Published at The Orthosphere on 8th of June, 2026
Replying to my previous post on Baird and Douthat, JMSmith doubted the capacity of many contemporaries to experience what I’ll call “holy dread.” Similarly, The Smirking Gnostic wrote concerning his seventies peers of “shock at the ice cold consciousness of an existence for no reason other than lust satisfaction” and that still today the “worship of their bellies goes on unabated.” Given that my post concerned Douthat’s book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” theirs was a skeptical view of the optimistic thrust of the book.
Nonetheless, and despite much contrary evidence from interpersonal experience, there remains in me a stubborn central apprehension of the common human vocation to salvation. So I expect the call of that vocation to express itself to every human soul in one way or another. However it manifests, it will evoke a recognition and a decision, even if that decision is to brush it aside. Unless the response to this prompting is to seek out salvation, the prompts, I believe, will be recurrent. Such is the power of Eastertide.
Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism all offer the strongest sort of bulwarks against salvation because they recognise and address the engine of the vocation. Nihilism, apart from the Buddhist varieties, offers no defence in depth, victuals and beer notwithstanding. Worshippers of their bellies get distraction and consolation in a broader range of sensory satisfactions. Those combined powers may build steeper berms against nothingness, but can only defer the confrontations.
Thirty years ago, in the first stages of my stuttering re-conversion, I met a well-read older man, living comfortably on his family’s wealth. He was then single, having parted company with the last of his mistresses (all of whom would come to his birthday party.) He told me that he had experienced “the terror of being” in the course of his philosophical meditations. It hadn’t brought him to God. I remembered a similar feeling. Mine was akin, perhaps, to Pascal’s fear on contemplating the starry heavens. Reminded, I tried to recover that sense of terror, but I couldn’t. Christ’s reality to me had rendered existence benign, thanks be to God. I suppose that Baird, so dismissive of Douthat’s thesis, would be contemptuous of this alteration in my outlook.
I am of an anxious disposition, so I am acquainted with fear under the night sky, but its poles were reversed from Pascal’s. The inland route from Sydney to Brisbane, the New England Highway, runs about 100km inland from the east coast. Coming back to Brisbane one clear night, the only vehicle on the road, I stopped and stepped out of the car into a moonless and featureless blackness. Fear of the dark seized me. But the Milky Way was ablaze above. The delight of it pushed my fear to the background. The city offers no such gorgeous prospect. It tries to bring the stars to Earth, but muddies the atmosphere with light and dust. The night heavens, though, are always poised to proclaim the glory of God.
Everyone, I persist in believing, will, at unpredictable moments, be brought up short by some occasion of holy dread, or awe, or wonder.
JMSmith is not the only one to have difficulties with “cheerful theism.” Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, although it goes into more detail about the fuzzy theology of American teenagers of the early 2000’s, is definitely cheerful, self-absorbed, and almost devoid of particular theological content. MTD adherents are syncretic and indiscriminate. But I think it is better, in the sense of being closer to salvation, to believe in an MTDeity, than no Deity at all.
I find it encouraging that there has been much chatter about demons and possession lately. Playing around with the occult is said to be a portal for demons. That seems to me to be credible; all the more so as we watch the moral structure of the world around us disintegrate. If that is true, then it seems to follow that playing around with Christianity is a portal for the angels.