We never left religion. Instead, we found new gods.

 --- Joel Halldorf,  Professor of Church History at University College Stockholm, Not So Secular Sweden, Comment magazine, January 2026, via Anneliese Burgess in Binne+Land

Excerpt

A global Ipsos study registered the change already in 2023: In highly secular societies, zoomers tend to be more religious than their boomer parents. Nowhere, the study concluded, was that pattern clearer than in Sweden, once the poster child of secularism. 

Why is this happening? To understand what is going on, we must, I believe, rethink secularism. 

Human history has never seen a society void of religion. Spirituality is, together with music, one of the few human universals. The secular twentieth century did not change this. We never left religion. Instead, we found new gods. 

although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things

 --- Miri Rubin, on the BBC In Our Time episode Medieval Pilgrimage, at timecode 11:00

In context - responding to a question from Melvyn Bragg about the role of relics, and the power associated with them

From very early on, the very idea of a sacrament means that deep in Christianity is the belief that although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things.

magic is ... any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system

--- Christopher Fennell, quoted in "Searching for the Witches’ Tower," Archaeology Magazine, November/December 2019, p. 37 (web version, p. 4)

From the article

Another explanation for the Pendle witch trials may lie in forgotten folk practices that often go unmentioned in official historical documents. Seventeenth-century Britons were mostly illiterate, lived by the rhythm of the agricultural calendar, and fought illness without the assistance of modern medicine. For decades, many historians subscribed to the notion that as Christianity replaced indigenous pagan religious systems in the British Isles from the late Roman period onward, magical superstition died out. Archaeologists, however, do find objects, markings, inscriptions, and other evidence of rituals and practices that should, they say, be considered magical. “When people start talking about magical invocations, they rarely try to define magic,” says archaeologist Christopher Fennell of the University of Illinois. “One definition of magic is that it is any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system.” Christianity, Fennell says, by way of example, marginalized paganism in England, but individual rituals surviving from those belief systems continued to be carried on in private spaces.

... that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened

--- Jonathan Shainin, in conversation with David Runciman and Helen Thomas, Talking Politics podcast #248, 4 June 2020, "Facts vs Opinions"

Excerpt, with approximate <time code> in angle brackets

<37:17> We have a settled model, a kind of classical model, so to speak, of how the facts, the news, and the demos interact with one another. And I think that settled model is now very antiquated, and I’m not sure we have a new model that adequately conveys the kind of chaos and instability in the relationship between those three elements. And so I think journalism feels more urgent to many people than it ever has before, in terms of, you’ve got it on your phone, you’ve got it on social media, people are talking about it all the time, people are talking about the news. And yet, that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened, in the way that an earlier iteration, journalists had a kind of functional monopoly on describing the world to their audience. […] <38:47> You had kind of a consensus about a stable way of representing the world, and I don’t think it exists anymore. And I think it's a real challenge, because I think this constant skepticism, or doubts, or even cynicism, about the extent to which we can produce a representation of what's happening out there in the world. And I think what you see, particularly when you look at questions of race in America, for instance, you get into another for of thinking about representation, which is, who are the journalists who are telling this story.

And here's Helen, following up at <39:32> 

I think that the - what's happening in America at the moment - does run into the limits of the analytical mode [of opinion writing]. Sometimes I think that's been true about Trump since the beginning. There's something about his presidency, where the analytical mode just seems inadequate to try to get to grips in any moral sense with what has been happening, and that is particularly true now. I think in terms of what's been going on for over the last week, and partly the analytical mode is sort-of near exhausted, because there's something almost I think religious about what is happening and that that means that trying to sort-of use conventional political language to try to say something about it doesn't really work. It can risk coming over as simple indifference, and that's simply not what's required in this situation. 

Zeus does not arrive at decisions which he then enacts in the mortal world; rather, human events are themselves an enactment of divine will

--- Harold Bloom. Quote taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus, which seems to be citing Bloom's Major Dramatists: Aeschylus (2002), p. 14-15. (I wasn't able to verify the reference.)

Quote in context (taken from the Wikipedia article):

Much critical attention has been paid to the question of theodicy in Aeschylus. For generations, scholars warred incessantly over 'the justice of Zeus,' unintentionally blurring it with a monotheism imported from Judeo-Christian thought. The playwright undoubtedly had religious concerns; for instance, Jacqueline de Romilly suggests that his treatment of time flows directly out of his belief in divine justice. But it would be an error to think of Aeschylus as sermonizing. His Zeus does not arrive at decisions which he then enacts in the mortal world; rather, human events are themselves an enactment of divine will.

religion has generally been an activity, not a set of true-or-false propositions, and above all a collective activity in which the tribe or nation finds meaning

--- from The Economist, "Transcendental meditation: Neil MacGregor on living with gods," 4 Nov 2017, a review of Neil MacGregor's show at the British Museum "Living with Gods" and associated podcast

Quote in context:

Mr MacGregor is a social anthropologist on a vast plane, whereas Ms Cook leans more to the neuroscience of religion. By including sounds, such as softly heard bells and flutes, she draws attention to the aural stimuli that can arouse people’s spiritual antennae.

However, they have a common purpose: to bring home the ubiquity, and the social character, of religion to a mainly secular public. To the modern mind, speculating about moral and philosophical questions is something people engage in individually. In most eras of history, and in many parts of the world today, such freedom would be inconceivable.

As the exhibition and the radio series both proclaim, religion has generally been an activity, not a set of true-or-false propositions, and above all a collective activity in which the tribe or nation finds meaning.

"the bear does not understand about fasting"

--- Ascribed to St. Sergius, patron saint of Russia, in a story retold by Ann Persson in The Circle of Love: Praying with Rublev's icon of the Trinity (2010) p. 32

Excerpt:

Like St Francis, Sergius was a friend to birds and wild animals. There is a story that tells how he regularly fed a bear that came near to his hut. Of there was not enough bread for the two of them, he gave his portion to the bear, because, he said, 'the bear does not understand about fasting'.

"a man who is afraid of sinning because of Hell-fire, is afraid, not of sinning, but of burning"

--- Augustine of Hippo, Epistolae 145, 4; quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1967, 2000) p. 375

Context in Brown: "It is Pelagius, not Augustine, who harps on the terrors of the Last Judgment: to which Augustine simply remarked that ‘a man who is afraid of sinning because of Hell-fire, is afraid, not of sinning, but of burning.’"

"we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion"

--- David Eagleman, opinion column Beyond God and atheism: Why I am a 'possibilian', New Scientist, 27 September 2010

Excerpts, quote quote highlighted below:

Given these considerations, I do not call myself an atheist. I don't feel that I have enough data to firmly rule out other interesting possibilities. On the other hand, I do not subscribe to any religion. Traditional religious stories can be beautiful and often crystallise hard-won wisdom - but it is hardly a challenge to poke holes in them. Religious structures are built by humans and brim with all manner of strange human claims - they often reflect cults of personality, xenophobia or mental illness. The holy books of these religions were written millennia ago by people who never had the opportunity to know about DNA, other galaxies, information theory, electricity, the big bang, the big crunch, or even other cultures, literatures or landscapes.

So it seems we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion. Given this, I am often surprised by the number of people who seem to possess total certainty about their position.

...

I don't think the important goal should be to fight for a particular story in the absence of strong evidence; it should be to explore and celebrate the vast possibilities.

...

This is why I call myself a "possibilian". Possibilianism emphasises the active exploration of new, unconsidered notions. A possibilian is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind and is not driven by the idea of fighting for a single, particular story. The key emphasis of possibilianism is to shine a flashlight around the possibility space. It is a plea not simply for open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas.

...

In every generation, people are seduced by the idea that they possess all the tools they need to explain the universe. They have always been wrong. From consciousness to dark energy, we know that we are missing an unknowable number of pieces of the puzzle. This is why in the debates between the strict atheists and the fundamentally religious, I choose a third side. A little less pretence of certainty and a little more exploration of the possibility space.

As Voltaire put it, "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

"What if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being?"

--- sociologist William Sims Bainbridge in an interview about his work on World of Warcraft, New Scientist, 27 March 2010

In context; interviewer's question followed by Bainbridge's answer:

You've done a lot of work with religion. What does religion in WoW tell us about the real-world phenomenon?

The horrendous question that always troubles me is, what if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being? What does science do then? Could there be some other stage of development in which we express ourselves through a kind of protean self in numerous realities with different levels of faith or suspension of disbelief appropriate to each of them?

That, on a much smaller scale, is what is happening with the fictional religions in WoW. The overwhelming majority of the people that play WoW don't take its religions seriously.

The difference between faith and fantasy might not have been very distinct in ancient times, and it's possible that we will move towards a time when instead of religion, people's hopes can be expressed in something that's acknowledged to be a fantasy but also, on some level, sort of real. WoW might exemplify that kind of post-religious future.

“God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word

--- theologian Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I could not be a Christian (2009), p. 15

Quote in context:

Marcus Borg has written a widely helpful book about the need for Christians to retrieve the correct understanding of Jesus, which, he claims, would be a much more appealing picture of Jesus. He titled the book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I think the same can be said about the need many Christians feel to retrieve their mystical traditions: they need to become mystics again for the first time. Karl Rahner, one of the most respected Catholic theologians of the past century (and my teacher!), recognized this in a statement that has been repeated broadly: “In the future Christians will be mystics, or they will not be anything.”
...

   When Buddha refused to talk about God in order to make way for the experience of Enlightenment, he was making the same point, but even more forcefully, that Rahner was getting at in his insistence that Christians must be mystics: “God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own. . . .

   To put this more in our contemporary context, Buddha has reminded me and all of us Christians that any kind of religious life or church membership must be based on one’s own personal experience. It is not enough to say “amen” to a creed, or obey carefully a law, or attend regularly a liturgy. The required personal experience may be mediated through a community or church, but it has to be one’s own. Without such a personal, mystical happening, once cannot authentically and honestly call oneself religious.