Religion and Modernity Collide Harder Every Year, and Not Every Religion Braked in Time

There is a conflict between religion and the modern world. That is not news. What is less often said is that the conflict is not constant. It grows, and it grows for a mechanical reason: modernity keeps nullifying religious claims, one after another, and the claims do not come back. A religion that has not adjusted to this is not standing still while the world moves. It is being driven, year by year, into a harder wall.

The Erosion Is Cumulative

Every generation, science and secular scholarship remove a few more things a religion used to be able to say.

The earth is not the centre. The species were not created separately. The flood did not happen. The scriptures were written by many hands over centuries and edited afterwards. Illness is not punishment. Prayer, measured, does nothing to the outcome. The mind is the brain. Each of these was once a live religious claim with a religious answer, and each has been settled against the religious answer, permanently.

The list only gets longer. Nothing ever comes off it. No finding has yet reinstated a miracle. So the distance between what a scripture asserts and what an educated person knows widens every decade, and a believer who wants to hold both has more and more to reconcile.

The Religions That Retreated

Most religions in free countries responded to this the only way a religion can survive it: by quietly giving ground.

The retreat is rarely announced. The literal reading becomes metaphorical. The commandments about diet and dress become optional, then quaint. The parts of the text that command violence are reinterpreted as historical context. The clergy stop making claims about the age of the earth and start making claims about meaning and community, which are harder to falsify. Doctrines that cannot be reconciled with modern life are not repudiated; they are simply no longer mentioned, and within two generations nobody remembers they were held. I have described how doctrines conveniently mutate under pressure; this is the same process seen as a survival strategy.

The result is a religion that has surrendered most of its mandate over the believer's actual life in exchange for continuing to exist. Mainstream Christianity in Western Europe is the clearest case: it asks almost nothing, forbids almost nothing, and collides with almost nothing, which is why it is both harmless and dying.

This retreat took a long time. It began with the Reformation, accelerated through the Enlightenment, and has been running for four centuries. It was painful at every step, and it left the religion a shadow of what it was. But it was gradual, and gradual is survivable.

The Religions That Did Not

Not every religion made this journey, and not every branch of the ones that did.

Take the case the note was written about. A Muslim who takes his faith seriously in the traditional sense holds a body of doctrine that is, in its essentials, very close to what it was many centuries ago: a text that is the direct word of God, a law that governs public life as well as private, and a set of claims about history and nature that have not been through the four-hundred-year softening that Christianity underwent. There are modernising currents, and there have always been, but they have not become the mainstream in the way liberal Christianity became the mainstream in Europe.

I want to be careful here, because this is a point about doctrine and its rate of change, not about people. Most believers of every faith live with contradictions comfortably and would rather be left alone. The point is about what the faith asks, and what happens when what it asks has not been reduced.

A religion that did not retreat gradually now faces the whole accumulated distance at once. Four centuries of erosion that Christianity absorbed a piece at a time arrive as a single demand: accept the modern world, and let go of most of what you believe, now. That is not a step. It is a cliff. And it is not obvious to me that anyone can be asked to jump it and remain what they were.

The same is true, in smaller enclaves, of the ultra-orthodox streams of Judaism and of fundamentalist Christianity, which deliberately refused the retreat their co-religionists made and now live behind walls built for exactly that purpose.

Why This Is Dangerous, and Getting More So

The gap between a religion and modernity is not just a private difficulty for believers. It is a political resource.

Anyone who wants to move a population has always found the sense of a threatened faith to be the most effective lever available. The wider the gap, the more the faith feels threatened, and the easier it is to persuade its adherents that the modern world is an enemy rather than a fact. Political actors have used this, are using it, and will use it, because it works, and it works better every year for the reasons above.

Now add technology. A mob roused against modernity in the seventeenth century could burn a town. The same mob today has access to the products of the modernity it rejects, and those products include weapons of a scale that make the old religious wars look like village quarrels. The gap widens, the resentment it fuels grows, and the tools available to the resentful become more powerful, all at once. None of those three trends is reversing.

What I Do Not Conclude

I do not conclude that the traditional religions are uniquely bad, or that their adherents are. Christianity, at the same point on the same curve, produced the Inquisition and the wars of religion. The difference is timing, not character.

I also do not conclude that the answer is to force the retreat. A retreat forced from outside is experienced as an attack, and produces exactly the mobilisation I have described. The Christian retreat happened from within, under pressure, and slowly, and that is the only way it has ever happened.

What I do conclude is that this is a growing problem, not a static one, and that treating it as static is a mistake. Every year the wall is a little closer, and the religions that did not brake are a little closer to it. Pretending otherwise, in the name of not giving offence, does not slow anything down. It only ensures we are surprised when the collision comes. I have argued that the three stages of religion end in something better than mutual respect; this is the reason the second stage cannot be held indefinitely.