No doubt. The box of religious feelings that had remained closed under seven keys has been opened.
The keys to materialism, positivism, skepticism, nihilism, utopianism, scientism, and hedonism have been blown up.
The seven locks that guarded the tomb in which the religious lay buried have been opened and religion has been liberated again.
We are therefore entering a new phase in which politics will once again coexist with religion.
We move, again, in the complex field sown with wheat and tares. And if there is something we are not prepared for, it is this.
We are experiencing a resurgence of the need for security, and security times ask for clarity, determination and absence of contrasts. To the bread, bread, and to the wine, wine.
Nuance, middle ground, moderation and forgiveness now have the burden of proof.
It is upon them that the burden of blame for getting us to where we are is thrown.
Therefore, moving today between the wheat and the tares, with patience to let both grow, and not uprooting the wheat because we want to kill the weeds, is extremely complex for minds that ask for security and shelter. You cannot ask for patience from someone who feels anxious or temperance from someone who is afraid..
If you want the wheat, you have to let the tares grow.
The wheat of our days is abundant, and beautiful ears of succulent grains bloom. The years of dialectical materialism and Enlightenment rationalism are long gone. Marxist ideology has been defeated by what was believed to be its ally, history. And the liberalism of positive data has been devastated by the ballot boxes.
Behind the iron curtain there was nothing to represent, only emptiness and desolation. And “data kills story” liberalism has not been able to fight the cultural battle.
Philosophical positivism studied us as objects, and almost turned us into inert things.
Neither scientific psychology nor materialist arts were able to explain the need for meaning and aesthetic emotion. The reality was something too big to fit into an Excel table.
And that reality, when crushed, emerges with the ugly face of sadness and guilt. They are natural outlets for the censorship of the most human feelings. This is the wheat of our time, in which we see sadness, guilt and the need for meaning emerge..
And what is the tares? That it is very easy to exploit the religious sense for spurious purposes. Among them, the most fearsome of our days is that good people, disarmed of their ideology, and in search of a true meaning, fall into the networks of the thousands of sects that proliferate in the fishing grounds of faith.
It is evident that there are more and more fish, and it is to be hoped that the fishers of men will multiply. If we talk about tares, we talk about sects. Of those human organizations that, in exchange for belonging and security, keep the freedom of conscience of their members.
It is an excessively expensive price that the Catholic Church is not authorized to pay, but in this it is almost an exception within the religious universe. No one should ever give their conscience to any organization, but this principle is not so clear to everyone.
The tares that the American winds bring us, from the north and the south, are the synthesis of the sectarian movement and the need for territorial and cultural belonging. Uprooting and loneliness quickly find their accommodation in their opposites, group belonging and community identity, What are the wickers for the nationalist basket?.
The most eloquent example is found in the transfer that occurred in the 1920s from the extreme left to the nationalist right. The promise of community warmth, collective rituals and the epic exaltation of the feeling of belonging led thousands of young people to enlist in paramilitary groups of Marxist, fascist, Falangist or national socialist inspiration.
All of this was a great communitarian movement that offered identity and security to masses who were disenchanted with the world.
The signs to recognize the tares among the wheat are that many of the religious movements that are being detected come from the reaction against an enemy. And every reactive act is the mirror image of what it reacts against.
It is worrying that a certain current religiosity is the fruit of a reaction against ideology wokeand, therefore, Trumpism, anti-immigration discourse, anarcholiberalism, “traditional values” are mixed and a religious aesthetic that results in a pack identity.
All of this is, in part, the result of a growing position of evangelical churches that presents itself with a phenomenon that I highly doubt we will be able to confront.
In Madrid alone, these churches have grown 60% since 2011, and 20% in the last decade in our country. It is a kind of Islamization of the Christian faith, converted into a book, into values and customs.
They are closed communities, suspicious of the world, entrenched in universal and immovable principles, with little or no freedom of conscience, which cultivate fear of reality and distrust of history. Not in vain are they good fishing grounds for the most extremist political options.
Celebrating the rise of religiosity, without separating the wheat from the chaff, could lead some to celebrate the spread of radical Islam in our cities because, at least, they would say, it offers meaning to disoriented souls. It is vitally important to be very attentive to the possible political instrumentalization of the religious sensewhose harmful effects are well known to us.
But separating the wheat from the tares too soon could stifle the just response that dialectical materialism and humanist positivism deserve.
The feeling of loneliness and the search for meaning are, in themselves, sacred, and we must celebrate their emergence. The answer to that has been with us for more than two thousand years and it is never too late to find it.
You just have to protect it from the threat of false idols.
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