So in hindsight, I most certainly did have a religion. When I thought I had none, I had one. A religion is defined by your actions, not your words. Although I thought I was a member of something called “no religion,” it was actually secular humanism. But this is not surprising because the entire public school system was geared toward the religion of humanism and actively steered American children toward it throughout the 1980s and 1990s. What’s strange is that we banned “God” from public schools because it was a religion. But we brought in humanism which is a religion. This religion is one that pretends that it isn’t a religion. The Supreme Court even named it as a religion in 1961 (Torcasso v. Watkins), which is just stating the obvious. There were even humanist churches that sprang up and withered away. Few object to humanism being taught in schools because we pretend it’s not a religion, but it has a manifesto with fifteen principles that sound a lot like commandments that defines the origin of the universe as it’s first item of business.

FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

This is literally the direct inversion of the three major world religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. If you start with this premise, your worldview flips completely to a pre-Christian, pre-Hebrew mindset. I spent many hours yammering about this in the About Uranus series. If you remove God as the first cause of the universe, who created the universe “out of nothing” (ex nihilo), then you have a lot of explaining to do. In fact, if you start with this first point of humanist manifesto, you are already in the pagan world of Zeus, you just use different terms for it.

The idea of a creator God never came up in public school. In a subtle way, the tenets of humanism are stamped on every American child. Unsurprisingly, I learned much later, after soaking in the bath of this humanist water for some thirty years, that one of the signers of this declaration of independence from religion, this humanist manifesto, was none other than the founder of modern public schools, John Dewey. Like Freud, the father of psychology, Dewey hated religion. Both of these founders saw their purpose as replacing religion with something else.

From the book Atheism for Dummies, Dewey is a described as a kind of hero for doing a bait-and-switch on religion:

Few people can claim a greater influence on American culture than the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up.

Dewey was also a key figure in the rebirth of modern humanism. But his approach was controversial, even among humanists — partly because he wanted to keep using the word God, even though he didn’t believe such a being existed.

Today we are living in a period of time where everyone is scratching their head and wondering why our world and nation is slipping into disarray. The fragility of nations and institutions is being felt across domains. Once you get out of the tub that you have been soaking in and look at the water, it’s no longer confusing to see what has happened. The water is filthy. A billion people are soaking in that tub and not realizing how soggy they’ve become. They can’t understand why they feel like dirty dishwater. They wonder how they can be in a tub and yet not feel clean. We don’t feel clean because we are living a lie.

Thus we have the “strange rites” that occupy so much of our modern life, particularly in sports, entertainment, health, fitness, technology. To quote the blurb from Tara Isabella’s book on this subject, Americans are “embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures -- from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right.”

It’s all a substitute for God. All of it. For me it was the pursuit of experiences. Alcohol, woodworking, triathlons, sports, skydiving, military service, career - you name it, I probably tried it. A quote from Joshua Mitchell sums up the state of this constant seeking of meaning through the self:

Homo sapiens is devolving into Selfie Man; and it is therefore to the manner of his falling into illness that we must attend, and to his experience of illness that we must appeal. I cannot prove it, but I suspect this is the path Selfie Man must take to recover an understanding of human nature. The Prodigal Son returns home only after he realizes the husks of corn on which he has been feasting nourish him not (Luke 15:11–32).

The story of our times is one of spiritual crisis, because not only has the word God become taboo, but most people who say the word don’t truly believe in it. How can I be so bold? We need to merely look at where the faithful spend their time. Drive by any gym or baseball field on a Sunday morning, or simply look at how empty the churches are. Their pajama shirts say “Faith” or “Jesus and coffee” and then they turn on Netflix and blithely violate the third Commandment to keep the Lord’s day holy.

How can these faithful be so bold? Easily. It’s because we don’t really believe in the idea of “sacred”. They have been programmed. When nothing is sacred, everything is sacred. When everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. This is why we can believe that laying on a couch and thinking about God for a split second is as good as going to church and spending one hour with God. This is the great flattening that has occurred.

This bait-and-switch that occurred is exactly as Dewey wanted. We say “God” but smirk inside. The pioneers of America who lacked internal combustion engines and lacked Netflix and youth sports, somehow found the energy to saddle up or walk to church. The test of our time - a test that appears to have been failed - is that we have incredible ease in getting to church, yet we choose not to.

The number one reason people hate Christianity today is because of hypocritical Christians. And so do I. What a scandal it is to see a believer who speaks the language of devotion and piety but whose actions suggest otherwise. This is why people roll their eyes at Catholics that sin on Saturday night and go to confession on Sunday morning (actually, few Catholics go to confession now, and therefore should not even be receiving the Eucharist, but that’s for another episode).

The hypocrisy scandalizes and drives people away. We all hate a hypocrite.

So did Jesus.

The problem is that we are all hypocrites, no matter how holy, perceived or otherwise. The hypocrites once drove me away, but I will never let that happen again. Why? Because I’m one of them. And as I frequently like to quote: “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints.” The church and its doctrine and sacraments and liturgy provide the path to remembering this. If I am confused about this, then righteousness or despair will begin to seep into my thoughts and action, and that is precisely when I’ve fallen into the trap, where God is on my lips, but not in my heart.

This was the goal of John Dewey. To keep God in our mouth, but not in our heart. Once you awaken to this fact, you can get out of the soggy tub and pull the plug to let the dirt drain away. Then you can take action, and get God out of storage once and for all.

The great achievement of Dewey and the humanists is the flattening of the sacred. They managed to make all things the same, to make all things sacred, and therefore making nothing sacred. This is the outcome of Unitarianism, which places all religions into the same the psychological basket. There is nothing set apart, nothing sacred, yet we still have the word God on our lips, just as Dewey wanted. And then you live in no-man’s-land, the wasteland of T.S. Eliot, because you are saying the word God but living like a humanist. You speak as if you have ultimate meaning, but you don’t live it out - hence the emptiness of our modern age. You must make your own meaning then, and this manifests out in a thousand ways, and all of them are dead ends. What is lost with God is ultimate meaning, and the vacuum is felt, the void, the onslaught of meaninglessness that drives the pursuit of self-destruction and self-salvation. Why? Because if we cannot find meaning we must either escape the problem or solve the problem. You can go toward nihilism like the French philosophers or you can go toward the will-to-power like the German philosophers. A third option, compliments of Karl Marx, is that you get to become the savior of the world. In all three of these outcomes, you can still say the word “God” and the word can mean absolutely nothing to you while you speak it. That’s the state we are in today. God is everywhere in our speech and nowhere in our actions. By design, most of us live out lives that have nothing to do with Christ. Only when we come close to the edge of a cliff and look down do we look up.

With God put into storage, we will go dust the idea off when feeling nostalgic or lost. When we are in a period of adjustment, between pursuits, we will look to God. But the moment a new distraction or experience or partner or job arrives, God goes back into storage. We only want God when we recognize the need for a real savior. We only want Jesus on the cross when we need forgiveness. Christ is treated like a 401K fund, where we look at the cross like a number of dollars that will save us in our old age, after we are done sinning. The penitent thief on the cross, who is promised entrance to paradise, is our secret wish for ourselves. It’s the get-out-of-jail free card on our death bed, and the card that allows us to live as we wish today, so that we can ignore everything Christ said before that moment on the cross. Most interesting, however, is that I hear self-professed Christians saying, “That doesn’t sit well with me,” regarding the penitent thief’s late change of heart in Luke 22. In reality, those of us with the name of God on our lips but whose actions lack follow-through should be begging and hoping that the salvation of the “Good Thief,” St. Dismas, will be a possibility for us, too. We rack and stack up mortal sin after mortal sin and ignore the sacrament of Confession, and at the same time cast our eyes down at others for their sins. We should be lucky if the same mercy is shown for our own hypocrisy that we ignore.

Any encroachment of traditional religion into the public sphere bothered me. I was wary of any form of Christianity creeping back into my life. In my mind, I thought, “Christians just can’t leave anything alone. They just have to shove it down our throats at every opportunity.” I felt like the Grateful Dead’s song Truckin’, where Jerry Garcia sings about getting busted on Bourbon Street, ratted out by nosey do-gooders who called the police: “They just can’t let you be.” The irony is how the flip has happened, where modernism is shoved down our throats. The old religion of hearing a one-hour Sunday message (plus maybe an hour on Wednesday nights) stood no chance against the full blast 40 hours a week of public schools preaching mainline humanism. We have been indoctrinated, without a doubt. We have been indoctrinated to modernism.

If you want to be free, you have to take the first step in opposition of the current. The new rebel is not the person that embraces sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It’s the person who embraces chastity, temperance, and silence. The new rebel is the one who un-moderns himself. I suspect as the result of a century of humanist education comes to an end, the next Abraham will be called out of California, the next St. Anthony of Egypt will find his way to the desert, and a new St. Benedict will find his way to a cave, and we will rediscover all that has been lost and lied about. This is the way it happens. It always has happened this way. The world tries to crush God, to remove him from all public spaces, and God seems to go away, and then he returns. Jesus also went to the desert. He also went to a tomb. But he returned. He is returned now. He is as alive as ever, and will once again be the healer that we are looking for.

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