can help us out of this.

What we chose to do about that is the ultimate human task. We can’t beat it, we have to learn how to live with it. We’ll get better at forecasting, we’ll start moving everything to higher ground – the value of beachfront property is going to take a serious hit in the decades to come. We may even start using cleaner forms of energy, if all else fails. But the storm doesn’t care. Only we can do that – the caring. In the same story I was talking about, a women from the parish was interviewed wearing the only piece of clothing she had, a red t-shirt stolen from a wrecked store by one of her neighbors when looting broke out. The uncaring storm vs. the generous thief - that’s the story, the whole story. We need to care for each other because the storm doesn’t. God has no wrath and less mercy. We’re the only ones capable of either.

When the storm waters recede to get ready for next time, you’ve got neighbors stealing for neighbors, doctors performing operations in a roofless bicycle shop, total strangers three thousand miles away pointing and clicking to send money for food, and a priest trying to keep the praying going because it’s all he’s got to offer. In its own way, it’s a victory, the only one really available to us. We’re better than the storm.

And if the priest dropped from exhaustion and there were still bodies to be blessed, and if I was there and he asked me to, I’d take his place in a second. I still know the words – Latin, English, take your pick. God doesn’t care. We do. And I wouldn’t be lying - just bluffing.

As are we all.