What Haunts Us: The Roots Beneath the Argument

Human beings are, in a sense that goes deeper than any particular creed or tradition, religious animals. This is not a statement about the truth or falsehood of any religion but an observation about the architecture of human consciousness. Across every culture and every era, humans have constructed elaborate systems of meaning connecting the individual to something larger than the self – a cosmic order, a divine purpose, a narrative of creation and redemption, a moral framework that renders suffering intelligible and death endurable. The universality of this impulse suggests that it is not merely a cultural artifact but something woven into the deep structure of the human mind: a response to the existential conditions of being a creature aware of its own mortality, capable of imagining its own nonexistence, and desperate for reassurance that its brief life matters.

The findings are consistent and unsettling. Viktor Frankl, writing from the shattering experience of Auschwitz, argued that the will to meaning is the primary motivational force in human life, and that those who found meaning – even in the most extreme suffering – were more likely to survive than those who did not. Contemporary research confirms this: a sense of purpose is strongly associated with physical health, mental health, resilience, and longevity. Religion has been, for most of human history, the primary vehicle through which meaning is constructed and transmitted, and its decline in modern Western societies has not been accompanied by the emergence of a comparably effective secular alternative. We have disenchanted the world without learning how to live in a disenchanted world.

Terror management theory, building on the work of Ernest Becker, offers an illuminating and uncomfortable lens. The awareness of mortality creates a potential for existential terror that would be psychologically paralyzing if not managed by cultural systems providing a sense of symbolic immortality – the belief that one is part of something that transcends individual death. Religion is the most powerful of these systems because it offers literal immortality: the soul survives the body, and the individual’s earthly life is embedded in a cosmic narrative of eternal significance. Experimental research has consistently shown that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they cling more tightly to their cultural worldviews, become more hostile to those who challenge them, and become more punitive toward moral transgressors. This has profound implications for this debate: the intensity of feeling on both sides may be driven by the unconscious terror of death that religious and secular worldviews each manage in different ways. To challenge someone’s worldview is, at the deepest psychological level, to threaten their defense against annihilation. No wonder the debate feels like war. At some level, it is.

The need for moral frameworks runs equally deep. Humans are social animals whose survival depends on cooperation, cooperation requires trust, trust requires norms, and norms require a source of authority. For most of history, that source was divine: the gods decreed the moral law, and you could not negotiate with God the way you could negotiate with a king. The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason rather than revelation has been intellectually productive but culturally unstable – rich philosophical literature on ethics, but no moral consensus comparable to what religion provided. Nietzsche recognized this with characteristic clarity: “God is dead,” he wrote, and the death of God would produce not liberation but a crisis of nihilism whose outcome was radically uncertain. Whether Nietzsche was right about nihilism’s inevitability is debatable, but he was surely right that the loss of a transcendent moral authority is not a minor cultural adjustment but a world-historical event whose consequences are still unfolding.

The fear of a godless society is not irrational. People who hold this fear are responding to a genuine observation about the role religious institutions and beliefs play in sustaining social order, moral commitment, and communal solidarity. The data are robust: regular churchgoers volunteer more, give more to charity, participate more in civic organizations, and report higher levels of social trust and life satisfaction. Religious communities provide a dense network of social support that secular institutions have struggled to replicate. The decline of religious participation has coincided with – and may have contributed to – the broader collapse of social capital that Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone and that has only accelerated since. When religious conservatives express anxiety about secularization, they are not merely defending doctrines – they are defending the communities, rituals, and moral frameworks that give their lives structure and their suffering meaning. To dismiss this as reactionary nostalgia is to miss its depth and its legitimacy.

The fear of theocracy is equally well-founded. People who hold this fear are responding to a genuine historical record. The Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the enforcement of blasphemy laws, the criminalization of homosexuality, the subjugation of women – these persist in parts of the world where religious law governs the state. Even in the United States, religious influence on law has included the criminalization of contraception, the prohibition of interracial marriage justified by biblical interpretation, the persecution of Mormons, and the ongoing efforts to enforce Christian sexual morality through statute. When secularists express alarm at Christian nationalism, they are reading the stated agenda of a movement that explicitly seeks to reshape American law in accordance with a particular interpretation of Christian truth. The fear that one’s rights, one’s autonomy, one’s very identity could be legislated out of existence by a religious majority acting on convictions one does not share is not hypothetical – it is the daily experience of LGBTQ+ Americans in many parts of the country.

Between these two legitimate fears lies a void that is quietly swallowing American civic life. The “nones” – the religiously unaffiliated – are the fastest-growing category in American religion, but many of them are not triumphant atheists liberated from superstition. They are spiritual seekers who have left organized religion without finding a satisfactory alternative. The explosion of interest in meditation, psychedelics, astrology, and various forms of New Age spirituality suggests that the human need for the numinous does not disappear when the churches empty – it migrates to other vessels, some considerably less intellectually rigorous and socially beneficial than the traditions they replace. The meaning vacuum also creates fertile ground for political ideologies that function as quasi-religious movements, complete with sacred texts, prophetic figures, rituals of belonging, mechanisms of excommunication, and apocalyptic narratives. The intensity and absolutism of contemporary political polarization has a distinctly religious quality – as if politics has become the arena in which the need for meaning, identity, and moral certainty is expressed in the absence of traditional religious channels. We have not escaped religion. We have merely found worse ones.

The faithful feel besieged because the culture has moved against them with astonishing speed. In a single generation, views on homosexuality, gender, and marriage that were uncontroversial mainstream positions have become marks of bigotry. A Christian who holds the same views on marriage that Barack Obama professed in 2008 is now considered a hateful extremist by significant portions of the cultural elite. Religious conservatives experience this not as progress but as cultural revolution, enforced not by argument but by social coercion and professional sanction. The feeling of siege is compounded by the awareness that the institutions shaping culture – universities, media, entertainment, technology companies – are overwhelmingly secular and progressive. For many religious conservatives, the retreat from public life that secularists recommend is not an option but a surrender.

Secularists feel encroached upon because, despite the narrative of Christian persecution, religious influence on American law remains enormous. Abortion rights have been curtailed or eliminated in many states. LGBTQ+ rights remain contested. “In God We Trust” is on the currency, and an openly atheist person has virtually no chance of being elected to major office. When secularists hear Christians claim persecution in a country where Christians dominate one of the two major political parties and control the federal judiciary, they hear not a genuine grievance but a power play – majoritarian dominance reframed as victimhood to generate sympathy and deflect criticism.

The mutual sense of siege – each side convinced that the other is winning and that its own position is under existential threat – is one of the most dangerous dynamics in the culture war, sustained by the fact that both sides are partly right. The culture is secularizing, and religious power is simultaneously consolidating in reaction. This is the sound a society makes when it is pulling itself apart.