Daily Archive

  I’m not a religious individual. This series has made that clear enough over time, and I’m not about to reverse course now. But looking out at the current cultural moment, something else is becoming difficult to ignore: within many of our influential cultural and institutional spaces, people are not stepping away from religion into something stronger or more coherent; they are drifting into something thinner, more unstable, and ultimately more corrosive.

Call it cultural relativism, call it critical theory, call it the downstream effects of postmodern deconstruction—it doesn’t much matter which label you prefer. What matters is the shared move underneath it. The older structures that once oriented people toward truth, obligation, and restraint are no longer treated as imperfect guides to be improved upon; they are treated primarily as systems of power to be exposed, delegitimized, and, where possible, dismantled.

That shift does not leave a neutral vacuum.

A society cannot sustain itself on permanent critique, because critique alone does not tell you what to build in its place, nor does it supply the habits of restraint needed to keep that construction from collapsing.”

On a more personal level, it is increasingly common to encounter people who describe their lives almost entirely through the lens of structural disadvantage, even when their circumstances are relatively stable. The framework offers an explanation for frustration, but it also narrows the space for agency, because improvement begins to look less like progress and more like complicity in the very systems being critiqued.

People require some kind of orienting framework, not necessarily a perfect one, but one stable enough to tell them what is worth building, what must be limited, and what ought to endure beyond their immediate preferences. When every structure is interpreted first as an instrument of domination, that framework does not evolve into something better calibrated—it fragments. What follows is not so much liberation as drift, where moral language remains in use but loses its anchor, and where personal identity begins to carry more explanatory weight than shared standards ever could.

Some of this thinking has value in narrow contexts. As a tool for examining institutions, it can reveal blind spots, excesses, and genuine injustices that deserve correction. But once it escapes those boundaries and becomes a general worldview, it scales badly. A society cannot sustain itself on permanent critique, because critique alone does not tell you what to build in its place, nor does it supply the habits of restraint necessary to keep that construction from collapsing under pressure.

The psychological effects are not incidental here. If a person is taught, explicitly or implicitly, that every system they inhabit is stacked against them, and that their standing within that system is best understood through grievance rather than agency, the result is not empowerment in any meaningful sense. It is demoralization dressed up as insight. Over time, that posture makes collective life harder to maintain, not easier, because it erodes the basic trust required for cooperation.

This is where the comparison with religion, uncomfortable as it may be, begins to sharpen.

Religious frameworks, even when metaphysically suspect or internally inconsistent, tend to provide a coherent structure of meaning, obligation, and limitation. They impose costs. They constrain behaviour. They bind individuals into something that extends beyond the self, whether that is a community, a tradition, or a conception of the good that cannot be endlessly revised to suit immediate preference. Those features can be abused, and often have been, but they are not accidental—they are part of what makes such systems socially durable.

It is worth noting that some of the most stable and prosperous societies today are also among the least religious. That observation deserves to be taken seriously. But those societies are not culturally unmoored; they are, in many cases, the beneficiaries of long-standing moral traditions that continue to shape behaviour even as explicit belief declines. The question is not whether a society can function after religion recedes, but how long it can continue to draw on inherited norms once the structures that sustained them are no longer reinforced.

If the practical choice is between a society that retains some shared, if imperfect, moral architecture and one that dissolves that architecture in favour of perpetual deconstruction, I am no longer convinced that the latter is the safer or more enlightened path. That is not because religion is true in any ultimate sense, but because it appears to do something that our current alternatives struggle to replicate at scale. Secular frameworks capable of supplying meaning and restraint do exist. What remains unclear is whether they can achieve the same level of cultural penetration and durability without borrowing from the traditions they seek to replace.

This is not an argument for theocracy. A classically liberal state remains the best framework we have for preserving freedom, dissent, and pluralism across deep differences. But liberalism has never been self-sustaining in the way its defenders sometimes imagine. It has historically relied on inherited norms—habits of restraint, notions of duty, a willingness to subordinate impulse to something more enduring—that it did not generate on its own.

When those supporting structures are steadily stripped away, the system does not immediately collapse, but it does begin to thin out. The language of rights remains, but the culture that made those rights workable starts to erode. At that point, something else will fill the gap, and it is not guaranteed to be gentler, freer, or more rational than what came before.

None of this erases the historical abuses tied to religion. It simply raises the possibility that removing it creates vulnerabilities we have not yet learned to manage.

Religion, for all its flaws, once carried a significant portion of that load.

Remove it, or hollow it out beyond recognition, and the question is no longer whether people will believe in something. It is what they will reach for instead—and whether that replacement will prove more stable than the thing it displaced.