The Western Mythos – Our Monster’s Spawn: Part II – The Theological Architecture of Modernity

Essay Four: Part 2 in the series of five essays called The Abyss of Civilization. Part 1 of this essay can be found here.

Religious Influence in the Modern Era Never Wanes

Before examining how civilizational and theological values indirectly underwrite our thoughts and feelings, we should first note religion’s direct influence within the modern European landscape so often proclaimed to be secular. By the early seventeenth century—when Francis Bacon proposed a new method for knowledge and helped inaugurate what is routinely celebrated as a secular age—religion remained structurally central. Modernity did not replace religion with secularity; it declared secularity dominant while retaining religious forms, assumptions, and moral architectures within an enduring amalgam.

Bacon’s writings are saturated with biblical and Christian imagery, and his orientation is thoroughly patriarchal. Nature is repeatedly figured as a woman to be “penetrated,” “bound,” “tortured,” or forced to “yield her secrets,” often accompanied by explicit invocations of the Adamic command to “subdue the earth.” This is not a departure from Christian hostility toward nature and woman but its continuation—now recast as the manly art of science.

And all the major figures of this era routinely invoke religious themes. René Descartes, in the Meditations on First Philosophy, offers three proofs of God’s existence to secure epistemology; Johannes Kepler frames his entire astronomy as divine geometry; and Galileo Galilei, less cautious, is punished by the Catholic Church in 1633. Isaac Newton writes far more on theology and alchemy than on physics and regards gravity as evidence of divine design, while Robert Boyle treats experiment as an act of worship. Blaise Pascal, a theologian, formulates the famous wager for why one should choose Christianity. Robert Hooke claims nature’s order presupposes divine craftsmanship; Leibniz justifies evil as part of “the best of all possible worlds”; and Spinoza redefines God as Nature. Even John Locke—whom we will return to later—grounds natural rights in God.

I provide these details to show how powerfully pervasive the religious climate remained in the first centuries of the Modern Era. Even when some thinkers felt obliged to write in explicitly Christian terms for acceptance, the effect is the same: the Christian cast of the European sociocultural sphere never disappeared. European societies—and the overseas colonies they dominated—remained overwhelmingly Christian until the end of World War II. And even as church membership declined afterward, the overarching themes of Christianity were only further reinforced, as I show below.

Here’s a telling example. In 1947, the darling of the fawning intellectual class and of political elites, Arnold Toynbee, published Civilization on Trial. The core message from this lionized historian was that “the West” could only be preserved by reaffirming what is, in substance, the Augustinian Synthesis. He did not use that term, of course, but the meaning is unmistakable: the corrective needed to save the West was to accept humanity’s fallibility and original sin, seeking “a cumulative increase in the means of grace” as “history passes over into theology.”

This is relevant because Toynbee is not merely a historian adopting theological language; he is doing so deep into the supposed secular age. To understand why, we need to step back and consider the world he was addressing. It was the dawn of the Cold War. Great Britain was spent and nearly bankrupt after two world wars; the Soviet Union loomed as a threat to the United States and Western Europe; and its revolutionary, explicitly anti-religious program was attracting support across the European colonies. This was precisely the moment when NATO was being conceived, and Britain was positioning itself as a junior partner within the emerging Atlantic alliance. Winston Churchill, instrumental in these arrangements, worked closely with British elites to preserve power, prestige, and civilizational standing. Toynbee, a dependable apologist for the British imperial order, took up the task of affirming the transcendent Christian goodness of the Western system against “godless communism.” The point is not to exaggerate his personal influence, but to note that the Augustinian Synthesis (AS) was being openly mobilized at this moment to secure hegemonic strategy and to preserve civilization’s prerogatives.

In the postwar era, church membership finally began to decline sharply in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Western Europe. If there is any period that plausibly deserves the title of a secular age, it is this one. But elites quickly grasped the danger. The erosion of respect for authority and for transcendent themes was deeply alarming, and they moved decisively to counter it.

As Daniel Stedman Jones documents in Masters of the Universe, elites in the U.S. and U.K. methodically planned a restoration of order through neoliberal restructuring. Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain set this project in motion, while, as Melinda Cooper shows in Family Values, their governments simultaneously forged strategic alliances with right-wing Christian churches. Conservative church attendance rose sharply, the political influence of religious leaders expanded, and the convergence of market discipline with moral authority became explicit. This was not accidental: neoliberal think tanks, policy networks, and conservative media actively reinforced the alignment. Variants of the same pattern spread across much of the global South, especially in Latin America and Africa, where conservative political values—largely American in origin—were carried alongside economic restructuring, a process readily visible from my own vantage point in Peru.

There are many other ways religion is explicitly supported and highlighted in society—political performance and symbolism, cultural events, military participation, and the continued credibility granted to academic disciplines in which theology is treated as an equal among peers. Clearly, religion has not waned; its political influence—mostly right-wing—has increased dramatically in the U.S. and in many less developed countries since 1980.

And we still have not addressed the role that religion and theology played throughout the development of European capitalism, imperialism, slavery, militarism, and colonization (which continues today in economic form). Nor have we reckoned with the long history of religious wars—perhaps a dozen in total—which Western pundits conveniently forget when they denounce Muslim militancy. And while the West has since graduated to wars waged largely for profit, the destructiveness of Christian wars should not be minimized. They were extraordinarily brutal: the worst, the Thirty Years’ War, killed a higher proportion of the European population than World War II.

Even so, the Christian churches’ support for Europe’s global conquests—including the worst atrocities, as Sven Lindqvist documents in Exterminate All the Brutes—proved far more costly. That support was unwavering. Vast missionizing campaigns moved in lockstep with the promotion of European cultural values, political domination, and the enforced compliance of indigenous populations. Christian apologists often praise the role Protestant churches eventually played in opposing slavery, but this raises an unavoidable question: why did they wait more than three centuries to do so?

I am not arguing that secular modes of thought and organization were unimportant, nor denying that the conflict between atheists and religious believers is real. Rather, claims about the steady diminution of religion over the past five centuries have been greatly exaggerated. Western cheerleaders for scientific objectivity, Enlightenment rationality, the separation of church and state, and other cherished secular values present these as far more dominant than they are. Meanwhile, when Christians repeatedly lament their supposed loss of influence, we are encouraged to assume—mistakenly—that religion is in retreat.

We have already seen the absurdity of this assumption in the preceding discussion of influence in the SCS, and we have still not addressed the profound impact of the Protestant Reformation on the external world. Because its internal effects on human behavior are even more consequential, that is where we will turn in the final section of this essay.

Readers of this essay series already know my basic thesis: civilization is an aberration in our species’ existence—one we both created and suffer from. During the hunter-gatherer (HG) era, our condition was comparatively healthy because our ancestors possessed integrated psyches, HG values, relational being, and the animism that held these together.

Almost as soon as civilization took form, those conditions came under sustained attack, precisely because they were incompatible with hierarchical elite rule and its prerogatives. We have traced priestly and then theological influence across this long arc—from the early third-millennium BCE transformations that consolidated enclosure and abstraction, through the negative ontological transfers (NOTs) of the Hebrews, early Christians, and Augustine, and forward into the modern era and the postmodern present.

I maintain that civilization’s means of controlling us is the best of all possible variants—not because it is admirable, but because it is maximally effective—to paraphrase Leibniz. If one were designing a system to manage large populations on a hypothetical planet, it would be difficult to improve upon a structure that persuades people that the very practices, beliefs, and values destroying them are in fact saving them. And what better way to secure their trust and deference than through an elevated class claiming privileged access to cosmic truth—speaking directly to a God they themselves created and installed as the ultimate authority?

Then, once people have grown accustomed to this schema, the same class introduces more sophisticated mechanisms of control. They persuade you that you are responsible not only for the problems of the world—which they themselves uphold—but also for any irregularities in the theological cosmos they invented. You are responsible and guilty—for your entire life. And when the toiling masses are finally granted a day off from crushing labor, they are expected to gather in a building where a designated specialist berates them for their failures. Yet people do not merely accept this arrangement; they actively participate in it, rehearsing their guilt, lamenting their every deed, and policing even their most private thoughts.

It is easy enough to imagine such a system operating in some remote science-fictional corner of the universe or long ago in ancient Mesopotamia. But today, on our own planet? It sounds preposterous, even conspiratorial. Even those who have long been critical of a particular faith—or of religion altogether—and who are deeply skeptical of contemporary spiritual claims often struggle to accept that such a history, or such a situation, could be real.

I am not attempting to compel agreement from readers, whether religious or not. The purpose here is to present evidence showing how a powerful and pervasive theological regime has developed in a largely unbroken line over the past six thousand years—serving civilizational interests and consistently rewarding its own gatekeepers. While this regime warrants serious criticism, opposition to it should not be confused with hostility toward meaning-making itself. Human beings, like all other animals, seek meaning and orientation in the environments they inhabit, and our HG ancestors did so through forms of RMS belief that were relational rather than coercive.

That only makes sense. The relational meaning system (RMS) itself was never the problem for roughly 285,000 years. Only with the move into civilization did values become decadent in the RMS of that stage. More precisely, psychologically and socially viable ways of life were dismantled so that profoundly destructive values could take root. This is why common sense now appears so rare: access to simple recognitions and relational truths has been systematically blocked. After millennia of conditioning, misery—guilt, sinfulness, resentment, envy, hyper-competition, and violence—now passes for “natural.”

The “school of hard knocks” parents warn their children about—the world that will “eat you up” unless one toughens up and conforms—is civilization repeating itself through the generations. John Mayer’s sudden clarity in singing No Such Thing — “there’s no such thing as the real world, just a lie you’ve got to rise above”—is one small ontological echo of what has been lost. And it is difficult to imagine a quieter, more enduring tragedy than that.

The underlying values of the Theological Regime

Protestantism and the Protestant individual

The Protestant Reformation had multiple socioeconomic preconditions, but its primary theological driver was a renewed commitment to the strict application of the AS among its founders—combined with its unexpected appeal to northern European populations. That this option was even available was due to the Catholic Church’s gradual retreat from the most ascetic and severe elements of the AS in the centuries following its formulation by Augustine of Hippo. By 1517, when Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg, the Church had developed mechanisms that effectively softened Augustine’s most punishing doctrines.

Luther’s initial outrage was directed at Catholic corruption, but he was himself a Catholic priest in the Augustinian order of friars. He and other Protestant leaders were scandalized by Rome’s accommodation of the AS through what amounted to a spiritual accounting system—one that promoted a quasi–works-based redemption via confession, vows, pilgrimages, penances, and indulgences. In practice, the faithful had been permitted to sidestep Augustine’s harshest claims in order to achieve reassurance within this lifetime. While the Church can be credited for tempering the AS’s most psychologically damaging features, the corruption surrounding these practices was undeniable and generated widespread resentment. The result was that Protestantism reinstated the Augustinian Synthesis (in its most severe form, making it normative—and in doing so, profoundly reshaping the inner lives of its adherents.

This development had numerous repercussions, but I maintain that many of them can be explained through the emergence of the modern individual—what I call the Protestant Individual (PI). The Augustinian Self, as you will recall, was fashioned as a stage upon which Christians of the late Roman Empire and afterward enacted the interminable drama of sin and redemption. The PI descended from that self but differed from it in several crucial respects, even as both shared the same underlying structure. The PI consisted of the following factors:

1-1. Traits of the Protestant Individual

1. A literate individual expected to read and interpret the Bible personally.
2. An indirect relationship to God the Father, conceived as absolute and unapproachable majesty.
3. A direct, one-to-one relationship with Jesus, requiring no priestly mediation.
4. Future-oriented, practicing delayed gratification, saving, and moral restraint in anticipation of heavenly reward.
5. Consciousness elevated as the core of the person, with body, instincts, and emotions subordinated or repressed.
6. An ascetic, often stern, disposition toward life.
7. Rational, orderly, and oriented toward planning and self-management.
8. Expected to make decisions independently and bear personal responsibility for outcomes.
9. Increasingly aligned with market logic, commodification, and economic reasoning.
10. Marked by heightened moral interiority and constant self-surveillance.
11. Living with a baseline of spiritual anxiety, since salvation was never assured.
12. Possessing a vocational identity centered on duty, discipline, and work understood as a calling.

And this, I argue, is largely who Europeans and their descendants around the world have become—Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and non-believers alike. As the European–American order has given way to a postmodern, capitalist global society, many within that later formation also display key characteristics of the PI. This is why I have focused on the Western variant of civilization as the second half of a story that began in the ancient Near East. To understand what is wrong with us, we have to understand where we came from and how our foundational dispositions were formed.

The PI is thus the cumulative outcome of the Augustinian Synthesis, which itself developed in a continuous line from early Christian negative ontological transfer and its antecedents in the Hebrew negative ontological transfer—each shaped, in turn, through sustained contact with Babylonian systems of abstraction and authority. The modern era beginning in 1492 marked a decisive transition: the decline of overt theocratic order and the loss of the unity and security it had once provided. The emerging individual was no longer anchored to a stable foundation. And while science and reason never supplied such a foundation, neither did religion, nor the destructive practices and values carried forward through European imperialism and capitalism.

The PI and modern alienation are the rancid fruit of these developments because the theological regime that advances civilization’s destructive and decadent values underlies them all. These dynamics are best understood through analysis of the PI itself. To begin, the very elevation of the individual is already problematic. A disconnected and perpetually insecure entity is nevertheless presented as powerful, knowledgeable, and free—an ideological contradiction that functions as one of the most sophisticated control mechanisms in history, its cruelty notwithstanding. Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that people experience themselves as perpetually falling short.

Even setting this aside, fulfillment is difficult to imagine when embodied life is systematically subordinated rather than trusted. Individuals are not disembodied, of course—they live in their bodies, feel emotions, and act on instinct—but these dimensions are routinely treated as suspect and placed under constant regulation. Instinct is to be restrained, emotions managed, the body disciplined or optimized, and the unconscious corrected. Under these conditions, the mind—the conscious mind—becomes the center of the individual’s inner life and the primary interface with the external world. The PI both consciously and unconsciously monitors itself, continually evaluating its own moral adequacy. While people raised in relatively stable homes may experience less overt distress than those shaped by moderate to severe dysfunction, the underlying deformation is systemic and affects everyone within the order.

That people suffer, are uncertain about anything they are not trained to think about—including death—and remain endlessly occupied with constructing identities, achieving goals, and improving themselves is not accidental. The complexity and busyness of everyday life serve to distract us from confronting our condition in modernity, leaving little space to recognize the depth of the predicament. This feature was already central to the effectiveness of the AS. As Nietzsche observed, priests construct labyrinths of meaning so that suffering becomes “meaningful.” In this way, the system even supplies false grounds for feeling depth, purpose, and connection.

Endless decadent messaging

Many people—religious and otherwise—appear relatively content, and some demonstrably flourish. There is no reason to deny their accomplishments or dismiss their capacities. But an onto-historical examination of our species indicates a consistent pattern: those who grasp the world as it actually is have found some living connection to the source—the locus in which HGs were once at home. Civilization’s transcendent claims do not approach that level of psychic integration and do not offer a substitute; they constitute a false detour that obscures the loss they claim to resolve.

It is, in fact, a testament to human resilience that kind, generous, and ethically serious people continue to exist within theological systems. Paradoxically, those systems benefit from their presence. Like a poorly run clinic sustained by a small number of dedicated staff, theological institutions derive much of their apparent value from the people who compensate for their structural deficiencies. Modern religions often appear beneficial for precisely this reason, reinforced by the extensive social, political, and cultural support they continue to receive.

New popes reliably become media darlings and are rarely subjected to sustained scrutiny. The horrors of pedophilia within the Catholic Church received intense coverage for a time, while similarly widespread abuse among Jehovah’s Witnesses drew far less attention. In both cases, follow-up has been minimal, even though effective safeguards remain absent. The current pope—despite a poor record on abuse in earlier roles—has adopted the correct language about reform while taking no concrete action to date.

Religion, by contrast – despite all the conservative handwringing to the contrary – is routinely granted a pass in popular culture, and the faithful are generally portrayed sympathetically in film and television. Heretic offers a revealing example. All of the informed critiques that Hugh Grant’s character advances against the Mormon missionaries are retroactively invalidated once he is revealed as a serial killer; the momentary realism exists only long enough to reassert who the “good” people are meant to be. Exceptions do exist, but they are rare. Religion is—and remains—a favored institution of civilization.

And who, under such conditions, is really in a position to disagree? Consider the limiting factors. Theological language is so deeply embedded in everyday speech that its assumptions are routinely reproduced without intention or awareness. Forgiveness, sacred, holy, providence, salvation, repentance, martyr, saint, miracle, calling, demonizing, mission, grace, atonement, crusade—these are only a small sample of terms in common circulation that bind thought to religious frameworks. As shown earlier in this essay series, transcendent language, concepts, and behaviors are woven into daily life. Dualistic categories such as good/bad, us/them, and love/hate continually force experience into crude oppositions that distort rather than clarify reality.

Even when these linguistic constraints are partially resisted, another limitation asserts itself: saturation with information that is not merely excessive but largely decadent. Advertising operates under an implicit imperative of perpetual expansion—one that must intensify year after year—yet the cumulative harm of this condition is rarely examined. We are trained not only to consume but to think in quantitative, materialistic, transcendent, and limitless terms—the very orientations that drive civilization’s momentum. This is without yet accounting for the additional pressure exerted by competing ideologies, propaganda, and the near-constant circulation of falsehoods.

We tend to associate these latter dynamics primarily with politicians, but—as will become clear in the final essay—the gatekeeping role played by scholars is just as essential to diversion and control. And even when one manages to navigate these thickets, it has become increasingly difficult to determine what is authentic rather than a copy of a copy of a copy of something once real. Jean Baudrillard calls this “hyperreality”; Guy Debord, “the Spectacle”; and Umberto Eco, “the Absolute Fake.”

There are, then, serious thinkers grappling with the condition of postmodern malaise, and my thesis is indebted to their work. But their contributions are either drowned out by civilizational cheerleaders or remain insufficiently comprehensive. This has been the difficulty from the beginning.

Karl Marx, for example, despite his antipathy toward religion, never explored the deep theological roots of history. A strong case can be made that he instead inverted salvation history into class structure: the proletariat ultimately triumphs, and a new utopian order—paradise—is realized. Within this teleology, capital replaces sin and communism assumes the role of redemption. The political theologian Jacob Taubes makes this explicit in showing that Marx secularized Paul the Apostle’s apocalyptic vision of time. Thus, even as he attacks religion, he reproduces its conceptual architecture—an instructive example of how theology can inform even the most radical critiques of society.

Sigmund Freud provides a similarly revealing case. A committed atheist and critic of religion, Freud nevertheless reconstitutes a structure closely resembling that of Augustine of Hippo. He removes “sin” and “God,” replacing them with “drive” and “superego,” while leaving the underlying moral architecture intact. Freud famously described the superego as “cruel,” “relentless,” and “sadistic”—a description uncannily reminiscent of the punitive Yahweh of the Old Testament. He pathologizes instinct, distrusts the body, and centers human failure in unruly drives. Freud was among the few major thinkers to recognize civilization itself as a primary source of repression and suffering, yet he ultimately concluded that it was necessary. The reason is telling: like original sin, human nature is assumed to be intrinsically corrupt and therefore in need of constant surveillance, discipline, and external control.

Civilization’s prerogatives are clearly expressed in the AS, which itself descends from priestly and theological strategies extending back to roughly 3500 BCE. Given this depth of continuity—and its demonstrated effectiveness—it should not surprise us that these structures continue to shape thought and behavior today. Yet we have been trained to assume that the past belongs to more primitive customs and beliefs we have long since surpassed. We reassure ourselves that we bear no relation to the Middle Ages or to ancient theologies. That confidence, however, is increasingly strained as multiple, converging threats to our survival suggest that the opposite may be true.

Consider the sustained pressure exerted on inner life through centuries of religious instruction—at least two millennia of systematic moral conditioning. Such prolonged exposure cannot fail to leave enduring traces as each generation inherits and transmits the damage. Attention has been deflected by the belief that the secular era largely ended this process. In reality, these persistent messages continue to operate beneath awareness, shaping perception and judgment as if they were internalized mechanisms rather than external doctrines. To make this influence concrete, I have selected twenty such messages—drawn from a much larger field—to illustrate how thoroughly the old continues to organize the new.

 Table 1–2. Twenty transformations from the Augustinian Synthesis to the present

Characteristics of the Augustinian Self — Examples of the modern secular form

1. Compliance to God — Compliance to elites and curated authority streams
2. Sin — Personal defect or psychological flaw
3. Confession to a priest — Disclosure to therapist, manager, or public audience
4. Divine judgment — Internalized self-surveillance
5. Original sin — Innately violent
6. Purity of the soul — Healthy diet, detox practices, wellness purification
7. Spiritual discipline — Productivity, efficiency, and habit regimes
8. Temptation — Impulsivity or weak will
9. Ascetic self-denial — Hustle culture, endurance ideology, and burnout
10. Obedience to doctrine — Institutional rules and HR codes
11. Fear of hell — Fear of failure, social exile, or reputational collapse
12. Salvation — Self-improvement, goals, achievement, success
13. Priestly authority — Expert authority (therapists, self-help authors, productivity gurus)
14. Spiritual warfare — Culture war and ideological policing
15. The saved and the damned — The platformed and the de-platformed
16. Confessional community — Online surveillance communities
17. The devil’s influence — “Toxic” people, negative energy, bad influences
18. Moral purity — Brand purity and ethical consumerism
19. Biblical law — Bureaucratic rules and corporate compliance systems
20. Divine providence — The algorithm as an invisible ordering force

I’m not suggesting that nothing has changed, nor that religion has faded into the background. Religious themes remain highly pronounced today, especially in American culture. At the same time, these theological structures have been secularized in ways that now shape experience far beyond formal belief. Everyone encounters their effects. Thus, while mechanisms of control—despite their structural continuity—have evolved, we have evolved alongside them. But rather than improving in any meaningful sense, they have become vastly more refined, even as we have moved ever further from the source.

In the final essay, I will present the strongest case I can for why this trajectory must be interrupted now. If it is not, civilization will indeed come to an end—but not in any way that restores our humanity. And yet, the resilience of the human spirit, and its enduring attraction to relational being, leaves open the possibility that this story is not yet finished.