As someone who grew up in a church environment that I never exactly fitted into socially as an adolescent, many of my longest friendships are with people who are not believers. I have the strange fact of comparison that comes from having a group of friends largely representative of contemporary secular individualism, and a group of friends and family who grew up in a fairly enclosed Christian environment, remained within its culture and fully imbibed its beliefs, animals on the ark and all.
Much is said at the moment about the loss of belief in God, the absense of shared values and the impending resultant collapse of our societies. In a recent video evangelist Gavin Ortlund recently described atheism as “devastating and unlivable” because it does not answer the problems of meaning and death. Without a coherent framework, it is claimed, we are collapsing societally, lacking in any culture, adrift and vulnerable to mass ideology.
There are certain sociological difference that could be used to argue the problems of religious belief and society at large are related. One example might be a difference between the two groups of people I know in terms of family life. All of my non-Christian friends have followed a template that roughly defines my generation: career, fun, getting on the housing ladder, becoming secure in life: all these come before having children. Having children, if it happens, happens in your mid to late-30s, if at all, because attitudes to relationships are also less committal. For those I know who are Christian, family is a priority, dating is about finding someone you want to marry and marriage is about having a family, which happens if you meet someone in your 20s. Career and housing and so on are problems you solve along the way rather than personal goals you achieve first. There is a distinct difference between individualistic, self-centered (I mean literally rather than the implication selfish) and between more communal/family oriented culture. The former may find the latter at some point, but it’s less a destination than an option among others.1
Which of these you think is better probably defines your own proclivities. Some would argue and have argued that expecting family to be a priority reflects impositions of society upon individual freedom. Yet one could also point out that this attitude is not exactly a reflection of the fact of life as inevitably about transmission and reproduction. The fertility rate in the UK has dropped to record lows and continues to, below replacement,2 and whatever anxiety you may think that demands, it reflects the fact that recent generations do not consider life to be primarily about family and having children, a fact that lifts individual freedom above more basic biological facts. One could argue it reflects a generation who consider the apparent meaningless of life to make having children not only an imposition upon freedom but something morally questionable given the state of the world, a weird kind of individualistic anti-natalism has drifted into a generation. Not entirely, of course, many of my friends have had children later, but the trend is fairly clear.
Again, whether you think this is good or bad depends on your own proclivities. Although anyone who is not the youngest generation of their family anymore knows that the reality of time’s brevity and of the fact of transmission is a reality that becomes unavoidable. I am who I am because somebody handed something on to me, and I will be what I will to someone else.
Of course, there is no reason why this has to have anything to do with religion. You can be an atheist and believe family is good, perhaps evolution itself tells us reproduction is a purpose of life, it’s hard to place this attitude change as resultant from the fact that my non-Christian friends are apathetic towards religion, especially if you could argue their own individualism itself rooted in protestant impulses. Yet the shift towards self as the primary orientation point clearly matters. If God is absent, something else coordinates value, and for many millennials and younger the value is simply me and the stuff I want and my desire to be happy, an attitude which data only suggests is leading to unhappiness.
The more cultural and moral value-structure is more complex. Those of my generation who are not Christian are hardly drowning in existential anxiety, whatever may lurk behind their decisions, and while the Christians I know are naturally conservative and the non-Christians more liberal, they remain people who are hardly spiraling into an abyss of moral relativism. It may be on-trend to observe that the values that orient the post-Christian generations are latently Christian, and there is an element to which this is true, but also there clearly is an element of ‘progress’ that defines a kind of morality that exists within more comfortable societies. Most people I know treat people kindly and decently simply because it’s obviously better for everyone and life is more pleasant. Whatever you might argue atheism implies, and whatever kind of moral spirals may exist among younger generations (onlyfans not the least) the idea that atheism entails a kind of moral degradation isn’t exactly true.
Yet the problem of culture fragmentation is a real one. One of the shifts that has occured over recent centuries is the way politics has come to replace certain tenants of religious morality and culture. In some ways this is good, things like human rights, or more particularly the welfare state or healthcare (in the UK) reflect ways that religious moral idea have shifted towards political institutions. It is now an impulse, one indulged by social media, that moral outrage is not expressed through religious but political language. If someone like Gary Lineker3 is concerned about the plights of refugees, instead of giving from his wealth or starting a private charity, the impulse is to express anger at the government on Twitter.
But this deference to politics is a problem hardly limited to people who aren’t religious, if anything the pop-religious sphere suffers from this politicisation in a way that is worse because of its conflict with a more personal concept of religious morality. When pop-star Taylor Swift recently announced her engagement, Charlie Kirk said on his podcast that Swift learning to “submit to her husband” might make her abandon her liberal politics, become conservative and “join team America.” Instead of genuinely wishing that Swift might find the higher religious value reflected by the goodness of marriage and children, Kirk’s response is to see Swift as a political pawn and the symbolism of everything involved is symbolism for a dynamic of political teams. Across the public religious sphere it has become impossible to seperate religion from a toxic culture of us and them politics framed as an existential battle for the future of our societies, at the expense of the values the same people claim to be fighting for.
Yet this deferral to politics, while it may reflect societal changes, also reflects the drift away from an understanding of God as a broad domain of morality that coheres society because people actually believe in Him. Kirk’s politics are primary, and from the outside it’s hard to see much religious conviction that doesn’t feel pompous and performative. What my non-Christian friends lack is something more personal that I have known in people in my family, that residual sense that you are in relation to something that relates to the world at large and that wants you to be good, to put it as Boethius did “A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things.”4
This is the religiousness that I think our society at large is in profound lack of. I’m not convinced many of the political figures advocating for religion truly have it, partly it seems because politics is inherently blinding to that most basic requirement to be honest with yourself, something that demands the humility to go in your room, close the door and pray to your Father who hears you. Political Christianity right now is fairly obviously reflective of the pharisee who Jesus describes as praying in the street so everyone can hear, for such are the demands of the attention economy in which we live. But I, and I’m sure anyone who has spend time around more ordinary Christianity, have known people who have genuinely had the boulder of their own egos moved by a diligence of faith, and in whom Paul’s fruits of the spirit are clearly manifest.
Yet this religiousness cannot be brought about by political crusades, culture wars or popular talking points. To some extent, the fragmenting effect of disbelief is sufficiently manifest in our culture at large that all things that enter it, in Marx’s phrase, dissolve into the air, even religion itself. Someone like Jordan Peterson illustrates how entering the meat-grinder of popular discourse turns you from someone with some interesting contributions to someone digging the content farm in an increasingly polarised and politicised environment that may well cost you your own integrity, if not your sanity.
One of the great obstacles to religious faith is exactly the obstacle that Jordan Peterson seemed to move for some young men around 2017–8, that of the reunification of religious faith with an underlying doubt and cynicism produced by the combination of scientific knowledge and the growth of atheism. Many of my friends who are not Christian are not remotely anti-religious. There are however two significant reasons why they aren’t religious, the first is a simply individualistic strain of relation to community and world that basically rejects the kind of corporate duty and participation that religion requires, and the second is a general apathy towards religious truth, and a general sense that its axioms have been disproved by modern science and knowledge. It’s not that they openly disdain it, it’s that they simply see no reason to accept its propositions if it requires them believing an iron-age man built an enormous boat in his garden and all the animals in the world got in it.
Perhaps in some ways though this latter problem represents as much a convenience in relation the former than a problem in an of itself. What I observe in the religious people I know is that if its central goodness and community coherence is present there is a strange integration of belief around it. This may manifest from the outside as a frustrating literalism, but this is only the case if you are to understand myths and stories as things that are fundamentally untrue rather than things that are true in a way that is implicit and generative rather than propositional and explicit. If believing literal people ate an apple because a snake told them to means having a life open to the transcendent, prioritising family and acting like God cares how you treat your neighbour, it’s hard to argue its truth is not real. Of course, those who believe such things and use it to wield ignorance and literalism while being indifferent to their neighbours will always exist as a case against it, but such is the problem we are faced with. It seems to me, as it once did to William James, that there really is such a thing as a sincere religious experience, and that at its best it really is transforming and good. It is the licence of someone who holds to religious belief to argue that we need more of the ‘authentic’ kind of religion to balm many of our problems, but that is the only way it can be. For all that our world is a mess, we are in an individualistic society only faced with the individual choice, and nothing I have seen persuades me other than to say, to paraphrase Socrates, that the un-religious life is not worth living. Either way, you bet your life on the answer.
Just to be clear, this is a personal set of observations and reflections, not sociological data.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynq459wxgo, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvj3j27nmro, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/27/england-and-wales-fertility-rate-falls-for-third-consecutive-year
Sorry, to readers not from the UK Gary Lineker is an ex-football player and presenter who is known for tweeting his political opinions in spite of it generating controversy over his employment at the BBC as their highest paid presenter, a supposedly politically neutral institution, leading to his recent departure.
Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy
I might not agree with your conclusions, but I really enjoyed the read. Thanks brother.
My only complaint about this post is that you bring up Ortlund's video, but you're not interacting directly with what he said. "Whatever you might argue atheism implies, and whatever kind of moral spirals may exist among younger generations (onlyfans not the least) the idea that atheism entails a kind of moral degradation isn’t exactly true." Well, Ortlund was arguing about what atheism implies, not making observations of the form you make in this post.
And I'm totally with Ortlund on this. I just don't see how life makes any sense if there isn't any hope of us participating in something eternal. People seem to reconcile themselves to death far too easily. My hypothesis is that we absorb the feeling of the way a good story ends, and we apply it to our own end, as if at the end of this life, the credits will roll, so to speak, and there will be some sense of accomplishment, completion. But if death is really just death, there won't be a sense of anything.
Note that Peterson himself doesn't seem to have contended with this. As far as I know, he doesn't believe in any genuine sort of eternal life. He might have good advice for living out your brief, vain existence, but he has absolutely no argument that it is not all vanity.