The Life We've Lost

21st century Western culture no longer has the sense of a God-saturated world. Modern people are not very religious at all. Today most people, though not atheists, feel God is somehow absent or far away. Instead we feel that we live in a secular world with God a long way off. Collectively we feel this as a kind of loss. The Western world in modernity is like a person haunted by a nagging feeling that something has been lost. That something is the Sacred. The sacred has been lost; but it can be recovered. However, this is NOT done by taking up arms in the culture wars. The culture wars are mostly a debate about the nature of civil religion in America. We cannot try to enforce the sacred on a secular culture. Instead, we need to help the church recover the beauty of the sacred. It is sacred beauty, not angry protest, that can make Christianity alluring again.