The Easter Reminder of Why Man Needs God
The Easter Reminder of Why Man Needs God
Fifty years ago, just after Easter, the insurgent army known as the Khmer Rouge toppled the official government of Cambodia and initiated the devastating genocide that put Pol Pot on the list of history’s bloodiest rulers. What began with naïve hopes of peace and the end to the war that had spilled over from neighboring Vietnam soon turned into terror as the new regime pushed millions of residents out of the capital city. It soon hunted down anyone perceived as an ally of the government it had just toppled, including scientists, priests, and even anyone who wore glasses, which was interpreted as elitist. The goal was to create a Marxist-Leninist utopia, a classless agrarian society. What resulted, after four brutal years, was a campaign of brutality and torture leaving a quarter of the Cambodian population in fresh graves.
The evil perpetrated half a century ago belongs to but one of several ignominious periods in a century that began with the promise of human progress, enlightenment, and less violence. Finally, the thinking went, humanity would shed primitive ideas about the supernatural while reason and technology would lead the world into a new utopian future. In his essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” philosopher Bertrand Russell promised, “Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can often teach us, what sort of social arrangements are likely to promote human happiness. That is all we mean when we speak of morality.”
Karl Marx, the godfather of the ideology that would motivate Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and softer versions that crept into the West, famously blamedreligion for holding humans back from their full potential: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” But, as the 20th century embraced those ideas and the body counts piled up around the world, it would be a Soviet dissident, who experienced the cruel torture of the Gulag, who would understand the perversity of this project:
I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s words were not merely a lament for his beloved Russia, but a warning for the West. And he could not have been more prescient. In the nearly four decades since he delivered his address, America and other leading nations have been pushing Christianity to the margins while living off the fumes of its benefits. It turns out that mere modernity, with its technological advancements, has left many people in a state of digitized misery, comforts at our fingertips but missing the guiding hand of God. It’s no secret that as church attendance has fallen, indexes of loneliness and despair have risen dramatically. The bonds of faith, family, and community have been broken in our atomized world. The ordered liberty envisioned by the American Founders, the twin spirits of liberty and religion described by Alexis de Tocqueville.
But perhaps there might be cracks in the secular ceiling, where the light of the supernatural is breaking through. Since 2019, the decline in the number of Americans who claim religious adherence has leveled off. And there are signs that church attendance, especially among Millennials and Gen Z, is on the rise. Anecdotally, reports of revival-like experiences have been reported across college campuses. In my conversations with pastors across the country, I’m hearing reports of overflowing church services on Sunday and dramatic conversions.
What’s more, something is happening in the intellectual class, once overtaken by New Atheism in the wake of 9/11. The most dramatic conversion story is that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a bright light among the skeptics, now a forceful advocate for Christianity. She is joined by Niall Ferguson, Rosalind Picard, Paul Kingsnorth, and others. Even Richard Dawkins, a virulent critic of Christianity, has admitted he’d rather live in a society shaped by it.
The intellectual reversals are met by a new openness to faith among the nation’s top media outlets, particularly in the podcast genre, where hosts like Joe Rogan and Sean Ryan regularly feature long conversations with Christian apologists. And one cannot dismiss the growing boldness of Christian athletes in college and professional sports.
Of course, a vibe shift does not an awakening make. There are yet remnants of resistance to religion in many of our key institutions of public life. Hedonism, violence, and despair still plague many of our communities. Still, the myth that societies can flourish without faith is becoming less palatable to a new generation. Even less believable is the idea that humans can possibly not believe. Humans, by design, are worshiping beings. No matter what forces may align to crush faith in the supernatural, a yearning for God will endure, whether in the darkened underground caves of closed countries or in the rotting jails of totalitarian regimes or in the tight groupthink of a faculty lounge.
This doesn’t mean that Christianity’s adherents are always the best messengers. Much of what fueled the turn against religion in the 20th century were the religious wars of earlier eras. Part of what motivated New Atheism were the scandals of the institutional church and of religious fanaticism that manifests in violence. And what of the evil — such as Pol Pot — that a good God allows?
This is where the story at the heart of this season helps us make our way through the spiritual fog. Easter is not the story of humans perfecting themselves through moral improvement, but the rescue of morally deficient people from themselves. Failing, flawed Christians are part of the plot. The passion narrative is God coming in the flesh to defeat the sin and death that humans themselves brought on the world. It is wretched sinners, aware of their wretchedness, at the mercy of a holy God.
Easter, rather than paint pastels over the reality of evil, takes us into the heart of darkness on that dreadful night, where the innocent Son of God is beaten and disfigured, not for crimes he committed but for the sin that lurks in every human heart. Those who question the reality of God in a world of evil must not only recognize that the definition of evil comes from God but that the Christian story claims Christ defeated evil on that day. And that there is a God coming in judgment one day for the Pol Pots of this world who, rather than beg for mercy before a Savior, thumb their nose in opposition to their Creator. Easter matches the ugliness of the world with the ugliness of the cross and pares the feint and false hopes of moral improvement with the triumph of Jesus’s resurrection.
This is what utopian Marxism can’t ever provide. This is the longing that modernity and science and technology, for all their benefits, can’t satisfy. Societies, of course, can’t find the personal salvation the gospel offers. Faith can’t be forced, it must be an act of the conscience. Still, when people move away from themselves and toward God, it is good for the nation.
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