Why young people are returning to Christianity: the dark secret at the heart of the secular world

digging in the recent rise in religious conversion and the addictions and existential woes that are driving it

I recently spoke with Sarah Madden from Newstalk FM on the rise of adult baptisms into Catholicism in Ireland and my own baptism at the Easter Vigil. Here is the piece with some parts of the interview if you want to check it out 👇

I will also be going live again this evening on substack with

Jacob Kishere

to discuss further the strange return of Christianity and you can join in the conversation here 👇

Why are Baptisms rising?

The Newstalk interview has given me more time to reflect on the phenomena which is a real and measurable thing of rising numbers of adult baptisms (Ireland, England, France, analysis across countries).

Remarkably many people have reached out to me about the interview and articulated that they too are returning to the faith. Many that I spoke to were born Catholic but fell out of practise for one reason or another but in recent years are praying, bible reading or returning to mass. It’s easy to be skeptical of talk of a “quiet revival” of Catholicism but my impression is that the return is real and that something is happening bottom up i.e from a need within people that has become so pressing they are willing to do crazy things, like start practising Catholicism again…

The question is always, why? Why now? What is it about this present moment that is driving formerly secular atheistic young people back into religion?

I think the answer is addiction.

Addiction Leads to Religion

“The worst part about drug addiction is ending up religious”

A Twitter User

There’s an interesting fact in cognitive psychology which is that addictions have timeframes. The longer you are addicted to a drug the more time your brain has to build up evidence that in fact your drug seeking behaviour is not delivering the rewarding life you were promised. Addictive drugs chemically trigger the brains reward circuitry and so make you feel good like you are achieving valued goals but without actually achieving anything. In crude words, our brain has a finite pool of feel good juices and these are supposed to be spent on making your life better, but an addictive drug or behaviour just gives you the feel good juices without the corresponding progress in competence.

Over time this addiction leads to a profound disconnection between the positive feeling and one’s awareness that the feeling has become debased from the underlying currency of actually achieving something meaningful. So once the brain has enough evidence that the drug is not delivering the rewarded and supernaturally meaningful life that all addictions promise, a conflict emerges. The conflict is between the self that wants to compulsively engage in the drug or behaviour and ignore the new evidence and the self that is now fully aware that ‘the drugs don’t work’ and that this way of living is completely fruitless. Eventually, in order to get past the addiction which becomes more and more untenable, one needs to seek out a better way of life and this leads to a religious conversion.

So here is the general story I’m telling about the return of Christianity:

1. Young people reject Christianity

2. Become secular

3. Engage in nihilistic hedonism

4. Develop a bunch of addictive behaviours

5. Become unable to cope with the addictive behaviours

6. Enter the desert (a period of dealing with addictive behaviours)

7. End up kinda, sorta, Christian again

This addictive cycle hypothesis would explain why more men are converting more than women, because typically men have higher rates of addiction than women and particularly of life-threatening addiction (although the numbers of women who are addicts is increasing and so we may see a corresponding increase in conversions in young women still to come!)

So the story is pretty simple, young men are becoming addicts at huge rates and religious conversion is the cure? One could make a secular critique here and say something like religion is just for weak people who became addicts and need a fairy tale to get them out again? But of course, that’s a just-so story that misses the bigger picture of why religious conversion can cure addiction in the first place…

Why does religious conversion cure addiction?

It’s a strange critique of religion, that it can save the life of people who are hopelessly self-destructive and beyond the reach of the treatment of medicine.

But this fact has been well known in social psychology for a long time, that the number one treatment for addiction is religious conversion. In fact, the main variety of twelve step programs began as an essentially religious enterprise. Bill Wilson, the inventor of Alcoholics Anonymous, was inspired to create the program by Carl Jung’s advice to a chronic alcoholic that his only hope for survival from his life threatening addiction was a religious conversion! This is how Jung described his patients addiction:

“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. ” (Jung)

The reason religious conversion cures an addiction is because addiction is not fundamentally a medical issue like the disease model of addiction would have you believe. Mark Lewis’s “Learning model” of addiction argues that addiction is a deeply engrained habit - reinforced by the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity which makes the behaviour incredibly difficult to change but not impossible. In his book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, Lewis writes:

“Addiction results, not from a disease, but from the normal process of brain change—plasticity—driven by highly attractive goals and repeated choices.”

Dr Anna Lembke, Stanford university chair of addiction counselling, once told me an addicted person needs a conversion to overcome their addiction, a totally new orientation to life from their old self and Lewis recognises the power of religious conversion to shift these deeply engrained habits by providing a “a new identity, a new set of values, and a new social network.”, which is what AA does in a more secular way, though not entirely.

Lewis argues at the root of every addiction is some pain, stress, trauma, or unmet psychological need that drives one to start engaging in the rewarding behaviour that becomes a habit and shifts the values and dimensions of the self:

“At the root of addiction is the attempt to solve a problem—usually emotional pain or distress—by repeatedly turning to a substance or activity that provides relief.”

So the real question might be, not why is religion returning? or why does religion cure addiction? But rather why are more and more people in pain, traumatised, suffering with unmet needs and turning to addictions to cope?

Meaning Crisis causes Addiction, Christianity solves the Meaning Crisis

I have written much more extensively about the meaning crisis in this essay, but to cut a long story short: our current experimental secular culture is deeply unstable and the result is increasing psychological chaos and pain. The pain is not physical but existential, what is the purpose of our lives? Are we just cosmic slime on the edge of a dead universe in a backwater galaxy no one cares about? Spoiler, no.

We can think of addiction and meaning as inversely proportional qualities: the more meaning you have, the less addiction and vice versa. Meaning is equivalent to flow states, where your self-consciousness is turned down and you are totally engaged, immersed in what you are doing, which means you are at the edge of your domain of competence and expanding your agency. Addictions give you the flow state without the corresponding increase in your agency. In fact, the agency is reduced because the addictive junk learning enmeshes you more and more with the habit you do not want. The addictions are substitutes for a life filled with meaningful flow states, which we crave.

This is not a new thing, as St Augustine wrote:

“God put eternity into the heart of man so that in our longing and confusion we will seek him.” St Augustine

The behaviour of dopamine, the molecule behind motivation, pursuit and craving, is the eternity in the heart of man and all addictions and flow states are mediated by dopamine. the human condition is that we must seek, pursue and find to be happy but that endless seeking, pursuing and never having makes us miserable. We are learning this in real time in the west that there is no free lunch, if you pursue impulsive hedonistic pleasure you become addicted and miserable and that’s a natural law - it’s built into the structure of our brains.

However, christianity had a solution!

For St Augustine, there are two kinds of goods which we can pursue, finite goods and infinite goods. The finite goods are things like food, drink, sex, money etc and these are all goods but if we pursue the finite goods like they are the infinite good we get addicted. In other words, we engage in the rewarding behaviour and strengthen the addictive feedback loop that re-structures our brains through learning and we end up with an addiction. However, as St Augustine observed, if you pursue the infinite good, God that is which is not a physical object, for some reason you overcome your addictions? That when we pursue the infinite good, the other finite goods fall into place and we don’t suffer from lust or gluttony or greed which are all putting finite goods in the place of the infinite?

I think this mechanism is built into us neurobiologically, that when we pursue a physical thing we train our reward system into a feed back loop of desiring that same thing more and more until simply it’s over-valued. However, when you pursue the infinite good, you are aligning your reward system to everything of value as such and not just one particularly salient thing. St Augustines argument is that the only good you can really pursue whole-heartedly for your whole life is the infinite good and that any finite good you pursue will result in addiction.

The first section of the Catholic Catechism is that the purpose of human beings is to know and love God. God is the infinite good, and the point is that our pursuit of the infinite good is an infinite game which we can play, coming closer and closer in our understanding and relationship to God but which we can never complete, because we are finite and God is infinite. When you reject this game, knowing and loving god, you will necessarily spend your dopamine on the finite goods and that this inevitably results in addictive behaviours. When you give over your will to your higher power, you submit the part of yourself hooked on the finite goods to the higher purpose of pursuing the infinite good and this works and is empirically and scientifically verifiable.

St Augustine defined religion, in keeping with the meaning of “religio” (to bind), as binding oneself to the divine or sacred. What is sacred or divine is simply that which is of the highest value, and for the religious proposition is that what is the highest value is what is common to all value, value itself, or the infinite good that is common to all of the finite goods, which is called God. We are finite and the fact we have two arms and two legs and two eyes in the front of our head, means that we must choose, select, and hence it is our limitations that creates this quest for value. However, the terminus of our quest is the infinite, which is what lies beyond and necessarily begins, supports and calls forth the finite.

The goal of religion is a relationship with what is of the highest value and for human beings like ourselves that are limited, selective of value, this is an infinite game we play approaching the source of value itself (God). An addiction is a bad relationship between the agent and the enviroment and so the replacement is a new relationship between the agent and a higher enviroment, the ultimate reality (God). The healthy non-addicted path is therefore to pursue the relationship with value itself, God, rather than just the physical and temporal goods which results in addiction. I believe this feature of secular culture ending up in addiction is like the hinge of a door, a mechanism, rooted in the behaviour of dopamine, and that is why the secular world, a world without an absolute source of value will inevitably lapse into self-destructive behaviour.

Conclusion

Augustine thinks the solution for our addictive tendencies is to ““Love God and do whatever you please”, once you are truly oriented to the infinite good over the finite goods then you are free.and at peace. The desire for psychological unity which Jung talks about as union with god, comes from alignment with the infinite good and so giving up our dependance on finite goods is a necessary step to achieving that end.

However, a society and culture without God has no conception of an infinite good, only finite goods by definition, and so by design pushes it’s adherents towards addiction. I think this is where we are in the life cycle of the secular age, generating more and more novel finite goods to try and fill the void of the infinite good and hence generating more and more addiction. The irony is that the more addictions increase, the more people are going to turn to traditional religious worldviews to find peace!

So essentially what we are seeing in the “quiet revival” of Christianity is the tip of the ice berg, in that the secular world leads to addiction because it only traffics in finite goods and not the infinite. This is what we are seeing in real time with young men getting baptised, who have tried to live the secular life, fallen into addiction and thus returned to religion because simply put secularity without addiction is impossible - the secular world will always lead to self-destruction, because it mis-understands reality, humanity and the relationship between the two. In some sense, these young men are the lucky ones - because of their overt and life threatening addictions they have had to address the issue head on. But what other addictions might be going on under the surface in the secular age?

Jung said "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism". The political movements we see in the secular age without God, from trans-humanism to communism to nazism, are addictions as well - ideologies and idealisms that feel good but spiral into self and other destruction. This is why the secular age will fail and inevitably give rise to what has been called “the sacred age” - an age instead focused on the infinite good. In some sense this is the same old story, the Israelites worshipping a golden calf in the desert. But now we are simply waking up from our dogmatic slumber to realise we have not escaped history and that God’s rules still apply and that we are paying the price for ignoring them…