We can impoverish ourselves and rend our garments in pursuit of environmental, racial, moral, or medical purity. But “the gifts and sacrifices being offered are not able to clear the conscience of the worshipper” (Hebrews 9). There is and has only ever been one God who can do that.
Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, G.K. Chesterton predicted the fate of a godless empire: “Once abolish the God, and the government becomes God,” he wrote. Close off the avenues of public piety, and people will cast about for some all-consuming secular ritual to make them pure. Naturally, they will intuit that any plausible surrogate god must have money, power, and the allegiance of millions. So when the hungry sheep look up, they look to the state.
America is in this exact position. “Americans have not lost their religion,” writes Georgetown University Professor Joshua Mitchell in American Awakening: “Americans have relocated their religion to the realm of politics.” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer faced some criticism when she lit a prayer candle in adoration of Stacey Abrams, who helped get out the Democratic vote in Georgia’s Senate race. But Whitmer was only expressing the spirit of the age.
The summer before, private citizens and politicians alike “took the knee” in an act of ritual genuflection to George Floyd and the BLM protests inspired by his death. Golden busts of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Representative John Lewis were erected in New York’s Union Square that fall, after statues of traditional heroes had been desecrated and defaced for months. All over America and the West, new idols arose to demand fealty.
None of this has changed. But it has accelerated. It is amazing how quickly the old gods are now forgotten and new ones erected in their place. As each liturgy in turn proves ineffectual, the congregation reaches for a new set of symbols and sacraments.