Seculosity

Seculosity Plot Summary

Introduction

In today's supposedly secular world, we face a curious paradox: traditional religious adherence is declining, yet we've never been more religious in our behaviors and anxieties. The intense devotion and ritualistic fervor once directed toward traditional faith hasn't disappeared—it has simply migrated to new domains. We now pursue salvation through career advancement, romantic relationships, parenting philosophies, political affiliations, diet regimens, and technological engagement with the same desperate intensity our ancestors directed toward heaven. What drives this phenomenon is our innate human need for "enoughness"—the profound desire to know that we matter, that we're worthy, that we have value. But unlike traditional religion, which often offered grace and forgiveness alongside its demands, these new secular religions offer only endless performance treadmills with no finish line. They promise fulfillment but deliver anxiety, replace community with competition, and transform natural human activities into venues for self-justification. Through examining these modern replacement religions, we gain profound insight into why, despite unprecedented material abundance, we're experiencing epidemic levels of anxiety, exhaustion, and isolation in contemporary society.

Chapter 1: The Rise of Replacement Religions in Modern Life

We've been bombarded with reports about declining church attendance and waning belief in God, leading many to conclude that society is becoming less religious. This assumption misses a crucial point: the religious impulse hasn't disappeared—it has migrated. What polls actually tell us is that confidence in traditional religious narratives has collapsed, but the marketplace for replacement religions is booming. We may sleep in on Sunday mornings, but we've never been more pious about other aspects of life. This shift requires expanding our definition of religion beyond robes and pews. Religion, in its essence, is what gives shape to our longings, what tells us we're okay, what convinces us our lives matter. It refers to our preferred guilt-management system—the justifying story of our life. Most fundamentally, religion provides us with a sense of "enoughness." Today we hear people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, woke enough, good enough. The belief is that if we reach certain benchmarks, then value, vindication, and love will be ours. The problem is that no matter how close we get or how much we achieve, we never quite arrive at "enough." The threshold doesn't exist, at least not where finite human beings are concerned. As moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes, "an obsession with righteousness is the normal human condition." The longing for righteousness isn't an aberration perpetuated by traditional religion but foundational to human experience. This obsession can be valuable for group formation and species survival, but it has significant downsides. To understand what makes someone tick, trace the righteousness in play. Your colleague who can't stop working? Odds are, she equates busyness with worthiness. Your single friend with impossibly high standards? Perhaps he's looking to another person to complete him—to make him feel like he's enough. Wherever you're most tired, look closely and you'll likely find self-justification at work—the drive to validate your existence via adherence to some standard of enoughness. The irony is profound: enoughness is a universal human longing that theoretically binds us together, yet the specific expressions of this obsession often alienate us from others. The tighter the in-group, the larger the out-group. Our drive for righteousness can inspire our most dehumanizing judgments of other people and encourage us to conceive of the world in terms of "us versus them." With traditional altars becoming less central, fresh targets for our religious devotion have cropped up everywhere—from the kitchen to the gym to the bedroom. The more ferociously we slash at traditional religious structures, the more our religious impulses multiply and attach to new objects. We once went to church weekly; now we attend the cathedral of self-justification hourly.

Chapter 2: How Career and Busyness Became Our New Sacred Pursuit

The standard response when asked "How are you doing?" has shifted from "fine" to "busy." This isn't merely descriptive—it's aspirational. To be busy signals importance, desire, and justification. Busyness has become not just how we are but who we are. It's now the great American barometer of worth and identity, the number one socially approved means of justifying our existence. In 1965, Congress confidently predicted that by the year 2000, Americans would have more free time than they'd know what to do with. Instead, despite boasting the smallest amount of paid vacation days, the United States leads the developed world in untaken vacation days. We clock in some 1,788 hours annually, hundreds more than our European counterparts. What explains this phenomenon isn't just economic necessity but our growing preference for overwork. "Keeping up with the Joneses" now means trying to out-schedule them. Busyness has become a status symbol—a public display of enoughness. What lies at the heart of this is performancism: the assumption, usually unspoken, that there is no distinction between what we do and who we are. Your resumé isn't part of your identity; it is your identity. What makes you lovable, indeed what makes your life worth living, is your performance. If you are not doing enough, or doing enough well, you are not enough. This devotion to performancism lies at the root of skyrocketing anxiety and fatigue. We see this most tragically in the "suicide clusters" afflicting high-achieving schools, where pressure to meet the highest possible standards has left students four to five times more likely to take their own lives than the national average. Elite universities like the University of Pennsylvania have identified phenomena like "Penn Face"—the practice of acting happy and self-assured even when sad or stressed—stemming from "the perception that one must be perfect in every academic, cocurricular and social endeavor." Social media has exacerbated these comparative judgments. Studies show that the longer we spend on platforms like Facebook, the happier we perceive our friends to be and the sadder we feel by comparison. Australian Instagram model Essena O'Neill, who quit social media at the height of her influence, explained her decision: "Please like this photo. I put on makeup, curled my hair, tight dress... Took over 50 shots until I got one I thought you might like... THERE IS NOTHING REAL ABOUT THIS." Our devotion to busyness and performance isn't merely exhausting—it's spiritually devastating. It turns life into a competition rather than an adventure to relish. It invests daily tasks with existential significance and transforms even menial activities into measures of enoughness. The language of performancism is the language of scorekeeping, and just like the weight scale or the calendar, it knows no mercy. Relief comes not through greater achievement but through moments that reveal performance as beside the point. Mary Karr recounts such an instance in her memoir when, after a suicide attempt, her father drove through the night to bring her plums—the only food she thought she could stomach. When she bit into the still-warm fruit, she realized: "Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody—anybody—who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you... That's how you acquire the resolution for survival... You don't earn it. It's given."

Chapter 3: The Religious Dynamics of Romance, Parenting, and Technology

Romance has become perhaps the most fertile ground for seculosity. We now look to romantic love to tell us we're enough, to manage our guilt, and to provide a route to transcendence and salvation. Middle school dynamics—where we believe that if we are liked by the right people, we will be enough—now extend into adult relationships. The language of "soulmates" and partners who "complete us" has transcended cliché to become our operational theology. This reflects what philosopher Ernest Becker called "apocalyptic romance," where "the love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one's life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual." Dating apps and expanded choice have intensified this dynamic. As comedian Aziz Ansari explained, the internet "doesn't simply help us find the best thing out there; it has helped to produce the idea that there is a best thing and, if we search hard enough, we can find it." The result is a pressure to find the "perfect person" that makes dating an agonizing process. Parenting has similarly become a venue for self-justification. The transition of "parent" from noun to verb in the 1980s birthed a parenting-industrial complex that capitalizes on our fears. When a child's achievement becomes the parent's justifying story, we see phenomena like helicopter parenting, where parents frantically try to outdo one another in the good-works department. The fallout is catastrophic: children who never experience failure lack resilience, sometimes fatally so. As former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims observes, when parents have done everything for their children, the kids "will experience setbacks, which will feel to them like failure." Technology represents another domain where our search for enoughness plays out. What French impressionist Edgar Degas recognized about early telephones—that they turned owners into servants, ready to be summoned at the clang of a bell—has become exponentially more true with smartphones. We respond to notifications hoping for affirmation or distraction from our core pain, which is often the pain of not being enough. The seculosity of technology operates through optimization (turning human beings into machines to be upgraded), information (staying on top of an endless flood of data to prove our relevance), distraction (avoiding silence and the uncomfortable feelings it might bring), and affirmation (using social media to validate our existence). In each case, what begins as a tool becomes a master, reinforcing rather than relieving our anxiety. What connects these domains—romance, parenting, and technology—is how they transform natural human activities into religious pursuits. Each promises salvation but delivers bondage, offers transcendence but deepens immanence, and speaks the language of love while enforcing the logic of law.

Chapter 4: Politics and Food as Modern Forms of Justification

Politics has rapidly become today's most entrenched and impermeable social divide, surpassing religion, income bracket, and even race. According to every metric, our society has never been more divided by political affiliation. In the late 1950s, fewer than 10 percent of American parents would have had a problem with their child marrying someone from another political party. By 2010, that number had quadrupled to roughly 40 percent. Party-based antipathy has more than doubled among both Democrats and Republicans since 1994. What once looked like comedic exaggeration in a Seinfeld episode—Elaine breaking up with a boyfriend over their differing views on abortion—has become the new normal. Politics has become the most popular replacement religion, and understanding it as such is key to surviving our increasingly fractured world and finding compassion for those in its thrall. The seculosity of politics is what happens when the political becomes not one lens among many for understanding the world but the only one that matters. It manifests when everything becomes politicized—not just how you vote, but how you shop, eat, socialize, vacation, and even worship. Political communities now function like churches, providing belonging, righteousness, meaning, and the promise of salvation through adherence to the correct doctrine. Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt's research explains how this works. He identifies six "moral taste-buds" that shape our sense of righteousness: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. Liberal conceptions of righteousness emphasize the first three foundations, while conservative righteousness is spread across all six. These different moral frameworks create competing narratives about what constitutes righteous living, leading to division when we fail to recognize the legitimacy of foundations different from our own. Food has similarly become a domain where righteousness is pursued with religious fervor. We now talk about food the way we used to talk about sex. The last time you used the word "cheat," was it in reference to a broken vow or something you ate? Self-described "foodies" make pilgrimages to eat at certain restaurants, while cookbooks by celebrity chefs fly off shelves. Food writer Alice Waters went so far as to say that "every single choice we make about food matters, at every level. The right choice saves the world." Our national conversation about food is soaked in religious language. Fasting, once reserved for monks, has become mainstream through "cleanses" that promise to purify our systems. We oscillate between indulgence and guilt, treating meals as a daily drama of discipline, deprivation, and self-satisfaction. The word "fat" has become perhaps the most taboo F-word in the English language, reflecting how morally charged our relationship with food has become. Both politics and food promise salvation—one through having the right opinions and supporting the right causes, the other through eating the right things in the right ways. Both create in-groups and out-groups, both inspire zealous devotion, and both ultimately fail to deliver the enoughness they promise.

Chapter 5: The Exhaustion of Performancism and the Hunger for Grace

The pervasiveness of performancism across domains—work, leisure, relationships, parenting, technology, politics, food—has created a culture of exhaustion. We are tired not just physically but spiritually. The constant striving to be enough, to justify our existence through our achievements or adherence to certain standards, has left us anxious, isolated, and depleted. This fatigue manifests in our relationship to leisure, which has been colonized by the very productivity mentality it should counteract. Even our downtime has become another venue for scorekeeping and self-justification. Play is no longer an end in itself but a means to improved performance. Meditation apps track our consecutive days of practice and encourage competition. Sleep has become not a respite from stress but something else to stress over, with an industry worth $32 billion promising "optimized rest." The Fourth Commandment—the biblical injunction to observe Sabbath rest—may be "the most difficult and most urgent of commandments in our society," according to theologian Walter Brueggemann. The Sabbath was intended to distinguish the Israelites from their Egyptian captors, for whom productivity was the highest value. Today, it might be heard as permission: to stop, take a breath, and remember that we are more than what we produce, more than our job title or bank balance. But simply mandating rest won't work. Those caught in performancism will either refuse to rest or find another, more ostensibly holy pursuit to occupy their day off—replacing one form of self-justification with another. The problem isn't that we don't value rest; it's that we can't accept it as a gift rather than an achievement. This points to a deeper hunger—for grace. Grace is what happens when the swimming stops, when we recognize that our value doesn't depend on our performance. It's the recognition that we are loved not because of what we do but despite it. This is the antidote to the exhaustion of performancism: not trying harder or doing better, but receiving what we cannot earn. Those moments when grace breaks through are often unexpected. Sometimes they come through failure, when we hit the limits of our ability to control our lives. Sometimes they come through love, when someone sees us at our worst and loves us anyway. But always, they reveal that the judgment we've been afraid of has been quelled, that the acceptance we've been striving for has already been given.

Chapter 6: Jesusland: When Christianity Becomes Just Another Seculosity

The tragic irony of "Jesusland"—a catchall for the bastardized form of Protestant Christianity dominant in the West—is that it often resembles secular replacement religions more than authentic faith. Rather than countering the performancism of secular culture, many churches reinforce it, turning Christianity itself into yet another venue for establishing our enoughness. This happens primarily through the emphasis on transformation. Conservative Christians tend to talk about transformation in personal terms—becoming more holy, more virtuous, more Christlike. Progressive Christians usually frame transformation systemically or collectively—creating a more just, equitable, compassionate world. But whether the goal is personal holiness or social progress, the same dynamic holds: faith serves as a means to an end, a spiritual method of producing results. When Christianity morphs into a self-improvement scheme, it loses its distinctive power. The message becomes "I once was lost but now am found, so I better stay found!" Faith gets tied to changes in behavior, making it only as reliable as the personal growth it produces. The dissonance between who we feel we're supposed to be as "New Creations" and who we actually are creates an environment of suspicion and blame, where otherwise kind people monitor each other's devotion. Similarly, when social transformation becomes the heart of Christian practice, resentment becomes inevitable. Instead of loving your neighbor, you start to hate her for not evincing enough compassion. Activist Frances Lee draws explicit parallels between her experiences in Christian and social justice communities: "When I was a Christian, all I could think about was being good... All the while, I believed I would never be good enough... I feel compelled to do the same things as an activist a decade later." What binds both expressions of Jesusland together is their scope: both restrict God's purposes so entirely to the here-and-now that they render any longer view incomprehensible. Christianity becomes a means to an earthly end, a way of using God to fix the world or yourself, rather than a relationship with the divine that transcends temporal concerns. True Christianity, by contrast, begins with failure. It tells of a God who is not shy about handing down law but who meets us in our inability to keep it. The cross declares that the guilt and shame we spend our days trying to expiate via sweat and scapegoating is absolved, past, present, and future. Rather than being a religion of "good people getting better," it's a religion of "real people coping with their failure to be good." This is exemplified in Alcoholics Anonymous, which meets in the basements of the very churches that have often promoted performancism. In AA, there is only one identity: sinner. When members speak, they begin by saying, "Hi, I'm Alice and I'm an alcoholic"—whether they've been sober for one day or forty years. This acknowledgment undercuts any false confidence in one's own strength. Sobriety, not transformation, is the goal, and it's understood as a gift rather than an achievement.

Chapter 7: Beyond Seculosity: Finding Rest in a World of Endless Striving

The abundance of doing—whether performing, producing, earning, climbing, or proving—is a big part of what makes life in the twenty-first century so difficult. We can scarcely conceive of ourselves apart from our work, our achievements, our adherence to various standards of righteousness. We chase enoughness into every corner of our lives, driving everyone around us—and ourselves—crazy. Our crisis today is not that religion is waning but that we are more religious than ever, and about too many things. We are almost never not in church. The altars have simply moved from sanctuaries to smartphones, from pews to Pelotons, from communion tables to kitchen tables. And unlike traditional religion, which at its best offered grace alongside its demands, these replacement religions offer only law—endless requirements with no forgiveness for falling short. The situation resembles being caught in a riptide. When swimmers panic and fight against the current, they exhaust themselves and drown. The key to survival is counterintuitive: let go and allow the current to take you out to sea, trusting that the tidal forces will eventually deposit you in safer waters. Similarly, our attempts to engineer our own salvation through various forms of seculosity inevitably backfire. The only viable response is surrender. What would a viable alternative look like? A grace-centered approach to life would speak about death more often than it currently does—not morbidly, but honestly acknowledging the limitations of human striving and the reality of transcendence. It would recognize that each of us is in bondage to forces outside our control, that none of us are free agents making purely rational decisions. Most importantly, it would proclaim that nothing that needs to be done hasn't already been done—that enoughness is a gift, given freely to those who insist on paying. This message doesn't necessarily require traditional religious language or structures, though they have preserved it more effectively than most alternatives. What matters is the content: that we are loved not for what we do but for who we are, that our value isn't earned but given, that the judgment we fear has already been rendered in our favor. Such a message, when believed, doesn't lead to complacency but to freedom—the freedom to love and serve others without needing something in return. The hope for those drowning in seculosity isn't found in trying harder to swim against the current. It's found in the surprising discovery that someone else has already rescued us from the waters—that despite our best efforts to save ourselves, we have been saved by another.

Summary

The central insight of "Seculosity" is that our supposed secularization isn't the decline of religious impulses but their migration to new domains. We've transformed career, romance, parenting, technology, politics, and food into replacement religions that promise salvation but deliver anxiety. These new faiths operate through the same mechanisms as traditional religion—ritual, community, purity codes, moral hierarchies—but lack the grace that made religion at its best life-giving rather than depleting. The alternative to these exhausting replacement religions isn't irreligion but grace—the recognition that our value doesn't depend on our performance, that we are loved despite our failures, that the acceptance we've been striving for has already been given. This insight doesn't negate the importance of career achievement, romantic fulfillment, good parenting, or political engagement, but it places them in proper perspective. When we no longer need these domains to justify our existence, we can engage with them more healthily and humanely. The path beyond seculosity isn't trying harder but letting go—discovering that the current we've been fighting might carry us to unexpected shores of peace.

About Author

Loading...

David Zahl

David Zahl is the director of Mockingbird Ministries and editor-in-chief of the Mockingbird blog. He and his wife currently reside in Charlottesville, VA, with their two sons where David also serves on the staff of Christ Episcopal Church.

Read more