Yesterday I wrote about Folk - about belonging, assimilation and what happens to a society that stops knowing who and what it is.
I ended by saying that it is not irrelevant what people in a folk believe - and that Man's need for belief is not accidental. It is a structural feature of man himself, to which all are subject.
I will try to unfold that today.
If you haven't read the first post, it's worth doing first - or after. The story continues in one post a day for the rest of the week.
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Everyone believes.
Not some. Not the religious. Not the naive.
Everyone.
It is not a question of whether one believes - it is only a question of what one believes in. And whether one has chosen it consciously, or just picked it up along the way through life without noticing. Like dust that settles. Like habits that become convictions. Like convictions that become reality.
Some arrange their belief according to patterns and an order given by something greater than themselves. Whether it is a divine intelligence or the sum of hundreds of generations' wisdom, experience and blood. An order that has been tested against reality again and again - and has survived. Not because it was comfortable. But because it was true.
Others piece it together themselves. From what they encounter, what they read, what they feel and what they happen to discover along their way. It is not necessarily wrong. But it is often quite fragile. For it rests on one person's limited experience - and nothing is harder than seeing one's own blind spots.
Both are believers.
One just knows and acknowledges it.
In the postwar period, an idea really took hold in Western Europe - an idea that had gained hearing since the Enlightenment slowly killed the sacred, and which Nietzsche sorrowfully noted in writing - that God was dead. It led to the infantile conclusion that religion was dangerous, established solely as a means to power and control, was stupefying and made one blind.
Yet it was not entirely wrong. One had seen what both corrupted institutions and national-religious fanaticism could lead to. And a reckoning was necessary.
But we did not stop at the reckoning.
Religion was not just criticised. It was ridiculed. Reduced to nursery talk. To something primitive people needed, and enlightened people had moved beyond. Unless it was something distant and exotic from the east - something soft, pacifying and harmless - that one could use to build a spiritual identity without obligation and without demands.
It was permitted to meditate. Not to worship.
And that movement de-Christianised Europe. Imperceptibly. Slowly. Over generations.
It did not stop at empty church pews. It went deeper than that. Much deeper. It went right into the understanding of interiority. Of the sacred. Of what it even means to stand before something greater than oneself and feel one's own limitation. That experience - which every great religion in the world has built its most important practices around - became incomprehensible. Embarrassing. Suspect.
And in the same moment we were taught that we were therefore superior to a thousand generations before us. Almost a new kind of human - finally cleansed of superstition, finally free, finally adult.
It was the lie that sounded like liberation.
For a brief while, however, it seemed to work.
For the part that was true was the part that aligns with something central in Jesus's teaching.
Before Jesus, religion was largely a collective and hierarchical matter. The priests stood between man and God. The law was external - an order from without, to be observed, and which others could measure you by. It created a culture where piety easily became public performance. And where the most God-fearing was always the one pointing fingers at others. An arrangement we still see in other faith traditions.
Jesus turned it around - and that is among the things that make Christianity particular.
He made it impossible to live up to the law - and removed the idea that piety or observance of the Law has any influence on salvation.
Thereby he made it almost impossible to use faith as a weapon against others - because he consistently turned accusation inward. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Take the beam out of your own eye before you see the splinter in your brother's. It is not the one who says Lord Lord who enters - it is the one who does the Father's will.
Faith became personal. Non-delegable. Something between the individual person and God - which no priest, no institution and no human authority could fully stand between.
It did not free us from the Law and the Order we are born into - the moral reality did not disappear. But it freed us from using it as a weapon. From making piety a competition. From telling others they were not good enough - while oneself got away without.
It was a real and deep liberation. And worth receiving. It still is.
But just as with nationalism, we did not stop there.
We continued and out over the edge. Into the open. Into dissolution. And for each generation that grew up without root, without ritual, without a living connection to something greater than themselves - the distance grew. Until we finally forgot, not just what we believed in - but that we were believing beings at all. That the urge for meaning, direction, belonging and transcendence is not a weakness that can be educated away. It is the architecture of the soul. Man's structure. It is what we are built from.
For the sacred does not disappear.
It is displaced.
The sacred is what every person in every culture lifts up above the ordinary and surrounds with awe and obligation. What one does not question. What one sacrifices for without being asked twice. What one builds one's life and choices around - consciously or unconsciously.
Remove God - and man finds something else to worship.
One sees it everywhere today. Status and recognition as life's true currency. The body as temple and project. Consumption as identity. Political belonging as tribal fellowship with its own dogmas, its own saints and its own heretics. Therapeutic self-realisation as salvation narrative - where it is no longer about becoming good, but about becoming whole. And communities built around feeling and identity, demanding the same absolute loyalty any religion ever has.
The modern person does not call it worship.
But the structure is the same. The need is the same. And the consequences - when what is worshipped cannot bear the weight - are the same.
Slowly eroded the strong faith that had raised cathedrals, founded universities, formulated human rights and built Europe out of the dust after each and every collapse. And the void it left was not allowed to remain empty very long. That kind never does.
Soon people with a differently and more strongly arranged faith laid eyes on all the value and beauty we had built - all that which we ourselves no longer understood where it came from. And they saw something we could no longer see ourselves.
They saw how weak we had become.
Spiritually defenceless. Civilisationally split. In full dissolution from within. No governing principle. No common order to gather around. No story of who we are and where we are going. Just consumption. Meaninglessness. And desire to fill the short time a human life takes - before the darkness comes.
The reverse is true for people who know what they believe in - and why. People who think civilisationally and intergenerationally - meaning people who understand they are links in a chain stretching backward into the past and forward into the future - they do not experience our condition as natural development.
They experience it as weakness.
A weakness that must either be corrected. Smoothed out. Or taken over.
And they are in no hurry. For they know that history belongs to those who still believe in something - when everyone else has stopped.
Despite the disappearance of living faith in Western Europe - and although Man here no longer quite knows what it means or why it was once good - everything that has been built still stands on the same foundation.
The particular combination of Christianity, Greek philosophy and Roman law.
And it is not therefore accidental that it is precisely here - in this foundation - that new and strong faiths collide with the arrangement. It does not happen (only) because they seek conflict. But because they are arranged according to another order. Another understanding of man, of law, of the state, of family, of man and woman, of the relationship between God and world.
We stand at the moment with two antagonistically arranged - meaning, oppositely directed - world understandings that cannot readily be reconciled - no matter how much we wish it, and no matter how many peaceful and well-meaning people find themselves on both sides.
And that brings us to what really should never have been controversial to say -
Faith is not a private matter without consequences for the community.
It never has been. It is only an idea modernity has been able to afford to play with - because it lived on the inheritance from a time when everyone already believed in roughly the same thing.
That play is ending. For Faith is the scaffolding culture and society are built over. It shapes what one experiences as right and wrong. What one owes each other and what one owes no one. What one is willing to sacrifice - and for whom. What one thinks the state is for. What one thinks family is. What one thinks man and woman are. What the meaning of it all is - and whether there is a meaning at all.
Cultures that know what they believe in are stronger than cultures that have forgotten it.
UAE understands this. Islam understands this. It is not accidental that the central pillars in their self-understanding cannot be compromised - it is a conscious and considered architectural decision. It creates a coherence, a direction and a strength that is difficult to withstand - particularly for a culture that no longer knows who it itself is.
And we no longer know.
We have forgotten what we believed in. Forgotten why it was good. Forgotten what it cost to build it. And forgotten what happens to a folk that loses its story about itself.
But the foundation is still there. Under all the noise. Under the dissolution. Under the surrogates and the emptiness and the thousand things we have tried to fill the hole with.
It still bears. And that means it is not too late.
But it requires that we dare to ask - not what we should believe in going forward - but what we actually always have believed in. What was there before we forgot it. What built it all.
Before others decide it for us.
Whether it is the godless technocracy - or foreign civilisations with another and stronger faith.
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Tomorrow I write about what we actually believed in.
Not as abstraction. But concretely - what was particular about that combination of Christianity, Greek philosophy and Roman law that built Western civilisation. Why it was good. What it gave man, as nothing else has given it in the same way.
And where the irreconcilability arises - when a differently arranged civilisational faith meets this foundation.
Not as enemy image. But as an honest mapping of what is actually at stake.
Good evening
❤️🔥🪽
