God and the Intellectuals

Peter Savodnik's recent column on Substack is titled How Intellectuals Found God. It's a compilation of a number of interviews he did with writers, artists, techies, etc., and it causes one to wonder if perhaps there's a spiritual awakening happening in our culture.

Savodnik writes:

For more than a century, the people at the apex of the so-called thinking classes had insisted that, post-Enlightenment, it was impossible to believe in God. Not all of them put it as bluntly as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his 1882 work The Gay Science, in which he declared that “God is dead.” Nor did they attempt to dismantle the whole religious project the way philosopher Bertrand Russell did in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” arguing that religion is based “mainly upon fear.”

But that’s what it amounted to.

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022.

By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States.

[But now] something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

What follows are excerpts from some of his interviews. For example, best-selling author Matthew Crawford after describing his own conversion says:

A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more. There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us. It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Niall Ferguson:

You can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism. It’s fine for a small group of people to say, "We’re atheist, we’re opting out,” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.

"The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Comedian Russel Brand comments:

I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.

Savodnik also quotes tech mogul Peter Thiel:

“God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

Even Elon Musk is included in Savodnik's essay:

“I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Psychologist Jordan Peterson said this:

“I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting [his new] book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

Savodnik asks the question that others have been wondering about since these conversions, if that's what they are, started to become known to the public: Were these moves toward God, whether total or partial, genuine? Were these men and women genuine converts to Christianity, or at least to Theism, or was their embrace of the religious life a temporary blip in their otherwise secular lives?

Of course, it's just too soon to tell. Most of them have not been believers for more than a couple of years which makes it hard to assess how permanent the impact on their lives will be. Even so, it's remarkable that so many from among our "cultural elite" are openly turning to God and traditional expressions of religion to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Here are a few more excerpts from Savodnik's essay.

Paul Kingsnorth: "When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a 'rational choice.' If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that. How does that happen?'"

He added that, “The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

Kingsnorth said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali told Savodnik that: “It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.... “I’m actually very grateful for whatever it was that was ailing me,” because it led her to God. “My life now is much richer, more fulfilling, than before.”

About tech billionaire Jordan Hall, Savodnik wrote: "That was when Hall knew his frantic casting about for meaning was finally over. He didn’t expect it. His mother was Jewish; his father, Catholic, but only technically.

"The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger. It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

Savodnik says that Hall was referring to "plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. 'The horrifying brokenness of people.'”

What these and so many others are discovering is that if we're just the product of blind, impersonal forces that have somehow raised us up out of the primordial soup and that our lives are not much different, biologically speaking, than those of ants, then our existence is just a Shakespearean "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Some people, evidently, can live with the awareness that their existence is pointless, empty, and meaningless, but many other very thoughtful people are finding that they cannot.