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.
