Jacques Ellul, twentieth century social critic and Christian anarchist, was a man of penetrative insight. He had the rare ability to look beneath the surface of society to expose its unrecognized roots. This is precisely what he accomplishes in The New Demons.

It’s commonplace (especially in the mid-1900s) to suggest that human progress is leaving religion behind to pursue a bright secularist future. To this naïvety, Ellul responds with logic and candor.

In the first place, the core of what it means to be a Christian is not to follow a religion. Religion is the tradition and accretions that gather around the people who follow Jesus. Once this happens, ‘Christianity’ as a religion is categorized and placed on par with the other religions of the world. However, it is impossible to sustain Christianity without it becoming a religion. Religion is a mixed blessing.

Today (that is, Europe in the early 1970s), left traditional religions like Christianity behind to pursue secularism. Society has sought to exorcise the sacred and create one profane playing field. Society, however, was wrong:

In any event, it cannot be said that man is no longer religious just because Christianity is no longer the religion of the masses. To the contrary, he is just as religious as medieval man. It cannot be said that there is nothing sacred now just because we claim to have emptied out the sacred from nature, sex, and death. To the contrary, the sacred is proliferating all around us. (65)

Humanity is still profoundly religious, we have just switched religions and use different names. Take the religion of consumerism, for example:

Consumption, along with the technology that produces it and the advertising that expresses it, is no longer a materialistic fact. It has become the meaning of life, the chief sacred, the show of morality, the criterion of existence, the mystery before which one bows. (144)

Or, consider the religion of politics:

In our situation, political man has become the perfect equivalent, the unalterable substitute for traditional, religious man. (189)

Humanity has a compulsion to religionize. If post-Christendom has led us away from the religion of Christianity, it has given us new masters, new demons to follow.

Ellul, Jacques. The New Demons. Seabury Press, 1975.