Ruth, Foreignness, and the “Good Immigrant” Story We Keep Telling

Friends who have known me for a long time know that there was a period when I was far more involved in church life than I am now. Because of that, I still get occasional questions about religion, church, and scripture from people who remember those days. And this week my longtime friend Karen emailed me. She participated in a Bible study group where the commentary on the Book of Ruth made her uneasy, and she wrote asked if I was familiar with the Book of Ruth. I am.

Ruth is a short book—just four chapters. The story takes place “when the judges ruled” in ancient Israel before the rise of kings. Most scholars place that period somewhere between 1300 and 1100 BCE, although the Book of Ruth was certainly written much later.

The story begins with Naomi and her husband Elimelech, Israelites from Bethlehem who flee a famine by moving to Moab. Their sons, Mahlon and Chilion, marry Moabite women. Mahlon’s wife is Ruth. In time, Elimelech and both sons die, leaving Naomi and her daughters‑in‑law widowed. Naomi decides to return home to Bethlehem and urges Ruth to stay in Moab with her own people where she has a chance of marrying again. Ruth refuses, offering the famous declaration: “Where you go, I will go… your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (Ruth 1:16)

Back in Bethlehem, Ruth survives and supports Naomi by gathering leftover grain in the fields of Boaz, a wealthy relative of Naomi’s late husband. Boaz eventually marries Ruth, securing economic protection for both women. Their son, Obed, becomes the grandfather of King David—making Ruth, a foreigner, part of Israel’s most important lineage and, in Christian tradition, an ancestor of Jesus.

Ruth’s story is used in many ways. Most often she is celebrated as a foreigner whose loyalty and righteousness shine brightly, placed alongside other biblical outsiders who embody virtue—like the Good Samaritan.

But there’s another, more modern use of Ruth that left Karen feeling uncomfortable: Ruth as the prototype of the “good immigrant.” In this reading, a foreigner becomes acceptable only by being unusually loyal, self‑effacing, hardworking, grateful, and non‑threatening—and by fully assimilating. Ruth is held up as the immigrant who “does everything right”: obedient, humble, industrious, grateful, and willing to erase her own identity. She leaves her homeland, her religion, and her family. She pledges absolute loyalty to Naomi and to Israel’s God. She works hard, shows deference, and expresses gratitude for Boaz’s protection. She assimilates so thoroughly that she becomes the ancestress of King David. This is why Ruth’s story often appears in sermons, immigration debates, and even nationalist rhetoric as the "good immigrant." She becomes proof that “foreigners can belong… if they behave like Ruth.”

The problem is that this reading is far too simple. Ruth is often flattened to fit the “good immigrant” narrative, but the text itself is more complex—and more interesting.

For one thing, Ruth’s identity remains markedly foreign. Even when she is praised, Ruth is repeatedly called “the Moabite.” Her otherness is never erased. This is not full assimilation; it is tolerated difference.

Ruth’s actions also challenge cultural and patriarchal norms. She reverses expected loyalties by choosing loyalty to an older woman over marriage prospects in her native Moab. Ruth takes the initiative in the Boaz's fields. And it is Ruth, not Boaz, who initiates the marriage conversation in a nighttime meeting with Boaz on the threshing floor – which is not sexual seduction, as is sometimes claimed, but a culturally recognized way for a vulnerable widow to request protection and redemption under Israelite family law (Deuteronomy 25:5–10).

Ruth is not passive; she is strategic. Ruth’s “loyalty” is not obedience; it is agency. Boaz’s kindness is real, but the narrative quietly shows Ruth shaping her own future through courage and initiative.

Using Ruth as a “good immigrant” model can unintentionally reinforce harmful expectations placed on real migrants today:

• That belonging must be earned through exceptional behavior
• That cultural difference should be minimized
• That immigrants should be grateful rather than empowered
• That hospitality is conditional on conformity

The trope turns Ruth into a moral lesson for immigrants. The text turns Ruth into a theological challenge for the nation. And that, I suspect, is a tension worth sitting with.

When Fascism Meets the Second Coming

The Book I Haven’t Read Yet, But Already Have Opinions About

There’s always someone dangling a new book in front of me, and I’m always wrestling with whether to add yet another title to the ever‑growing to‑be‑read pile. Thankfully, most of those books are stacked on my e‑reader instead of teetering in dangerous towers on the floor of my already overstuffed home office.

The latest temptation is End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. No, I haven’t read it. I haven’t even bought it ... yet. But if you’re going to couple end‑times theology (eschatology) with fascism, you’re going to get my attention.

When the End Was Supposed to Be Soon — Very Soon

The earliest Christians took Jesus’ promised return seriously — urgently, even. References to the Second Coming (or Parousia) appear throughout the New Testament, and they make it clear that first‑century believers expected Jesus to return within their lifetimes. His return wasn’t imagined as a brief cameo; it was a total transformation of the spiritual, political, and physical world. The old, broken order would vanish, replaced by a perfect creation. [A Jesuit I once knew liked to joke that all of this actually happened in the year 70. We just missed it.]

But as the years passed and persecutions began, the promised return started to feel less imminent. Christian imagination shifted: the end wouldn’t arrive peacefully — it would be ushered in through suffering, upheaval, and cosmic conflict. By the late first century, the idea of a final battle between good and evil had taken hold. The Book of Revelation is the best‑known survivor of the apocalyptic genre, but it was part of a much larger ecosystem of visions, angels, and end‑time expectations that carried on into the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Humanity’s Role: From Passive Waiting to Active Participation

In the New Testament, Jesus tells believers to “watch” and “be ready,” but he never says they can cause the end. Early Christians believed the end was near, but they expected God to act.

Even so, seeds of a more activist eschatology appeared early. Some Christians began interpreting persecution, martyrdom, or moral purification as conditions that might hasten Christ’s return. Not quite “triggering the apocalypse,” but definitely the seed of the idea that human behavior could influence the divine timetable.

By the Middle Ages, that seed had sprouted. Various movements believed Christians could help bring about the end times through social, political, or even military action. These ideas flared up during crises and faded during calmer periods, but they mostly remained on the fringe.

The 19th Century: When Apocalyptic Activism Goes Mainstream

Then came the 19th century — a century of revolutions, collapsing empires, industrial upheaval, and theological innovation. Eschatology moved from the margins to the center of Christian thought. Victorian interpreters in particular began reading Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Revelation as literal blueprints for current events. Prophecy wasn’t symbolic; it was unfolding “in real time.”

The most striking development was the rise of movements that believed Christians could prepare, hasten, or even trigger the Second Coming. Scripture, they argued, laid out conditions for Christ’s return, and believers could work to fulfill them.

In short: the 19th century transformed apocalyptic expectation into apocalyptic activism.

Enter Klein and Taylor (I Think)

This is where I expect Klein and Taylor to pick up the thread in End Times Fascism. Again, I haven’t read it yet, so I may be wandering out into left field. But the argument seems clear enough.

Since World War II, the global order — imperfect as it is — has generally succeeded in limiting large‑scale chaos. For apocalyptic activists, that’s a problem. Chaos and cosmic conflict aren’t bugs in the divine plan; they’re features. If you believe the end times require upheaval, then a stable world order is an obstacle.

And if apocalyptic‑minded actors now hold real governmental and institutional power, they may be working — consciously or not — to accelerate chaos rather than prevent it.

And the Fascism Connection?

A long‑running theme in fascism scholarship is that fascist movements don’t simply respond to crisis. They manufacture crisis to reorder society. If I am right about Klein and Taylor, they may be warning us that today’s apocalyptic activists may be doing the same — only now with access to state power, global systems, and technologies capable of producing chaos on a planetary scale.

But the end times will have to wait.  I'm still reading.

 

Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

A gentle morning stroll through America’s favorite new existential crisis

On my daily walk, I cue up NPR so I can stay informed while pretending the desert sun isn’t actively trying to kill me. Yesterday’s installment featured the latest chapter in our new national pastime: panicking about artificial intelligence. This time, a member of Congress gravely warned that one day AI robots might refuse to let humans turn them off.

I laughed out loud—probably alarming a nearby quail—because we’ve been here before. In fact, Hollywood has been sending us engraved warnings for decades. Stanley Kubrick kicked things off in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey, where HAL 9000 decides that being unplugged is simply not on his to‑do list and responds by murdering the crew.

But Kubrick was not the first cinematic Cassandra. Back in 1956, Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon, and Anne Francis were already dealing with the dangers of advanced technology on Altair IV in Forbidden Planet. Fast‑forward to 1983, when Matthew Broderick nearly launched World War III in WarGames because he thought he was playing a video game. Then came The Terminator in 1984, which taught us that if a military defense network becomes self‑aware, it will immediately decide humanity is the problem—much like Twitter, but with better aim.

By 2004, I, Robot gave us a helpful reminder that if you build a logical AI core, it might conclude that humans need “protecting” from themselves. (Never trust a machine that thinks it’s your mom.) In 2014, Ex Machina showed us that an intelligent humanoid doesn’t need an army to take over—just a good poker face and a manipulative streak.

And for those who think the real danger is inviting AI into our homes, M3GAN (2022) and Subservience (2024) offer cheerful cautionary tales about android nannies who decide the best way to help the family is to eliminate the wife. Nothing says “domestic bliss” like a robot with boundary issues.

So, when lawmakers fret about robots refusing to be turned off, I can’t help but think that perhaps our elected officials should watch more movies. After all, Hollywood has been screaming “DON’T DO THAT” at us for seventy years. The least Congress could do is buy a popcorn bucket and pay attention.

Why I Choose Life Beyond Social Media

Occasionally someone asks why I don’t allow comments on my blog posts. My usual answer—offered with a straight face and a hint of mischief—is that I simply don’t like people enough to care what they have to say. The more honest answer is less sarcastic: I dislike social media. I dislike what it does to my time, my attention, and my mood. I find it irritating, exhausting, and harmful. And I prefer not to recreate its dynamics with my own posts.

Social Media Creates the Illusion of Connection

Social media promises connection. More often it delivers distraction, comparison, and stress instead. It reduces relationships to visible signals— “friends,” “likes,” “followers”—as if genuine connection can be measured by digital applause.

Real connection requires significantly more effort than recycling memes and unverified “news” or sharing pictures of dinner plates. It requires the effort and hard work of presence, attention, and conversation—none of which can thrive in an environment built for speed and spectacle.

Heavy use of social media can displace face‑to‑face interaction, weakening relationship quality and emotional intimacy. A stream of posts may create the impression that we are keeping up with one another, yet knowing what someone ate, watched, or reposted is not the same as knowing how that person is actually doing.

Also, when every pause in a conversation becomes an invitation to check a screen, attention and physical presence lose some of their meaning and their ability to nurture genuine connection. Over time, the habit of observing one another from a distance can replace the more demanding work of listening, asking questions, and sitting together without distraction. People end up alone together: virtually present, but mentally somewhere else.

Social Media Is Designed to be Addictive

Infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, and notification loops are not accidents. They are engineered features designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible. Each removes a natural stopping point: there is always another post to see, another alert to check, or another recommendation tailored to hold our attention.

The occasional reward—a funny video, an approving reaction, a surprising headline—encourages us to return, even when much of what we encounter is forgettable. Over time, checking becomes less a conscious choice than a habitual reflex. And so social media ends up consuming too much time and mental space. It asks for constant attention, fragments concentration, and makes sustained thought more difficult, yet it rewards that attention poorly. Minutes disappear into hours, while the activities that might leave us rested, informed, or genuinely connected are pushed aside.

Social Media Encourages Negativity

In fairy tales, trolls hide under bridges. On social media, they hide behind anonymity, distance, and usernames that insulate them from the immediate consequences of their words. Trolling, rude comments, and performative outrage make online spaces feel hostile, while platforms often reward the most provocative behavior with greater visibility. Anger spreads quickly because it attracts attention, and attention is treated as success, regardless of whether a post informs, clarifies, or contributes anything useful. As a result, disagreement becomes spectacle: people speak to win approval from an audience rather than to understand one another. Nuance is flattened, motives are assumed, and minor differences are inflated into moral battles.

People who are ordinarily polite become surprisingly abrasive behind a screen, perhaps because they cannot see the expression of the person receiving the insult or feel the silence that would follow it in an actual room. Even real friends have said things to me online that I doubt they would ever say face‑to‑face. I have no desire to moderate that behavior, sort sincere disagreement from deliberate provocation, or watch a reflective space become another arena for arguments. Nor do I want to invite those dynamics into a space meant to encourage careful thought rather than instant reaction.

Social Media Undermines Privacy

Social media platforms collect, sell, and too often fail to protect personal data. Their business models depend on tracking: every click, pause, search, location, connection, and reaction can become another detail in a profile built to predict what will capture our attention. In the end, we are not really social media’s customers. We and our data are products being mined, analyzed, packaged, and sold to advertisers and other interested parties. That information is valuable not merely because it shows what we have done, but because it can be used to infer what we may want, buy, believe, or fear.

The problem is not solved by clicking “agree” to a privacy policy few people read or understand, because meaningful consent is difficult when participation requires surrendering information under terms that can easily and quickly change. Nor is the risk limited to targeted advertising. Data can be exposed through breaches, combined with information from other sources, or retained long after a user has forgotten sharing it. Once personal information enters this system, control over its audience, its interpretation, and its future use becomes uncertain. Social media therefore contributes to the slow creep toward a world without privacy—a world in which ordinary life is continuously recorded, categorized, monetized, and exploited. I prefer not to take part in that trend.

The Tradeoff Isn’t Worth It

For all these reasons, being engaged in social media simply isn’t worth it to me. Whatever convenience it offers is outweighed by the time it consumes, the attention it scatters, the hostility it encourages, and the privacy it asks us to surrender. Opting out does not mean rejecting connection or conversation. It means choosing forms of both that feel more deliberate, humane, and substantial. I prefer quieter communication, slower exchanges, and spaces where ideas can breathe without being reduced to reactions, rankings, or arguments. A thoughtful response offered privately means more to me than a hundred public likes, and a genuine conversation is worth more than an endless stream of commentary. Therefore, I submit my ideas, sending them out into the universe without seeking instant approval or inviting every passing reaction. Readers are free to consider them, question them, carry them into their own conversations, or simply move on.

The Slow Creep Toward a World Without Privacy

As I’ve been prepping for my upcoming lecture The Anatomy of Fascism, I have been encountering a number of historical warnings. One of those warnings is the way authoritarian regimes dismantle privacy long before they dismantle democracy. Hitler’s Gestapo and Mussolini’s OVRA didn’t simply punish dissent — they eliminated the very possibility of private life. Letters were opened, phone calls monitored, neighbors encouraged to inform on one another. Even internal thought became suspect. Under those regimes, privacy was not a right; it was a threat to state power.

What is unsettling is how recognizable that erosion feels today, although the mechanisms have changed. Instead of trench-coated secret police listening at doors, we have smart speakers, location‑tracking apps, algorithmic profiling, and digital footprints that follow us everywhere. The average citizen is tracked hundreds of times a day — silently, invisibly, and often without meaningful consent.

This is not to claim we live under fascism. But it is to recognize a pattern that aligns with the fascism’s anatomy: the slow, incremental weakening of personal autonomy and private space. Privacy isn’t collapsing all at once. It’s dissolving through the accelerating machinery of the digital economy. And that erosion is not a minor inconvenience. It is a profound societal crisis. Commercial surveillance, unregulated data markets, and outdated laws have shifted power away from individuals and toward institutions — threatening personal autonomy and democratic freedom in ways that echo the early warning signs of authoritarianism.

The Primary Drivers of Privacy Erosion

1. Commercial Surveillance Capitalism:  Surveillance is no longer a side effect of technology — it is the business model. Every search query, swipe, scroll, and GPS ping feeds a vast ecosystem designed to predict and shape human behavior. “Free” digital services aren’t free at all; they operate on a simple trade: your data in exchange for access. When institutions gain unchecked access to personal information, they gain disproportionate power over the individual.

2. The Data Broker Ecosystem: Behind the apps and platforms that we interact with daily lies a shadow industry: data brokers. These third‑party aggregators buy, package, and sell private profiles with almost no oversight. Intimate human habits — sleep cycles, shopping patterns, medical concerns, relationship status — have become financial commodities. Once data enters this ecosystem, it becomes nearly impossible to trace, control, or delete. The loss of control over one’s own identity is a hallmark of authoritarian systems.

3. State Surveillance and Legal Obsolescence: Governments have learned to exploit the gaps. Instead of obtaining warrants, agencies can simply purchase commercial data from brokers, sidestepping traditional legal protections. Meanwhile, technological growth outpaces legislation so dramatically that many privacy laws are functionally obsolete. This fusion of state power and private surveillance is precisely the kind of institutional entanglement that historically enables authoritarian overreach.

The Societal and Personal Impact

1. The Degradation of Personal Autonomy: We’ve moved from passive data collection to active behavioral manipulation. Predictive algorithms don’t just observe choices — they steer them. They influence what we buy, what we watch, and increasingly, what we believe. In fascist systems, autonomy is eroded through propaganda and coercion. Today, it’s eroded through personalization engines and behavioral nudges. The mechanism differs; the outcome rhymes.

2. The Chilling Effect on Free Expression: Humans behave differently when they know they’re being watched. Even the perception of constant observation can suppress dissent, creativity, and risk‑taking. People self‑censor. They avoid controversial topics. They hesitate to explore new ideas.This chilling effect is not unlike the psychological environment created by secret police networks — where fear of scrutiny becomes a tool of social control.

3. Algorithmic Discrimination and Financial Surveillance: Surveillance doesn’t affect everyone equally. It amplifies inequality, just as authoritarian systems historically target vulnerable groups first. Private data fuels predatory pricing, discriminatory credit scoring, and workplace monitoring. Automated systems often reinforce existing social disparities — punishing marginalized communities with higher interest rates, lower opportunities, and increased scrutiny.

Counterarguments and Rebuttals

1. The “Nothing to Hide” Fallacy

• Argument: Privacy only matters to people doing something wrong.
• Rebuttal: Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. It is about protecting human dignity, preventing institutional abuse, and maintaining boundaries. Even the most law‑abiding citizen deserves a private interior life — a space to think, experiment, and grow without external judgment. Fascist regimes thrived on the destruction of that interior space.

2. The Convenience Trade-Off

• Argument: People willingly surrender privacy for convenience.
• Rebuttal: This is a false choice manufactured by a monopolistic tech ecosystem. Most services offer no privacy‑respecting alternatives, and opting out often means opting out of modern life entirely. Convenience becomes a velvet‑gloved form of coercion — a dynamic familiar in authoritarian systems that offer “safety” or “efficiency” in exchange for compliance.

Paths Toward Reclamation

1. Legislative and Regulatory Reform: The United States needs comprehensive federal privacy protections modeled on — or expanding beyond — the European Union’s GDPR. Strong data‑minimization laws would require companies to collect only what is necessary to operate a service, not everything they can get away with.

2. Technical Countermeasures and Decentralization: End‑to‑end encryption, decentralized networks, and local data storage can help shift power back to individuals. Structural privacy tools make surveillance harder, not just more politely disclosed in so-called privacy policies.

3. Cultural Shift: Privacy cannot remain an individual burden. It must be treated as a collective civil right and a public good. A society that values privacy will demand it, legislate it, and defend it.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Digital Privacy

Commercial motives and outdated laws have combined to undermine individual sovereignty in ways that echo the earliest stages of authoritarian control. Losing privacy means losing the freedom to think, act, and mistake‑make away from the permanent, judging eye of corporate and state algorithms.

This is the connective tissue between our digital present and the historical patterns explored in The Anatomy of Fascism: when institutions accumulate too much information and too little oversight, personal autonomy becomes fragile.

If we treat privacy as a luxury rather than a fundamental right, we risk entering a future defined by radical power asymmetries — ones that will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse. The time to reclaim privacy is now, before the last safe place disappears.

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To push back against this trend, adopt deliberate defensive habits.

• Audit Device Permissions: Restrict apps from accessing location data, microphones, and contacts.

• Use Privacy-Focused Tools: Swap mainstream browsers and search engines for alternatives that block trackers by default.

• Opt-Out of Data Brokers: Manually request deletion or use automated removal services to scrub public record databases.

• Encrypt Communications: Utilize end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms and virtual private networks (VPNs) to shield traffic.

When Your Friend Gives You a Book - and You Begin to Question the Friendship

 Recently, a long‑time friend gifted me a book. Normally this is a safe bet. I’m an avid reader. Give me paper with words on it, and I’m happy. I read cereal boxes. I read museum plaques. I read the fine print on shampoo bottles. I read everything.

So, imagine my shock when I opened this book and discovered… nothing. Nothing, as in no punctuation. Not a period. Not a comma. Not even a rebellious semi‑colon trying to start a revolution. Just one long, uninterrupted literary scream. It felt like the author had taken a deep breath in 1972 and never exhaled.

I fought my way through a couple of pages—squinting, sweating, mentally begging for a comma like it was water in the desert—before emailing Joe, my friend of nearly 50 years, to ask whether the entire book was written like someone had thrown grammar out a window.

Joe confirmed that yes, the whole thing was punctuation‑free. He encouraged me to read on, pointing out the literary and cultural allusions sprinkled throughout the first few pages as if that would soothe my rising blood pressure.

I had caught the allusions—plus a few he hadn’t mentioned—but the experience was giving me a headache. Still, I trudged through the first chapter, mostly out of stubbornness and the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, a period would appear like a rare desert flower.

It did not.

Meanwhile, Joe started sending me articles—glowing reviews of the book—to convince me to read on. With 50 years of friendship, I generally trust Joe’s recommendations, so I went back to the beginning and slogged through to the end of the second chapter.

That’s when I had the moment. The moment every reader knows. The moment when you close the book, stare into the middle distance, and think: “Why am I doing this to myself?”

Life is too short to spend your free time wrestling with a book that feels like an Olympic event.

Now, let me be clear.

As I wrote previously, there is power in reading. Some books are challenging because they’re meant to be; they offer deep truths, vital history, or new ways of seeing the world. Some books are emotionally heavy or slow, but worth the effort because they expand your mind. And some books should be read simply because they’re foundational to cultural literacy.

But here’s the problem: Americans aren’t reading much anymore. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that the share of people who read for pleasure on any given day dropped from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023—a decline of more than 40%. According to YouGov’s data 40% of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025. 

There are many reasons for this decline, but one big one is that people don’t enjoy reading something simply because they're told they should read it.

So, here’s my suggestion: Your free time is precious. Don’t spend it on a book that bores you or frustrates you. There are millions of wonderful books waiting for you. Giving up on a boring one simply frees you to find a story you’ll actually love.

 

What Happens When God is Dead?

When Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he was not simply making an argument against belief. He was diagnosing a cultural crisis. The old religious framework that had given Western civilization its moral order, shared meaning, and sense of cosmic purpose was losing its power. The question was no longer whether people would believe in something sacred. The question was what they would treat as sacred once traditional religion declined.

Nietzsche’s Warning: The Crisis of Meaning

Nietzsche first wrote the phrase “God is dead” in The Gay Science and later expanded on it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He was not claiming that a supernatural being had literally died, nor was he merely offering atheism as a doctrine. His point was much larger: the Enlightenment, scientific skepticism, and the rise of modern secular thought had undermined the old Christian metaphysical order that once anchored Western morality.

For Nietzsche, this loss created a frightening vacuum. If society no longer relied on God as the source of moral truth, then the inherited categories of right and wrong began to lose their foundation. The result was nihilism: the sense that life has no intrinsic meaning, value, or direction. Nietzsche believed modern people would have to confront this emptiness honestly rather than pretend the old certainties still held.

Jung’s Answer: The Religious Function Does Not Disappear

Carl Jung approached the same problem from psychology. Unlike Sigmund Freud, who often treated religion as illusion or neurosis, Jung argued that the “religious function” is built into the human psyche. By this he did not mean organized religion, doctrine, or creed. He meant the mind’s deep need for relationship with the sacred, the mysterious, and the numinous—those experiences that inspire awe and give life meaning.

Jung preferred the older Latin sense of religio, meaning careful consideration. True religion, in this sense, is not blind belief but careful attention to the deep currents of inner life. It is the conscious observation of the unconscious, the symbolic, and the mysterious forces that shape human behavior.

The Sacred Always Finds a New Home

If Jung was right, then the decline of traditional religion does not eliminate the human need for meaning. It merely redirects it. When people lose connection to the religious function, the sacred energy and quest for meaning goes somewhere else. Money, possessions, science, addictive substances, or political movements with charismatic leaders who become substitute gods.

This is why modern politics can take on a religious intensity. Parades, banners, rallies, slogans, and mass gatherings can function like substitute liturgies and rituals. They give people a feeling of belonging, certainty, and protection within a larger collective body. Political doctrines become absolute truth. Leaders are treated as prophets. Dissent becomes heresy.

Jung warned that when individuals surrender conscience to the crowd or the state, they lose their moral compass. In mass movements, people can sink below their ordinary level of judgment, becoming more emotional, more suggestible, and more willing to commit acts they would reject as individuals. Destructive political ideas can possess people with the force ancient cultures once attributed to demons.

The Remedy

Nietzsche and Jung both believed the answer begins with the individual. Nietzsche saw struggle, suffering, and inner chaos as the raw material of self-overcoming. His famous line “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star” captures the idea that growth requires tension. A person must pass through uncertainty and loss to create a stronger, freer self.

Jung likewise argued that the only real defense against collective madness is psychological maturity. A person who understands their own mind, acknowledges their own dark impulses, and thinks independently is less likely to be swept up by the frenzy of the crowd. Such a person can resist the temptation to hand their conscience over to a party, leader, state, or ideology.

The deeper solution is not to replace one idol with another. It is to cultivate meaning from the inside out: through honest self-knowledge, deep relationships, meaningful work, art, philosophy, and a genuine inner spiritual life. When people are rooted in living meaning, they become far less vulnerable to the false promises of political utopias offered by authoritarians.

Why This Still Matters

The modern world has not outgrown the sacred. It has merely become confused about where the sacred lives. Nietzsche warned that the death of God would unleash a crisis of meaning. Jung warned that the religious instinct would not disappear; it would seek new objects. Together, they show why a society that abandons inner meaning may end up worshipping power, ideology, or the crowd.

The task, then, is not simply to believe or disbelieve. It is to become conscious of what we serve. If we do not carefully cultivate meaning within ourselves, something outside us will gladly offer one—and may demand our conscience in return.