In 1917, the German sociologist Max Weber delivered a stirring speech at the University of Munich to a hall full of students and faculty. The topic of his address was what it takes to make it in the profession of science; Weber was a stern man and a proud scientist, who believed that only those single-mindedly devoted to the scientific ideal should pursue it. But Weber’s lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” is rarely remembered for its career counseling; rather, what has endured is the account of modern life that framed his advice. “The fate of our times,” Weber famously declared, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’”

Weber’s impassioned remarks about “disenchantment” have become lodestones of sociological lore. But their influence extends far beyond it, animating a broad common feeling about the world. That the modern world is “disenchanted” has become something of a cliché. Yet like most clichés, the truth it points to has been buried beneath layers of misunderstanding.

Weber is known for articulating a tragic account of modernity – the tragedy resides at the intersection of two facts. The first is the supremacy of science and technology in modern institutions. And the second is the deep human need for transcendent moral meaning.

The modern world is shaped by the forces of science and technology. In every domain of our lives – from what we eat and consume to how we travel and work – we rely upon technological expertise. Ours is a society premised upon the domestication of nature for our own instrumental ends; through science and technology we seek mastery of the world. Because of the immense instrumental power unleashed by science, Weber observed, it takes an outsized role in public arguments about what is true or good. Modernity, he noted, institutionalizes a spirit of rational calculation at the expense of substantive values.

The tragedy of modern disenchantment arises, then, from the fact that, for all its instrumental power, science cannot provide the metaphysical or moral succor humans desperately need. Citing Tolstoy, Weber remarks, “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” Here lies the modern predicament: science and technology have given us unprecedented instrumental power yet excised the sources of moral meaning upon which human flourishing depends.

Secularization Theory and Its Weaknesses

In the field of sociology, secularization theory – the account of religion’s decline in the modern world – is profoundly indebted to Weber. In fact, it would not be unfair to say the theory is merely a refinement and expansion of Weber’s Munich address. Secularization theorists view the decline of Christianity in the West as chiefly the result of processes of “disenchantment” – that is, the rising authority of science, the replacement of religious ritual by technology, and the codification of instrumental rationality across modern institutions.

Secularization theory sees science and technology as undermining and displacing Christian belief and practice. A premodern Christian farmer, faced with drought, would pray for rain; now the farmer simply turns on some sprinklers. But I’m skeptical of this account. Belief in ghosts, fairies, and spirits remains widespread in the twenty-first century; ours is far from a rationalist paradise, as Pew surveys make clear. What is more, many Christians – both historically and in the present day – have had little trouble reconciling science and religion. In fact, according to sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, professional scientists around the world routinely combine rigorous scientific practice with personal faith. Science properly understood is silent on the question of moral meaning and so cannot tell us what values or projects to commit to. In this sense, science simply cannot replace religion.

What the Weber story fails to see is that Christianity’s decline derives less from the ascendance of science than from the falling out of fashion of what Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith calls “traditional Christianity.”

When Westerners think of “religion,” we tend to think about churches, priests, pastors, and the like; that is, we associate “religion” with the types of Christianity that have been historically dominant – think mainline Protestantism in the United States, Anglicanism in Britain, Catholicism in France – traditional Christianity. Beginning in the Enlightenment but culminating in the 1960s, traditional Christianity (“religion”) became coded throughout the West as anti-modern, oppressive, and intellectually suspect. For countercultural youth, “religion” represented everything that was wrong with the world. Baby boomers weren’t against religion or spiritual feeling (as the blossoming of the New Age Movement demonstrates), but rather opposed “religion” (again, traditional Christianity). This explains why the real drop in churchgoing begins not in the nineteenth century with the rise of science, but in the 1960s.

In his recently published Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, Smith bolsters this thesis, while deepening it considerably. He contends that the decline of traditional Christianity in America has very little to do with the spread of science. Instead it has a great deal to do with the consolidation of a resolutely anti-Christian culture. On this view, the world we inhabit is less post-religious than post-“religious.” Many moderns – especially the young – have rejected traditional Christianity as a viable route to salvation. They see Christian values and virtues as antiquated and anathema. They reject Christian beliefs and practices, not because they are irrational, but because they are uncool.

But our religious yearnings are not easily shaken off. Weber believed that the religious impulse stems from the fact that humans require frameworks of meaning to motivate us, guide our behavior, and give purpose to our lives. Without these, we experience nothing short of existential terror. When each of us wakes up in the morning, we face the question: What shall I devote myself to? To answer this question, says Weber, is inherently religious, for it presupposes a faith in something that transcends us. Humans require a soteriology – an account of life’s ultimate meaning, a commanding moral framework, a promise of salvation. For Weber, owing to the spread of science in modernity, this need is frustrated for most contemporary people. Yet, again, it does not – cannot – disappear. So what becomes of it?

Taking Weber seriously leads one to the conclusion that disenchantment inevitably spurs re-enchantment. If humans are made to seek salvation, it is unlikely that we will be able to tolerate a “disenchanted” order for very long. No – we will seek salvation in something because, well, that’s just what we do.

This is why secularization theory, for all its insight, is deeply mistaken. The modern world is indeed pervaded by science and technology; rationalization and intellectualization have made inroads into almost every domain of human life – from social policy to our sex lives. Yet, far from being wholly “disenchanted,” the twenty-first century is furiously enchanted – plural sources of salvation are multiplying and competing for our souls. Modernity is less a secular wasteland than an arena of warring gods. There are too many to name, but four contenders stand out: the self, work, politics, and technology.

Seeking After Modernity’s Gods

The first god of modernity is the self. A legacy of the Romantic movement is its preoccupation with immanence, subjectivity, inner feeling, and expressiveness. Contemporary romantics chase pure experience and personal authenticity. Their soteriological end is self-realization. To become one’s “true self” is a principal moral commandment of secular modernity.

The romantic quest for salvation through self-realization is most apparent in the rise of “spiritual but not religious” self-identification. In rejecting “religion,” people who claim to be spiritual nevertheless aim to reject conformity, dogmatism, and collectivism – which they associate (rightly or wrongly) with traditional Christianity. “Spirituality,” on the other hand, is said to be expressive, open-minded, and individual. Not surprisingly, the “spiritual but not religious” cohort has close historical ties to the liberation movements of the 1960s, from feminism to gay liberation. In their own ways, these movements endorsed a shared soteriology of self-realization, laying the groundwork for what philosopher Charles Taylor calls our late modern “culture of authenticity.” To question the sacredness of personal authenticity now constitutes heresy.

Of course, Christians do, and should, care about authenticity. What is more, the sacralization of self has been instrumental to the spread of belief in human rights. But the quest for self-realization has evolved in strange, dark directions in recent years.

On the gnostic left, the ideal of self-realization sees all societal traditions and norms as oppressive and tyrannical, as forcing individuals into boxes at odds with their subjective sense of themselves. This is what leads a striking number of youth to oppose not merely restrictive gender norms, but the mundane belief that sex is binary. From the vantage point of untrammeled self-assertion, the categories of male and female can only be experienced as violent impositions. If societal norms conflict with one’s inner feelings, then the norms must go.

Many moderns reject Christian practices, not because they are irrational, but because they are uncool.

Ironically – and frighteningly – the Nietzschean devotion to raw self-assertion is now finding traction on the political right. The Left’s great mistake was assuming that the sacralization of subjectivity would naturally support progressive ends. Yet, as the popularity of “vitalist” spokespeople like Bronze Age Pervert makes clear, the Left has no monopoly on the soteriology of self-realization. If God and self are one, morality is what you make it. For the radical right, genuine self-realization demands that the strong do what they want, while the weak suffer what they must.

Here we meet another god warring for dominance: work. What gives work its salvific quality stems, in part, from its relationship to wealth. Under modern capitalism, mammon takes on a mystical quality. To be sure, in all ages wealth has been mistaken for a sign of divine blessing. But in highly stratified societies, wealth is both a status symbol and an entry pass to social acceptance. To lack wealth can mean social death. Yet especially for the educated upper-middle classes, work is not valued merely for the prosperity it promises; it’s increasingly looked to as a source of transcendent moral meaning. When surveyed in 2018 about what gives their lives meaning, 48 percent of high-income and college-educated Americans reported that it was their jobs.

While seeing one’s labor as having spiritual value is by no means foreign to Christianity, it would be wrong to interpret these findings merely as a survival of the Protestant ethic. As the writer Derek Thompson notes, the trend in recent years is not viewing one’s career as consonant with one’s religious vocation but rather replacing religion with work – what he calls “workism.” In a similar vein, the Berkeley sociologist Carolyn Chen argues in Work Pray Code that instead of investing their lives in a religious congregation, as was once an American norm, the upper-middle classes increasingly invest themselves in their jobs – to the great detriment of their families, friendships, neighborhoods, and communities.

The romantic quest for salvation through self-realization is most apparent in the rise of the “spiritual but not religious.”

For those who doubt that work serves as a source of salvation, recall that for Weber religion concerns the question: What shall I devote myself to? Ours is a world where the professional-managerial classes desperately pursue redemption through productivity, self-optimization, and ever more achievement: one more line on the CV, one more degree, one more title. The promise of salvation is, one prays, just around the corner. Moreover, in the age of AI, the threat of damnation in the form of unemployment becomes all too real. The modern quest for self-optimization is Sisyphean; optimization presupposes an ultimate end. Optimization for what? To make more money, to produce more, to achieve more. But to what end? The god of work looms like a slavedriver, always present but never satisfied.

Another god that vies for our loyalty is politics. One need only recall the utopian movements that tore through the twentieth century, fueled by a this-worldly desire for salvation: communism on the left, fascism on the right. At the heart of the soteriology of politics is a belief that religious redemption can and should be achieved through political struggle.

The term “wokeness” is generally used pejoratively, and many critics have mocked the phenomenon by analogizing it to religion. But the analogy warrants our consideration. The doyen of antiracism, Ibram X. Kendi, confesses in the opening pages of his 2019 bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, that his zeal for social justice stems directly from his upbringing in the Black church, and the soteriological strivings it cultivated in him. Whatever else one might say about this, it exemplifies perfectly the transference of religious yearnings into political ones – a process that has become commonplace on both the left and right.

In the “enchanted” 1600s, Catholics and Protestants waged war to defend their theological commitments. Today, few millennials or Gen Zers even know the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Yet ask them if they would be willing to date someone of an opposing political tribe and the knives will come out. It is not questions about the nature of God that foment our contemporary “religious wars,” it is questions about gender, race, and immigration.

As politics has risen to become a dominant source of salvation, polarization is the natural outcome. If our soul’s redemption depends upon our having the “right” politics, then political disagreement becomes intolerable. Moreover, political messianism raises the stakes of democracy to unbearable heights. Every election becomes a matter of deliverance or damnation.

There is one final modern god competing for our worship: science. Much of “Science as a Vocation” involves Weber cautioning his fellow scientists against looking to science for what it cannot ultimately deliver – moral meaning. In this way, one can find in Weber a powerful critique of Richard Dawkins’s paeans to the inherent meaningfulness of science. His faults notwithstanding, Weber was admirably consistent; true courage, he argued, demanded that moderns resist “enchanting” science and technology (what amounts to “scientism”).

We have spectacularly failed to heed Weber’s counsel. Ours is not merely a “rationalized” society, it’s shot through with a techno-utopianism that treats science and technology as the lone routes to personal and collective salvation. This techno-utopianism is most apparent in Silicon Valley, where self-appointed priests of technological progress like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen employ their inordinate wealth and power to steamroll us into a future of their making. But it equally lives on in the commonsense assumptions that lead so many to confuse the virtual with the real, to fall spellbound before every new gadget, and to treat technological adoption as an iron law of nature. One of the great follies of secularization theory has been its failure to see that science and technology are invested with immense moral and religious significance, that they serve as the mythic anchors of an Enlightenment narrative of perpetual progress, while animating our near-boundless Promethean grandiosity.

The most paradoxical aspect of the modern deification of technology is that, while it begins as a promise of human emancipation – from scarcity, sickness, and mortality – it ends in dehumanization. The motivation for pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI), our tech overlords readily admit, is to transform humans into gods. What is never mentioned is that achieving this would entail ridding ourselves of everything that makes us truly human, from our frailty and dependence to our capacity to love and die. Thus the god of technology is perhaps the most dangerous of all, for it commands us to betray our very humanity.

Today, few millennials or Gen Zers even know the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Yet ask them if they would be willing to date someone of an opposing political tribe and the knives will come out.

These are a few of the gods that war for our souls in this “disenchanted” age. Of course, as has always been the case, these gods can, and do, find common cause, forging alliances here and there. But like all gods, they are jealous and harbor imperial ambitions; they desire our undivided loyalty.

Christians may read this and think: these are not gods, they are idols. I would not disagree, but Weber’s sociological perspective helps us cast our present condition in a new light and realize how many Christians unknowingly worship at their altars – a fact in no small part responsible for diminishing the moral standing of the church. Either way, when we remove our sociological lenses, we are still faced with, as Weber puts it, “the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’”

There have been murmurings about a Christian revival, about youth flocking back to the churches. What should we make of these claims? As the religious commentator Ryan Burge notes, the claim that there is a religious revival taking place among the young is an extraordinary one, which requires extraordinary evidence to prove. That incontrovertible evidence does not exist, at least yet. Of course, anything is possible, but I agree with Christian Smith that we inhabit a culture that is inimical and alien to that of traditional Christianity. So, while I can absolutely envisage a religious revival taking place, I am not confident it will be Christian in any recognizable sense.

This is not to say genuine Christian piety is nowhere to be found. It is to suggest that to be a committed Christian in the twenty-first century is to be profoundly countercultural. In the world we inhabit today, to live by the gospel requires principled conviction, concerted discipline, and purposeful community. In a sense, the task is much harder than it once was. And this is indeed a sobering thought. Yet it’s worth remembering that Christianity emerged into a world not unlike our own – where jealous gods warred for our attention and loyalty. Thus, in a deeper sense, it is no harder now than it ever was to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.