(Commonplace) Emile Doak-The Stabilization of Religious Decline Is a Big Deal

In this light, we can see that the dizzying changes of the past decade represent the dying lurches of a postwar consensus and a re-enchantment of the West. History, contra Fukuyama, is not linear, and epochal shifts will often entail volatility as the old order grapples with its demise. In other words, Pew’s RLS data is more evidence of what N.S. Lyons called the “end of the Long Twentieth Century.” And it may be the strongest evidence yet that we’ve truly turned the page.

Lyons is following Rusty Reno, who sensed in his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods that the era of a Western “open society” consensus was coming to an end. In its place, “strong gods” would return. These strong gods “are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” While the twentieth century saw an attempt to domesticate the strong gods through the promotion of weak ones like “inclusion” and “multiculturalism,” the quest has proved futile. These weak gods stand in negation to certain values—“anti-racism” or “anti-totalitarianism”—and are therefore incapable of stirring the aspirational loyalty necessary for a cohesive society.  

But not all strong gods are equally benevolent. Some can be quite destructive. Reno argued that to counteract the rougher edges of strong gods like nationalism, we will need “to nurture to primeval sources of solidarity that limit the claims of the civic ‘we’: the domestic society of marriage and the supernatural community of the church, synagogue, and other communities of transcendence.”

Thus, we can say that religion is perhaps the strongest of the strong gods….

Read it all.

Read more in @commonplc, an essential journal: https://t.co/FNH7Z8pLNd

— Emile Doak (@EADoak) March 6, 2025