Is God Making a Comeback?

• Last weekend The New York Times ran an interview featuring actor Anthony Hopkins talking about “epiphanies,” moments in his life when “God” spoke to him in life-altering ways.
• The political scientist Charles Murray is out with a new book, Taking Religion Seriously, which he hasn’t ever done until now. Murray writes, “I spent decades dismissing religion as superstition. But the more I learned, the less my own certainty made sense.”
• And New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote memorably earlier this year about his own coming to faith. There are recurring reports about Gen Z, twenty-somethings, turning to faith and church in numbers exceeding that of their parents and grandparents.

Lately I have been reading the opus of the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Taylor’s breadth and erudition are astounding, and so is the length of his tome, 874 pages. I read Taylor the way I read Karl Barth, five or ten pages at a time. That is because there is so much there, but also because reading such a brilliant person and writer is pleasurable.

Taylor is curious about a seismic shift. There was a time when belief in God was universal and assumed, part of the fabric of life. People lived in an enchanted world. Then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “the death of God” (Nietzsche’s phrase) became the assumed reality. That is, if not universal, then the prevailing view in the modern west.

“The ‘death of God’ thesis,” writes Taylor, means that “one can no longer honestly, lucidly, sincerely believe in God.” Why, wonders Taylor, do the arguments for a godless, indifferent universe now seem so obvious, “when at other times and places God’s existence” seemed just as obvious?

The elements of the story our secular age tells itself are that science proves we live in an indifferent material universe, that religion is a childish illusion from which we have now been liberated, and we are “coming of age.” Now, we moderns may and must face life courageously, without illusion; we are free, absent religion’s repressions and superstitions, to focus on human welfare. Taylor calls the latter “the subtraction theory.” Subtract religion and all will be free, all will be well.

“What we got rid of were the illusions, and it took courage to do this; what is left are the genuine deliverances of science, the truth about things, including ourselves, which were waiting all along to be discovered.” This became the official story of a secular age, one predominant in western liberal culture. (I’ve had more than one encounter with a come-of-age modern person who at some point in a conversation says, as if sharing a confidence and perhaps a hushed tone, “Now truthfully, Tony, you seem an intelligent person, you don’t really believe in God, do you?”)

Taylor’s argument is that this secular materialism, rather than being a discovery about how things really are, is merely one historically-constructed understanding. But the consensus of secularity saw its view not as A construal of reality, but as THE true and only reality which all honest, rational, and courageous people must embrace.

Taylor’s book was published in 2007. The reality he describes remains pervasive, and is particularly dominant in the academy, however, things have changed. When one looks beyond the modern west and affluent, white people, it’s clear that a lot of the world’s people apparently didn’t get the secularist memo. And now some of the intelligentsia (e.g. Hopkins, Murray, Brooks) are becoming dissidents to the official story of secularity.

One of Taylor’s really interesting distinctions is between what he calls the modern “buffered self,” and “the porous self” of any earlier enchanted world. “For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those that arise within me . . . this self can be seen as invulnerable, as master of the meaning of things . . . the porous self is vulnerable, to spirits, to demons, cosmic forces.”

Anthony Hopkins’ reports of epiphanies, of hearing a voice of God speak to him and setting him on a different path would be an illustration, or a testimony, of a “porous” self or experience, and of an enchanted world. Here I am simply noting that such testimonies seem to have gained new traction, even respectability. Where once the respectable option was the so-called courageous, come-of-age secular man, casting aside religion as false comfort and illusion, that seems less the de-facto accepted version of late.

Where this is heading, your guess is as good as mine. Nor do I see it as all or necessarily to the good. Religion is, like most else, a mixed bag. But the cracks in the hegemony of the official story of secular modernity and materialism seem to me both worth noting and refreshing.