Something New Under the Sun: The Supernatural Abhors a Vacuum

When the world shifted from scarcity to abundance, many traditional messages fell flat. Modernity created the need for new language and metaphor to access the divine.

The American Spirit Essays #10

(continued from last week’s From Scarcity to Abundance)

The New Gods

Modernity, as we have seen, shifted humanity from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance.  A new world, understandably, needs new gods.  Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capitalism should have been a wakeup call.  Whereas the biblical “strong hand and outstretched arm” brought slaves to freedom, Smith’s invisible hand shuffles resources to the places best able to use them.  Traditional deities bring strength, freedom, and justice.  Modern deities work the magic of distribution.  Far more than a farmer god or a soldier god, a modernity born of abundance needs a managerial god.  Needless to say, few prayers or rituals honed in the pre-modern world address that very modern need (at least directly and literally).

That mismatch has created a vacuum.  It’s easy for contemporary elites to see a provider/protector god as speaking primarily to old world or dated concerns—and thus the people mired in them.  It’s easy for anyone to walk away from a god whose archaic language fails to reach the locus of contemporary faith.  It’s even easier to walk away from irrelevant rituals and the communities that gather to practice them. 

Biblical admonitions notwithstanding, it’s easiest of all to put your trust in princes and the son of man who deliver consistent and improving quality.  Say what you will about modernity, the quality of life ratchets forward with each passing decade.  Modern man lives longer, with fewer maladies, a greater range of experiences, more material possessions, better food, freer sexuality, and far more leisure time, than did any of his predecessors.  If modernity’s elite provisions are indeed to come to nothing, their demise hardly seems imminent.

The supernatural, however, abhors a vacuum every bit as much as does nature.  The ease and comfort inherent in walking away from an unneeded provider/protector god leaves open a critical question: Are those same people also walking away from a god they need quite deeply?