Modernity disconnects us from God

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.

John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821). Source: Wikimedia.

Life in the modern world brings about difficulties for faithful Christians. In this week’s essay, I discuss how modernity has disconnected us from our hearts, from charity, and from nature, which makes it more difficult to find God.

This is the second week of a three-part essay series (Essay 1: Religion doesn’t resonate; Essay 3: Return to Bugnini’s negative spirituality) inspired largely by Charles Taylor’s three “axes of objection” to the modern moral order, which can be found on pp. 311-21 of the 2018 Harvard University Press edition of A Secular Age. They explain mindsets that object to modernity, from which Taylor takes indirect steps towards a secularising world. I here use his objections directly to explain the malaise of the Christian faithful.

Axis 1: Rationalisation

Since the Enlightenment Era, society has placed an ever-increasing focus on the rational. We must be able to find truth through reason. Those who start their search with the Cartesian maxim “I think therefore I am” represent the roots of this intellectualisation, which flowers into Deism, agnosticism, and nihilism. These theories disconnect reason from the heart, which instead desires a god to love.

In the face of that non-engagement of the heart, society saw reactionary movements that emphasised the importance of the heart and of the irrational. Broadly, this is Romanticism, though one could also include schools like existentialism, absurdism, or Dadaism.¹

Christianity, too, developed the same intellect/heart disconnect. There was little alternative in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Out with Saint Guinefort² and illiterate priests, in with catechisms and seminaries. With the gradual progression of near-universal literacy and schooling, faith continued to develop under the pinions of reason. My grandfather recounts that, in his day, he could sing the Credo, but didn’t know what the word Credo meant. This is unthinkable in our church today. The vast majority of Christians nowadays (and I count myself among that number) would require that catechumens understand the meaning of the tenets of the faith before allowing them to profess that faith. Our Church intellectualised in a way that parallels society more broadly.

If we reflect on that parallel, we are therefore also unsurprised to see a religious parallel to the Romantic counter-reaction. I would include various classes of people here: the “spiritual but not religious;” their companions who “reject organised religion;” the Charismatic movement within mainline denominations; the growth of Charismatic religions like Pentecostalism and Mormonism; the eclectic picking-and-choosing of other beliefs in traditions like New Age or Unitarianism; and the growth of associated irrational practices, like astrology, yoga, or tarot. It is comparatively hard to think of a highly rational and systematic faith movement that is growing. I posit that the majority of modern religious trends can be understood as a reactionary re-emphasis on the heart.

We humans have a heart and a brain. Over the course of the last few centuries, and in rapid acceleration over the last few decades, we placed growing emphasis on our brains at the expense of our hearts, on reason at the expense of love. The faith, too, has rationalised, an inescapable consequence of existing in modernity. However, this disunity is not sustainable, and the faith suffers from the counter-reaction.

Axis 2: Utopianism

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, our society has also laid a growing emphasis on systems of morality and justice. This makes sense in a world with such material abundance, as it is the distribution of goods that causes our problems. We have enough food for everyone, yet people starve; We know how to take care of people, yet we see suffering on the streets; We know whose property is whose, yet we hear of crime every day. Our societal failings are all moral, not material.

Indeed, utopia would be possible if material need were the only problem, and this draws many people today into ideological visions for utopia. Politics increasingly focusses not on material problems of charity, but on utopian visions of the future. We see this clearly in Marxism and in other extreme ideologies like Nazism, but also in the unquestioned assumptions of our own world view, like the conception that free markets will lead to ever-growing prosperity and peace between trading countries.³

When morality becomes utopianism, however, it is disconnected from the charity that should underlie it. Instead of helping our neighbour, we subscribe to social justice, and our charity produces political correctness, gender theory, and DEI initiatives; Instead of producing goods for our local community, we subscribe to capitalism, and our industriousness produces environmental destruction, inhumane work, and vice.

This disconnect causes problems for Christians. The vision of a Christian community at the time of the Acts of the Apostles was a small group of saints united to each other voluntarily in a hostile world. But, as the Christian community grew into Christendom, and our neighbour began to include the whole world, Catholicism also started to be evaluated by utopian standards.

Christianity cannot survive being evaluated in this way. Catholicism will not get us to utopia. God makes it quite clear that paradise will only come after death. Christianity is not a utopian vision but a choice of the individual to pursue charity. In a world where we disconnect from charity, Christianity doesn’t make sense.

Axis 3: Disconnecting from nature

Finally, since the Industrial Revolution, we disconnected ourselves from nature. We started living in cities; we stopped being farmers and became laptop warriors; walking in the wild became driving on the highway; woodworking became turning an Allen key on our IKEA flatpack.

When we do not experience nature, we disconnect ourselves from something that has, for many generations before us, served as an experience of God. Kant says that the sublime is encountered in thunderstorms, mountains, and looking out at the stars. When we live in climate-controlled homes, on man-made streets, and can’t see the stars because of light pollution, how can we experience the sublime? How can somebody sing like Saint Francis, if their only interaction with fruits and flowers is in the supermarket?

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.

I heard a sermon once where the priest said that children who grew up with roosters and hens in their garden were unlikely to end up believing in gender theory. Similarly, when we grow up never touching dirt, we prefer chemical fertilisers to cow manure, we grow afraid of wonky vegetables. Unfortunately, as we have learnt to control nature and to segment it into useful components, we start to doubt the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of natural things. As Charles Taylor writes: “In the effort to control our lives, or control nature, we have destroyed much that is deep and valuable in them.”

Of course, this is not to say that our modern relationship with nature must necessarily destroy what is deep and valuable in it. There are many great Christian scientists (like Mendel, the monk who discovered the theory of genetics, or Lemaître, the priest who discovered the Big Bang theory). If we use modern tools to improve the beauty of something natural, to do good acts using the world, or to discover the truth of natural laws, then we are interacting with beauty, with goodness, with truth - with God.

What I am criticising about modernity is not science that improves our relationship with nature, but a science that worsens our relationship with nature. Unfortunately, though, modernity has made it so that it is optional to connect to nature. This disconnect makes it all the easier to believe that we, rather than God, are the masters of the universe.

We are disconnected from God

The world has gotten to be a very different place since the Enlightenment. We have gotten to be far more intellectually capable, our society has developed great material abundance, and we have become the masters of much of nature. These things can be good. Unfortunately, our reason has disconnected us from our hearts, our utopianism has disconnected from charity, and our technology has disconnected us from nature. These three disconnects also disconnect us from God.

Luckily, though, unlike many of the modern mindsets mentioned in last week’s essay, each of these disconnects is fixable. Ensure that your faith is not merely rational, but fall into deeper love with God. Love thy neighbour, not mankind in the abstract,⁴ and spend more time doing good in real life than by preaching politics. Take deliberate steps to connect with nature, eat real foods, avoid overly-industrialised products.

Modernity doesn’t force us to be disconnected from our hearts, from charity, or from nature, it just provides the option to do so. To protect our faith, we must take active steps to remain connected to our hearts, to charity, and to nature.

This essay will be continued in a final instalment next week - if you’d like to receive it, type in your e-mail and hit subscribe below!

1. For more on this, I highly recommend William Barrett’s book Irrational Man.

2. A 13th Century greyhound venerated as a folk saint. The legend goes that a knight of Lyon, leaving his child and dog at home, came back to find the cot overturned and blood all over the jaws of his dog, Guinefort. Distressed, he slew Guinefort, only to hear his infant crying. When he turned the cot over, he found his child, well, and also the bloody corpse of a snake, bitten to death by the faithful Guinefort. The knight buried Guinefort in a well, building a shrine there for the prayers of mothers with sick children. Stephen of Bourbon recounts that Church condemnations against her veneration did little to stop the practice.

3. “Capitalist peace” can effectively be symbolised by the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which states that two countries with McDonald’s will never go to war with each other. As with every utopian vision, it sounds good in theory but eventually fails. The Golden Arches theory was disproven in 2022 by the Russia/Ukraine conflict, and again in 2023 with Israel/Lebanon.

4. I coincidentally stumbled on an article today, Ye cannot serve God and mammon, by J. Terry, with a beautiful paragraph about this topic that I wanted to share: “It’s not a mere consequence that our Lord taught ‘Love thy neighbor’ rather than ‘love thy fellow humans.’ As Dostoevsky put it in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.’ The more our relationship to a person or a group becomes physically distant, the more we will be forced to consider them in the realm of theory and will inadvertently dehumanize them.”

I also highly recommend Johann Kurtz’s article, You’re called to love your neighbor, not everyone.