The Strange Return of Faith at the End of the World
We are always told we live in a secular society
— and why that’s plain wrong.
The modern world, we’re assured, escaped medieval darkness and marched triumphantly into the Enlightenment by torching throne and altar, king and pope. This world is all there is. Faith, it is asserted, survived as a cultural curiosity — useful for weddings and funerals — not a viable option for serious people in the modern world.
Yet here we stand at the fag-end of modernity, and the question still won’t die: Is faith still possible today?
The Strange Return of Faith at the End of the World We are always told we live in a secular society — and why that’s plain wrong.
1. Great Separations
At first glance, the answer seems bleak. The market, which once operated under the watchful eyes of bishops and theologians, has now entirely severed money from morality. In the medieval world, usury — charging interest on loans — was a sin that could get you dragged before a council: “Lend, hoping for nothing again” (Luke 6:35), said the cleric. Today, lending is rendered entirely respectable; your local banker only appears in court if he’s committed a truly spectacular crime.
“Usury…is a form of theft, the sale of an ‘alien good’ which belongs, rightly, to God.” — St. John Chrysostom
Next: science. For all its brilliance, it moved nature away from Christian symbolism and replaced stories with statistics, myths with mathematics. Where monks once prayed through the night for the world’s well-being, government bureaucrats now toil under fluorescent lights, drafting better policy manuals. Meaning did not finally come down to nature’s created shape but to its mathematical measurability. Our real problems, it is believed, therefore, are not spiritual but technical — the kinds of issues solved with faster Wi-Fi and better foam mattresses.
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Modernity is built upon many such profound separations:
• Church from state.
• Self from society.
• Money from morality.
• People from tradition.
Everything lives in its own private compartment now, and we’re told there is no longer a shared vision of life that binds us together. Modern hubris demythologised the world and dismantled all hierarchies, and in the process conjured its own nemesis: the painful unravelling of family life, community identity, shared values, and common meaning. Faith — the great tradition of symbolic hierarchy — had to be pulled up by its roots.
2. Faith Returns
And yet here comes the surprise ending no secular theorist foresaw: faith is stubbornly surviving.
The “death of God” was supposed to be the final word; instead, belief has proved maddeningly persistent.
I’ve travelled widely across the Western world in recent years — most of all in New Zealand and Australia — and the pattern I see is unmistakable. From Boston to Botany Bay, from Birmingham to Blenheim, people are returning to local communities of faith to find what the modern world, with all its gadgets and gears, all its scientific brilliance, cannot give them.
3. Spiritual Homelessness
For all its achievements, modernity leaves behind a great wound — one that is visible as clearly in our public parks as in our mental health statistics or the number of young adults locked out of home ownership. The modern world has made us all homeless. If not physically, then spiritually.
Spiritual homelessness is the defining disease of late modernity.
It’s mirrored in bodies — especially in the millions of refugees on small boats, the global symbol of our disease of dislocation. Modernity dissolves traditions, identities, and stories faster than we can build new ones. And so we drift.
Our Promethean quest for autonomy has come at the cost of human meaning.
4. Human Nature Returns Too
However, here the secular myth of endless progress encounters an immovable obstacle: human nature. The biblical claim is that we are not autonomous, freestanding creatures of pure will; we are made according to a blueprint — the image of God. And to be the image of God is to need a home, an anchor, a relationship with the One who made us.
We are, fundamentally, symbol-making and story-making creatures. Even cave dwellers painted their walls, turning shelters into sacred spaces. Humans can live with very little, but we cannot live without meaning. Our meanings are mediated by the symbolic worlds we share with others — the stories in which we live and move and have our being.
Religious sociologist Peter L. Berger once wrote, in The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge: “Whatever happens ‘here below’ is but a pale reflection of what takes place ‘up above.’” Our stories are larger than the natural world we inhabit, encompassing the wider cosmic panorama and the doings and activities of those beings higher than ourselves with whom we share a spiritual community — not least of these, God.
So when modernity launched its assault on myth, symbol, and story — reducing truth to what can be measured, weighed, and counted — it bulldozed into oblivion the one kind of home we truly need. Berger called our modern condition “spiritual homelessness”: a loss of the sense that we inhabit an intelligible, connected, meaningful world.
And this — ironically — is why faith is making a comeback.
“Whatever happens ‘here below’ is but a pale reflection of what takes place ‘up above.’”
5. The New Mission
Churches across the West are filling with the most unexpected people. Some come because of dreams or strange spiritual experiences. Others because depression or addiction has left them quietly desperate. Still others because modern life simply feels… empty. All arrive seeking the one thing late modernity cannot manufacture: hope.
Which means the task of the church today is being radically redefined.
A. The Grace of the Foyer
The centre of church life is no longer the nave — it is the foyer: the place where newcomers are welcomed. The true altar of today’s church is the parking-lot conversation, the pre-service café line, the moment someone realises that strangers will become friends.
B. Aliens & Strangers Together
A renewed church recognises itself as a community of the spiritually homeless — “aliens and strangers in the world”. Its mission is not to perform religion but to extend hospitality, grace, and friendship to the unhomed.
C. Awareness & Love
A fresh ecclesial imagination focuses less on programs and more on compassion, presence, and practical care. Berger reported in A Rumour of Angels: “A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, ‘So that the rumour of God may not completely disappear.’”
D. The Message
Preaching must once again become an invitation — not to self-help or motivational therapy, but to table fellowship. To the grace of God made visible in the bodies of the followers of Jesus Christ.
Late modern people don’t need another dopamine hit of therapeutic positivity.
They need a home.
They need meaning.
They need hope.
And that — surprisingly, truly, defiantly — is why faith’s story is not over. It may, in fact, be just beginning again.
— Dr Craig Heilmann
