The Disappearance of Secularism

my hypothesis

EDIT: I have turned off comments because the "actually nobody's rights were restricted during Covid except for when they were and that was good" crowd has arrived. Life is too fucking short.

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Russell Brand recently joined Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the ranks of a rapidly growing group: formerly secular people who have converted to Christianity. Ali was a well-known atheist; Brand appears to have been the typical “spiritual, not religious” type who had an eclectic mix of beliefs that amounted to a secular life in every way that matters.

(I wrote about Ali’s decision not long after she published her Unherd essay, for anyone who’s interested.)

There are many online who doubt the truth of both Ali and Brand’s professions of faith. This is natural. Celebrities getting attention in a way that makes them appeal to a new, identifiable group is always suspect. And “Christian” is one of those murky concepts. As I wrote in my essay about Ali:

The word “Christian” means so many different things to so many different people that it’s functionally useless without clarification. The Westboro Baptist Church, Pete Buttigieg, and Barack Obama all claim to be Christian. Depending on individual understanding and theology, different people, both professing Christians and not, might conclude that that the Westboro folks are Christian and the other two are not; that the Westboro folks are demons and the other two are real Christians, or vice versa; that all are Christians, just badly misguided and mistaken in various ways, or that none are in fact Christians.

In this sense, “Christian” is a little like “feminist.” There are people who, both approving and sharply disapproving, consider me a feminist because I think I should get the same salary as other senior data scientists, even if they’re male and supporting a family, and because I think that the people on the right who constantly discuss repealing the 19th Amendment are unreasonable. My position that my adulthood and citizenship (to say nothing of the confiscatory tax rate I pay) entitles me to vote if I choose to strikes plenty of people on the right as evidence sufficient to convict me of “feminism.” When people ask me if I’m a feminist, I make them define that word in excruciating detail before I will answer.

So, acknowledging that many people disagree, for the sake of argument let’s say that Brand and Ali are both in fact now Christians. This is just one part of a noticeable phenomenon. I am aware of no properly conducted surveys, but I have seen a number of essays on Substack and Medium, and I’ve lost count of the number of personal anecdotes I’ve been told in the last two years. Formerly secular people do seem to be seeking the church in larger numbers than at any other time in the last decade.

I have, myself, done a lot more reading and exploring than I used to, questioning my atheism and trying very hard to talk myself into faith. It didn’t work, but I tried very hard. I know other people, including one friend I’ve discussed this with many times, who have done the same. We’ve all been reading C.S. Lewis and even praying occasionally, hoping someone is listening, though we’ve no reason to believe anyone is doing so.

What is going on?

I have a hypothesis.

Prior to COVID, I had what I think a lot of people had, and a lucky naive few still have: a deep, profound belief in certain ideas. I thought that I had rights by virtue of my American citizenship. I thought that, while various institutions were all beleaguered by corruption—yes, I did know that—the corruption was in individuals, and not the institutions themselves. I thought that most people with power, both of the government variety and the societal respect variety (scientists and such), were motivated by at least some notion of the common good, even if it had some selfishness at core. An example of what I mean by that: a scientist who makes correct predictions that serve the common good will personally benefit. He or she will have a better reputation and more secure funding, greater access to scientific collaboration, etc. Win-win.

COVID revealed the truth. I do not have any rights at all. Nor do any of you. What we have are privileges, and they are dependent on one thing only. If, at any time, people with PhD after their name are willing to interpret data in a way that justifies taking our privileges away, then they will be gone.

The people who were most aggressively suppressed and silenced turned out to be very, very right. Rather than dig up a ton of links, this Bill Maher rant says most of it anyway.

The fundamental axioms of the world I thought I lived in — the things I didn’t question, didn’t doubt, didn’t consider debatable — were all shown to be fiction.

It’s depressing, terrifying, demoralizing, and sickening.

It’s also reality.

If there had been any kind of reckoning — Nuremberg 2.0, prosecutions, etc. — then maybe I could have gotten some of my faith in those things back, to some extent. If some redemptive process had occurred, then it might have been possible to integrate the events of COVID into a new normal that wasn’t so horrifying.

But there wasn’t, and there will not be.

Humans Need Faith

Humans are not built for the kind of constant anxiety and fear that is now reasonable. I am more vulnerable than most people — a woman alone — and I know that my awareness of how vulnerable I am, and how dependent I am on things like the electric grid that permits my hearing aids to keep working is part of why I take this so seriously.

But nobody else has any real rights, either, and people who don’t acknowledge that are in denial.

So it makes perfect sense to me that people, including me, want desperately to believe in something more stable than the Constitution and more trustworthy than the construct of inalienable rights.

It makes perfect sense to me that people want a story to tell themselves where someone powerful, who loves them, will protect them from the worst possibilities—or at the very least, have a plan for their ultimate good if the worst possibilities do happen.

I want that story, too.

I’ve tried very hard to convince myself of it.

It’s just not true.

But I understand—and am in fact envious of—those who find a way to talk themselves into it, and I think more and more high-profile conversions are likely.

Conclusion

I don’t have any clever way to wrap this up, since I’m just riffing on something I’ve noticed and why I think it’s happening, so I’ll end with this: please don’t proselytize me. I know myself far better than any of you do, and I’ve failed to talk myself into faith. Few of you can exegete Scripture better than I can and none of you are going to convince me. Not even today, when it should be most possible, as I am pondering the likelihood of a solar killshot (something that would fry the grids permanently and return us to the Stone Age, putting a swift end to many lives including mine) from these solar storms happening—in the next couple of decades, if not tomorrow. So please don’t try.