Is Our Godless Era Dead?

           Paul Kingsnorth is a British writer, who up until three years ago was an atheist. But then he converted to Christianity. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he looked at the offerings of modern, secular society and found them wanting. Here is Kingsnorth’s description of himself: “My most strongly held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war.”

It's a war he thinks we, as Christians, are winning. In a recent essay, he raises the question, “Is our godless era dead?” Kingsnorth is wondering how many people are going through the same transformation he went through.

I grew up in a wonderful Christian home, attended a thriving healthy church, and never had any reason to consider anyone but Jesus Christ, or any faith but Christianity. But most people did not have my inheritance. Like Kingsnorth, they have spent much of their lives wandering around in a spiritual wilderness that is increasingly bereft of meaning and joy.

Kingsnorth begins his essay; “Sometimes I think I have been lied to my whole life.” Who is doing the lying? The secular society surrounding him, making all kinds of promises, and delivering on none of them. He gives a list of those promises:

·     Your life will be happier if you put career before family.

·     You need to accumulate wealth as a marker of status.

·     Treat sex as recreation.

·     Reflexively mock authority and tradition.

·     Put individual desire before community responsibility.

·     Treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process.

·     Believe that ideology or technology can create paradise on Earth

·     Assume our ancestors were thicker than us.

·     Treat religion as something both primitive and obsolete. 

Kingsnorth argues that history travels through eras and that the era of human arrogance and so-called enlightenment is coming to an end. It has been an era he describes as “a can-do materialism, which sought to transform reality through ideology, technology, and science. God…was dead. The modern West had killed him.”

We are seeing the death of the replacements for Christianity: Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Fascism, and secular liberalism. They intended to replace the Christian faith with Utopia. Instead they gave us a death cult leaving men and women wandering aimlessly through the cosmos without hope and without God in the world.

The big doctrinal mistake all these ideologies have made is they assume man is merely an animal, or at best an animal governed by reason. He is not. He is fundamentally a spiritual being. And he spends his life hungering to have those spiritual desires satisfied. Those desires were placed there by Almighty God when He created us in His image. That’s why everyone is religious. I remember many years ago listening to a sermon by A.W. Tozer. It was on Ecclesiastes 3:11, on the phrase, “He has put eternity in our hearts.” Tozer argued that every man and woman is looking for ultimate, spiritual meaning. He preached this sermon in the 1950s and he said a prime example of this truth was Joseph Stalin, the brutal dictator of the Soviet Union who murdered upwards of 30 million people. Tozer said Stalin proved this verse. Stalin’s spiritual hunger drove him to try to build an earthly utopia that meant killing tens of millions of human beings. God had put the desire for spiritual meaning into Stalin’s heart and he was working it out in a demonic way.

Kingsnorth argues that we are all religious and he defines religion this way: “By “religious” I mean inclined to worship; attuned to the great mystery of being; convinced that material reality is only a visible shard of the whole; able across all times and cultures and places to experience or intuit some creative, magisterial power beyond our own small selves.” That’s a pretty good definition. And it describes every human being on earth, not just Christians.

Kingsnorth speculates that the old worn out secular religions have run their course and that a new era of seeking the true and the spiritual has arrived.

One thing we know. The answer to all our questions arrived two thousand years ago as the babe of Bethlehem. Whatever your spiritual search, it ends when you find Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas everyone!

More: My video and critique of secularism is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDrh5B6lwDk

Paul Kingsnorth, on the death of godlessness: https://unherd.com/?p=494120?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

Paul Kingsnorth, on becoming a Christian: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why I am Now a Christian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=039-0HjWzso