Recently I attended a public event with Ross Douthat at the Catholic University of America. He shared the stage with Spencer Klavan, a young intellectual from the Claremont Review of Books. Both speakers promoted their new books and discussed how the tide had turned away from secularism towards interest in various forms of religious experiences. Klavan was enthusiastic about such development and even looked intoxicated from the successful battle against secularism. He appeared confident in a bright future, particularly for Christianity and the conservative movement at large. Douthat, on the other hand, was not so bright-eyed and at times appeared pensive, offering a more cautious assessment of the current cultural moment, declining to give positive predictions of how things will proceed from here.
Things are changing fundamentally and irrevocably, of this there is no doubt. The ground that felt so firm just a few decades ago now seems to come apart, revealing gaping holes right under our feet. Intellectuals from various disciplines try to put their finger on the nature of this shift. Douthat, a conservative political commentator, suggested, at the aforementioned event, that we are seeing the end of secularism as the dominant framework. Political economist Francis Fukuyama hinted at the end of liberalism–a political system that emerged after the Enlightenment and served as the premier philosophy guiding our political and economic enterprises. British philosopher and theologian John Milbank announced the end of Analytic/Phenomenological philosophy, which pushed any and all metaphysics (or reference to the supernatural) out of its purview.
Maybe some of these sentiments regarding the end of liberalism and secularism are a bit premature. The rate of dechurching, for example, has not yet reversed its course. Nevertheless, the feeling of the end of an era persists in the general public; it is both palpable and undeniable at the moment.
As a relative newcomer to the US, having moved from Uzbekistan just over 20 years ago, I have observed these fast-paced societal and political changes with a great deal of interest and even amazement. Since my arrival in 2003, the US has undergone such rapid secularization and liberalization of moral norms that I now routinely witness brazen and unconcealed shoplifting in my neighborhood stores and see elementary schools in my county openly promoting school-sponsored LGBTQ clubs. For a person who grew up in the stagnating Soviet Union, the events of the last twenty years in the US developed at the speed of light.
But there is more to the sense of shifting ground than a simple, rapid change of social norms. Since my move to the US, I’ve witnessed a dramatic loss of faith in liberal democracy. The wars waged by the US in the Middle East since 9/11 left the American public with a sense of failure and doubt about the ability to establish liberal democracy in nations lacking a history of liberal democracy. Perhaps it takes more than just freedom from tyranny from an outside power to build a liberal society. Worse, public distrust in governing institutions, already present after those wars, only intensified during the Covid-19 years.
Then, there is the economic side of things. There is now a bipartisan agreement that the age of globalization has over-promised and under-delivered, not only in global politics but also in the domestic economy. Writers from both Jacobin and American Compass came to the same conclusion that the Clinton era globalized economy decimated US domestic industries and working families. In his book The Marvelous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, Nelson Lichtenstein argues that the “marvelous” growth of the Clinton era was merely a bubble that has finally burst.
Since the first Trump presidency, with the subsequent tremors of the George Floyd protests and the January 6th Capitol uprising, my husband and I have repeatedly felt a sense of unsettling familiarity. The breakdown of institutions, toppling of statues, attacks on government buildings, and general existential dread of realizing that things will never go back to the way things were. We experienced all of this as the Soviet Union crashed before our eyes. While the United States is structurally sound, many people here feel, and, more importantly, act as if it is falling apart. This means that the US is indeed undergoing real existential changes with actual breakdown of familiar ways of life, politics, and economics.
Cataclysmic societal changes often reveal a kind of vacuum or absence of beliefs that undergird the fabric of human existence. The rise of interest in religious and spiritualist experiences mentioned by Douthat at the CUA event is no accident. This was also the case after the fall of the Soviet Union.
There was a widespread hunger for anything spiritual in the days after the Soviet Union's collapse. People were experimenting with everything from Scientology to Buddhism and reading everything from the Book of Mormon to ancient astrology. All sorts of conspiracy theories were floating around. People were latching on to them in the absence of information attempting to find an explanation for what had happened to them and their country.
There was a significant interest in organized religion as well. Many people returned to their historical faiths. Russians returned to Orthodox Christianity, and Uzbeks to Islam. Protestant missionaries flooded the post-soviet territories. My personal spiritual journey and commitment to the Christian faith resulted from those missionary activities.
However, this overall openness and interest in exploring religions and spiritualities quickly fizzled out. It was replaced by more mundane and practical needs for survival in a collapsed economy. Materialistic desires for prosperity and financial security quickly squashed any spiritual fervor on a larger scale.
A missionary couple who came to Uzbekistan in 1994 for a summer project, when I became a Christian, witnessed a large number of people converting to Christianity in the span of two months. They returned to Uzbekistan five years later for an extended stay. They decided to go back to the US a year later, disappointed at how few people were interested in Christianity or spiritual things. I remember them sharing how sad they felt to see that all the young people were interested in was immigration or better career prospects.
As a result, even if there was an interest in Christianity, and here I mean primarily Protestant forms, it proved to be short-lived. My Russian friends told me that in the early 1990s it was common to hear people bursting into Baptist hymns on public transportation in her Siberian hometown. By the late 1990s, all of it was gone. The new interest in Protestant Christianity remained minimal. In the case of Eastern Orthodoxy, the largest Christian denomination in post-soviet Russia, the picture is even more grim. It became utterly subservient to the state in an ill-fated attempt to forge an alliance with the powers that be.
Perhaps Solzhenitsyn was right in his Harvard address, that the Communist East and the Capitalist West were fundamentally the same–deeply materialistic at their core. If this is true, then this resurgent interest in religiosity or spirituality is simply a thin veneer that, when scratched, reveals the same old materialism and secularism.
This is not to say there are no genuine Christians or faithful churches in Uzbekistan, Russia, or the US. There are countless Christians who entrust their lives to God and live in faithful communities. Many Christians still face severe persecution in Uzbekistan, others open their homes and share their goods with less fortunate ones. I hope Christians in the US will do more of that as we are going through massive changes in our country with many people poised to lose jobs and livelihoods. But pardon my Russian if I am not as excited as some conservative think tank intellectual, if I remain skeptical about a large-scale revival of religiosity.
For a religious person like me the decline of secularism is indeed good news. Witnessing a renewed interest in Christianity is exciting and validating. However, my experience gives me a certain level of skepticism. Such things can be incredibly fleeting. The outcomes are not always positive. The real issues that we face, if indeed the tide of secularism has turned and we see a revival of interest in Christianity, especially amongst the intellectual elites, is how to preserve and sustain such interest without squandering it.
It does require building healthy Christian institutions (which can only happen in a stable and fairly prosperous environment). It also requires leaving space for real thinkers to do the intellectual work of creating a framework for Christian communities to thrive. But, the hardest task for Christians, especially those who claim the mantle of culture war winners, is to live out their faith and create these institutions in a world that always challenges us, seducing us by power, wealth, or security. Unless we do that, this cultural moment will be nothing more than a momentary vibe shift. In the Wilderness the great temptations presented to Jesus were material security and power. We are naive if we think we will not face similar dangers.
