The Devil of Progress: When Consumption Replaced Faith

When we think about the secularization of the West, we tend to look for its causes in ideas: the Enlightenment, science, liberalism, social movements, the decline of religious authority. All of these things matter. But there is something even more concrete that we often forget:

the way we live has changed.

For thousands of years, most Europeans lived in predominantly agricultural and pastoral societies. The family was an economic unit as much as an emotional one. Land meant survival. The community was where people were born, lived, worked, married, and died. Religion was not something practiced only on Sundays. It was woven into everyday life: the calendar, festivals, marriages, funerals, births, moments of fear, and moments of hope.

Then, within just a few generations, everything changed.

People left the countryside and moved to cities. Work moved from farms and family workshops into factories, offices, shops, and eventually the service economy. The family gradually lost many of its economic functions. Local communities became less important. Individuals acquired a degree of freedom their ancestors could hardly have imagined.

And along with that freedom came something new:

mass consumption.

This, I believe, is one of the keys to understanding the contemporary West.

The peasant produced. The industrial worker worked. Modern man increasingly consumes.

This is not a condemnation of supermarkets. I go to them too. The question is much deeper: what happens when consumption stops being merely a means of satisfying our needs and becomes one of the main ways in which we define ourselves?

You only have to walk into a modern shopping mall to get a sense of it.

It is curious. The old temples were places where people went to remind themselves that something existed beyond them. Shopping malls are places where people go to discover how many things they can possibly desire.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, but it says something.

Advertising no longer simply tells us, "You need this product." It tells us that the product can make us more attractive, younger, happier, more desirable, more successful, more free.

It doesn't merely sell objects.

It sells possibilities.

And a society built around possibilities inevitably begins to look suspiciously at limits.

This also helps explain the transformation of social values.

In a traditional agricultural society, people were born into a series of identities they had not chosen: a family, a village, a religion, a social class, a trade, a community. That did not necessarily make them happy. But their identity was deeply connected to something that existed before them.

Modernity broke many of those constraints.

And in many respects, that was a good thing.

Women gained rights that had previously been denied to them. Minorities gained the ability to demand dignity and equality. Millions of people acquired freedoms that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

When we see today's Woke movement challenging patriarchy, we should remember that behind it lie decades—and in some cases centuries—of struggles for women's rights and the rights of minorities.

And when we see a Gay Pride parade, we should not make the mistake of thinking that homosexuality itself was invented by modernity.

It wasn't.

Homosexuality has existed throughout human history.

But the contemporary Gay Pride movement is a product of modernity.

In a traditional agricultural and pastoral society, it would have been essentially inconceivable to see thousands of people marching publicly to assert a sexual identity. Not because homosexual people did not exist, but because the social conditions that make such a phenomenon possible did not exist: large cities, individualism, anonymity, mass communication, modern political organization, individual rights, and a radically different understanding of personal identity.

The world in which we live changed.

And as the world changed, so did the way we understand ourselves.

But there is something else that I find even more interesting.

Capitalism does not necessarily need to destroy a cultural revolution.

It can sell it.

A protest can become an event. An identity can become a market. A political cause can become an advertising campaign. A difference can become a brand.

This does not mean that LGBT rights were created by corporations, any more than feminism was invented by the market.

It means that contemporary capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability:

it can absorb almost anything.

Even things that were originally created in opposition to it.

And this brings us to religion.

Why did the West become secular?

Part of the answer certainly lies in ideas. But another part lies in everyday life.

For centuries, God was present in an enormous number of aspects of human existence. Today, many of the functions once associated with religion have been taken over by other institutions.

Medicine protects us from disease.

The welfare state protects us from poverty.

Schools provide knowledge.

Science explains the physical world.

Technology solves problems.

Entertainment fills our free time.

And the market offers us an astonishing range of things to buy.

And so God can gradually become less necessary.

Not necessarily because someone actively fought against Him.

Simply because He is no longer needed to organize everyday life in the way He once was.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of secularization.

Not the denial of God.

His irrelevance.

This is why I find it difficult to take seriously those theories that explain the religious crisis of the West through black masses, satanic rituals supposedly performed by global elites, Beelzebub, or mysterious Masonic lodges.

We do not need to imagine a global elite gathering in a dark room to understand what happened.

If we want to use the word "devil," I would rather use it as a metaphor.

The devil of the modern world would not need to perform a black mass.

It would only need to convince us that there are no limits to what we should desire.

Its temple would not be a crypt.

It would be a shopping mall.

And its ritual would not be an occult ceremony.

It would be the shopping cart.

We enter. We choose. We desire. We buy.

And tomorrow we desire something else.

It is a religion without God and without transcendence, but it has its own daily rituals: advertising, purchasing, gratification, replacement, desire.

The problem, of course, is not progress itself.

Without progress, we would still be living with diseases we can now treat, widespread illiteracy, high infant mortality, extreme poverty, and countless injustices that humanity has rightly fought to overcome.

The problem begins when progress stops being a tool and becomes a faith.

When we assume that every change is necessarily an improvement.

When we confuse freedom with the absence of all limits.

When consumption becomes the answer to our anxieties.

When family, community, tradition, and even patriotism are perceived merely as outdated obstacles to individual freedom.

And yet, in the end, there is one limit that even the most powerful economic system will never be able to erase.

We can desire everything.

We can buy cars, houses, holidays, clothes, experiences, medicines, technology, comfort. We can build increasingly sophisticated machines and imagine a future in which technology will solve problems that today seem impossible.

But we cannot buy immortality.

And this is precisely where, for those who believe, God might have the last word.

Because we may eventually conquer almost everything that belongs to the material world, but one question remains before which money, markets, and technology all come to a halt:

What happens when our life ends?

Perhaps death is the one limit that the consumer society will never be able to turn into a commodity.

And there is another irony.

In our attempt to consume more and more, we may end up consuming the very world that makes our consumption possible.

Land, water, energy, forests, biodiversity, raw materials: everything has limits. A civilization built on the assumption of virtually unlimited material growth must eventually confront the finite nature of the planet.

We do not know where the breaking point lies, nor whether humanity will actually experience an ecological collapse. But we can imagine the extreme scenario.

A post-apocalyptic society.

Not necessarily a simple return to the Stone Age. It could be something much stranger:

advanced technologies surviving alongside surprisingly archaic forms of social organization.

Intermittent electricity grids, drones, artificial intelligence and computer systems existing alongside self-sufficient local communities. The ruins of great cities standing beside fortified villages. Scientific knowledge preserved by small elites while much of the population returns to agriculture, animal husbandry, local production, and barter.

A new Middle Ages, perhaps.

Not the historical Middle Ages, of course, but a new age in which technology and archaism coexist.

History, after all, is not a staircase on which every generation automatically climbs one step higher than the previous one.

We like to imagine progress as a straight line: every generation richer, better educated, more technologically advanced and more free than the one before it.

But history does not always work that way.

There have been collapses, fractures, political breakdowns, economic crises, epidemics, wars, migrations, and cultural regressions. The fall of the Western Roman Empire is certainly one of the most famous examples, but it is hardly the only moment in history when complex systems entered into crisis and were replaced by very different forms of organization.

Every generation is new compared with the generations that came before it.

And no generation is guaranteed to be better.

Perhaps that is the lesson we have forgotten.

Progress is not a benevolent deity leading humanity inevitably toward an earthly paradise.

It is a tool.

And like every tool, it can be used to build or to destroy.

We have built an extraordinarily powerful civilization. Now we must discover whether we are wise enough not to consume the conditions that make that civilization possible.

Because perhaps the real "Devil of Progress" is not the one that tells us what to do.

It is the one that convinces us that we can have everything.

Everything except immortality.

And perhaps, precisely at that boundary, modern man may discover that God was never dead.

He was simply waiting.

LGBTQ+ and Islam: Allies Today, Enemies Tomorrow?

Protecting minorities, tactical alliances, and the hope for a secularized Islam.

There is a question that is often avoided in Western debates about Islam, immigration, and individual rights because asking it forces us beyond simplistic narratives: what happens when a minority that carries its own Weltanschauung gradually becomes a numerically and politically significant part of society?

The question does not imply hostility toward minorities. Quite the opposite. It begins with a principle that should be beyond dispute: minorities must be protected. A Muslim should be free to be Muslim, a Christian to be Christian, an atheist to be atheist, and a gay person should be able to live openly according to their sexual orientation without persecution.

But protecting a person does not necessarily mean turning that person's Weltanschauung into the model for society as a whole.

That distinction is increasingly difficult to maintain.

Minority and Majority

A minority can have the right to preserve its identity without society as a whole necessarily adopting that identity.

The issue becomes particularly sensitive when a minority brings with it not merely a religion or spiritual tradition, but a comprehensive understanding of humanity, family, sexuality, authority, and the relationship between the individual and the community.

Islam, like Christianity, is not simply a collection of religious practices. There are very different understandings within Islam of the relationship between faith, morality, law, and politics. There is personal and spiritual Islam, conservative Islam, reformist Islam, secularized Islam, and, politically, Islamist movements that believe religion should play a determining role in the organization of the state.

It is therefore inaccurate to speak of "Islam" as though it were a politically homogeneous reality.

But precisely for that reason, distinctions matter.

A Muslim who prays five times a day, observes Ramadan, and abstains from alcohol can be perfectly compatible with a secular state. A Muslim who believes that religious law should take precedence over civil law raises an entirely different political question.

The issue, therefore, is not Muslim faith itself.

It is the relationship between faith and power.

Protecting minorities does not mean turning them into the majority

Another distinction is often blurred in public debate.

A minority must be protected from the majority, but a democratic society cannot be based on the assumption that every minority, simply because it is a minority, automatically possesses a worldview that should become the collective social model.

A Muslim has the right to his or her faith. That does not mean Italy should become an Islamic state.

An LGBTQ+ person has the right to live according to their identity. That does not mean every citizen must adopt their understanding of sexuality.

A Christian has the right to his or her moral beliefs. That does not mean every religious precept should automatically become criminal law.

Authentic freedom also means being able to live alongside people whose Weltanschauung differs from our own without turning every difference into a political war.

But this principle must work in both directions.

The Tactical Alliance

This distinction also helps us understand an apparent contradiction in contemporary Western politics.

At times, we see convergence between sections of the political left, progressive movements, LGBTQ+ organizations, and Muslim communities.

On one side are movements that have made individual autonomy, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights central elements of their political worldview. On the other are currents within the Muslim world whose religious and cultural outlooks can be considerably more conservative precisely on questions of sexuality, family, and the role of women.

How can these groups coexist politically?

Perhaps because what we are seeing is not necessarily a strategic alliance.

It may be a tactical one.

Two groups do not have to share the same vision of the world to cooperate against a common adversary.

Political history is full of examples.

The Iranian Lesson

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is particularly instructive.

The uprising against the Shah brought together very different forces: Islamists, nationalists, liberals, intellectuals, Marxists, and communists. The Tudeh Party, a communist and pro-Soviet organization, supported the Islamic Revolution and cooperated with the new authorities.

But once the revolutionary regime consolidated its power, its relationship with the communist left changed radically. The Tudeh was suppressed, its leaders arrested, and the party was eventually outlawed.

The lesson is not that "Islam will always do the same thing."

That would be an absurd conclusion.

The lesson is something else:

A political alliance does not necessarily demonstrate the existence of a shared political project for the future.

A and B may fight together against C and discover, once C has been defeated, that they have become rivals.

That is the difference between a tactical alliance and a strategic alliance.

The LGBTQ+ Paradox

This brings us to a more serious question than the often-propagandistic claim that "the LGBTQ+ movement wants to Islamize the West."

We do not need a conspiracy theory to raise the issue.

We can simply ask:

Can a political culture built around individual autonomy coexist indefinitely with a political-religious worldview in which religious law imposes limits on sexual freedom?

If we are talking about a secularized Islam, the answer can be yes.

If we are talking about political Islamism and certain traditional interpretations of sharia, the answer becomes far more problematic.

That is where the paradox emerges.

An LGBTQ+ activist can legitimately defend a Muslim against discrimination without wanting an Islamic state. They can defend freedom of religion without endorsing every aspect of the religion that another person practices.

Likewise, a Muslim can demand protection against racism while simultaneously rejecting the sexual morality of an LGBTQ+ activist.

There is no inherent contradiction in either position.

The contradiction arises only when we pretend that all cultural and moral differences are irrelevant, and that every conception of humanity is automatically compatible with every other.

They are not.

Weltanschauungen can come into conflict.

The Problem of the Day After

The most interesting question, however, is not about the present.

It is about the day after.

As long as different groups remain minorities, they may have an incentive to form alliances. They can protect one another and find areas of common ground.

But what happens if one of those groups becomes powerful enough to impose its own conception of society?

That is where we need to look beyond the simple protection of minorities.

A liberal society should be able to say simultaneously:

"You have the right to be Muslim."

and:

"You do not have the right to turn your religious interpretation into compulsory law for everyone."

It should be able to say:

"You have the right to be gay."

and at the same time:

"Another person has the right to regard homosexuality as morally wrong on religious grounds, provided that they do not turn that moral judgment into violence or legal discrimination."

That is the real frontier of freedom.

The Hope Is a Secularized Islam

And this is where we reach what I consider the most interesting conclusion.

The answer is not a war between Christianity and Islam.

Nor is it the Islamization of the West.

The hope is the secularization of Islam.

That does not mean asking Muslims to stop being Muslim.

It means hoping that Muslims can remain Muslim while simultaneously accepting citizenship in a state where civil law takes precedence over religious law.

They can pray toward Mecca without expecting the state to pray toward Mecca.

They can observe Ramadan without imposing it on everyone else.

They can abstain from alcohol without demanding that the state prohibit it for everyone.

They can hold their own moral views about sexuality without demanding that those views automatically become criminal law.

They can preserve their religious identity while accepting legal equality between men and women, the freedom to change one's religion, the freedom not to believe, the freedom to criticize a religion, and the freedom of people to live according to their sexual orientation without persecution.

In a sense, this is what the West gradually did with Christianity.

Europe did not have to become atheist in order to become secular. A Christian can still believe in God, attend Mass, and regard certain behaviors as sinful. What changed was the relationship between faith and state power.

Faith remained.

Theocracy receded.

Perhaps this is the path we should hope for with Islam as well.

Not Assimilation, but Secularization

The immigration debate should therefore be framed differently.

We do not necessarily have to ask Muslims to abandon their identity.

We should ask them to share the fundamental rules of the society in which they live.

The point is not:

"You must stop being Muslim."

The point is:

"You can be Muslim, but the state remains secular."

That distinction is enormous.

It means that a society can be pluralistic without becoming relativistic.

It can protect every religion without being governed by any religion.

It can defend minorities without turning every minority Weltanschauung into a majoritarian political project.

And it can defend the rights of LGBTQ+ people without demanding that every religion share LGBTQ+ morality.

The Real Question

Perhaps, in the end, the question is not whether the West must choose between Christianity and Islam.

The question is whether the West will be able to preserve the principle it gradually developed through centuries of conflict:

religion is free, but the state does not belong to religion.

If that principle remains intact, a Muslim can become Italian without ceasing to be Muslim.

A Christian can remain Christian without imposing Christianity.

An atheist can remain an atheist without imposing atheism.

An LGBTQ+ person can live freely without having to turn their identity into a civic religion.

That is true pluralism.

And perhaps, for precisely that reason, the hope is not that Islam disappears from Europe.

The hope is that Islam, as it becomes part of modern European society, will learn to coexist with secular government in the same way Christianity had to learn to do.

Not a religious war.

Not the Islamization of the West.

Not the persecution of Muslims.

But the transformation of religion into a personal, communal, and cultural faith without turning it into absolute political power.

The hope is a secularized Islam.

YOU DON’T EMIGRATE TO EXPORT UNDERDEVELOPMENT

People do not normally leave their country because they are perfectly happy with it.

They leave because they want to work. To earn more. To give their children a better future. To live in a safer, more prosperous society. They leave because they believe that somewhere else they will find opportunities that were unavailable to them at home.

That is the whole point of emigration.

You leave in search of something better.

You do not leave in order to recreate the conditions you were trying to escape.

Yet this rather obvious point has become strangely controversial.

Immigration is not simply the movement of human beings from one geographical location to another. People do not arrive as blank slates. They bring languages, customs, social habits, moral assumptions, ideas about family, authority, religion, work, property, individual responsibility and the law.

Culture travels with people.

To deny this is not tolerance. It is intellectual laziness.

If a country remains poor, unstable or chronically underdeveloped, we should be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: why?

Geography matters. History matters. Colonialism can matter. International politics matters. But none of these explanations is sufficient on its own.

A society also has what might be called an operating system.

It consists of its institutions, its habits, its unwritten rules and, above all, the assumptions people make about how society is supposed to work.

What does an individual owe to the community?

What does the community owe to the individual?

Is the law something to be obeyed—or something to be negotiated?

Does personal loyalty matter more than an impersonal institution?

Is advancement earned through competence and hard work, or through family connections and patronage?

Is individual responsibility a virtue, or is every failure someone else's fault?

These are not trivial cultural details.

They shape institutions.

And institutions shape societies.

This is where the intellectual tradition associated with becomes relevant. Behind institutions there is culture. Behind culture there is a particular view of the human person and of society.

Before you can understand the political structure of a society, you have to understand the mentality that produced it.

And mentality does not emerge from nowhere.

Religion has historically been one of its most powerful sources.

That does not mean that a particular religion mechanically produces either prosperity or poverty. Human societies are far too complicated for such childish formulas.

It means something much simpler—and much harder to deny.

Ideas matter.

Religious traditions have helped shape attitudes towards authority, family, gender, law, community, individual responsibility and the relationship between the individual and the collective. They have helped define what people consider sacred, legitimate, obligatory or forbidden.

A worldview is not decorative folklore.

It is part of the machinery of society.

Which brings us to integration.

Integration cannot mean that the host society provides everything while demanding nothing in return.

It cannot mean housing, welfare, education, healthcare and legal protection on one side, with no corresponding expectation of learning the language, obeying the law, respecting institutions and accepting the basic social norms of the country one has chosen to enter.

Integration works both ways.

And there is nothing remotely radical about saying so.

In fact, there is something deeply absurd about the alternative.

Imagine leaving a country because it offers little freedom, little security, little prosperity and few opportunities—then arriving in a country that has built precisely those things and demanding the right to reproduce the cultural and social patterns from which you were trying to escape.

That is not integration.

It is cultural importation.

And no successful society has an obligation to commit cultural suicide in the name of tolerance.

If you come to Europe because you recognize that Europe offers greater opportunities, then ask the obvious question:

Why does it offer those opportunities?

They did not fall from the sky.

They are the product of centuries of institutional development, legal evolution, economic growth and cultural change.

You cannot simply demand the fruits of a civilization while dismissing the historical, cultural and institutional foundations that produced them.

The immigrant who comes to work, obey the law, educate their children, build a future and become part of the society around them is not the problem.

The problem begins when immigration is treated as a one-way transaction: the host society is expected to provide, accommodate and apologise, while the newcomer is told that adaptation is somehow oppressive.

That is not integration.

That is surrender.

A confident society can welcome outsiders without apologising for its own identity.

It can be generous without being naive.

It can be tolerant without declaring every imported practice beyond criticism.

And it can say, without embarrassment, that some things are not negotiable: equality before the law, individual freedom, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, the rights of women, the protection of children and the authority of democratic institutions.

An open society can welcome people who are different.

But an open society still needs a centre.

If it becomes so terrified of asserting its own values that it refuses to distinguish between what it wants to preserve and what it does not wish to import, then it has ceased to be tolerant.

It has simply become confused.

And a civilization that has forgotten why it became prosperous should not be surprised when prosperity—and eventually cohesion—begin to disappear.

You don’t emigrate to export underdevelopment.

You emigrate to escape it.