NYT Wonders: Could We Have a God-Sized Hole In Our Hearts After All?

It’s a good question. And perhaps no better time to ask it, although the timing may be accidental. 

Or not.

The New York Times published this Lauren Jackson column on Good Friday, which questions whether America’s march toward secularization and atheism threw “the baby out with the baptismal water.” Jackson points out that Americans seem to have changed direction yet again, becoming more likely to embrace religious belief. After decades of attempts to find deeper meaning in other pursuits, God — or at least the impulse to seek Him — has returned:

I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.

Jackson’s column is worth reading in full, with the kind of insight and meaning that other NYT columns have sadly lacked in recent days. There is nothing to criticize, especially since Jackson offers a very personal angle on a cultural momentum that only gets discussed in polling analyses and in a mainly political context. (She covers that as well, but mainly as a tangent.) 

However, the timing of this goes beyond its Good Friday publication date. Three days afterward, Pope Francis passed away at 88, declaring to his last moments his faith in Jesus Christ and the Resurrection. He gave his life in service to that faith, as have the cardinals who will choose his successor, and the bishops that will attend Francis’ funeral. And while the media coverage of that process has also largely focused on ersatz “short lists” and politics, it still draws the eye to the stakes involved: the leadership of a church that has existed for two millennia, and whose leadership matters because its faith matters — far more than its politics.

And this timing is especially propitious, given Jackson’s lament that Americans in particular have found no compelling replacement for meaning than the religious faith that the dominant culture has attempted to discard. Exercise doesn’t do it; yoga doesn’t cut it; generic and self-focused ‘spirituality’ comes up empty. Neither have sports, video games, social media, or other platforms on which to create communities that can replace the congregation united in faith. Jackson doesn’t even mention politics, which might be the most powerful attempt to fill the void left by secularism, but given how politics gets conducted these days, the results are abysmal for connecting to others, let alone to anything transcendent.

That is where the God-sized hole in the heart exists. We know, instinctively, that men and women are more than just the aggregation of their physical bodies. We can recognize that humans are uniquely endowed with transcendence of some sort even while denying that the source of that transcendence is God. And we yearn not just to connect to the greater transcendence that this clearly indicates, but to seek meaning from it that escapes us in all other human endeavors that focus on mere physicality or appetites. 

Jackson admits that near the end of her essay:

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos. 

May she find her way to that truth as she searches for real meaning in her life. May we all find our way to that truth.