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Can Faith Survive in the “First World”?

Sunday, March 22, 2015

“As incomes go up, steeples come down. . . .Happiness arrives and God gets gone.” Looking at the so-called first world, this assertion, on the whole, has some merit. Over the last few centuries, as our material and creaturely comforts have slowly multiplied, religious fervor within society has generally declined. Yet this decline has not happened to the same degree in less opulent parts of the world. Since the sweep of secularism within the first world seems to have coincided with material and technological advancement, it is fair to ask whether religious faith will survive in this climate.

This seeming incompatibility of faith and human comfort is not new. Our Lord himself announced this tension in a warning to all: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matt 19:24) This admonition followed Jesus’s advice to a rich young man, who chose to return sadly to his many possessions rather than follow Jesus.

From the opposite perspective, faith seems stronger when people are in need. Ten lepers sought Jesus in their distress; once their needs were met, only one remembered to pay homage to his Healer. The heroic inspiration of martyrs has spurred faith in many believers during times of oppression. In our own day, Catholic churches at noon on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, were far more crowded than on the Tuesday prior or the Tuesdays since.

Even our Lenten practice of fasting seems to point in this direction. By fasting we deliberately deprive ourselves of food and other physical goods in order to spark spiritual growth. In the first week of Lent, we asked God that “through the chastening effects of bodily discipline, our minds may be radiant in your presence with the strength of our yearning for you.”

So was Marx right – is religion just the opiate of the masses, destined to be eradicated once sufficient wealth and material happiness are obtained? Will faith be snuffed out in the first world as its inhabitants grow more comfortable?

"Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ" by James J. Tissot, c. 1890 [Brooklyn Museum]
“Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ” by James J. Tissot, c. 1890 [Brooklyn Museum]
            First, there is nothing wrong with material goods or physical comforts in themselves. Second, so far, faith has clearly survived the spreading of luxury goods and secularization. Many still believe, and believe fervently, including some of the wealthiest and most comfortable among us. There are parishes and regions throughout the first world where religious practice is fervent, and rich and poor young people are still answering the call of religious vocations. So it is not the case that wealth and comfort necessarily destroy faith.

But it does seem fair to conclude that “first-world living,” as we know it today, has the potential to be inimical to the life of faith. Our restless hearts destined for God, as St. Augustine put it, can easily be distracted (in the literal sense of “dragged away”) by the wide and easy availability of comforts, conveniences, and medicines that promise happiness. Amid the frantic pace and constant din of our current world, God’s voice, which prefers silence and stillness, becomes more difficult to hear.

Yet the first world is more than a glut of things, noises, and activities. The sheer power of technology and material goods has given birth to a unique spirit, one characteristic of the Modern Age that gave birth to the first world: the service and worship of ourselves as the ultimate end for which these goods exist. Rather than see our material progress as a means of building the Kingdom of God, the first world has instead chosen to use technology to banish God in attempt to make ourselves the self-sufficient rulers of the universe. As a society, we have allowed the materials to lead us to materialism – the belief that only what is physical and tangible has any real significance.

Within this milieu, it is difficult for faith in an invisible and immaterial God, who promises not an elimination of our worldly sufferings, but a bestowal of an unknown type of union with Him after death, to take hold of minds already captivated by material goods and their promises. Imagine the response of a typical teenager to a description of the beatific vision as his cell phone flashes with all sorts of pictures and messages. There certainly are teens who have found today’s materialism empty and embraced religion, but they are relatively few.

Today the enemies of faith in the first world are as formidable as anytime in salvation history. And this history shows that Catholics have had massive success evangelizing whole peoples when they were compelled by two deeply held beliefs: a profound love of Christ to the point of martyrdom, and an understanding that those they encounter cannot be saved unless they accept the Gospel.

Our Lord promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church, but that was not a guarantee to keep souls within her. A distressing number of first world residents have heard of the Gospel but have not listened to it. Unless our efforts at evangelization reach the same zeal as the successful missionaries of the past, the first world may find itself the reason for our Lord’s sobering and haunting question: “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8)

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David G Bonagura, Jr.

David G Bonagura, Jr.

David G. Bonagura, Jr. teaches at St. Joseph’s Seminary, New York.

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  • ron a.

    The only way I can see it surviving (short of a cataclysmic event) is by changing it. This, I suggest, is exactly what’s happening. Which, then, begs the question: “how many will buy into that, in any meaningful way?”

  • Michael Paterson-Seymour

    “Amid the frantic pace and constant din of our current world, God’s voice, which prefers silence and stillness, becomes more difficult to hear.”

    But silence and stillness are what people do not want at any price; “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.” (Blaise Pascal)

  • Nick_Palmer3

    “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”

  • Stanley Anderson

    Though, as you say, riches are not in themselves bad, the tendency of the rich (virtually all of us these days, even the poorest of us in this rich nation) is to take the ball of material-goods-dough and pound it out on the cutting board into a flat circle, presumably intended as a pie crust — again, not necessarily bad in itself.

    But then, “Look, if I pound it even thinner, it gets larger and larger.” As it becomes paper-thin, it has grown so large it no longer fits onto the countertop or dining room table and must be moved onto the cleared floor of the den. But no matter — from this better vantage point, standing to the side of the unbaked crust at the edge of the room, one can look down and see entire, the new enormity of one’s riches. “And look, over there, some uncovered floor space to pound the dough out more and make it even larger!”

    So the floor has become the materialist’s entire world and the thought of actually using the dough as food is abhorrent. The wayward rich and narrow materialists mistake as “volume” the flatness of this wealth and its potential for large surface area as “increase”. Whatever it was that Jesus did to the loaves, it wasn’t deforming them into facades of bread or hollow balloons of larger inedible loaves, but causing them to actually fill five thousand living stomachs with basket volumes of solid fragments left over.

  • Michael Dowd

    “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8)”

    If by faith He means those who largely depend on God and not themselves, the answer is that He will find little faith on earth. And now even more, with Pope Francis and his mostly materialistic concerns, there is little hope the situation will improve any time soon.

  • Howard Kainz

    If the Lord returned today, he would find faith, but mostly a faith characterized by what Freud called “displacement” — faith in oneself, in science, in drugs, in charismatic leaders, in “progress,” etc.

  • Manfred

    We must never forget that the laity never asked for Vatican II and all the ideas which flowed from it. It was was Pope John XXIII and bishops and cardinals who were descendants of Fathers Luther, Knox ,Calvin, et al, who opened the Church to the world. THEIR descendants are the Bergoglios, Kaspers, Baldisseris, Volpis and Marxes we are confronted with today.
    Three notables associasted with Notre Dame University died recently: former president Ted Hesburgh, Fr. Richard McCormick, a noted dissenter who was secretly married for years, and Charles Rice, a lay professor in Notre Dame’s Law School. It was Hesburgh who called the Land O’ Lakes conference in 1967 where N.D. and twenty-five other “Catholic” Universities left the Church to pursue “academic freedom”. It was only Rice, the layman, who was continually sound and orthodox to his deatrh.
    The good news is that intelligent, trained laity, who are being fed data from around the entire Church by sound priests, bishops and lay men, are using the internet as a powerful weapon to purge the Church of dubious leaders and movements. It was they who were present at the Synod in October, 2014 in great numbers challenging the bishops and cardinals from the floor in the Q & A. They are there to assist in guarding their brother sheep and lambs while their shepherds strudy sexual aberrations.

    • Michael Dowd

      Yes, there is hope for more faith in what you say Manfred. Let us make it grow by using the internet “as a powerful weapon to purge the Church of dubious leaders and movements.” I would like to a web site(s) devoted to this endeavor.

    • ron a.

      The way I see it is these dissidents have basically given voice and encouragement to what I would term “accidental Catholics”. Even they, of course, have the right to truthful catechesis; however, there is no guarantee they would be open to it. On the other hand, the Truth will eventually triumph and God will not abandon those who are pure of heart. The whole affair is misleading to the World; but, to God all is perfectly clear. And, in the end, that is all that really matters.

      It was Richard McBrien, not Richard McCormick. And you’re right, Charles Rice was a wonderful Catholic man and a great teacher of the Faith and Natural Law.

  • Tony Seel

    Good analysis, but I don’t see any solutions offered.

  • Colin

    It is not riches, but comfort. We are too comfortable. Our people are too busy accumulating possessions, enjoying the comforts of them. Our priests are more focused on their shrinking parish budgets than on preaching a solid and soul-stirring homily. The musicians at church care more about performance than about prayer, while the people barely can be bothered to whisper the people’s mass parts. The meaning of what we worship at Mass is about as strong as a higher form of fiction, in which we believe that the Gospel is the truth in theory, but not in practice. Or worse, that it is merely A truth. Why such a disconnect from what is the source of eternal life? Because putting this faith into practice involves risk…and we are far too comfortable for any risk, thank you very much. We have placed our faith into neat little boxes that do not involve challenging us to grow in our faith in any meaningful way. Instead Jesus is placed as a picture on the wall and we consider him as a guy we would have voted for if he were running for president….and not much more.

  • Mary C.

    If we consider ourselves as striving to be faithful to God and the teaching authority of the Church He left to us , we need to practice humility in our lives, be a good example to others , use our talents to bring each other and those who have have little knowledge of Him into a better understanding and relationship with Him.
    This may require us to refrain from judgement and certainly from voicing such judgement personally and through the social media. We may have reservations that trouble us, but time and effort spent expressing them will be better spent in prayer for and with others , whoever they are..
    Most importantly , prayer in worship and in petition for our own shortcomings would surely be pleasing to God.

  • Dennis Larkin

    Manfred is exactly correct in that the laity never asked for the Council. It was the popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, and religious who did this to the Church.

  • MJ Anderson

    Provocative article. It seems, however, that even more than material comfort, the greater threat to faith is from the secular comfort that there really is no serious sin left. We have culturally winked at every mortal sin, we have legislated certain sins out of public morality, and sadly, there is decidedly rare mention of sin from a Catholic pulpits. Where a culture becomes comfortable with sin, the rich and the poor abandon God.

  • nobody.really

    Can faith survive in the First World? A concern since at least 1922.



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