The Evaporation of the Sacred

We traded worship for branding, mystery for metrics, and now the soul is colonized by code

This is a guest essay from John Seel.

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“Every age is marked by its illusions; ours is that we have none.” — Daniel J. Boorstin

“Where there is no sacred order, there can be no social order.” — Philip Rieff

We are living through a civilizational inflection. The West is gravely ill. It is not yet time for hospice. Palliative care is required. Palliative medicine treats serious illness and multisystem failure; it manages pain when the cure is uncertain. That is our cultural condition—moral, institutional, political, economic, ecological, and spiritual systems all failing at once, without clarity on what to do next.

Our leaders prescribe optimism: innovate, pivot, build back better. They offer marketing slogans instead of addressing reality. But a culture cannot heal when it refuses to name its disease.

The late sociologist Philip Rieff called our moment a Third Culture—a social order that has severed its link to the sacred. First Cultures, in his analysis, lived within mythic transcendence; Second Cultures, such as Christendom, drew moral authority from revelation. The Third Culture rejects both. It affirms freedom without form, choice without covenant, progress without purpose, overwhelmed with information without the capacity to live within a meaningful, orienting story.

Its fingerprints are visible from Auschwitz to abortion, and now transgenderism—three triumphs of nihilism that make life and reality negotiable. Our politics manage despair; our technologies anesthetize it. The patient still breathes, but the pulse of purpose is gone. We are a zombie culture, animated yet dead.

To confuse resuscitation for what is really needed, resurrection is the final illusion of a dying civilization.

The Foundations of Civilizational Collapse

Civilizations unravel along their deep structures—those unseen frameworks that make meaning possible.

First, culture is a reality of its own, not a sum of individual choices. Evangelicals often treat culture additively: change enough hearts, and society will follow. But culture multiplies; it interacts; it has emergent properties. James Davison Hunter, in To Change the World, warned that all theories of cultural change based on individual conversion will fail. Culture is a social fact, as French sociologist Émile Durkheim insisted a living organism that shapes us even as we inhabit it.

Second, culture is hierarchical. Religion is upstream from culture; culture is upstream from politics. Religion forms the moral order; culture expresses it; politics institutionalizes it. When the sacred collapses, every downstream institution wobbles. Rieff captured this simply: culture is the form of the sacred order.

Third, culture is coercive. It shapes conduct long before law demands it. Try publishing a defense of gender biological reality in The New York Times and you will learn how social taboos punish other views.

Finally, culture is invisible until it fails. We live in it as fish in water. When the sacred evaporates, the social atmosphere thins; meaning suffocates. Rieff warned that “the death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals of the sacred.” Ours have failed.

Modernity replaced being with having, mystery with mechanism. Reality became a do-it-yourself project; persons became data; communities became markets; nature became inventory, storytelling became story-selling. The sacred once ordered the social from above; now politics dictates culture, and culture manufactures its own religion. We have traded transcendence for technique, worship for branding, truth for polling. The soul has become colonized by algorithms.

The reversal is complete—and catastrophic. God created man in His image. Now man perceives he can create God in his image or replace God with AI surrogates.

Weather vs. Climate

We mistake weather for climate—events for conditions. Instead of time being unified by a meaningful narrative, it merely becomes a succession of events. The news cycle amplifies every crisis, yet the real change is subterranean: a slow shift in the underlying moral atmosphere.

Political victories and symbolic protests give the illusion of motion, but as Rieff said, “Culture is the form of the sacred in which we believe we disbelieve.” Even our denials are religious.

Our activism assumes a mechanistic theory of change: pull the right levers and society will improve. But culture changes symbolically—through imagination, narrative, and ritual. These are climatic processes over seasons, not temperature changes over days. When the symbolic order collapses, legislation becomes theater. We think our performance leads to renewal while the stage itself rots beneath our feet.

The spectacle conceals the deeper desolation: a crisis in our existence and reality masquerading as the need for political solutions. The “vibe shifts” we report on are actually masking shifts in the cultural plate tectonics.

Death and Desolation

Your metaphor for the change of age matters: a pendulum shift, a dying organism, a phoenix rising from the ashes. These pictures frame our entire subsequent analysis.

Economists and politicians comfort themselves with pendulum metaphors—history swinging left and right, always returning to equilibrium. The pendulum metaphor confuses motion with vitality. The pendulum is not swinging back; its string has snapped.

Civilizations are not metronomes; they are organisms. Life cycle is more descriptive of civilizations than a pendulum. They are born, mature, decay, and die. Aging civilizations show all the signs of sclerosis and dementia. Such analysis suggests a realistic pessimism.

Opposite the pessimism of the life cycle analysts are those who invoke the phoenix myth—typically young anarchists and Silicon Valley techno-utopians: collapse breeds innovation; disruption redeems decay. “Fail fast,” say the technologists. But resurrection without repentance is not renewal—it is rebellion and naiveté.

Every election brings the new hope of a newly elected “savior”. An official that will make all that is wrong right in our land. With the passing of time and a new election cycle we swing in a new direction or promises are made that if the other is not elected our party will finally get it right. Reality soon catches up to these promises, which prove often to be hollow.

Having rejected the sacred, we no longer create forms that sustain or generate life; we only consume the remnants of older meanings. We are eating our seed corn. Symbols remain, but their referents are forgotten. We live amid the ruins of desecrated sanctities—a moral wasteland where even irony is exhausted and historical lessons discarded.

Such desolation follows desecration. And it breeds despair disguised as sophistication.

Philip Rieff and the Culture of Deathwork

Rieff’s analysis remains the most prophetic of our age. Every culture, he wrote, in his book My Life Among the Deathworks, is a system of moral demands backed by sacred authority. Ours is the first culture to deny the sacred yet still demand obedience. This paradox is historically unprecedented. He concludes, “Culture and sacred order are inseparable.... No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived.”

Having dethroned transcendence, we enthrone the self—but retain the moralism of religion without its metaphysical grounding. We outlaw sin while canonizing the sinner. The result is moral totalitarianism without moral coherence: a policing of speech in the name of liberation.

Rieff called such acts deathworks—cultural creations that invert the meanings they inherit. A cross submerged in urine, a drag-queen Jesus, a child’s body commodified as a choice—all are liturgies of negation. They do not merely transgress the sacred; they advertise its absence.

The Third Culture differs from all that came before: it does not build; it unbuilds. Its art deconstructs beauty; its politics deconstruct virtue; its technology deconstructs the human. It is not declining by accident—it is self-destructing by design.

This time, indeed, it is different.

Acceleration: AI as Catalyst

Into this vacuum of meaning rushes artificial intelligence—the accelerant of every existing trend. If the printing press democratized knowledge, AI transforms knowledge from wisdom-seeking to utility-driven. The criterion of truth becomes performance. It collapses the distinction between perception and reality, producing simulations indistinguishable from embodied experience.

We once said, “Seeing is believing.” Now, reality is optional. We create it as we desire it. Objective reality has lost its hold and its relationship to truth.

Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist describes modern consciousness as ruled by the analytic left hemisphere, cut off from the intuitive right. AI is the left brain’s dream: tireless, precise, and soulless. It promises omniscience while eroding discernment, information without wisdom. We become like the machines with which we are working.

Andy Crouch reminds us that technology turns from tool to device when it no longer extends our agency but replaces it. AI perfects that substitution. It colonizes creativity, defines worth by visibility, truth by virality, relevance by engagement. It baptizes distraction as destiny.

AI is not simply another novel innovation; it is modernity’s climax—the moment simulation supplants incarnation. It accelerates nihilism on digital steroids. The already-weakened patient of Western culture is now given a shock that could end its pulse as humanness itself is bypassed.

Our civilization looks omnipotent yet is brittle to the core. The digital economy rests on a few massive server farms—AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and chip plants in Taiwan. A single cyberattack or solar flare could paralyze commerce and governance.

We have built a technological Tower of Babel in the cloud. Its bricks are code; its mortar is electricity. Efficiency replaced resilience; redundancy was sacrificed for profit.

The irony is ancient: the more godlike our power, the more precarious our position. Like Babel, our architecture reaches heaven but cannot support the weight of its own ambition.

The Globalization of Deathwork

The West once sent missionaries; now it exports a market mindset. Under globalization, secular modernity has become the world’s default operating system. Through entertainment, trade, and digital infrastructure, we spread a desacralized worldview as the price of prosperity.

Gunboats once carried empire; today, algorithms do. The moral conditions of participation in the global economy include the surrender of transcendence. Fashion Models and Sports Teams, metal to folk music, Hollywood films, and Silicon Valley apps preach a common creed: autonomy as salvation.

We are not liberating the world; we are corrupting it—baptizing it into our despair.

Dark Enchantment

Charles Taylor observed that secularization is not disbelief but the multiplication of beliefs. Having expelled transcendence, we now worship its substitutes—nation, identity, technology, self.

Our rituals are digital, our priests are influencers, our sacraments are experiences. We scroll instead of kneeling; our liturgies are envy and outrage. The self has become infallible, repentance, impossible.

This is dark enchantment—the return of pagan imagination under technological conditions. The world is not disenchanted; it is re-enchanted by idols. Most of the leaders of AI are deep into the dark enchantment of neo-paganism, even the occult.

The only cure for dark magic is divine enchantment—the re-sanctification of reality through awe, gratitude, and worship. Only a recovered sense of the holy can break the spell of the algorithm.

Leadership for the Change of Age

At such a threshold, this change of age, management will not save us, and nostalgia will destroy us. We need liminal leaders—men and women who can live between the lightning and the thunder, reading the weather of the age and preparing the ground for what comes next.

Liminal leaders embody four rare virtues:

• Vision — the capacity to see beyond collapse toward renewal.

• Courage — the willingness to act without institutional permission.

• Humility — the conviction that renewal begins in repentance, not strategy.

• Exploration — the willingness to seek what they do not yet know.

Such leadership is neither revolutionary nor reactionary; it is restorative. It resists both despair and distraction. It builds dense networks of meaning, small communities of faithfulness, and institutions ordered by truth rather than lies.

The Benedictine monks did not reform Rome; they remembered God. Out of that memory a new civilization emerged. So too must we remember what it means to be human—and to bow before reality rather than manufacture it.

Why This Time Is Different

It is tempting to retreat into fatalism: “There is nothing new under the sun.” But kairos moments, theologically, are times charged with divine consequence. Here is my thumbnail assessment. Modernity is dependent on Christendom as Tom Holland demonstrated in his book Dominion. With Christendom fading in its influence on modernity, it has become a cut flower. We are living through a liminal period of withering.

Modernity consists of three things: ideas, institutions, and instruments. Postmodernism critiqued modernity: “the incredulity of a metanarrative.” Post-postmodernity critiques postmodernism: the absence of a metanarrative. We are left in a shared culture of nihilism: a deathwork culture, a Third Culture in Rieff’s sense. Hunter argues that both the political left and right are even now operating out of a shared culture of nihilism where meaning evaporates and only raw power remains. Ours is a 500-year inflection point. The ideas of modernity are imploding. The institutions of modernity are paralyzed. And the instruments of modernity (namely, AI) are exploding. Minimally, this is a volatile moment in history and in our civic life. It is a time for humility, leadership, wisdom, courage, and exploration.

Our historical moment is different because we inhabit the first civilization without a shared sacred symbolic. Earlier ages clashed over rival gods; we live or attempt to live with none.

It is different because artificial intelligence, due to our perceptions, now bears the weight of a god-like transcendence. It does not merely extend human capacity; it redefines the human altogether by exceeding the human. The global AI arms race makes ethical restraint a liability.

It is different because global interconnection breeds fragility. A virus in Wuhan collapses markets in New York. A blackout in a server farm in Texas silences global commerce. The next Black Swan will not be local; it will be planetary. It is not if, but when.

This is a kairos moment—an age demanding watchful discernment and courageous leadership. All the chips are indeed in the center of the table. There has rarely been a more exciting time to be alive as a follower of Christ than now. Ours is a turning point.

Hope in the Storm

The pause between the lightning and the thunder is an opportune time for reflection. We count to determine how close the storm is to us. This moment in the life cycle of modernity is not the end; it is the soil of beginnings. “You can’t go back and change the beginning,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

We begin by telling the truth: that our culture is ill; that its disease is spiritual; that its cure is repentance, not policy. We recover the humility to receive the world as a gift, the courage to resist its idols, to honor objective reality, and the imagination to rebuild on foundations of transcendence.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism denies the darkness; hope defies it. To see clearly and look forward in the twilight is already an act of grace. To lead from that clarity—patiently, truthfully, sacrificially—is the vocation of our time.

The age is changing. This time, it truly is different. The question is whether we will merely survive the transition—or sanctify it.

May we stand, liminal and luminous, as witnesses to the sacred in an age that has forgotten how to bow.

David John Seel, Jr., Ph.D., is a cultural analyst, writer, and board consultant. He is the author of Aspirational Masculinity: On Making Men Whole and the forthcoming Liminal Leadership: Navigating a Change of Age (2025). He writes on culture, leadership, and meaning in advanced modernity and co-hosts, with Dwight Gibson, the forthcoming Change of Age podcast.

Cover image is AI generated