Living in a future 'After God'

Most readers of OnlySky may be unfamiliar with the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and the American theologian David Bentley Hart. That is unfortunate, because Sloterdijk is the preeminent secular thinker in the world today. His collection of essays, published in English in 2020 as After God, teaches us a great deal about the perils and pitfalls of secular life.

Meanwhile, Hart is a great liberal Protestant voice of anti-Christian nationalism who reviewed After God in Commonweal magazine in 2021, in an essay entitled “No Turning Back.” Hart’s reflections not only clarify Sloterdijk’s thought for us, but offer a window on the future of Christianity.

Western culture is post-God

Sloterdijk and Hart agree that we Americans, the West as a whole and ultimately humankind, live in a period that is “after God.” That is, we live in a time in which older religious assumptions no longer work for most people. In coming to this conclusion, neither thinker is looking at the ups and downs of attendance at religious institutions, or the prevalence of religious practices in any particular cultures. Rather, they are looking at the power of religious traditions to lead humanity into the future. They believe that power is lacking.

Hart describes Sloterdijk as a celebrity philosopher in a European context. In Europe, unlike America, the phenomenon of the celebrity philosopher is still a possibility. Sloterdijk is widely considered the heir of Martin Heidegger, the dominant Western thinker of the late 20th century, not in the sense that he agrees with Heidegger, nor that he shares any of the taint of Heidegger’s association with Nazism, but in having absorbed Heidegger’s thought so deeply that he can think beyond Heidegger in a way no one else can do.

Sloterdijk’s style is intentionally outrageous and obscure and often very funny. Hart calls him a clown, but a very serious philosopher at the same time. The important thing to remember is that Sloterdijk is secular. Hart writes that Sloterdijk is “incapable of religious belief,” regarding such belief as “a culturally and psychologically exhausted possibility.” Sloterdijk is thus one of us, though one we may find hard to take.

In contrast, Hart is a very committed and genuine Chistian. Ironically, however, in some ways Hart is easier for a secularist to read, because of his rigorous rejection of Trump, the MAGA movement, all forms of hierarchical oppression, including capitalism run amok, and his vision of egalitarian Christian life. Hart is the kind of Protestant thinker who, in the 1950s, would have been regularly invited to the White House. Now, he is probably too far left politically to be invited by any president today.

The conclusions of these two thinkers concerning our current context, which Hart calls “the cultural and historical situation of modern humanity,” are expressed in the titles of both Sloterdijk’s book and Hart’s review. For Sloterdijk, modern humanity lives after God. Whatever anybody’s personal religious beliefs may be, secular assumptions form the current boundaries of political, social, and economic possibility. Hart assents to this description of our current situation, calling it “an evident fact of history.” That is why Hart agrees that there is “No Turning Back” to some imagined golden age of greater Christian influence. As Hart puts it, “innocence yields to disenchantment, and disenchantment cannot revert to innocence.”

How to live a flourishing life after God

But neither thinker regards our current situation as positive. As Hart observes, “there is nothing triumphalist” about Sloterdijk’s atheism, which is critical of the Enlightenment’s slide into “metaphysical nihilism” and a humanism that is anthropocentric, egoistic and oblivious to “the mystery of the world.” For some reason, the English translation omitted Sloterdijk’s subtitle, which I am told could be translated as “Attempts of Belief and Unbelief.” In other words, no one has yet figured how to live a flourishing human life after God.

In terms of Hart, the end of what he calls “Christendom”—that marriage of religion and empire, first in Europe and then America—is a religious advance. But it came at the price of the Death of God, which meant that the “transcendent horizon of meaning and hope” disappeared and with it any “transcendent index of values” that would allow us to adjudicate peacefully our different visions of the good. The Death of God is the cause of the endless conflicts in public life.

The fundamental problem that Hart identifies is that Sloterdijk describes the current secular worldview as regarding the proper essence of human beings as “self-creating subjects” seeking “absolute rational autonomy, inhabiting a world that exists for us only as an object to be exploited by our will to power.” This description is not consistent with authentic and sustainable human life. This vision of what human life should be is bound to lead to isolation, alienation and, ultimately, forms of violence.

The nature of human dependency

In his earlier trilogy, Spheres, Sloterdijk identifies the human quest as the recovery of protected life in the womb, followed by maternal embrace and then hopefully what Hart calls “countless other sheltered clearings in the darkness of being.” Humans are not proud and independent beings. It is healthier to think of us as frightened children seeking safety and solace. Hart regards Sloterdijk’s insight as “a powerful moral intuition regarding the nature of human dependency.” It is not, as Freudians might see it, an infantile fantasy, but a deep and enduring human need.

Sloterdijk’s prescription for us is to seek new forms of human solidarity that would provide “co-immunity” against the pathogens of modern life. For millennia, forms of such co-immunity were fostered by the great religious traditions. Those traditions, over time, evolved into the high vantage point of various forms of “the one”—known in Christianity as “God Most High.” Hart regards their shattering as inevitable. But what are we left with?

For many secularists, we are left with the construction of our own beliefs—we say that humans make their own meaning. Sloterdijk is disdainful of this project, which he identifies with William James’ “will to believe,” though he is impressed with James himself. Hart neatly summarizes Sloterdijk’s rejection of this “post-religious, thoroughly Americanized religion-as-vitamin supplement” that includes secular beliefs as well.

But Hart also warns against the religious reaction to modernity, with its “fideistic fanaticisms and reactionary dogmatisms” that only mask the absence of “a living faith.” Hart observes that modern humanity has “found no true sphere of social co-immunity adequate to our era of globalized 'hyper-polities' and ecological crisis.”

Hart sums up Sloterdijk’s vision of what is needed as “a new sphere of solidarity”

that can encompass all life, a shelter strong enough to create a robust co-immunity for the defenseless whole: global society, animal and vegetal life, nature, the earth itself…a new piety devoted to, and sustained by, the oneness of the earth that we inhabit, share, and depend on.

This new vision cannot abandon the lessons of modernity, both of science and individual liberty. But those lessons must be deepened. Unfortunately, Sloterdijk sets forth no clear and easy path for getting there. That is our task.

As for Hart, while there is no turning back, “history is always also a realm of radical novelties.” Christianity will not again dominate. But the event of the Gospel may always allow for “new expressions of the love it is supposed to proclaim to the world.”

While readers of OnlySky may balk at that religious hope, we can agree with Hart that history is not fixed. We are not fated to live forever in the current empty space of After God. Something new and wonderful may yet await.