December 8, 2024 - 6:40pm
This week, it was reported that Bible sales in America have spiked by a dramatic 22% between the end of October 2023 and October 2024. According to Wall Street Journal coverage, first-time buyers appear to be reaching for Christian scripture out of an instinctive sense that it can meet a spiritual desire which the material world cannot satisfy. Cely Velasquez, an unlikely evangelist who appeared on the pheromone-soaked reality show Love Island USA, described being prompted by “a combination of where we are in the world, general anxiety and the sense that meaning and comfort can be found in the Bible”.
Formal religious observance in America has been declining for years. The response to this phenomenon has varied by denomination, though one notable trend among Catholics is a renewed interest in the formal rites of the ancient church. Liturgical solemnity and high orthodoxy, once derided as irrelevant or oppressive, have become increasingly attractive to seekers of order and understanding in a world of chaotic fragmentation. But many others seem drawn to the Bible by a more private and less easily definable sense of longing, which doesn’t show up in Sunday attendance numbers. If one response to social unsettlement and collapsing institutional trust is to look for higher sources of authority in the magisterium, another — more Protestant than Catholic in character — is to clear away the apparatus of ritual altogether and reach for an unmediated relationship with God.
The past year has been characterised by radically unsettling technological change and material privation, wars around the world, and turbulent elections all over the West. Renewed combat in the Middle East has revealed a grim strain of violent bigotry in supposedly enlightened and liberal countries. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence have called the very future and purpose of humanity into question.
These mounting existential anxieties and crises of national identity, the WSJ report suggests, have likely contributed to the demand for Bibles. In moments of affliction and vulnerability, Americans still apparently sense that the Christian tradition can bring a unique solace. This will be a fact to contend with as the role of religion in public life becomes ever more sharply contested.
As the writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali stressed in accounting for her own conversion, Christian ethics and metaphysics are neither self-evident nor commonplace. In the West, they have shaped a distinctive set of mores and ideals: “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.”
The truth of this claim is newly apparent, and newly urgent, as American politics threatens to become radically de-Christianised and so mercilessly hierarchical. Opponents of progressive race politics find themselves increasingly tempted to answer it with an anti-egalitarianism of their own. Writing for Jacobin, Dustin Guastella has argued that the Right-wing figures known as “vitalists” often “evince a disdain for the Christian emphasis on care for the weak, universalism, and equality”.
A degree of contempt for Christian mercy has been present in the Right-wing coalition at least since the middle of the 20th century. In 1964, Ayn Rand scorned the cross as the symbol of “the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal”. But this kind of sentiment has been drowned out by the conservative movement’s more prominent and numerous religious members — until quite recently. Now, as Ross Douthat and Nate Hochman have both written, Nietzschean vitalists such as Bronze Age Pervert have cast modern Christianity as a decadent nursing home for weaklings, its emphasis on compassion unsuited to the harsh necessities of an anti-woke counter-revolution. The traction these ideas have gained prompts some Christians to fear they may be demoted to the status of minority partners in a newly paganised America.
But the future is not guaranteed to belong to the post-Christians, Right or Left. For all that vitalism and identity politics have loomed large over the past decade, the US connection to the Judeo-Christian tradition is ancestral and bone-deep. Americans still feel the draw of it at a visceral level, which is why they reach impulsively for Bibles in times of need, why they tend to be put off by naked appeals to genetic guilt or supremacy, and why they have just reacted so decisively against a Democratic administration which freely indulged in race-based politics.
Evelyn Waugh, citing G.K. Chesterton, once referred to “an unseen hook and an invisible line” that draws the irreligious back to God in historically Christian societies. Many Americans appear now to feel the strong pull of that invisible line. In the coming years, much will depend on whether their quiet stirrings of devotion draw them further into retreat from public life, or push them to meet our godless politics with a groundswell of new and homegrown faith.
Spencer A. Klavan is associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith.
SpencerKlavan
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SubscribeWorthwhile essay, and in the search for meaning in our world it’s only natural that people might turn to historical sources. My issue is with those who use the texts to take us away from our world into another, i.e. copping out.
We need everyone to be aware of and therefore involved in the future of our species. If reference to the bible takes them in that direction, that’s all to the good. However, the writer warns of the dangers, in the final paragraph, of “quiet stirrings of devotion” drawing them “further into the retreat from public life“. Do that, and the ground is ceded to more strident voices – and haven’t we all had enough of those?
One final thing: the writer evinces those being “put off by naked appeals to genetic guilt“, in terms of racial politics. It should bever be forgotten that the greatest source of existential guilt is evinced in the bible itself – that of “original sin” – the guilt of all humans, as it were. We aren’t born with any guilt. Not you, not me, and it’s an abomination to suggest otherwise.
While “we aren’t born with any guilt” we do have a conscience that does appear to be, at least in part, innate; animals and small children feel, and display, it. Ignore it at your peril.
LL is doing the opposite of ignoring it. While a +ve thing for many Christians, who know Christ has redeemed us, the original sin concept is associated with much psychic suffering for non believers living in Christian & post Christian societies. See the excellent essay ‘The strange persistence of guilt’. If I was an unbeliever I’d say OS was an abomination too, though sadly not so easy to counter ideas embedded deep in the collective unconscious.
Original sin is a tendency towards sin (and thus guilt).
It isn’t in itself sinful or blameworthy.
We must in any case always remember to distinguish between guilt as an emotion, and guilt as a fact.
Correct, and the person to whom you reply also ignores the import of the rest of my comment. Ignore it at your peril.
I am a non-believer living in a (probably post) Christian society, and I can say that all that doesn’t apply to me. If you say “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, I will say “Give the stone to me, and I will cast it”.
The concept of Original Sin is indiscriminate. It effectively refers to the State of Human Nature that Hobbes described and Locke/Rousseau tried to rework. Its also consistent with Darwinian logic that an individual’s first priority is their own survival.
Rousseau being the preeminent modern Communist thinker rejected the selfish paradox believing that human beings were inherently good and it was only because of “social conditions” that they became selfish.
So safely assuming you reject Rousseau’s fundamental premise than you also believe in the underlying concept of Original Sin even if you reject divine nature. If survival is the first priority for every human than each will undercut others in order to meet their own needs. Not only do we do this unconsciously as soon as we’re born but we do continue to do it even once we’ve become conscious and developed a concept of empathy. Its an unavoidable part of being alive.
Except… history tells us this isn’t true. Everyone who’s fought and died in a war, for instance, does so with the knowledge that there is something greater than their own survival. This is the true human spirit.
In terms of Darwinism, what actually matters is the promulgation and survival of our DNA. This is what is meant by “eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge” – hence why my reference to the bible in my original comment isn’t to condemn it, just to temper it with what we now understand, even whilst there are those who still adhere to the literal meaning, which itself has been filtered through centuries of obfuscation by people with their own agendas.
I agree that DNA survival is the key. My point is that I don’t think the Christian stance on human nature is any different from that of the typical evolutionary biologist…That humans are almost exclusively motivated by self-interest.
I am genuinely interested in what you believe the “true human spirit” entails.
Maybe bible sales have increased because everyone is running out to buy Trump’s God Bless the USA bible. At only $60, it’s a good bargain for salvation.
I’m kidding of course. Very interesting essay.
Ah yes, the intersection of religion and commercialism, another topic Americans are intimately familiar with. I knew there was something missing in the author’s analysis. Religion and politics have often been mixed in US history, but commercialism has ever been the third leg of this wobbly stool. Americans have always been a highly political and highly religious people and enterprising individuals have always found ways to profit from both tendencies. Here we have the conjunction of all three. The more I think about the situation, the more I wonder if Donald Trump is among the most peculiarly and appropriately ‘American’ President in my lifetime.
He has certainly embraced the Grift from God.
The techniques used by the late Billy Graham at his mass rallies to attract converts are also a case in point. And although everyone is a sinner, his daughter was understandably disappointed to hear of her father’s affair.
Then there’s the Russians. Their Christian mysticism ought to enable them to make a hands across the nuclear divide with the Americans. Two people divide by a common faith.
Graham appeared on the BBC’s chat show hosted by Terry Wogan in the 1980s. Graham declared that it was his belief that if humans attempted to start a nuclear war, God would intervene to stop it.
Of course, God moves in mysterious ways. And there are a number of ways Graham’s view can be interpreted, if it is to be taken at face value at all as a general comfort at a particularly dangerous moment in East-West relations.
Though taken literally, Graham’s belief could be seen as implying that the one sure way of getting God to intervene visibly and directly in the world would be to launch all the missiles. But then, as the Tempter was admonished in the wilderness, you must not tempt the Lord your God.
(Billy Graham’s)daughter was understandably disappointed to hear of her father’s affair”. – This is an unfounded lie, or else sloppy writing, and the author needs to correct this immediately.
Yes I agree, it is an terrible slur on a man married for 64 years.
I’d like to hear what Jesus the Man would have to say to Trump the Man.
Well He stopped that bullet.
Redirected it actually.
My simple prayer is that these good folk are not so much turning to ‘the church’ as to Jesus.
“The Church” is what’s here, though. “Jesus” has been gone for 2,000 years.
For years, anti-Christian hate has permeated the organs of propaganda. The message was reduced to simplistic rubbish about judgment. Dawkins, for example, thinks Christianity is evil because it suggests babies are born in sin. Consider how idiotic this reduction is.
When you become an adult, unless you are literally the Second Coming of Christ, you know for a fact what a fallen person you are—to put it politely. Some feel this more than others, but we all feel it. Christianity doesn’t judge; it simply says, “We get it, you are fallen, but you are still loved – indeed, you are made in the image of God.” All you have to do is turn away from your ‘sin,’ the thing that is removing you from the presence of God.
That’s a profound message. It also makes sense, even though people cant ‘rationally’ explain why.
To be fair Christianity kind of does both. For example, at almost every service in my CoE church, we chant “We have left undone those things that we ought to have done; and we have done those things that we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.”. But would agree the overall message is hugely +ve, we are indeed made in the beautiful image of God, who loved us enough to send His only son to die for us. It’s unbelievers one should feel sorry for, they are stuck in a kind of half way house. Though ultimatly God will wipe away every tear.
“We have left undone those things that we ought to have done; and we have done those things that we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us”
The first two statements are true for everyone, so isn’t the third naturally self-evident? I believe people yearn for a clean, orderly, and upright life, free from the ‘sins’ so vividly defined within the faith.
We judge ourselves first, we don’t need to be told what sinners we are. We already know.
For many, religion is simply a crutch to lean on.
It can be used to excuse bad behaviour, because if everybody is a sinner then your bad deeds don’t make you any worse than anybody else, as long as you ask for forgiveness from a deity who will never answer your plea one way or the other.
I was always puzzled about this self defeating bit of Anglican liturgy. Isn’t the idea of redemption through Jesus death that we are supposed to be redeemed & free from our sins, not wallowing in self condemnation?
It’s never made any sense to me. I should say that I actually have no issues with the teachings of the person who subsequently became known as Jesus Christ, who has always struck me as an enlightened guy. It’s just all the stuff that has emanated from the creepy old perverts who comprise the clergy of the Christian Church(es) that puts me off.
I always smile when people mention Dawkins. The man who famously said (in the face of a mass of evidence to the contrary) the humans were incapable of love or hate & we were just dancing to our DNA, then after a stroke tries to argue that our pets have souls.
I’m half way through Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God: perceptions of the divine; it’s a great insight into the Bible and the eternal issues of human existence. That it has hit number one on Amazon indicates there is a real thirst for the understanding of the wisdom behind some of our oldest stories.
Good essay, final para reminds me of the excellent poem, ‘The hound of Heaven’
Religion has always had a political dimension in the US, particularly at the lowest levels. There was virtually no point in American history where religious affiliation couldn’t be mapped to political affiliation both easily and accurately. One could reliably put Southern Baptists, Catholics, and Presbyterians into one political column or another fairly reliably in 1920 or 1820. Indeed, these were reliable political voting blocs courted by politicians before the concept of demographics was widely understood.
This author avoids getting into the weeds of how the numerous fractured Protestant denominations that exist here often represent past political differences and conflicts rather than any meaningful theoligical disputes and how muddied the lines dividing the political from the religious truly have been. Perhaps he wants to save space and avoid going off on tangents, or perhaps he’s a European observer with a limited knowledge of American history. Either way, mixing religion and politics is par for the course. Americans have been doing that since before the revolution, with mixed results. Had the author at least mentioned this in passing, I might take him more seriously.
This authors analysis falls entirely too close to the typical elite media narrative of those racist, xenophobic, uneducated, intolerant religious kooks vs. their benevolent, enlightened secularist opponents who clearly know what’s best. I can’t take it all that seriously without some attempt at pointing out the ideological hang ups of the other side as well. There’s plenty of people just as turned off by the zealotry and intolerance of the woke brigade and they have just as much right to their feelings as the other side. I have to wonder if commentators are genuinely unaware of their bias, do they think they’re hiding it, or is it just a case of ideological echo chambers within their profession, education l, and peer group. I don’t know the answer but i do know that they aren’t going to be successful reaching out to the other side if they can’t do any better than this.
C S Lewis warned of the effect of using Christianity as ‘a short cut to the chemists shop’. The result of doing this has been ably described by Mary Harrington in her recent article for UnHerd.
Believers rarely seem to pay close attention to what they have been told. ‘There will be wars and commotions’, but they are ‘not to be terrified’. ‘Men will faint with fear at what is coming on the world’, together with ‘distress of nations in perplexity’.
The believers are instructed to do certain things in response, but one is not to try to attempt to use Christianity as a solution to all these things.
Given the amount of contempt in which Christianity is held, by both the educated and the uneducated, perhaps some MP or other should propose a Christianophobia Week.
It has always struck me as strange that, uniquely among first world countries, the US is becoming if not more religious, then at least not less so. I have never been clear why. The phenomenon is definitely not apparent in Australia (the country in which I reside), the UK (the country of my birth), or Germany (the country of my mother’s birth), all of which have largely abandoned Christianity.
Spirituality is an individualist exercise – simply oneself, and the divine. Mystics live in caves or in deserts, not in the suburbs or the cities, meditating alone, without the world’s distractions. An anchorite attends no rallies, riots, or fundraisers.
Religion is a group exercise – a shared set of beliefs rooted in dogma, mass rituals, various officiants such as deacons, priests, worshippers, and supplicants – and in those respects religion greatly resembles political movements.
After all, what is wokery, other than a religion without God? There are sainted martyrs, there’s shunning, there are endless displays of virtue and piety. There is an Elect, and the damned, and rituals to perform. There are, indisputably, dogmas and heresies throughout modern leftism, and the far off hope of salvation, albeit in state controls and saintly bureaucracies.
People turn to traditional religions in times of crisis, when existential questions are raised, and when their complacency is threatened. An omnipotent, benevolent God being provides comfort and certainty.
Or they turn to an alternative belief system, no less illogical, that assuages their guilt and reaffirms their own prejudices.
You sound like a Gnostic Eastern Mystic which is actually the existentialist foundation of Wokeness far preceding the French Revolutionary and Postmodern “spirit” of the age.
“Religion” is an anthropological term used to clump people together to separate the wise “Knower of all things” from the so called “delusional masses.” While it is true that group rituals are performed in many different cultures, rituals like Mass are not the point of Christianity. They are simply part of the organizational structure.
That churches services are held for the group is because Christianity is about fellowship with one another. Its also a basic organizing principle needed to reach as many people as possible. The idea that organization and hierarchy nullifies the message is about as nonsensical as claiming the existence of earth’s magnetic field nullifies God.
Does Wokery mimic the structure of Christianity? Of course it does. Marxism is Gnostic. Does Secular Humanism mimic Christianity. Sure does. When you speak of “Spirituality” what does that mean, what does it entail and why do you buy into it?
I’ve always thought that the ancient gnostics understood what Jesus was on about far better than the Church of Rome did.
“How striking is the light which the Bible throws on the character of man! It teaches us what men may be expected to be and do in every position and occupation of life. It gives us the deepest insight into the secret springs and motives of human actions, and the ordinary course of events under the control of human agents. It is the true “judge of the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). How deep is the wisdom contained in the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiasties! I can correctly understand an old Christian saying, “Give me a candle and a Bible and shut me up in a dark dungeon, and I will tell you everything that the whole world is doing
….
By the same proportion that the Bible is honoured or not, light or darkness, morality or immorality, true religion or superstition, liberty or tyranny, good laws or bad, will be found in a nation.”
J.C Ryle
I grew up rejecting and hating the Catholic Church. However I confess I am starting to feel that invisible hook and invisible line. I think a lot of us who rejected religion didn’t really understand the important function it plays in society and our lives. The alternatives – all these things filling up the religion shaped hole in our society – are often much much worse.
If you have a “religion shaped hole” in you, why are you drawn to the Catholic Church? If I ever wanted spiritual guidance, I’m sure I wouldn’t seek it from the bunch of raving pedophiles that comprise the Catholic clergy.