On a rainy afternoon in Valletta, I mistakenly sought refuge from the rain in what I thought was a museum but turned out to be a church. Standing awkwardly at the entrance, I couldn’t help but notice the few attendees, mostly older people, reflecting the gradual fading of traditional faith in our time.
This sparked a thought: I was comfortable not attending church myself, so long as everyone else kept going. It was a strange comfort, born perhaps from a contradictory desire to preserve tradition while not actively participating in it.
As I contemplated the empty pews, Aristotle’s phrase “Horror Vacui”, which means “nature abhors a vacuum”, came to mind. It made me wonder: In our drift towards a godless society, what’s filling the gap left by religion? Are we too hasty in letting go of something that’s been part of human history for so long? And what about caution in choosing what comes next?
In his work titled The Laughing Prophet, Emile Cammaerts stated: “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe anything.” This quote aptly frames our current problem. In the absence of a unifying faith, and a world of fake news and ‘your truth’, what becomes of our collective moral compass and shared viewpoint?
Consider the concept of transcendence, once the cornerstone of the religious experience. It’s that ineffable feeling of unity amid diversity, a shared sense of belonging that cuts across individual differences. This communal bond, once fostered by faith, is now an elusive ideal in our fragmented and atomised society.
Furthermore, religion historically offered a framework for moral decisions – a shared vocabulary of virtues simplifying our navigation through life’s dilemmas.
Often, when we found ourselves in unchartered seas of moral confusion, religion gave us a basic foundation upon which we could justify and explain our decisions. In its absence, are we left to drift in a sea of moral relativism?
Writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton once warned: “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” Indeed, in our zeal to embrace alternative codes of ethics, are we unmooring virtues from their contextual anchors, allowing them to drift into extremes?
Desperate to regain a sense of transcendence, they seek refuge in hashtag activism and Facebook posts
In Catholicism, for instance, adherence to its moral code of compassion exists in the context of humility, not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing and forgiveness for those who transgress. In fact, most religious NGOs carry out their philanthropic work completely under the radar, bar a few occasions when the press gets a hold of a story.
However, the compassion displayed by people online, uncoupled as it is from such a context, is flaunted and paraded for all and sundry to see. More often than not, it is as shallow as it is boastful.
Those who do not share the right post become social pariahs. Anyone who makes a mistake, differs in their view or simply says something stupid must be brought in front of a judge and be charged with hate speech. And, what’s worse, there is no coming back from a mistake, no hope for reconciliation.
This isn’t to say that we haven’t benefitted from secularism. We can all agree that the rigidity of religion in the past suppressed many aspects of who we are and we are happier and freer as a result.
Science has been able to flourish and now we benefit not only from a better understanding of the world around us but also from the technology this understanding has given us.
It’s also important to acknowledge those who lead ethical lives without religious practice. Many of my friends are atheists or agnostics, including myself, and we navigate moral decisions just as well as anyone else.
This is, however, anecdotal and cannot be used as evidence that nothing is going wrong.
If you were to look around on social media and in general society you would not see a congregation of stable and compassionate atheists and church-goers. Instead, you see the rise of polarising ideologies, each presenting its own absolutism, a new ‘religion’ with its own dogmas and zealots, sinners and apostates.
Each side feels duty-bound to pull everyone over onto their side and to make sure everyone has what they deem to be the correct opinion. As a result, friends and family fall out over Facebook posts and tweets and anyone who doesn’t agree must be abhorrent or bigoted.
I think this phenomenon, especially in its extreme form, seeks to replace the transcendent unity of religion, bringing with it a storm of divisive, secular tribalism. Desperate to regain a sense of transcendence, they seek refuge in hashtag activism and Facebook posts.
So, we return to the existential questions facing our post-religious society: Might it be possible to identify with a religion, without literal belief in its texts, to maintain a sense of transcendence? What else, if anything, can take religion’s place?
If there are people who wish to replace God, they must recognise that whatever they replace Him with must be able to sustain not just individual morality but a societal ethos that upholds freedom, diversity and a sense of shared humanity.