Diffused Religiosity – how do sects react to this phenomenon in the first world?

S.E. Prof. Julian Porteous, Sydney (Australia)

The drama of atheism was lived out in the twentieth century, although its root extends back into the centuries before. Bishop Walter Kasper notes that "atheism in the proper sense, which denies everything divine, became possible only in the modern age. It presupposes Christianity and to that extent is a post-Christian phenomenon. The biblical faith in creation had broken with the numinous conception of the world that was current in antiquity and had effected a dehumanisation of reality by distinguishing clearly and unambiguously between God the creator and the world as his creation."

Once Nietzsche’s mantra that God is dead was embraced and lived existentially in the first world, a paradigm shift in culture occurred. Gaudium et Spes noted the essential shift: "When God is forgotten, however, the creature itself grows unintelligible" (n. 36). The first world experienced a haemorrhage of meaning to life itself. The communion of civilisation built on Christian structures is fragmented. The Tower of Babel is experienced once again. This is experienced particularly strongly by the young. The Christian culture of life is being replaced with a morbid culture of self(fulfilment). This culture gives rise to the incapacity to donate oneself to the other and so the person experiences to be alone, and through this, alienation. Yet the truth remains that we are creature and so have a natural orientation towards the Creator. "Nature abhors a vacuum" and so the first world, especially the young, are searching for the meaning to life and are searching for communion with others and with the Divine.

It is into this restlessness, the same restlessness that sent St Augustine on his search for the meaning to his life, that the sects tap into. The post-Christian culture of the first world has left a suspicion, if not hostility towards the Church. The sects offer an experience of the numinous and of ‘belonging’ but without perceived atrophied established structures or organisation, without ‘Church.’

If Creator and world are not distinct then all means are permissible to arrive at the experience of the numinous for one’s own self-fulfilment. Hence as the document Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life notes the sects, in as much as they fall under the umbrella of New Age draw from many traditions, from ancient Egyptian occult practices to contemporary practice of Zen Buddhism and Yoga (cf. 2.1).

The sects offer to answer the most basic, primordial desires of the post-Christian man and woman. They offer a return to paganism. The clear, life giving water of Jesus Christ is held suspect and people willingly drink from the muddied waters of the sects.

The Church can engage with people in their searching for true life: to present to them the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the bearer of the Water of Life and an invitation to meet Jesus Christ "will carry more weight if it is made by someone who has clearly been profoundly affected by his or her own encounter with Jesus, because it is made not by someone who has simply heard about him, but by someone who can be sure that he really is the saviour of the world" (Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life no. 5).