Is God Being Resurrected?

Dispatches from Deena Stryker

Ten years ago, no one in the West would have seriously questioned the future of secularism. But apparently, that situation represented the apex of an arc leading from roughly the nineteen-twenties. During that short century, belief in God declined while sexual freedom rose to unquestioned supremacy, its only detractors being ‘old-fashioned’ religious types blind to the values of individual freedom and flowering. 

Other cultures down through time have honored the body and its appetites, but they did so without falling prey to the exigencies of money. In the United States, even before the advent of the cyber world, advertising powerfully influenced attitudes toward sex. While Freud helped men accept that women should have orgasms, Madison Avenue convinced women to purchase all sorts of products so orgasms would happen, transforming the female body into a symbol for every kind of achievement.

From there it was but a small step for homosexuals to come out of the closet, just as AIDS began to threaten the lives of its male practitioners. It’s probably fair to say that the desperately colorful campaigns demanding that the dreadful illness be acknowledged and that science find a cure, heralded a much more expansive attitude toward sex. The pink bonnets who demonstrated after the election of Donald Trump were demanding continued access to abortions, the shattering of the glass ceiling in business and politics, and access to gender-related bathrooms for the LGBT community.

For a US religious right that rejected this entire project, the Trump campaign was a shot in the arm, but while all news is local, processes are more roundabout. In Europe, the left campaigned to force Muslim women to uncover themselves on beaches in order to conform to the local culture, while the New Right found an unexpected ally in the Russian President in their conviction that ‘multiculturalism’ cannot work, and that it is not too late for a revival of separate but equal religions across the globe to include the West, a development that can only hearten America’s religious right.

A recent Times article titled Moscow Cozies up to the Right, could have just as aptly been titled The US Right Cozies up to Moscow, since it reveals the American religious right’s admiration for Vladimir Putin. Its expectation of Armageddon and resulting support for Israel, could conceivably be replaced by support for Russia as the leader of a world-wide reaction against religion-trashing modernity.

In the nineteen-sixties, growing alienation had spawned an American ‘counter-culture’, that tried to turn the so-called ‘developed’ world toward recognition of the ancient wisdom that persisted in its ‘backwaters’. Inevitably, their efforts failed: the West doubled down on sex as commodity — very different from the counter-culture’s spontaneous hedonism which at its best is a form of communication.

Russian policies in support of the family are accompanied by legislation against homosexual propaganda aimed at minors (although not, as is commonly reported in the US, against homosexuality itself), and Vladimir Putin’s attitude toward religion differs from the American religious right in another way. While encouraging Russians to re-embrace their Orthodox Christian tradition, like the European New Right, he unequivocally supports every faith, seeing religion as a bulwark against the “degeneracy of the West”, and believing that the failure of multiculturalism will ultimately foster a flowering of separate but equal religions across the globe.

While secularism, backed by science, is an attractive way for the mind to view the world, when the body and its appetites are subjected to commercial and political goals, mind and spirit are degraded. God as a white-bearded man on a heavenly throne is not coming back, but the notion of sacredness is. In my book A Taoist Politics I argue that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as encompassing the entire living world is, if we are to save the planet. A retreat from modernity’s sterile ‘anything goes’ brings morality back to both individuals and the polity — perhaps even allowing the developing world to hold on to its Gods. 

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