The Future

This chapter addresses the limits of religious change. It argues that invoking the notion of change is sometimes less helpful than admitting that something has been discarded or hollowed out or evacuated. A new mentality has arisen in the West, which has marginalized the awareness of the otherworldly that is indispensable to ‘religion’ as substantively understood. Moving to this new cognitive style has constituted a definitive break (the ‘Great Ditch’) in the history of humankind. This new cognitive style is the essential plank of modernity. Modernity can be manifested in a variety of cultural expressions but the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ is misleading if it suggests that modernity is possible without it. Religious institutions persist in the West, in many cases with considerable power and influence, but they have been largely NGO-ized or reduced to the role of pressure groups or agencies within civil society. Their role today is as promoters of human values; it is hardly the role traditionally claimed, which was relating the human to the otherworldly. It is not that religion ‘poisons everything’, as some New Atheists say; it is that a new cognitive style has changed the human situation irrevocably.