There’s a resurgence of religious belief going on. It’s been happening for few years, but the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to have accelerated the trend. Young adults — who have been pilloried for their supposed apathy about all things important — are the group that is impacting this movement the most. So, what’s the deal? What in the world is causing such a thing?
I submit “the deal” is the same thing it’s always been. St. Augustine identified it more than 1600 years ago when he said:
“Our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.”
Twenty years ago, the so-called “new atheists” like Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason), and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), were dominating the discussion of God and that was going on in the culture. They made names for themselves by attacking all religious belief as morally equivalent to the fanatical Islamic extremism of September 11, 2001. In March, 2012, they even held the first Reason Rally on the national mall in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the coming victory of reason over blind, religious irrationality. Estimates were that there were almost 30,000 attendees.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the atheistic nirvana.
In 2016, at the the second quadrennial Reason Rally, less than half that number showed up.
No one has heard of the Reason Rally since.
Two years after that first Reason Rally, I wrote about the actions of the self-proclaimed “activist” atheist, Preston Smith, at the Lake Worth, Florida City Commission Meeting. Smith gained national attention when he offered the following invocation:
Mother Earth, we gather today in your redeeming and glorious presence, to invoke your eternal guidance in the universe, the original Creator of all things. May the efforts of this council blend the righteousness of Allah with the all-knowing wisdom of Satan. May Zeus, the great God of justice, grant us strength tonight. Jesus might forgive our shortcomings while Buddha enlightens us through His divine affection. We praise you, Krishna, for the sanguine sacrifice that freed us all. After all, if Almighty Thor is with us, who can ever be against us? And finally, for the bounty of logic, reason, and science, we simply thank the atheists, agnostics, humanists, who now account for 1-in-5 Americans, and [are] growing rapidly.
In closing, let us, above all, love one another, not to obtain mythical rewards for ourselves now, hereafter, or based on superstitious threats of eternal damnation, but rather, embrace secular-based principles of morality — and do good for goodness’ sake. And so we pray ... So, what?!
Smith certainly considered his mockery of religious belief to be clever. Apparently, he thought lumping all the religions together in his “prayer” was some kind of sarcastic proof that they could all be equally dismissed. But people like Smith don’t think things through very well.
The fact that all the religions he mentioned make contradictory claims about reality or that that they all have varying levels of evidence to support them is lost on him. But even more comically, Smith didn’t realize that his defense of atheism was also a religious claim that he expected everyone else to take seriously.
Then, there were the Godless Church Services that were popping up all over the place at about the same time. The movement was growing exponentially among those who claimed to “believe in nothing.” Eventually, it went global. As one of the early leaders of that movement, Sanderson Jones, put it about his London “congregation” (his term):
The thing that we’ve got is that we’re the only non-religious service that works. Rationality is part of it, but we also have the emotional connection,” Jones said. “We are speaking to the whole human.” Sunday Assembly is already talking to an awful lot of humans.
Jones wonders if they might manage to start 2015 congregations by 2015. “It might just be a little bit historical if it goes on like this. We could have a profound impact,” he said. “Throughout history there’s been these moments when an idea takes off: the Great Awakenings. We could suddenly create a great moment …”
These godless movements ended up being flashes in the pan, too. Today, they’re nowhere to be found. But the issue I want to explore is not about the silly things these godless folks did.
I’m more interested in why they did them and how that relates to the current explosion of belief in God.
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Why did those who mocked the idea of religion or the reality of God simultaneously engage in projects that paralleled the practices of those who did believe in Him? What would motivate them to go to such great lengths to replicate the actions of the faithful?
After all, if they really believed what they were saying, there is no God and therefore no standard by which their actions could be judged. That means there is no reasonable explanation or need to do the things they were doing. They should have been partying on the beach instead of attending a “godless church service” on Sunday mornings.
Philosopher Peter Kreeft gives us a formalized explanation for their actions in what he calls the Argument From Desire:
Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
Or, as C. S. Lewis so aptly put it:
“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists ... If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
~ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
It turns out that what these “humanists” were actually doing was offering a sad demonstration of the reality of what has come to be known as Blaise Pascal’s “God-shaped hole.”
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” ~ Pascal, Pensées (Section I, X, 148)
In other words, instead of getting angry at their atheistic stunts, we should have been feeling compassion for those whose sense of emptiness is so deep they were compelled to respond with navel-gazing mockery toward the only reasonable way they could fill the God-shaped hole in their own hearts.
I submit that Gen ‘Z’ is doing the same thing, but for a better reason.
Think about the world Gen ‘Z’ has grown up in.
They were born around the same time as the September 11th attack on America.
From their earliest years, the world after has been almost continuously engaged in the “endless wars” our politicians have found to be so irresistible. Some of their parents fought in those wars.
When they were pre-teens, the country plunged into one of the most protracted, economically painful decades in this country’s economic history — the “Lost Decade” from 2000 to 2009. Their parents were struggling to make ends meet during their formative years.
They’ve grown up as digital natives in a world where social media has succeeded in creating the loneliest, most anxious generation in human history — a generation with the highest levels of suicide ideation ever recorded.
When many of them were in high school or college, the COVID disaster shut their world down and left them isolated and unable to engage in any kind of meaningful social interaction.
They’ve witnessed the social-media-driven political polarization of the country in which politicians spend most of their time demonizing their opponents in pursuit of political power, and almost no time using that political power to find solutions to our problems.
While there are always specific exceptions to these circumstances, in general, their world has not been a happy place. Instead, it’s been empty — a world that offers them no meaning or purpose.
Their entire world has a God-shaped hole in it. And they are begging to have it filled.
For those of us engaged in the project of making the case for Christianity, this is a pivotal moment. Let’s not miss it.
Rarely has the need for offering “a reason for the hope we have” been more critical.
Rarely has the audience been more primed and open to the message.
Rarely have we had as much powerful, compelling evidence for the truth of Christianity at our immediate disposal.
Rarely have the God-shaped holes in people’s lives needed more filling.
God’s people need to be ready and willing to help those holes get filled.
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