Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote that “God is dead” dates back to his 1882 book “The Gay Science.” The notion entered public consciousness with the provocative 1966 Time magazine cover, which asked, in large red type, “Is God dead?” It has been clear for a while now that, no matter how many holdouts there may be with regard to personal beliefs, the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions no longer lays claim to the cultural power He held from the reign of Constantine to the Protestant Reformation.
Until now, what comes next has remained an open question. The husk of institutional Christianity has limped along for the last hundred or so years, with Hollywood and the literati (and recently corporations as well) feeling little to no compunction about dancing on its grave. But if world history has shown us anything, it is that religiosity is a deeply human impulse, and one that will not so easily perish from this earth.
Tara Isabella Burton’s new book “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World” takes a look at the various ways religious tendencies are popping up in our post-modern, post-Christian culture. Describing members of upcoming generations as neither purely atheistic or purely Christian, Burton terms them “Religiously Remixed.” Just as the invention of the printing press spurred on humanistic transfigurations of the Church into dozens of branches of Protestantism, the rise of the Internet has allowed every Millennial and Zoomer to pick and choose doctrine to follow and idols to worship. These include major commercial properties like Harry Potter and Marvel, self-help and self-care mantras such as those prescribed by Gwyneth Paltrow for women and Jordan Peterson for men, and New Age mumbo-jumbo like horoscopes and tarot cards.
On the surface, these outlets all seem relatively harmless, things for us to do and to care about in an age in which we’ve been separated geographically from our families and told to put off starting our own. Burton’s read on the new normal get significantly bleaker toward the end of her book, as she gives her take on larger social movements she believes have the potential to become institutionalized as religious traditions. Her description of the “Gospel of Social Justice” in particular seems prophetic. Although eagle-eyed culture warriors foretold of the matriculation of “cancel culture” from college campuses to the country at large, even the most pessimistic Cassandras could hardly have predicted this level of unmitigated success. Wanting to tear down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln is no longer a niche position, nor is the notion that it one is to disregard public health imperatives in the name of “anti-racism.”
Less prominent but perhaps no less terrifying is the other quasi-religious trend identified by Burton: transhumanism. Unrelated to the “trans” prefix obsessed over by the SJW movement, transhumanism is the desire that humanity should be transcended and our lives prolonged indefinitely. Not uncommon in Silicon Valley, transhumanists (or techno-utopians, as Burton calls them) believe in the power of technology to free us from the chains of flesh and blood. Whereas Gwyneth Paltrow’s readers pursue “anti-aging” to merely look young forever, Peter Thiel’s are trying to actually be young forever. One of the foremost goals of this movement is to be able to “upload” human consciousness so that one can continue to “live” after one’s body has withered away. If you think that such an insane idea lacks appeal, consider that the most popular episode of “Black Mirror,” a program typically pessimistic about the role of technology in society, is “San Junipero.” In that episode, deciding to be euthanized and “uploaded” to the simulation is considered a happy ending.
The best reason to read “Strange Rites” is to be prepared. The world is changing rapidly, and truths that were once held to be self-evident are now threatened. Even after Enlightenment thinking caused belief in a personal God to wane (remember, most of the Founding Fathers considered themselves Deists), Christianity remained a lingua franca. Today, few people have read the Bible, and if there is anything resembling a shared language, it is more likely to include Muggles and Dementors than angels and demons. In other words, the kids are not all right.
