The Death of Secular Messianism: Religion and Politics in an Age of Civilizational Crisis

The Death of Secular Messianism argues that, the claims of secularists notwithstanding, modernity did not so much abandon humanity's historic search for the divine, but rather transposed it into a new, innerworldly key. This "secret religion of high modernity" came in both positivistic and humanistic variants. The first sought to overcome finitude by means of scientific and technological progress. The second sought to overcome contingency by creating a collective Subject—the Modern Democrat...