Religion as a Historical Form, Not an Eternal Option
The contemporary call for a return to religion, or spirituality, is often framed as a corrective to modern nihilism, addiction, violence, and technological abstraction. Such appeals assume that religion represents a lost resource that might be recovered if belief were renewed, practice reinstated, or transcendence re-affirmed. From the standpoint of genealogical analysis, however, this assumption is untenable. For Born Man—consciousness formed after the completion of Christian metaphysics—any return to religion is necessarily a falsification. This falsification does not consist in hypocrisy or bad faith, but in a structural impossibility: the conditions that once made religion true no longer obtain.
Born Man is not defined by disbelief. He is defined by historical belatedness. He inhabits a world in which transcendence has already completed its work and has withdrawn. Religion, under these conditions, can only appear as representation, lifestyle, or therapy—never as metaphysical necessity.
Religion is not a timeless human constant. It is a historically determinate form of consciousness structured by symbolic mediation between the human and the Absolute. In premodern worlds, transcendence was encountered through cosmology, ritual, myth, and sacred order. Meaning inhered in the world itself. The gods were not “believed in”; they were present.
Christianity fundamentally altered this structure. By internalizing the Absolute through Incarnation and Crucifixion, Christianity abolished the cosmological location of God. As Hegel famously argued, Christianity is the absolute religion because it brings God into history, dissolving the metaphysical distance that sustained earlier forms of worship (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion).
This movement does not leave religion intact; it consumes it. Once God has entered history, symbolic mediation becomes unnecessary. Faith replaces ritual, conscience replaces cosmos, inwardness replaces world. Christianity thus prepares the conditions for its own supersession. As Wolfgang Giegerich insists, secular modernity is not Christianity’s betrayal but its fulfillment. “Technology is not saeculum, but precisely the realized civitas dei, merely unacknowledged as such” (Giegerich, Technology and the Soul, 2020).
Born Man is born after this fulfillment. He does not stand before God; he stands after God’s historical labor has concluded.
What distinguishes Born Man from premodern or even early modern believers is not skepticism but reflexivity. Born Man cannot not know that religion is a historical form. He cannot inhabit symbols naively. Ritual no longer discloses reality; it signifies itself as ritual. Myth no longer reveals truth; it appears as narrative. Doctrine no longer names being; it registers belief.
This reflexivity is irreversible. Any attempt to “return” to religion requires the suspension of historical consciousness. Yet such suspension is itself an act of modern will, not premodern participation. As Max Weber already observed, disenchantment cannot be undone by decision; it is the consequence of rationalization itself (Max Weber, Science as a Vocation).
Thus, when Born Man prays, he knows he is praying. When he believes, he knows he is believing. This self-relation falsifies religion from within. Faith becomes psychological stance rather than ontological participation.
The impossibility of return is intensified by the relocation of the Absolute. For Born Man, the Absolute has not disappeared; it has become operational. Technology occupies the structural position once held by God: it is total, autonomous, universal, and non-negotiable. It governs time, space, communication, labor, and survival itself.
Giegerich formulates this with deliberate provocation: after the Incarnation and Crucifixion, God “changed his shape or locus… He has his place not… in nature, but in the artificial world of technological civilization. As this technological civilization he is the Risen” (Giegerich, Technology and the Soul).
Religion presupposes a transcendent Absolute that speaks, commands, forgives, and judges. Technology does none of these things. It does not address the subject; it absorbs him. It does not demand belief; it enforces necessity. In such a world, religious language can only function metaphorically or therapeutically. It cannot regain ontological authority.
Because of this structural displacement, contemporary returns to religion take one of three falsified forms:
- Regression – a romantic attempt to re-enter premodern belief, often accompanied by anti-intellectualism or hostility to modern knowledge.
- Aestheticization – religion as beauty, symbolism, or meaning-making, detached from metaphysical claim.
- Therapeutic religion – religion as psychological support, moral guidance, or recovery aid.
All three evacuate religion of its original necessity. They do not restore transcendence; they instrumentalize it. As Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed, such returns are not revivals of faith but symptoms of nihilism’s aftermath (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power). God is invoked not because He is true, but because He is useful.
Born Man cannot participate in religion without knowing that he is using it. This knowledge falsifies the act.
The impossibility of return does not imply despair. It implies responsibility. Born Man must learn to endure consciousness without transcendental reassurance. This endurance is not heroic overcoming, nor nihilistic resignation. It is the sober acceptance that history has closed certain possibilities.
As Giegerich repeatedly emphasizes, psychology’s task is not to heal by restoring meaning, but to think through the reality that has emerged. “The soul no longer exists for us,” he writes, “but objectively, in the world” (Soul-Violence, 2008). Religion, once the vessel of soul, can no longer contain it.
Born Man cannot return to religion without falsification because religion belongs to a metaphysical configuration that has already fulfilled itself. Any return presupposes the denial of historical consciousness, the aestheticization of belief, or the therapeutic use of transcendence. None of these restore religion’s truth; they merely recycle its forms.
The task of Born Man is not to believe again, but to endure the truth of a world in which belief has completed its historical work. What remains is not faith, but lucidity.
References
- Giegerich, W. Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web. Routledge, 2020.
- Giegerich, W. Soul-Violence: Collected English Papers, Volume 3. Spring Journal Books / Routledge, 2008.
- Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.
- Weber, M. Science as a Vocation.
- Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power.
Brenton L. Delp
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