The Modern World Isn’t Even Remotely Secular

In his 1882 work Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (i.e. The Gay Science), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared:

“Gott is tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder? Das Heiligste und Mächtigste, was die Welt bisher besaß, es ist unter unsern Messern verblutet—wer wischt dies Blut von uns ab? Mit welchem Wasser könnten wir uns reinigen?”

In English, this means:

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have murdered him! How do we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest thing that the world so far has possessed, it has bled to death under our knives—who will wash this blood off from us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”

When he wrote this, Nietzsche did not mean that God had literally died, but rather that modern science had disproven his existence and human beings had entered into a new, secular age. Nietzsche believed that humans needed to find something to replace God to provide life with meaning.

Few academics today agree with everything Nietzsche believed, but they do generally seem to agree that, in the western industrialized world in the twenty-first century, religion is no longer important in most people’s lives and secularism and rationality now generally reign supreme. This notion, however, is entirely mistaken. Traditional religions of all kinds are, in fact, thriving in the western world, especially here in the United States, and belief in the supernatural remains widespread.

The notion of “disenchantment”

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor writes in a summary of his book A Secular Age published in 2008:

“Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an enchanted world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less enchanted world.”

By this, he means that people five hundred years ago saw supernatural forces at work in everything and they perceived even the most commonplace and natural events as having supernatural causes; whereas, today, even people who are religious don’t usually perceive supernatural forces as being at work in everyday life.

This is a notion that seems to be common among scholars. For instance, last year I took a class about Byzantine history in which the professor memorably described the Byzantines as “more religious than any modern person is really capable of understanding”—implying not only that the modern world is more secular than the medieval world the Byzantines inhabited, but that even those people who are still religious are incapable of truly comprehending just how religious the Byzantines were.

ABOVE: Byzantine fresco from the cathedral at Ohrid dated to the eleventh century AD depicting Saint Basileios of Kaisareia consecrating the Eucharist

Scholars’ perception versus reality

I have had several other experiences in which professors have seemed to speak as though religion is more-or-less a thing of the past, something that it is inherently difficult for modern students to understand and relate to. This attitude has always sort of puzzled me. I think that these professors must have had a very different experience growing up than I did.

I grew up in a rural area outside a relatively small, very conservative town in northern Indiana. The house where I grew up is surrounded by vast cornfields and soy bean fields on all sides. My high school was very small; my graduating class had only 117 students. Almost everyone I knew growing up was Christian, including all my teachers and nearly all the students in my classes. In my experience, Christianity was always the norm and irreligion was an aberration.

This very conservative Christian atmosphere hasn’t really changed. In the town where I grew up, there is still a church on nearly every street corner and churches are still integral to community life for most people. I imagine that this probably is not the environment that most university professors were raised in.

As I discuss in this article from April 2020, the notion popular among Evangelical Christians that public universities are dominated by evil atheist professors hellbent on destroying their students’ religious beliefs in completely false. Nonetheless, I do think that some professors fail to fully understand how prevalent religious belief is in the world today and how important these beliefs are to many people.

ABOVE: Photograph I took on 27 May 2020 of the road leading away from my parents’ house

Modern belief in God, divine intervention, and prayer

There is some truth to the idea expressed by Charles Taylor and my Byzantine history professor. For instance, it is certainly true that the percentage of people in the United States and other western countries who self-identify with organized religion is indeed declining. Likewise, irreligiosity is undoubtedly more common today than it was five hundred years ago.

Nonetheless, the conventional narrative that religion is dying out is more wrong than right. Indeed, although the percentage of the people in the United States who identify as Christian is declining, the actual total number of Christians is increasing—just not as quickly as the population. Meanwhile, worldwide, the percentage of people who are Christian is actually growing. Christianity may be declining overall in the western industrialized world, but it is actually rapidly growing in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Furthermore, surveys consistently show that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States still believe in the supernatural aspects of religion, particularly those associated with Christianity. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2014, at that time, 89% of people in the United States said that they believed in God and 63% said that they were “absolutely certain” that God exists.

Think about that for a moment: It’s been nearly a century and a half since Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” but yet nine in ten Americans say they believe in him and nearly two thirds say they are “absolutely certain” he exists. If God died in 1882, then, clearly, most Americans haven’t gotten the memo.

Meanwhile, according to a survey conducted by Gallup in 2017, 24% of Americans at that time said that the Bible was “the actual word of God to be taken literally.” An additional 47% said that it was “the inspired word of God,” but that not everything in it was to be taken literally. Altogether, according to the survey, about 71% of Americans said that the Bible was, in some sense, the inspired word of God.

ABOVE: The Creation of Adam, painted c. 1512 by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo. Americans overwhelmingly agree that God exists in some form.

Interestingly, a survey conducted in 2018 by Pew Research Center found that the vast majority of people in the United States who identified themselves as “religiously unaffiliated” still said that they believed in some form of higher power.

The survey found that 17% of people who described themselves as “religiously unaffiliated” said that they believed in “God as described in the Bible” and an additional 53% said that they believed in some other “higher power” or “spiritual force.” Only 27% said that they didn’t believe in any kind of God or higher power.

Interestingly, the survey found that 65% of self-described agnostics and 18% of self-identified atheists said that they believed in some kind of “higher power” or “spiritual force.” This is fascinating because it shows that, apparently, a substantial number of people who see themselves as atheists or agnostics haven’t totally rejected the idea of a higher power, but rather merely the Christian conception of God.

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing that the majority of people who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated still say that they believe in God or a higher power of some kind

Now, at this point, some people might object, “Ok, so most people in the U.S. still believe in God—but probably very few of those people actually think that God is actively involved in worldly affairs.” Survey data contradicts this objection, however. Surveys have found that, by a whole range of metrics, the overwhelming majority of people who believe in God also believe that he is actively involved in their lives.

Pew Research Center’s 2018 survey found that 59% of people in the United States who had a high school diploma or less who said that they believed in God or a higher power also said that they believed that God determines what happens to them all the time or most of the time. Thirty-three percent of people in the United States with a college degree who said they believed in God said they believed this as well. In other words, even among college graduates, belief in divine providence is still alive and well.

The survey also found that 85% of people with a high school education or less who said that they believed in God also said that they believed that God had protected them at some point in their life. Sixty-six percent of college graduates who said they believed in God said the same.

Things get even stranger, though; 30% of believers in God with a high school education or less and 23% of believers in God with a college degree said that they believed that God sometimes spoke to them personally. It is unclear how many of these people meant this metaphorically and how many of them meant it literally, but this data shows that, apparently, a person believing that God talks to them isn’t nearly as unusual as they might sound.

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing the percentages of people who believe in God who agree with various statements about him

While people who believe that God talks to them may be a minority, surveys indicate that the overwhelming majority of Americans talk to God. According to Pew Research Center, roughly 55% of all people in the United States say that they pray at least once every day. An additional 16% of people say that they pray at least once every week and an additional 6% say that they pray at least once every month.

In other words, for most Americans, prayer is not at all an archaic thing that no one does anymore, but rather an integral part of everyday life. (Is it any surprise, then, that a Gallup poll conducted in 2010 found that, at that time, 57% of Americans supported having a National Day of Prayer, while only 5% opposed it?)

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing that the overwhelming majority of people in United States pray at least once a week

Modern belief in angels, demons, Satan, and demonic possession

Most Americans don’t just believe in God, divine intervention, and prayer; they overwhelmingly believe in all sorts of other supernatural entities associated with the Abrahamic religions. An Associated Press-GfK survey conducted in December 2011 found that roughly 77% of all Americans said that they believed in the existence of angels. Fascinatingly, the survey found that the majority of Americans who self-identified as irreligious still said that they believed in angels. In fact, the survey found that over two fifths of those who said they had never attended church in their life said they believed in angels.

It has often been claimed that most people nowadays don’t believe in Satan or demons, but, at least in the United States, this is not at all the case. A YouGov poll conducted in 2013 found that 57% of all people in the United States said they believed in the existence of a literal Satan. An additional 15% of people said they weren’t sure if Satan existed. Only 28% of people were willing to definitively say that Satan does not exist.

The same survey found that 51% of all people in the United States believed that human beings could be possessed by Satan or another evil spiritual entity. An additional 20% of people said they weren’t sure if Satan could possess people. Only 28% were willing to definitively say that people cannot be possessed by Satan.

ABOVE: Chart from YouGov showing that the majority of people in the United States believe that Satan is real and that he has the power to possess people

In fact, there is at least some evidence that, over the course of the past twenty years, exorcisms have actually grown in popularity. Here is an article published in The New Republic in 2015 talking about a rise in exorcisms more generally and here is an article published in The Atlantic in 2018 talking about a rise in Catholic exorcisms in particular.

If it is indeed true that exorcisms are becoming increasingly popular, there are several factors that are probably at play. One factor is that the gradual decline of Christianity and the growth of secularism and religious pluralism may be contributing to a general feeling of religious unease among Christians.

Historically, when confronted with this kind of religious unease, Christians have tended to see the forces of Satan as being more at work in the world. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, Christians in western Europe became obsessed with Satan, demons, and possession in a way that they hadn’t been for most of the Middle Ages. (As I discuss in this article from October 2018, it was actually in the aftermath of the Reformation that the hysteria over witchcraft swept across western Europe.)

Another factor is that portrayals of exorcisms have become increasingly common in popular culture. On some level, the growing presence of exorcisms in books, movies, and television probably reflects the growing interest in real-life exorcisms, but there may also be something of a feedback loop going on.

In other words, it may be the case that people are interested in exorcisms, so they make books, movies, and television shows about them. Then those books, movies, and television shows lead more people to become interested in exorcisms, thereby leading more people to write stories involving exorcisms.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the demon Meg Masters being exorcized from Supernatural, season one, episode twenty-two “Devil’s Trap.” The growing prominence of exorcisms in popular culture may be linked to the growing popularity of exorcisms in real life.

Some personal experiences

I personally grew up with people who sincerely believed that God and Satan are actively involved in the world. When I was in second grade, I had a friend who made a “spellbook” for a game that we played at recess. It was full of silly fantasy “spells” that he had made up that were supposed to do things like summon magic fireballs and that sort of thing.

He gave some pages of it to one of my other friends for him to look after. That friend’s parents, who were very devout Evangelical Protestants, discovered that he was keeping pages about magic. They were horrified, so they ran the pages through a paper shredder. They warned him that magic comes from the Devil and that he should have nothing to do with magic in the future—not even pretend magic, since Satan uses fantasy magic to entice people into practicing real magic.

I later got to know that friend’s father rather well. I discovered that he was actually a very caring and thoughtful man. I also found out that his own parents had been even more religiously strict than he was. He mentioned to me once that he had never even been allowed to play cards when he was growing up because his parents said that playing cards were “tools of the Devil.” He commented that he never gave much credit to this idea, since he figured that, if playing cards were the best weapons the Devil had, it was hard to explain why he was so powerful.

When I was in around third or fourth grade, I remember a girl in my youth group at church telling a story about how her own grandfather had personally encountered an angel. At the time, none of us thought that her story was at all crazy or implausible.

When I was in fifth grade, there was a tornado warning for our county while we were at school and we had to take shelter in one of the sixth grade classrooms. Many of the students were scared, but one of the sixth graders spoke up and tried to comfort everyone by talking about the power of God.

He assured us that God controls everything that happens and that he has a unique purpose for every single person and, if any of us died during the tornado, that meant that person had already fulfilled the purpose God had made them for. For some people, this may not seem very comforting, but I found it comforting at the time and I know some of the other students did too.

Prayer was also a very important part of public life in the community where I grew up. Whenever we had any kind of community event like a Veterans Day program, an awards ceremony, a graduation ceremony, or an induction ceremony, the event always started with the Pledge of Allegiance and a group prayer. We were all accustomed to it and no one ever protested. We also always prayed at family get-togethers and on Boy Scout camping trips.

Belief in the supernatural among present-day Evangelicals and Pentecostals

Among Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants, these sorts of beliefs are especially prominent. Pentecostalism in particular places a very strong emphasis on the alleged influence of God, angels, Satan, and demons in the human world. They also place a strong emphasis on alleged miracles and spiritual gifts, such as the ability to speak in tongues, the ability to perform exorcisms, and the ability to heal people through the power of faith.

Evangelicals and Pentecostals often see even the most minor of occurrences as being caused by God, angels, demons, or Satan. For instance, here is an excerpt from the bookThe Clashing of Two Swords by Renee Fotch, published in 2013 by WestBow Press, in which the author literally says that Satan hides people’s Bibles to keep them from reading them and that, if someone picks up a Bible, he uses his demonic powers to distract them or make them feel sleepy:

“Why aren’t stores sold out of the book [i.e. the Bible] as fast as they get it in? Why are there not fights and wars breaking out everywhere with anyone who dares take it away from us? Why? Because we are in a spiritual battle, that’s why! Satan does not care if we go to church. As long as we don’t pick up that Bible, he is good, because he knows if we do we will find out who we are.”

“He doesn’t want us to know who we are when we become one of God’s children or the authority that Jesus gave us over him. He keeps our Bibles hidden in our houses, because if we find out what it says, his kingdom will be destroyed. He knows that he has no power over us, but we don’t. If we do pick up a Bible, he makes us sleepy, or distracts us or makes us busy. He despises Jesus and every single one of us.”

To me, this description honestly makes the Devil seem more petty than powerful. You would think that, if Satan were really the supreme lord of all evil, he’d have more important things to do than sneaking around individual people’s houses and hiding their Bibles from them—like, you know, inspiring wars, murders, and genocides.

Nonetheless, this example is highly illustrative of what many Evangelicals and Pentecostals believe. They see the interventions of God and Satan everywhere. If a person falls asleep while reading the Bible, a preacher gets a flat tire, or a projector isn’t working at a convention, they assume it must be the work of Satan. Not all Evangelicals and Pentecostals necessarily think like this, but many of them do.

Far from being an obscure fringe movement, though, Pentecostalism is actually the fastest-growing form of Christianity worldwide. It is becoming especially popular in South America and in sub-Saharan Africa. Part of the reason why people find it so appealing is because of its emphasis on the idea of supernatural forces being at work in people’s everyday lives.

The idea that most religious people today don’t think that supernatural forces are at work in everyday life simply isn’t true. Even the majority of religious people with college degrees still believe that God is actively involved in their lives in some fashion. There can be no doubt that belief in the supernatural aspects of religion is alive and well, even in the industrialized west.

ABOVE: Photograph of a Catholic priest performing an exorcism in Italy sometime around 1950 or thereabouts

Belief in ghosts—an undying belief about the supernatural

Furthermore, while some forms of traditional religion may be very slowly declining in the industrialized west, many other supernatural beliefs don’t appear to be fading at all and some may actually be growing. For instance, in the industrialized west, belief in ghosts remains as popular as ever.

We don’t traditionally tend to think of belief in ghosts as a religious belief. This is probably because Christianity is the dominant religion in the west and ghosts are entities that have never fit well into orthodox Christian theology. Traditionally, Christianity has taught that, when a person dies, their soul goes to Heaven or Hell. (For Catholics, there is also Purgatory.) Christian theologians have generally either rejected belief in ghosts as a silly pagan superstition or concluded that ghosts are actually demons who are merely impersonating the spirits of the dead.

Most Christian authorities today still reject the existence of ghosts. Even the Evangelical Protestant apologetic ministry Answers in Genesis, which is known for defending all sorts of ludicrous ideas about miracles and the supernatural, unambiguously concludes that belief in ghosts is incompatible with Christian teachings. An article published on their official website in July 2010 proclaims:

“No evidence has produced a single fact that should sway a Christian into believing that the spirits of deceased people can loiter on earth. In light of the Bible, the only conclusion is that ghost sightings are either the figments of overactive imaginations, or else they are demons.”

Historically, though, ghosts have been tied into all kinds of different religious belief systems.

Belief in ghosts is extremely ancient. Many people in ancient Sumer in the third millennium BC believed in spirits of the dead known as “gidim.” These entities were widely believed to haunt certain locations in the world of the living. The Sumerians believed that the gidim of those who had died particularly violent deaths were especially likely to come back to haunt the living. The Sumerians used religious rituals to keep the gidim at bay, including magical practices and sacrificial offerings.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Neo-Assyrian bronze statuette of the demon Pazuzu dated to the eighth century BC or thereabouts. The ancient Mesopotamians used images of Pazuzu to scare away gidim and other evil spirits.

The ancient Greeks and Romans told ghost stories that sound remarkably similar to the sorts of ghost stories that people still tell today. For instance, the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD) retells a ghost story from his hometown of Chaironeia at the beginning of his Life of Kimon. He writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin for the Loeb Classical Library:

“Then Damon, who was ravaging the country with predatory forays and threatening the city, was induced by embassies and conciliatory decrees of the citizens to return, and was appointed gymnasiarch. But soon, as he was anointing himself in the vapour-bath, he was slain. And because for a long while thereafter certain phantoms appeared in the place, and groans were heard there, as our Fathers tell us, the door of the vapour-bath was walled up, and to this present time the neighbours think it the source of alarming sights and sounds. Descendants of Damon’s family (and some are still living, especially near Stiris in Phocis, Aeolians in speech) are called ‘Asbolomeni,’ or ‘Besooted,’ because Damon smeared himself with soot before he went forth to do his deed of murder.”

Similarly, the Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 AD) claims in his Guide to Greece 1.32.4 that the battlefield at Marathon was still haunted by the ghosts of the warriors who fought there in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Here is the passage from Pausanias, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod:

“At Marathon every night you can hear horses neighing and men fighting. No one who has expressly set himself to behold this vision has ever got any good from it, but the spirits are not wroth with such as in ignorance chance to be spectators. The Marathonians worship both those who died in the fighting, calling them heroes, and secondly Marathon, from whom the parish derives its name, and then Heracles, saying that they were the first among the Greeks to acknowledge him as a god.”

People today are still telling stories remarkably like the ones that Ploutarchos and Pausanias were telling around 1,800 years ago. For the ancient Greeks, though, ghosts were most certainly a part of the religious experience. It was believed that certain rituals, such as the ritual of burial, could keep ghosts from coming back to haunt the living.

These beliefs did not fade after the advent of Christianity; while some Christian theologians may have disbelieved in ghosts, lay Christians everywhere continued to believe in their existence. The Christian writer Constantius of Lyon, who was writing in the late fifth century AD, records a ghost story in his De Vita Germani that is almost identical to a story recorded by the Roman writer Pliny the Younger (lived 61 – c. 113 AD) in his letter “To Sura.”

In both stories, the hero stays in a house that is supposed to be haunted and, at night, he encounters the apparition of a shackled man who has been improperly buried. The apparition shows the hero the site where his bones are. The next morning, the hero digs up the ghost’s bones to discover they too are shackled. The hero then removes the shackles and gives the bones a proper burial with the proper rituals, allowing the man’s spirit to rest in peace.

ABOVE: Illustration from c. 1900 of a famous ghost story recorded by Pliny the Elder in his letter “To Sura” in which the philosopher Athenodorus Canaanites encounters the ghost of a chained and emaciated man

This ancient pagan belief has survived to the present day virtually unchanged. Ghost stories, mediums, and séances became wildly popular in both the United States and Europe in the late nineteenth century. This spiritualist movement continued into the twentieth century. As Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm documents in his bookThe Myth of Disenchantment, even the avowed atheist Sigmund Freud (lived 1856 – 1939) devoted a large part of his time to investigating spirit mediums and the occult; Freud even took a turn as a spirit medium himself.

A HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted in December 2012 found that 45% of American adults said that they definitely believed in ghosts and an additional 23% said that they weren’t sure if they believed in ghosts. The same survey found that 28% of Americans said that they themselves had personally seen a ghost and an additional 13% said that they were unsure.

A survey conducted by Chapman University in 2018 found that around 58% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “places can be haunted by spirits.” A survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2015 found that around 18% of Americans believed that they had personally encountered a ghost. The same survey found that around 29% of Americans believed they had been in contact with the dead, but not necessarily in the form of an full-on apparition.

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing the percentages of Americans who claim to have had various experiences involving ghosts

It seems that the majority of American adults believe in ghosts—at least to some degree—and somewhere between one fifth and one third of Americans believe that they have personally encountered a ghost. You might think that this only applies to the United States, but similar statistics apply in the United Kingdom.

A poll conducted by YouGov in October 2014 found that 39% of people in Britain said that they believed houses could be haunted by supernatural beings, 34% said that they believed in ghosts, 28% said that they had personally “felt the presence of a supernatural being,” and 9% said that they had personally communicated with the dead.

ABOVE: Chart from YouGov showing that a large percentage of British people believe in ghosts

Aliens, anyone?

People aren’t just continuing to believe in old religious ideas, though; there are also new supernatural phenomena that people today believe in that people two hundred years ago never would have even considered.

For instance, we don’t tend to think of the belief that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth as a religious one, but this very belief is actually an integral part of many new religious movements, such as Raëlism and Scientology. Furthermore, it resembles traditional religious beliefs like the ones I have just talked about because it is a thing that people believe in without scientific evidence.

Chapman University’s 2018 survey of paranormal beliefs in the United States found that roughly 41% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “aliens have visited Earth in our ancient past” and roughly 35% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “aliens have come to Earth in modern times.”

What is especially interesting is that fact that belief in intelligent extraterrestrial beings seems to be just as common in Europe as it is in the United States. A YouGov survey from 2015 found that 56% of people in Germany and 52% of people in Britain said that they believed that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, compared to 54% of people in the United States.

The same poll found that, of those British people who said they believed in intelligent extraterrestrial life, 19% agreed with the statement “Intelligent ET life has contacted or visited Earth, but long before the development of human civilisation.” Seventeen percent of British people who said they believed in intelligent extraterrestrial life agreed with the statement “Intelligent ET life has already contacted us but the government has covered it up.”

In other words, even in Europe, a very large percentage of people believe that aliens have visited Earth—even though there is no substantial scientific evidence to suggest this. This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that, while some people have been speculating about the possible existence of life on other planets since ancient times, belief in extraterrestrial beings that have visited Earth has only become widespread within the past two hundred years.

ABOVE: Chart from YouGov showing that the majority of people in Germany, the United States, and Britain say they believe that intelligent extraterrestrial beings exist

Civic religion

The evidence clearly shows that, contrary to what many scholars assume, belief in supernatural phenomena associated with religion is absolutely thriving in the industrialized west, especially in the United States, where people overwhelmingly believe in God, Satan, angels, demons, and ghosts. This is only the very tip of the iceberg, though; religious ideas are evident in all aspects of modern American life.

One area in which American religiosity is especially evident is in the realm of politics. The United States government may ostensibly be secular, but almost everything about American patriotic culture is, in some sense, religious. Sociologists have a name for the religious manifestation of American patriotism; they call it “American civil religion.”

American civil religion is rather syncretic and it has been heavily influenced by both Christianity and Greco-Roman polytheism. It’s also not always explicitly religious; sometimes the religious ideas are hidden just below the surface and only become evident when they are closely examined.

Let’s take the American flag as an example. When Colin Kaepernick began kneeling before the flag during the national anthem in 2016 rather than standing with his hand over his heart, millions of people were shocked and horrified—more shocked and horrified than they ever were about police brutality or systemic racism. Why? It’s because, for most Americans, the flag isn’t just a symbol of our country; it’s a religious symbol.

The United States has an official list of rules for how the flag is supposed to be treated, known as the “United States Flag Code.” Most people don’t follow these rules. For instance, 4 U.S. Code § 8(i) states:

“The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.”

4 U.S. Code § 8(j) states:

“No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations.”

Despite the fact that some of the rules for how the flag is supposed to be treated are often violated, many Americans still have a strong sense of conviction that the flag must be treated with the utmost reverence. Many Americans see the American flag as literally analogous to the cross in terms of its sacred significance. Thus, any action that can even remotely be construed as “disrespecting the flag” is offensive to them.

The United States is far from the only country in which people regard the national flag with reverence and awe, but people in this country are definitely more likely regard the flag as, in some sense, holy than people in some other countries. The United States has other sacred symbols aside from just the flag itself, including the Great Seal and the American bald eagle.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the American flag flying October 2011

Much like traditional Christianity, the United States has its own canon of sacred texts: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address. All of these documents were originally seen as secular, but, over the centuries, they have become widely seen as sacred and even, in some sense, divinely inspired. They are routinely referenced and quoted in political discourse in much the same way that the Bible is cited by Christians.

Alongside these sacred texts, the United States has its own sacred hymns, such as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The United States even has its own sacred rituals: the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance every morning by every student in every public school across the country, the singing of the national anthem before every major public event, the inauguration ceremony, and all sorts of others.

In addition to all these things I have listed, the United States also has a whole pantheon of deified past leaders. In the exact same way that the ancient Romans built temples and erected monumental statues of past emperors, the United States builds temples and erects monumental statues of past leaders—and we do this in a manner that blatantly and unmistakably echoes the practice of the ancient Romans.

Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. and the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial in Philadelphia are literally temples built in the Greek style. Inside, they bear colossal cult statues of the deified former presidents that are meant to be viewed by visitors with awe and worship.

The only difference whatsoever between how the United States honors its past leaders and how the ancient Romans honored their former emperors is that we don’t literally bow down and worship their cult statues and we don’t literally make sacrifices to them in their temples. In every other aspect, we worship them as gods. They have their faces on our coins, they have their own sacred days, and we constantly ask ourselves what sides they would take on current political issues as a means of deciding which sides we ourselves should take.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Temple to the Deified Abraham Lincoln (a.k.a “the Lincoln Memorial”) in Washington D.C.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the cult statue of the deified Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Temple to the deified Thomas Jefferson (a.k.a. the Jefferson Memorial) in Washington D.C.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the cult statue of the deified Thomas Jefferson inside the Jefferson Memorial

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the cult statue of the deified Benjamin Franklin in the Benjamin National Memorial in Philadelphia

American civil religion goes deeper than all these things, though. Many Americans tend to think about their country in deeply religious terms. They see the United States as a special nation chosen by God to serve as a “city on a hill” and to enlighten the whole world through its example. They see the United States as having a sacred mission to spread peace, justice, and democracy (or, if you’re one of those people, republicanism) throughout the world.

American soldiers who die in battle are routinely described as heroes who have voluntarily laid down their lives for a cause in a manner that is deeply reminiscent of how Christians have traditionally described martyrs of the faith.

American civil religion even influences people’s sense of morality. Values such as freedom, justice, equality, and democracy are generally seen as “American” and therefore good; whereas ideas that run contrary to these values are traditionally seen as “un-American” and therefore bad.

Both liberals and conservatives generally agree that the values I have just listed are virtues, but they disagree about what these terms actually refer to. For instance, does the term “freedom” only refer to freedom from external constraint (i.e. negative liberty) or does it refer to a state in which a person possesses the resources necessarily to fulfill one’s desires (i.e. positive liberty)?

ABOVE: Freedom from Want, painted in 1943 by the American painter Norman Rockwell, illustrating the idea of positive liberty

Religion and current events

Even if we look at the events going on right now, we can see the enormous influence that religion (especially Christianity) is having. On the one hand, conservatives who oppose the Black Lives Matter movement are trying to portray themselves as pious Christians and the protesters as radical atheist fanatics. Even Donald Trump, who is arguably the least Christian person ever to live, has tried to get in on the action.

On 1 June 2020, Donald Trump had peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square dispersed with tear gas and rubber bullets fifteen minutes before curfew so that he could walk across the street to stand in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church and hold up an unopened Bible to prove to his supporters that he is a true Christian. Needless to say, the stunt didn’t go over very well, but the intentions behind it are abundantly clear.

ABOVE: Photograph of Donald Trump standing with a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on 1 June, immediately after he had Lafayette Square cleared of peaceful protesters using tear gas and rubber bullets

Trump himself isn’t the only one who has tried to do this, though. On 22 June 2020, Trump’s legal advisor Jenna Ellis tweeted this:

Notice how Ellis explicitly ties her identity as a patriotic American with her identity as a Christian and tries to portray the Black Lives Matter protesters as un-American and un-Christian. This is an excellent illustration of how American conservatives see Christianity and Americanness as inextricably intertwined. Also notice how she tries to present conservative Christians as a righteous minority that the evil Black Lives Matter protesters want to oppress.

The other side: the Black Lives Matter movement and religion

Despite conservatives’ best efforts to paint the protesters as godless communists, it is clear that there is a very strong Christian element within the Black Lives Matter movement itself. Far from calling for the “cancellation” of Christianity, many of the protesters are devout Christians themselves.

If you look at pictures of the demonstrators, you will see people holding signs with explicitly religious slogans such as “GOD didn’t give us this breath for YOU to take it away,” “God is against injustice I stand behind God,” “You can’t say you LOVE God & hate his creation,” and so on.

ABOVE: Photograph from News 9 of protesters in Norman, Oklahoma on 1 June

ABOVE: Photograph from MassLive of protesters in Boston on 2 June

Not only are many of the current protesters themselves Christians, but they are also consciously following in the footsteps of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Some of the most prominent leaders of that movement were black Christian religious leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (lived 1929 – 1968) and Gardner C. Taylor (lived 1918 – 2015). These leaders’ Christian beliefs and ideals are thus indirectly shaping the current movement.

It’s worth noting that many religious leaders—both black and non-black—are involved in the current protests as well. For instance, the black Baptist minister Al Sharpton gave a televised eulogy at George Floyd’s funeral on 9 June in which he explicitly declared that God is on the Black Lives Matter movement’s side:

“It’s time that we reclaim the righteous in this country. Well Reverend, we don’t know if we got the money and we got the political power. Well, we got the vote, and we got something that we had before we had the vote. We had God on our side. That’s why, when they was even in slavery, they used to have church out in the slave quarters, because they understood that if they called on God, that God would answer prayer.”

“And the same God that brought us from chattel slavery is still on the throne. The same God that brought us from the back of the bus is still on the throne. The same God that brought us from Jim Crow is still on the throne. And if we are right, he’ll fight our battle, and we’ll put George’s name in history where they say, ‘That’s the one that they shouldn’t have touched. That’s the neck they shouldn’t have bent down on.’”

This narrative of God siding with the righteous oppressed against the evil oppressors is one of the oldest narratives in both Judaism and Christianity. It appears in the Book of Exodus, which portrays God supporting the righteous people of Israel, who are being oppressed by the wicked Egyptians.

Jesus himself is recorded in the gospels to have preached that those in power are in power are abusive and that those who are oppressed are the ones who are truly righteous. In Mark 10:25, Jesus is portrayed as saying, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” In Mark 10:31, he is portrayed as saying, “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

In Luke 6:20–26, Jesus says that the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed are on the side of God and that the wealthy, the content, and the respected are the enemies of God. In Luke 16:19–31, he tells a parable about an evil rich man, who dies and is sentenced to burn in Sheol for abusing the poor, and a righteous poor man named Lazarus, who dies and is carried off by angels to be with Abraham.

In 2 Corinthians 4:4, the apostle Paul goes even further than Jesus, calling Satan “the god of this world,” implying that those who are in power in the world literally worship Satan. Early Christians saw themselves as a righteous, oppressed minority living in a world of evil oppressors. (This is part of why martyr narratives are so central to Christianity.) Oppression narratives exist outside of Judaism and Christianity, but they have historically held a special resonance in these religions.

A martyr narrative

This narrative of God siding with the oppressed against the oppressors is not the only idea that is prominent in both traditional Christianity and in the Black Lives Matter movement, though. Martyr narratives are also common to both.

A martyr is not necessarily someone who is morally perfect, but they are someone who is perceived as generally decent and undeserving of death. The martyr is then killed, usually in a horrifyingly brutal way. After the martyr’s death, certain locations, such as the spot where they died and the place where they are buried often attract large crowds of people seeking to pay respect to them.

The murder of George Floyd fits this model perfectly. He wasn’t a perfect man, but almost everyone agrees that he didn’t deserve to die the way that he did. His brutal murder at the hands of a police officer led to widespread public outcry and, within a few days after his death, the site of his death had transformed into a shrine with a mural of his face decorating the nearest wall and offerings for him laid out all over the ground.

Martyr narratives occur in all cultures around the world, but they are particularly prominent in Christianity.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from KSAT of the site of George Floyd’s death, showing the mural, the signs, and the flowers left at the site

Iconoclasm

There’s another element here that ties the Black Lives Matter movement to Christianity: iconoclasm. For our purposes, I will define iconoclasm as “the deliberate destruction or removal of public images of figures who have been traditionally revered in service of an ideological mission or goal.” Historically, iconoclasm has been closely associated with the Abrahamic religions.

As I discuss in this article I wrote in April 2020, during the Christianization of the Roman Empire in late antiquity, some Christians destroyed or vandalized statues of the traditional Greco-Roman deities. During the iconoclast periods of Byzantine history, icons of Christian saints and other traditional holy figures were deliberately destroyed.

Later, during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, Protestants destroyed or vandalized statues and other images of Roman Catholic saints. Today, protesters are destroying and vandalizing statues of Confederate leaders and other symbols of white supremacy.

Conservatives have tried to portray present-day iconoclasm as evidence that the protesters have rejected American civic values. What the protesters are actually calling for, though, isn’t so much the abolition of civic values, but rather the reshaping of those values to be more inclusive.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from NBC News of protesters after having pulled down a statue of the Confederate general Albert Pike in Washington D.C.

Conclusion

The western industrialized world in the twenty-first century is anything but secular. Religious ideas are woven into the very tapestry of modernity and they show up even in places where people might not expect them.

I don’t believe that a completely secular world is even possible. Human beings are naturally superstitious and irrational creatures; we like our gods, our angels, our demons, our ghosts, our unseen forces of fate, our rituals and ceremonies, our sacred symbols, and our religious narratives.