Succumbing wholesale to the seemingly unstoppable secular tide seen in twentieth century history, some shortsighted Christian theologians went so far as to declare the death of God in the early 1960s.[15] If God Himself were indeed “dead,” however, such ongoing phenomena as the belief in the importance of the spiritual dimension of human life, religiously inspired values and ethics, and the active search for God on the part of many millions of people today seem to be very far from it. The only thing that seems to be “dead” today is the very idea that “God is dead.”
As we enter the twenty-first century, it appears that religion has made an undeniably powerful comeback onto the world stage. Throughout the Third World, nation upon nation is rejecting the current Western materialistic paradigm. Nations that were traditionally Hindu (Sanatana Dharma), Islamic, Buddhist, Taoist and Animist are rediscovering their ancient religious heritage and turning to these time-tested spiritual worldviews for meaningful and practical answers to many of today’s social, political, economic and ethical dilemmas — dilemmas, many of which were themselves created directly as a result of the failures of secular materialism. The world’s many indigenous peoples and tribes — peoples ranging from the Aborigines of Australia to the many hundreds of Native American tribes in North and South America — are also reconnecting with their own, long oppressed, spiritually-based cultures: cultures that have proven themselves to be gentler, saner, and more Earth-centered paradigms than anything secular materialism ever had to offer.
Moreover, with the dramatic failure and consequent collapse of Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Third World, the peoples of these former Communist regimes have expressed an unprecedented resurgence of interest in more religious ways of life. Indeed, in today’s Russia, and throughout much of Eastern Europe, two of the fastest growing religions are Sanatana Dharma and Buddhism.
This worldwide rediscovery of the importance of religion and spirituality has also had a dramatic impact on the American scene. There are several recent trends in American culture that readily reveal this fact. One of these trends has been the explosive popularity of the trendy New Age movement in recent years. As a movement deeply grounded in the belief that personal spiritual development is essential to any real social and political change, New Age thought has had a deeply penetrating influence on tens of millions in the American public. With an emphasis upon such concepts as karma, reincarnation, meditation, natural foods, chakras, and yoga, much of currently faddish New Age thought is directly derived from much older and more authentic forms of Vedic philosophy; though this clear dependence on Sanatana Dharma is sadly not often fully acknowledged by many New Age thinkers and leaders. As a result of this disconnect from its religious roots, the actual understanding of many of these New Age leaders tends to be rather shallow, consumeristic and faddish.
The rebirth of interest in spirituality is also seen on the popular stage by the amazing number of books with spiritual themes that have become runaway bestsellers. These include the works of such pop-spirituality writers as Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, Bernie Siegal, Thomas Moore and Marianne Williamson. While the New Age movement is not deeply rooted in the philosophical profundity and guiding discipline of traditional religious thought, the popular impact of this movement is still a clear testament to the resurgence of popular interest in spirituality in modern America.
Coupled with the more recent success of New Age pop spirituality has been the growing popularity of Asian religions in the previously solely Judeo-Christian American religious landscape — specifically Sanatana Dharma and Buddhism. Over the past four decades, millions of Americans have joined various overtly Dharmic religious traditions. Legions of famous celebrities, such as the actors Richard Gere, Julia Roberts and Russell Brand, and musical performers like Madonna and Sting, among many others, now consider themselves to be practicing Dharmis, Buddhists or Taoists. In addition, to throngs of college students and youth across America, nothing is considered “cooler” today than studying and practicing Vedic and Buddhist philosophy and spirituality. Every major American city has many Hindu temples and Buddhist meditation centers. New York City, for example, has many hundreds!
Yoga, Tai Chi and meditation are spiritual techniques that are now practiced by tens of millions of average, middle class Americans. The estimate is that there are currently 18–20 million Americans practicing yoga regularly, with an even greater number enjoying the benefits of meditation. In Gallup polls conducted concerning the basic religious beliefs of everyday Americans for the last twenty years, a consistent 20%–25% of Americans say they believe that the principle of reincarnation offers the best possible explanation for the afterlife (22% in Western Europe).[16] The number of followers of Sanatana Dharma in America today is roughly 5 million. Approximately two-thirds of these are non-Indian Americans who have adopted Sanatana Dharma as their spiritual practice. In many ways, it has become easily arguable that twenty-first century Americans are witnessing nothing less than the slow but steady “Dharma-ization” of North American culture and society.
The recent religious and spiritual resurgence in America is affecting society not only on a more popular level, but within the realm of academia as well. The latter phenomenon is evidenced by the recent successes of overtly religious scholars in philosophy departments across the land. Over the last 50 years, philosophy departments at almost every major university were uninviting intellectual vacuums, in which only materialist and empiricist philosophy was allowed to flourish. Religious philosophers were purposefully made to feel like outsiders. This is beginning to change quite significantly today as more and more departments are forced to open their doors to theistic thinkers. Such philosophers of religion as Alvin Plantinga (famous for his bold defense of the ontological argument for God’s existence) and Keith Yandell (author of The Epistemology of Religious Experience)[17] have begun to make tremendous inroads into an area that, until recently, was almost the exclusive domain of atheistic skeptics.
On a more ominous note, the new religious resurgence in America has also included a marked rise in Evangelical Christian fundamentalism. This new evangelical revival has taken on increasingly political tones in recent years. Beginning with such individuals as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in the late 1970s and 1980s, fundamentalist Christian activists began to take their theological opinions into the partisan political realm. Through supporting politicians and ballot initiatives viewed as being pro-Christian, Evangelicals have made their views forcefully known and have caused them to be implemented throughout the nation. The success and acceptability of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the Republican Party in the late 1990s, and the more recent overt confessions of Christian faith on the part of former President Bush, reveals to us that this is a movement that is both immensely powerful and that is here to stay.
In addition to the rise of Christian fundamentalism, the world has also witnessed the violent specter of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist-inspired terrorism in recent years. The most prominent example of its destructive force of fundamentalist terror was, without question, the terrorist attacks on innocent American civilians perpetrated on 9/11. In an attempt to enforce their highly reactionary version of Islam upon the world, Islamic terrorists have declared open war against both modernity, as well as the followers of all non-Islamic religions. From the southern Philippines, Indonesia, Southern Thailand and Northwest China, to the Chechen Republic in Russia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Sudan, the ravages of Islamic fundamentalism have led to untold thousands of deaths, horrific destruction and immense suffering on the part of many innocent people globally.[18] Thus, the current global resurgence in religious consciousness also has its extremely ominous counterpart as expressed by the Abrahamic faiths, in addition to its decidedly positive value.
The fact that spirituality, both in America and throughout the world, is again becoming an increasingly important factor in human
culture is now well-established knowledge. Let us now explore some of the possible reasons for why this is the case. One reason for the ascension of religion is certainly the dramatic failure of the most powerful anti-religious ideology in human history: Marxism. First presented to the public as a rational, scientific and humanistic alternative to religion, the fall of Communism in Europe in 1989 revealed Marxism to be a more repressive, inhumane and destructive system than any religion had ever been.[19] Indeed, Marxism has turned out to be the most repressive and anti-human ideology that the world has ever known!
As only one of a large multitude of examples showing the failure of Marxism, we have the vivid example of Cambodia. Cambodia was a peaceful and beautiful Buddhist nation previous to the Marxist Khmer Rouge, who shot their way to power in 1975. Marxist rule led to the systematic genocide of at least 1.5 million of Cambodia’s inhabitants — over an eighth of the population at that time! — over a three-year period. This was an instance, not of a foreign nation invading and committing acts of genocide, but of Communists committing acts of mass genocide against their very own people! And all this was done in the name of a purportedly humane and rational ideal of Marxist atheism. Similarly, Marxism led directly to the systematic murder of 61 million people in the former Soviet Union, 76 million in Communist China, 3–5 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Vietnam, 1.5 in Poland, over 1 million in Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia, and tens of millions in other Marxist nations,[20] and as a direct result of Marxist terrorist, revolutionary and guerrilla movements globally.
Interestingly, Marxists and secularists over the last 150 years have repeatedly attempted to accuse religion of being responsible for all of humanity’s many historic sufferings and injustices. As we now know, however, more human beings have been persecuted, murdered, tortured and dehumanized as a direct result of atheistic Marxism in the twentieth century alone than have been harmed in all of the world’s religious wars combined since the beginning of human history. Religion does not inherently lead to war among people. Atheism does.
Indeed, it could be argued that the complete and unmitigated failure of secularism, as a whole, is directly responsible for the new religious and spiritual renaissance now being experienced globally. The omnipresent human need for meaning and hope simply could not be adequately addressed by the cold, impersonal institutions, and ideologically driven death-cult of secular materialism. The human heart desires meaning, beauty, love and compassion. Secular materialism, instead, could only offer conflict, meaninglessness, irrationalism, mediocrity, hopelessness and fear. Consequently, we are now witnessing an increasing worldwide reaction against all forms of Western materialism, both Marxist and capitalist. America, as we have seen, has been far from immune to this rather dramatic global shift.
Some might argue that it is still somewhat premature to proclaim the advent of a new religious era for humanity. However, the data reveals that there is currently a definite, dramatic and undeniable global shift away from institutions and philosophies that have urged the abandonment of the human spirit and the transcendent. Additionally, the ongoing rediscovery of humankind’s many unique spiritual traditions reveal to all impartial observers that we are experiencing nothing less than the beginning of a Post-Secular Age. It is quite apparent that those scholars who had predicted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — and in many cases, eagerly looked forward to — the death of religion were exceedingly mistaken. Rather than being on the verge of extinction, as we begin the twenty-first century, the natural, positive and healthy phenomenon of human religious expression seems to have been rekindled anew.
Instantiating Natural Law in the Social-Political Arena
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)[21]
The ideologies of the twentieth century have all failed us. On the Left of the political spectrum, liberalism, socialism, Communism and anarchism have all failed to deliver on the utopian paradise on Earth that they all claimed they could create. On the Right, conservatism, fascism and capitalism have all failed in their attempt to recapture the better world that once was. The time has come to put the failed ideologies of the twentieth century behind us. The reality of Dharma is eternal (sanatana). It has served as the spiritual crucible from which the greatness of our past heritage has been born. More, it will serve as the blueprint for a renewed spiritual civilization in our immediate future.
[1] Chanakya Pandit, Sri Chanakya Niti-shastra: The Political Ethics of Chanakya Pandit (Ram Kumar Press, 1981), 1:10.
[2] Most Indo-European historical models postulate the existence of four distinct, and succeedingly degenerating, ages. These correspond to a Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron age.
[3] The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, 1928).
[4] The great Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE), for example, describes the four generally recognized ages in great detail in the first book of his Metamorphosis. Of our current Iron Age, he says, “Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook; Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took...No rights of hospitality remain; The guest, by him who harbor’d him, is slain. The son-in-law pursues the father’s life; the wife her husband murders, he the wife...Faith flies, and piety in exile mourns; And justice, here opprest, to Heav’n returns.”
[5] Indeed, one of the very few positive aspects of Enlightenment-era intellectual speculation was its antecedent dependency on the previous pagan revivalism of the Renaissance era. Rather than bringing the renewed appreciation of ancient Greco-Roman (i.e., European pre-Abrahamic) civilization to its ultimate cultural denouement by restoring an Imperium Paganum, however, the “Enlightenment”-era philosophes derailed European history entirely by following a road paved with atheism, skepticism, utopianism and a betrayal of the pre-Christian European tradition, thus betraying the promise of a much-needed Natural Law transilience.
[6] Indeed, Maximilien Robespierre, one of the chief leaders of the French Revolution, himself stated in his speech to the National Convention (February 5, 1794): “If the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.” Robespierre was himself, most illustratively, beheaded in the name of the very revolution he was instrumental in instigating a mere five months after making this rabid pronouncement.
[7] One of the earliest refutations of the dogmas of the French Revolution was Theorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (3 vols., 1796), by Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald (1754–1840).
[8] A Dharma philosopher would have asked the more conspicuously philosophical question of whether or not mere pleasure alone should be the highest aspiration of man, and would not merely have settled for substituting an empirically verifiable set of desiderative behavioral activities for a genuine attempt at actual philosophical analysis! For the Utilitarians, the question of what constituted the scope of ethics settled lazily upon a preliminary empirical understanding of the psychology and behavior of the masses, rather than delving deeper into the actual philosophical justification for such mass behavior. A true philosopher never merely settles upon a given behavior as being a self-justified good merely by the weight of its own existence. A true philosopher logically critiques the foundational ethical basis of such behavior, a project the Utilitarians obviously did not feel themselves inclined toward conducting.
[9] This cabal consists of individuals who are essentially powerful criminals of high intelligence. Such demonic psychopaths (known as asuras in Sanskri
t) often gravitate toward international banking, the media, or politics. For purely self-serving reasons, they often pose as liberally-minded humanitarians. In actuality, however, they are thoroughly without conscience, feel no empathy or sense of commonality with other human beings, and are ruthless and cruel in their behavior. Being a demonic psychopath is an inheritable psychological disorder. Subconsciously, such demonic psychopaths seek to elevate themselves to unbridled power by destroying the very societies that they find themselves living in. These two contradictory instincts are what make the demonic psychopaths the greatest internal threat that any society faces.
[10] C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), p. 109.
[11] He said this in a lecture that I attended at Loyola University in 1993, and which was broadcast on National Public Radio in 1996.
[12] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 95.
[13] The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
[14] Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963). Please also refer to Gabriel Vahanian’s book The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York: G. Braziller, 1961), from whence such theologians appropriated the term “God is Dead” as a general title for their movement.
[15] The October 1965 issue of Time Magazine infamously celebrated this specious phenomenon known as the “God is Dead” movement on its front cover by focusing on a negligible number of crypto-atheist, Christian academics who were convinced that religion had run its course. The originator of the phrase “God is dead” was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). It appears in section 108 of his book, The Gay Science.
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