Maybe you have noticed this among your coworkers, certain family members, and even in yourself; there is a constant drip of ‘doubt’ when it comes to the things of God, or even His reality. What people don’t understand, I think, is that we don’t doubt in a vacuum; in other words, the way we doubt has an informing history in the ‘history of ideas.’ At a theological and ultimate level, as Christians, we know that people who engage in skeptical doubt, to the point of remaining in a state of unbelief, do so for a moral reason; because they ‘love the darkness rather than the Light’ (cf. Jn. 3:17ff). It is this moral ‘foundation’ that has led to a history of ideas that is constantly attempting to erect something like a tower of Babel wherein humanity reaches up to the heavens by projecting outwards their own sense of self-possessed godness. This is the modern project: to collapse the classically Christian attributes of God into humanity at large, and then assert oneself, as an instance within the greater humanity, as a god who has the power to move mountains and create a world where their way is the way. This way, while telling itself, definitionally, that it has matured beyond the superstitions and prognostications of the religious past, has ironically imbibed said religious past into their own sense of being as ‘enlightened’ individuals in the secular and now post-secular age.

In order to illustrate how this skeptical mode of doubt and self-assertion took shape in the history of ideas let’s read along with Tom Holland’s sketch of such developments as they were birthed in the heartland of the Enlightenment:

Such blasphemies—while profoundly shocking to Christians—were to some a summons to battle. The letter in which Voltaire was hailed as the Antichrist had been written not by an opponent, but by an admirer: a philosopher and notorious free-thinker by the name of Denis Diderot. It was tribute that that the great man received as his due. There could be no place for any modesty or self-abasement in the war against fanaticism. Fame was a weapon and self-promotion an obligation. Influence such as Voltaire had come to wield in the courts and salons of Europe would only be wasted if not exploited to the full. This was why, fusing conviction with invincible self-regard, he insisted on his status as the patriarch of an entire ‘new philosophy’. Voltaire was far from alone in his contempt for Christianity. Diderot’s was, in anything, even more inveterate. Ranged alongside them were a whole host of philosophes—metaphysicians and encyclopaedists, historians and geologists—whose scorn for l’ infâme was often no less than Voltaire’s. Whether in Edinburgh or in Naples, in Philadelphia or in Berlin, the men most celebrated for their genius were increasingly those who equated churches with bigotry. To be a philosophe was to thrill to the possibility that a new age of freedom was advancing. The demons of superstition and unwarranted privilege were being cast out. People who had been walking in darkness had seen a great light. The world was being born again. Voltaire himself, in his more sombre moments, worried that the malign hold of priestcraft might never be loosened; but in general he was inclined to a cheerier take. His age was a siècle des lumières: ‘an age of enlightenment’. For the first time since the reign of Constantine, the commanding heights of European culture had been wrested from Christian intellectuals. The shock of Calas’ conviction was precisely that it had happened when la philosophie had been making such advances. ‘It seems, then, that fanaticism, outraged by the progress of reason, is thrashing about in a spasm of outrage.’[1]

We have ostensibly moved beyond the ‘age of Volataire’ in our age of PostModernity (PoMo) or the so called Post-Secular. Supposedly, and at some level, this seems to be the case; the sort of bodacious self-assertion of humanity’s ability to transcend the revelational religions and gain access to ‘universal truths’ on its own has gone to seed. In other words, this sort of machismo arrogance about humanity’s capacity to divine the essence of reality in totalizing ways has been abandoned for the more humble attitude that humanity doesn’t really have this capacity after-all; at least not in the universalizing ways it once thought. In our age the spirit of Voltaire remains, but with the caveat that our access to reality is limited to ‘our own particular truth’ and sense of the world; this is enough for the PoMo sensibility. Ironically, and this is why I used the word ‘ostensible’ to start this unit of thought out, the PoMo, or normative relativist spirit that is operative today, is really nothing other than the Enlightenment spirit redivivus; it is just that today people are less confident about the idea that they have tapped into totalizing conceptions of reality at all—except for the fact that their belief itself ends up being totalizing about humanity’s inability to not have a totalizing access to reality.

At the end of the day what remains is the fact that no matter what people think about the world and themselves, they continue to imbibe the Christian confessional reality and its grammar as its way to negotiate their self-constructed secular universes. In other words, the doubting-skeptical people of the 21^st century, those who believe, along with Voltaire et al., that they have moved beyond the superstitions of the religious past, have in fact internalized that past into their own world-identities. The moral: the post-secular person’s identity, and the way they doubt at both a grammatical and conceptual level, is contingent upon the confessional religious past that they say is full of superstition and self-delusion. The conclusion: they haven’t moved beyond the Christian past, they have simply collapsed that into themselves and attempted to construct the Christian reality into their own images (see Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion, it is apropos to both the post-secular as well as the Christian among us); as if the universe, at least their sense of the universe, is contingent upon what they say rather than what God says.

If the aforementioned sounds eerily similar to another story you might have heard, look no further than the Serpent’s forked-tongue:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. –Genesis 3.1-6

[1] Tom Holland, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 390-91.